Open Combat by Carl Brown

Apologies to all for dropping off the blog for a while.  Work, family and church has kept me incredibly busy of late, and I can't promise that my pace will pick up anytime soon.  I do have a number of new painted figures to post, as soon as I have time to take some pictures.  In the meantime, here is a review (of sorts) for a new game I picked up and played recently.

Open Combat by Carl Brown is a new miniature rule system released through his website and company Second Thunder.   Having heard about the game from a couple of my favorite podcasts, Meeples and Miniatures and Fool's Daily, I decided to pick it up.  On the face of it, the game system is flexible for ancient, medieval or fantasy gaming with a limited number of models per side. It is easily customized to fit any miniature, and it promises to be quick to set up and quick to play.

What is perhaps the most unique aspect of the game, one that sets it apart from other miniature wargames, is the creation of your army list or warband.  Warbands are based on a point system ("renown") and can be set at various levels for desired length of play and size of the warband.  One hundred points will get you a small force with some average to good characteristics. Points are assigned to each individual model for five basic statistics - Speed, Attack, Defense, Fortitude and Mind.   Weapons and special abilities (Aim, Inspiration, etc.) add points as well.

The mechanic for combat is based on adding up modifiers to the character's attack value, such as cover, high ground and so forth.  The number of points greater than the defender's total (if any) determines the amount of dice the attacker rolls, with a maximum of three.  The attacker takes the best value, and this should give him a greater chance of scoring a hit.  There is no save roll if a model is hit, this is built into the modifiers and the fortitude (i.e. "hit points").  This makes for a quick resolution of combat.

Initially, I was a bit perplexed by the lack of lists or standards? What is the typical defense value for a Viking in chain mail?  What sort of attack would a Roman legionnaire have? And, if we're getting into fantasy, what about a goblin, an orc or a werewolf?

Lest you think the lack of lists can be attributed to the authoer's laziness or inattentiveness, it was purely intentional and it may be the key selling point of the game. In a true skirmish game, each miniature is an individual and all individuals are distinct. Not all Vikings were equally tough. A quick but naked Celt could have a defense of 6 and a clumsy Roman in armor might have a defense of 3 if you so choose.  This gives you the freedom to create a warband with a few powerful heroes or a swarming mob, or somewhere in between.  You could even create a warband made of a single god-like character (25 attack! 25 defense!) but the rules system naturally limits such pointless overpowering.  No matter how high your attack, you still roll only three dice and pick the best, and no matter how high you defense, your opponent still gets to roll a single die. Regular players of the game should find an equilibrium based on their style of play.

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For my initial game, I decided to test out character creation and put some Skraelings up against Vikings.  The Skraelings were initially for SAGA, but I never had a great desire to play their battleboard. Loved the figures, so now I can play the Indians as I envisioned them.  The Vikings were led by an 11 year old son of a friend, a Boy Scout with an deep interest in history - definitely a future war gamer.

The Indians are low on defense and fortitude, but I spent points on Speed, Aim and Nimbleness. Run and Gun! 

Above, the Vikings advance to the tree line. 

Initiative is the usual IGYG system, but rolling a "1" during combat ends your turn.  The does bear some similarities to the Song of Blades and Heroes iterations, in that a poor roll ends your turn before all the models have moved.  

Position matters in Open Combat.  This Viking about to get shot in the back will only be able to apply half of his Defense value.  

Above, the Jarl successfully defends against a Brave attacking from the high ground and then pushes them back,  He has taken some damage, however and...

another Brave activates and takes him out.   

With their Jarl slain, the Vikings reach the breaking point on their renown, and the game is called in favor of the Skraelings.  Total game time is under an hour, not bad for two players, one completely new to miniature wargaming.  

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Open Combat definitely fills a niche in my gaming habit.  The DIY nature of warband construction allows me to field some figures and forces the way I think they should be played, all within a balanced game mechanic.  It is quick to learn, and quick to teach, but not at all oversimplified.  

Currently, it is only available as a PDF from his website, though a published edition may be down the road if the game catches on.  I hope it is because Carl Brown is very supportive of his product through forums and outreach.  

Update:  Apologies to Carl BROWN for originally listing his name as Brand.  Not sure who I can blame for that, but if I find the culprit I'll be sure to identify him!

Indian Warband Completed

Some projects and purchases take longer than we expect to finish. Case in point: I purchased this Skraeling warband for SAGA in the Summer of 2012.  It was definitely a one-off oddity for the game. Few people seem to use them, and there has been no strong call on the forums to include them in an official release, as was the case for the Byzantines and Steppe Nomads. But, I had to have them because the Vinland Saga is one of my favorite sagas and my interest in the Mississippi mound builders

It is probably not with the most politically correct intentions that I was in part inspired to finish by the Thanksgiving Holidays.  Before Thanksgiving, elementary schools in America put a happy face on relations between the early colonists and the Indians.  My two grade school age children both learned a bit about pilgrims and Indians leading up to the holiday, and I did my best to give them a slightly fuller view of the early encounters between Europeans and Indians, without getting too Howard Zinn on them.  

Of course, six centuries before the arrival of the English, an encounter between Europeans and the native peoples was less a cause for  Thanksgiving.  The European advantage due to metal working was there, but not enough to overcome the natives' numerical advantage.  Calling the people they encountered "Skraelings," we know very little about how they looked or fought.

Gripping Beast's Skraelings are a very well produced set of miniatures.  It contains six variations of 24 warriors and three poses for the 12 archers.  Flash lines are minimal Historically, they probably miss the mark. While there is much that is unknown about the "Skraelings" encountered by the Norse settlers, they were probably of the Thule culture. The Thule were precursors of the Inuit and had similar lifestyle, based on the hunting of sea mammals for food and clothing. With their light clothing and deerskin clothes, these models might be more appropriate for Mississippi period mound builders.

Here's the whole warband, minus a couple of figures undergoing conversions into Shaman types: 

The other reason I was motivated to finish the warband was attending a field trip with my Daughter's third grade class to the Etowah Indian mounds. Are any museum diorama builders also wargamers?  If so, they must surely be tempted to give their layouts a test. Pardon the glare, but here is a model of how the Etowah might have appeared at its peak in the eleventh century. 

A recreation of a ceremonial deer mask, based on fragments approximately 900 years old.  It should make for an interesting priest character. 

Stone axe heads from the Mississippi period: 

Woodland Indians update

The Gripping Beast Skraeling army is almost completed - only a unit of warriors and the War Chief remain.  They will propbably put on hold, a box of plastic Normans awaits.

Non-Fiction Reading Recommendations

For further research on the Indians of the southeast, the best survey is Charles Hudson's The Southeastern Indians (1976).  It is a comprehensive look at the peoples of the southeast from the Paleolithic Era to the Cherokees.  The wargamer and military historian might better enjoy that same author's Knights of Spain, Warriors of the Sun (1997).  It is a well researched scholarly work about DeSoto's journey through the southeast, but its also a gripping narrative of the encounter between the Old and New Worlds at the end of the Middle Ages.  Centuries before, the steel swords of the Vikings were not enough to make colonization of the Americas tenable; later the guns, germs and steel of the Europeans made conquest almost inevitable.  However, in this brief moment, both sides faced each other with an equal share of advantages and disadvantages.  As DeSoto and his band haphazardly wandered across the south, they were also torn apart by their lust for gold and internal jealousies.

Historical Fiction 

People of the Weeping Eye
People of the Masks 

The First American series of books by Michael Gear and Kathleen O'Neal Gear can be an uneven lot.  Most books contain a liberal amount of New Age mysticism, but overall the authors avoid idealized depictions of harmonious first peoples.  They depict a complex, yet deeply tribal group of peoples, who build, destroy, scheme, love, fight, and trade.  It should also be noted that the authors engage in what fantasy writers would call world building.  No matter how archaeologically informed and researched, the authors do have to re-create the intricacies of social institutions without any documentation. In The People of the Weeping Eye warfare erupts as one tribe challenges the hegemony of another among the mound builders of Mississippi and Alabama.  For those interested in the Viking/Indian encounter, a more relevant book might be People of the Masks, about the early Iroquois, builders of the longhouses.

Woodland Indians and Mound Builders

I've finally started painting my box set of Gripping Beast's Skraelings.  Here are the first eight.

Due to a strong local connection to the Etowah Mounds, I am depicting my figures as eastern Moundbuilders of the Mississippi period.  According to some sources, they developed and used many dyes on their fabrics, favoring reds, yellows and black.

While the time frame of the Viking settlement of Vinland does coincide with the Mississippi culture, it is very unlikely that they were the Skraelings so described.  Nonetheless, the trade networks established by the great moundbuilding cities like Cahokia, extended north to Canada and the Great Lakes region, south all the way to Meso-America and west to the Rocky Mountains.


Pictures from the Etowah Mounds in Cartersville, Georgia.

Defensive ditch surrounding the village

View of the second mound from atop the highest mound.
The Etowah  River is behind the stand of trees in the background.

View across the Plaza, where ceremonies and civic activities occurred

Printing and Finishing Custom Dice

My previous homebrew SAGA dice have been printed on decal paper or on regular paper and affixed with spray adhesive.  I am now working on something a little more professional looking, waterslide decals.  This paper can be obtained fairly reasonably from a variety of sources, I found mine on eBay years ago for a guitar related project. At any rate, I have about a dozen sheets left, great for a variety of uses.

I create my custom pictures using a freeware program calked PhotoFiltre, or use the image files on the Studio Tomahawk forum.  The SAGA community should be really thankful that the game designers have opened so much of the game up to fan experimentation.

I tried to put as many decals as I could on a page.  The decal paper is not very expensive, but I hate to waste space, and I could always make extra dice for friends I am trying to hook on SAGA.

Spray the printed sheet with a glossy sealer, let dry for several hours.

Carefully clip and dip your decals in a cup of water for about 30 seconds.  You want the decal to slide off the paper and onto the surface of the die. Too much submersion and most of the adhesive is leached away, too little and the decal will not come loose from the backing.

SAGA Dice for Woodland Indians or "Skraelings"

Finally, I sprayed the gloss sealer on the dice, a couple of coats to get all the sides.  All together, it is not terribly expensive to produce a set of dice this way, but it is time consuming.  Of course, one could always use regular d6, but without getting too pretentious, part of the appeal of rolling dice in general and SAGA dice in particular is its connection to ancient ritual behavior.  The earliest dice to prehistoric and ancient men were "knucklebones," or the anklebones of livestock or hoofed game like deer.  Symbols and runes were marked on the sides for use in shamanistic rituals...or mostly gambling.  Symbol dice seem to carry greater significance than just a number of dots.   

SAGA dice for the Scots faction

New Dice Symbols

Woodland Indian dice symbols added to the Downloads page for use with Skraelings.  My next custom battleboard will be Woodland Indians later this summer.

The official SAGA battleboard for Skraelings is fun and unique with its use of imitation and elimination of your opponent's abilities, but what if two Indian warbands face each other?  More traditional shooting and melee  abilities will be necessary.

Time to Focus

Like most miniature collectors and games, I have a mountain of figures that seems to grow faster than I can paint it.  Currently, my unfinished projects are...

1. Some stray Norman and Byzantine infantry for SAGA:

2. The 37 figure Skraeling set for SAGA:

3. 16 Scot warriors from Crusader Miniatures purchased on impulse when I was reading King Hereafter months ago:

4. A few units of Song Chinese ordered from The Assault Group. I would like to do some skirmishing on China's western frontier with Chinese, Tibetans and steppe nomads.

Add to that the soon to be released plastic Norman infantry from Conquest Games - two boxes, definitely.