....I played Torch and Shield.

 Torch and Shield is the kind of game that intrigues me far more than it has a right to do so.While my background is mostly wargaming, I've only really truly enjoyed the excellent Battletech and Blood Bowl as far as gridded games go. While Underworlds was a decent title, I didn't see anything that wouldn't just work better without the hexes - for goodness sake there aren't even facing rules!

Ah, I'm ranting. Torch and Shield. No real major interest in dwarves, sour taste in my mouth because let's be frank, the Hobbit movies burned me, and I didn't really enjoy any of the newer "duardin" GW was putting out. I've since come around on the Fyreslayers (I like the newest Warcry band and nothing else, at all.) but alas, not much else. 

 

But, I do like Landsknects, and when I saw those on their website, I realized I should pay more attention. Let me be clear, I wasn't going to go for anything in the kickstarter but those goofy merc-looking dwarves, but then I watched some videos on the game, and realized that they basically took a lot of Games Workshop design ideas and put it into an honestly brilliant game. 

Combat is quick and easy to resolve, and features "buckets of dice" style resolution - you will be rolling around 3+ dice to make hits, you need successes for hits, those come on a 5-6, so throwing more dice is always important. 

There's no real structure to this post, so I'll just go with some observations:

While it's a "bring what minis you have" rule (which is a pointless descriptor, every minis game is a "bring what you have" game and there's exactly one company with the clout and power to enforce otherwise...) I found that going WYSIWYG was a massive, embarrassing mistake because one side of Vulkyn Flameseekers (mostly painted!!) was able to trounce a dwarf army of Kainan's reapers (not painted! mea culpa!!) very easily in every single game (we played three) except for one where we got some very unlucky pulls from the event decks and I was having to pull from my Warcry teams to be able to have enough. Now I've been assured that the main game will have a load-out system, so I'll mea culpa that for now, because otherwise having a "balanced" team with pure WYSIWYG is not possible.

Positioning is important and there's something of a "death spiral" in the games - your characters have 3 wounds, and it's possible to get one-shotted easy - but even taking a single wound means you become easier to be wounded. That's generally fine, because the resolution is pretty chunky and - roll a direct contest to hit, then to wound for each hit you get, a la' MESBG. There's knockback like in MESBG or Blood Bowl or Underworlds, and like MESBG and Underworlds if you don't have a place to be knocked back to(you choose where to go, unless the enemy is using a hammer. Hammer dwarves get to choose where to push) the enemy rolls an extra die to wound you. Like Blood Bowl, you can then do a "follow up" and come up to them. 

Taking a wound means you're knocked down. It uses a pool system, so if your MS(attack stat) is 4, you roll 4d6 and count the 5/6's for a hit, same with wounds, with armor and resilience reducing the amount of dice the "wounder" would get from its strength score. That resilience goes down by 1 each wound suffered, and all of the demo guys had 2 resilience, so if you took two hits and weren't dead, you were not going to survive another hit.

The card initiative system(each dwarf gets 1 card) was a bit slow going (our first two rounds of six was 50 minutes nearly) but once we had it down pat we were sheathing cards(you get +1 extra card if your leader is alive and can save it for the next turn) and slaughtering each other with ease, with each round lasting about 15 minutes. So for "pro" or "people that know the rules" type players I would say a normal game of T&S would last about 90 minutes. Depending on your life circumstances you could probably get two games in a session. Cards also do stuff like make you lose your light sources fuel or worse like spawning one or three monsters at the nearest entrance to you - meaning you can, at the end of the round, go from chuckling and confident to sweating bullets and having to realign plans. Or you set off a trap and have to resolve a hit against you. Nothing good happens to the player that draws this, and it's the player with priority that gets it. Which is interesting, there's some indication that being the Fated One has positive stuff going for it. As it stands you get to draw from the "fuck you" deck.

Being shrouded is the most "hold your breath" stuff I've seen in a game. Basically you become harder to shoot at but you also lose the protection of the light source, and the light source is a huge part of the game. You will tactically position yourself automatically without even thinking of it, and we started using home-made blood bowl scatter templates to show line of sight. If you're not careful re: light, you're going to have a bad time. Anyone without light becomes shrouded and that means every round you roll 2d6. On a 2, you die, no save (fuck you). You were eaten by a grue. On a 10-12 a monster spawns next to you. Monsters interrupt fights, as dwarves will fight, sure, but they won't stand a monster to live.

You are only guaranteed up to half a game of light. You get d3 rounds of light in the beginning, and after that you roll 1d6 for each light source and it goes out on a 1. Also, you lose 1 fuel if you, the fated one, draw a diamond card. For both teams, draw it again and the lights go out. Then monsters start showing up because you then are rolling for every single god-damned dwarf. Again these are QS rules so I'd recommend you hit up the discord for more questions by it, but this game is very tense and good. It's the diametric opposite of something like Warcry where the point is to just swarm each other like angry ants and beat the fuck out of each other (although there are special skills determined by your card drawn's suit for each guy, similar to Warcry's Yahtzee initiative). You really want to be careful - tactical positioning is extremely important - and objectives are very important. There's still the "cinematic" moments that Warcry offers, but it's more of an "oh shit" as the lights go out and then you suddenly have 12 monsters on around you and it's round two.

 So it's a great game. The Kickstarter is running right now and I recommend you get in on the ground floor because, not only is it good, it has Landsknecht dwarves. 

 

- Klang 

Kharmlund Session 2

In the time between the....oh hell, skip the cliche and let's begin it's time for Kharmlund! An open table OSE game I'm running here bi-weekly. For...ever? I have no idea. It's a sandbox campaign.

For this session, only two players sporting three characters and a pack of four dwarven henchmen went into Kharmlund (it's long weekend time in Canada, it was a fool's gambit to do this). 

That was:

Talsi - Drow illusionist

Ulf - Human Assassin

Grent - Elf

And of course, I will be simply naming any dwarves by the names of Thorin's company aside from other, neater sounding names I find on the spot. So Thorin, Dwalin, Balin and Floki joined the party into the depths of Kharmlund. There was no adventuring in the Dveghom about the underground, they took their eight hour (in-game) time limit and entered into...the long dark of Kharmlund. 

This session had the party dealing with their first combat encounters and uh, boy howdy did they have some combat encounters. First and foremost the party decided to go to the south-west from where they scored an easy win, gaining 400sp, which is like, 40gp in my lazy currency conversion. They scooped it into the pockets of their henchmen without a second thought. Money is kind of a trap unless it's literally gold, especially since I just make "coins" all weigh the same, but the party had four doughty dwarves with them. 

 

                                                                                  The Party's hand-drawn map(it is not correct but close enough)

 

From there, they entered into a few rooms (and made an absolute shitton of listening checks, holy hell, every door, multiple times, at least 60 minutes IGT(in game time) was spent listening at doors. They found the hasty camping site of some bandits belonging to one of the campaign's factions and then found one of the "easy early" treasures I usually put in there. It's a book of smut, with a GP value of 2500 gp. So think "lust argonian maid" and you're golden (also the book is studded with rubies). Sadly, the party was then surrounded, as there's a two-way mirror wall that allowed them to be seen. These bandits, with shoddy equipment and large red K's somewhere on their armor had placed the book there, see. Stolen from Kurgan's treasure, you see. They were just trying to figure out how to get past the wight that "guards" the entrance to the dungeon. One of the bandits also was able to clock a treasure sack full of coins and cut it open, causing silver, sweet silver to spill onto the dungeon floor, everywhere. This caused some distraction, enough for Turk, the assassin to use his ability.

Assassins in OSE have a neat trick. If they do a sneak attack on an unaware target(and I ruled he was unaware) the target needed to make a save or die roll. He did this to the leader - who did not make the save. The bandits also lost initiative, and most of them lost their morale rolls when their numbers were halved in a single combat round. Sadly, they did manage to kill Floki, so when all was said and done, the dwarves were down a number. Loyalty checks passed easily, but there was some soreness at losing someone so early on.

Onward! 

The party pushed northwards into a small, safe room. There was a pair of living eyes on the wall, and it called out, "Well Met! Have a drink!"  The party greeted them as the wall began vomiting water, cool, clear, water. There was a door to the north, so the party entered and stepped into a teeny tiny shelob's cave. Not willing to mess around with the webbing and the near silent rustle of something on the roof, the party decided to see if they could go around, noting at least two other doors. 

 So they went east. After much more listening at doors, hooray, they entered and moved north, stopping at a small Altar of some kind of wolf god, taking 2 damage from touching it(they were heathen nonbelievers) and debating knocking it over before moving into the "spider" room from a secret door. They were able to try and bushwack the spider and it worked...sort of. The Elf had to dodge what would have easily been a one-shot kill from the thing, but they were able to murder the awful thing. At this point, with the IRL timer running low and them already having a ton of money, they shrugged and decided to turn back.

No major encounters despite 3(!) rolls for them, and the party managed to return back to the land of the living, with a few thousand XP and many large piles of coins, they did good. 

The Dwarves will likely be asking for an up-front fee due to people dying. 1gp ain't worth your life, after all!