I played my third game in our revised Song of Blades and Heroes (SoBH) campaign last night.
We had originally started the campaign using the basic campaign rules in the main rulebook, but soon after I bought the Song of Deeds and Glory book with the expanded campaign system, so we decided to restart from scratch.
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| The table layout, the third river section was designated as a ford. |
I had my Dark Elf Warband facing off against Jeff's Orc. I have won all my games so far, and Jeff has been struggling to get the Orc to work effectively and has lost all his games. Still I never going expecting to win, as I am prone to a severe lack of strategic thinking and also make the odd silly mistake that usually lands me right in it!
However, the gods were certainly on my side last night. We were playing a take and hold scenario, there were three objectives and we got victory points each round for holding them (uncontested). The game would be over when either of us held all three objectives or when one of us wiped the other out...
I advanced across the field and soon had two of the three objectives and was advancing on the third. One of my crossbowmen landed a bolt in one of Jeff's Orc, it knocked him down and more importantly reduced his quality by 1 (sneaky Dark Elves and their poisoned weapons). Then I charged my Dark Elf Lizard Rider into a group of three Orcs that Jeff had sent to push me back.
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| My Goblin Sneak guards the first objective. |
Now, my Lizard Rider had proved to be totally useless in previous games either standing their doing nothing or running in and getting killed, so I didn't hold out much hope for this tactic this time. How wrong I was. In the first round of combat he pushed one Orc back and then ripped a second one to pieces (a Gruesome Kill in game terms). This forced Jeff's whole force to take morale checks, of which half of them failed, and as we were quite close to Jeff's edge of the table they ran right off it...
The next round of combat proved just as successful. Jeff's fallen Orc failed to get up and my Lizard Rider finished him off in similar fashion to the first one, causing another morale check which drove the rest of Jeff's force from the table!
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| Red "Splat" Markers indicate Gruesome Kills... |
So effectively I had completely routed Jeff's entire warband with just the one miniature. Now I must say that on the whole I was extremely lucky with this one, and Jeff made some very poor dice rolls just at the wrong time. However, my Dark Elves struted off the field with suitably smug looks on their faces!
The after battle campaign resolution went fairly well too. I managed to aquire a small cash reward of 25 gold pieces, taking my purse up to 54. I decided not to spend any on adding new equipment or a new recruit to my warband, prefering to save the cash for a expensive purchase later on! I did however have some experience point to use. I upped the quality of a few of my characters and decided to take a risk and let two crossbowmen attempt a Quest. To have a successful quest the figures sacrifice three XPs and then roll on a D6. If they get a 6 they can roll to see what reward (usually an improvement to the figures abilities in some way) they get. My first attempt failed, but I got very lucky with the second attempt and one of my crossbowman aquired the Leader special ability (giving me two leaders and a hero now)...
