Song of Blades and Heroes - Campaign Start

Last night we played another game of WHAA and another game of SoBH. Both games cover the same subject matter but they are also sufficiently different to make playing them both games interesting.

My force consisted of:
Ragnar Flameheart Q3 C4 Leader Hero
Ketil One-Eye Q3 C4 Fearless Savage
Bjorn Q3 C3
Thorir Q3 C3
Ulf Q3 C3 Shooter (Long)
Egil Q3 C3 Shooter (Long)

Steve fielded:
Klaus – Human Leader
Matthais – Human Cleric
Rudolf – Human Warrior
James – Human Warrior
Pawel – Human Warrior
Michael – Human Archer
Uli – Human Archer

Steve and I decided that we should start an intermittent Song of Blades and Heroes campaign to see how it worked out. Well, my dice have now been thrown into the Humber, which flows past near my house, and I shall be breaking out some new dice for the next game.

Here we see both forces set up. Ragnar Flameheart and his heroic band (my force) are deployed on the left of the picture, while a bunch of Teutonic peasants (Steve's force) are deployed on the right. The scenario was the Difficult Ground one, which left both of us avoiding all terrain, because there is a chance that your figures get swallowed by terrain or fall into quicksand or something!
(Don't forget to click the pictures for larger versions)


With the forces deployed, we quickly rushed towards each other. Both of us know only one command in battle: "Charge!" As we charged forwards, my archer shot and killed Steve's cleric. The battle lines then clashed. I had the advantage of numbers and so I charged in. Bjorn was knocked out in the first melee, Ketil One-Eye was pushed back and Thorir pushed back one of the enemy.



Seeing that we had the local advantage, despite two of my figures losing their melees and one being killed, we chose to all charge in. Ragnar bellowed and attacked. Ulf and Egil, the archers also charged in. How could we lose? We totally outnumbered the two peasants that were in the enemy battleline by at least 2:1 in each case. As each attack was made, we confidently expected to slaughter the enemy and hear the laments of their women.



And so, with Ragnar and Ulf being knocked off their feet by the spearman on our right, and with Thorir and Egil being knocked over on our left by the other lone spearman, we chose the valorous path and surrendered. Despite outnumbering the enemy and making lots of Quality rolls, we still failed to win any melees at all after that first one where the enemy spearman was pushed back. Aaaarrrggh!

And so, I headed down to the river and made sacrifice to the dice gods ...

This was a great fun game but it seemed to highlight the high element of luck that seems to be needed in SoBH, more so than WHAA, which seems to even out more with lots of dice rolling. I can't wait to try some different tactics in the next game of SoBH!

Terrain mostly by WorldWorksGames, supplemented with a few Woodlands Scenics trees and some aquarium plants.