An Oldhammer Evening

Just a quick post before I jet off to Gen Con.

I've been running a D&D5 campaign for a bit, and I decided to have it culminate in a titanic battle. The fate of the north of our campaign world hung in the balance. The big question became: what system would we use to play this out?

-Would I use the Unearthed Arcana Battlesystem rules that Wizards put out? Needs more playtesting.
-Would I use the D&D Miniatures Handbook from 3rd edition? Maybe, but then I'd have to learn a new system and teach it to everyone.
-Would I use Warhammer? Sure! I mean, my entire game group is a bunch of Warhammer players, that would work wonderfully.

But which edition?

The answer, of course, was 3rd edition. I mean, it's got all the role-play trappings of the era, but built to be a miniatures war game. It was fun converting all my group's D&D characters, and their adversaries into Warhammer stats. I'd read everything for 3rd edition, but I'd never actually played it before. It would be both new and familiar to everyone.

I enlisted the help of two of my friends who weren't in the campaign to be the "ringers" and play the evil forces of hobgoblins and traitorous northmen. While the player characters (PCs) took on the roles of their characters and those they recruited to help preserve peace in the north. I'm pleased to say that the PCs won (despite being outnumbered by ~1000pts.). Though the wizard of the party did make a shady pact with the enemy to preserve his own skin.

I let the players add some role-play elements to the game, and I acted as game master which was a lot more fun that I thought. I'd never played an '80s wargame before, and I worried that the job of game master would be dull, but it was pretty great. Anyway, here are some pictures:

The prep.

Depoloyment (the pink cards in the center are traps, and decoys).

The clash in the center.

The frost giant pictured there was determined to be drunk at the
beginning of the game. Out of the two giants in the game he was
the only one to survive.

The dwarves held their own, that's for sure.

The LotR figures are "Empire soldiers," and the Mantic ghouls
are summoned lesser daemons.

The dwarves pursue the hobgoblins (represented by savage orcs)
through the forest.

The ogres were led by the cyclops warlord Kronar. He defeated
the fighter Corvinus (king of the north), but ultimately lost the war.

The real casualties of the battle. The beer was drunk by myself
and two others, while the bottles of cider were quaffed by the
gnome player.

Anyway, while Warhammer 3 had some weird and clunky rules (Vortex of Chaos is over-powered), it was filled with character, and we all had a great time! A perfect end to the campaign.

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