Dark Ages DBA Campaign Weekend

Well… now that the Back of Beyond Campaign is over with it is time to start work on the NEXT campaign weekend!!

The next campaign weekend will likely be the weekend of the 26-27-28 February 2010 (Tim’s Sixth Annual Wargaming Birthday Bash). It will be set (mostly) in England, nominally around the end of the first millennium AD (give or take 66 years or so…). There will, at the very least, be Normans, Vikings, Anglo-Saxons or Anglo-Danish, Irish, and Scotts. If I get a couple extra armies finished, and if CVT, Cory and Gary can be convinced to bring theirs out… well then we could potentially have up to THREE Anglo-Saxon/Danish players, two to three Vikings, Normans AND West Franks, Scotts AND Picts, Irish and Welsh… potentially up to twelve players…. (MWA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-HA-Ha-Ha-Ha-ha-ha-ha…. wait… do I even have that many friends…!?).

I’ve done some rough sketching of the map, but I won’t make a good one until I have a better idea of who is coming and what armies will for sure be available. If the megalomaniac vision of 12 players was realized I imagine it would be broken up something like this:

Norse Irish in Ireland, Welsh in Wales.

Picts in the North of Scotland (Highlands), Pre-feudal Scots in the south (Strathclyde, etc).

The English would be broken up into three and could play either Middle Anglo-Saxons or Anglo-Danish. The three “kingdoms” or regions would be Wessex/Sussex/Kent in the south, Mercia/East Anglia in the middle, and Northumbria in the north…

The three Vikings would be Denmark, Scandinavia, and the Islands (Hebrides/Shetland/Orkney).

The last two would be the Normans in Normandy and the West Franks in… well… the rest of France…?

Maybe not entirely historically accurate... but damn wouldn't it be FUN!? TWELVE players!? Is this totally nuts…?

It’s never too early to mark it on your calendar and say “DUDE, I AM SO THERE!!”

I decided last week to take stock of where I’m at and realized I have about 339 foot and 25 mounted to paint… That will finish off the Normans, Anglo-Saxons/Danish, Irish, Welsh, Scotts, Picts and a second Viking army…. With just under 20 weeks to go, that’s about 20 figures per week… Easy… so far this year I’ve been averaging 23. (I will do the second Viking army last – that’s 76 foot right there, if I don’t get it done it’s no big deal – I’ve already got one and Gary’s half finished his… a third would be fun… but… Anyway without them it drops the per week quota to 16). There is also a week Amanda has off in December and I could potentially get a lot done then.

Future Campaign Weekends

I think for the weekend in June I’ll do another Hordes of the Things campaign. I had hoped to do the Successors of Alexander, but I just don’th think I’ll have time to finish all the required armies. Another HOTT campaign seems more likely as I wouldn’t HAVE to do anything for it…. I already have five complete purely fantasy armies that can be fielded right now (Elves, Dwarves, two Orcs, and the Sapphic League). By then I’ll likely be able to field two Dwarf armies, possibly a third Orc, maybe some others…. And, of course, I can add any of the 9-10 DBA Armies I will likely have done (Normans, Anglo-Saxons/Danish, Irish, Welsh, Scotts, Picts, two Vikings, Romans, and Samurai). Maybe the HOTT Summer Campaign weekend could become a regular annual event…

That will give me up to eight months to work on something big for next October…. I’m kind of torn between The Successors of Alexander or an 18th Century “imagi-nation” campaign… I’m totally going to do BOTH at some point… the question is which will I do FIRST. It will probably come down to which requires the least to paint…

Of course I was also sketching a point-to-point map for a 1914 campaign the other night and dreaming up a possible campaign mechanic to play a section of France in the opening stages of the great War…. I’ve also been contemplating just how many English Civil War DBA armies I could put together with the shwack of lead I have…

We shall see… The next one will be Dark Age England… the one after that will most likely be a Fantasy Hordes of the Things campaign…