Dark Age DBA Campaign… Some thoughts…

Lessons learned, etc….

As Christian has mentioned in the comments of one of the other posts I think this was the most successful of the campaigns I’ve run so far. This was a combination of the players involved plus some minor tweaking/evolution of the campaign rules over time. There are a few changes I’d make if running it again (or other campaigns) – and I very much hope to do so! (on a fairly regular basis!)

Gary commented was that he wasn’t killed by his enemy, but by the sea – and that it would have been more honourable to die in battle. An odd comment from a guy that spend half of his first battle hiding in a swamp… but he makes a very good point. I don’t th ink I want to completely remove that, but think I would change the sea losses to a d3 instead of a d6.

I might also make SOME sea routes “safe” mark them in black like overland routes and they wouldn’t have to be diced for in the spring or fall. I’m thinking mostly of the two routes into Roskilde. I’ve effectively done that with the route from Oslo to Nidaros – I doubt very much that there would have been a regularly used overland route between those two areas and that most travel would have been by boat following along the coast.

I’d definitely want to add some more travel lanes. I wanted to keep this as much like the wagon wheel schematic campaign diagram with isolated capitals (capitals that could not be reached without first attacking at least one of the players other cities first. I didn’t want to make too many cities TOO accessible – cities with three or four (or more!) ways leading into them. But as I don’t really have a center city that all can get to I think I’ve created some bottlenecks…


I’d definitely add one from Shetland to York, and probably from Oslo to Ribe and/or Cambridge. I might also consider Lind Duchail to Nottinghanam and/orLoch Garmon to Exeter? Would Lind Duchaill to Deganwy put too many routes into that area?

Of course adding in the West Franks and East Franks would change a lot of this…

I had considered at one point doing Sea Zones – where a move from one city to another within the same Sea Zone would be considered one move and not require dicing for loss at sea, moving from a city in one Sea Zone to a city in another Seas Zone would count as two moves and would require dicing for loss at sea… but there’s so many capitals that are on the ocean I couldn’t figure out a way to effectively isolating them…

This has gotten me pretty stoked about the idea of painting up a few Greek Hoplite armies for a Greek City-State War/Peloponesian War campaign (well, and the fact that my kids are nuts about Ancient/Mythic Greece right now… and I HAVE figures for two Hoplite armies and have already started them… and the fact that Jackson already has a Spartan army!). I think one of the advantages to such a campaign is that all the participants would have more or less the same army, removing the trump card army of the Normans. A feudal Japan campaign as Phil suggested in the comments on the previous post could also be similar (and a bit more dynamic – as there would be a few more troop types to play around with – yet everyone still has a pretty level playing field).

The one thing I worry about in adding East and West Franks to this map is the addition of two Knight-heavy armies… It would be idea if they would quarrel among themselves, but if you get two friends running them they could end up destroying everyone.

An interesting idea from the simple rules laid out in the DBA3.0 draft that could easily be added to this system and remove the two friends back to back issue is adding a bunch of cards with the names of all the countries on them which are dealt out at the beginning of each year. If you are dealt a card with the name of a player that you currently share a border with (i.e. have a direct travel route from one of your cities to one of their cities) you MUST declare war on them and attack them in the spring.

There was a problem with forcing players to attack other players and letting other players know about out in a previous campaign – other players could potentially take advantage of that knowledge and attack a neighbor that they knew would be busy attacking their other neighbor. This could easily be circumvented by doing it during the declaration phase AFTER all the players had secretly written down who they want to declare war on and simply add the card drawn to their declarations – or even deal it out before declarations are made but do it secretly so players can decide NOT to invade BOTH neighbors (if they’d originally been planning on invading the opposite neighbor indicated on the card). Does that make sense…?

Oh I forgot to mention elsewhere - the one change we made to the 3.0 rules was to add a caveat to the rules involving placement of terrain - that when dicing for a quarter to put a terrain piece in if the result indicated a quarter in which there was already a piece of terrain, the defender may roll again, but most accept the outcome of the second roll. I think this worked very well. Some of the earlier games of 3.0 ended up with some very lop-sided terrain. I don't think there was anything really terrible in any of the fields of battle generated by our tweak. Also we added that bad-going much be diced for first - because it was conceivable that if you had all gentle hills plus one piece of bad-going - if the bad-going was diced for last I could possible be placed in a quarter in which there was no room and therefore be discarded which could leave a table without any bad-going at all!

Anyway… just a few ideas…? I’m sure I’ll think of other things in the following weeks and months.…

Anybody else have any ideas…? Please leave a comment!

Coming soon on Tim’s Miniature Wargaming Blog:

I have no idea. I need to take a break from the late nights of painting minis and get going on some other projects (comics, painting pictures, etc…). I have a bunch of Greeks and West Franks and space ships and 20mm WW2 Soviets all polluting my work station already… hard to say which will see paint first…