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I've sort of decided that if I'm doing mass battles in fantasy or ancients, I'm only ever doing "whole regiment" style games where the frontage of the movement tray is what matters, so I don't have to ever worry about rebasing things.

Hail Caesar is the system I like the look of for that, and I like that it's very much supposed to be a "build your own forces" toolkit. I also like that it's explicitly made for big demo-game style multiplayer games. Perfect for doing something like the Battle of the Pelenor Fields in 28mm as an event. It means my LOTR minis can easily do double duty by just making the frontages fit.

It's relatively easy to make forces fit, I just use the Army Lists as a starting point and find an army that roughly fits what I want, and most of the time that is all I need to do. But I'm curious if anyone else has used this system for fantasy games, and if so, how they dealt with more fantastical creatures like giants, trolls, dragons and balrogs. At the moment, I'm modelling large Trolls as elephants and smaller trolls as units of chariots, and I'm handwaving stuff like the Nazgul flying around on it's beast as just my commander for the evil side.

But if I wanted to do First Age LOTR or WFB style fantasy, I'd need to represent things like dragons, units of balrogs and so on. I suppose the logical answer is to look at Warmaster? Has anyone done something like this?

There was a Hail Caesar (1.0) mod called Shadow Storm, which IIRC has split off to it's own (non-HC) thing. Might see if you can find some of the old adaptations for inspiration.

Thanks, I remember looking for that some time in the summer but had forgotten the name!

There is no reason you can't use that base, since the original base was Warmaster! You would be going full circle!

Yeah I had heard it was based on Warmaster originally. I should check it out, warmaster is just a bit hard to track down.

Maybe I should just do warmaster straight, when I think about it.

Went about trying to make a Facebook account to get the Storm Shadow stuff.

Jeez. I was not aware of how many hoops you have to jump through these days to make a social media account. Bailed on it, it's not worth dealing with Meta's nonsense.

Didn't warlord publish a fantasy game, warlords of ehrtrhrow or something along those lines? I've no real idea what the rules look like but perhaps this could scratch your itch?

Oh yeah, I have Erehwon and it's great! It's individually based skirmish though, and I was looking for something with blocks of infantry, but not KoW because I found the basing requirements a bit too stringent and the community a bit too competitive focused.

Reading Erewhon and getting excited about it is what lead me to looking at Hail Caesar again, and thinking about how I could use it for fantasy gaming.

I think I'm gonna just put a little bit of work into producing my own fantasy house rules for it - mostly focused on Middle Earth. I want a system for doing big "participation game" events for stuff like the Battle of the Five Armies and the Battle of the Pelenor Fields and maybe stuff like the battles between Elves and Morgoth in the First Age.

I probably just have to bite the bullet and construct some stat-lines for dragons and the like.

Made a good guess didn't I? Erehwon was a game I had intesred in, like many others, but convincing my fellow players to jump in was always too hard.

Pike and shotte uses fairly large armies as well in ranked battles, but that may be somewhat too modern for a fantasy setting. May I ask, why not play GW's game in that instance? Is it too small scale?

Sorta similar for me - I love the look of Erewhon but mostly play with a "non-wargamer" and I think it's a bit too complicated for him at the moment, so I'm training him up on LOTR SBG for now! (I seem to only want to play games by Rick Priestly).

Pike and Shotte would work well for Warhammer Fantasy era games, I think. You'd definitely use it to represent the Empire pretty well.

Hail Caesar is more appealing for the Dark Ages/early medieval kind of period I prefer, so for stuff like LOTR and so on - pre-gunpowder.

Which GW game do you mean? Warmaster is the one I'd consider using, but I don't really like the "3 bases" way of organising the figures - it makes sense for 10mm figures but I'm gonna do 28mm. So a major priority for me is that the game accommodates a variety of basing methods. Hail Caesar is pretty good there - it has no stipulations for how many miniatures are needed for a unit, just that all the units of a certain size and type are similarly sized. So I can use round based 25mm, square based 25mm or square based 20mm, 25mm x 50mm cavalry or 40mm round cavalry, and the various weird oval bases that some companies use for cavalry and it's all good.

GW's "Old World" or older editions make base size too game relevant and that's kind of a deal breaker for me at this stage - I refuse to rebase anything and I want to be able to use all of my collection across several ranges together in one game, and for a regiment based game I see no reason to care about individual bases at all. KoW is good that way, but their minimum basing numbers sort of assume a 20mm base for your dudes, and most of mine are on 25mm circles. Also I just don't enjoy the competitive focus of that community that much.

So yeah, tl; dr - I have specific tastes with regard to how basing is handled in my fantasy games that Hail Caesar seems to meet the best.

Hope that made sense!

If you can find an old copy of Battle of 5 Armies, that should port over to Hail Ceasar pretty well. It uses the same Warmaster baseline as well.

 Da Boss wrote:
Sorta similar for me - I love the look of Erewhon but mostly play with a "non-wargamer" and I think it's a bit too complicated for him at the moment, so I'm training him up on LOTR SBG for now! (I seem to only want to play games by Rick Priestly).

Pike and Shotte would work well for Warhammer Fantasy era games, I think. You'd definitely use it to represent the Empire pretty well.

Hail Caesar is more appealing for the Dark Ages/early medieval kind of period I prefer, so for stuff like LOTR and so on - pre-gunpowder.

Which GW game do you mean? Warmaster is the one I'd consider using, but I don't really like the "3 bases" way of organising the figures - it makes sense for 10mm figures but I'm gonna do 28mm. So a major priority for me is that the game accommodates a variety of basing methods. Hail Caesar is pretty good there - it has no stipulations for how many miniatures are needed for a unit, just that all the units of a certain size and type are similarly sized. So I can use round based 25mm, square based 25mm or square based 20mm, 25mm x 50mm cavalry or 40mm round cavalry, and the various weird oval bases that some companies use for cavalry and it's all good.

GW's "Old World" or older editions make base size too game relevant and that's kind of a deal breaker for me at this stage - I refuse to rebase anything and I want to be able to use all of my collection across several ranges together in one game, and for a regiment based game I see no reason to care about individual bases at all. KoW is good that way, but their minimum basing numbers sort of assume a 20mm base for your dudes, and most of mine are on 25mm circles. Also I just don't enjoy the competitive focus of that community that much.

So yeah, tl; dr - I have specific tastes with regard to how basing is handled in my fantasy games that Hail Caesar seems to meet the best.

Hope that made sense!

I was thinking of GW's middle earth game. As for basing itself, have you thought about basing your collection either on 2 bases - one large and a shorter on top, magnetised maybe, or with wire. That way you could switch your minis between several bases.

That was an answer we had to someone around on this forum who had kind of the same issue with different bases required for different games on Bolt Action weapon teams, namely a mortar.

Could be too big of an investment for an entire collection though.

Oh yeah, War of the Ring? Yeah, I have played and enjoyed that. I think the rules designers got a bit over-excited in places though. Probably worth looking at for ideas.

As to the bases, I'm too lazy, I think. I want something that really just doesn't care about base size, because it's possible to design games that way and with manufacturers messing around with it for cynical reasons, that's what should be focused on. Erehwon has a simple way of dealing with it - unit sizes are relatively fixed, and everyone in a unit always gets to fight in melee - just gets rid of any quibbling over base sizes. So it is possible to do that, but GW and others don't want to, because changing base sizes is a cynical move designed to push people to buy their collections again/make their stuff incompatible with 3rd party stuff.

At the moment, my Middle Earth stuff is on 25mm and 40mm rounds, and that works out well for unit bases of 6x2 25mm for infantry and 4x2 40mm for cavalry. Has the bonus that 20mm ranks 8x2 and 25x50mm cavalry ranks 6x2, so it accommodates all the sizes I'm generally dealing with.

 Da Boss wrote:
Yeah I had heard it was based on Warmaster originally. I should check it out, warmaster is just a bit hard to track down.

Maybe I should just do warmaster straight, when I think about it.

Went about trying to make a Facebook account to get the Storm Shadow stuff.

Jeez. I was not aware of how many hoops you have to jump through these days to make a social media account. Bailed on it, it's not worth dealing with Meta's nonsense.

https://www.wm-revolution.com/

https://wm-selector.github.io/#/

There is a rank and flank game coming out soon called "Hobgoblin" by the guy who created Gaslands, which I have the early access rules of and am having fun with teaching my 9 year old.

It's multibase like Kings of War, so no unit removal, and it's super minis agnostic. Like, there are about 10 main unit types every force must choose from, and you just assign your models to be the type of unit you intend them to be, and personalize the unit further with Abilities that are both strengths and weaknesses.

A "Heavy Infantry" unit could be standard Chaos Warriors.

A "Heavy Infantry" unit with Ranged and Slow could be Armored Dwarves with Blunderbusses.

It's 28mm scaled, but lots of people have been halving the unit footprint, and measuring ranges in centimeters to play at smaller scales.

Lord_Blackfang - thanks for the links! PDFs downloaded now.

AegisGrimm: Yeah, I should look a bit further afield, I might find some better games for my ideas that way. I know there are a lot of skirmish games that work that way, I'll check out Hobgoblin. Sounds good.

 AegisGrimm wrote:
There is a rank and flank game coming out soon called "Hobgoblin" by the guy who created Gaslands, which I have the early access rules of and am having fun with teaching my 9 year old.

It's multibase like Kings of War, so no unit removal, and it's super minis agnostic. Like, there are about 10 main unit types every force must choose from, and you just assign your models to be the type of unit you intend them to be, and personalize the unit further with Abilities that are both strengths and weaknesses.

A "Heavy Infantry" unit could be standard Chaos Warriors.

A "Heavy Infantry" unit with Ranged and Slow could be Armored Dwarves with Blunderbusses.

It's 28mm scaled, but lots of people have been halving the unit footprint, and measuring ranges in centimeters to play at smaller scales.

It is similar to Fantastic Battles? I like FB but maybe a bit too abstracted...

I had a look at it, have to say I don't love the idea of the cards. But I will pick it up if I see a copy in my local shop and give it a fair shake.

There are a few decent choices for rank and flank these days, but of the ones I've seen for whatever reason I like the look of HC the most. KoW is fine, but there are elements to it I just don't enjoy - it's a bit too tournament focused.

Oathmark seems on the other hand a little bit half baked? Also not a fan of having to buy lots of books to get it all. But I should give it a proper try maybe. I also have to say I prefer classic fantasy tropes for my factions rather than the mixed approach.

And then Hobgoblin seems like what is it...hordes of things? Song of Blades and Heroes? But regiment based and with cards?

Oh and then you've got The Old World if you want complicated rules for the sake of complicated rules.

 Da Boss wrote:

Oathmark seems on the other hand a little bit half baked? .

Oathmark has horrendous balancing issues and can be a drag at times. Saying from experience playing around 10 games.

Hobgoblin probably plays the most like Kings of War. There is no model removal, only unit bases of a certain size. The unit sizes are variable so you can use anything you like, but the minimum size for an infantry unit is 100mmx40mm, comparable to other games having two ranks of 5 infantry.

It's basically a streamlined rank and flank game. Units move just like expected, with advances, sideways shuffles, wheels (where one base corner stays in place and they rotate around like a door swinging), and spins in place.

There is only one to-hit roll when attacking and most units have a base of 10 attacks, and unit's to-hit rolls are balanced against every other unit type. So for instance, if you have a unit of Light Infantry attacking a unit of Heavy Infantry, the Light Infantry hits on 5+. But if they are attacking another unit of Light Infantry, they hit on 4+. Lots of abilities you can give units modify their to-hit, or give additional Doom on hits (or they take less Doom to rout), etc.

When a unit takes hits, they gain Doom Tokens (this games morale). If ever the unit's Doom level is higher than their Courage, they are routed and removed. Routed units panic nearby friendly units, giving them each a Doom Token.

Characters are embedded in units, giving bonuses to courage, and extra dice a unit throws when attacking, or if a Wizard, they can cast spells.

There are cards, but they are basically "fog of war" cards you draw and play during the game, like a unit gets to advance extra, or a unit removes D6 Doom, or hits harder this attack, etc.

My 9yo son and I played a couple of games with my collection of Lego minifigures that I had originally collected meaning to use for Kings of War. Only a few figures per base, but they are approximately the same size unit bases (100x40) as if you had 28mm ranked models. The square at the back tracks a unit's Doom.

I think its fun, with a cool way to quickly build custom, unique armies from scratch using a small list of starting units, instead of a bunch of established "Army Lists" like Kings of War. Like, a Hero can be added to a unit of the Light Infantry type to represent a Hero with a Men At Arms bodyguard, but they could also be added to a Monster unit and then given the flying ability to represent a Hero on a griffon, or dragon, etc.

Seems like at the very least it'll be easy to plug and play with my existing stuff with no effort, so it's a no brainer to pick up the book if I see it locally. Thanks for the rundown!