Lead Adventure Forum
Miniatures Adventure => Interwar => Topic started by: H.M.Stanley on February 04, 2013, 07:47:47 AM
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One of the guys at the club has been broking a VBCW project for a while now and hasn't had so much a nibble, let alone a bite.
However, i picked up the Concise Source Book admit its an interesting concept. Naturally i'm drawn to The Peoples Armies (so that i can use my SCW collection of Militia and International Brigade)
So, how to start? Rules, Campaigns, films even? I can see the boys doing a small campaign with their current figures and take it from there.
Cheers
James
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Rules - whatever you're using for SCW, I would think; that'll provide mechanics for movement, shooting and morale, as well as hardware.
Campaigns - where are you based? That's the easiest place to start.
Films - Land and Freedom, Richard III (Mackellen), any Jeeves and Wooster
And then you have to make random event cards, to be drawn at the beginning of a turn (depends on how your turn sequence works, obviously)...
Suggestions:
Tea Break - one unit gets a brew going and cannot move or shoot (but can defend themselves if attacked hand-to-hand) for one turn
Bad Weather - a sudden squall makes the going treacherous; all units on the table move at half-speed for one turn
Ducks on the Road - animals (ducks, cows or in urban areas, children) are crossing the road, field etc; one unit cannot move, fire or be fired on, or attack or be attcked hand to hand, for one turn
Game of Footie - two opposing units within 12"/30cm begin an impromptu game of football; for this turn and all subsequent turns until BOTH commanders make a suitable control/leadership roll to regain command, the two units will play football instead of fighting. No other units from either side may attack, fire on or otherwise interfere, except that more senior commanders may try to intervene to restore order. If order is restored at the beginning of a turn, each unit must move its maximum move away from the enemy, before being able to move and fight normally on the following turn
Just a few suggestions there...
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Basically as Red Orc said, any WWI, interwar or WWII rules are easily adapted. The Ian McKellen Richard III is apparently the spark that ignited the whole thing so its highly recommended viewing :)
Mick
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Thanks chaps
I quite like the alternative history of this but i'll step away from the Buffoonery of Wodehouse [i enjoy the books of course] :)
I've ordered that version of RIII
I'm minded to use Bolt Action as it worked for my SCW games
James
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The original idea was to use whichever rules you'd use for that period, so if you're happy with the BA one's it's a goer.
Related books are typically about the BUF, and Guy Walters did a good similar themed novel "The Leader". There's a Moseley mini-drama on DVD but probably not that vital tbh.
There's a dedicated web forum over at http://vbcf.freeforums.org/index.php (http://vbcf.freeforums.org/index.php)
and my media empire has some examples of models, figure, etc, but also plenty of free handy bits like flags, banners, posters,chance cards, and the like; http://6milphil.wordpress.com/?s=vbcw (http://6milphil.wordpress.com/?s=vbcw)
plus there's jp1885's excellent miniature guide; http://vbcwminisguide.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/welcome-to-vbcw-miniatures-guide.html (http://vbcwminisguide.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/welcome-to-vbcw-miniatures-guide.html)
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Thanks Phil - i'll have a look
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Thanks chaps
I quite like the alternative history of this but i'll step away from the Buffoonery of Wodehouse [i enjoy the books of course] :)
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One's willingness to shoehorn Bertie and his antics into VBCW is entirely a matter personal taste. I regard all 20s-30s gaming as part of one big Pulp-style mega-setting which includes, apart from Bertie and Roderick Spode (one of two Fascist leaders in my fictionalised 1930s Britain) a dollop of Agatha Christie and country-house murders as well as eldritch happenings of blasphemous and cyclopian aspect... or 'Professor Plum versus the Nazis of Kadath Parva' as I described it once. Not that everything has to appear together of course. And other ways of playing are possible. But if you do use the same rules as for your SCW games, I really do recommend coming up with some slightly daft 'random event' rules to do with tea, the weather, games of football and listening to Arthur Askey or Tommy Dorsey on the radiogram - they're the main thing in my opinion that make it a Very British Civil War, as opposed to a very generic civil war.
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Oh i agree ... to some extent.
Have you seen the Sword and the Flame Action/Event Cards? Great fun and not necessarily balanced.
But the whole "Earl of Snodgrass Gentleman Volunteers" blah blah [insert stereotypes] leaves me cold and is the reason i wasn't interested in the first place in VBCW
Pulp i like, within reason
James
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Take a look at the blogs in my signature, and join up to the very british civil forum at vbcf.freeforums.org :D
The film 'went the day well?' Is also worth a look.
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"But the whole "Earl of Snodgrass Gentleman Volunteers" blah blah [insert stereotypes] leaves me cold and is the reason i wasn't interested in the first place in VBCW"
Me too, but I've built up a mighty People's Army of Norfolk agricultural workers, Norwich shoe-workers and busmen, miners, postmen, socialist militia, returned International Brigade-members, Scottish republicans, Liverpool Free State security and cadets. My interest in the 1930s has been in the Hunger Marchers, the anti-fascists at Cable Street, the men and women who fought Franco and the ordinary decent working men and women of the British Trade Union movement, not Lord Muck's Hussars.
For me, nothing is more British than the Durham Miner's Gala, a colliery band and a sing-song in a pub. If you fancy that side of VBCW you are not alone and Solway's "The People's Armies" (which I wrote) should be to your taste. Many folk use SCW figures, perhaps not sombreo wearing ones though...Up the workers!
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I see that you're a man after my own heart, your first paragraph in particular :)
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But the whole "Earl of Snodgrass Gentleman Volunteers" blah blah [insert stereotypes] leaves me cold and is the reason i wasn't interested in the first place in VBCW
Each to their own.
Make of the setting what you like.
Etc.
However, missing out this tone sort of misses the 'Very British' Part of it doesn't it?
I feel its charm as a game setting is precisely this sort of thing.
Troops should be storpping for tea breaks, or getting distracted by unattended beer barrels. They should be led by Captain Mainwaring or Lord Flashheart. Cabbage patches, and cricket lawns should be impassable terrain. Vehicles should be living embodiments of Messers Heath and Robinson. Prisoners should be taken with a hearty handshake, a generous fill of their pipe, and a nice chat about the events of the day.
The way you play the game too should perhaps reflect this shouldn't it?
Random cards seem a popular way to mechanise this, but when your opponent rolls all '1's', sure its the gentlemanly thing to let him reroll?
Isn't the appeal that this is a CIVIL war, rather than a civil WAR?
:D lol :D
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I get it, i really do.
But the more i look at this the more i hear Spain calling again.
Salud!
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As us VBCW veterans like to say, 'it's -your- VCBW' so please don't feel pressured into changing the tone or direction of your pocket of the genre. :)
I've seen threads on the VBCW forums, ranging from jolly japes with Colonel Sillyname to all out class war in miniature - to each his own!
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As us VBCW veterans like to say, 'it's -your- VCBW' so please don't feel pressured into changing the tone or direction of your pocket of the genre. :)
I've seen threads on the VBCW forums, ranging from jolly japes with Colonel Sillyname to all out class war in miniature - to each his own!
I agree, as i said in my throat-clearing. :D
But don't you think a sort of grim, bitter, Balkans-style grubby little war is just a bit Not Very British?!
Whatever people like i guess, but for me its the 'Cricket with shotguns' approach that i really like. :D
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There's nothing humorous about the SCW. I suppose that's the difference. It matters.
I get my sillyness kick elsewhere (Bloodbowl for example); VCBW is just not doing it for me really.
I did try ...
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Oh well, sorry we put you off... it's another of those 'horses for courses' things, I guess. The reason I don't game SCW, which really put me off, was considering the actual brutal and horrific events that I would be turning into an evening's entertainment actually made me feel ill. Fictionalising and abstracting it all made the idea much more attractive, by basically removing what I considered the repellent aspects of making a game about actual killing and horror tat happened in the recent past. I'd happily play Roderick Spode's Balckshorts or my own British League of Fascists (the Union is too posh and Southern for my Northern Fascists), but not the Falange or the Condor Legion, or by extension, the SS. But again, I'd play Hydra in a Pulp/Weird War/Superhero game.
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Oh well, sorry we put you off... it's another of those 'horses for courses' things, I guess. The reason I don't game SCW, which really put me off, was considering the actual brutal and horrific events that I would be turning into an evening's entertainment actually made me feel ill. Fictionalising and abstracting it all made the idea much more attractive, by basically removing what I considered the repellent aspects of making a game about actual killing and horror tat happened in the recent past. I'd happily play Roderick Spode's Balckshorts or my own British League of Fascists (the Union is too posh and Southern for my Northern Fascists), but not the Falange or the Condor Legion, or by extension, the SS. But again, I'd play Hydra in a Pulp/Weird War/Superhero game.
Agreed, and as a vet of the current conflicts, I feel strange about playing games set it in them. But I have not problem with play a fictionalized conflict.
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"Troops should be stopping for tea breaks, or getting distracted by unattended beer barrels. They should be led by Jack Ford or Compo. Cabbage patches, and cricket lawns should be impassable terrain. Vehicles should be living embodiments of Messers Heath and Robinson. Prisoners should be taken with a hearty handshake, a generous fill of their pipe, and a nice chat about the events of the day."
My take on VBCW..
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I play both sorts of games. In my on going campaign the games are more gritty (such as the Seige of Exeter one at PAW) but my one off games at the local club tend to be the more gentlemen/quirky games... :)
Mick
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Oh well, sorry we put you off... it's another of those 'horses for courses' things, I guess. The reason I don't game SCW, which really put me off, was considering the actual brutal and horrific events that I would be turning into an evening's entertainment actually made me feel ill. Fictionalising and abstracting it all made the idea much more attractive, by basically removing what I considered the repellent aspects of making a game about actual killing and horror tat happened in the recent past. I'd happily play Roderick Spode's Balckshorts or my own British League of Fascists (the Union is too posh and Southern for my Northern Fascists), but not the Falange or the Condor Legion, or by extension, the SS. But again, I'd play Hydra in a Pulp/Weird War/Superhero game.
Hi. Noted and understood.
I don't game anything more recent than WW2 for that reason. I couldn't imagine gaming, say, the current Afghan situation but i'll happily play the 1st/2nd/3rd Afghan War (which in their own way were no better than now) but they're too long in the tooth for me to think about them in anything but an abstract way. Otherwise you couldn't game any historical actions.
As you say, horses for courses. I'll support my mate if he wants to run a campaign and i dare say the IB will make an appearance on home soil if required
Cheers, James
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... the Union is too posh and Southern for my Northern Fascists), ...
That joke never fails to get a laugh from me. lol
The topic of wargame morals and ethics is a perennial one, you'll find similar topics all across the boards here. People just have different takes on the hobby. I'm sort of with the fictionalising and abstracting crowd, which comes out in my own choices of gaming fare. Having said that, my choice of not gaming anything after around 1980 is aesthetic, rather than based on abhorrence for any more recent conflict.
By the same token, I'm looking at an alternative WW2 scenario for myself, in which the Nazis don't gain power in Germany and cease to be a force in German politics. It won't make a substantial difference to the inevitable death and destruction experienced by those involved in the war, but I'll sleep easier knowing that I haven't in any way glorified the really, really bad guys.
The 'cricket bat and shotgun' thing is what put me off gaming VBCW myself and I lean far more towards Paul C's take, where you look for 'real' organisations and factions, around which to base your forces. It's your hobby though and I'd be even more put off if folks like me, attempted to impose some kind of rigid conformity on one of the few 'periods' where people have got a free hand to do what they will. As some of you will know, these people exist!
As for gaming recent conflicts, I think the important thing is respect for what you're dealing with. I've noted a few people over the years at clubs and shows, who seem to take an 'unhealthy' degree of enjoyment out of what they are gaming, in a variety of ways. I'm also tempted to say that some wargamers are far more sensitive over what they do, than are the general public at large. Maybe it's the appreciation of what war is and does, that comes through reading up on them. Not a bad thing to my mind.
Anyway... Spanish Civil War. Good call! :D
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That joke never fails to get a laugh from me. lol
I aim to please.
The topic of wargame morals and ethics is a perennial one, you'll find similar topics all across the boards here. People just have different takes on the hobby.... It's your hobby though and I'd be even more put off if folks like me, attempted to impose some kind of rigid conformity on one of the few 'periods' where people have got a free hand to do what they will. As some of you will know, these people exist!...
I absolutely agree. We don't just have different styles of gaming, we have different reasons for doing so. I'm not a 'hardware' kind of guy, I don't care if if my riflemen have Grapefruit Henrys, Martini and Lemonade or Nancy Mitfords, it doesn't bother me. Do they look smashing in their red coats (that went out of use 30 years previously)? That's what I want to know. And why does Sergeant Noggin have such a fear of squirrels? Don't ask what happened in Straggley Woods, he doesn't want to talk about it. But my style of gaming isn't for everyone. Though of course we're all doing it for fun, we get our fun in different ways, some people from looking in depth at tactics and the capabilities of different weapons (for example), some constructing elaborate and improbable backstories in the minutest detail (yes I have a 6-generation family tree for one of my characters, who doesn't even have a mini yet...) - but one thing I think we can all agree on: those people who paint minis but don't play with them are just weird. ;)
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That way of doing it gets no argument from me... you only have to look at the LDV in 1940 to imagine how far things would have gone if some people were given a free hand.
lol
I'm very much the same actually, if all my plans and ideas were actually translated into lead, metal prices would skyrocket due to a sudden chronic shortage of it. I enjoy the planning, research and all that jazz though and it's all part of the hobby to me.
::)
But yes... those folk who don't play with their toys... weirdos... >:D