Author Topic: An age of sword and arrow - finished & free to download rules (Read 1937 times)

Anatoli · « **on:** 10 September 2013, 12:17:57 PM »

Tyler Bembenek who has been working on a set of wargaming rules as a school project finished the rulebook earlier this month and you can download it in PDF format for free from his site https://sites.google.com/site/anageofswordandarrow/

The finished product looks very professional with the background art, pictures and charts explaining the rules. You can download it in full color or printer friendly black & white (without any pictures), but I would recommend the full color version - it looks better than most commercial PDF rulebooks that I have seen! Beside the rules the book also features a great little hobby guide which is really adding extra time and effort for a project such as this. Tyler got help to shape the rulebook and rules from a bunch of volunteers, among them Arran Slee Smith from the WWPD.net community. The project really shows what can be done with the generosity and willingness to help of a good internet based historical wargamer community.

This whole project has been going on for several months with Tyler writing and rewriting the rules to make them to make them easy to understand, have balanced points for pickup games and to provide an interesting multi layered gameplay experience which includes a lot of detail and ideas from games such as the Total War series for PC. That source of inspiration actually translates very well onto the tabletop, and troops get fatigued over the course of battle or when moving in difficult terrain, generals have various (optional but very fun) personal traits and units such as skirmishers are actually worth taking as their harassing attacks gradually wear down the opponent by adding fatigue.

So I really recommend anyone interested in ancient/medieval warfare to take a look at these rules. They are written for multi based 6-15mm infantry so if you already have DBA army or a similar setup you can start playing immedietly! You can of course use larger 20-28mm miniatures as well if they are arranged in blocks and share the same basing standard.

Also make sure to check out the An Age of Sword and Arrow site for additional resources such as campaign lists, pre written army lists for various nations and reference sheets!