Tales of Blades and Heroes. Seeking Eziko's Bane:

[eilif]

We recently completed the penultimate 4th episode of our Tales of Blades and Heroes Campaign
http://chicagoskirmishwargames.com/blog/2016/12/06/summerfall-campaign-session-4-seeking-ezikos-bane/

Our GM has been putting together some amazing scenarios and this one was no different.  River monsters, pIrate ships, Mercenaries, and possibly ghostly villagers it was quite a game on a darned impressive table.





I'm not a fan of pen and pencil RPG'ing, but this campaing has won me over to the fun of terrain heavy RPG Skirmishing.

Like some of our other projects, this campaign has been slightly obscured by our lack of a blog last year.  Those wanting to see how the campaign has gone until now can visit these posts on our club's forum:

Pre Campagin TBH trial run:
http://chicagoskirmishwargames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=121

Campagin sessions 1-3.
http://chicagoskirmishwargames.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=2&t=136
Unfortunately, session 1 (a huge town layout) and 3 (an underground cavern maze) were not well photographed, but the second session of exploring the abandoned mining town was very well documented.

[JollyBob]

Bostin' like Steve Austin. 

Love the set up, very impressive.

Is that waterfall the vac-formed one from Amera, or is it scratchbuilt? If it's the Amera one, it is a hell of a lot bigger than it seems on their website.

[Hobgoblin]

This looks excellent.

TBH is a massively underrated game, I think, both as a small-scale skirmish game and as an excellent RPG. I ran it last year for some friends and am planning a few family games during the Christmas holidays (my wife's recent, inaugural experience of Heroquest Glorantha has convinced her "those games" can actually be highly enjoyable; the kids need no such convincing!).

What TBH does particularly well, I think, is remove the awkward interaction between miniatures and RPGs. It does this in several ways. First, basing your character on a miniature you like gets round the age-old problem of having to find a suitable miniature for the character. It's a simple inversion that works really well. Second, the SBH-like action system gives the game a fluency that most RPG systems lack; too often, RPG encounters played out with miniatures just come across as very poor wargames with excessive bookkeeping. And third, the movement has just the right amount of abstraction to get the game going really fast.

What I noticed about running TBH is that the players were thinking tactically with regard to the environment rather than with regard to their character sheets. So it was much more about manoeuvre than resource management than with other RPGs. And that's a great thing, I think.

[eilif]

Thanks Folks!

JollyBob,
     I'm pretty sure it's a scrachbulit foam piecee.  I think the GM bought it as a set with the winter river sections (made of foam or foamcore I think) from some online dealer.

Hobgoblin,
     I'm not familiar with other RPG's, but I agree with your feelings.  The movement and combat system works quite well. I think it ends up falling to the GM (probably rightly so) to determine the level to which Role Playing occurs.  I think that our GM has done a good job with this depending on the situation. Some of our episodes were heavier on the interaction and others were more combat focused.  They all felt very narrative though and he reinforced that by giving extra XP based on how well the various characters behaved in-charachter.

[hummus]

does it need a gm or can it be run as purely a skirmish game?

[DeafNala]

Whether you game on it or just take photos, that is a LOVELY scene. GREAT WORK!

[eilif]

Thanks Defnala!

does it need a gm or can it be run as purely a skirmish game?

That's a good question. I suppose it could be run as a skirmish game.  Our "pre-campaign trial run" linked above was essentially that. Me running 4 heroes and my buddy running a few more baddies with virtually no RPG elements.  It went quite well.

Normally for a Skirmish game I'd just suggest Advanced Song of Blades and Heroes, but TBH does give you a bit more detail, so if you wanted to run warbands of 3-4 heroes with a bit more detail instead of the usual SBH/ASBH warbands of 7-11, then TBH would be a good option, especially if you're a fan of SBH style mechanics.

I do think that where TBH really shines though is in multiplayer games where each player controls 1-2 characters.  In SBH and it's sister games we've found that more than 3 players in a game really slows down the action and it runs most smoothly with just 2.  TBH, however, easily acommodates 4 or more players and a GM and allows for cooperative games that are not as easy to run in other games.

The TBH campaign was run instead of our usual yearly SBH campagin.  Our goal was to have everyone at the same table each game, a co-op experience and to up the narrative element, all without too many rules.  I think that's been achieved so far.