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Author Topic: Plynkes' Five Leagues Thread  (Read 14838 times)

Offline Plynkes

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Plynkes' Five Leagues Thread
« on: March 26, 2023, 05:33:25 PM »
I've recently developed quite an interest in the game Five Leagues from the Borderlands, a solo/co-op skirmish game with quite an involved campaign system. I've created a warband for me and my old oppo Sickly, and we've recently begun our campaign. This thread is going to be a painting log for the experience, and may well include a few battle reports, too.

The setting for our campaign is the county of Grimandy, a province ruled by Count Raymundo. The Empire it is part of is riven with religious strife, ever since the monk Kalvin Looter nailed his ninety-five faeces to the temple doors, kicking off a massive upheaval that has become known as the Defamation. Brother slays brother, many have forsaken True Religion, apocalyptic death cults have sprung up, and desperate bandits plague the land, all cursing the Emperor and the Pontiarch in Chrysanthium. On top of this, the villainous Sea Reavers have taken advantage of the Empire's weakness and relentlessly raid the coast.

Amid all this, four exiles band together, for safety, and perchance do some good.

So let's meet the gang...

THE EXILES: We are lost, we can never go home.





Our group consists of four heroes and two hired followers. The heroes are all exiles of one sort or another.


Iago Loyola


My name is Iago Loyola. You killed my hamster. Prepare to die.
(North Star/Foundry conversion)


Iago is the leader, and my avatar character. Unlike me he is very religious, and devoted to True Religion, the counter-Defamation and the rightful rule of the Pontiarch. His home town was destroyed in a Sea Reaver raid, and he seeks revenge on the Nine-Fingered Man, a notorious Sea Reaver captain responsible for the slaughter of everyone he loved. In later life, if he survives, he will probably find new purpose in founding a religious order, one that answers only to the Pontiarch.

(The figure is the Jon Snow I painted for the 2018 Lead Painter's League, which is why his base doesn't match anybody else's. I may or may not get around to fixing that.)



Lenore of Grimhold

(WI Giants in Miniature)

Lenore is the eldest daughter of Count Raymundo. Her exile is voluntary. Always a tomboy, she became so sick of his condescension that when he told her to 'hush now, and attend to your embroidery, dear' one too many times, she rejected the pampered castle life vowing never to return, and decided to make her own way in the world as an adventurer. We shall see if any kind of reconciliation between father and daughter is possible.





Morgaunt the Slightly Fey


(North Star)

Morgaunt was driven from her home village of Westwold by her superstitious neighbours. She was always cold and odd, and the rumour spread that she was a changeling, or at least of mixed Fey blood. In these troubled times folk will believe almost anything, and blame almost anyone for their milk turning sour. Forced to flee their scorn lest it turn to violence, she also took up an adventuring life.

She may or may not be of Fey Blood (though she will be counted as such as far as the game rules go), it could be simply that she was going through a moody teen Goth phase...




Wicklow Pottler


Is he a halfing? Or is he just very short? I don't know.
(Midlam Miniatures and North Star)


Wicklow is a Halfling mystic. He has been ostracised by the Wizarding community due to a series of controversial and offensive posts on the town notice board. Pictured with him we see his magical construct, a kind of fighting scarecrow we have christened 'Patches.' In just two tabletop games we have already developed quite a bit of affection for Wicklow and Patches.




Neville and Greville


(North Star)

Neville and Greville are two hired guides. We know almost nothing about them at this point. Perhaps we shall discoverer their stories as we play. Or perhaps not.



I have finally joined the ranks of the 'No paper chits or counters' Brigade...



To be honest, I was always sympathetic to the viewpoint, just too lazy to actually do it. The treasure chests and bone piles are for marking objectives and other scenario stuff, under them we have some wound markers and the dropped bits of gear are stunned markers.

More soon, hopefully.


With Cat-Like Tread
Upon our prey we steal...

Offline Earther

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Re: Plynkes' Five Leagues Thread
« Reply #1 on: March 26, 2023, 05:45:55 PM »
Oh, wow! This is going to be good!

Iago is my favourite. Shame about his hamster.  lol

Offline Bloggard

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Re: Plynkes' Five Leagues Thread
« Reply #2 on: March 26, 2023, 05:59:37 PM »
fantastic back-story / place names etc. Looking forward to more of this game/ narrative.

great figures and paint-jobs.

Offline marianas_gamer

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Re: Plynkes' Five Leagues Thread
« Reply #3 on: March 26, 2023, 07:48:43 PM »
Always great to see a Plynkes project! I am looking forward to this.
Got to kick at the darkness till it bleeds daylight.

Offline LouieN

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Re: Plynkes' Five Leagues Thread
« Reply #4 on: March 27, 2023, 02:15:01 AM »
The figures are great.  I look forward to your story. 

Offline Grumpy Gnome

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Re: Plynkes' Five Leagues Thread
« Reply #5 on: March 27, 2023, 06:41:33 AM »
Loving it mate! 👏🏻
Home of the Grumpy Gnome

https://thegrumpygnome.home.blog/

Offline blacksoilbill

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Re: Plynkes' Five Leagues Thread
« Reply #6 on: March 27, 2023, 12:04:42 PM »
Excellent work: your past projects have brought plenty of inspiration and laughs, so looking forward to more of the same here.

Online zemjw

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Re: Plynkes' Five Leagues Thread
« Reply #7 on: March 27, 2023, 12:50:03 PM »
I bought the rules recently, so I'm looking forward to seeing how they play and what sort of campaign they give

I've been on a bit of a scarecrow buying spree, so I'll be following Patches with interest :)

Offline Freddy

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Re: Plynkes' Five Leagues Thread
« Reply #8 on: March 27, 2023, 05:00:11 PM »
Nice figures, poor hamster though. Maybe a skilled necromancer could help.

+I am in the Paper Chits Are Still better Than Putting Dice There Then Forgetting What They Mean Brigade, but I appreciate a good set of 3d counters :)

Offline Plynkes

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Re: Plynkes' Five Leagues Thread
« Reply #9 on: March 27, 2023, 05:19:41 PM »
+I am in the Paper Chits Are Still better Than Putting Dice There Then Forgetting What They Mean Brigade

 lol


Offline Plynkes

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Re: Plynkes' Five Leagues Thread
« Reply #10 on: March 27, 2023, 07:41:56 PM »
The rule book provides a couple of starter scenarios to get you into the game. First of all a little fight with some stock characters. We used some very ancient Lord of the Rings figures from back before LAF was even a thing. Both myself and Sickers collected the entire partwork magazine that came out back then, so we ended up with hundreds of pretty cheap LotR minis.



Aragorn, Boromir, Legolas and Gimli absolutely kicked the ass of some orcs. This game is easy, we thought.







The second one is the same scenario, but with more baddies and you use the characters that you have created for the campaign. There are no consequences in this battle, as it is only training, but if you go through with it you get a Story Point, which is a resource used in the campaign.

This training battle was conducted in a rather nice rustic setting...



We declared we were mock-fighting some guys pretending to be goblins, so used the LotR baddies again.



Once more it went pretty well for our gang. Lenore was wounded, but they dispatched the pretend enemies rather easily in the end.

Our experiences in the training battles had the unfortunate effect of making us a little overconfident. We felt like we were going to steamroller everything we came up against. Well, it didn't turn out quite like that...

Next: The Campaign begins.


Offline Plynkes

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Re: Plynkes' Five Leagues Thread
« Reply #11 on: March 27, 2023, 09:42:59 PM »
It is necessary to make a campaign map of the region your adventurers are operating in, so here's mine...


The little fella marking our position on the map is a soldier from English Heritage Risk. Remind me to put him back in the box at some point or the Red player will be a guy short.

I toyed with the idea of getting one of those cool fantasy map-making programs, which certainly would have given us something a bit easier to see on LAF than this photo, but in the end drew one by hand. I may do so later, or not.

Next one generates three Threats. These will be our main antagonist groups for the campaign, and you get to pick from a bunch of different ones in the book, allowing you to match them to the figures in your collection. The overall campaign objective is to bring peace to the region by eliminating all three threats. I have also decided upon a personal objective for Iago, that of avenging his town by slaying the Nine-fingered Man.

The Threats

The Sea Reavers
Nasty piratical Viking types, taking advantage of the Empire's weakness to raid the coasts. The Nine-Fingered Man is among their number (We are using the Duskling Warbands threat from the book. It is kind of implied they are non-humans in the rules, but really they are just a stat line and a set of abilities, so can easily be represented with any figures. In our game they are humans).

The Mano Rosso
The chaos of the Defamation has led to widespread banditry. However, some groups are more of a threat than others. The Mano Rosso are an organised network of bandit gangs, led by the mysterious bandit king known as Il Ragno (We are using The Ruin Within threat for these, who are basically bandits and brigands so a good fit).

The Listeners

Many of those who have forsaken True Religion have listened to the voice of the Whispers from Beyond. They are a fanatical death cult, dedicated to spreading the gift of Undeath throughout the lands, though the less committed ones merely roam the county defacing statues of Our Lady of the Veils. (For these we shall use The Whispers from Beyond threat, which as you may guess, is cultists and undead. It is the faction with the largest variety of enemies in it, so will be the biggest painting task, from skeletons to bestial humans, cultists and Our Lady knows what else).

As of yet I haven't painted anybody for the three threats yet, but I do have some skeletons and bandits on the painting table. As soon as I have anything to show, rest assured the pics will be posted here.




It has become our custom in games that require you to mark the turns, that you simply must have a Turn Track Lady. So here is ours, Galadriel masquerading as Our Lady of the Veils...



I have started a dedicated Turn Track Lady figure, but she isn't finished yet, so it will have to be Galadriel for a bit. We picked up the Turn Track Lady habit playing Congo, and this is our original...



I think I prefer her fashion sense.


So at last, on to the campaign itself. Much more of the book is dedicated to the the campaign mechanics than the actual tabletop combat rules. All sorts of stuff goes on between battles. To ease ourselves into things, we met up at the Horse Fayre Fields, a seasonal village used by the travelling folk of the county to hold... surprise surprise... their horse fairs. After establishing our stash point in the wagon of a friendly traveller, we hunted a little, foraged a bit and then for our main campaign activity we rode out on patrol, looking to keep the environs around our travelling friends safe and secure. The book suggested riding patrol as a relatively safe activity for starting groups, or ones who have some wounded characters. We believed the book because we are idiots.


Our patrol ran into some impoverished common folk who had turned to banditry out of sheer desperation at the harshness of the current times. Iago and Lenore decided that was no excuse and they should be punished harshly. We figured they would be no match for us, these bumbling pretend-brigands (they honestly had terrible stats and there weren't very many of them - ha! Easy peasy!)


Only took a couple of photos of this one, unfortunately

Our heroes advanced against these villainous scum, and initially things went as expected, we were brushing them aside with ease.




One of the bandits was played by Sean Bean (in the centre of the group, blowing his Boromir horn). As is entirely fitting for Sean Bean, he was killed in the fight.

But then in our hubris, the (dice) gods deserted us. When the bandits were down to two men they suddenly unleashed their pent-up fury against us. One by one our heroes began to falter. Greville and Neville fell. Well, they are only followers after all, who really cares? But then Lenore was cut down, and right after that Iago fell too. Suddenly the halfling Pottler and Morgaunt were the only ones still in the fight, and things seemed pretty bleak.

Just as hope was fading, Wicklow summoned his construct and it was Patches to the rescue (Patches can only be summoned when we have less than six figures on the table, so he makes a good impromptu reinforcement). With his aid the beleaguered survivors of the bandit onslaught managed to fight back and triumph. Hurrah for Wicklow and Patches! Examining the aftermath of the carnage, it was discovered that Lenore and Iago had only been knocked out. Neville had sustained quite a nasty wound that would take him some time to recover from, but recover he would. But for Greville, it turned out to be the end of the road. He lay dead by the side of the road. A sobering sight for the adventurers (and for me and Sickers too, suddenly this game wasn't the cake-walk we thought it to be.)

Sickers had rolled badly on the injury table for Greville, and talked me out of using any of our medicine to save him, as he was 'only a follower' and it wasn't worth it. We decided this was Lenore's doing, being the stuck-up daughter of the count, and thus having little regard for the lowly working man. What a cow.

But then fortune smiled on us. A scared villager had seen the entire thing from his hiding place, and inspired by our heroic feats (was he watching the same fight?) asked to join our merry band. So we immediately acquired a loyal follower and it didn't cost us anything. Noice! His name is Brom and he has his own figure, it's just I haven't finished it yet, so the Greville figure shall have to do for now.  :)

Then it was back to the Horse Fayre Fields to lick our wounds.




Poor Greville. We never really knew you.





Offline LouieN

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Re: Plynkes' Five Leagues Thread
« Reply #12 on: March 28, 2023, 03:45:02 AM »
Awesome. 

Maybe the new follower has a death wish and is secretly in the cult.  That would be a nice twist to the story. 

"If I join this incompetent lot I am sure to die!"

Offline Tactalvanic

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Re: Plynkes' Five Leagues Thread
« Reply #13 on: March 28, 2023, 08:59:36 PM »
Nice, really getting interested in taking a look at those rules even more

Guess I can put it on the birthday list!

Offline Grumpy Gnome

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Re: Plynkes' Five Leagues Thread
« Reply #14 on: March 29, 2023, 09:37:10 AM »
Loving to see the narrative come alive.

 

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