Skip to main content

Song of Blades and Heroes at MillenniumCon 16

The Convention

MillenniumCon 16 was held in Round Rock, Texas on November 8-10th.  Once again, it was a successful event with over 100+ game sessions.

MillenniumCon is the largest historical miniature wargame convention in the state of Texas.

This year, I was part of the convention staff and got to see what happens 'behind-the-curtain'.  I learned a lot about how the convention is organized and coordinated.  It was a great experience!

Fortunately, I was able to break away from those duties to host the 'Song of Blades and Heroes' game session.

The Scenario

The scenario was a multi-player treasure hunt.  The game borrowed heavily from the Chicago Skirmish Wargamers' scenario called 'The Dead Rise'. Please visit their blog! Basically, the map had several terrain features like rubble and tree stands, surrounding a single large crypt.  Partially collapsed walls were spread around the map to break up the line of sight.

The table layout

The objective of this game was to collect magic items left by the armies of an ancient war.  The players had to move one unit into contact with a terrain feature (not counting the collapsed walls) and investigate that area.  Players would roll a die and consult the random encounter table to reveal what was buried in the terrain.  At the same time, the bodies of the deceased warriors would rise to protect their ancient relics.  The dead warriors were represented by zombies with the 'rabble' special rule so a single hit would kill the zombie.  Included were skeletons with swords and ghosts.

Here's the random encounter table I created. Roll D6


  1.     D3 Zombies – Minor item
  2.     D3 Zombies – Minor item
  3.     D6 Zombies, skeleton swordsman – Minor item
  4.     D6+1 Zombies  – Minor item
  5.     D6 Zombies, Ghost – Magic item
  6.     D6+3 Zombies – Magic item
The crypt building automatically popped out six zombies, a magic item, and the Tomb King!  When a magic item appeared, the player would roll on the random magic item table from the 'Song of Gold and Darkness' book. Items took two actions to pick up. Terrain features could be investigated only once.

The rewards were:


Each Minor item = 1 Victory Point

Each Magic Item = 3 Victory points

25 points of enemy players and Zombies killed = 1 victory point.


The crypt building and the collapsed walls were paper models from David Graffam Models. He makes some really good PDF's with layers that allow you to customize the texture of the walls.

The crypt building. Could be made with several different textures but I liked the grey brick with columns.

 

The Battle Report


Four players signed up to play.  Connor (playing my warband 'Venom Inc.'), John (playing a shooter-heavy elf warband), Sebastian (playing another elf warband with h-t-h weapons), and Grant (with his infamous Xenomorph warband).
View of the table with other games in the background
The game started with the players cautiously approaching the terrain.
Sebastian's units approach some rubble, Connor's crew in the back, John's shooters taking aim on the left.

By the second turn, each player had contacted a terrain piece. One elf shooter and one xenomorph had been eaten by zombies.
John approached the crypt but didn't make contact.

Grant, disappointed that an alien warrior had been eaten with nothing to show for it, spread out his warband to search as far as they could.  The xenomorph queen touched a terrain feature and rolled the worst possible result on the chart.  Six zombies and a skeleton swordsman appeared and surrounded the queen.  The queen attacked the zombies first and was knocked down. On the zombie turn, they returned the attack.  The queen perished and triggered a morale check for all the aliens.  Most of the them fled from the battlefield.
The queen is dead!  Long live the queen!

Sebastian rolled better on the random encounter table.  He cleared out two terrain features and picked up a magical 'Hat of Lightning Bolts'.  John systematically cleared out some terrain but had trouble shooting the undead at a distance. Connor struggled to move his warband across the table which has been a long time problem with the Venom Inc.warband. Grant contacted the crypt with his remaining xenomorphs.  This triggered the Tomb King and his contingent of zombies.  The Tomb King died but his zombies committed a 'gruesome' kill on an alien and forced all but one off the table.
An alien contemplating a retreat.

The players eventually cleared out the terrain and turned against each other.  Sebastian and Connor traded blows and Connor's 100pt leader was killed.

We called for one final turn.  Each player rushed to pick up whatever items were left unclaimed but couldn't roll enough actions to be successful.  We tallied the victory points and Sebastian scored the most with two magic items, one minor item, and several kills of zombies. 

Comments

  1. SBH is great for convention games. Glad to hear the scenario worked out for you!

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Blog is going on a Permanent Vacation

Ok, I haven't had any comments on this blog on an post for many, many months. The only post that seems to get any traffic is my 2015 post about Star Fleet Battles.  I don't fully understand why that post has generated so much interest, while the rest of my content has been mostly ignored.  Clearly, this has not been an successful blog. I get much more traffic with my Facebook content and the YouTube channel is showing promise. Perhaps the subjects of my posts have been too random. I may need to focus on a specific game or subject. Maybe I didn't generate enough posts to keep the audience connected. Whatever the case, I am ending this blog with this final post.  I'm calling it a 'permanent vacation' because the blog and posts will still be here, though I will not be adding any new content. I might continue to comment on the SFB post since that is still generating traffic 3 years after it was published. To anyone who might still be reading, I say 'Thank

ReaperCon - Live Vlogging

Hey all! This year, I made the trip to ReaperCon in Denton, Texas.  This is new for me because I have never been to this convention and I am more focused on the gaming rather than the painting segment of the hobby. But I do want to improve my painting skills and learning from better painters is a way to improve. Another new challenge was that I decided to do a video blog of my experience at ReaperCon. aka a 'VLOG'.  This is a new way to share content with friends and hobbyists and it was exciting to try. And I was able to take the trip with my brother who lives out of state, that made it fun as well. We took classes, painted figs, took the factory tour, and entered the painting competition all in just three days! Below is the link to the VLOG playlist. Most the videos are less than 10 minutes long. All the videos together comes out to 56 minutes if you play them all in order. Enjoy!

Team Yankee Night

Our local Team Yankee community has a regular game night called 'Cold War Thursdays'. I was able to make it out to the store about a month ago. Chris had enough USMC figs to make a 75 point list for me to use. He took an equivalent West German force. We played out a NATO-v-NATO version of the Hasty Attack scenario. I am currently building a list that is heavy on Cobras and Hueys. Chris had plenty of air units to choose from. So, I grabbed all the Hueys and deployed them with a platoon of Marines loaded inside. The Leopards were absolutely deadly! The majority of my force was wiped out by three of them. My Humvees were the only unit that could even put a scratch on them. The Hueys were useful at moving troops forward quickly. I was able to drop the Marines nearby an objective. There was a squad of grenadiers inside a house close enough to still hold the objective. Except for the Leopards, most of the Germans were wiped out quickly. The Marines cleared the hou