Getting back in the saddle

The first quarter of this year has been cruel to me, but while there are still issues to be settled, I am keen to get back to wargaming again.

This week I made a set of ten 10 x 10 grid 2D terrain tiles: Heroic Maps Village Core Set glued onto 1mm PVC foam boards. The terrain depicted on the maps - one, two and three square wide passages - are perfect for the Riot! rules from Irregular Miniatures. which I will be using.

The idea for this project grew out of my desire to see more use out of my 28mm dwarves collection. As the dwarves come in armoured and unarmoured forms, it seemed natural to divide them into two sides based on this difference. This then led to the idea that perhaps they represented "peasants" and "royal" forces respectively, which then led me to read up about the Peasants' Revolt. The wikipedia account of the Revolt reads like a ladder campaign, which is pretty much what I had in mind.

Looking for a set of rules to play the campaign, I recalled the rather unusual set of rules from Irregular and ordered a copy - it turned out to be rather interesting and would convert to 28mm and my low fantasy setting easily. Also, the scenarios provided allow me to recreate some of the conflicts described in the wikipedia account.

With all that in place, I started to put together a backstory in my head, in which my dwarven kingdom is actually made up of several provinces, each named after the lines or manufacturers of my figures... And what's more, the story dovetails with that which I used as a background narrative for our Strandhogg games.

I hope to get the first game in next week, and if I can find the time I will give an account of the situation which resulted in this revolt.