Road Trip!

This week I'm writing a day early as tomorrow I, Mrs Penda, Master Penda and Dog Penda head off on a road trip to Yarmouth, whereupon I shall be taking up an offer to play our great friend Bish (real name: Christian Hacon) at his home in sunny Great Yarmouth.

If you didn't know already, Bish is Norfolk's resident crazy Darklands man and has painted (beautifully) a great number of hosts for a number of different kindreds - winning many best painted host trophies at our Darklands tournaments - as well as being the culprit of such wonderful things as this:

this

and this!

He's supported us for years and years, and it's about time we went to see him rather than the other way around. He makes at least two trips a year to the Sheffield Slaughter and to the Sherwood GT, so it's only fair I return the favour. We'll have a game of Darklands or two and discuss Darklands Lite™, which I'm currently working on...

Darklands Lite

Well it's about time, isn't it?

Dayle Archer's Anglecynn take on Andy Parkinson's Jutes at the Sherwood GT 2024

Darklands the wargame has been around for a good few years now - and it's a bloody good game if I say so myself - but it suffers from three things: lack of exposure, a small player base and accessibility - meaning, if I'm not around to teach, it's hard to learn thanks to a thick rule book and no videos. I'm no good at doing videos - yet!

Darklands is not necessarily too complicated, but it does have a lot of depth and it can be very daunting. As well as that, I'm a dinosaur - I grew up on reading rule books, and nowadays prospective players just don't seem to have the time.

So it's about time I did a version for today's generation of one page rules, and while it won't be one page, it won't be 400 pages either! I'm hoping to keep it to less than fifty pages, and hopefully even smaller than that.

Darklands Lite™ (working name) is a new version of the rules that keeps the core mechanics but simplifies things massively, from mustering your host to speeding up play to ensuring you don't need a maths degree to work things out.

Second edition already did a bit of the above, but it didn't go far enough, and it's time to do that!

Things you can expect from Darklands Lite™:

• A very simple, one page mustering system
• Much simpler profiles with stated ‘to hit’ and ‘to save’ values
• Very few modifiers
• The same core mechanics of ‘my unit goes, your unit goes’ play
• Combat system based on mass and blood
• Simpler sorcery rules

That's not all of course, but watch this space. It will take me a little while to get it all sorted, and I expect it won't happen this year, but I am hoping early next year is when I can get that done. My playtesters will certainly be busy...

Ograx of Baalor

It's taken a little longer than I'd hoped to get the ograx sorted, but the sculptor is almost there and they should be on release next week! I've already popped a few items onto the old webstore (including some head packs!) with just Skaag's Mob  and Haakon on srónocx to sort.

You'll be able to request (or purchase) the different types of head separately too!

One thing to note - there's a slight addition to the way we'll be selling monstrous infantry. A lot of our big lads come with a banner bearer and musician, and while they work for Darklands we know a lot of you won't be using them in our game system. With the banner bearer and herald always having alternate miniatures - basically versions of them without banner or musical instrument - we're now offering a unit of monstrous infantry with champion and four warriors at the same price as the other unit of five!

...and if you ask me why I haven't done this before now, I have absolutely no idea. I guess there was some kind of mental block there... 

Alexandra the Saviour

I'll leave you with the Queen of the Atalantes (Ilios) realm, Alexandra the Saviour, by Quinn Colvin. Simply exquisite.