The Battle of Windcroft

My brother Ivan and I are getting into playing army battles fielding my growing collection of orcs and undead. The first system we’re trying out is One Page Rules. We picked it because the rules are light, roster creation is not rigid, and model count is not excessive. With so many miniature agnostic systems on the market today if feels like there is something out there for everyone’s needs. We’re happy with OPR, but I’d love to try a few alternatives in the future nonetheless. If you have any recommendations that match our criteria leave them in the comments.

Our goal for this project is to create a particular kind of experience for ourselves: it’s what we expected Warhammer would be when we got into the hobby as kids, twenty years ago. We’re not setting this in the Old World, but our own grossly derivative setting we’re building as we go along. I’m heavily ‘borrowing’ from early Warhammer, Lord of the Rings, Ralph Bakshi’s Wizards, Heroes of Might and Magic III, and more... The minis I’m collecting and painting for our armies are coming from various sources, vintage and modern, whatever fits the vision.

In the Battle of Windcroft we each had a 1080pts list with 3 heroes. Our starting lists were put together many months ago, just so I could use them as painting goals. I have more now in my lead pile to expand the armies and swaps some things out now that we know how the game plays.

My orc forces for this encounter were as follows:

• Morgul, Knight of Black Fortress (counts as Black Orc Boss)
• Orc Boss Hagob
• Fimbul, Master Shaman
• 20 Orcs with hand weapons and Scary Shields, banner and sergeant
• 10 Orcs with halberds, banner and sergeant
• 5 Black Orcs with great weapons, sergeant
• 3 Trolls (count as Brute Orcs)
• 10 Orc Shooters with bow, banner
• 10 Orc Shooters with bow

Ivan’s undead list:

• Wight Lord Ladislaus (mounted Skeleton Champion)
• Wight Champion Nandor (Skeleton Champion with army standard)
• Sandro, Master Necromancer
• 10 Stitched Zombies
• 10 Skeletons (Drained Soldiers) with hand weapons, banner, musician, and sergeant
• 10 Skeletons (Drained Soldiers) with halberds, banner, musician, and sergeant
• 10 Grave Guard (Skeleton Guard) with cursed heavy swords, banner, musician, and sergeant
• 5 Zombie Wolves
• Bat Beast

Our battlefield was a human hamlet in an area bordering both our territories. Unfortunately for its denizens, it was built on an ancient burial site. Lord Ladislaus of Charnel Keep, and Sandro, a proxy of Lich Ichorax the Insomniac, brought their undead servants forth to claim the entombed heroes and their riches. At the same time, dark knight Morgul was sent by King Angmar of Black Fortress at the head of an orc raiding party to plunder the village for resources.

Ivan has written a lovely report of the battle from his perspective. Enjoy!

Night has fallen over the village of Windcroft. Peasants slumber in their beds after a hard day’s work. The familiar sounds of nocturnal birds and insects are noticeably absent as a grim host approached through the nearby woods.

“This is the place”, said a gaunt figure robed in tattered red, addressing an armoured skeletal rider next to it. “The four burial mounds housing ancient heroes, haa-haa.” The last was meant to be a sneer, but came out closer to a death rattle.

“There are only three”, rasped the mounted warrior.

The red-robed lich stared for a moment longer. “Indeed. That explains the rumours of farmhands unearthing treasure while ploughing their fields. The simpletons must have levelled the mound to make room for more farmland. Unfortunate, but we will have to-”

“Another war party draws near. I hear drums and shouting. Orcs. Trolls.” The rider stood higher in his stirrups and drew a long blade, blackened with age but still deadly sharp.

“The rumours must have reached them too. The beasts have come to plunder the village, but will undoubtedly ransack the mounds as well. Over my dead-”

The two figures turned to face one another, gazes briefly locking before turning their attention back to the village.

“You know what I mean, haa-haa. Raise the banners. Bring in the bat thing. Summon the hollow wolves. We march to meet the orcs.”

This was our first contact with One Page Rules, a model-agnostic d6-based system that prioritizes simplicity in gameplay. The basic rules of the game are free and fit on one page, making it accessible and minimizing the time spent looking up rules – which in turn improves the flow of play. The game is properly balanced, intuitive, and fun to play. Alternating activations make it superior to Warhammer’s phases in my opinion.

For this battle, we used Age of Fantasy Regiments, as it is closest to the old-school Warhammer Fantasy vibe we were going for. In the future, however, I think we might shift to Age of Fantasy (sans Regiments) to make movement and targeting easier as units will no longer have facing, flanks, and rear.

Key mechanics in this game revolve around fighting and morale. Units become fatigued after charging or striking back in melee, causing them to be much less effective until the end of the round. This limits them to one fully-effective melee fight per round. If a unit takes more wounds than it inflicts in melee combat, it has to make a morale test, becoming shaken on a failure. Shaken units count as fatigued and must spend their next turn doing nothing to stop being shaken. It a shaken unit would become shaken, it is destroyed instead. This system rewards forward thinking and good positioning – a must for a strategy game – while not becoming complicated or exploitable.

My army consisted of skeletons, wights, zombie wolves, zombies, and a large vampire bat creature. The army also included three heroes: a necromancer (joined to a unit of skeletons) a wight battle standard bearer (joined to a unit of wights), and a mounted wight (joined to a unit of wolves). This led me to choose Vampiric Undead as my faction, as all of the models can be represented.

The battle started off well for me, with my wights wiping out Ana’s advancing black orcs. The second round was more of a mixed bag, with units trading blows across the board. Overall, my left flank was crumbling under the pressure of a 20-model strong orc mob. What makes it worse is that they were equipped with scary shields – giving my models a penalty to their attack rolls. It’s as if I wasn’t having trouble hitting them anyways.

I would say that luck favoured me throughout the game, but failed me whenever I tried to do something sneaky. For instance, when I charged my bat thing into the rear of Ana’s shaken trolls I just had to win the combat (i.e. cause more wounds than I take) and then let morale do the rest. Everything was going my way: the trolls were shaken, so they would only hit on 6’s, I was attacking them from the rear, so they would suffer a hefty penalty to their morale test, and my bat monster had high quality so it can land consistent hits. Yet despite everything I lost the combat and the bat almost died. Dice do be dice…

At some points we also misinterpreted some rules. An example would be spellcasting, where we incorrectly thought that you rolled more dice for higher-level spells as you expend more magic points for them. Needless to say, all our spells went off without a hitch before we caught ourselves.

The game ended with me being in an advantageous position. I was in control of the centre with my strongest unit (wights with battle standard bearer) still on full strength. My right flank was contested, with my wolves fighting Ana’s archers. My left flank had collapsed under the weight of scary shield-toting orcs, though. Overall, we ended the game with me controlling two central objectives, with one being in Ana’s control and one being neutral. A slight victory for me.

The orcs and skeletons clashed in the streets and fields of Windcroft, but peasants stayed hard asleep in their beds. It would appear as if neither orcish war cries nor the clashing of iron could wake the sleepers. After a fierce battle, the orcs were routed and fled into the night. Then, an eerie silence fell over the village, along with an unearthly fog.

The following day, and all days thereafter, the sky was overcast. The residents of Windcroft arose to attend to their duties, faintly aware that something had changed. The farmers would not sow crops but corpses, and their harvests would consist of the risen dead. They did not find this unusual, for they were dead themselves, turned into revenants by dark spells. Word has spread of the village of the dead, and travelers for miles around would learn to avoid the cursed hamlet.

Their army now bolstered with orcish corpses and the shambling remains of long-dead heroes, the two figures, one gaunt and robed in red, the other clad in ancient iron and astride a skeletal horse, moved on to their next conquest.

Back to Ana.

For this battle report I went back to my old convention of recreating a few key moments as scenic shots after the fact. This lets us fully focus on the play experience, and I can later take time with setting up the composition and lighting to have much nicer photos. I’ll be doing the same for the rest of the series. If you’re curious what the actual gaming table looked like, here it is:

The next report is coming very soon. Thanks for reading, hope you enjoyed it. And as always a big thank you to my Patreon supporters!