Transcript
Napoleonic horror. Victorian fashion. The Enlightenment of the 1700s. Movies like The Duelists, Brotherhood of the Wolf, Plunkett and Macleane, Master and Commander. And one of my favorite shows Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell. Dracula, even. While none of these take place in the same literal time frame, we’re gonna throw ‘em all into a fashion blender and play a skirmish game for which we can draw inspiration from all of these pieces of media and story and visual aesthetic.
But the first thing we gotta do to play this game, is create a warband.
Greetings good humans and welcome to Table- what is this? Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy where we’re doing part two of a skirmish game mini-series! And where we say Merci beaucoup to our patrons in a gesture stylized just a bit to fit today’s theme.
All right, I’ve been waiting to get into this kind of video since starting the channel. Today we’re gonna draft up our first warband for Joe McCullough’s The Silver Bayonet: a War-game of Napoleonic Horror. Ooh, I like the historical era this game takes place in. I mean from a romanticized fantasy aesthetic sorta way. I would never want to actually live in that time frame.
I mean, unless werewolves and vampires were real, then maybe I’d, you know, give it a shot. But I’m truly a fan of modern plumbing.
The Silver Bayonet is all about small groups of brave and specialized soldiers taking on the nightmare creatures of fantasy lore. Specifically, the rule book explains that basically scary monsters are coming for humans, feeding on the rage and pain fueled by the Napoleonic wars being waged across Europe. Collectively, these forces of darkness have become known as the Harvestmen. And Europe’s armies are being forced to face this darkness one way or another.
And for now, small troupes are put together to execute raids against the Harvestmen, or to track them down, or race the fiends to seize magical artifacts et cetera et cetera. Basically, we’re putting together a group of 19th century commandos to go kick monster asses in the murky forests of haunted Europe. With, you know, muskets.
Silver Bayonet war bands are predicated on several European country forces, so the first thing you do is choose the nation you’re fighting for. We can go with Britain, France, Prussia, Austria, Russia or Spain. In my case, I’m choosing France. One, cause you know, I liked girl from France and two, the Three Musketeers. C’mon! I know they occur historically a hundred and fifty years before Napoleon goes stomping across the fields, but hey, you know they’re super cool. You know, kinda like pirates. Just the whole aesthetic of rapiers and I don’t know. Anyway.
One thing the nation of choice will do is set our paint scheme for us, so that’s kinda cool. At least for me. Totally helps with the whole “come up with a color scheme” thing right?
So now we’ve got our nation of origin settled, the next thing we do is create our commanding Officer. The author of the game heavily suggests coming up with a back story for your Officer and warband just to personalize the group and add narrative to the game. So the first thing I did was go a-googling for French names. Go a-googlin. Yep, I wrote that and I said it. I do this sort of googling, let me rephrase that. I do this quite a bit for all kinds of fantasy game stuff, I particularly like checking out the meanings of names. I also have a vague notion of basing this character on one bit of the lore regarding Brad Pitt’s character in the movie Legends of the Fall. Yes, I’m pretty much built out of obscure film and book references.
Anyway, I came across this name Ottilie and I liked the weirdness of it and the meaning behind it: prosperous in battle. It’s a little on the nose, sure, but hey, we’re having fun. Looking up some French surnames, I came across this one, Bastarache – and yes, I’ve had to listen to lots of pronunciations to learn how to butcher these names properly. While I’m not a huge fan of the sound of the actual surname, Bastarache, I am a huge fan of the name’s meaning: lives near a boundary. That is pretty cool and feels very apropos to the Silver Bayonet’s setting lore.
So now for the fun part, writing up a little backstory for our Officer, Ottilie Bastarache. This kind of thing is fun for me, just splashing words down on a page, not worried about anything. Of course the first thing I had to come up with was a name for the warband itself, and I figured Nightmare Hunters was in order. Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars. I don’t know if I said that right either, but that’s my best attempt and you’re going to hear a bunch in this video, so prepare for the pain.
All right, let’s spin up a story.
Ottilie Bastarache went to war when she was sixteen. She marched with Napoleon’s ranks as a vivandierie, meaning she would procure food and wine and water for the troops. Her unit had a nasty habit of running on the vanguard and more than once she would pick up a fallen infantryman’s musket and return fire during the heat of the battle. After her third time doing this resulted in her saving a Lieutenant’s life, he gifted her his bracer of pistols, a pair of firearms his father had commissioned from a local weapon smith. She refused the gift at first, but the lieutenant insisted, pointing out even though she had saved his life, he was still losing a leg to gangrene and would be chaptered out. He had no use for the pistols and the men in the unit would be better served if she had them in her possession.
Although Ottilie had proved herself in battle, she was known for her uncanny ability to procure provisions of surprisingly high quality, a rarity on the battlefield. Her unit often had better wine and meat than most of the army and her soldiers loved her for that. Five years into the wars, there came a fateful day. She caught wind of a farmer rumored to have three pigs ready for butchering and a cask of trappist ale for sale. With her current officer’s blessing, she took five infantrymen with her in search of the farmer’s house. They found it in a clearing in the woods a day’s hike from the unit proper and arrived at dusk.
She bartered with the farmer, secured the freshly slaughtered ham, the cask of ale and a basket of fresh bread. And a space in the barn for her and her men to pass the night in.
At midnight, there in the clearing in the woods, the Harvestmen came, drawn from the Gloaming by the perfume of blood and the stench of good will. Ottilie woke to the screams of the farmer and his family, smoke and ash stinging her eyes and throat, as a pack of goblins mischiefed and murdered their way through the main house. She and her infantrymen burst from the barn, already set ablaze with faerie fire and hatred.
Muskets thundered in the chaos and Ottilie drew her pistols and went to work, yelling to rally her soldiers in the face of nightmares come to life. But the goblins were many and the Frenchmen were few. Chittering and gibbering, the twisted visages of scarred and evil fae swam out of the murk, Ottilie trying to draw a bead on the closest horror when something slammed into the side of her head like a steam-powered hammer. She blinked, and the world tipped on its side. She blinked again, and all sound drained away into shadow. She blinked a third and final time, and watched a hulking malignant form scoop up two of her soldiers and fling them like sacks of potatoes over its broad shoulders, striding away into the Gloam, lit by the fires of Hell.
Three days later, Ottilie’s unit was packing up their tents, readying to deploy upon their new marching orders. Distraught, more than a few of the soldiers moved under a pall of uncertainty. Their Officer barked words of encouragement, assuring them he would send scouts to continue the search for their missing brothers and their vivandierie. But his voice faded and his men turned to follow his gaze to see a figure trudging along the dusty road, approaching. A lone figure with wild hair and a bulky sack over one shoulder.
It was Ottilie and all of the hair on the left side of her head had turned white. She dumped the burlap sack at the Officer’s feet and stared at him, one bloody tear running down one scarred cheek. The sack tipped in the dust and fell, and a malformed, horned head rolling out to stare blindly up at the Officer. “I tried,” she said, “but I couldn’t kill them all.”
Now, Officer Bastarache leads a band of brutal, strange and fanatical soldiers into the Gloaming on moonlit nights, hunting the Harvestmen as they once hunted her. Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars is making a name for itself, both here in the army and there, in the shifting shadows of the border of Fairy, and this is not the end.
Nothing like a wandering, wordy, first draft of a little bedtime story. But hey, I’ve got a little background of this warband now and we can just keep riffing on it for the rest of the warband members.
So, I’ve gone through the recruiting section of the book and taken a quick look at all the different soldier types. I’ve made selections based more on story than on min-maxing for tactical advantage. Plus I’m just not very good at min-maxing for tactical advantage anyway. But we get to choose up to seven soldiers and there’s a simple point-buy system. The author recommends taking the maximum seven soldiers instead of fewer, more expensive types, so I kept that in mind.
So Ottilie has recruited Felice Armand, a vivandierie; Gaspar Gagneux, a doctor; Vermont Escoffier, a supernatural investigator; Claude Cellier, a scout; Jolanda Scaletta, an occultist; Baptiste Moreau, an infantryman; and Brielle Pelletier, a grenadier.
Now the next cool thing we get to do is choose some miniatures to represent our characters. I went looking through my Pile of Opportunity gallery and while I discovered that I have quite a few miniatures that could vaguely fit this era’s aesthetic, albeit a definitely fantasy-infused sorta take on it, I have very few miniatures that have black powder weapons. I mean to be really honest, I do have enough that I probably could have built up the warband without buying anything new, but then what kind of a tabletop gamer would I be? A poser at best. This is a prime gamer opportunity to BUY MORE STUFF! C’mon!
So I went onto Etsy to search for some figures with muskets or flint lock pistols, and I even started by searching for hussars and Napoleonic figures. There are a few but they are all sort of rank and file and very normal looking? And also, not many female figures. Even though historically, according to Wikipedia anyway, France had quite a few female fighters. Until a certain political group went into action, but, we’re rabbit-holing. So I tried out some more search terms and one that returned the best results for kinda what I was looking for was vampire hunter miniatures. Eventually I came across this set and what I liked about these was the ability to order them with or without their hats. So I ended up ordering seven figures from this store, two of them I ordered duplicates of because I couldn’t decide between the hat or no hat version. Also, I was uncertain about how customizable – or non-customizable – their weapons are, and the no hat versions seemed to be all the versions with black powder weapons versus the swords and crossbows.
Anyway, this is the figure I think will be Ottilie. Here’s what I’ve decided to go for with the rest of the warband.
Felice Armand is the sister of an artillerist who was rescued from a werewolf by Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars. She tracked down the Silver Bayonet warband to offer her gratitude and was so taken with Ottilie, she pledged to join them on the spot.
Gaspar Gagneux was a medic with a marine unit. When they launched a beach assault on a seaside town in Spain, they found it overrun with pixies and a revenant. Gaspar became obsessed with the possibilities of Gloaming magic insofar as how it might be utilized for practical medical purposes. He annoyed his commanding officer with so many requests for Silver Bayonet assignment, he was kicked out of the unit without orders and left on the shore. While tracking a vampire across the Spanish countryside, he encountered Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars and tagged himself along.
Vermont Escoffier hails from the newly re-opened College of Sorbonne where he has studied mythology and theology. He joined a secret society of magicians and has been deployed by them to recover magical artifacts. The society found an assignment for him with Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars via a distant relative of one of the members who’s brother’s sister-in-law’s aunt is –
Jolanda Scaletta, an expatriate nun from Italy who’s work in Silver Bayonet units has caused her to both strengthen her faith in God and distance herself from the Church as a remote agent of the Vatican. She has served in three of the fringe units, the first one having been disbanded due to the insidious actions of a changeling and the second having lost all but two members to a vampire’s estate in the Gloaming.
Claude Cellier is the most talkative scout in the Army, and his constant stream of chatter subsides only when he’s walking point or securing a perimeter. Although even then his chatter merely becomes a whispered conversation with himself. He’s strangely adept at finding cover, at blending into the background, and he thinks he’s fallen in love with his commanding officer, though not a day goes by that he hasn’t tried to talk himself out of that notion.
Baptiste Moreau is a brute of an infantryman. He’s been enlisted for almost a decade and prefers his axe to almost anything else. His snarling attitude and general demeanor has kept him from being promoted beyond the low rank of Corporal, though he has received and melted down over a dozen medals of honor. He has traded that raw gold for silver and commissioned the making of silver rings that he wears on a chain under his breastplate, elements of a singular dream he holds close to his black heart and tells no one of.
Brielle Pelletier is a madwoman, a force of nature on the battlefield, one of the few female grenadiers in the ranks. Ferocious and bold, she looks for challenges everywhere, and creates them when there are none to be had. Combative and brash, her commanding officer recommended her for assignment to a Silver Bayonet unit just to teach her a lesson. Upon learning of the Harvestmen, she knew the Gloaming was her next challenge, full of new foes to vanquish. She came to respect Ottilie only after witnessing Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars’ commanding officer in combat.
Ignatius! Please stop torturing your dear viewers!
I sincerely apologize for my friend, his French is terrible.
They deserve to know how to pronounce correctly the names of the members of Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars.
Ottilie Bastarache
Felice Armand
Gaspar Gagneaux
Vermont Escoffier
Jolanda Scaletta
Claude Cellier
Baptiste Moreaux
and Brielle Pelletier
Thank you!
Enjoy the rest of the show. If you can. See you!
And this is the Silver Bayonet warband! Almost ready to go. There’s just a few small things we need to do to wrap it all up, and that is selecting attributes for our officer, selecting gear and filling out the unit sheet. The gear list is fairly short so it doesn’t feel overwhelming like certain games that are out there.
For our officer we get to increase a few stats of our choice based on the rules. So I’m going to increase Accuracy over Melee, Health over Speed, and Recruitment over Courage. I would have rather have gone with increasing Courage story-wise but increasing Recruitment gives us an extra 5 recruitment points which allows us to make Brielle a grenadier rather than an infantryman, so she has a littles stat boost.
We also get to choose two attributes for our Officer, and for Ottilie I went with Indefatigable and Inspiring, mostly driven by character flavor again. I feel she’s quite inspiring to her soldiers and the indefatigable attribute prohibits her from receiving more than a single fatigue token at any time. And fatigue tokens are essentially equivalent to a -1 penalty on combat rolls. In Silver Bayonet, melee combatants receive two fatigue tokens almost every turn they are in combat so this feels like a good balance between supporting the story of this character and a decent game tactic.
Our officer has six equipment slots and may select items from the General Armory and up to two items from the Special Armory. We’re definitely going with her storied two pistols, a musket with a silver bayonet and a cartridge box, and silver shot for one of her pistols. I’m doing a little bit of meta gaming here because I know the first solo scenario has a likelihood of spawning in some werewolves, which are susceptible to silver weapons. But Officers are allowed to change up their gear between games, so, you know, Ottilie has some peculiar instincts, or perhaps even top secret intelligence from military scouts regarding what to expect. Who knows? It’s just a game.
For the rest of our warband members, they each get to choose one item from the Special Armory, with the exception of any soldier that has the attribute Supernatural Veteran, which three of our seven soldiers, do, and those get to choose two items from the Special Armory. But as opposed to Officers, the equipment these soldiers select is permanent, they don’t get to switch gear between games. So, we’ll go down our unit sheet and add all this stuff.
Felice Armand, our vivandiere, has the Supernatural Veteran attribute, so she’s going to carry a silver hand weapon and oil and torches.
Gaspar Gagneux, the doctor, will carry a salt bag, which some Harvestmen monsters are susceptible to, but it does have a chance of ruining a firearm when it’s used.
Vermont Escoffier, our supernatural investigator, has the Supernatural Veteran attribute and so he’ll deploy with a heavy weapon and pistol and he’ll take along some oil and torches and some cold iron shot.
Claude Cellier, our scout, will take some silver shot for his musket.
Jolanda Scaletta, the expatriate occultist, benefits from her Supernatural Veteranship by carrying a well-worn holy symbol and a silver hand weapon.
Baptiste Moreau, the surly infantryman, shall take some cold iron shot and Brielle Pelletier, the grenadier, has a holy symbol of her own making.
Now, obviously playing a game will require me to be able to make notes and changes on this unit sheet in pencil, and so this onscreen version is just to show how I’m going to fill out the actual printed sheet.
Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars, ready and waiting to storm the Gloaming. By the way, this term “the Gloaming” is my own little invention to add into the Harvestmen lore for the game. I just wanted a way to refer, I guess according to the game lore, basically to the fae realm or land of fairy, which is where these monsters are coming from.
So, all that’s left to do is a massive building and painting session to get these figures ready to fight on the tabletop. Again, I’m not looking forward to that, to be perfectly honest. This will be painting up eight unique figures for the warband, I had to order eight wolf miniatures from Etsy for the enemy models – and that’s the bare minimum, more wolves will be needed, but I’ll have to proxy some, you know the budget can only afford so many wolves! And I need a couple of werewolf figures because in the scenario there’s a chance for werewolves to appear on the table as well. And I only have one werewolf figure at the moment. Actually no I’ve got two. So what is that? Like, I gotta paint up like 17, 17 figures?! I don’t know about that, I kinda want to break that up into two separate painting episodes, even that would be tough to do but that’s gonna wreck my perfect little mini-series schedule.
But hey, we got a warband on paper, a scenario picked out, terrain from last month’s crafting video, basically, game on!
So. Go build a warband. Write up some backstory, just for fun. See where it takes you.
See ya!