Skirmish Games

EXT. MILITARY ENCAMPMENT – TENT CITY – DUSK

Orange glows, fires, dot the muddy paths between the canvas tents stretching toward the dark forest beyond.

EXT. OTTILIE’S TENT – DUSK

Voices heard from inside the tent, which is lit internally by lanterns. A barrel stands guard outside the entrance flaps, a pair of hatchets embedded in the splintered side where a rough target has been painted with whitewash.

JOLANDA (O.C.)

Madame, would you leave scorpions to run wild in your kitchen? We must deliver fire and salt and light.

GASPAR GAGNEAUX steps up to the tent door but hesitates before entering.

INT. OTTILIE’S TENT – NIGHT

JOLANDA stands, leaning on her staff; OTTILIE sits on the edge of a cot, repairing a tear in a boot with leather cord. A small lantern sits on a footlocker.

OTTILIE

They won’t give us more soldiers.

JOLANDA

There is no need for more men. 

Ottilie looks at her.

JOLANDA (CONT’D)

Not while we have those.

Ottilie follows Jolanda’s gaze to the footlocker, on which lies the shining silver dagger and the small golden icon she uncovered in the ruins. 

OTTILIE

They want that delivered, for something down on the front line.

GASPAR enters, but the women hardly acknowledge him.

JOLANDA

And they may have it. After we conclude our ritual. I have sent Vermont to my excardinated Sisters in Lyon for the additional components.

Ottilie sighs. She picks up the silver knife, flips it casually between her fingers.

OTTILIE

You’re right, we can’t leave a vampire unchecked at our backs. Folly. Gaspar.

GASPAR

Yes ma’am.

Ottilie flips the silver knife again and offers it to him hilt-first. It gleams in the lantern light.

OTTILIE

Go find Felice, she’s with the grenadier and the infantryman. Give her this. And tell them all … we’re going back.

Intro

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we’re setting up for Chapter 3 in an on-going saga where sometimes the characters we’ve created start demanding their own storylines! And we thank our patrons for all of their steadfast support in this crazy new year! I’m talking to you, you know who you are.

So this is kind of a story-heavy episode today. For any new viewers here we’ve been running Joe McCullough’s Silver Bayonet solo scenario chain, you can find the first two of those here <snap>, and I thought we’d just be jumping into the third scenario that’s in the book but the characters in our warband are starting to take the reins of this tale. Jolanda just wouldn’t leave me alone about  this whole thing.

Jolanda Scaletta is our resident occultist and she simply could not stomach the idea of leaving vampires roaming around in the French countryside. So she’s got a plan – well, let’s continue the story, shall we?

EXT. MILITARY CAMP – QUARTERMASTER LANES – NIGHT

VERMONT ESCOFFIER and CLAUDE CELLIER push through roaming soldiers, their blue trench coats somewhat of a contrast to the mostly white uniforms clogging the muddy lanes.

CLAUDE

You’re off to find a horse, lad, so you can travel to Lyon in search of what now?

VERMONT

Salt. And oil.

CLAUDE

Really? Are we making a roast?

Vermont spots the picket lines full of horses ahead.

VERMONT

I’ll be back in four days, tell my aunt. Three if the weather holds.

And the supernatural investigator is off in a flapping snap of leather coat.

CLAUDE

(to himself)

Well, have a nice vacation, Investigator. 

MALE VOICE (O.C.)

Is that Claude Cellier?! Who owes me several ducats?

Claude winces, turns slowly – but then his expression brightens noticeably.

A short, heavyset MAN waves Claude over to his massive pile of tents and crates and wagons. Hanging lanterns keep the shadows at bay.

CLAUDE

Quartermaster Lucille! You short bastard, I’ve been looking for you since Boulogne!

QUARTERMASTER LUCILLE

Yes, yes, I’ve been looking for you as well. If you have what you promised, I have what I promised. But first! Onion soup and goat cheese! Never turn down a chance to feast, aye?

Claude grins.

CUT TO:

EXT. TENT CITY – RAUCOUS DISTRICT – NIGHT

Fires blaze high in front of tents full of loud drinking and gambling. Soldiers stumble to and fro, bayonets flash in the firelight, laughter punches through here and there.

GASPAR pushes through the tassels and hats of the French army, searching. He frowns, noticing a clearing ahead, a tent the regular soldiers seem to unconsciously drift wide of. 

The tent is well-lit and out front are three rickety tables, but only one is occupied. The brawny infantryman BAPTISTE MOREAUX barks at the pale cook working sausages on a griddle over a small campfire. Grenadier BRIELLE PELLETIER leans back in a wooden chair, boots kicked up on the table. FELICE ARMAND pours Brielle’s metal cup full from a basketed bottle she holds.

Gaspar looks at the soldiers wandering past, noting that all of them slide brief glances at the trio but look away equally fast, nervously even.

Gaspar wrestles an empty barrel over to the table and sits.

BAPTISTE

(raising his cup)

You’ve outdone yourself, kid.

Felice half smiles.

BRIELLE

Bordeaux and sage sausages? You work magic much better than that Italian nun, or I’m a worse shot than this lug right here.

She laughs at Baptiste’s growl.

FELICE

Wine, doctor?

GASPAR

(shaking head)

I have something for you, Felice.

He unsheathes the silver knife, both Brielle and Baptiste tensing slightly at the sound it makes. Gaspar hands the weapon to the vivandierie, who takes it with a small frown.

GASPAR (CONT’D)

Ottilie says it’s yours.

Baptiste grins and claps Felice on the shoulder, a bit too hard in his tipsy state.

BAPTISTE

You earned that. 

BRIELLE

Aye, it shining just like your eyes. Make sure you keep em closed in the dark, lest you give us away,  eh?

GASPAR

Ottilie also gave me a message for everyone. 

They look at him, but a handful of drunk soldiers boisterously stumble over to fill in one of the empty tables.

SOLDIER ONE

Garcon! Wine! Oh and those sausages smell like heaven!

FELICE

That’s our meal, soldier, forage your own.

SOLDIER ONE

Oh, sweetheart, ain’t you a bright and shiny thing. Look, boys, we have guests to dress up our table tonight!

The rest of the soldier’s compatriots have grown silent. He notices their change in demeanor and wobbly tries to pinpoint what has soured the mood. 

The soldiers stand and start to leave. One leans over and mutters to the Nightmare Hunters.

SOLDIER TWO

Apologies. 

SOLDIER ONE

What is happening? Where are we going?

They drag him with them, all harsh whispers and mutters.

SOLDIER TWO

Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars. Idiot!

BAPTISTE

What’s the message, Doc?

Gaspar watches the soldiers go, their haunted glances over their shoulders not lost on him. One of them makes the sign of the cross as he slips behind another campfire. Gaspar looks at his fellow Hunters.

GASPAR 

We’re going back. To hunt the vampire.

Slow push on their reactions. Baptiste groans. Brielle polishes off her cup of wine and wipes her mouth with the back of her hand. Felice looks down at the silver knife, it’s shining reflection hitting her downcast eyes.

CUT TO:

EXT. LYON – LATE AFTERNOON

Sunlight slices across the city beneath dark heavy clouds. A bell tolls in the distance; smoke billows from fields far to the south.

EXT. COBBLE STREET – TALL GOTHIC BUILDINGS – CONTINUOUS

Winding tightly between stone buildings, sun cuts across the lane in slashes through which a figure approaches, coat flowing, tricorn hat punctuating the silhouette. 

VERMONT ESCOFFIER ducks into an arch full of shadow. He knocks on a stout wooden door.

INT. STONE CHAPEL – CONTINUOUS

A musty back room, splintered floor, crates draped in dusty drop cloths. Colored light splashes in from a doorway. VERMONT crosses to that threshold and peers into –

HIS POV: a small chapel full of colored light and stained glass windows.

WOMAN’S VOICE (O.C.)

Investigator.

Vermont turns to SISTER MARGARET, a nun, emerging from a dark stairwell in the back room.

SISTER MARGARET

We have what you seek. Downstairs.

She turns and descends back into the shadows. Vermont follows her down into –

INT. CHAPEL BASEMENT – CONTINUOUS

Sister Margaret crosses to a massive oak table set with lanterns and candles and long flat crates banded with leather straps. Vermont approaches. The nun lifts the lid from one of the crates, revealing three covered wooden bowls; the lids are branded with the Holy Cross and three hovering circles. 

Sister Margaret lifts one of the lids, revealing the bowl to be filled with salt.

SISTER MARGARET

These salts have been consecrated by the Archbishop’s exarch and his Gnostics. They must be sown into the earth by the hands of believers  and then …

She holds up one finger, turns to another table and lifts a stoneware decanter and offers it to Vermont.

SISTER MARGARET (CONT’D)

The cleansing fires can be laid. Your aunt will know the prayers, Sister Scaletta is … well-versed in the armor and wrath of God.

Vermont looks from the flask of oil to the bowls of salt.

VERMONT

Then I must ride, time is of the essence.

SISTER MARGARET

When is it not, Investigator? 

CUT TO:

EXT. LYON – COUNTRYSIDE – DUSK

A rider on horseback, silhouette, coat rippling in the wind, gallops into the setting sun.

SISTER MARGARET (O.S.)

When is it not?

CUT TO:

EXT. TENT CITY – DAY

Tracking with the long, narrow crate that we know holds the sacred bowls of salt; it’s moving down the lane between tents, obviously carried by someone holding either side of it. Soldiers approaching us (or being approached by us) look from the crate to the off-camera crate-bearers and step back to give a wide berth.

INT. OTTILIE’S TENT – DAY

Ottilie sits across from that small golden icon, studying it. She draws one of her pistols, turns it over in her hand, contemplating … then sets it down in front of the little saint statue. She draws the pistol’s sister and sets it down as well, arranging them just so before the icon.

OTTILIE

I shall anoint these with oil and bless them –

She looks skyward but with closed eyes.

OTTILIE (CONT’D)

and they shall speak with your wrath, if they speak at all.

CLAUDE (O.C.)

(from outside the tent)

Look what the mangy cat has dragged in off the boat –

Claude pushes into the tent, carrying one end of the bowl crate. 

CLAUDE (CONT’D)

– and on a horse no less, a horse he didn’t even pay for. How’d you manage that, by the way?

VERMONT

Madame. Is my aunt nearby?

The men set the crate down beside the icon and the pistols.

OTTILIE

She’s administering Communion in the blood tents. She’ll return shortly.

Claude unslings his musket from his back.

CLAUDE

Take a peek at this ma’am, it’s one of the finest things you’ll ever see is my bet.

He shows off a brand new, shining brass scope that runs nearly half the musket’s length.

Ottilie takes the rifle and brings it up to her eye, aiming through the tent flap. Surprised at what she sees, she looks at Claude over the scope.

OTTILIE

This … this is very nice.

Claude grins. 

CLAUDE

Yes it is. Brielle’s never gonna win any wager she puts against me now. Hah! Glorious.

So this is just super fun for me, I could just keep spooling out scenes kinda forever, so at some point, we just gotta, you know, move along right?

So while this batch of narrative has been fun and sorta free-for-all, what today’s episode is really all about is constructing our first custom scenario.

So we’ll use the existing scenarios as our template and I’m gonna use the same Pages document that I used for the House Rules home brewing extravaganza <snap> and copy the scenario layout from the main rule book. We’ll start with the scenario title.

The Cleansing

Hopefully the successful cleansing, right? And a little blurb that gives an overview of what’s going on. Something like:

Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars’ last encounter with the undead at the ruined chapel proved successful except for one nagging detail: they left at least one vampire roaming the ruins. The occultist Jolanda Scaletta convinces the warband’s officer Ottilie Bastarauche that they must return to stamp out the threat and reclaim the desecrated grounds with holy oil, fire and salt.

All right, now for the Set Up. We’re gonna have the same board terrain as the previous scenario, so that’s easy enough. Now, this scenario is all about a guaranteed vampire fight, there’s no way around it. And the revenants are still gonna be a thing too as long as the grounds haven’t been consecrated. But I’m going to adjust some of the numbers for the starting setup in this scenario versus the last one.

So the game will start with a vampire in the middle of the ruined chapel, that’s first. Second, we’ll place three revenants roughly circling the vampire at random tombstones. We won’t have any clue markers in this scenario BUT we’re going to have three markers for Unhallowed Ground and a fourth marker which is really just a reminder that goes in center of the ruins with the vampire, which we’ll call the Icon Marker.

All right, now for the Special Rules.

So, first off, we’ll keep the previous scenario’s special rule about sunlight being magically dimmed essentially and so Line of Sight is limited to 12 inches max and vampires suffer no penalty for being out in the daytime.

Next, the Unhallowed Ground markers. These must be removed from the table by sowing consecrated salts into the dirt. Salting costs 1 action and a figure must stand adjacent to an Unhallowed Ground marker to sow the salts. If any Unhallowed Ground marker is left on the table by the end of the game, the scenario has essentially been failed.

Now, the Icon Marker rules. So the golden icon – that little saint statue Ottilie found last time – must be placed in the center of the ruins, and that costs 1 action to do, and then holy oil must be spread across the ruins. This probably costs a figure’s entire activation, during which if they are attacked, the spreading oil activity is interrupted and requires another activation to complete. Okay I wrote that in there but then later I remove it, because it makes no real sense from a game mechanic stand point, there’s not really a way for anything to interrupt a figure’s activation. So you’ll see that bit get deleted in a minute.

Now we need some special rules regarding how enemies appear during the scenario, so first we’ll say that a new revenant appears from at a random Unhallowed Ground marker at the end of Turn Two and every turn after that.  

Now in the previous scenario, there was a rule that said a second vampire appeared on the board at the end of turn 5. So let’s say that if any Unhallowed Ground markers remain at the end of turn 5, a 2^nd vampire appears at a random corner. This might be a little generous, let’s make it turn 4.

Now, once the icon has been placed and the ruins have been drenched in holy oil, Jolanda Scaletta must conduct a ritual prayer that will bless and re-consecrate the grounds. This will cost her an activation, so no other actions can be taken while she does this. And she must be within Line of Sight of the icon to conduct the ritual prayer. That means within 12” because of the sunlight rule.

And last but not least, the holy oil must be set alight. This requires either a torch or a firearm shot. Technically speaking, we need a firearm shot that strikes sparks off something but we’re gonna stop right there and not get too technical. This is just a fun fantasy game right? So, a figure can spend an action to set the oil on fire with a torch as long as they are within 1” of the central ruins or a figure can make a Shooting Attack with a target number of 12 to set the oil on fire.

Now this can all be done with figures in the ruins, so any figure that is inside the flames suffers damage from a Melee Attack type of dice roll with the Power Die functioning as the damage die and any Undead figure that is inside the flames takes damage equal to the total of both dice, not just the Power Die. And this damage happens at the end of any turn a figure is inside the main chapel ruins.

All right, that’s a big old batch of Special Rules but I think they’re pretty easy to understand. We’ll fix any snags when we actually play it, no problem.

But we do need to set some declarations at the beginning of the scenario. 

One: which figure carries the icon.

Two: which figure carries the holy oil.

three: which figure carries the bag of silver shot they found last scenario

We’ll just assume the sacred salts have been distributed amongst the warband members.

Now, there are some artifact special rules from the last scenario. The silver knife Ottilie gave to Felice functions as a Holy Symbol and lends +1 Courage to the wielder. Ottilie will carry the icon, which also functions as a holy symbol and grants a +1 to Courage for any figure within Line of Sight of it.

And finally we have the Rewards section! 

Units receive the following bonus experience points for this scenario, starting with 

plus 1 experience point if the warband kills 4 or more revenants

plus 1 experience point for each vampire slain by the warband

plus 1 experience point if at least 4 soldiers exit the table

plus 1 experience point if Jolanda completes the ritual prayer 

plus 2 experience points if all Unhallowed Markers are removed from the board

plus 2 experience points if the holy oil is set alight with the icon in place

I basically modeled these after the previous scenario’s so it seems generally in the same realm of possible XP gain.

All right, I think that is it! Scenario 3: The Cleansing is ready to play! I’m looking forward to it, should be fun.

Until then, well, better get your game on, build a warband, roll some dice and tell a story.  

See ya!

That’s what I said <snap> back in that video, so now we’re gonna do it. We’re going homebrewing!

INTRO

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we just go and make up our own freaking rules! And we thank our patrons for their oblivious support of such rampant hubris!

All right, a few videos ago, we played our second chapter in the Les Chasseur de Cauchemars Silver Bayonet skirmish saga and during that game, as you saw, I mentioned a couple of spots where I was inspired to brew up some house rules for three specific things in the game. So today we’re gonna do that and at the end you can tell me how many grave errors I’ve made.

Because I’ve never home-brewed skirmish rules before. Don’t act surprised, you know your host is like.

So we are coming up with rules specifically for Silver Bayonet solo play, these really aren’t gonna apply to PVP – although they might apply to co-op games. But hey, whenever you play whatever you play, it’s your game and you can play it the way you want to, right?

All right, so the biggest rule I wanted to come up with is simply called Stealth. Even as I am just now thinking about it, some form of this could possibly be used in a PVP game, I guess it would kind of be like implementing something like the convoluted obscured concealed order mechanics in Warhammer 40k Kill Team.

But the number one things we have to consider, in my opinion, is the elegant simplicity and flavor of Mr. McCullough’s game design. I have to admit that my initial tendency is to make things over powered. Because I want my war band to survive, duh!

The whole reason I want a stealth mechanic is almost purely for narrative story reasons. But also because I don’t think my soldiers would always just start out with full on attacks. At least in solo play.

So with Stealth in mind, I first just started listing things that popped in my head, just notes.

Like in line of sight vs no line of sight.

What stat? Speed stat, Courage stat? Defense? Out of those only Courage would function like offering a bonus to a die roll.

Stealth movement is probably half speed, but can a figure Sprint at half speed or not? Maybe movement is at minus 2 inches. And probably Sprint shouldn’t be allowed, to keep it simple and kinda “realistic”.

Figure activates, declares stealth, rolls for success. May shoot after movement? Now, X that. May not shoot or attack.

Success removes figure from “line of sight”, meaning it may not be targeted.

Is there an ability a monster could have that defeats or negates stealth?

Success must simply equate to “non-targetable”.

Failure equals targetable.

Success costs two actions – figure can only move, can’t do anything else.

Figure has to have some kind of cover to activate stealth? Yes.

Should there be a melee attack bonus for stealth?

You can see from my notes I just jotted down whatever came to mind.

The main thing I came away from this list with – keeping in mind the game’s simplicity – was that the result of a stealth check has gotta be simply deciding whether or not a figure is targetable. Because we also have to keep in mind that during solo play, enemy models are following a very simple AI flow chart to determine their actions. And targetable means not just of attacks but of movement, as monsters can simply move toward a nearest figure if it’s in line of sight. 

The next thing to lock down is whether or not this check is tied to a particular stat for some kind of bonus. But going over the Silver Bayonet stat line, I don’t think any of these really correlate. So it’s just gonna be a simple check, meaning roll and beat a target number.

Now what’s the target number gonna be, that is probably the most important thing to figure out. I think for now I’m just gonna go with a 50/50 chance, so target number 10? Maybe 11? One of those, cause the numerical spread on 2d10 is 2 to 20, not 1 to 20. Oh, if we look at the Sprint rule, it has a very similar check mechanic, so we’ll use that as the basis for our target number, which will be 11 or higher. 

Now one cool thing I like in D&D is how a player can roll a check but not know if they’ve succeeded until something happens to let them know. Now this is solo skirmish, so we can’t do that exactly, but we can kind of re-create the effect by making the Stealth action a forced action. This also keeps it from being too powerful, I think. So what I mean by forced action is that in order to use Stealth, a figure declares they are going to attempt to go stealthy, and then, regardless of the result of the dice role, they are bound to the Stealth action rules.

Which are: moving up to a specific distance and not being able to take any other actions, like Melee or Move To Attack or Shooting. At first I thought maybe a stealthy figure would move at 1/2 speed and still be able to Sprint, again at half speed. But then I thought maybe I am again being a little too generous, so how about a Stealth action means the following:

A figure attempting to be Stealthy can move up to 4 inches, which is slightly more than half the typical base soldier movement, but after that, the figure can’t do anything else, which in game rule parlance would be saying: once a Stealth movement is made, that figure’s activation immediately ends. And the kicker is that a figure is bound to these rules regardless of whether or not their check succeeded. 

So that’s pretty limiting – a figure can’t Stealth and make an attack or investigate a clue marker, or anything else – they are busy trying to stay hidden.

The last relevant question might be, are there any abilities a monster might have that would logically negate a figure’s attempt at being Stealthy? I think there is only one, at least in the core rule book: Ethereal, which states that a figure with this attribute can see and move through terrain as if it were not there. 

So, we got to add a tidbit about how monsters with the Ethereal attribute are immune to Stealthing figures, or something like that. Figures can never successfully Stealth against a monster with the Ethereal attribute. There.

Which brings us to adding a single prerequisite for figures trying to be Stealthy: in order to make a Stealth check, a figure must have a piece of terrain taller than 1/2 inch between it and all enemy models.

All right, I think that covers it. It seems pretty straightforward and easy to parse out, at least on paper. We’ll play test it in the next scenario.

Okay, for the second house rule, I want to address this issue of “discovered items “. Now this is probably not in line with Joe’s design overall or he probably would have included it in some fashion. But he also clearly wants players to have fun from the get-go, so, you know that’s what I’m doing – I’m having fun.

And remember, I’m kind of doing these homebrew rules to basically let me service the narrative aspects of solo play.

So this second house rule is all about allowing figures to hand off items to each other. But we’re not going to break Joe’s core rule for soldiers, the one that says they’re stuck with the items chosen at the point of recruitment. We’re going to limit this special rule to only items and artifacts discovered during a scenario by investigating clue markers and drawing cards.

Because, like in the last battle report, both warband members who investigated clues and turned over cards, found items they either already had or couldn’t use. And I think special items should maybe have a better chance of helping the unit that found them. And I don’t think it’s too unbelievable that if a figure can pick up a clue or an item or something, that they could easily toss or drop, say, a bag of silver shot or a silver dagger they found on the ground or to another soldier in the warband.

So this one I think is pretty simple:

Item Hand-off

A figure can use a free action to “hand off” an item or artifact discovered via scenario special rules (i.e. via clue markers and drawing cards).

A figure can choose to hand off an item to another friendly figure up to 3” away OR may drop or toss a discovered item to the ground up to 3” away.

Super simple, moving on.

Now this third house rule I want to write up has to do with the monster expert ability, which can be chosen for any soldier in a warband during recruitment. As written, this ability only functions during a PVP game, because it affects only the monster die in a player’s Fate Pool. And in that capacity, it functions perfectly well. But in solo play, as written, it doesn’t function at all. But I still want to use it, because I think it’s a cool character attribute.

Like in the Nightmare Hunters, Vermont Escoffier, the supernatural investigator, for example, it’s just cool to think he’s had to study up on these fairytale monsters they tangle with, while he was at University, which is part of his backstory. So, let’s make it work for solo play.

The first thing we should declare is that using this attribute must affect the figure with the attribute – or if not affect, it must at least involve the figure in some way.

See, this attribute is meant to cause a monster to increase its damage against or target your opponent in PVP. But for a solo players, it will allow an attempt at making a monster decrease its damage against the figure with the attribute only.

So the figure can use its Monster Fate Pool die to re-roll a monster’s Power or Skill die, and the lower result takes precedent. But this can only be used during a monster’s attack that is targeting the figure with this attribute.

Alternatively, a figure may use their Monster die to modify a monster’s action. They can force a monster to target the figure themselves during a shooting attack or become the target of a move or move to attack that would have originally been made against or toward another figure.

You know, this is kinda like they know how to bait a monster into targeting them. Basically spamming aggro, right?

There is a third option, which would be similar to the first, but the figure could re-roll a Power or Skill die in their own attack against a monster. But we’re kind of getting into the normal Fate pool stuff here. So another thing we could say is …

A figure can burn their Monster die to gain a +2 to their Melee stat in a single attack action against a monster. Now, I am not sure what’s over powered without play testing, so … I don’t know. 

All of this is easily justifiable from a narrative perspective. A figure with this attribute has either studied monsters in some way or learned through encounters and thus they know some monster’s weak points or eccentricities or whatever.

So I’m gonna go with the plus two for now, I don’t think that’s too OP at least on the surface. One attack getting a plus two, doesn’t seem like much.

All right, let’s take a look at our brand new sheet of house rules for solo play. Because, you know, design makes everything better, right?  

I can link this document as a PDF in case any of you wanna download it and use it in your solo games or, you know, you can print it and roll it up and use it to start a fire in your Christmas fire place!

So, go brew up some house rules! You could make a whole new game that way, if you wanted to. And let me know what you think of these.

See ya!

THE RUINED CHAPEL

EXT. WOODS – DAY

A muddy, still stream. A staff breaks the surface, plunging down slowly to check the depth.

Jolanda Scaletta stands at the edge of the brackish water crossing her path. Her dipped staff suggests the water isn’t too deep. She lifts her already-muddy skirts, but hesitates, scanning her surroundings, the woods, with a frown.

Vermont Escoffier steps into frame, her studied look causing him to survey the woods himself. 

Vermont: “Something ahead? Claude’s out there somewhere.”

Still fixed on the woods, Jolanda replies softly, “Running water offers protection, no? Standing water may do the same, but not for us.”

Vermont glances sideways at her.

CUT TO:

Muddy boots trudging through the undergrowth, two pairs.

Infantryman Baptiste grunts, surly, hefting his musket over his shoulder on its strap and yanking a leather-wrapped canteen from his belt. “That bastard scout’s gone and got his lost again, I know it.”

Before he can sip, the canteen is snatched from his hand, grenadier Brielle hefts it with a grin, swigs from it. “Claude only got us lost once. You, on the other hand, didn’t know the map was upside down.” She grins, then pushes deeper into the trees.

Baptiste snarls, “That’s my -” and cuts himself off as the canteen flies back at him from the trees.

CUT TO:

Felice, moving slowly through the bracken, every sound, every twig crack, every squirrel squirreling through the forest, making her twitch, nervous eyes darting here, there, to the side and back. 

CLOSE UP: her hands white knuckling her musket.

A gloved hand lands on her shoulder and a beaked plague mask enters frame; it’s hanging around Gaspar Gagneux’s neck.

Gaspar: We’re all here together, remember?

Felice nods shakily.

A small creak from up head draws her attention, and she hisses, raising the musket, the barrel trembling, and from the woods a harsh whisper calls, “It’s Claude, uh, just, you know, don’t fire up on me.”

CLOSE UP: a gloved hand thumbs the hammer of a holstered pistol carefully back down. Tilt up to reveal Gaspar’s silent relief.

POV: sighting down the barrel of the musket. Gaspar’s gloved hand gently pushes the barrel down out of frame, revealing a blue-coated Claude emerging from the trees.

CUT TO:

The warband huddles together with Claude and Ottilie at the center.

Claude: We’re very close. The old walking path lies just yonder.

Ottilie looks skyward.

HER POV: the sun shining through breaks in swaying branches

Ottilie: Mid-morning. This is good. We need to be on our way back to the regiment by nightfall.

“Is this the rally point then?” asks Claude.

Jolanda points across the stream of stagnant water behind them. “On the other side of the stream if you please.”

Ottilie sizes her up and nods. “So be it. We don’t know exactly what we’re looking for, but we’ll probably know when we find it.”

Baptiste grunts. “So it’s true, then, we be grave-robbing today?”

Brielle snorts. “You’ve been robbing graves since you were nigh-high as a weasel or I’m a three-legged sow.”

Ottillie looks at Baptiste: “The old records say there was a cemetery. You, however, will be robbing any nightmares of the chance to murder us, aye?”

Baptist grunts again.

Ottilie looks at her troops. “Felice, Baptiste with me, eyes open, soul shielded.”

The warband replies in unison: “Mind clear. Powder dry.”

Craning up: the warband disburses into the trees, camera tilting down to the ribbon of still water below.

CUT TO:

Low angle, half-buried cobblestone. A boot steps into frame. TILT UP, reveal Claude creeping forward along an overgrown path. 

REVERSE ANGLE: ahead of him, some sort of stone arch choked by creeping vines, rusty black iron hanging in some facsimile of a once-proud gate.

He drops to a knee, swinging up that great musket with the brass tubular sight. Something beyond has captured his attention. The trees have thickened, here shadows threatening to swallow the whole forest.

Claude sights down the barrel and murmurs, “What do we have here? Another party we weren’t invited to? I’d say that sounds about right.”

Confusion crosses his face, followed by a slow horror. He’s lowering the gun, rising backwards, then turning and running.

INTRO

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes it’s Chapter Two in an on-going narrative skirmish game series! And you might think that’s a weird way to phrase that since this is technically our first Chapter Two, but over time, there’s bound to be more!

And we thank our patrons for their monthly support, which goes quite a ways in both a material and spiritual sense!

Ah and if you’re new to the channel, you can see Chapter One of this saga, right here. <snap>

So we’ll get right into it, shall we? Well, let me preface this one with a couple of notes. Even though this scenario ended up being a shorter game than Chapter One, it took me twice as long to shoot it, and I don’t know why. Just thought I’d throw that little bit of trivia in there for no apparent reason. Tabletop Alchemy, the proud home of rambles and long-winded stories!

Second off, look at these stats for the Vampire in The Silver Bayonet! These things have me pretty much terrified for our little warband. And I thought the werewolves were tough! <snap> 

They’re Indestructible, which means they’re immune to all damage that doesn’t come from those sources to which they’re allergic – which is silver, blessed and I guess things that are on fire. They’re Ethereal, which means they can see AND MOVE through any terrain without penalties. Which, I assume, means walls and stuff. Ridiculous. They have the Hypnotic attribute, which means any figure trying to make a Move to Attack must first pass a Courage check. They’re Indefatigable, so they can only ever have one Fatigue token, they’re Strong, which means they get a plus 1 to melee damage – oh and look! They have this attribute called Soul Sheer. And THAT means any figure they cause damage to has to make a Terror check with a penalty equal to the amount of damage they inflicted. They’ve got a +3 to melee, 14 Health and a 15 Defense. They are literal monsters and I don’t think any of The Nightmare Hunters are capable of withstanding a battle with these things, not even a little bit. 

So yeah, I’m pretty terrified of these things getting on the board. And according to our scenario’s special rules, one Vampire arrives at the end of Turn 1 and another at the end of Turn 5.

To be fair, I think these vampire stats are a pretty slick representation of the general mythic vampire, right? All those attributes and scores really do evoke “vampire”. I just really, really don’t want to face one. 

Which is also the accurate response according to myth and legend, right? Good on ya, Mr. McCoullough. 

Third and last here, I think in a future video it’s going to be fun to write up a couple of homebrew rules for solo players. Well, at least for me but you know maybe some other solo players might wanna use them too. That’ll be interesting to do together ‘cause I’ve never really written any skirmish-type rules, but in today’s game I’ll point out a couple of things I’d like to do rule-wise in the future. 

How about a montage?

Okay, so the table is set, we just need to put down the clue markers and here’s a little legend of the playing pieces we’ll be using. We’ve got the clue markers, which I put together in this little video here <snap>, and we’ll use the black dice as Power Dice, the blue dice as Skill Dice and the red and green dice as Monster Dice. 

Four clue markers go on the table today, according to the scenario set up instructions, and each goes in a corner of the central ruins. And now, deployment. 

First we put down the starting enemies, of which there are six zombies – called revenants in The Silver Bayonet – and each one of these goes next to the six main gravestones that ring the chapel ruins. I added this little cemetery area because it just felt like a logical terrain addition to the location. Our last zombie is apparently starting on top of a broken sarcophagus, cause like most of us, he’s just a teenager deep down.

And over here is the gate slash entrance path to the whole place and so that’s the direction our warband is coming from, even though the scenario states that we could deploy soldiers on any or all table edges. The narrative kind of helps give me direction so I just kind defer to that when I can. 

So Claude has rushed back to Ottilie to warn her about the stirring undead. Ottilie breaks the warband into two squads and keeps the edgy Felice with her along with Baptiste and the doctor, who refuses to leave the officer unattended. Ottilie reminds everyone how the dead don’t care much about being shot – she tells them to engage in hand-to-hand combat with blade and flame to put them down.

This attribute here is the reason they aren’t super-susceptible to black powder weapons, they automatically reduce any shooting damage by 4, which is a pretty hefty penalty, enough to dissuade our intrepid soldiers from wasting ammunition.

Ottilie’s squad deploys along what we’ll call the western border, with Officer Bastarauche gaining a perch on a tall rock and her accompanying soldiers arrayed alongside her on the forest floor. 

Claude takes the supernatural investigator and occultist with him around to the north and Brielle the grenadier follows. The scout has his eye on a rocky perch just ahead of him and the others fan out amongst the trees. Vermont in particular is very keen on getting into those ruins, hoping to discover some kind of artifact. But he can see more than one undead lurking through the trees and that’s definitely dampening the treasure-hunting mood.

And as Turn One begins, clouds roll in and the trees thicken somehow and it’s almost as if night is falling – while the Gloaming rises. Line of sight for the game has been minimized to 12 inches. A mist coalesces along the forest floor and the revenants stumble and moan listlessly in the gloom. Felice shivers.

Now here is where I want to write up a rule from scratch and that rule would be Stealth. Now a stealth rule probably has no place in the general game but for solo players, I feel this is almost a missing feature. I mean, I know it’s just a combat skirmish game, but because we get so into narrative here amongst ourselves, when I look at this board and I think of how the story would go, I think Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars would do their best to capitalize on some sort of stealthy movement. You know, instead of just charging in to fight right away.

But, like I said, we’ll get into that in an another video down the road. For now, without a stealth mechanic, Ottilie leans over her rock to tell Baptiste that she’s going to try to take out this closest aberration, but the goal is to reach those ruins. Before he can reply she leaps down and rushes forward, musket coming off her shoulder with its shining silver bayonet slashing through the gloom as she Moves to Attack!

She rolls a 9 and a 7 plus one for her melee and she connects with a brutal stab that hammers the revenant to the ground. She rips her bayonet free and with a single hit point left, the revenant savagely Strikes Back, snapping at her ankle like a rabid dog impervious to pain or reason.

And it rolls … double nines! It’s damn near torn her leg off! With it’s +1 for melee, it ravages Ottilie like a starving bear, clawing on its way up the fearless officer, who is shocked by the sudden savagery as she stumbles back, trying to keep the maniacal thing at bay with the butt of her musket.

Baptiste aims his musket but snarls in frustration at his officer’s reminder of the undead’s disinclination to suffer much from shooting attacks, so he drops aim and charges through the trees to barrel into the shrieking starving revenant himself.

And wow, another nine shows up, he gets a total of 15 with his plus one to melee and he slams into the soulless creature, growling like a bear himself. That nine on the power die puts that revenant back in the mud for sure. He knocks it so hard into the cracked sarcophagus behind, its head snaps clean off.

Gaspar cuts along the back of the rock his Officer was on and catches up to her, rummaging in his satchel, but as he reaches her, he spots shambling movement off in the murk and panics slightly. He draws out his pistol and fires over Ottilie’s shoulder, startling her and Baptiste both.

The second unit hears that shot echo strangely, and in the gloom Claude mutters, “Well. I suppose five minutes of surprise is all we could ask for, huh?” Brielle and Vermont look nonplussed. Jolanda isn’t paying attention, fixated as she seems to be on the darkening vault of tree canopy.

Gaspar rolls a bizarre fourth nine in a row on the power die and a six on the skill die for a 15 total and hits the revenant – much to his own surprise. “En guard?” he whispers to himself.

With its damage reduction attribute, its only reaction to Gaspar’s black powder ball tearing a chunk out of it, is to shuffle twitchily for a more clear look at the doctor and the other humans gathered there like a buffet line. It bears its teeth, eternal hunger burning deep in its dead gaze.

Felice, wanting to show her beloved leader she’s not afraid, grits her teeth and advances through the trees, wiping leaves out of her face, to cover the flank. Blinking in the growing murk, she squints to spot the moaning corpse the doctor fired upon and, with a darting glance at the darkening ambiance, she lights her torch and raises it high. “I see it,” she mutters and decides to sprint to put herself in line with Baptiste, anxious to help.

With the first squad fully activated, we now enter the Monster Phase.

That revenant Gaspar invited to the party barely notices Felice move into its peripheral vision. Its black heart is set on the feast before it and it shambles through the shadows dragging one broken foot. It doesn’t run. It doesn’t hurry. It just stumbles forward toward Baptiste, opening its mouth in an impossibly large gaping maw, heedless of the branches raking at its face, its hollow eyes.

The next revenant can smell Felice, her fear like smoke in the air and it lurches through the woods towards the vivandierie and her flickering flame.

Two revenants shamble towards the second squad, Brielle barking, “We’ve got the loudest scout in the legion, I swear.” She arches an eyebrow at Claude. “But I appreciate you serving them up, I’ve got a silver ducat says I put more in the mud than you today.”

“Uh huh,” Claude drawls into his scope. “I believe I’ll take that bet, grenadier.”

The last revenant, weeping strangely, shambles towards Ottilie and the doctor.

That’s all the enemies, so the second squad activates now.

Claude scrambles up that rock and sweeps the murk with his scoped eye. A guttural moan from beneath him makes him swish the musket down and a revenant looms up in his scope. He jerks his eye out of the glass to sight down the barrel instead and fires nearly point blank down the escarpment. 

A 3 + 10 + 1 for his accuracy and his crazy aim proves true. He grunts with satisfaction as a chunk of skull blows out of the side of the revenant’s head, then sighs in dismay as it looks up at him for a beat … and after its damage reduction, it begins to climb. 

Brielle snaps at Vermont and Jolanda, “You’re on your own for a beat, lemme help our talkative scout stay alive.” And she’s charging through the trees with her bayonet leading the way.

She slams into the rock-climbing revenant, stabbing wildly with her bayonet and with a seven and two and her plus one for melee, she manages to slip on a gnarled root and just miss the moaning zombie, blade scraping across the cracked granite. “Merde!” 

That zombie strikes back with a lurch and falls on her with a sudden ferocity, rolling a 10 and a 9! A huge counterattack that even Brielle is stunned by, the monstrous thing tearing at her, shredding through her coat and raking a huge gaping wound in her side. Brielle screams despite herself, twisting away in the last moment, forcing a laugh and coughing up blood. She spits in a creature’s face with a grimace.

Now, here we’ll use our first die from our Fate Pool, in which of course we only have two dice to start with. We’ll roll the skill die from the pool and we get a seven which will negate four of those 9 damage points; not great but we’ll see how it goes. So Brielle is at five health instead of 1.

Vermont Escoffier keeps eyeing those ruins. He nudges Jolanda. “With me?” Jolanda nods, closes her eyes and holds her staff at the undead atrocity stumbling towards them. She curses it with a prayer to the Almighty, beseeching the Creator for just a bit of sunlight, even if only metaphorical, and blesses the aberrant creature.

Now, here I made a mistake and I overlooked both the Courage check and the point of damage occultists are supposed to take upon attempting to cast a spell. I realize this later on, but hey sometimes we make mistakes, if it happens to be in our favor… well, it’s still a mistake. 

So the revenant’s gotta make a Courage check with target number of 18 and it’s got a, oh wow, these things have +5 Courage?! Who wrote this scenario? This is only chapter 2 and it feels like we’re on hard-core mode, good grief! It rolls and 11 + 5 = 16; excellent! Not enough. It suffers -1 penalty to all it’s rolls for the rest of the game. 

Vermont charges ahead as soon as Jolanda touches his shoulder. He swings at the blessed zombie with all his might, trying to cave it in in one go with his heavy mace … and the revenant shuffles mindlessly into a mossy hole that causes it to stumble just under the supernatural investigator’s wild attack. He curses and tries to over-correct as the creature Strikes Back at him. 

And that die that jumped out of the rolling tray was a 1 and I’m damn well keeping it! Fight me! It’s a one! For a total of 11 which misses! Vermont recoils with a grunt, just out reach. Yes! (Napoleon Dynamite) 

And that’s the end of Turn One. Now, some end of turn stuff happens of course, first, a new revenant clambers up out of the ground and the directional die will show us … that it appears topside beside a sarcophagus very close to our second unit. Great.

Second, a vampire is arriving, drawn by the psychic screams of horror and the smell of warm blood. We gotta roll that directional die again to determine which corner of the table it’s going come from. I’m deathly afraid of this thing. Here goes. All right!! Finally something good! I mean it’s the farthest corner from our guys as possible, that’s literally the best we could hope for. Whoa, okay, we’ve got a fighting chance, at least for now.

Turn Number Two.

The doc goes first, pulling a great brass syringe from his satchel and stabbing Ottilie with it. She belts out a cry and jerks away from him. “It’s going to make you feel better.” Upon her snarling glare, he adds, desperate, “I swear!” and she gains two health, back up to a whopping six out of 14.

Baptiste lunges at the monster before him, stabbing with his heavy bayonet. The infantryman is pissed off today and with a 9 + 8 + 1 for melee, he runs the revenant through and ruthlessly twists the blade, then kicks the twice dead thing off his weapon. “Back to the inferno with you.”

Ottilie sprints into the chapel ruins, vaulting over a cracked sarcophagus with a burst of energy from Gaspar’s terrible syringe. She desperately starts searching one musty corner, kicking over a moldering heap of detritus and scattering ancient broken floor tiles. She yells as loud as she can, “Vermont, Jolanda, still breathing?” “Currently, madam!” is the distant answer.

Felice sprints after Ottilie. “I’m right behind you, Madame.” Ottilie replies, “Search this damn place. Find us one thing to make this bloody excursion worth it.”

And we’re on to the Monster Phase.

Unbeknownst to our crew, silent death is drifting towards the graveyard and the ruins, the smell of blood lighting it’s way like a synathetic beacon. Synathetic isn’t a word, but neither are vampires. Except in the Gloaming.

Baptiste has a new friend coming to say hi, much to his chagrin. The revenant that didn’t move last turn now sees lunch on the menu and hobbles toward Vermont and Jolanda. The NEWLY risen revenant agrees that lunch sounds like a great idea and follows suit.

The revenant that tried to hug Vermont earlier comes at him with open arms and renewed vigor. It’s broken jaw carving a hideous smile in the shade, it’s cold embrace all chipped teeth and talons scraped from finger bones and it rolls an 8 + 7 + 1 for melee but minus one from Jolanda’s metaphorical sunlight blessing, but the blessed curse isn’t enough to stop it, and it wraps Vermont up in a vicious hug and takes a bite out of him for good measure – and 8 points of damage.

Now here we’re going to meta-game for a moment and this is one of those homebrew rule things I want to write up. So when I built Vermont’s character and chose his special attributes, I chose Monster Expert as one of them and I didn’t know yet how that functioned in solo play. Monster Expert adds one extra Monster Die to a warband’s Fate Pool. But in solo play, the player doesn’t get any Monster Dice in their Fate Pool. So this is essentially worthless in solo play UNLESS we brew up a bit of homebrew rules. Now I’m not gonna think to hard about it right this moment, we’ll develop this idea later on. For now, I’m just gonna say that Vermont’s Monster Expertness allows him to force a single re-roll of a monster’s power die once per game, kind of just like an additional Fate Pool die, which is probably a bit much and why this needs some actual thought behind it. But for now, he turns that eight into a one which turns that hug of pain into a blind miss, which happens because  the revenant stumbles into another mossy pothole which pulls it off kilter with a sad, sad moan. It really wants those hugs and kisses.

Vermont Strikes Back, sidestepping the clumsy attack and brings his mace around with an uppercut swing for a 6 + 10 + 2 for his melee and his mace crunches into the zombie face with an echoing crack. That mace is a heavy weapon which adds one to the damage, leaving the revenant with three hit points. With deep breaths, Vermont readies himself for more unwanted advances.

The slavering insanity that nearly killed Brielle lunges again at the wounded Grenadier, gnashing at her with tooth and bone – and that’s another bounce out that’s a one! And I’m keeping that one too! Deal with it!Struggling to breathe through broken ribs the Grenadier forces a grin as she manages to get her musket up between them, holding the scrabbling monster just out of reach. 

With a wheezing snarl, she kicks back at it – very reminiscent of a Baptiste move – and rolls the illustrious 6 + 9 but if only those dice had been reversed! As it stands, she punts it hard in the chest, and as it flies back, she slashes at it with her bayonet for seven damage and they both get their fatigue tokens.

And that brings us to the second squad activation phase.

With an exasperated sigh Claude slings his musket and leaps from his rocky perch, sliding down with pebbles and debris cascading after him – and he lands right between Brielle and her opponent. Somehow his boot knife has materialized in his hand and it thunks down on that skull he already shot once. Yes! 9 + 3 + 1 for melee, the MVP is back, the revenant collapses under the great deluge that is Claude Cellier, the mouthy scout. Without looking back, already shouldering that musket and bringing the scope to his eye, he mutters, “That silver ducat is most likely mine, eh?”

Even in terrible pain, Brielle can’t stomach it, spitting a curse. She looks around for something to smash and spots the two zombies attacking Vermont and limply charges the wounded one. Ooh it’s about time. We got some good rolls a 9 + 8 + 1 for her melee but minus one for fatigue and she cleaves that zombie fully in half, her bayonet falling like a bolt of lightning. The rotting corpse falls away to either side, revealing the snarling grenadier’s blood-streaked visage. “We’re even now, you mouthy bastard!”

Claude, eye to his scope, sighs a third time.

Vermont, emboldened by Brielle’s barbarous victory, rushes at the next revenant, the thing standing between him and the ruins beyond. His swings that heavy mace and wow, another run of nines and eights! 

It better stop when the monsters go, though. 

So an 8 + 9 + 2 for melee and -1 for fatigue and his mace knocks the hanging jaw clean off that revenant, one point shy of putting it down. Its whole decrepit body shivers with the impact, and yet, it strikes back like an undead cobra. OMG the 9 + 8 reversed! This mission is rigged.

We’re gonna burn a re-roll. Wait, okay, wait just a minute. Okay, looking at the board, we might not use that last Fate Die just yet. So that zombie snaps back with 10 damage, which is enormous. Vermont buckles under the brutal rending fingers that tear at him with the black strength of the Gloaming.

Jolanda hisses at the wound Vermont suffers and steps up, smoothly drawing her silver knife. Whoa, what that roll says is that Jolanda just walks calmly up to the thing and slices her blade across its exposed throat, finishing the job Vermont started. The thing slowly sags to a sitting position and its head rolls down into its own lap, staring up at them all. With a fistful of coat, Brielle keeps Vermont on his feet, both bleeding heavily and wheezing for breath. 

Jolanda turns to watch another revenant doddering towards them from the weird midday twilight. She frowns, takes a curious sniff, looking off into the shadowy depths of the woods past the ruins. “Vermont,” she says, “light your torch.” Into the gloom, she calls out, “Mistress! There is something else here!”

And that is the end of turn two. Fatigue tokens are collected, and a new revenant halls itself out of the ground near Baptiste and Ottilie.  

Turn Number Three

To kick things off with what might be a terrible decision, Felice crosses the ruined chapel to get to the far clue marker. The special rules for searching in here require her to make a target number eight check to successfully investigate, so let’s do it as Felice searches, desperately, for what, she has no idea. She makes the roll with a 10 and we finally get to draw a card: the king of spades! Which means she trips on a dark sack that clinks and from inside she retrieves a bag of silver shot. Excellent! Now if only Felice had a firearm with which to use that possibly soon to be precious item.

And this is another thing I want to create a small homebrew rule for, the trading or passing off of found objects. But again, we’ll deal with that later. And another side note, in the intro, I forgot that Felice doesn’t carry a firearm, so that scene with her and Vermont and Claude would have been slightly different.

All right, Ottilie nods at her vivandierie and continues searching herself. Over her shoulder, she says, “We need to fall back, Felice. Find Claude and the rest.” 

“Ma’am?” 

“I’ll be right behind you.”

She rolls for her investigation check, knocking over an ancient pest-ridden cabinet. She barely makes it with a nine and the cabinet disintegrates as she tips it over, muck rats, squealing, and darting over her boots. Something down in a chink in the wall glints – let’s draw a card! Queen of spades! Ottilie digs a silver knife out of the wall, just what the woman with a silver bayonet needs, right? You can never have too many knives – that’s another Bloody Nine reference – except in this game where one is really all you need, mechanically-speaking. But this knife has an intricately carved ebony handle and the blade is bright and razor sharp – it’s a handsome specimen of single edged wit, for sure.

Kicking diseased-looking rodents out of her path, Ottilie crosses to another corner of the ruins. She yells, “It’s time to go. Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars, retreat!”

Upon hearing this Baptiste grins mirthlessly at the revenant trudging towards him. Confident he can outrun the stupid thing, he retreats just far enough to stay out of reach, baiting it to keep it fixed on him and not his crewmate and commanding officer who are poking around in the ruins back there.

And to make sure he’s captured its attention, he shoots at it. Another big role! 9 + 10 + 1 for his accuracy, his shot easily center punches a musketball into the creeping zombie’s chest, knocking it off its feet. It spasms … and then clambers back up with five points because it doesn’t care about being shot. 

“Reload your pistol doc and fall back,” Baptiste growls. Gaspar, glancing about nervously, reloads his gun, but then instead of falling back, he heads towards the ruins. “Doc, you bloody fool, where are you going?”

“Where she goes, I go,” is Gaspar’s sober reply.

And that puts us into the Monster Phase.

The vampire glides silently through the ancient graveyard, its feet lost in a shadow it seems to pull with it like a vast black cloak swallowing the world.

Baptiste’s zombie follows after him mindlessly, moaning and limping through the bracken, it just wants to return his thoughtful gift of a bullet.

The last revenant lurches towards Jolanda’s gleaming white headdress, which captures its attention from the other humans, who to be fair are slightly further away from it and it wants lunch now dammit! 7 + 4 + 1 in melee and it claws at our occultist but with her Defense of 13, she just takes a calm step backward from the lumbering atrocity, which is her way of Backing Off instead of Striking Back.

All right, second unit time and it’s pretty simple. They all fall back but they don’t retreat just yet. Brielle calls out, “We await you at the tree line, Madam!” With the pained grunt, she hefts her musket and fires at the single revenant in front of her and with a 3 + 10 + 1, she scores a hit but again the dead walker’s dead flesh just absorbs the shot like a rock tossed in the mud. Brielle spits more blood on the ground in disgust.

From his rock Claude snipes at her, “I take it that was a miss, dear grenadier.”

“I hit the damned thing, damn you!”

“Aye, just not hard enough eh?”

“Shut your mouthy mouth, you mouthy bastard.”

Smiling grimly to himself, Claude reloads his musket.

Jolanda murmurs to herself, once again clasping her holy staff, and this time we remember to make the Courage check, where she rolls double eights, no problem. She blesses that incoming revenant with another prayer beseeching the Above to share its light and winces, touching her forehead where a sharp pain lances briefly through her mind and she loses a hit point for casting a spell. The zombie rolls it’s Courage check and it’ll be close – oh boy, it rolls of 15 + 5 for its Courage and no penalties so it passes the check and suffers not the blessing, curse or otherwise.

Another revenant punches up from the grave dirt for air and lumbers to its feet by this grave marker and we’re now at

Turn Number Four. 

Just a reminder that at the end of Turn Five another vampire is going to appear on the board and I’ll be up front with you – I had every intention of trying my best to get the Nightmare Hunters off the board before that happens.

We start with Ottilie, who’s still ransacking the ruins. Felice hears that new revenant claw its way up from the dirt and she is sensing something foreboding now as well, something putting her teeth on edge. She begs her commander, “You ordered us to leave, you must be leaving as well?!”

“One last look,” Ottilie grunts. “Get moving. That’s an order.”

Ottilie rolls for her investigation check, which she passes easily and while kicking over a pile of broken stones and bricks, she catches another small glint, covered in old spiderwebs and we draw another card: the jack of spades! She finds a small icon, a tiny golden figure with the mark of a saint on its base. “This,” she murmurs, turning the small statue over in her gloved hand, “this is something useful.” She looks out from the ruins into the murky forest, pondering. With a self-satisfied nod, she calls, “Retreat on the double, we’re done here!”

And the bonus that icon gives us is we get to add another power die to our Fate Pool, excellent.

Now Ottilie and Felice haul ass out of the ruins. Felice can sprint but Ottilie spent her action searching so she gets the standard 6 inch move. Gaspar sprints after her towards the rally point and Baptiste sprints off the board and that’s it! No monsters can catch any of the crew on their turn and everyone makes it successfully back across the running water, back to where the sun is able to dapple down through the trees again. 

Vermont and Brielle hobble across the stream supporting each other. Jolanda walks calmly, pausing for a brief moment on the far side of the stream to let her bare feet feel the damp sand. Ottilie and Felice and Gaspar are the last to cross the stream and together, Les Chasseur de Cauchemars head back to the regiment, somewhat the worse for wear but silently hopeful in their gait. As the rest trudge down the trail, Jolanda stops and turns to look back toward the ruined chapel. She pantomimes the sign of the Cross and bows her head in thanks and murmurs, “We shall return with the cleansing fire.” 

And we fade to black. 

All right, another battle report in the can!

An interesting thing about being able to do these battle reports as a video is that I’m essentially debriefing myself and studying the battle after the fact. Which means of course seeing things I should have done differently, et cetera. I think my most interesting take-away after going over this game again is how I missed out on the tactical nature of the revenant movement stat for most of the game. Like at the beginning Ottilie literally rushes into hand-to-hand combat because I was fixated on this Damage Reduction attribute the zombies had. But they also only had a movement of 4 versus our warband’s movement of 6 inches. And I didn’t capitalize on that until the very end with Baptiste doing his kiting thing. Really, even though a new revenant was going to spawn every turn, if I had focused fire with multiple troops on single zombies, I probably could have whittled down one or two per turn from a totally safe distance. Well, maybe. The dice of course are really what drive things, so you never know right?

But yeah, this definitely felt like a shorter game compared to the last one, but it was still really fun. I know a lot of you actually liked the last battle report and I really like these too, but I can tell that I have to be pretty careful about over-producing them. They take a pretty large amount of effort on the production side and while I really enjoy the end result, I gotta be careful to pace myself so I don’t burn myself out on doing them, if you get what I’m saying.

I mean, I wanna play a bunch of different games, but I really only want to do this type narrative battle report. Storytelling is really what I enjoy and these things – as if you couldn’t tell – sorta help me scratch that itch as a “failed filmmaker”. But anyway I hope you had as much as fun as I did – there’s really only one campaign thing we have to do post-game, because we didn’t lose any warband members this time, and that’s allocate XP. 

Every member gets one XP for going through the grind and then they took out I think six revenants, at least five and for that, the warband as a whole gets one XP point. They get one XP because more than four of the soldiers got off the table of their own volition and they get one XP for successfully investigating three or more clue markers.

So I gave Ottilie one of the extra XP points, one to Brielle and one to Jolanda, who from a story-perspective I’m really starting to lik quite a bit, she’s just developing as a cool character, to me anyway. I like her mysteriousness. 

All right guys, well, cheers and, you know … go play a game! 

See ya! 

Exterior moody forest – dusk.

The last vestiges of gold sunlight rake through the tops of trees, pine and oak and ash.

A boot, battered and scuffed, presses into the loam. 

A man, 30, kneels quietly in the bracken, his blue tricorn hat pulled low. His long blue coat criss-crossed with dark leather, belts, straps, pouches. He scans the undergrowth, muttering to himself.

CLAUDE

So nice of you poor bastards to leave such a trail just for us. Except it’s not just for us, is it? 

He suddenly slips the great musket off his shoulder and brings it to his eye with a swift smoothness belying years of habit. 

CLAUDE (cont’d)

(to himself)

Y’all invited the demons to your party, didn’t ya?

(louder)

Madam!

Reverse POV, sighting down the musket barrel: just beyond a pile of forest stone, a clearing. Full of uniformed bodies.

Footsteps crunch up from behind. A voice, a woman.

OTTILIE (o.s.)

What’s there, Claude?

CLAUDE

Oh, I think we found the special unit. 

Angle on CLAUDE and OTTILIE. She stands just behind him, 30 years old, thick hair piled high and tied back from her ebony face. Her well-worn blue coat matches Claude’s, festooned with pouches and belts, a pair of pistols at her waist and a musket over one shoulder, its silver bayonet shining in the gloom. Her hair is remarkable not only for it’s sheer mass, but also because the left half has been shocked white as bleached bone.

OTTILIE

Sweep the east side, I’ll gather the rest. 

CLAUDE

Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars, going to work.

He slips off, just another shadow in the woods. 

PAN WITH OTTILIE as she heads back the way she came, revealing the shapes of other soldiers in blue coats moving quietly through undergrowth.

The scenario’s about to begin!

INTRO

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we’re doing part four of our little skirmish mini-series and battle reporting a solo scenario! And we thank our patrons almost specifically for the crazy cool deck of cards we’re gonna use in the game today, your support is always much appreciated!

So we’re playing the game of The Silver Bayonet today, the first solo scenario. In fact, this is my first time ever playing this game. Now I’ve played Frostgrave and Ghost Archipelago, which are also written by Joe McCullough, and I absolutely love his stuff. My brief overview of The Silver Bayonet’s gameplay experience is that it’s pretty fast-paced, moreso than his other games which are already pretty lean and fast moving themselves, and I think Silver Bayonet’s extra speed has to do with the fact that there really isn’t any magic to deal with. There’s only one soldier type that can cast “spells” and even then, there are only four spells that can be cast. 

Another mechanic that I really liked is the … I’ll call it “the melee exchange” mechanic. Every time a figure attacks another, in melee, you can essentially resolve two attack actions because Joe has created a ruleset that really captures the exchange of hand-to-hand combat. It’s very fencing-esque, for lack of a better word. Once a figure has been attacked, they get to make a choice, Strike Back or Back Off. And in today’s game you’ll see I don’t think I backed off a single time. This mechanic also really keeps both players having fun playing regardless of who’s actual turn it is. Well, in today’s case, which is a solo scenario, I get to sort of keep playing while the monsters are taking their turns. 

The swingy-ness of the 2d10 dice math also really makes for some serious ups and downs and dramatic occurrences. This is true of his d20-based systems as well, like Frostgrave and Stargrave, and while most competitive gamers don’t dig this swingy-ness because it makes tactical decisions harder to rely on, I think it forcibly injects cinematic storytelling into each match, which is pretty cool if you like that sort of thing.

So, TLDR at the beginning this time? Whoa, things are already crazy. My first impression of The Silver Bayonet is that it’s fast, pretty brutal, exciting and very fun to play. That’s just my opinion, of course, and your mileage may vary.

So the video intro was just my take on story-ifying the story setup Joe had written as the basis for the scenario. Essentially, the scenario states that a special unit had been dispatched to search for a lost chapel, but that unit went missing and now our warband is being sent to find that missing unit and recover, if not any survivors, at least the orders the unit carried with them, lest they fall into enemy hands. 

So, Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars has gone off into the woods to track down this missing special unit and they have just stumbled upon what looks to be the site of a battle the unit unfortunately lost, deep in the forest. The sun is setting, the shadows are stretching and our warband is hunting for those orders amongst the remains of this murdered unit.

Here’s a quick rundown reminder of the members of our warband, the full details of which you can find here <snap>: The Nightmare Hunters are led by Ottilie Bastarache, our inspiring Officer. She is joined by Felice Armand, a vivandierie; Vermont Escoffier, a supernatural investigator; Gaspar Gagneaux, a doctor; Claude Cellier, a scout; Jolanda Scaletta, an occultist; Baptiste Moreaux, an infantryman; and Brielle Pelletier, a grenadier.

Now, I’m not sure how this video battle report is going to turn out, I’ve never produced something like this so this is, uh, you know, another FFT, right? Setting up the table, this scenario calls for a two and a half by two and a half foot area, my card table is 32 inches on a side and my game mat is 36, so our playable area is essentially almost edge to edge. The scenario says to fill the table with trees and rocks and undergrowth. So I’m putting down all the terrain we made for this scenario <snap>, and I’m actually digging out some more scatter bits I had nearby, all of it forest-y themed, right? 

Now the clue markers, of which there are six in total, go down randomly at three distances from the center of the table – 8, 10 and 12 inches away. 

Each clue marker is tied to a random playing card, meaning every time we investigate one of these clue markers, we draw one of the six cards the special rules has instructed us to set aside. You’ll see here that I’ve neglected to include the Ace of Spades, I only shuffled five of the necessary cards at the beginning, but I realized that before actually starting the game and mixed in the Ace of Spades so the clue deck is correct.

Also, this is just a side note, you need little markers called Fatigue Tokens to place next to figures when they’ve engaged in melee combat, so you know I grabbed some Lego! Just these little Technic 1/2 bush parts and they stack nicely on a Technic axle for easy access. I have light gray ones too but figured the yellow would show up better on the table.

All right, now the warband gets positioned all within 3 inches of the center of the table. I don’t get real finicky with measurements – I’m not a competitive player, remember – but yeah, 8 figures in a 6” diameter circle means they’re kinda packed in there. 

Ottilie goes down first, she’s got eyes on something out past that rock bridge that looks interesting. Doctor Gagneaux is sticking close to Ottilie, basically focused on keeping her alive. I have this vague idea of splitting the warband into two smaller units and Felice with her Inspiring attribute will sort of head the second unit. For sure Claude the scout – who I’ve come to think of as a sniper for some reason – has clambered up onto a pillar of rock to get a solid view of the perimeter. And Jolanda tucks in here under his watchful eye. Vermont has spotted a body up on another rock formation and he needs to investigate that. Baptiste is positioning himself ready to climb up onto the rock bridge to offer some overwatch and Brielle has spotted yet another “something interesting” just a few strides to the west that she’ll investigate.

Now the wolves get basically evenly arranged around the table at the edges, two to a side. This doesn’t look dangerous at all, right, surrounded by wolves in a circle? Nope, nothing wrong with this at all.

All right, let’s do this! Turn Number One.

The first phase of a turn is me getting to activate half of the warband, rounded down. So we’re activating four figures. Ottilie starts things off moving her full six inches towards that clue marker. She calls over her shoulder, “Find those orders, but keep an eye on each other!”

Gaspar follows her, creeping under the natural rock bridge and searching the shadows for threats.

Baptiste grunts and climbs to the top of the rock bridge, working tension out of his broad shoulders and readying his musket as they all hear a lone wolf howl pierce the falling night. 

Brielle strides through the undergrowth with a grimace at the answering wolf calls and steps right up to what she thought might be a discarded satchel. 

Now, here I’ve made my first mistake with the rules. I made all the soldiers’ movements prior to finishing each soldier’s activation. So basically I did what’s called a “group activation” in Frostgrave but that’s not a thing in The Silver Bayonet. I’m supposed to fully activate a figure, meaning they do all their stuff like moving and taking actions, before activating the next one. It’s okay, it’s just a game and we’re learning. 

So, Brielle has moved and now uses her Action to Investigate the clue marker, this satchel thing she’s found on the ground. Since we’re investigating a clue marker, we draw a card and hope for the best. The 10 of spades means she’s found an ornate silver ramrod – we get to add 1 Skill die to the Fate Pool. Nice!

You’ll see how the Fate Pool works in a bit. For reference, in a solo game, we start with a very small Fate Pool, one Skill die and one Power die. And when we start rolling dice, you’ll see that I’m using blue dice for Skill dice and black dice for Power dice. There is a third type of die called a Monster die but, again, in the solo rules, we don’t really get to use those. 

Ottilie comes out from under that rock bridge to see a pair of glowing eyes in the distance: a big old Dark Wolf creeping towards her. She draws one of her pistols and fires, rolling a 7 plus 6 plus 2 for her accuracy stat and taking a minus 1 penalty because she’s shooting after moving. That totals up to 14 versus the wolf’s Defense stat of 12, which means she’s hit it! Pistols use the Power die for damage, so that’s 6 damage on a wolf who’s got 8 hit points. It yelps as it takes that ball right in the shoulder. 

Now we use little bits of cotton to signify when a figure has fired a gun and we’ll remove the cotton when they reload, that way we know which figures have loaded vs unloaded weapons.

Baptiste sees the smoke from Ottilie’s pistol and sees that wounded wolf, but he also spots another wolf closing in from the west and two more coming from the south east. He barks a warning to the rest of the crew and shoulders his musket, deciding the wolf closest to Brielle presents the greatest threat due to proximity. He fires and with a 9 plus 3 plus 1 for accuracy and minus 1 for moving before shooting, he just barely scores a hit with a 12! But the Power die is only a 3, so more of a grazing shot. It’s hard keeping a bead on these wolves in the trees as the darkness deepens. 

That’s the first half of our warband activated, now the enemies get to do some stuff. Despite it’s wounded shoulder, Wolf #1 charges at Ottilie, this behavior marking the beast as definitely somewhat unnatural and Ottilie hastily holsters her pistol and swings her musket off her shoulder. The wolf’s six inches of movement easily allows it to plow into her, snarling and snapping, rolling a 5 plus 3 plus the 1 it gets from its melee stat for a 9! And as angry as it is, it’s hurt and Ottilie dodges out of reach. 

She comes back from her dodge and Strikes Back with a vicious stab from her bayonet. That’s a 10 plus 4 plus 1 melee for a 15 and she slams that wolf to the ground, twisting that bayonet before wrenching it out with a gout of blood. 

Wolf #2 charges the black and white haired witch who just murdered it’s sister, bashing into her with a snarling fury. Rolling a 5 plus 8 plus 1 for melee for a 14 and Ottilie takes a massive hit from those ripping fangs, suffering 8 damage, leaving her with 5 hit points. 

The other wolves lope through the shadows as the moon rises.

Now our second warband phase kicks in and we get to activate all remaining figures.

Vermont Escoffier looks from the incoming wolves to the uniformed body lying on top of a rocky escarpment. His primary function is discovery and knowledge, so he quickly settles on investigating what happened to that poor bastard up there. He uses his action to Sprint in order to scale to the top of the escarpment within a single turn but he doesn’t have an Action left with which to investigate, that will have to wait until next turn.

Jolanda Scaletta steps back behind Felice at the sight of two wolves inbound; she knows her place in the warband, and the front line is not it. She takes a calming breath, winces as she takes a point of damage and utters an incantation, a prayer of harming directed at the wolf coming from the east. Failing to hit the target number of 18 for its Courage Check, the beast shakes its head and growls in confusion, glaring at the occultist and baring its teeth. It now suffers from a minus 1 penalty to all its rolls for the rest of the game.

Felice, holding aloft her burning torch as her short sword scrapes clear of its leather, notes Jolanda’s action and the reaction of the wolf and she charges the cursed animal. She hits with a 12 on her attack roll, inflicting 4 points of damage with a wide slash through the gloom. The wolf gnarls and strikes back, frothing, and the curse seems to afflict its depth perception as it snaps well clear of the vivandierie.

Muttering about being surrounded by four-legged sharks, Claude swings his musket to aim past Brielle and fires. With his plus one to accuracy, he scores a 13 and puts a steel ball right between the wolf’s eyes, and he’s already reloading and searching for a new target before that wolf even falls.

That marks the end of Turn One! Now I messed up again, here: I forgot one of the scenario’s special rules that was supposed to happen at the start of the Monster Phase rather than the end of the turn, and I also forgot to allocate Fatigue tokens. But Fatigue tokens are cleared at the end of each turn, so I don’t think we had any situations where they would have come into play this turn anyway, especially since I seem to have forgotten to let Ottilie strike back during that second wolf’s attack on her. 

Now the special rule I’m enacting a little late here is that one of the running wolves transforms into a Werewolf, and that turns out to be this one right here. So we’ll swap the miniature as this wolf surges through the undergrowth and transforms under the moonlight, stretching, rising, swelling into a nightmare of murder and mayhem. 

Turn Two! Baptiste reloads and fires over Ottilie’s head, his 9 total resulting in a clean miss. He swears and spits in frustration.

Brielle, hearing Ottilie’s pained grunt, spins to her left and fires her musket. 4 plus 9 plus 1 accuracy succeeds with a 14! And that 9 damage drops the wolf Baptiste failed to hit. She laughs at the infantryman, shooting him a maniacal grin as she reloads. “That’s another flagon you owe me, Baptiste, ya clumsy bastard!” Baptiste makes an angry face.

Okay, I messed up again! I was even looking forward to this but I completely forgot to roll on the Wolf Pack Event Table at the end of Turn One. We’re supposed to roll on that table at the end of each turn. We’ll do it now – that’s a 9, which is … rainfall, damn! Maximum line of sight is reduced to 12” and all shooting attacks suffer a minus 1 for the rest of the game. That’s not good. These enemies don’t even have ranged weapons, so it’s all us taking the penalty.

All right, thunder rolls overhead and rain starts with a light patter in the trees, then turns suddenly into a full downpour, drenching our warband.

Gaspar steps up to Ottilie and works his medicinal skills to heal her for 2 hit points. Another side note, I realized after the fact that this was incorrect, the doctor is supposed to NOT move if he wants to perform a healing action on a friendly figure within 1 inch. It’s just another rule that’s slightly different from other games, so, you know, we’re rolling with it as we learn.

Ottilie moves to investigate the clue marker, the upper torso of a ravaged soldier from the special unit that fell victim to something possibly worse than a park of Dark Wolves. We draw the Jack of Spades and Ottilie takes a Silver Saint Medallion from around the torso’s bloody neck. 

It’s kind of a bummer that Ottilie was the one to find this artifact because it makes all of the finder’s attacks function as if they were made with silver weapons, but our Officer already has a silver hand weapon and silver shot for her firearms. But hey, we get to add 1 Power die to our Fate Pool so that’s pretty good.

All right, the Monster Phase kicks off with Wolf #8 rushing Jolanda, careening off wet rocks and churning up mud in its wake as it launches itself into the Vatican occultist. Oh boy, that thing rolls a 2 plus 10 plus 1 for melee which is a 13, which is also Jolanda’s Defense stat, which means it crushes her with maximum damage, 10 hit points from that Power die! Jolanda goes down with a shriek under 300 pounds of rage, wet fur and savage teeth and blood flashes in the moonlight. 

Don’t ask me how the moon is shining during a rainstorm. Things are getting weird out here in the Gloaming. 

Wolf #7 bites at Felice, but misses with a 10 – that’s 6 plus 4 plus 1 for melee but minus 1 for the curse. Felice Strikes Back, hearing Jolanda’s cry behind her but not daring to turn her back on this thing, but Jolanda’s cry distracts her enough that she misses her lunge. Both Felice and her foe receive Fatigue tokens.

Wolf #6 skirts Vermont’s escarpment and blurs through the rain to plow into Felice’s back. The total of 12 would normally be a miss, but Felice’s Defense stat has a -1 penalty now due to the Fatigue token, so that 12 becomes a hit and the wolf tears 5 hit points of blood out of her with its ferocious jaws.  

Startled, Felice reacts on instinct and rage at the surprise attack and she whips around with an unexpected fury and Strikes Back with a staggering counterattack! 18! And also causing max damage with that 10 on the Power die! She nearly cleaves that wolf in two with a massive swing and apoplectic battle cry; gore spatters across her feral features. 

The Werewolf bounds silently through the rain towards Felice, intent on bringing death to this human wearing with the blood of its brother. Its black claws grow in the stippled moonlight, glinting like daggers.

Wolf #4 lunges through the trees at Brielle but misses with an 8, the grenadier ducking, before retaliating with a her bayonet, rolling another 18 and gutting the beast with 7 damage. She kicks it off the end of her musket and wipes rain out of her eyes. She spits on the steaming carcass, and receives a Fatigue token.

Vermont sidles up to the body he’s been intent on investigating and we draw a card – holy smokes, the body rears up, a monstrous second Werewolf unleashing a debilitating roar right in Vermont’s face. That Ace of Spades, man, worst card in the deck to draw. Oh, this is, this is a pretty bad turn of events here.

Claude, on his spire of rock, spins, raking the sights of the musket across the battlefield and fires on the first Werewolf, having heard Jolanda go down and seen Felice take on two more wolves. The scout’s roll of 9 plus 6 plus 1 accuracy but minus 1 for the rain equals 15 for a hit! AND he’s got silver shot loaded! So that’s 6 damage to the Werewolf that it cannot negate with its Damage Reduction attribute because of its Silver Allergy. It doesn’t seem to notice the damage but its bleeding for sure, and Claude is already reloading, muttering about how he hates dogs that walk on their hind legs. “No one wants to see that here,” he mutters.

Felice Armand is in dire straights. She can’t flee because the wolf behind her will force an attack no matter where she tries to move, so she just resigns herself to attacking it first. And she’s tired, with two Fatigue tokens, so her attack just misses with an 11. She stumbles on a root and bites her tongue. The Wolf counters with a 14 after modifiers and Oh man, that 10 on the Power die is huge! It snarls and shreds into her and she goes down with a terrified wail.

That’s the end of Turn Two! Rolling on the Wolf Pack Event Table produces a 3, two more wolves join the action! Holy crap, this is getting a little crazy! I’m a little worried about The Nightmare Hunters, not gonna lie.

Turn Three kicks off with, well, there are things to consider on the board now. Vermont is surrounded, like a guy on a raft in the ocean surrounded by barracuda. Should he flee? Yeah, there’s just no way around it, he’s gotta get outta here, he’s cut off from the rest of the warband now, he’s gotta go, gotta live to fight another day. He flinches back from the Werewolf and jumps slash falls the ten feet or so to the ground, landing in the mossy loam, rolls to his feet, darts 3 inches away from the rock, draws his pistol and fires at Wolf #7, the brute that bested Felice. His roll results in a 13 total and with 7 damage, drops that wolf.

Brielle yells at Gaspar, “Get off your ass, Doc, and take out this wolf, I’ve done most of the work for ya! I gotta get to that body over there, we’re running out of time!”

Gaspar frowns but draws his medical saw and charges after her. He lashes at the wolf but misses with a 2 and a 5. The wolf Strikes Back, snapping at the flashing steel blade, but misses with an equally terrible roll of a 5 plus 2. Each take Fatigue tokens as they square off facing each other, both growling in the rain.

Brielle’s already tearing headlong through the woods, rolling a 19 on her Sprint check to gain an extra 4 inches of movement, pushing to get to that body that might hold what The Nightmare Hunters are looking for.

Wolf #8 charges straight up the low cliff Claude has perched himself on and attacks with a near miss, jaws snapping into the hem of his coat but gaining no purchase. Claude jerks around, whipping out a boot knife and jamming it right into one wild canine eye, that roll with a 10 on the Power die just enough to hit but impacting more damage than the wolf’s entire health stat, executing it in a single blow! Claude jams the knife back into its sheath and puts his eye back to the musket’s sights and continues scanning the battlefield.

Werewolf #1 is equidistant from Claude and Vermont, but it can’t see where Vermont has gone and it’s been shot by the scout on the rock, so toward Claude it veers. On its way, the Werewolf gains 2 hit points from its Quick Heal ability, recovering from its wound preternaturally and horrifically fast. These things are nasty!

Werewolf #2 launches itself after Vermont, leaping from the cliff and almost reaching the Supernatural Investigator, but falling just an inch short, roaring its anger and hate in his face. 

The almost-dead wolf, bleeding heavily, limply snaps at Gaspar and misses, and the doctor flinches but Strikes Back with a hefty roll and puts it out of its misery with 6 more damage. Gaspar takes on a second Fatigue token and, chest heaving, looks around for Ottilie.

Baptiste and Claude both unload on that first Werewolf as it careens toward the scout, flanking musket fire thundering in the rain. Baptiste rolls a 6 and a 5, the rain penalty and his accuracy bonus cancelling each other out for an 11 total and his shot goes wide. Claude rolls complete garbage, a gout of rain flooding his face and obscuring his vision just as he fires, his shot ricocheting off the rocks.

All right, we’re gonna use a die from the Fate pool to re-roll his Power die, this Werewolf is freaking me out, I think these guys might be in serious trouble. The thing heals every turn and can negate 5 points of damage from non-silver weaponry. So let’s re-roll that Power die and … are you kidding me?! A three? A three?! 

Good lord. Okay, I’m gonna cheat right now, ‘cause I’m freaked out. I know this isn’t right, but I’m justifying it because I basically forgot about the Fate pool until just now and we have four dice in there! So I’m retconning back to Baptiste’s stupid roll and we’re gonna re-roll his Power die. Oh my god, another three?! This is a joke, right? C’mon, these guys are doomed!

Claude, always the professional, is already reloading.

Ottilie bolts after Gaspar and Brielle, rolling a crappy Sprint Check and gaining only two inches of extra movement, putting her shoulder to shoulder with the Doctor. “Nice work, Gaspar.” She claps him on the back. “Keep moving.”

All right that’s the end of turn three, we’re rolling on the Wolf Pack Event Table … Five. Another wolf shows up! For fuck’s sake! This is getting real hairy real fast. So the new wolf is gonna show up in the center of random table edge, so I’ve numbered the edges from North to West as 1, 2, 3 and 4 and I’ll just roll a d6 until I get a number between 1 and 4. And this wolf shows up … oh man.

Turn Four begins with Vermont. He’s backing away from this slavering fiend when he hears a twig snap behind him. Without looking he knows he’s done for. His only hope is to flee to the south and try to outrun this nightmare. He dashes to the left and Sprints for all he’s worth! With an 8 on his Sprint Check, the rain has turned the ground to mud that sucks at his boots and he struggles to gain just two extra inches of movement. As he rushes through the trees, something out of the corner of his eye catches his attention. Damn, there’s something lying off to the west that could be valuable. He gauges the forest ahead of him and the sounds of the creatures behind him and makes a snap decision. Instead of veering off the map to safety, he heads toward that curiosity, fairly certain he can decide in the next few moments if he can stop to check it out or if he needs to flee for real.

About to continue after her grenadier, Ottilie hears the double musket fire to the west and looks sharply in the direction of her scout and sees the massive Werewolf about to scale that low ridge and she immediately draws her second pistol and fires. With the rain and that sub-par roll, she only manages to draw the thing’s attention briefly. With a snarl of frustration, she bum rushes the menacing figure, holstering the pistol and unslinging the musket in one crazy action and leaps with a rabid battle cry – and rolls a 20 total! Holy cow! One point shy of absolute maximum damage! Her silver bayonet flashes through the rain, her bared teeth a bright promise of righteous fury as she guts that Werewolf from sternum to throat, laying its black heart bare and sending it back to the mud with a confused yip of surprise and pain. What an epic scene! 

Claude yells to his commanding Officer and savior, “Another one, madam, to the east!” and he readies his aim, blinking more rain out of his eyes.

Brielle races up to the body she’d seen, rolls it over, pats it down, looking for a satchel, an envelope, anything – we draw the next card … and YES! She finds the missing orders! Success! She snarls as she rips them free and yells as loud as she can, “I got ‘em! Get to safety! Retreat, you bastards!”

Vermont’s new wolf chases after him, hissing through the rain, snapping at his heels, followed closely by the bellowing and baying Werewolf.

The two new wolves coming from the southwest each go after different targets they can see, one after Gaspar, the other hunting Baptiste, who’s standing tall and angry atop the bridge of rock. 

Hearing Brielle, Baptiste runs to the edge of that rock and leaps to the ground, landing next to Gaspar, who starts to head towards the hollering grenadier, but stops to keep an eye on Ottilie.

Claude, having swept the forest with his musket sights and failing to find fresh targets, finally gives up his perch and slip-slides down the wet rock to the forest floor.

That’s the end of Turn Four, let’s roll on the Wolf Pack Event Table. And that’s a six, which means another wolf arrives at a random table edge, please, please, please not the western – that’s a four. That means it appears on the western table edge. Dammit! The Gloaming is angry tonight!

Turn Five and we’re starting with Vermont again. There’s just no other choice than to have him get to safety. He heard the faint holler from Brielle and he knows they’ve got what they’ve come for. He has no allies in sight. He’s got a Werewolf and a Dark Wolf nipping at the tail of his coat. He’s vacating, right now. He races off  the table, which means he’s able to leap across a ravine and slip away down a hillside and vanish into the night. 

One survivor so far.

Ottilie runs back to her doctor and infantryman, spots the new wolf heading straight for them. She raises her musket and fires and with a roll of 2 plus 1, she uses a Skill die from the Fate Pool to re-roll and gets a … no way, another three? Damn. All of her weapons are now unloaded and she’s already moved this turn. Oh man. Just when we thought we were home free, right? 

Doesn’t this game seem to be a decent emulator of real life?

Baptiste Sprints ahead to prepare to provide cover during the next turn and makes a great Sprint Check, gaining those extra 4 inches of movement to help him get clear of the woods.

The wolves and werewolf all give chase through the deluge and the newest wolf explodes from the trees and rocks at Ottilie.

Of course, the wolf rolls great, a total of 16 and tearing into Ottilie with, oh man, 7 damage! Ottilie collapses under the mauling claws, taken to exactly 0 Health. But this is crazy, it’s the exact reason Gaspar stayed where he was. He sees her go down, calls for help and then he’s right at her side with a bandage and a strange poultice he crafted himself only the day before and it brings Ottilie back to 2 hit points. 

The Medic attribute can literally only help wounded figures that are not down OR have been reduced to exactly 0 hit points. Had Ottilie taken one additional point of damage, she would very likely have died or suffered a permanent injury. Crazy, man, just crazy!

Claude hears Gaspar’s cry for help, drops to one knee without moving further, aims through the rain and the trees and the bracken and fires! It’s close! That Power die is gonna be great if it hits. A 3 plus 9 and the other modifiers cancel out so his total is 12 and that’s what he needs to hit! Yes! That 9 damage on the Power die drops that wolf right at Ottilie and Gaspar’s feet. Awesome! Claude is definitely in the running for MVP of this match for sure.

Brielle almost leaves the map to safety, but abruptly halts and turns to provide support like the badass grenadier she is.

And that’s the end of Turn Five. Wolf Pack Event Table roll! Eight! Nothing happens! Finally, a tiny flicker of hope! Yes!

Turn Six opens with Ottilie shoving Gaspar ahead of her, “Run!” and he does, blowing his Sprint Check, so only gaining 2 inches of additional movement, wet branches slapping at his head and roots causing him to stumble. But he can see Brielle at the edge of the tree line, waiting with her musket and her savage grin.

Ottilie limps after her doctor, but instead of Sprinting, she stops at the end of her regular movement to reload her musket.

Baptiste muscles his way through a patch of difficult terrain and turns to provide covering fire if necessary.

The wolves and werewolf surge through the undergrowth, gaining on the warband, unflagging, unstoppable, growling and slipping through the rain like ravenous shadows.

Claude moves past Baptiste and after a quick survey of the field, feels confidant they are all going to make it safely to the rendezvous, but he drops again to one knee and fires at the closest wolf. He uses the last Fate die to re-roll the Skill die and gets a 7 plus 4 and just misses with an 11.

Brielle spots a wolf appearing just at the edge of her vision in the downpour, grunts with satisfaction and aims her musket. Bah. It was a hail mary of a shot to begin with, she doesn’t even feel bad about missing. It’s just covering fire for now.

That’s the end of Turn Six and essentially the end of the scenario, as Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars are all out of reach of their pursuers and they escape to safety, which is a unit of grenadiers waiting atop a hill to pour musket and rifle fire down on anything else coming after them.

Wow! Now that was quite a bit of narration. This video must be ridiculously long. But man, what a fun game! Like, I was pretty worried there from time to time and hey, we have two soldiers who didn’t make it, or at least, we have to roll to find out what’s happened to them. But man there were some cool highlights too, right, just some epic scenes in there. So maybe you see how the swingy-ness of using a 2-20 number range really results in unexpected, uh … results. Results that result in results. Huh. 

Anyway, yeah I found this to be super fun. So real quick before I sign off here, let’s do the campaign shenanigans. The first thing we gotta do is roll on the Injury and Death Table. So first we’re rolling for Jolanda Scaletta.

Oh my god, no way, a ONE! A one!! No! Oh no, Jolanda didn’t survive. Damn, that’s a huge bummer. I’ll be honest, I feel like cheating and re-rolling. I’m not going to but I definitely feel like it. And actually what’s kinda really dumb is that I didn’t realize you could use any left over Fate Pool dice to re-roll these rolls on the Injury and Death table. So Claude burned that last Fate Pool die just because I didn’t think there was any reason to keep ahold of it after the actual match. There was no real reason for him to even take the shot to begin with. Hmmm. Well, I could let myself just retcon using that Fate Pool die from Claude and use it now to re-roll this death result for Jolanda. 

Ultimately I understand it’s just a game and I’m the only one playing it and I could just simply do what I want, but I’ll think about it. Let’s roll for poor Felice, who did so well and but also got bushwhacked. Oh man, that’s a TWO! Oh my gosh, the two lowest possible rolls? Well, a 2 means we gotta roll on the Permanent Injuries Table. And that’s a 7, so she suffers from the jitters now, which means a permanent minus 1 to her Courage. That’s a fair and very story apropos result. If I’d been attacked by and fought off multiple wolves and had a Werewolf come at me, I’d probably lose a point off my Courage stat too.

I think I’m gonna give myself the benefit of the doubt here and retcon Claude’s Fate die usage and we’re gonna use it here to try to negate Jolanda’s death. She’s Schroedinger’s Jolanda right now. Okay, here we go. That’s a four, okay, I’m gonna go with it. From now on, I know I can save Fate Dice for these rolls, so that’s just another tactical consideration to keep in mind during a game.

Okay, last there’s the XP points, which everyone gets a point for participating in the scenario and the group as a whole gained the following experience: a point for investigating three plus clue markers, a point for killing five or more wolves (they put down 8), a point for slaying one werewolf, two points for getting more than three soldiers to safety, and 3 points for securing the missing orders! Awesome, that’s 8 more XP points which we can kinda divvy up as we see fit, as long as no soldier gets assigned more than 3 points in total. So I’ll just give everyone 2 xp each. 

The characters don’t really gain anything until they hit 5 XP so they’ll have to go through a couple more matches to see some results from this experience progression. 

All right, well, there you have it, a Silver Bayonet battle report. And a finale to the four episode mini-series, which I’ll put into it’s own playlist. 

I have no idea if this kind of battle report execution is interesting or dull or unwatchable or fun, I just don’t know, so let me know what you think of the format I cobbled together for this thing and uh you know, 

Go play a game and have some fun!

See ya! 

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 19^th 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!