I have been rather inspired by Shaun Travers refights of numerous Ancient battles based on Peter Sides 'Ancient Historical Battles' series. I've got loads of scenario resources on major Ancient battles already with the huge number of Command and Colours Ancients scenarios and the possibly more accurate ones in Strategos and Lost Battles. It is easy enough to convert these to simpler game systems, I did quite a few historical scenarios for 3x3 Portable Ancients, some of which were published in the first PW Compendium.
However Ork Publications took much of the effort out of it by publishing a Historical Battles supplement for Dominion of the Spear. 36 Battles spanning a couple of thousand years of history, converted into DotS format, which saves me the bother of doing it and covers some later periods about which I am singularly ignorant.
This is the sort of thing, the Battle of Megiddo scenario. Very cleverly any key terrain is incorporated into the unit ratings, and therefore also reflected in the points values, so eg Auxilia in a historical wooded area might be rated as 'armoured' instead of just infantry.
These scenarios are a very similar in layout to the old Peter Sides scenarios which Shaun uses a lot. I was trawling around the Interweb to see if I could find any of the original Peter Sides books, and came across some scanned/pirated copies on Scribd. Looking at the cover art I realised I actually have two volumes of them already!
The cover art is very distinctive and quite typical of the early 90s. Volume I.
And Volume II.
I picked both of these up from a second hand rules box in the Wargames Emporium many years ago for about 50p each. They are such slim volumes they were shoved in with a load of other very old scenario books of varying quality and I'd quite forgotten about them.
With all these resources I've got enough stuff to play scores of historical Ancient battles solo, as tbh I much prefer historical to hypothetical stuff (even if our historical knowledge is limited to 'a battle took place between X and Y'). I don't have any ancient Egyptians, Dark Ages stuff etc, but I do have a bunch of suitable counters in some of the Society of Ancients games, and various figures I could substitute. Persian Cataphracts as Normans? Well, lets see.
You have just proved the point that Old Stuff can still be Good Stuff - especially when a lot of old stuff was pre-internet so the original exposed audience might have been relatively small.
ReplyDeleteHi Martin,
ReplyDeleteI must admit that I have been deeply inspired by the Peter Sides books for a long time. He wrote five in all - two Ancients, one Medieval, and two Renaissance all available from Caliver Books. The 36 Battles supplements were very much inspired by them!
Steve