A large battle of elves vs. orcs in MapTool

After some time of inactivity, here is a battle report of elves vs. orcs using Rally Round the King, played in MapTool. In this battle, the elves led by Yoselith the Defender have arrived to challenge Warchief Zagul's campaign of conquest.

Game setup, with a 1" grid and force leaders marked

Yoselith's forces are concentrated at the center. At the front there are four units of elf archers, followed by two bodies of elf soldiers. At the rear, Yoselith stands with three units of elf marines, ready to come to support the battle as needed. [As I played the elves, I made the recruitment rolls and deployed them before finding out what the orcs would do.]

Zagul's main forces are a wide line of melee troops including ogres at the center, black moon orcs and then orc soldiers. In front of them are three units of skirmishers (orc archers.) Warchief Zagul stands with two units of wolf riders and two units of soldiers. Ready to take the other flank are two units of trolls and another two units of soldiers. Lastly, their reserve is composed of two more units of soldiers.

Starfighters for MapTool

Here is another token pack for MapTool. This time there are four starfighter styles, in three color schemes.

A compressed file containing the tokens and the Inkscape file with the original vector drawings can be downloaded by clicking here. The files are shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

Soldiers for MapTool

I have created a simple pack of top-down tokens of sci-fi soldiers in light armor, suitable for colonial forces or scout squads. These include soldiers with rifles, a heavy repeating laser and sergeants with submachine guns, all in four skin tones. Here is the preview:

The compressed file with all tokens and the Inkscape file used to build them can be obtained clicking here. The files are shared under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license.

MapTool 1.4

MapTool 1.4 was released five days ago but I only found out yesterday. Besides a lot of infrastructure changes that will probably impact future versions, they have added isometric maps. Now it is possible to play in "fake 3D" views which I think will be mostly useful for dungeon crawls.

Moving a flat token in the new isometric view. There is also support to tokens that could look like miniatures standing on the map, but I have not created any yet.

As explained in the forum thread about the new feature, to use the isometric view you should configure the map to use the isometric grid, then use the Flip: Isometric Plane option on the flat objects and tokens that you add to the map. Tokens representing miniatures can be set to the new Figure shape.

GunCrawl

I got the GunCrawl Collection in the recent WorldWorks sale and after seeing some nice pictures on the Cardboard Warriors forum, I had to try it. GunCrawl is a sci-fi "crawl" game for one or more players. The map is built with tiles (6"x6" rooms and different types of corridors) with grid-based movement. These features make it particularly simple to run a game using MapTool, so I wouldn't have to print and build all tiles and props first.

Here's my first mission map. The objective was to repair the two computers marked as blue squares on the map, avoiding or fighting the hostile aliens that may be found. The mission had a 20-turn time limit. I had two grunts armed with assault rifles and an engineer with a pistol. I created a single type of alien: fast-moving, with strong close-combat attacks but relatively easy to kill.

My soldiers entered the first room and found three aliens inside. The creatures charged and incapacitated one of Tom, but he recovered at the end of the turn. Afterwards they defeated the three aliens and another two that showed up in the following corridor.

By the 10th turn I had fixed the first computer and was on my way to the second objective. However, now some alien patrols started appearing. The engineer opened the door to the last room and was ripped by one of the aliens inside. Fixing the second computer without him was going to be harder.

On turn 16, one grunt was killed as the other desperately tried to fix the computer. On the next turn, he managed to complete the repairs, completing the objectives of the scenario. I didn't keep playing but I don't think he would be able to escape alive.

Conclusion

My first game of GunCrawl was interesting. The beginning was easy, maybe because my map didn't have suitable corridors to allow placement of patrols (at least until I passed through the second room.) Also, I didn't use the rules for ammunition, which would have limited the amount of ranged attacks I could make in a turn. On the other hand, near the end of the game I would repeatedly roll new enemy reinforcements that slowed me down. I still have to experiment with the threat level system for balancing the number of enemy units on the board.

I felt that the rules for GunCrawl are simple and easy to memorize. They're also very flexible, and can be adapted to sci-fi, zombies, killer robots etc. Generally, all-out aggressive enemies will be well modeled by the rules. Differently from other tile-based crawls, in this game you set up the whole board in advance. This has the drawback of requiring some planning but at least there is no risk of getting stuck in a dead end.

Into the Lair of the Spider Cult

After my quick but promising experience with Dark Dungeon, I tried another game using the Lair of the Spider Cult module, a supplement for the basic game. This 53-page PDF includes a new scripted adventure, three additional adventurers (with their profiles and cards), two new spells, four new dungeon tiles and five new enemies.

[Disclaimer: my PDF of the "Lair of the Spider Cult" adventure module was kindly provided by Avalon Games. However, I am in no way affiliated to the company.]

Lair of the Spider Cult takes place in Mordenhelm, the base city for Dark Dungeon. The first thing I noticed is that, differently from the Goblins Lair, you have a choice of three places to start your adventure. Also, the text that sets up the adventure -- finding the missing daughter of a friend of yours -- is nice and gives a sense of purpose to it.

I used my previous party as a starting point, but since in this adventure you get 150 gold to spend, I was able to give them better equipment than before, and add one of the new characters:

Review: Dark Dungeon

Dark Dungeon is another title from the mini-game series by Avalon Games. It is a solo dungeon exploration game which comes with one adventure module, and there are many others available as well as expansions to the game rules. I'll start with a review of the material, then proceed to a playtest report, including comments on the rules.

Content: the basic Dark Dungeon package consists of eight PDF files, including the rule book, an adventure module, a book with details about the adventurers, a quick reference chart, cards and counters for the adventurers and monsters, and a set of dungeon tiles. Quite a lot of stuff which is meant to include all that's needed to play except for ten-sided dice.

Presentation: the rulebook, character book and adventure module are laid out as single-column text, which might be readable even in booklet format. The artwork follows the same "old school" style as other Avalon Mini-Games; check their product covers to know what to expect. The diagrams look better than the ones in Battle Armor and do not cause confusion. The "Master Adventure Chart", which is used to track time and other information in the dungeon, has a good layout but it's a little crazy on the colors for my taste.

Using RPTools to play Song of Blades and Heroes

RPTools is a suite of programs made for playing tabletop-RPGs on a computer, even over the Internet. The main module is MapTool, which allows players to draw maps, roll dice and place tokens of various sizes and with different properties. If you aren't used to the program, it's probably a good idea to check the tutorials to learn how to use the map, dice roller and tokens.

With little effort, MapTool can be configured to play Song of Blades and Heroes (SBH) and similar procedures might be used for other skirmish games. There are three basic steps to do this: