It’s been a busy few weeks Dawn and I decided to do some exploring to the North of us, other than Hadrians wall we’ve never really explored what’s on our doorstep so we’ve had a few days at the Cheviott Brewery ‘ glamping’ - great fun and that included exploring the Etal estate and the village of Ford.
Then we had another few days a couple of weeks later and visited Bamburgh castle, most impressive to be sure it also included a display from the Last Kingdom although I was a little disappointed it wasn’t a little larger.
Most enjoyable trips and a lesson learnt that sometimes we forget what’s nearest to us.
On the hobby front there’s quite a bit of painting going on of which I shall post some pics in my next post. Part of the painting has included figures for Never Mind the Billhooks/ Lion Rampant and it was whilst having a drink with my regular gaming opponent he mentioned when we used to use the Lamming Medieval rules at the club.
First published in 1975 they included very detailed campaign rules and a great set of battle rules where figures could take hits and be hurt, wounded, disabled or killed which resulted in figures wearing lots of different coloured plastic rings to signify their disability.
I tweaked the rules when we used them for our WOTR demo games of Bosworth, Tewkesbury and Stoke Field. Getting rid of the rings we brought in that when figures were injured the fell back one move (hurt) two ( wounded) or three ( disabled) the figures count as lost to the unit for morale purposes until they rejoin which means units frequently have to stop to let stragglers catch up or risk poor morale, it worked.
Anyway we decided to give the revised 2nd edition rules a run out and set up a small skirmish each side having two units of Bill, a knight (lord) his standard bearer and a master archer.
For the scenario my boys were escorting Brother Gilbert on his journey to deliver the Holy Relic of St. Barnaby’s hand.
Lord Stephan Whalley had learnt of this and decided the possession of the Holy relic just might bring him some change of fortune and decided to intercept and escort Brother Gilbert himself to his estate for the hand to go on display for a while!
We had a smashing little encounter ( some photos below) in essence my chaps gave Lord Stephan a bit of a kicking killing 8 of his men to my two. Almost killing Lord Stephan as well when he spectacularly charged my Lord, failed to hit and I struck back killing his horse and forcing him to flee!
We then tried out some rules for replacements, campaign progression etc. which I will detail next time once we’re satisfied they work. So I better start adding some narrative to our Lords and where they live before the next encounter.
