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Scenarios keep wargames fresh. For skirmish level games, they are the life blood of it. I'm wondering if the community would be interested in a contest based around everyone creating and submitting system-agnostic scenarios for wargames. They will be compiled into one huge PDF and released back to the community. I can't promise much of a prize for the winners beyond the assembled archive of scenario goodness.

The Submission Categories Will Be:

Mass Combat (25+ models, or, models represent more than 1 man)

Fantasy

Modern

SciFi

Historical

Skirmish (1-20 models, where models represent exactly 1 man)

Fantasy

Modern

SciFi

Historical

If there is much interest, I will gladly facilitate the whole thing. The tentative submission deadline will be by midnight on Thanksgiving. That will give me some time to assemble the PDF (I do quite a bit of desktop publishing work) and get it to some community members who want to judge (with a final release date of New Years). The current plan is to award a 1st, 2nd, and 3rd place for Mass Combat, and the same for Skirmish (no winners by genre, just by scale). That's 2 winners, and I'm not opposed to footing the bill for a small gift card to wargamesvault for some digital goodies, or what have you.

To remain system-agnostic, all scenario specific special rules will use d6s (easy to find, most people have them already), all distances will use inches (they are common in games and easy to convert), special unit profiles will use a general difficulty [easy/medium/hard/legendary] and common descriptive rules [flying, undead, armored, fast, slow, stealthy, etc.] that are found in most games, we will assume 25-32mm as the scale (15mm gamers are used to converting down).

Here is the rough draft of the tentative rules & scenario template (of course the official version will be editable):
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/2884325/SBH/Scenario%20Contest%20Template%20Generic.pdf
(if the link goes down, it's just dropbox being overloaded, wait a few minutes and try again)

So what do you guys think? Any interest?

If so, we'll put out the official rules and template next week.

(I'm thinking 30-50 people participating would be respectable. A PDF with 2 scenarios in it - Both Winners! - would be pretty darn sad.)

Cool idea. I love scenarios.

I used to organize a similar thing on the Privateer Press forums.

We would give a broad theme/hook/prompt at the beginning of the month (say "ambush" or sometimes more vague prompts like "ghosts", etc.)


Entries had to be posted the first day of the last week of the month (hopefully with some playtest/design notes and sometimes with pics and/or a batrep). We would then open the voting up to any that submitted a scenario. Highest votes won that month and got to pick the hook/prompt/theme of the next month's scenario.

i look forwad to seeing how you set this one up, and I will definitely take part if you get this up and running.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Also, are you planning to do one per year?

I think quarterly would be doable no?

I think quarterly would be doable no?

I figure I'd see how this goes down. I wouldn't mind doing quarterly, as long as it doesn't burn out the creativity.

I have never tried going the generic route before, but there is so many different games these days (thanks to the wonders of digital distribution) I want to try and make a catch-all resource that can be swiftly adapted to any of them. If the generic thing works, awesome. If it completely doesn't work, then I might start a cycling system (Warmachine in January, 40k in April, WHFB in July, etc.) We'll see.

Many years ago there was a listserve for Mordheim where we did holiday themed scenarios. I remember a fantastic xmas one that had my warband diving down chimneys - If I remember correctly, there were presents with explosives and presents with wyrd stone - and you couldn't tell which was which. I just remember it was complete chaos and we made a lot of snow covered terrain and skaven in santa hats...

Many years ago there was a listserve for Mordheim where we did holiday themed scenarios. I remember a fantastic xmas one that had my warband diving down chimneys - If I remember correctly, there were presents with explosives and presents with wyrd stone - and you couldn't tell which was which. I just remember it was complete chaos and we made a lot of snow covered terrain and skaven in santa hats...

Good stuff.