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Anyone interested in this when it is released?

https://ospreypublishing.com/dragon-rampant

I long since sold my WFB armies so I'll probably use my Hordes Circle Orboros models to make a force for it rather than buying a new fantasy army. There's a preview of the units available in the book here: http://merseybooks.blogspot.co.uk/search?updated-max=2015-08-28T00%3A20%3A00%2B01%3A00&max-results=15&start=13&by-date=false

This is my list (subject to some modification when the book is released and I've checked the rules).

1x Heavy Foot (12x Wolves of Orboros inc. UA) 4 pts.
1x Bellicose Foot w/ Reduced model unit (4-8x Tharn Ravagers) 4 pts.
1x Bellicose Foot (12x Tharn Bloodtrackers) 4 pts.
1x Light Missiles or Heavy Missiles (12x Reeves of Orboros inc. UA) 4 pts.
1x Scouts (6x Druids of Orboros) 2 pts.
1x Scouts (6x Druid & Woldstalkers) 2 pts.
1 Lesser Warbeast (1x Light or Heavy Warbeast) 4. pts.

24/24 points.

I'm not 100% sure how I'm going to run it but for the Khorne Bloodtide from the AoS starter I was thinking of something like this.

Khorne Lord - Elite Foot - 6
Blood Warriors - Elite Foot - 6
2 x Blood Reavers - Bellicose Foot - 2x4=8
Khorgorath - Something for 4 points like Heavy Foot or Lesser Warbeast - 4

I'll need to see all the upgrades, some might be really suitable. 24 points is quite hard to fit everything into.

 George Spiggott wrote:
Anyone interested in this when it is released?

Yes.

It's the main reason I keep my ogres and skaven now, and even why I started buying high elves and dark elves. I still have to assemble forces, in mini form and on paper, but I'm pretty happy that appropriate troop types shouldn't be very difficult to figure out.

Even better, it'll let me do my Moot ogre and halfling army that I've been dreaming about since 6th ed. Didn't get too far because I wasn't happy shoehorning halfling models into WFB gnoblar rules; and it was very difficult to grab enough old C11 halflings off ebay for a reasonable price to fill any decent-sized units, anyway.
Now though: ironguts, bulls and leadbelchers as elite foot, heavy foot and heavy missiles. (All reduced model units) I've pulled another couple of bow-armed halfings off ebay to fill out a scout unit. Paid more than I would have, but I only need two more. My remaining halflings should do nicely as light foot or something. (Can't bring myself to use them as a horde, equivalent to Lion Rampant's dung-eating serf class, for the same reason as gnoblar rules. )

And then, for a greater warbeast, I'll have to resurrect George.

I've had it preordered for months. Looking forward to it finally shipping...

Less than a month to release now and I've go an army ready to go for the release.

I'm definitely going to be buying this. Just the thing to get me painting the LoTR figures I've been acquiring.

We've got a couple of folks in the club who have expressed interest, so this could be our intermediate (platoon-level-ish) scope game between our squad/warband games of Song of Blades and Heroes and our Company level games of Kings of War.

Is 24 points the standard game?

 Eilif wrote:

We've got a couple of folks in the club who have expressed interest, so this could be our intermediate (platoon-level-ish) scope game between our squad/warband games of Song of Blades and Heroes and our Company level games of Kings of War.

Good idea, IMO. I've been thinking the same, which is why I'm glad multibasing causes few problems in L/DR. Flexibasing FTW.

Is 24 points the standard game?

I think so. Has there been any indication otherwise?

I'm basing all my rules knowledge on the existing Lion Rampant rules. 24 points is standard in LR.

Good to know. Thanks folks!

Preordered the rules during the 30% sale, along with Black Ops. Don't know if I'll play any of them but I like reading rules, and I'm sure the black ops stealth rules will come I. Handy in Necromunda!

Is there an ebook version available somewhere? I'm probably just missing the link.

I have it on my wish list. I'll probably wait until the price goes down a few quid, because I'm so mean.

Osprey are going great guns with their B5 rulebook series. I have the Ronin, Fistful of Kung Fu, and Fighting Sail books.

 streamdragon wrote:
Is there an ebook version available somewhere? I'm probably just missing the link.

Game's not released until the 20th of December, so there's no link yet. Osprey have Kindle/ePub/PDF for all their games.

 Kilkrazy wrote:

Osprey are going great guns with their B5 rulebook series. I have the Ronin, Fistful of Kung Fu, and Fighting Sail books.

Dux Bellorum, IHMN, Ronin, Lion Rampant.

Even if I don't play them or if some rules don't scratch my itch, there's just something I like about this series. Maybe because I was quickly burned out on the big, fat, expensive, hardbacked rulebook trend, that might need a bunch of supplements, and need to sell an attached miniature range. Not that a couple of these titles don't have supplemental books, but in general... simple focus; uncluttered rules; use what minis you fancy; portable format; nice price. Luvly.

I'll admit I'm one of those people, who regardless of whether they're going to play it or not, seems to buy pretty much all of these nice rulebooks they keep making.

Momotaro wrote:

 streamdragon wrote:
Is there an ebook version available somewhere? I'm probably just missing the link.

Game's not released until the 20th of December, so there's no link yet. Osprey have Kindle/ePub/PDF for all their games.

I just checked my pre-order and have to wonder about who came up with that stupid date for release? I guess most of us will see it in early-mid-January at best.

 Vermis wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:

Osprey are going great guns with their B5 rulebook series. I have the Ronin, Fistful of Kung Fu, and Fighting Sail books.

Dux Bellorum, IHMN, Ronin, Lion Rampant.

Even if I don't play them or if some rules don't scratch my itch, there's just something I like about this series. Maybe because I was quickly burned out on the big, fat, expensive, hardbacked rulebook trend, that might need a bunch of supplements, and need to sell an attached miniature range. Not that a couple of these titles don't have supplemental books, but in general... simple focus; uncluttered rules; use what minis you fancy; portable format; nice price. Luvly.

I totally agree with you!

It takes me back to the good old days of the 70s and 80s, when you could buy loads of game rules as A5 paperbacks (black and white, crappily typeset, stapled together and full of errata) for under £5. But the rules were often very good.

now Osprey by using their publishing empire have managed to make that type of book into nice, perfect bound volumes with full colour throught and great layouts. And considering inflation, the price has hardly gone up at all.

 Kilkrazy wrote:

It takes me back to the good old days of the 70s and 80s, when you could buy loads of game rules as A5 paperbacks (black and white, crappily typeset, stapled together and full of errata) for under £5. But the rules were often very good.

now Osprey by using their publishing empire have managed to make that type of book into nice, perfect bound volumes with full colour throught and great layouts. And considering inflation, the price has hardly gone up at all.

Right there with you.
I came to gaming later, but back in the 90's there was still a wargaming store near me that had huge bins of those type of rulesets. Mostly indie, black and white and with few pics if any. I'm sure they were great, but they weren't shiny enough to attract my 2nd edition 40k mind.

To be fair, similar rulesets have continued to be published since then, but I think Osprey has found the sweet spot for size, layout, price and variety. Many of these games come from established or semi-established game writers, some of whom have successful games to their names. However, I think the fact that they all come from Osprey, a respected name in military publishing has really gotten them attention not just from indie gamers, but from folks who wouldn't have given an indie game a second glance.

To those who have more of these, are you generally finding them to be faster-playing rules-lite systems? So far I have IHMN and supplements, FoKF, OGAM, and one or two others and they all seem to be aimed at this kind of gaming. In fact, that's one of the main selling points for me, but I don't know if the series as a whole is like this.

Fighting Sail is designed as a fast-play fleet battle Napoleonic naval game. It achieves this by abstracting most of the detail of shooting and damage to concentrate on overall fleet 'morale'.

Experience with various other naval rules tells me this will work well as a mechanism for speeding up battle resolution.

Someone wrote a full review on Fighting Sail in this forum.

One thing about naval wargames is that once you have made a fleet, it will work with any rules.

They're all pretty light Eilif (well the four or five of them I have...). Not as light as, say, Neil Thomas's One Hour Wargames rules, but definitely "read it in a couple of hours".

Lion Rampant has about 25 pages of rules and the rest is unit descriptions, army lists, scenarios, campaigns. There's only about a dozen unit types (on the basis that "light cavalry" covers a multitude of things well enough), and only a handful of unit options and special rules. And half of the book is pictures anyway. It's already pretty playable as a fantasy game - magic is the big thing that's missing

The rules themselves, and the writing, are simple but tight. Definitions are deliberately loose. There's no rule for consolidating units into close combat to see who can fight - if two figures make contact, everyone fights. It's definitely a "pamphlet" style game, game and none the worse for it

Well said, Mo. This is why I'm convinced Dragon Rampant is... maybe not the answer, but an answer to AoS. Broadly similar themes: 'big' skirmish, uncomplicated, free 'n' easy, use what you like; but with a method to structure and balance forces, and focused more on mechanics than models.

My copy got dispatched today, will probably get it early next week. Anyone got theirs yet?

I've seen a few folks get theirs early, because the retailers they ordered from got their stock in a few days ago. I ordered directly from Osprey, so I guess I'm twiddling my thumbs for another few days.

Arrived this morning, but at work today so I've not had a chance tor read it properly yet (I was trying not to dribble porridge on it over breakfast...). Book is as gorgeous as you'd expect, loads of illustrations and photos of minis from various manufacturers.

Glance through the contents:

Building a warband - not gone into depth with the different units (or the differences between this and Lion Rampant. The obvious one is that units basically have Strength of 6 or 12 - basically a fixed number of hits rather than a fixed number of models (11 pages)
Battle Rules - only glance in here, looks broadly similar (16 pages)
Fantasy special rules - flyers, magic items, spellcasters, undead etc. Not had a good look at magic (8 pages)
Scenarios - despite the names they looked fairly generic. There's one called "The Ringbearer"...(8 pages)
Sample Warbands - good range of fantasy staples (7 pages)

Xmas tree is up, kids' school plays are done for the year, so this evening will be DR + glass of something

This looks like a wonderful system. I've tallied up my WHFB/AoS armies into Dragon Rampant and it looks like I have 36 points of Dwarfs (well, I could add a score or more if I wanted to field a bunch of single model unity hero Slayers) and 54 points of Lizards.

Which is odd, because Dwarfs are my main army and I literally only have 5 units of Lizardmen (as far as I used them in WHFB), but then again they have a Greater Warbeast, a caster, and loads of special rules.

My little brother has probably 100 points of Undead, even thought in WHFB our games were usually limited by how few points he could bring.

I like this system, I think. Can't wait to play a game.

Got my book today. Hope to get some games in sometime. I can make a list with quite a few things: My AoS chaos, old WHFB O&G and HE, even my small LoTR collection and of course all the historical stuff still works.

OK so read it last night.

If you have Lion Rampant, you have the core of the game. The units are almost identical, with a couple of new additions for Warbeasts, and some very minor tidying up. The rules too - only a couple of things are different from before. I'm perfectly happy with that.

The section on Warband building now separates Strength (= unit hits) from the number of models in the unit. It's something we were already doing to allow us to play Lion Rampant with fantasy models, but it's nice to see it done formally. It's not a lot of extra book-keeping to track unit hits separately, and it does mean that you can put the army that you want on the table.

Fantasy special rules all look useful, and as with the rest of the book, this section acknowledges that you're simply adding a new rule to the unit, and leaves the "chrome" up to you. So Invisibility can represent magic, Elvish concealment or ninjas. Flying and burrowing creatures work the same. There are magic items in the game, but they can also be represented by other rules - more powerful weapons could have the more expensive Venomous or Slayer special rules.

Undead is a list of options that you choose from to differentiate, say, vampires from skeletons.

All these special rules have a points cost, but there are limits on the number of units in an army and the maximum points cost of any single unit, so you're not going to wear down an enemy with 24 units of Zombies...

Magic is relatively simple. Spellcaster is a special rule that can be added to any unit type. Casters can choose from a list of 10 spells (11 if you find the hidden one). These are generally simple effects that work with existing rules, rather than adding more complexity, and it should be pretty easy to add more. Summoners work differently - they can bring in units from reserve.

Couple of minor issues. Invisibility is explained pretty poorly - it's clear you can fight back against an Attacking invisible unit, but it's not clear whether you can initiate an Attack action against them. I reckon you can.

Eyeballing were-creatures, they do look overcosted. I've not played them to test that hunch though.

Some scenarios and sample army lists round out the book, but you will have no trouble creating your own warbands.

It's lovely to see such clarity in a rulebook, and the design philosophy shines through at every step. And I know it's a decent game to play already from Lion Rampant.

I bought my son this for Xmas, because he's moving away from 40K and more into fantasy gaming, but had started to get too many minis for our staple (SoBH) to easily handle. We tried it out today and loved it! I'm going to have to pick up my own copy, I think. Felt like there were solid strategic options at the start, and interesting choices every turn. Combat results were always satisfying and plausible, but were resolved very quickly. Great stuff. We used a mix of minis -- Blood Rage vikings for me, lead by Barbarian Libby (Hasslefree) as an Elite Cavalry leader, versus a bunch of Orcs, Trolls and Goblins for him. Looks pretty balanced so far.

I'd be interested in some comparison to KoW if anyone who has played both has any thoughts!

I've not played KoW, sorry.

DR is ace though. Lots of interesting interactions. Lots of customisability. We played a 2nd game. My son wiped me out handily again...