Very British Civil Warpath

Very little of the old paintbrushes and superglue used for this one unfortunately, but at least I've done something hobby related that can be blogged about for once.

As I've mentioned in a previous post, I've been playing some games of the Warpath v2 beta recently. This is Mantic's sci-fi skirmish game, which is apparently going to be ready for release soon as a full, non-beta version. It's somewhat simpler than 40k and has a nice mechanic for activating units that adds some brinksmanship to turns.

I've also been playing games set in the Very British Civil War, the alternate history setting described in the books from Solway Crafts and Miniatures. In case you don't know, this "what-if" setting assumes an unpleasant outcome to the abdication crisis in 1938 and has a fascist government of Britain fighting a very splintered war across the whole country. It's presented in a very light-hearted style and the emphasis is on over the top cobbled together forces, vehicles and weapons, and can be a lot of fun.

We had been using 40k rules for our games, which worked quite well, but I wanted to try something different and so I have created Very British Civil Warpath - army lists and special rules for VBCW games using the Warpath rules!

Kieron and I played our first test game of this last night and it seemed go well (despite ending in an extremely bloody stalemate).

The simplicity of the Warpath army lists meant that I was even able to come up with (hopefully) sensible points values and options for different units, so it's a system which we can use for some reasonably balanced games and as the basis for our campaign.

Something that I was very keen to include was a method for representing shortages of fuel and ammo - in most cases the weapons and vehicles being used have been scrounged or bodged together so it makes sense to me that they can't be entirely relied upon. I've come up with what I think is a fairly simple mechanic for this, which will require a few tokens to be used to keep track of things but can make for very uncertain times for the commanders.

I've also tried to do something sensible with cavalry and give them the ability to mount and dismount during the game, so that they aren't caught in the trap of trying to behave like napoleonic cavalry against opponents with machine guns.

Finally I came up with some rules that allow vehicles to be upgraded fairly simply, so I think you can cover most things with the options there.

There are still more things to add to it in future but I think it works as is, but I need to test it some more. Any offers of help would be gratefully received...