Dragon Rampant Mammoth time!

So, as promised, back to me to tell you a bit more about our attempt at Dragon Rampant. Well last blog post I allowed the Distinguished Opponent to tell you about his Dragon Rampant army. Well, how did we get on? Well, often with new games I have spent most of session reading one book between two people, so ensuring both of us had a copy in advance was a great help. (The affordable Osprey price helps here.) There are some great how to videos on Youtube as well so we were both confident we could make a good start to our first game without too many false starts. The table was set up the night before, army lists were written. We were good to go.

 

 You've seen most of my Barbarian army, but here is the final result:

Yep, that is a big Mammoth in the middle of the army. Yes I did originally say my Leader was the Bad Squiddo Lathgertha shield maiden on horseback, but I wanted something with more of an impact. The model is still there and joined by some of her fellow horseriders. I've also added an old GW giant, some giant wolves and some Black Tree Design vikings that fit in really well with the Frostgrave barbarians. The wolves are led by a hammer wielding fantasy viking from Hasslefree miniatures that I am sure I have shared on my blog before.

Table from Bad Squiddo, stones are made from air dry clay.

 

I added this wizard to the back of my Mammoth and gave him the Wizardling bonus. This means he doesn't have access to all the magic spells a wizard does, you pre choose just three from the list but for less points. Don't get me wrong, my Leader is still the Shieldmaiden, I also added Lathgertha on foot to the back of the Mammoth. I also gave her Cause Fear as she was on the back of a giant Mammoth! In hindsight, I wouldn't use this combination again, it felt a waste to be both a spellcaster and a giant lumbering combat beast, you can't do both in the same turn.

 

 

I set up a simple table with a small farmstead in the middle and we agreed the field and any hills or woods would be difficult terrain to slow things down as the table is unfortunately only 3' deep. To also help with this we both deployed off table and rolled to activate for each unit from turn one to see when they actually arrived on the table. The table layout really just meant we ended up with two separate battles either side of the farm with just some scouts creeping through the field in the middle. (As scouts they suffer no penalty.)

Scouts advancing on the farm

 

 

 

 

Although we had visually two completely different armies, because we were theoretically picking from the same "army list" (to pick a traditional wargame idea) the game felt very fair and balanced. There is one magic spell that is slightly overpowered compared to all the others (I'll not say which, I don't condone metagaming) but if it becomes a problem that you keep only using that spell, you could just nip it from the list as a house rule, problem sorted.

 

Lathgertha and the shieldmaiden rally after being driven off by the skeleton cavalry. Who then get driven off by the giant wolves led by Thor Wolfrunner.

The giant happily stomps towards the undead pigs, who fortunately aren't bothered that he causes fear, being undead

It's all too much for Tiny the giant, and he loses the combat and stomps off.

Barbarian bezerkers face off against my opponents Leader (excuse the naked bottom!)

 

I love the simplicity of the Dragon Rampant system. It is easy to learn and adapt to your own choice of models. Advantage can bounce back and forth between either side as the game progresses. As units lose strength they become less effective but can still make a difference. My opponent and I happily just made two fantasy armies that made us grin and then adapted  the rules to fit them. You don't even need to necessarily conform to certain unit sizes really if you don't want to, I just found it easier to indicate 12 strength points with 12 models, but it's not necessary.  My Distinguished Opponent just used dice to indicate as such. I would also recommend having on hand a handful of tokens too to keep track of the status of your units.

Finally I thought I might show some evidence of what the Mammoth looked like when it arrived. Technically it is a Dwarven War Mammoth but the Dwarves have gone in the bitz box for another day. (Although no-one was stuck down in the howdah, I'm not buying something this cool and not using it every opportunity I can). It was fun to get really stuck into such a large project, although every time I even slightly knocked the tusks I had a tiny heart attack.

My saviour was this new product I found. The kit actually fit together really well, but with any large resin kit there will be some gap work to be done and I had recently bought it to try it out. It squeezes out similar texture to oil paint, then dries solid. Weirdly the most use I had for it was when I was looking for a base for the mammoth. I actually glued together two plastic boards together that were the right size but a little thin. I then filled the gap all the way around with the putty.

 

 So what now? Well, lately I have always said its a good idea to always have two armies ready for any system. That way you can always offer a game to any opponent and not have to wait a couple of months for them to paint the models. Well, progress with army two continues with some halfling archers:

 

 

 

 

Well, hopefully Dragon Rampant will be making an appearance again at some point. Maybe I can persuade the Illustrious Opponent to put together a fantasy force and when we can safely get together for a game give it a go.