Warband Napoleonic Wars Campaign

[Sean Vaidhyanathan]

Ijust picked up TSB and am so pumped about this ruleset. I plan on making a Spanish warband as soon as that set is available (hint hint WA) that I can also use for Muskets and Tomahawks. In the meantime I assembled this ragtag group of adventures for a steam punky French warband. I'd love to see whatever other warband kitbashes you all have done, too!

@JTam The front right is my "irregular" and he is a frostgrave warrior soldier body with WA conquistador arms/matchlock. The tricorn hat dude is WA Dark Age Irish with a frostgrave rope over the right shoulder and the hat is from Perry miniatures AWI British infantry.

Silver Bayonet has brought a new flame to my hobby. I loved Bram Stroker's Dracula as a kid. I would love an army game with a similar setting. One that is more like Oldhammer, just a reason to pit fantasy models against historicals.

The Hot and Dangerous models are incredibly detailed and finely casted. I am slightly worried about them being too fragile for the gaming table .... but it will probably be all right once they are assembled.

The Hussar is also a gorgeous model. The seperate torso means creating a dismounted version will be relatively easy. (I need to order a second model for the dismounted conversion.... I was holding out until I got this model in hand and saw the way the parts broke down.) I think some of the Wargames Factory female Zombie survivor legs will work with some file work for dismounted Napoleonic cavalry legs. The new Deadman's Hand female Gunfighters II legs might also work.

The Polish Lancer is a little disappointing. The pose with the lance will make making a mounted version difficult. It's hard to substitute other weapons in the dismounted pose. Additionally her overalls are sagging which is fun for a pinup but less so for what I'm trying to do. A shame as it's otherwise a beautiful mini and I LOVE Polish Lancers.

EDIT: It's also disappointing that there's no rules for lances in Silver Bayonet. Seems like it would be a natural choice for trying to deal with monsters. Easy enough to make my own rule/points I suppose.

That's going to be an amazing looking warband and that's a great idea for the goblins. I used all my left over dogs to make the grey wolves and picked up some reaper minis for a werewolf and the big wolf creature. I was definitely thinking about using the WA goblin set. I think I saw either on the legion page or maybe the TSB page someone had used the Prussian reserve models and bashed skulls under the hats and used those as revenants. I might look into that as well but between the gobos and the wolves I've probably got enough baddies for a while!

At left, a Warlord British Napoleonic cavalry sprue that came free with a Wargames Illustrated. On the far right is another free sprue of later period British Infantry. I believe some of the heads could still be of use.

Metal miniatures top row: Brigade Games female Spanish Guerilla, Brigade Games female Spanish Guerilla mounted, Brigade Games female civilian mounted. Metal miniatures middle row: Brigade Games Sergeant Harper and Sharpe, Wargames Hot and Dangerous 95th Rifleman. Metal miniatures bottom row: Warlord Games Witchfinder and assistant.

I love the Sharpe books too and the Peninsular campaign.... so my British warband will be operating in Spain and lead by CPT Sharpe and Sergeant Harper. They are of course are augmented by a native Spanish guerilla. The civilian female on horse is just a nice mini and may figure into a scenario.

@JTam I haven't yet but I've been thinking about what would make good substitutions. I've already decided to make a more renaissance-esque warband using my Spanish and thought about using Lizardmen and Aztecs for some of the NPCs.

If you can lay hands on the old Warhammer Lustria supplement book it might be of use/inspiration to you. It has some special jungle rules, tips on terrain building, and some really nice/evocative renaissance men vs lizardmen art:

@JTam I have read the thread, it is very interesting, but being portuguese, I have a lot of references (every history book in school, and half of our literature).

I started the campaign in north Africa, mostly because I have some sarracen miniatures, and they will go on to Brazil, India and Japan.

@JTam How do you like the game itself? I read a review on @Grumpy Gnome 's blog and he basically stated that the book is well made and the minis nice but the rules had some issues... (like weapon ranges being a bit off and not a lot of distinguisment beteween weapons). Also, I have seen people saying about playing in an earlier setting. Do the rules support that? Could you play a 30 years war silver Bayonet campaign? Or a "Spanish gold" campaign?

@William Redford I like the game a lot, maybe because I am also a big fan o Rangers of Shadow Deep and Frostgrave. There are some issues, but I solved them with some minor homebrew adaptations.

It is very adaptable, my first game was against my younger brother, in the French Indian War, he palyed the british, using their list, and I played the Iroquois, using an adapted Russian List (just because ? ). I have also seen some AAR of game with different samurai factions in the Sengoku period.

So both your campaings would be very easy to do, the spanish gold campaign is basicly during the same age of my Portuguese Age of Exploration campaings.

@Vitor Soares Ok. I am interested. I backed Blood And Plunder for ships and pirate crews... along with militia and troops. A Silver Bayonet pirate themed game might be fun. I will see if I can get any interest with my gaming group.

Weakness 1: Lack of granularity. The weapons are really generic. You could substitute a crossbow for a musket and the rules work just as well. As an example, the rifle has longer range than the musket, but the reload speed is the same. Any student of the era knows this isn't right. Even the blurb for the weapon in the Silver Bayonet rulebook discusses the slower loading speed of the rifle, but it's not represented in the rules. I know many prize speed and flow in game rules over all else, but I prefer more granularity in a game with 8 models per side.

Weakness 2: The reload times are too fast. Models run and gun all over the board like they are in WW2, not laboriously reloading muzzle loaders. More realistically you should probably get A volley and than it's silver bayonet time.

@William Redford I'm also wanting to get into B&P. Just recently discovered a lot of the Firelock stuff and really love that system for the accessibility. B&P is definitely the "flagship" ruleset (pun intended) but I definitely recommend looking into the other stuff if you haven't already (Blood and Steel, Blood and Valor). They're running a 20% discount off their stuff through tomorrow. Great chance to buy up some of those cheap pdfs.

It is very much the time period and the looks I have used for my conquistadors in my Silver Bayonet campaign. I only changed the colours, tv shows and movies like to give the renaissance and medieval times a gritty, dirty look, and actually they used colourful clothes.

@JTam They were. They are actually speaking it with a brazilian accent ( the actor is brazilian), which is the historically correct accent.

Modern European Portuguese is much harder to learn for english speakers, Brazilian Portuguese sounds more like Renascence Portuguese.

Modern European Portuguese has a lot (really, they are a lot) of sounds (phonems) from African Dialects and Asian Languages.

That means that Brazilians have some dificulty undertanding some of our words, and we undertand everything they say.

As an example, the vast majority of Spanish do not undertand European Portuguese, and I mean at all. Portuguese undertand Spanish perfectly, Italian with ease (especially the Sicilian and Napolitan dialects), Catalan to us sounds like a drunk guy, most Romanian words, and French, German and English are very easy, every student in Portugal has, at least, 12 years of English, 5 of French, 3 of Spanish and 3 of German.

If you like history, you can get a lot of information on the influence of the Portuguese language in Asia.

Although I was reading about some old and ISOLATED Russian speaking communities in Alaska who speak a dialect far closer to old Russian than modern Russians speak. The Russian lanquage in Russia drifted and modernized over the years while it stayed virtually frozen in these small communities.

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