I’ll open with what someone would really want, the actual scenario briefs:

The Battle of Clontarf

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

The Battle of Clontarf

I went through several iterations for these documents. The historical background is fairly abstract and meant more to give the general idea of the event. The best overall summary I have found to date can be found on The Deadliest Blogger. I strongly recommend reading it–just set aside an easy 30 minutes.

Clontarf is distinct for being one of the last “dudes run at each other and start beating on guys” battles of the medieval period. There’s no archers, no knights, no horsemen–it’s just some guys with throwing spears up against some guys with armor. This makes for an ideal learning game but also keeps the battle relatively simple, which I like. In a big game with four players all learning together, you want them to be able to grasp the objective quickly and move on it. Here, the objective is effectively to capture ground and beat up the enemy. To add a wrinkle of historical context, you get bonus reputation for fighting out the legendary duels that occurred.

That last one has me slightly worried, if only because there will be a lot of “Okay wait–which one is Connaig mac Whatever?” My thought is to put some form of color coded label, so you just match red hero to red hero and go to town.

What’s funny is that’s really most of what I have to say for this design. The heroes are aligned so that their duels should occur if they just march forward. The armies are normal one-player armies but split between two learners because that makes things as smooth as possible. The only core rule I intend to fudge is that both heroes a player controls may influence all of their personal units, rather than each hero having a personal retinue. Again, just seeking simplicity.

The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly

This one is adapted from the 2023 Lard Magazine. I’ve changed it somewhat to fit my needs and sliced out a little bit of the flavor. I love this scenario, truly, because it solves the passivity problem in a multi-player game. Hanging back won’t win you the game: you need to get out there and kill. In order to win, you have to collect clues off your three opponents. Once you have all three, you learn where the treasure is and how to get it.

My modifications focus around making it four distinct teams, as I have four players. The original scenario can be adapted up to nine players by subdividing the original teams and structure. Again, to learn about that, look at the 2023 Lard Magazine.

Just like the Midgard scenario, this is simple and straightforward to grasp and plan around. My only concern here is that with four cowboys each, the players may take a while. My opposite concern is that with four cowboys each, the players may just kill each other a little too fast. I’m hoping to lay down enough terrain so that enterprising players can duck behind walls, into alleys, and through dense fields to keep themselves from getting killed.

I’m a little less certain on this one. We’ll see in the after action report how it worked out.

Concluding

I’m greatly looking forward to this year’s Tentcon–wait, wait, wait. Space Gits? Oh yeah, I’m doing that, too. No real scenario there: we’re just rolling through the default “Out collect all the gits.” The game is not complete so we’re playing the quick start rules just to get a feel for it.

Okay, back on target. I’m greatly looking forward to this year’s Tentcon. I have a diverse set of games and scenarios I think the players will really enjoy, alongside some table setups that should hopefully bring a few more people around our Historicals chat. I don’t have the time to run multiple games anymore but if I can at least get a few more people rolling historically flavored dice I’ve done my job.