Friday, May 31, 2013

Buy "By This Axe"

Chris, that Weird-invoking author of the wild & wonky Hill Cantons blog, has announced the release of his midieval wargame rules, By This Axe.

By This Axe is a short booklet with rules for playing battles with or without miniatures. It includes a subsystem for fighting battlefield duels between champions (I like the idea of dirty tricks), as well as an abstract magic system and a method of converting D&D characters to battlefield leaders.  Scale is slightly abstracted, other than one figure can represent 5 or 20 individuals on the battlefield.  In addition to fighting, morale is an important part of the game, and can influence the outcome of a battle.

It may not be very groundbreaking, but I had a good time when I helped playtest this game way back when:  The battle seesawed back-and-forth to make for a thrilling match, and the rules are simple and straightforward.  The game plays very quickly, and Chris's conversion will make it easy to integrate into your roleplaying campaign if you ever need to fight a major battle.

He's charging eight bucks for hardcopy, and two-and-a-half for electronic, with all proceeds going to charity.  I'm looking forward to playing this again, and I encourage you to check it out.

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