Crimson Errant

In our journey to a new wargaming scope, I made an interesting discovery. It all started when I was looking into how to prepare games of Silver Bayonet and Frostgrave Archipelago that would be really appealing. I was attracted by the idea of coastal scenarios, some that would maybe even involve some amphibious action. For years I had marveled at the ships by Firelock Games, and this seemed the perfect excuse to own one.

Particularly now that their newly published Blood & Plunder starter set includes two plastic Sloops plus sailors for quite an affordable price.

It fit perfectly in my plans as I always imagined my Frostgrave Archipelago to be themed like the Age of Sail. With gunpowder, conquistadors, natives and pirates. I guess it draw many of the pulp fantasies I had as a child when I was addicted to the Tintin and the Spirou & Fantastio comic books. Well… I guess nowadays the appropriate term is “graphic novel”.

It did not help that I spent a good amount of my teenager years in sailing boats. My father owned one and it was our main father-and-son escape. I did many courses and we sailed to different Mediterranean islands.

As it’s a starter set, I simply investigated a bit what that “Blood & Plunder” game system was. Oh boy, I was delighted with what I found out. It seemed to tick all the boxes of my new wargaming scope. It allowed small games while still using units, and allowing historical but fun narrative scenarios. All while giving tons of different experiences in a relatively simple and approachable rule set. I loved the fact you could play the same

scenario as a land skirmish, a naval skirmish or an amphibious one.

Another great thing I discovered is that the same engine was used in multiple historical period games, all with some tweaks. So only learning a single ruleset and having few quick references for each period would be enough to cover a lot of interesting historical eras. Blood & Crowns would allow us to delve into late medieval skirmishes, Blood & Steel the Victorian little wars plus the American Civil War, Blood & Valor small WW1 raids, and finally the recently announced Blood & Bayonets that would allow serve as a perfect excuse to remove the dust from my Peninsular Napoleonic collection.

My main gaming mate had some doubts so I had to prepare a fast improvised demo to taste the waters. I sure as heck was not going to invest a decent amount of money and time into prepare a game that was later hated and shelved. I picked up my Sengoku Period Japanese forces from Test of Honour and filled the gaps with some French-Indian war Canadian militia skirmishers with muskets. I prepared myself my usual rules summary to properly learn the rules, got a couple of our standard playing cards’ decks, big dice to use as reload and fatigue markers and tokens from other games to mark special situations. We had an absolute blast. It was quick, it was intense, it was deadly and had enough historical narrative flavor to make us chuckle multiple times. So we decided to dedicate ourselves to it for the next months. I’m really attracted to the Spanish forces and my main playing mate opted to focus on Native Indians (and some English/Pirates for naval and land scenarios that require artillery).

Unfortunately the wind was not in our favor, and most of the Blood & Plunder items are out of stocks all across Europe, including the starter kit. The stores I contacted told me not to expect anything until at the very least the second quarter of this year. The news hit us like a bucket of cold water. We decided to take it as an opportunity to challenge ourselves and improvise something fun meanwhile. I had already a box of Frostgrave Crewmen that would be perfectly suited to proxy as sailors, lancers and even “milicianos indios”. I also had some AWI Indian sprues that I had not touched for years, so that presented the perfect opportunity to fight against the grey pile juggernaut. I was missing something to represent the bulk of my Spanish forces, I had nothing that would fit the bill even if I added some extra level of imagination. I decided to indulge myself and do some online window shopping. I found that Wargames Atlantic had released a really nice Conquistador set. It was meant to cover late 15 to mid 16th century, but Spanish colonial militias were poorly armed with old school stuff. I believe they’ll be good enough to allow me to represent some early period militias. With the contents of one box I can do a couple of “milicianos” armed with muskets, a unit of “piqueros” armed with lances (by default they don’t get pikes, funnily enough), and the rest I’ll use to create odd characters like a musician, a commander, and something else.

So far I have not find any suitable replacement for small boats and ships, so seems that naval and amphibious warfare may be off the table for the next months. I mean I could stick a few lollipop sticks and call it a raft, but I’d rather find something a bit less desperate.

The plan will be to replace the proxies as soon as I can get my hands into more period appropriate miniatures. Particularly ones that are more suitable for 20mm bases -the game standard-. But these proxies will live on as the main minis for my Frostgrave Ghost Archipelago games.