Saturday 22 January 2011

Warmaster WoT - A Wheel of Time Wargame?

A good gaming buddy of mine put a germ of an idea in my head this week; using the Warmaster Ancients ruleset to recreate some of the battles from Robert Jordan's "Wheel of Time" series of books.

What was a passing suggestion has now got me thinking about how to turn it into a reality.

For those of you not familiar with the series it is 14 books charting the build up to a classic "good versus evil" battle for the world. The series is so vast in scope that it has outlived its author and creator and is being finished by another author using the original notes.

The books feature a whole range of nations and armies battling each other, many of which have quite distinct styles of fighting/units as well as looks. And many of the battles are large in scope as well, making any wargaming version of them almost mandatory as "grand scale" rather than skirmish.

At this stage it is highly unlikely that either of us will get around to building a dedicated WoT army in the short/medium term (if ever!). But I am going to have a look at how by using the original warmaster fantasy rules for "exotics", combined with the improved combat rules from the Warmaster Ancients series could produce something that would reflect the battles of The Wheel of Time.

The army creation rules from Warmaster Ancients should suffice for most things, the only things that will be different from classical ancients/medieval armies are the "magicians" and one army which uses types of monsters in combat (The Seanchan). In the books apart from a few isolated incidents in battles most of the magic is restricted to quite local offensive spells (equivalent to fireballs etc) and fairly generic spell effects which are covered by the original Warmaster. In the books by and large magic either completely wins the battle (in which case we would not be trying to recreate it!), or it plays a peripheral role (much like WMA shooting) in line with the original Warmaster rules.

Hopefully at some point once I've got some trial rules/armies we can play a game with WMA figures as proxies. In the meantime I will likely post up some rule suggestions and army lists wherever I have time to have a look at them.

From some quick research it would appear that to date there are no wargaming rules/mods for WoT, apart from the official RPG (which isn't really the same thing!) Let me know if you know of any, or have any thoughts on this proposed project.

1 comment:

  1. http://www.chucksphere.com/wargames/WofT/WOT2test.pdf

    These are at Chuck's WOrld of Wargames. The mechanics seem familiar but I'm not sure why. The lists are useful.

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