I am very lucky – not only do I get on well with The Sister, but we also live close enough that she can come and see me every other week. This has been going on since I moved back to Leeds, with a chance to cook up food and relax with a movie or TV series. However, there has also been discussions about returning to our tabletop gaming – we played some games back in 2021 (when I was able to work from home and therefore had more prep time) but then dropped off for a variety of reasons (I did buy a house in that time). Since then, we have been planning to play more, but for various reasons, we never got around to it (although we have been watching through a pile of films that have been inspiring our games).
However, the dice must be rolled, the tabletop wargaming gods must be appeased, and quite frankly, we were both looking forward to returning to the world of the Empress’s Hounds. A kitbashed fantasy setting I’ve pulled together with inspiration from all the usual sources and fueled by releases from people like Last Sword, Games Workshop and Highland Miniatures, this is a setting that my sister has enjoyed writing about on her blog, Wolfish Written and one I’ve enjoyed coming up with mostly because it gives me an excuse to buy more Dark Elves (not that I need one, I just think they are cool).
The difference this time is the choice of ruleset. We had been playing with Open Combat, but by the end of the campaign we played, we realised it wasn’t really the style we wanted – my sister is a wargaming newbie (although she has played a lot of D&D), and for her, Open Combat didn’t really click. So this time, we’re playing Famous by Our Swords. The last test game went really well, reminding me how much I like this set and being the final push to prepare for another game day. It’s the perfect scale and setup for a few hero characters fighting small groups or monsters.
Now, I did do a few little tweaks, the biggest one being taking the weapon special rules and playing around with them. All three of the heroes are involved with the Swordmasters (think Inquisitors from 40k mixed with Witchers mixed with Musketeers) and so are trained with the blade. To show this off, at the start of each turn, each of them could pick a sword fighting style to determine their special rules – Parry (bonus defence), Riposte (retaliate against an attacker) and At Bay (enemies can’t move within 1″ without beating their attack). This is still a work-in-progress idea (I need to give Parry and Riposte a weakness to make the decision a little more interesting), but thanks to the piles of rules that Famous By Our Swords includes, it’s easy to fit pieces together to build something new (quite literally in the case of the monster creator). I’m always cautious about rulesets that describe themselves as “oh it’s a sandbox, change what you need” as plenty of people use it to cover a half-finished rule set that hasn’t been fully tested. FBOS, however, feels a lot more sturdily constructed, with the hacking being more about using the systems there and then rebuilding off of them. I look forward to trying more.
The common heroes through all these missions were a pair of Human Swordmasters and an Elven guide. The Swordmasters were from North Star’s Ghost Archipelago range (and painted back in 2020) while the Elven Guide was printed from Vae Victis.
The first game saw the hero trio getting ambushed by cultists in the woods (the classic “so here is how the rules work” scenario). I staged it out into two waves to keep the activation times relatively quick, keeping a reasonable number of tokens in the bag. For terrain, I went with area basing rather than specific trees, opening up a few pathways. If either side had been using ranged troops, I would have probably stuck a few extra rocks and terrain features in to block line of sight. But for now though, it’s just a clash of blades/claws/spikes.
As for the game itself, the Trio managed to fight their way through both waves of reinforcements. With the guide taking point, the Swordmasters were able to cut through the enemy, fighting off the first ambush before crashing into the second. However, it was not all going their way – some terrible rolls led to Benfrey taking an injury while duelling the enemy leader, giving him a terrible case of “Please test morale before charging an enemy”. There wasn’t a huge amount to write about as this was very much a learning game – both the mechanical “pulling actions from the bag->use actions in game” but also a lot of the more standard wargaming elements, such as working out areas of control and how best to wrangle your force around the battlefield.
However, she picked it up quickly, and so, after some food, we jumped into a second game.
For this one, I decided to go a little more “this is what wargaming CAN be”. Rather than a straight-up brawl, it was presented as a stealth mission – the Swordmasters and their guide have fought through the ambush and now seek the sanctuary of the ruined church in the woods. However, they’ll need to traverse the woods, sneaking past more of the cultists and their reinforcements. To begin with, until the alarm was raised, the cultists only put a single counter in the bag, letting the heroes navigate around the cultists tramping through the undergrowth. The only way to raise the alarms was for the turn to end with a cultist having a line of sight to a non-cultist – if you could hit them hard and wipe out an enemy in a single round of combat, then you could keep things quiet. Next time, I would probably have added some bonus for attack from behind or stealthily, but it seemed to work well enough for the vibe I was trying to get across.
There was, however, a twist. Inside the bag, there were four counters of a third colour, representing the activations of a mysterious third party. As each was pulled, I mentioned the deepening sense of dread among the figures on the board, the mist swirling in until finally the third force was revealed… a Vampire Lord. This is a monster profile and is an absolute combat threat – able to heal from the enemies he kills, terrifying to face and with a pile of actions, meaning he could shred through the poorly equipped cultists and would be a threat to the Swordmasters.
What happened is best described as a horror movie. At first, the Swordmasters and their guide managed to sneak around, moving from clump of trees to clump of trees. However, before the end of the first turn, the mist parted to reveal a monstrous vampire that snuck through the Cultist lines ripping them to pieces. The Swordmasters did manage to pull off some incredibly sneaky work, avoiding the attention of cultists and even wiping out a whole patrol in a turn. However, the alarm was raised when the Vampire Lord managed to leave one group of enemies alive at the turn end, leading to an all-out brawl (as much as one can be when facing a creature of the night). The Swordmasters managed to make it to the exit (with a Vampire hot on their heels) – only for the final reveal to be that the Vampire Lord is a fellow servant of the Empress, a twist that would have been revealed if they had encountered the vampire face to face. A fun little bit of world-building mixed in with the gameplay.
Overall, we had a great time – I was really glad when, at the end of the day’s gaming, my sister said she finally understood why I like wargaming. There was a lot more interaction and with plenty of choices around positioning and actions. The constant interaction cycle of pulling tokens from the bag to deciding which action to take, to very quickly moving onto the next activation. There is a rapid pace, avoid a pile of dice rolls all at one time which means it’s great to keep the focus on the table. FBOS’s ruleset is also flexible enough that it’s easy to quickly add stuff in – we’re already looking at how best to spread out to include the magic elements (as well as adding additional spells) while also expanding the forces out to include more ranged weapons.
And speaking of, we’re about to have a whole load of additional Swordmaster models thanks to a favourite of the blog, Last Sword. July’s releases (now available at the Adventurer tier) are for a set of Musketeers in the style of their other High Kingdoms releases. For someone who loves swashbucklers, these figures are spot on – Captain Alatriste (they are a Spanish company after all) mixed with D’Artagnan and the other musketeers. There are some great details in them to make them look like a set of hard-case individuals skilled at fighting and willing to use whatever tools they have. I’m very much looking forward to getting some of these printed off (as well as the older High Kingdom sets) to build up the collection of characters we use.
For now though, I shall finish off and direct you towards my Sister’s blog at Wolfish Written. She will be writing up some more narrative retellings of our adventures soon as well writing a new post pretty much every week so plenty of great things to read. For me though, I’m going to need to get the printers warmed up and then break out the leather and feathers paint schemes. FBOS continues to be my main ruleset for fantasy skirmish and I’m looking forward to what happens next! I can sense the Dastardly Regular Opponent needs an excuse to put more Dwarfs on the table. If you want the rules for yourself, you can grab them over on KoFi, including a PDF bundle.
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