Cult Of Games XLBS: How Do You Write FUN Wargaming Scenarios?
November 30, 2025 by crew
For some website features, you will need a FREE account and for some others, you will need to join the Cult of Games.
Or if you have already joined the Cult of Games Log in now
What difference will having a FREE account make?
Setting up a Free account with OnTableTop unlocks a load of additional features and content (see below). You can then get involved with our Tabletop Gaming community, we are very helpful and keen to hear what you have to say. So Join Us Now!
Free Account Includes
- Creating your own project blogs.
- Rating and reviewing games using our innovative system.
- Commenting and ability to upvote.
- Posting in the forums.
- Unlocking of Achivments and collectin hobby xp
- Ability to add places like clubs and stores to our gaming database.
- Follow games, recommend games, use wishlist and mark what games you own.
- You will be able to add friends to your account.
What's the Cult of Games?
Once you have made a free account you can support the community by joing the Cult of Games. Joining the Cult allows you to use even more parts of the site and access to extra content. Check out some of the extra features below.
Cult of Games Membership Includes
- Reduced ads, for a better browsing experience (feature can be turned on or off in your profile).
- Access to The Cult of Games XLBS Sunday Show.
- Extra hobby videos about painting, terrain building etc.
- Exclusive interviews with the best game designers etc.
- Behind the scenes studio VLogs.
- Access to our live stream archives.
- Early access to our event tickets.
- Access to the CoG Greenroom.
- Access to the CoG Chamber of Commerce.
- Access the CoG Bazarr Trading Forum.
- Create and Edit Records for Games, Companies and Professionals.
Supported by (Turn Off)
Supported by (Turn Off)
Supported by (Turn Off)
![Warcradle Studios Reveal TINY New 10mm Festive Marker! [Updated]](https://images.beastsofwar.com/2025/11/christmas-kyle-main-600-338.jpg)
Happy Sunday Backstagers, CoGs and OTTers (Finally!)
Happy Sunday!
I’ve been to that ring fort in donegal a couple of times. My wife’s from just down the road and used to play round it as a kid. Has some internal tunnels in the walls that only a kid can fit in now because the earth has taken over
That’s pretty cool that you could explore it so much
Maybe not perfectly on-topic … but I remember when videogames had tons of maps both by in the core game and as created by their respective communities.
These days you’re lucky if you get more than a handful and you can forget about creating your own.
I loved never quite knowing what a map was like when playing, because there was a pretty good chance it was new.
These days games have so few maps that even a casual player will have learnt the ins and outs after a while.
Anyways …
I like it when wargames have a decent set of scenarios to start playing.
I like it even more when there are good instructions that teach players how to create interesting maps/scenarios for games.
Seeing the 40k tournament ‘instructions’ made me throw up a bit (especially when you get some creatively bankrupt folk using the bare minimum cardboard). Why the heck limit yourself like that?
With a good set of core terrain elements (as mentioned in a previous XLBS) we should be seeing a ton of different maps.
Any advantage/disadvantage with deployment can be countered by playing the same map twice (as attacker and defender).
Totally on board with good instructions, especially for getting people into making their own scenarios. I also like the idea of doing the attacker/defender thing and changing things up.
Happy Först Advent
And I don’t write fun scenarios. I pay people for that. That’s why I buy books. I can’t write to safe my life. Now on with the show.
00:00 Sunday. Tired. Slow comments
11:00 TEN-TA-KILL!
44:00 Blooooooooooood! Also if you watch the end of Doom there is a bunny sitting around and later is dead. I think they made a little “unofficial side story” that doomguy is out for revenge for bunny.
47:20 People make fun about weird Space Marines not being able to see what’s left or right because of giant shoulder pauldrons but this one takes the cake XD
53:00 I can’t remember. I could look it up. But I’m too lazy
1:22:00 but what have the Romans done for the SpeedPaintPens?
1:31:00 Doooooooom guy!
PS: you’re all wrong about everything all of the time. Does that cover all my bases? I think so. See you lot next week!
Being wrong has never felt so right
Creativity is a dying art.
Look at hollywood and streaming TV and you’ll see remakes, or variants on a theme… I mean which idiot came with the Die Hart and Bride Hard… those are terrible ideas that I have no interest in watching.
RPG scenarios are too generic, possibly because they let AI churn out the crap.
Wargame battles are balanced for tounament play rather than being interesting.
I’m amazed they create anything that takes longer than 5 minutes to play because that seems to be the attention span of a lot of people now.
Do you think the table generation method is a good way to solve the death of creativity?
I think that depends on the size of the table and how people use them.
You need something that gives a good set of options that inspire people to build on top of the results these things generate.
Ideally the results should fit together no matter which elements they roll.
Yup your right Gerry I do generally write my own scenarios. Also I GM them as I get winged at that’s it unfair if I play.
Quite often I do do what Ben Suggested and move periods for Historical battles.
The SAS battle of Mirbat from Aden got moved to Vietnam ( which had some funny moments, particularly when the Aussies bundled a war correspondent away from a Firefight, and the Viet am player shouted, ‘look capitalist oppression trying to style the truth!)
Kevin often plays asymmetrical games , with players stopping sides and comparing victory..
That’s cool – great ideas to move things around. Alas that you have to be the forever GM of a wargame haha
Nerdy sci fi reference inbound. In the final season of Deep Space 9, Miles O’Brian and Dr. Bashir have a multi episode story arc where they are refighting the the Battle of the Alamo. And as the Texans they kept losing and they were trying to figure out how to win. This was all in the way of the background of the Dominion war that the Federation was fighting and losing. Nice juxtaposition but the point was that in game terms, victory for the Texans is doing better than their historical counterparts. This generally works for most historical games. Do better than your historical counterparts.
Fallout Factions has an interesting scenario generator. You roll up the basics, raid on a homestead or a wasteland encounter, then you can have multiple objectives that either player can achieve. Then you have deployments of objectives and hazards and terrain where it’s very much a back and forth between the two players as you alternate picking and placing everything. Kind of like a pre-game, and very interactive.
I do like the idea from Fallout Factions and thanks for the Deep Space 9 info – one of the best entries in the Star Trek universe!
Happy St Andrews Sunday COGz & OTTers Folk’s
Alien earth ‘s eye’s relatives?
Chaos Animal farm 🤔
Are you thinking of the MUMMY when he half made with bugs running around his face Gerry 🤔
Great show guy’s 👍
In thinking about it some more, I remembered a recent game of Sharpe practice where we had a GM. We were playing an American Revolution scenario where I had a mixed force of Tory dragoons, regular hussars and regular dismounted dragoons vs Rebel militia infantry and mounted militia. It was winter time and there was a cold stream with a single narrow bridge the Loyalists would have to cross to get to their objective, a Rebel leader asleep in a building.
Unknown to me was that the Rebels had the ability to wake up and rouse the Rebel leader to move him off the board. I did know that the Rebel mounted troops were going to reinforce their infantry but I didn’t know when.
The GM told me that I could cross the stream but that it was so cold I’d take a random amount of shock. This seemed better than trying to cross on the narrow bridge so I did that. I of course rolled the maximum amount of shock.
At one point I had the opportunity to charge my Tory dragoons into some Rebel infantry but the straight line would’ve taken me through a cornfield. The GM just made a decision in the fly and let me but ruled I’d take a random amount of shock due to be being somewhat impeded by the cornfield but not enough to prohibit the charge. I of course rolled the maximum amount of shock but my Tory dragoons were so much better than the Rebel militia it didn’t matter and I wiped them out.
It was at that point his mounted troops appeared and counter charged into my dragoons wiping them out. My dismounted dragoons then proceeded to push the Rebel mounted troops back into their own lines thus disrupting their unengaged units.
I was then able to get my dismounted troops to rush up and capture the Rebel leader and then beat back a rescue attempt by the Rebels. British victory, huzzah!
The point here is that I was given the scenario, but not all information, plus a choice (cross stream and suffer shock or go over narrow bridge) and the GM made up a rule (charging through the cornfield) on the fly. Those three things made the game really fun and engaging for both players.
I really like that. This shows off the benefits of having a good GM making the experience awesome for both involved
This is an episode I have needed to laugh with. Thanks all for a great presentation
No problemo dude
I was away this weekend and on catching up with XLBS tonight I find that I’ve won a GB 🙂 Thanks very much – glad you liked the Speedpaint Roman Army. I’m thoroughly enjoying doing them, not least because of how quick they are. Gerry is of course right that a brown base layer would be very forgiving. Fortunately I can get to everything that is visible with the pen nibs. If you turn the minis upside down you might be able to see some unpainted bits but nobody is going to do that. They look great at gaming distance.
On the topic of writing our own scenarios, our group often do this. In fact we prefer this type of setup to just doing something out of the book. Certain rules work better with the book scenarios, Saga for example. The Mersey rules are a bit looser and they suit a home engineered scenario. We do them with Xenos and Dragon Rampant. Recently some of my friends had their Dead Mans Hand campaign that they wrote published in WI.
When I write them I prefer there to be a hidden element that the other gamers need to discover, or mostly not discover during the game. The last Xenos Rampant one I wrote I was scheduled to play 3 other players in a ‘meet in the middle’ type of scenario. I gave each player their own printed, themed objectives which they had to search the table for and keep secret from the other players. As I knew the objectives in advance I played my “space police” faction and rather than searching and attacking I was just defending the main hidden objective. It worked pretty well with the player who tried to complete their given objectives doing better than those trying to either kill as many enemies as possible, or protect as many units as possible.
The Death machine would fit into The Doomed well as its Drone horror.
Oddly all our books have loads of scenarios in them… some books are just scenarios, so its not dying for us.