Demonsub is Five Leagues From The Borderlands

This is a simple practice scenario with two battles, the first with only 4 warband members and the second with all of them, to try out the rules and play a simple battle without any risk or harm to your characters. There’s no treasure or XP up for grabs but you are awarded a Story Point for playing. Story Points are spent to allow rerolls either in a battle or when rolling on a table during the campaign. They are quite rare, so the opportunity to get an extra one before the real game starts is nice.

Battle 1

Turn 1

Dar moves forward to the broken ruins at the bottom of the hill, then all of the skeletons advance onto the other side of the hill, with the archer taking a potshot at Hands, only temporarily stunning him.

Gregnil takes a shot and wounds the skeleton archer.

Turn 2

Kremmel points a finger at a nearby skeleton and casts Mark, making it easier to shoot for this turn but Gregnil fails to take advantage of this and misses, and as he rolled a 1 is now out of ammo.

Then the skeleton archer shoots at Dar, wounding and stunning him, making him less effective in the forthcoming combat as a skeleton charges him, but luckily it’s a draw and he steps back.

Another skeleton charges Kremmel and takes him out of action.

Hands moves up next to Dar, attacks the skeleton and kills it.

Turn 3

The skeleton archer on the hill shoots at Hands, wounding and stunning him. 

The skeleton that attacked Kremmel moves and attacks Gregnil but Gregnil wins and counterattack over the fence killing the skeleton. Another skeleton charges Gregnil but is driven back. Gregnil then charges over the fence and kills the skeleton.

The only skeleton left is the archer on the hill, which Dar charges and kills. 

Victory to me.

Battle 2

Turn 1

Petra, the bunny archer feral, moves up to the top of the hill with the tomb for cover and shoots at the skeleton archer in the ruins but misses. Both skeleton archers return shots of their own, all missing.

The rest of the skeletons all advanced forward.

Hands and Dar both move around the bottom of the hill to try to separate a few skeletons away from Petra.

Turn 2

Petra runs back down the hill to avoid the incoming skeletons.

The skeleton archer in the ruins moves forward a little and shoots Dar but misses, while the other archer shoots at Petra but also misses.

Two skeletons move towards Petra while three go after Dar and Hands. 

Kremmel casts Mark on a skeleton approaching Kiri, near Petra and Gregnil kills it with an arrow.

Hands charges a nearby skeleton, stunning the skeleton but is himself driven back. Dar seizes the opportunity and rushes in and kills the skeleton. It’s all going quite well.

Turn 3

Kremmel has nothing much he can do so moves to the top of the hill unworried by arrow fire as he can take cover behind the tomb, meaning the skeleton would need a 6 to hit. Guess what, one of the skeleton archers shoots, scores a 6 and rolls to wound and takes Kremmel out of action.

The other archer shoots at Dar and takes him out of action. 

The last skeleton near Petra charges, only forcing Petra back. 

At the bottom of the hill, Hands is facing two skeletons, he forces one back but the other one rushes in and kills him.

The tables have turned and my luck ran out. Petra, Kiri and Gregnil all head towards the table edge and leave the battle.

The skeletons have won.

Afterthoughts 
Well, that was fun. The game is pretty quick to play and the games don’t last long at all. I think I got a bit over confident towards the end of the last battle thinking I was close to winning but then my luck turned. If this had been a “for real campaign scenario “ I would have had to roll to see if any casualties were injured or dead, and I may have also had to roll to see what happened to those who ran off the table.

I didn’t use the rules for enemy morale at all as I was fighting undead and they don’t really know such a thing as self preservation.

Next will be the start of the actual campaign and true adventure.

One of the fun things with this game is that it asks you to make a map of the area you’ll be exploring. When I discovered this I was pretty excited and started playing around with some ideas even before I got to that part of the book. 

The game does give a framework of how to build your map, like rolling for number of settlements and size, add a delve, an unexplored location, and add enemy camps but it’s up to you where to place them. It also asks to break the map up into areas, such as hexes, to give an idea if you need to travel to a distant location or not.

The author, in a recent blog, gives additional thoughts on creating your map. This, I believe, is new to third edition.

In the Facebook community many people are using Inkarnate, an online map making program but it turns out it won’t run in a browser on my iPad, you need to run it on a PC, which I don’t use. Someone else did mention a random online map generator with slight customisation called Perilous Shores, which I tried and quite liked. I ended up using the github version which worked better on the iPad. I used this program to generate the land and terrain.

I used the iPad image app Pixelmator to create and place icons and text onto the map. As new locations are found during play I can go back into Pixelmator and add or remove stuff to the map quite easily as everything is its own layer.

So here’s the map I came up with, which I’m pretty happy with. I did try a coloured in version but I like the black and white one better.

For each of the settlements there was a further roll to determine the nature of that settlement. 

Starting from the top of the map we have;

Gateswood – a small hamlet that functions as a market town once per week for the many small farms that surround it. 

Hillsend – a small fortified outpost defending the road through the Barren Hills between the Untamed Coast and the lands to the west. Although there are enough soldiers to defend the outpost there’s not enough to venture out and mount any concerted action. The Warband will be starting near here.

Tydemouth – A scattered fishing community rather than a village.

Shieldstown – The largest settlement in the Untamed Coast, a walled town fortified with enough troops to form an adequate defence, for now. 

The locations of three camps are also known, chosen from a list of enemies in the book, matched to my miniature collection. There are also three hideouts which are unknown but may be discovered in play, and added to the map later.

I’m looking forward to tracking my progress on the map and adding many new discoveries in time. I’ve printed out the map and will be tracking my location by marking on it in red pen. I love this idea and it really feels like I have a whole land to explore.

The land to the east, known as The Untamed Coast is crying out for help. Evil Cultists summon and bind the dark undead to do their bidding, bands of Gnolls raid farms and attack travellers on the road, and the  Barbarians to the lands of the cold south are raiding more and more.

Resources are tight and the King has few soldiers to spare defending his own kingdom and so the call went out for heroes to assemble and venture forth and help turn the tide.

Few would have expected Kremmel Mortay to answer the call, but Kremmel knew there was ancient arcane knowledge and treasure to be found in the Untamed Coast. He would lead a warband and tame the untamed.

Dar Swordarm was the first to join with Kremmel. Many said Dar was a true hero, always the first to help others, whether to kill the head of a snake cult or destroy a stepped pyramid full of magically maddened berserker men terrorising small towns, he was there saving the day, swinging his huge sword. A good old fashioned hero.

Petra Hopshot and Gregnil Sureshot were both next to join. The team of archers were well known throughout the kingdom. The odd looking couple of a feral and a duskling had been campaigning for years, whether working as scouts for patrolling armies or guarding a town near the borderlands from raiders.

It is unknown how or when the two first met, and why they both left their peoples.  It’s a secret neither of them are ready to tell. They trust each other implicitly as each has saved the life of the other many times.

The four heroes set out on the long road east for The Untamed Lands. It wasn’t too long before they met a man known only as Hands (“Like feet but at the other end of your body”) at town one night, who after a drinking session, found himself signed up with the warband having agreed on a thirst for adventure. 

Not long later a young woman named Kiri begged to join up and be apprenticed to Kremmel. As an act of good faith she presented part of a map with a location of an ancient delve to the north of the Barren Hills in the Untamed Coast. When asked how she came upon this map, Kiri said that it had been in the family for years, supposedly brought back from her great uncle who journeyed there in his youth and barely escaped with his life. This delve had all the signs of hiding some of the very ancient lore that Kremmel was searching for so he agreed to take Kiri on but would bide his time before divulging any of his secrets to her.

Mortay’s Rangers as Hands nicknamed the warband were now six strong and the mysteries of the Untamed Coast was ahead. Adventure awaited.

The rulebook for the third edition recently went on pre-order from the Modiphius site, so, since I’ve been waiting for this from when I first heard about it last year, I didn’t hesitate to go for it. I won’t receive the book for a few months but I did get the full version as a pdf so I can make a start now.

With experience from playing Five Parsecs From Home I knew there’d be a lot of rolling on tables and note taking before I would flesh out results and the story so I bought myself a notebook just for the game. Then it was time to work out my warband.

First I would generate my four heroes. I had a choice of a variety of races and after some thought, and looking through some of my miniature collection I settled on two humans, a duskling and a feral.

Miniatures wise, I’ll be treating dusklings as dwarfs and as for ferals I have a few Burrows & Badgers miniatures which I can choose from.

Next I had to choose backgrounds for each of my heroes which would provide 4 tables each to help shape them. I chose zealot and mystic for the humans, the mystic being a spell caster. For the duskling and the feral I had to choose the outsider background.

I then selected weapons and armour from a limited list, which I did with the miniatures I had in mind to use.

Then I rolled to see what two followers I would get, an outcast drifter and a studious apprentice, which sent me back to my miniatures collection to choose two more suitable models.

Finally I had to select one hero to be my avatar, my representation on the tabletop, around which the warband was based, for that I chose the mystic as I fancied myself as an all knowing wizard. 

From left to right:

Outcast Drifter (follower), an Otherworld Miniatures thief,

Duskling with bow, a Midlam Miniatures dwarf ranger,

Human mystic (avatar), a Hasslefree Miniatures wizard, 

Human zealot with sword, a Hasslefree Miniatures barbarian,

Feral with longbow, an Oathsworn Bunny with bow,

Studious apprentice (follower), a North Star wizard’s apprentice.

As well as painting the six models for the warband, I need to fill out the warband roster sheet and campaign sheet from the notes I’ve made in my book, as well as come up with names for each of our members (and maybe even backgrounds).

There’s a small practice scenario to play which provides no risk and isn’t part of the campaign but helps with learning the rules and the game involves creating  a map of the land where my adventures will take place, which I’ve already been experimenting with.

Fun times ahead.