Tony Bath's Ancient Wargaming

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Peltast and Pila - Situation Chart

Peltast and Pila -Morale chart

extract from Chapter 7 Campaign Extras-

Another fairly recent innovation in Hyboria has been the introduction of chance effects. We decided that in addition to all the complications devised by the players, there ought to be certain events outside their control which played a part in the proceedings. Obviously harvests could fluctuate, landslides could block important roads, earthquakes could occur; similarly dishonest treasurers could embezzle funds, riots could break out, and numerous other things could happen. We didn't want to make this too effective but merely to introduce a certain chance element which would occur now and then to generally liven up the proceedings.

First of all we drew up a list of events which came under the categories we thought reasonable, some good, some bad. There turned out to be 16 of these, and I list them below; doubtless if you put your mind to it you can think of others as well.

Plague

Bumper Crops

Religious riots

Efficient Treasurer saves money

Crop Damage

Discovery of new mine

Peculation in the Treasury

Betrayal of enemy spy network

Fraudulent Quartermaster

Success by own intelligence network

Treachery in High Places

Outbreak of Banditry

Forest Fire

Earthquake

Sex Scandal among Nobility

Assassination of important person

For each of these we made a Happening Card, which we shuffled and put face down in a pile. We decided to draw from this pile once a month, so as to strictly limit the number of happenings; and, so as to be fair to the players, since we had at the time Ave power groups we decided to give each a certain number of draws. To make it easier we split the largest, the Aquilonian Federation, into Northern and Southern Aquilonia, so that six areas each had two happenings a year. A simple draw soon decided the "order of play", Northern Aquilonia drawing a card the first month, Hyrkania the second, and so on till all six had drawn, and then repeating in the second half of the year, not necessarily in the same order, of course.

As each month came along, we drew a card from the pile and applied it to the requisite country. First of all a dice was thrown to see the strength of the happening. A six of course made it very strong, a one relatively weak. We then worked out the actual locality of the happening, either geographically or among the characters. Two examples will show the sort of thing. A card drawn for Northern Aquilonia gave us an earthquake, and the dice throw made it moderately severe. By dividing the map into areas (which was already done anyway for other reasons) we settled on the area, and another dice throw pin-pointed the occurrence in Bossonia. We then made quite a thing of this, reporting it in the Herald, starting a Bossonian Earthquake Disaster Fund, etc, and had a lot of fun from it. As it happened, it had no effect upon any military activity, being far away from the fighting fronts; but this was pure luck — it could have happened anywhere.

A second happening card later fell upon Shem and called for a success by their intelligence apparat. This called for rather more work, but some dice throws indicated a happening in the capital of Vendhya, with whom Shem was at war. A look in the diary for the month showed that the Hyrkanian Ambassador to Vendhya was due to die — and Vendhya and Hyrkania were then in a delicate position vis a vis each other, where an incident could spark off war. So, we set up the death of the Ambassador as an assassination, played it up in the Herald, released rumours of Vendhyan plots — and lesser rumours of Shemite plots - and let things take their course. As it happened it didn't push Hyrkania into war with Vendhya, but it did worsen relationships and generally stir things up.

Intelligence systems are of course another item which can be used to effect in a campaign. Spying has always gone on in Hyboria, and in the past I tended to be fairly lenient about this. Hyrkania penetrated Turan early in the war against the Aquilonian Federation, planting spies in all the main towns; these had a number of successes and also a few defeats. They were responsible, for instance, for the successful betrayal of Tadmor, the Turanian capital, which virtually finished Turanian resistance, but they failed in an attempt to burn the Turanian fleet. Until players also set up anti-espionage systems I allowed spies a good deal of latitude; only taking strong action against them under special circumstances. Phil Barker, for instance, allowed himself to be carried away by a desire to "needle" Charles Grant on the occasion when the Hyrkanian fleet suffered damage in a storm and straggled back into port rather the worse for wear. Phil directed that his agents in the port should stick up copies of a scurrilous ballad, and this alerted Charles to their presence. He directed a house to house search and I ruled that Phil's whole apparat in the area was uncovered and smashed.