Skip to main content

Yo Ho! More 'Blood & Plunder'!


About a week ago we asked Peter Megginson to reprise a Blood & Plunder game for some of those in the Scrum Club who were unable to play in our recent foray with these rules. Steve Braun and Josh O'Connor both have the summer months off from work and live close enough that they joined in for a rare weeknight wargame.

Peter had taken note of my earlier write-up in which I expressed a desire to try out the Blood & Plunder ship rules to see if I could appropriate and adapt them to the sword & planet skirmish game I'm working on that will feature lots of airship battles and boarding actions in the skies of Mars, so for this game he concocted a scenario that would allow us to do just that. Steve, Josh, and I each helmed a pirate ship sailing toward a Chinese fort full of spices we hoped to plunder before the other had the chance. Peter gamely played the Chinese spice hoarders.

One of the highlights this particular evening occurred by happenstance: Peter brought a shore mat but had forgotten to pack his ocean mat. This allowed me to offer up for use the combined shore-and-ocean mat I had commissioned shortly before the pandemic. It had yet to make it to the table for any gaming, so I was excited to see this hand-crafted mat in action.  

It was good fun, and the ship rules would work well enough transplanted to Mars with some streamlining and tweaking. I'll definitely look elsewhere for the skirmish rules, though: I want something that is focused more on man-to-man combats rather than unit-on-unit, which is how Blood & Plunder organizes its fights. I'm a little surprised that the rules eschew swashbuckling and derring-do in favor of the more abstract (and traditional) five-man squads being thrown into battle. The latter allows the game not to bog down, but it definitely feels less thematic.

Here are a few photos of the game, more to capture the spirit of the night than serve as an actual after-action report. My wife Ellen, our Scrum Club's official combat photographer, had the night off, so these photos are by me and Peter. (Click on any of them to enlarge.)

Blood & Plunder

Peter setting up the game and explaining the scenario. Peter and Steve both got in character with some piratical garb.

Josh (l) and Steve (r) setting up their ships.

The Chinese fort...

My ship and crew.

I played the French again, which gave me an excuse to shout out French clichés in a bad accent. "Sacre Bleu!"





Some Fistful of Kung Fu miniatures got press ganged into filling out the garrison.


My captain (red coat/yellow sash) on deck with his gnarly crew.

Steve and his ship lunging through the waves toward shore.



That textured terrain sure looked sweet.

Closing Thoughts and Parting Shots

I made a truce with Steve right from the start to not exchange cannon fire with him so that I could concentrate on getting to shore unmolested and attack the Chinese fort. He and Josh had no such agreement and spent much of the game blasting one another. I did eventually get to shore and started taking shots at the men in the fort, but the hour was late, and everybody had to start their treks home before we could lay proper siege to the fort. Ships move a bit slowly in Blood & Plunder, which makes sense in terms of keeping these vessels engaged with each other and not speeding off the play table. But my truce meant I was doing nothing but inching my way toward shore for most of the game, which was less than thrilling for me. Next time if I'm in a similar situation I'll just let loose with a fusillade from the start and let the chips fall where they may.

A special thanks to Peter for bringing all of his gear over for another great evening of gaming and holding our hands through the rules. I always appreciate it when somebody graces my table with all of their amazingly crafted figures and terrain, and Peter does it up right!


============================================
==========================

Labels:

Comments

  1. XanderJuly 30, 2021 at 6:42 PM

    Oh man, I would play your B&P Skyships of Mars game in a heartbeat! I would love to help playtest, if every you look for outside advice (I'm on the west coast, sadly!). You think it'll stay a homebrew game, or be something you might bring to Kickstarter or otherwise publish for reals?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Joe ProcopioAugust 3, 2021 at 10:22 PM

      Thanks, Xander! I'll definitely post more about the planned Mars game here. I'm currently working on and playtesting a set of rules for a competitive dungeon crawler that I'd probably try to publish first, but if the Mars rules felt interesting and fresh enough, I'd be open to trying to publish those, too (and looking for playtesters when the time is right). Keep in touch!

      Delete
  2. caveadsum1471July 31, 2021 at 7:24 AM

    Great looking game and it's still fun shoving figures around the table in good company, even if you don't get to a conclusion I find! I have a possible pirate boat under way and might end up doing something along those lines,your matt looks ace and I am basing up some ancient (circa 1979!) Figures, painted by teenage me,repurposed for frostgrave!
    Best Iain

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Joe ProcopioAugust 3, 2021 at 10:27 PM

      Thanks, Iain. And sage observations, for sure: if the company is good, I can push around almost any figures and have an enjoyable time of it. That's great to hear about pulling out some of your older figures for Frostgrave. Hope you post about it on your blog! I, too, have had the itch to start painting some of the figures I bought in the early 1980s as a young teen...most of the sculpts still have much charm, even if the 25mm scale doesn't perfectly match up with the bulk of my collection any more.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Well-thumbed posts

Take the High Road: Making Cheap and Easy Dirt Roads

I have wanted some good roads to add to my games for a while now. My first attempt was a couple of years ago when my standards were a bit lower and I wasn't sure how much I was interested in investing in this new hobby. I bought some PDFs of cobblestone roads that I sized, printed, and glued to felt. The result was okay, but the way my laser printer  produced the roads ended up being quite reflective to the point of almost being glossy looking. The combination of glue, paper, and felt also meant the roads had a wavy consistency and almost always curled at the edges. I used them once or twice but was never happy with them. My sub-par first attempt at making roads for my games using felt strips, glue, and printed designs. You can see how shiny and how wavy and curled at the edges they turned out. I never felt good about putting them on the table for our games and eventually stopped altogether. I've been meaning to take another crack at making some roads now that I have...
17 comments
Read more

Playing with Yourself: 'Rangers of Shadow Deep' vs. 'Sellswords & Spellslingers'

As the year crawls to an end, I'm looking through this blog and noticing a couple of posts I started and never finished. This is one of them. Back in July 2019, I placed the photos on the page, jotted down a few bullet-point placeholder notes, and then never actually went back and wrote anything to post.   The post was meant to be my informal review of Rangers of Shadow Deep after my first game of it with Josh O'Conner, who set it up for us to try in his basement. I think I never finished this post because I was not very impressed with the game but I knew Josh was, and we hadn't been gaming together long enough for me to be sure my candor about the game wouldn't hurt his feelings and sour a budding gaming friendship. I consider Josh more than a gaming friend these days, and so I'll go ahead and post this with some very short notes fleshing out the bullet points I had left as a reminder for myself back in 2019 (at least the one's I can still decipher the ...
2 comments
Read more

Candid Photos From "Conan the Barbarian" (1982)

This post is barely gaming adjacent, but the Conan stories have informed much of my fantasy gaming since my first forays into the hobby. I've seen the John Milius adaptation more times than any other movie (probably over 50 times, though most of those viewings were on VHS or HBO as a teenager). The 1982 Conan  film was the first R rated movie I saw in a movie theater (age 12). The first convention game I ever played in was one in which I played the barbarian himself. The first convention game I ever ran as game master was an adaptation of Howard's "Beyond the Black River." For good or ill, I've spent a lot of time in that fantasy world. When I stumbled on an online trove of about 400 candid photos from various sets of Conan the Barbarian shot by somebody on the crew, it was oddly visceral for me. It generated a warm feeling getting to see these actors and sets from new angles, both in character and out, in situ and behind the scenes. Seeing Sandahl Bergman, Ge...
1 comment
Read more

Lost Art of D&D No. 2: Games Workshop's Holmes Basic (1977)

After Games Workshop attained the license to print a co-branded edition of TSR's 1977 Dungeons & Dragons basic rules book, they set about putting their own stamp on it, designing a new cover and replacing a number of the illustrations they deemed too crudely drawn for their U.K. market.  The cover art was by John Blanche at the very start of his career as a fantasy illustrator. Blanche went on to be a mainstay at Games Workshop, producing countless illustrations for them. His fannish enthusiasm for the material--as an artist as well as a lifelong gamer--has deservedly made him a favorite over the decades. I first encountered Blanche's work in the David Day compendium, A Tolkien Bestiary (1978), to which he contributed five illustrations that sit comfortably alongside the book's chief illustrator, Ian Miller. I have a special fondness for this book, having coveted it as a child during my incipient Middle Earth fixation. My parent's procured an out-of-print copy of t...
4 comments
Read more

Scrum Con IV: In Your Face!

The Second Saturday Scrum Club rejoined the fray on April 8, organizing and hosting Scrum Con IV in Silver Spring, Maryland. Although we ran a surprisingly successful virtual convention in 2021 that took advantage of its online format to invite all sorts of participants we couldn't have otherwise (Dirk the Dice of Grognard Files  in the UK ran a game, and I interviewed wargame/RPG historian Jon Peterson via livestream ), Scrum Con IV marked our return to an in-person format. Because  Scrum Con 2020 ducked right under the pandemic lockdown on the last weekend of February that year, we were anxious to see if anybody would remember us. Turns out any fears were misplaced...because Scrum Con sold out again this year! In fact, every in-person convention we've organized has sold out, but this year's Scrum Con IV was almost 70% sold out of its 225 badges in the very first week, a pace that frankly caught us off-guard. About a week before the show, we had sold enough badges that...
5 comments
Read more

Chainmail: Battle of Emridy Meadows

In my imagination, Chainmail has always been that shadowy precursor to Dungeons & Dragons that I was both intrigued by yet leery of. I loved the idea of a game involving mass battles in a fantasy setting akin to those depicted in the The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings , but I also had a sense that Chainmail , released in 1971 a mere year after I was born, was likely a clunky wargame that would be too frustrating to bother mastering. It also didn't help that my first inkling of its existence was around 1980 or so when I could never dream of amassing the miniature armies needed to play out these massive conflicts. No, back then I was pretty sure Chainmail was the province of grizzled old grognards who had started wargaming before I was even born. Even after my gaming rebirth decades later in 2016, I was fine with letting the dim past remain so, and was more than content during my first couple of years back in the hobby exploring rules of a more recent vintage and managea...
9 comments
Read more