Campaigns or Campains?

Campaign Outline: Scourge of God

by Victor Otto Schmidt

The Scourge of God will be a detailed simulation of an event that has happened countless times in history, namely the visitation of misery and mayhem by well-armed, well trained, ferocious troops upon helpless civilians. In this case, the exact situation will be the ravaging of a pleasant corner of Poland, north of Crackow, by the Mongols in the Thirteenth century. There is a catch, however. The Mongols in the campaign are the rear most of rear-guards to withdraw from Europe after the death of Ogodai Khan. They are therefore under extreme time pressure to grab as much as you can and do as much damage before you must withdraw. The Mongols will be under command of one player.

The other players will each be a semi-independent Polish noble, landowner, or peasant headman. Each will have his own domain, and each will be attempting to save as much as he can.

Cooperation between the Poles will be limited, and players must balance the chance of helping each other with not having enough to defend their own lands, or, perhaps, sending troops on a wild-goose-chase and helping no one and having their domains devastate. Mongol forces will generally be good elite troops, and will usually outnumber the Poles at each encounter. Poles will be average to poor feudal troops backed by a larger number of peasants (armed and unarmed).

Mongol superiority will be mitigated by the need to detach, in each action, small parties of men to raid, gather plunder, burn houses, crops, barns, kill, rape, destroy and generally have a whopping good time by nomadic standards. The Mongol commander will get a points score for each farm raided, tower pillaged, villager killed and horribly mutilated. Creative and picturesque massacres will gain bonus points, but will take precious time to set up.

Generally speaking the Poles will lose every action (from a normal tactical sense) in that each locale probably will be more or less destroyed. Poles "win" by saving enough food and treasure (which the lord will keep from his slaughtered peasants) , to last the winter. (Peasants we can get more of). Players will have the option of making deals with the Mongols on an individual basis, turning over to them various amounts of booty, buildings to burn, food, and nubile young peasant girls for their pleasure. The priests will approve of this provided you preserve their church and they get their cut. If it can be agreed upon, some Polish players may ally themselves against the Mongols and help in attacking other players, taking whatever booty they can get.

To help the Poles the Teutonic Knights and the King of Poland have a small army of Knights which may or may not be involved.

Rules will be an adaptation of Sword and Swill, and a portion of the campaign map is shown. Miniatures will be 25mm.

There will be no economic, social or replacement factors to deal with. What you have at the start of the game is all you get

HOW THE GAME WILL BE PLAYED

There will be twelve battles, and we will generally do one per wargame meeting, which since we meet about every two weeks, means a campaign duration of six to seven months. Each player will have various options, and the options will be different.

    1. Each month the umpire will decide which Polish domain (each player) the Royal Army and Teutonic Knights will be marching to, but he will not tell any player where they are moving. Further.

    2. The Mongol player can only decide to attack, or withdraw. Withdraw means he leaves Europe and the campaign is over. If he decides to attack he chooses in secret one of the six Polish players to attack. He may make up to three attacks in one turn, but he must divide his forces accordingly. He mails in his move to the umpire (it can be on a postcard), noting forces and targets.

    3. Each Polish player may decided to either stand and defend his homeland, or he may move some or all of his forces to another player's homeland to help him defend against an anticipated Mongol attack. All forces not moved to help another noble must remain at home. A Polish player can send forces to only ONE other polish player.

The winner is decided on the twelfth move. If the Mongol player has more booty than ALL Polish players combined he has won. If the Mongol player has not won, then the Polish player with the MOST booty has won.

A point schedule of booty and atrocities will be provided. The Polish player cannot commit atrocities.

IF YOU ARE INTERESTED IN PLAYING
Sign your name below and mail it in.

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Only receipts by mail will be accepted. No fax, verbals, phone calls, or e-mail.

Note: This is a sample outline only. Do NOT send the above form to The Courier or MagWeb.com.

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