Monday 4 March 2013

Art of War Games Campaign Books


Art of War games (publishers of the free Get Some: Fantasy Warfare and Get Some: Future Warfare rules) produce a number of epic campaigns and scenario books that are completely compatible with the GZG's Full Thrust, Star Grunt II and Dirtside II rules-systems. Most of the various campaigns use all three of GZG's rule-books to incorporate Fleet Actions, Battalion/Company scale ground warfare and platoon level ground warfare scenarios.

Most of these scenario books are literally dirt cheap, costing no more than $2 or $3 to download from Wargames Vault and well worth the money, even if you only intend to mine them for ideas rather than play through the whole campaign yourself.

What follows isn't a proper review (as I haven't played through or even read most of these books). It's more an exercise in bring their existence to the attention of people who might be interested.

(Note: You can download the GZG rulebooks mentioned using the links to the left of this article) 
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The Sentai Campaign is published in two parts. Book One details humanities efforts to enlist allies in their war against the Synod. It includes new ships, new units and 12 scenario's for Full Thrust, Dirtside and Stargrunt. Book Two contains a further 12 scenarios detailing additional battles for the Sentai sector.

The Ghost War Campaign continues the story after the Sentai Campaign, and so far consists of no less than 9 separate scenario books, each with around a dozen scenarios.

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The Alpha Centauri Campaign occurs in the same universe as the previous two campaigns, but I'm not entirely sure how it fits into the ongoing story as yet. The campaign involves an intelligence point and a Logistics point system to represent the ebb and flow of supplies and information available to the players.
The various books of the new "Regiments" series each center on the exploits of a single regiment. However, the books aren't quite stand-alone. The later books in the series tend to refer back to earlier books rather than repeat vehicle and unit stats. Even so, the books have a very "Hammer's Slammers" or "Falconbergs Legion" feel to them that should really appeal to a lot of 15mm sci-fi gamers. 

All of these books are available from Wargame Vault.

Probably the biggest issue with these books is whether or not the scenario's are balanced. The books seem to be released at a rate of once a week or so. It's unlikely any of the scenario's have been playtested. Many of them aren't. But I believe that's a deliberate part of the design philosophy. After all, how often does a general go looking for a fair fight?

Edit: I've just learned from TMP that at least some of the photographs used in these supplements are copyrighted pictures which have been used without permission: link

The link also leads to a very interesting review of one of the recently released Regiment books. A second review can be found here.




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