(As I had this ready to go, I went ahead and posted it...otherwise, busy busy busy today and perhaps tomorrow)
I am posting this for a short break from my crunching numbers and modifying what amounts to four game systems (I've made no mention of Pike & Shotte, but I will) as it will eventually come to bear on my campaign.
Only a relative few game designers invent completely new mechanics or systems for their designs. Most, from what I've seen over the years, will latch on to something seen elsewhere and then modify and mold it until they can get something out of this process that is useful to their own design.
I am not ashamed to admit that I'm not much of an inventor. I much prefer to take someone's idea of a wheel and tinker with it until I like the way it looks and handles. Thus, this blog post.
In working on a campaign that is intended to be a source for creating all sorts of interesting stories and, more importantly, battles in miniature, from a historical timeline that loosely follows our own, I am going to need to incorporate a means resolve exploration of the world.
I've just recently received a copy of The Conquistadors from Compass Games and while I am very excited to soon set up and play a solitaire session of this game, I also was enamored with how it dealt with exploration of the New World. As an aside, I highly recommend this game for solitaire and multi-player gaming.
The above image is the northern part of the game's two maps, being where the remnants of the Maya and the empire of the Mexica resided at the time that the Spanish conquistadors began to explore this region of the unknown world.
In looking at the map, there are spaces without numbers and then there are spaces numbered 0 through 4. These are very important to the mechanics of exploration in this game, in that they are factors in the likelihood of Spanish finding population centers and even empires of the native peoples.
The rules, which are freely available on their website, as well as at the original Kickstarter page for the game, provide an excellent system for exploring anywhere in a fictional world. Of course, one can quite easily do this by creating a series of tables, delineating the number and size of native populations present, etc., etc. But, this game has already done that.
Not only that, it has a very good system for quickly and easily resolving combat, but as I want to do that with miniature skirmishes and battles the generation of native opponents is what is most interesting to me as far as the conflict resolution.
Now, for my campaign, I will obviously want a way to have my main factions to be able to explore the world around them, to come into contact and conflict with the local population, and then let those events and incidents influence the campaign in ways that are realistic and reasonable. Which is one reason why I do think this game has given me a perfect or near-perfect system for doings so.
The game does have exploration tables, but I will not be posting them here. However, there is a very good example of how exploration works, in the rulebook, and that is below.
What the rule book covers, but this example does not, is that the exploration tables have more than one size of population center, and that a newly discovered city can be a part of an existing native empire. When the natives turn hostile, counters are randomly drawn which have strength numbers on them, and can be double-sided, but not all are. This sets up some interesting scenarios in that a single Spanish force can face a small group of hostiles or accidentally kick a hornet's nest of massive forces, depending on the luck of the draw.
For my campaign, the exploration tables and the method they used for exploring map spaces (the 0,1,2,3, and 4) will work nicely, in that I can have temporary markers on unknown portions of the map, removing them as they are explored or as information about these spaces is otherwise discovered.
Furthermore, I can quite easily allow native empires to fight each other, without needing miniatures for them all, by using this game's combat system. Hopefully, this will cause some consolidation and an increase in strength in the native, should the main factions within the campaign decide to leave them be for a time.
These mechanisms allow for a "Darkest Africa" type of scenario, whether in the campaign's version of Africa, or in its variation of Asia, Pacific islands, and of course the New World.
It is likely I will finally get my game/hobby room back from my son in a few weeks, and once that is so, I will be posting a battle report from this game here.
Note: Although I linked to the maps from the official website, the links were continually breaking over the past couple of days. I had to download them and then upload them for them to, hopefully, stick around.
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