Otherworld Fantasy Skirmish Trials

Another week and another new game to try, this time it was one with quite an 'Old Skool' flavour, namely Otherworld Fantasy Skirmish Rules.

Kev once again providing the goods in the terms of the rules, tokens and some new mini's from a variety of sources but including Otherworld own range of fantasy miniature's with trial scenario from the rules with a couple of sample bands to try out the rules. Dave and myself being the volunteer guinea pigs to try out.

The scenario was a simple enough raid of some usual bad guy shape TS in the form of an ogre and his goblin and giant minions attacking a village and a band of 'slightly nicer' adventurer types defending the village.

The whole venture was quite enjoyable in a slightly clumping way as we explored the rules but we quickly picked things up with the use of the tokens. Representing everything from spell effects and morale status to special items carried, the tokens certainly making things clear what was going on and eventually speeding play up but I felt took something of the story/RPG/flow from things that typify the skirmish genre and made the event more gamey, 

The game itself was fun in its own right with a simple D6 based system with hit/kill/save format and checks against stats which is pretty familiar.

In the end the Dave and his nasty adventurers managed to fend off the noble ogre and his goblin myrmidions, fairly convincingly as the attackers only managed to burn down one of the four buildings required for a victory, the ogre taken out (fairly early on and surprisingly easily) and several of the goblin crew down with a small compliment of the adventurers down in return.

I salute the obvious attempt to recreate the old D&D style of game in a more up to date format with lots of touches and nods back to its inspiration in terms of spells, artwork and even the creatures and monsters in the rules. (I particularly like the style of the black & white line drawings).

The rules themselves are a nicely produced set with good production values, nice artwork and a good mix of rules, stats, and scenario's and I do like the style of the rules.

The rules themselves as said earlier are simple enough and take up about a third of the 140 or so pages, the next forty pages are taken up with stats on a spread of typical fantasy standard adventurer archetypes and followed by the ubiquitous creatures and monsters and lastly the rest is taken up by the Encounter guide; scenario's and game settings and examples of play and what to do with tokens, adventure cards and the like. I particularly like the 'Against the Slave Lords' scenario featuring an adventure deep beneath the ground in caverns against the file Drow, (ring any bells?)

The game does seem to be set and and designed around a one on one set up with stand alone games and no campaign system which does limit the scope of the rules where much of this type of game use would normally come from multi-player set-ups.

In the end a fun game was had in this trial, and I would like to play again with perhaps a set up of a back story to push on the involvement in the game, but I feel the one-off methodology may limit the longevity of the system. Hopefully some development will be forth coming to expand the concept into a more campaign based setting.