WHAT 1st Encounter – Part 1, The Set Up

Two Hour Wargames has released a new set of Fantasy rules – Warrior Heroes Adventures in Talomir (WHAT). To be honest, I was about to sell off my entire fantasy collection – miniatures, terrain, rules, novels, etc. I’m at that age where I’m having to downsize a lot of things. However, when I got wind of this new rule set, I was inspired to give fantasy another go. I’m afraid I still have to get rid of a lot of things, but in place of mass battles and large skirmishes, I can play a RPG instead.

WHAT can be played on a 3′ x 3′ tabletop or on a battle board. I found some really neat battle mats, The Dungeon Books of Battle Mats from Loke Battle Mats. You can purchase these at your local game store or at various on-line game stores if you don’t have a FLGS.

Each book has 40 pages of battle mats and you can put them together to build a 2′ x 2′ table top. So in effect, I have the best of both worlds – I can use a page as a battle board or several pages as a table top. Here’s a sample of two of the pages:

After a cursory read through of the rules, I’ve decided to play a one off encounter to show case what has changed from the older versions and how this game flows. The encounter that is asked about the most on the forum and Facebook groups is the Dungeons Encounter, so that’s the one I’m going to play first.

In all of the previous Two Hour Wargames rule sets, only a portion of Talomir, the fantasy world setting is used, the notable past exceptions being Warrior Heroes Warrior Kings, Warring Fleets and Rally Round the King. WHAT has the stats for every major nation in the Talomir setting. I’ve chosen to set my Dungeons Encounter in the countryside of Entoich. In my mind, my adventurers have been traveling across the southern lands of Talomir to reach Mare Tropilii, the Tropilium Sea. But, they ran out of money in Entoich and need to replenish supplies and fill empty stomachs before getting to the coast of the inland sea. I’ve deliberately chosen a Black Moon aligned country and have a few Black Moon adherents in my party, because I want to try out the new Magic Power rules which seem to make Black Moon magic casters more powerful.

I’ll do a separate post on the members of my group with their back stories and game stats. But here they are:

Bhoma Yasmu, the Star, was born at sea to Kurinthian Pirates. At two months old, she was orphaned and adopted by an Amazon Captain. She grew impatient waiting for promotion in the Asterian navy, so she and a couple of friends left Valkae for Kurinthia where she recruited the rest of her band.

Now that I have my party of heroes, I need to determine who will be their dungeon opponents. I rolled on the Big Bad table and the result was a six. So I go to that row and discover the dungeon lowlifes will be wererats! The dungeon minions will be – wererats! More wererats? Okay…. And the Big Bad of the dungeon is wererats! Wererats? Really? Okay, I see that this dungeon is one where the Star and her band are overrun with wave after wave of wererats. But, with a little imagination, I can do something a with a little more variety.

The lowlifes will still be your common wererats, but the minions will be a wererat specialist with his entourage. One will be a Pack Master driving a swarm of slavering mutant rats; another will be a Caster with Beastman bodyguards, and a third will be a wererat officer with his guard. Finally, the Big Bad is a Rat Ogre. The stats of these dungeon dwellers will appear in detail in another post.

Before I can begin to play the encounter there are a couple of things I need – dice and a deck of playing cards:

And here are a few things that are nice to have, PEF & Party markers, OOF & OD markers, & dungeon room loot:

I’m going to call this encounter “The Usurper’s Haunt” – it takes place in the dungeons of an abandoned temple where an ancient King – Muwali the Usurper was assassinated. So, the next two posts will detail the Star and her band and the Rat Ogre and his followers. Then we’ll set up the battle mats and play the encounter.

There is one new thing I would like to try at the end – I going to attempt a Quick Strike AAR video using the format from Little War TV – I’d like to learn how to do this and perhaps enter a Nuts! battle in the competition toward the end of the year:

I hope this takes off – nothing is more boring than a 90 minute to two hour battle report video. Also, if I get good at it, I can use this format in place of word intensive posts. What do you think?