Creating army lists for Oathmark

The Oathmark rules contain two systems used to build an force for your games. The first is to pick a race and then spend points on units and characters from that list. This is a quick way to play a game but it misses some of the fun of mixing and matching units from other factions. The second way to build an army is to use the Kingdom building systems and create an army for use with the campaign rules.

I don’t find either of those options very good. The first lacks some character and the second requires you to spend a fair amount of time to create a kingdom with the assumption that you will then play campaign games. My experience is that there are a lot of folks that are potentially interested in playing in campaigns but aren’t really interested in doing the ‘paperwork’ that they often require.

Force limitation

There is a very good reason to use the Kingdom building rules in Oathmark. They serve as a force limitation. You create your own ‘army list’ of potential troops and if you want to create an army that has, for example, access to a lot of artillery then you can do so but you forego some other option. The Oathmark author has snuck in a clever way to limit army choice without having to build, and balance, a series of army lists. Or, even better, not limit the types of armies that players can build. Players may often say that the game has no army lists but this isn’t technically true. It is just that you create them yourself. You can match an army list to the forces you have on hand or even create an aspirational list for models you want to build or buy.

The best part of this system is that you don’t need anything more complicated than a piece of paper or even an index card.

Building a list

The army building system starts on page 75 of the main Oathmark rulebook. Ignore the comment about using the Kingdom chart and just write out an army name and then a heading for each of the Tiers. You can even ignore writing out the name of the terrain and just list the units and characters that you get access to.

Here is a recent force list I put together to help determine what models I was going to paint. Lets see if it is legal :-)

# Unit
14 Skeletal Spearmen
1 Skeletal Champion
10 Skeletal Archer
14 Revenant Warrior
1 Revenant Champion
5 Revenant Cavalry
10 Goblin Slave
15 Goblin Slave Slinger
10 Ghoul
1 Skeletal Light Catapult
1 Revenant Captain (Horse)
2 Necromancer 1
1 Necromancer 2

So to create this force we would need the following army list.

Army List

Tier 1

Tier 2

Tier 3

Tier 4

Using the Kingdom building rules this leaves me with three Tier 4 options that I can fill in for any options I want to add. Eventually I want to add some Goblin Wolf Riders, a Goblin Spellcaster and some Goblin Soldiers. That would change my Tier 4 list to:

Tier 4

Implications and impacts

So the first thing you can see from using the Kingdom rules to create an army list is that you have immediate limitations on the number of Champions that you can add to your army. The Goblin portion of the army can only have a single Champion and the Undead force has their Champions split between Revenant and Skeleton units. You also can’t have everything. This list has no access to Vampires, Wraiths or Trolls (from the Goblin terrain list). You can easily build a mix of ‘core’ troops but it is more difficult to fit in Champions and monsters. Champions are important in Oathmark 1 because they are the most cost-effective way to bump up the combat power of a unit. Champions do more wounds in combat and have the potential to kill an opposing units leader making it less effective.

And if I was going to add a Colossus or Living Statues 2 to an army at a later date I would have to find space for the Mystical Stonemasons and Master Enchanters terrain types. The campaign rules have options for this. The Territorial Dispute scenario allows the winner to expand by adding a new terrain to their Tier 5 territories. I haven’t mentioned this tier previously because it starts a campaign game empty and if you are just building an army list for one-off games then it doesn’t have any use. In the campaign game Tier 5 is where you expand and add new units or some of the unique terrain types that were added in the expansions.

No matter what my intentions are I can use this army list to build a force for one-off battles and even use Tier 5 to expand it if I want. I can also use it as a gateway to a campaign.

Army list or stealth campaign?

Earlier on I mentioned that there are a lot of people that would be interested in playing games but perhaps not interested in doing the paperwork and tracking their Kingdom. If you compress the kingdom into an army list you can supply those folks with a list of troops and the point cost and then let them build an army for a game. You track the details on your own, maybe even make the scenario rolls prior to a game, and then your friends, or club members, can fight out the games without feeling like they need to do ‘work’ afterwards.

Narrative versus campaign

The one area where I think that the kingdom/army building system doesn’t work as well as I would want is in the area of narrative gaming or linked scenarios. My own Oathmark rebuilding process has been mostly to create a series of narrative games that I can link into an interesting story for the amusement of myself and my gaming buddies. I am not really interested in a campaign but building a story based on scenario results sounds like a lot of fun. This is something that the Ash & Stone YouTube channel does to great effect. I don’t think that the author uses the core campaign rules but they do use some parts of it to determine if characters survive or units that flee the field are able to come back.

Summing up

Oathmark is a fairly flexible system. I think part of this is because it doesn’t have a lot of complex rules for the Kingdom and campaign system. You can pick and choose the parts you want without having to worry about some critical aspect of the system falling apart.

  1. IMO. YMMV ↩︎

  2. From the Bane of Kings expansion ↩︎