Starting out
Winter in Edmonton is, for me at least, not a time of the year that involves a lot of activities outside my home. So when winter starts to make its impact felt I usually start to plan what my hobby activities are going to be for the upcoming inclement months. I don’t ski, and I don’t really like the cold in general, so the next four or five months are going to provide me with a lot of time to devote to hobby projects.
The plan
Over the many years that I have been gaming I have found that I really like fantasy wargames far more than sci-fi games. And after I started playing Oathmark I discovered that flank-and-rank fantasy games were more my style than games like Age of Sigmar.
I recently stumbled upon a significant deal for an large Undead army. The models are all from TTCombat’s Necropolis Undead range and there are enough figures to produce several different armies for several different systems. There are actually probably more miniatures in the set than I can possibly use.
The games
My plan is to paint two forces and have the figures necessary to use them in several different rule systems.
Saga: Age of Magic
I was introduced to this system by my friend Palmer. It started as, and is primarily, a historical rules system. The developers, Studio Tomahawk, released a fantasy expansion for the game, called Age of Magic, and it is my favourite fantasy skirmish game. The primary reason for this is that it allows you to take almost any set of miniatures and use them in one of the six provided army lists. The lists are thematic in nature and not tied to any particular miniature system. Some of the army lists, like the Undead, are less diverse in the models that you could possibly use. Others, like the Otherworld or Lords of the Wild, have enough scope that you could bring a considerable number of possible model ranges to the table and use them.
Saga is a unique set of rules that focused on the quality of the troops on the field. The core rules are very compact and there aren’t many special rules or exceptions. The Age of Magic expansion adds enough ‘fantasy chrome’ to make you feel as if you were playing a fantasy army without overloading you with rules and abilities.
Oathmark
Oathmark is a game by Joseph A. McCullough so you know that it will have an extensive campaign system. Oathmark has a core rulebook and three expansion books all published by Osprey Publishing. One book adds the Undead to the system but the primary focus of the new books is to add campaign options. If you like miniature campaign games then this is the game for you. Oathmark is supported by a range of metal and plastic miniatures from North Star Figures.
Oathmark is an odd game. It is miniature agnostic but the army lists all make assumptions about the fantasy beasts that you can add to your army. And some (many?) of them are fairly obscure. How obscure? One of them had its Wikipedia page deleted. So the armies are fairly generic and have some very wide overlap from army to army. And then they have fantasy monsters that almost no-one makes miniatures for.
I do like the combat system as well as the simplicity of the core rules but it is the ‘cozy mystery’ of fantasy games in that it doesn’t really give one the feel of playing distinct and interesting armies. It also suffers from the general problem with most Osprey titles in that it didn’t get enough playtesting.
Age of Fantasy
Age of Fantasy is produced by One Page Rules and comes in three different formats. A skirmish game, an Age of Sigmar scale game and a ‘rank-and-flank’ system. All three games are built from the same core rules and the differences are primarily one of game size. Even the army lists for each game are scaled variants of each other. Age of Fantasy is easy to learn and quick to play. It is miniature agnostic but the core army lists are heavily influenced by Warhammer and Age of Sigmar armies.
The Age of Fantasy rules are the simplest of the three games mentioned here and the game leans heavily into the different abilities of army units and characters to give your game some necessary fantasy influence. There are a few generic system-wide abilities and each army usually has a handful of them as well. It isn’t anywhere near as bad as Age of Sigmar though.
Picking a system
As much fun as Oathmark is I am not really interested in playing a campaign game and without that additional game experience there isn’t really enough to recommend it. I will definitely be building forces for use in Saga: Age of Magic and I suspect that Age of Fantasy will end up being the game system I use for larger skirmish type or rank-and-flank games.
Miniatures
Given my recent purchase, one of the forces will definitely be Undead. I have enough figures for a Horde and several units of Warriors. I also have Creatures and Monsters in abundance. There are no painted or assembled models I could use as Hearthguard but there are quite a few Mummy troops with shields and khopesh that could be used as Hearthguard. The Undead army in Age of Magic also uses the Chaos dice set which is a good thing since almost all of the other miniatures I have are Order factions.
The choice of a second faction is a bit tougher. Not because I lack for miniatures but that many of them don’t have a lot of the specialist units that a fantasy army typically fields. It is less of a problem for Saga: Age of Magic since those army lists tend not to make a lot of reference to specific weapons or troop abilities. Age of Fantasy though is heavily influenced by Warhammer and Age of Sigmar and so it tends to require more distinct types of model.
Quite a few of my existing models were built for Oathmark and so are more generic. That works well for core troops but I really don’t have a lot of figures that are anything other than ‘warriors’. This isn’t a problem that is difficult to fix but I want to try to build this force up without having to spend a lot of money. So while I will most assuredly being doing Undead I still haven’t figured out what my second force will be. I would actually love to use my existing force of Halflings and expand it with some models from TTCombat but that would immediately mean adding even more new minis to a collection that has overtaken my basement.