Walk the Battlefield

A Couple of weeks ago I got another opportunity to visit one of my favorite English Heritage sites, Battle Abbey in Sussex. This was the site of the Battle of Hastings on 14th October 1066 in which the Saxon King, Harold II, was defeated and killed by the Norman Duke William II.

Back in October last year I wrote about a previous visit to the battlefield and how important I felt it was to see the landscape first hand. I still hold with this view even though the landscape has been significantly altered in the intervening 944 years. For a start the crest of Senlac Hill - where most of the hard fighting took place and where Harold met his end - was leveled off by the Normans to build the Abbey. The surrounding lands have also been drained and farmed in a way that obscures the natural obstacles Williams army faced. In particular the coastline was radically different and the whole area was in fact a peninsular surrounded by water and marshland.
For me this puts a whole new perspective on the hurried action of Harold when he learned of Williams invasion. Many books I have read describe Harold's decision to force march his troops south and engage with the invaders to be reckless. Plenty of armchair generals have said he should have waited for fresh reinforcements before attacking or should have fallen back on London to buy more time for defense. But I suspect Harold saw an opportunity to contain the Normans and dictate the conditions of battle. I think he made the best decision he could given the conditions and was just unlucky with his dice rolls.Standing at the bottom of Senlac Hill looking up towards the Saxon position its clear what an excellent defensive location they held against the invader. The battlefield tour takes you around the perimeter of the site, then up the long slope to the abbey itself. Walking up this slope is an effort, even when not loaded down with armour and weapons. No amount of maps, books and TV documentaries can illustrate the geography like being there for yourself.

If you get a chance to visit a battlefield I strongly recommend it. It may change your perspective of events and challenge some of the conclusions in your history books.

Minions in 4E

Today I have a Guest Post by The Evil GM on a subject close to his heart.

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D&D 4th Edition introduced a new class of monsters, minions, creatures with only a single hit point designed to be slaughtered in droves by the heroes. Now my first impression when I heard about these was “Not in my game!” Foes with one hit point, killed by even the meanest attack seemed utterly pointless to me. My players will confirm I prefer to pitch them into tough battles that force them to think and work as a team, so pitting them against foes designed to have a glass chin just seemed wrong. OK, they are slightly tougher than the one hp would suggest – a missed attack never kills a minion, so if they are in the blast of a fireball they don’t take half damage if it misses them, but still their low AC and defences mean most in a blast will be killed.

However the more I read and thought about them the more interested I became. While of limited use in many situations, they are perfect for those scenes when the PC’s have to cut their way through large numbers of foes to reach their goal – the enemy wizard, the coven opening a portal to hell, the grand vizier etc. ‘Normal’ 4e monsters of an appropriate level would be too powerful in large numbers, and while it is theoretically possible to simply use lots of lower level foes, in practise this doesn’t work so well. Their ‘to hit’ bonuses are so low that they rarely threaten the PC’s, while their AC and defences are poor enough that they get hit almost every round, so it just becomes a boring exercise of hacking away hit points with no real danger. Minions by contrast are designed to actually threaten the PC’s in combat and have the potential to damage them (not much, admittedly, but the cumulative effects add up) and generally have sufficient armour that, while still relatively easy to take down, they will survive poor dice rolling. And of course if they can outflank the party and get to the ‘squishes’ at the back they become a real threat, preventing the wizard from casting, tying the archer down in melee, and even a minion can coup de grace a fallen hero. The clincher for me is that they are so ‘cheap’ - as a rule of thumb between four to six minions replace a ‘normal’ foe, so by replacing a two or three normal ‘grunts’ you can have around ten to twelve more monsters on the battle map – worth it if only for the panic in the players eyes before they drop the first one or two to confirm they are minions!

In practise I’ve had mixed results with minions, initially employing them in a nice tight group thinking there was safety in numbers – until a single area effect spell decimated them all... But over time I’ve begun to use them better, spread out and attacking from two or more different directions, trying to hit softer targets and leaving the parties melee champions to the enemy Brutes and Soldiers, going after non-combatants etc. A different mind-set is also important - at first I’d think they were a waste of time when they dropped like flies, being wiped out in the first couple of rounds, but then in discussion with the players I realised they were taking up the attention of key party members and forcing them to utilise valuable resources to counter them. Now when they get wiped out en mass I’m perfectly happy as that’s exactly what they are supposed to do.

But all of this is irrelevant when compared to the key measure – do they make combat more fun? In my view definitely, fun for me in being able to stage a larger scale battle and fun for the players as their PC’s carve a bloody swathe across the battlefield. Of course the real fun will come when one PC suffers the indignity of being ‘dropped’ by a minion! The ribbing will be brutal...

Lashendene Air Warfare Museum

While I was on holiday I had a chance to visit the Lashendean Air Warfare Museum near Ashford in Kent. This museum is on the site of a wartime airfield that still operates today. Indeed the day I went there were several plane loads of skydivers getting ready to jump out of perfectly good aircraft... for fun!

Photography is by prior permission so I emailed a few days in advance and was duly told I could take pictures.

This was a very interesting museum with everything laid out in an organised and informative way. All the artifacts were carefully displayed and the individual stories associated with them presented in an interesting way. Some museums bombard you with loads of reading and frankly can be a little boring. Lashendean however presented enough information to make the 'story' easy to read.

I also thought there was an interesting selection of artifacts on display, from parts of recovered aircraft to models and personal memorabilia.

Big Picture : Gathering of Warbirds

This picture was taken just a week ago at a special airshow at North Weald Aerodrome. The Gathering of Warbirds and Veterans event brought together over 20 vets from the Battle of Britain (from both sides) and some of the aircraft they flew.

From The Big Picture

The weather was a bit grim, with drizzly rain off and on all morning. But despite the weather aircraft were arriving all day, including these four Spitfires.