"Legends of the High Seas Review" Topic

Take a look at a comprehensive review of the Games Workshop Historical's Legends of the High Seas at my blog: link

Thanks for the very useful review. Just wondering how many figures per side they're designed to run with?

Regards, Bill.

Good review, thanks!

(Must resist urge to buy pirates and/or musketeers.)

Typically you would start with a crew of 8-10 figures and a small ship then work your way up to a limit of 30 crew per player

Ray,

Thanks or the review, I too was not happy with the internal artwork as well as Pete Borlace who did the layout work as well as the photos.

Tim Kulinski

Hmm,

I hate not being able to edit my post, but what I was trying to say, Pete Borlace & I agreed that the internal artwork was not the best that the artist has done in the past.

Pete did a fantastic job on the layout of the book as well as the photos for the book as well. In fact if another book comes up, I would love to work with Pete again.

Hope that clears up what I was trying to say above.

Tim Kulinski

Hi Tim,

I tried to be as objective as possible in the review. So far, others who have seen the art work agree that they look like re-skinned FPS characters. They are truely bad.

On the otherhand, while we do pay for those, the real content are the rules. I'm curious, though, why LotR:SBG is never mentioned by name. Is there a licensing issue? Can you even answer the question? Perhaps it is an attempt by BL to distance the Warhammer Historical from the fantasy LotR products.

One of the things that I would like to know is whether supplemts for the Royal Navy and Marines is going to be published. I was disappointed that they weren't included in the basic book.

I would also like to see the templates, QRS and rosters available as PDF downloads.

I applaude the work that you and Mark Latham have done adapting the basic rules to different periods. I hope that these rules will keep Rick Priestly's rules from disappearing as interest in the LotR wanes.

Ray: Funny you should mention that… Before I bought LotHS I sent Warhammer Historical an email asking if it was like LoTR. I had seen a stat profile and it looked similar. The response from Rob was "As noted in the introduction to High Seas the game is based on our strategy battle game system that we used in Legends of the Old West and was very popular."

Not having any experience of that system, I told him I didn't know anything about it, but no clarification was forthcoming.

This is not intended to be a slight against Rob, in fact he was nothing but helpful and we exchanged several emails about gaming in which he gave me a lot of good advice.

But I was left with the impression that LotR was strictly off topic!

Part of me has to admire the extent to which GW etc can control what is and isn't said, even down to responses to simple questions. But another part of me finds it pretty creepy!

Fab game though. Talking of creepy, that was my response when I say the artwork… The monkey on page 57 (I think) especially creeps me out.

Finally: My copy of the rules *does* have a crew list for the Royal Navy. And as far as I'm aware, I don't have a special copy!

Thanks.
Chris

Ray,

To answer your question about why LotR was not mentioned, it is a licensing issue, in fact I had to change some of the stat lines to distance it from LotR (Might = Fame, Fate = Fortune). In fact one of my friends in my game group hates when I play LotR I use Fame & Fortune when calling for Might & Fate!

As for supplements, thats up to Rob Broom & WHH, I would like to do another book, but it really comes down to them giving me the greenlight to do another book. I would like to expand the Crew lists to nationalities like French, Dutch, Spanish as well as expand some of the native tribes in the local area. I would also like to add in Corsairs (African Pirates) as well as Chinese Pirates. But as I stated above, it really comes down to what WHH wants to do.

As for templates, QRS and rosters available as PDF downloads, thats something that WHH and Rob need to do and hopefully will get around to posting them.

As for LotR disappearing, I think with the new Hobbit movies comming, plus I know that there are other Legend books planned for other periods (Can you say Samurai?) so it will be here for a long time.

Tim Kulinski

Samurai would be a good choice for this type of game. I'm envisioning Zatoichi or The Seven Samurai. Bigger battles are addressed by a myriad of perfectly capable rules.

Personally, I think it is an error in judgment to attempt to do a mass combat with these rules. Not that big battles aren't possible, it's just that you have to have lots of players to do them.

My friend, Ed, who got me started on The Three Musketeers path, also was the co-GM for a convention LotR game. We had six players and each had about eight or so miniatures. It worked pretty well.

One of our obseverations (we do a post mortem after each convention game we run) was the the LotR:SBG system is virtually unknown and is considered too "simple" by those who haven't played. I think this comes from hear-say coming from people who may have read the rules and misunderstood the depth. As I said int he review, that's an easy thind to do because of the *apparent* evenly matched dice off in melee. However, after our players played a couple of turns and got the feel for the profound affect of (and necessity of) budgeting the expenditure of Might & Fate has on the game as whole. This is a game where one can't take a single mechanic out of the context of the whole game and make any sense of it.

Hi Chris,

I should had mentioned that soldiers are available in the Hired Hands section, but there are no "crews" defined. The Hired Hands are sort of ancillary characters and window dressing for games, but not proper crews. There is no Royal Navy crew. However, it is a simple matter to simply use a privateer crew and give them new titles or assemble an officer, sergeant, and a few soldiers. What would be missing, of course, are the special rules and constrainted composition that defined crews have.

Samurai – that will be worth getting…big time.

Ray,

Maybe I'm missing what your asking, you state there is no Royal Navy Crew listed, there is, but are you asking for more of the Crew listing to be flushed out?

The book has three Crew types, Royal Navy, Privateers, & Pirates.

Tim Kulinski

I'm an idiot (no comments from the peanut gallery please!) the two pages containing the RN crew were stuck together in my book so I kept flipping past them! (again--no comments please!)

Yikes! I appologize for the oversight and will correct the review this evening.

Chris and Tim. I've fixed the review and posted the correction prominently at up front. Thanks to both of you for catching the oversight.

No worries Ray. It is a great review!

>>> Is there a licensing issue?

Smart lad! As you all probabbly (or ought to) understand, it's very difficult to lay claim to ownership of game mechanisms. So adapting the mechanisms used in the LotR:SBG is not a problem. But it's easy enough to understand why the trademarked name might not be mentioned outside of the range of licensed products.

I'm surprised by the comments on the artwork. Jonny had done the interior art and maps for "Hannibal", and I was very pleased by them. Receiving LotHS recently, I rather liked the interior art. It's not Howard Pyle, but it has its own charm.

Allen

Allen,

Jonns work is usually very good, heck look at his portfolio of work. I really like the cover but some of the internal stuff just did not seem like his usual work. In conversations with Jon, he was going to go for a more Howard Plye sort of look, which I was on board for, but it looks like someone else okayed the work as is.

Oh Well, it is still a good looking book IMHO, but I could be biased ;-)

Tim Kulinski

Allen,

On the matter of licenses: I think you might be confusing copyright with trademarks and with license. There is no legal copyright or trademark issue associated with a citation of a product. Rather, I think the case is simply one of terms of the license obtained from New Line. When LotR:SBG first came out there was some discussion of this. GW agreed not to "mix" LotR with their established game systems. LotR:SBG had to stand on its own. Thus the figures are not compatible with WHFB stuff. GW is simply complying with that same prohibition of "mixing" by avoiding a any mention of LotR:SBG in association with LotOW or LothHS.

As for the artwork: I'm not, as many know, a fan of WAB (I assume that's the "Hannibal" reference that you made) so I have no prior experience with this, Jon, of whom you speak. I can only judge the art on its own merit. I actually took a lot of words about how bad the art is out of the review because I wanted to concentrate on the game,rather than the fluff. Truth be told, had I been the producer of the book I would have fired the "artist" and delayed publication. After all, there is the publisher and author's reputations to protect. Indeed, if he intended the illustrations to be a Howard Pyle pastiche, he has demonstrated an incredible lack of insight into the form, balance, and exectution of Pyle. The number and area that these hideous things occupy would have been much better filled with period woodcuts, skrimshaw, historical sidebars and the like. In fact, the art is so bad that I toned down some of the words for fear the the "artist" was someone's kid and I might hurt thier feelings.

The bottom line is that I suspect that the cause of the inclusion of such atrocities is probably production deadlines and market windows. At least that's what I want to believe.