"Brush War campaign for all wargames now available" Topic

Brush fire wars, low intensity conflicts, proxy wars.

Whatever the name, military action in third world countries has been a common gaming style in war games campaigns.

This supplement gives you all the tools to run a narrative campaign set during a brush fire war.
As the leader of your country, lead the nation to victory or a bloody, drawn out quagmire.

Within the pages you get the nation generator (previously published) and the brand new military generator, both allowing you to set up your own imaginary nations and forces.
You also get a simple campaign system that will help you generate the background events and narrative to act as a backdrop for your tabletop games.
The campaign puts you in the role of El Presidente, trying to steer your nation through a brush war.

Not Just a Brush War is system-agnostic, bolting on top of any cold war or modern war games system of your choice.
You can even switch systems mid campaign without having to restart your campaign.
If you liked AK47, this is for you.

42 pages, 5.99. Available now.
link

No questions but a ton of people are buying it.

So that's good but if you have questions, I am good answering them :)

Very cool!

Bought it and think it's great : )

Weasel, if you want questions you'll have to start being a lot more vague in the rules you write ;)

I bought it right away and love it – I wish this was available 20 years ago when I started some brush fire war imagi-nation campaigns.

I'm looking forward to seeing what you do next.

Aw, thanks guys :-)

Purchased it, and it looks good!

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What rules recommendations do folks have for playing games using these campaign rules?

And what companies sell 28mm figures for this era?

Thanks for buying!

I imagine a lot of people will do Force on Force but anything should work.
If you set things in the late 40's / early 50's, you could even use ww2 sets, like Crossfire.

I might suggest No End in Sight or FiveCore but then, I would do that, wouldn't I? :-)

Can't help you with mini's though, since I only game in 15mm and below.

Saw the "Not Just A Brush War" campaign rules on WargamesNews.org, and then ordered them from Wargames Vault.

So with "No End In Sight" and "FiveCore", can we have a brief explanation of what these two systems are like, aimed at, how they are different, etc.?

GamesPoet –

Broadly speaking:

No End in Sight is platoon skirmishing. A typical game is a reinforced platoon.

FiveCore has three versions aimed at controlling a squad, a company or a whole brigade (individual, squad and battalion stands respectively).

If you had to pick out what each game is "about", the key features in NEIS is how far you can push your squad leaders, the constant difficulty of moving around on a modern battlefield and relatively low casualties outside of close assaults.

FiveCore is "about" making difficult choices each turn (You can always do something, but never all the things) and features a combined firing system where one roll will tell you whether the target is now heads down, running away, onthe ground or out of action.

FiveCore plays quicker and NEIS has a bit more of a "military" feel.

Both has solo options, campaign rules and all that nice stuff.

Does that help?

Yes, thank you.

So NEIS is a skirmish systen only, while FiveCore has opportunties to use as a skirmish, mid sized fight, and large battles. With FiveCore and at the skirmish level (individual figures), can their be more than one squad on the table, say two or three per side, with each player on each side commanding a squad or more?

Cheers.
A full platoon might get a bit hectic, though I know at least two groups that did it with multiple players.

Each player had anywhere from 5-10 men and took their turns individually.

So if players 1 2 and 3 are on one side and A B and C are on the other side, they'd go 1A2B3C each turn.

If you want about a platoon or so each, with some support, I'd probably guide you towards NEIS since it starts right at that level.

FiveCore has the advantage though that if you want to play with squad or company stands later, you don't have to learn a new game.

Just finished reading "Not just a Brush War".
How inspiring! Lots of great ideas. I'm busy making notes to relaunch my African imagi-nation campaign.

Inspiration is the name of the game. Glad you liked it!

Ah, so it sounds like NEIS could work better for multi player games, good to know. Not sure how many multi player games I'd see happening, yet with multiple nephews possibiliy wanting to join in on the fun, perhaps NEIS is the way to go.

And yes, I've finished a first read through of "Not Just A Brush War", and it's got me looking for and at miniatures for possible imagi-nation type concepts to enjoy at some point.

If I remember tonight, I can do a quick write up on the turn sequence and you can see what you think.
I had one but it seems to have vanished

Dang it Ivan, I still haven't picked this up, maybe Wednesday (tomorrow is baseball practice)…

GamePoet – Might I interest you in 10mm?

Pendraken SF from the Falklands range.

Pendraken French Indo-China.

Pendraken Vietminh.

Pendraken Aussies from the Vietnam range, with a VC RPG gunner.

Pendraken Brits from the Falklands range, very useful with helmets and berets, SLRs, MAG-58s.

Minifigs Special Forces.

Minifigs WarPac troops.

Pendraken Falklands Range Argentinians.

Minifigs Insurgents.

Minifigs French.

Some of my favorites: Minifgs Aussies (look at those packs!).

Minifigs Brits (love the machine gun).

Well, there's enough to give you an idea of what's out there and avaible for Brush War stuff. Cheap, easy to paint = quick to get on the table.

V/R,
Jack

SLR's and berets could work wonders for a ton of different "El Presidente's Royal Democratic Freedom Guard" type of units.

Wow Jack, nice figures! If I wasn't already a 15mm guy I'd be tempted

If I remember tonight, I can do a quick write up on the turn sequence and you can see what you think.

That could be interesting to see.

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As for those 10mm figures, I'm more of a 25/28mm kind of guy … lol. But those do look like a very good collection of figures. : )

I've been considering Empress Miniatures Modern line … link

Oooh! And I like these Gripping Beast figures … link

They have 28mmm Argentine & British Troops for the Falklands Conflict, as well as Mercenaries, U.S. 1990's Rangers/Delta Force, and African Militia.

The eternal scale question :-)

I find the smaller scales make for a nice "additional scale" or side project.
For me, cost and space is the bigger factor though. You can squeeze a lot of 10 and 15mm guys o nthe table.

Of course, sharing terrain is always nice too.

How big games are you looking to do?

I mostly do 25/28mm. With the imagi-nations style that I'm hoping to do, the idea is to have small skirmish style fighting, maybe 10 to 30 figures per side. I already have terrain for this scale, and prefer the visual scope of these size figures.

yeah, at that scale, that makes a ton of sense.
You can get more character out of them :)

My terrain is 15mm. So every new project of mine is always 15mm. :)

One question from my first read through – when rolling for the actual tech level of things like tanks and aircraft, is the technological base year the nation's tech level/year or the year of the setting?

Using the initial example for calculating the nation's tech level, the setting was 1970 and the nation ended up being 11 years behind, so 1959. The way the tanks and aircraft are determined could mean they're 30 years behind (at an extreme), so you could have 1929-era tanks/aircraft fighting in 1970!

Its post war so you could justify having a base date of 1945. Obviously later the 30 years is not so weird. I think T54's are close to being a 70 year old design and Dakotas even older.

Boy – it's based off the national tech year.

At the extremes you can get stuff that is far out of date. I might interpret those as essentially not having armoured forces but the later you go, the more old stuff hangs about.

As Max says, setting a base year isn't a bad idea either. I may add that as an option.

Thanks, those ideas make sense.