"Simon Wally's Medieval Campaign ideas - any good?" Topic

I noticed that on 'Secrets of Wargame design 5' there's an article about medieval campaign. It would be my main reason to pick up the book, can anyone tell me if it's worth reading? Thank you!

Here's the book
link

The name is actually Wally Simon.

Try and find a copy of the old Lamming Medieval rules. There was a campaign system in there that was pretty good.

I've played about a dozen different medieval campaigns with Wally. So I don't know which one Russ has chosen to include. They are fun, and the reason that there are a dozen is because he was always tinkering with them.

Doctor X The Lammings Medieval campaign is now republished by John Curry as The Discovering Wargames Series and Bill Lamming's Medieval Campaign and Battle Rules: Early Wargaming Rules Volume 5

You can order via Lulu or Amazon.

Sorry I have never tried the Wally Simon rules so can't help with the OP question, sorry if I have derailed slightly, not my intention, just following up on a post.

I have had the Lamming Campaign rules for many years. I keep reading them over and over, to see if there is a good campaign there. The problem is they require a lot of bookkeeping. Always wondered if you could make a boardgame of it, and use it for a campaign. I have not seen Wally's rules. They are sure to be interesting, he always came up with cool ideas. He showed my brother and me a baseball game he designed for miniatures. It was awesome. He used individual stats for the players to determine the outcomes of pitches, hits, etc. You positioned your fielders, and based on where the ball was hit and how fast your players were they would try to reach where the ball would land. We told him to find a publisher, he just laughed. :) One of the most inventive guys in gaming.

If it is book keeping that worries you, Wally's rules generally don't require much.

Thank you very much for all your responses!

As for Campaigns, my main objective is to have some medieval flavour nbut not too much book keping since I prefer to focus on the main drive of events. I'm particularly interested in

1 ) a sort of 'cycle' play style where you raise a huge army one turn and the following turn you can't raise that much, because of financial constraints ( typical of medieval warfare ) preferring maybe a smaller raiding force composed by retinues and such. This should give more variety to the gaming, I think.

2 ) a mechanic to generate different scenarios, especially if one of the factions can't raise huge armies and then reverts to a 'shadowing/harassment' tactics which normally would be quite difficult to pursue for larger armies. Difficult terrains should help in this. It's good to gameplay both for variety and for giving a better chance to the disadvantaged player ( although it shouldn't be too decisive, since larger armies are already restrained by point 1 )

About point 2 I would like to avoid an umpire so I was thinking to use the battle generation rules from Standard Wargame Rules ( link ) which has a cool manuever system. I'm also reading some medieval boardwargames rules for inspiration. My main thing to decide is if I want somethjng strategic or more operational in scope.

The old Heritage Knights & Magic had a nice Medieval campaign system.

Bill – you could probably automate a lot of the bookkeeping in the Lamming rules with a simple spreadsheet. Its been awhile since I looked at them but I think they could be simplified.

Charge – thanks but I already own the rules. They also regularly pop up on eBay for just a few dollars.

In #5 Wally Simon's Master Secrets of Wargame Design, the medieval campaign article posits a number of ideas to use to create a campaign instead of a fully formed campaign. You'd have to adapt it to your own preferences. In my comments at the end of the article, I noted it was inspirational, in the sense that when doing a campaign, consider these ideas.

For example, his map is 20 spaces (provinces), but there was no map included in his original article. He chose 20 because he could toss a d20 to bring in 'marauders' that would attack a province…and then clone.

Each turn, a player can choose one of four options: Move, Raise Troops, Build, and Collect Taxes. He does not specify exactly how many gold pieces a town generates or how many construction points a serf creates (presumably one per), but notes that serfs are either assigned to fields where they increase in number, or to towns where they generate construction points to make houses that generate gold.

Simon actually uses individual figures in his example, but you could use units instead of individuals.

As a complete campaign system, it falls short. As a series of ideas to incorporate into your own system, it offers inspiration for a game that he says lasts 'a couple of hours.'

For complete campaign systems (as opposed to ideas), see #4 Campaign Secrets of Wargame Design. Although no medieval systems are included, the ancients article and Dot Wars article can be adapted, and other articles offer a number of systems regarding movement, procurement, and so on.

Thank you Russ! To be honest I already have #4 in my shopping list! I was just wondering if adding #5. Those ideas looks interesting, I love that you must choose only one action per turn.

Wally explored wargame mechanics in his PW Review -- a monthly photocopied newsletter that ran about 25 years that dissected wargame mechanics of established games and created his own.

For the booklets, I cherry picked the articles that featured interesting mechanics, edited the text, fixed any graphics included (not many overall), and added some clip art graphics where appropriate so it wouldn't be a wall of text. You may not use or want every idea, but all of them provide concepts and mechanics worth considering.

Wally Simon was an odd duck and a great war gamer. He was ahead of his time in many ways, and never scrupled to charge for his ideas, many of which were innovative, and interesting. To be fair, Wally had, sometimes, real clunkers, and Wally was the first to savage them and say what a terrible idea it was. Wally also had the central soul of the hobby firmly in his gaze and it never wandered. That was that the essence and main goal of the hobby was to have fun, here, now, right away, and he believed that real war had nothing to do with wargames.

Therefore all his rules were envisioned as mere introduction and invitation to the game, and meant to be, clearly, secondary to the fun of pushing lead around. Wally also believed in playing rules, not to make them work, but to wreck them. That is, he would take an idea or a system and play it till he shook it apart into pieces and push the envelope to where it broke, the reason being that he knew that in games that is exactly what players would do.

You had to like Wally's stuff, and especially you had to like Wally, who could argue for fun or 'realism" as the case demanded, but always he was there for the game.

Otto