"Campaigning the First Crusade" Topic

Our group is looking at running some sort of Campaign for the First Crusade. I am curious what other groups have done for campaigns in this period.

Currently I am thinking that our group of intrepid players will all be playing the Franks. The game itself will handle the Saracen using a modified Tree Campaign approach. I have used a similar approach to a D-Day campaign for WWII. However there are some very key differences that might make the modified Tree Campaign more problematic for the First Crusade; including the issue of a heterogeneous groups for the Saracen which are not unified in their approach to the Franks.

My Plan is to start the campaign with the Battle of Dorylaeum (July 1097) with five possible outcomes in the tree (Saracen Major/Minor Victory, Draw, Frank Major/Minor Victory) and moving along these lines.

First question – Is the Battle of Dorylaeum the best place to start, Kilij Arslan and the attempted relief of Nicaea (May 1097) or even further back Civetot (Oct 1096)?

Second Question – How to handle the Byzantine Empire. Are they like the Saracen in my plan handled by the game or should a player or council of players handle their objectives? There are pro and cons to both approaches.

Third Question – Have people used multiple rule sets to handle different scenarios?
We are planning on using Field of Glory (3rd Edition) as the primary rules for our battles, but are looking at other rules (Outremer – Faith and Blood) to handle Skirmishes and other potential encounters.
We understand the requirement of additional figures but a couple of players have fairly decent sized Skirmish armies for the period and others have fairly large armies based using WRG7 standard.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Respectfully Submitted.
Goldy

Have you looked at Onward Christian Soldiers by GMT. It allows for two, or three to seven players.

Being a card driven board game it has plenty of period flavour, balanced (?) forces and all your campaign rules. Not to mention a very beautiful map.

I bought it some years ago, with a miniatures campaign in mind, following a highly successful 2nd Punic War campaign using the board game Hannibal – Rome Vs Carthage (which has very similar game mechanics) as the campaign system.

The only thing you need work out is the problem of 'force to table and back again' when combat occurs. Obviously, playing the board game a couple of times with the players before the campaign proper will help you evaluate what combats would look like, and the players will understand how you are making your decisions.

Adjudicating results back to the map post battle will be the hardest thing to do. If you've played the board game you'll know the general spread of possible results so you can use that knowledge to simply declare what the board game result would have been – remembering that table results are almost always more bloody than board game results so the on table result often needs toning down for board game balance.

You can see my Punic Wars campaign reports (x 30) here:

link

S&T had a multi-player game of this as well.
One of the features of the campaign is the in-fighting amongst the Crusaders (who would also seek alliances with Byzantines, Armenians and – later I think – Moslem factions). I don't think actual combat occurred, but certainly going after individual objectives (Antioch, Edessa, gaining leadership by 'discovering' relics) caused severe disruption to the general effort.

It will be hard to get players to reflect the complicated Byzantine-Crusader interaction.

We don't have the right religious or social attitudes.

My suggestion would be to start with the battle for Nicaea. It involves most of the major players and is essentially the jumping off point for the whole campaign. The Turkish garrison could be given several options. Wait for a Turkish relief force to drive off the attackers, surrender to Alexius and be treated courteously, negotiate a deal with one or more of the Crusader leaders, or be sacked by the Crusader host. Obviously if you followed the historical story, Kilij Arslan totally underestimated the fighting capabilities of the Crusader forces after his destruction of the "army" of the People's Crusade. I think it would be interesting to start there and see if the smaller Turkish force could inflict enough damage on the much larger Crusader army to give them an advantage down the road.

As to the Byzantine problem, I think it would be pretty interesting to play it out historically. Alexius needs to regain territory lost to the Turks, but still has not finished re-creating the Byzantine army. The Byzantine player needs to regain lost territories however he can. I would think about making the Crusaders reliant to some extent upon Byzantine supplies for the campaign. This would provide an interesting dynamic I think.

I organized a 1st crusade campaign at my club. Players had a faction and a personal secret goal. I was the umpire and had 5 franks and 4 muslim players. The strategic part was played like a kriegspiel.