From Daniel's Games Emporium
Watermarked PDF – $12.63 USD
Softcover, Black-and-White Book – $17.04 USD
Watermarked PDF + Softcover, Black-and-White Book – $18.31 USD
Glutter of Ravens was first published in 1998, and became known as an essential guide to wargaming the Arthurian period. This 2024 Author's Edition is a reproduction of the original text, but features a new layout, additional notes, and the author's new preface. Part One contains a set of miniature wargaming rules designed to recreate and play battles in post-Roman Britain. These rules allow players to take the part of historical leaders, who field an army representing the warriors of their kingdom and fight using the tactics of the period. The rules are fairly simple to learn, and there are no hard-and-fast restrictions governing the size of miniatures used. Part Two will be of interest to anybody who cares for the historical King Arthur and the military history of his time. This part of the book describes the warriors of the period, the way in which battles were fought, and the equipment used by the fighting man of Arthurian Britain.
Important note about the Author's Edition
With the closure of the original publisher, Outpost Wargame Services, Glutter of Ravens fell out of print, so I decided to revive it. I've done this as a labor of love, to keep my vintage book about early medieval wargaming in circulation and also finally make it available as a PDF. It's a "dead system" because I gave the rules a major overhaul when Osprey Games came knocking some years ago; Dux Bellorum (Osprey Publishing, 2012) is a revised and much-changed re-imagining of my original Glutter of Ravens concepts, and I feel that it's a more viable game to play this side of the year 2000. That said, I do think it's worth giving these rules a run out for old times' sake, and I had great fun dusting off this original version and getting a few games in. As with many rules from that time, assumptions are made about the players' knowledge of wargaming in general and their ability to "fill in the blanks" – as a consequence, I do not recommend Glutter of Ravens as a beginner's set of wargame rules, but as an archaic and arcane set of rules for more experienced wargamers to revisit. A major caveat for Part Two of the book – The Resources – is that the content was written a quarter of a century ago and has not been updated. Re-reading it, there's little that I'd say is definitely now "wrong," but so much more has since been discovered about the period and some of my own views have changed considerably. My more recent books present my evolving thoughts on the history of the period.