L'Arsenale del Nano: Dark Age Lion Rampant

Last week on the Lion Rampant Facebook group, someone linked a post on Daniel Mersey's blog (the author of LR), in which he suggested how to adapt LR to play with Dark Age warbands. The post can be found here.

Basically the author gave us a table for converting troops types and added some boasts. One very appreciated addition is the "Holy men and Banners" upgrade: costing 1 point and being usable by any unit (except the leader's one), it's a great way to use a spare point.

We decided to test the gameplay, thanks to Paolo, who provided us with his dark age miniatures. The straggle was set in a desertic enviroment and saw a Byzantine Warband fighting some mutinous Vikings.

The Viking warband has been taken straghtly from Mersey's blog, while the Byzantine was improvised. The lists are the following:

Viking

2 Foot Companions* @12 points

2 Upper Class Spearmen @8 points

1 Warriors @ 4 points

Byzantine

1 Cataphracts* @ 6points

1 Mounted Companions+bows @5 points

2 Lower Class Spearmen+mixed weapons+1 holy cross @11 points

1 Skirmishers @2 points

The leaders were respectively Rash and Vulnerable.

The game started with an initial Byzantine prevalence: every unit could shoot, except the Cataphracts. On the Byzantine right flank, one unit of Vikings spearmen and the Warriors suffered the greatest from shoot and were routed. The Byzantine scheme was simple: batter the enemy unit with shoot and charge them with the Mounted Companions.

On the opposite flank, the Cataphract obligatory charge against the Foot Companions proved undecisive. A failed countercharge posed them under severe threat.

The situation seemed almost irremediably lost for the Vikings, when the Byzantine General (me) failed two shoot orders in a row, allowing the Foot Companions to reach the byzantine infantry. The Mounted Companions were repelled twice and the fight degenerated quickly: the Byzantine leader was killed in action (its unit was wiped out entirely) and the table reversed. The game ended with just four units on the table: for the Byzantine a battered unit of Mounted Companions (1 model) and a lower spearmen unit (with their cross helping passing their morale test), against two unit of Foot Companions, both reduced to one man, but still able to rout several enemies. So the Vikings won the match 15-12.

We had a great fun. The mod confirms the ability of LR to manage really well the "medieval" warfare. We are very happy of this mod, which give us the chance to purchase additional armies for a well known and funny ruleset. I'm already tinkering about which dark age army I shall make, since I own any. The aivalable opponents are: Hospitaliers (about XI century), Muslims (Crusaders), Byzantine, Vikings. I'm considering doing a Sicilian Norman army. A mix of Normans and Arabs sounds fun, I like uncoventional - mash up armies. Stay tuned!