Hello,

Long term lurker here with an idea I would like some feed back on. I have been painting up a storm of minis and terrain pieces for the release of the Terrinoth book. When it came to walls progress in 3D things kinda came to a grinding halt due to the potential of obscuring the battlefield and the cost/usefulness ration wasn't ideal for me.

I propose making 2D tiles of walls out of super thin plywood or chitboard if you got access to it. These walls would have a damage states on the reverse. I was thinking I can print stickers and place them on the wood to stick my art work to them.

Then to counter the walls I would have various 2D siege engines on round bases that can flip for their movement (like in Discwars). You can put your minis that are moving the discs on the disc. It would have various defense dice bonuses printed on them to let the players know what bonuses they are entitled to whilst on base to base contact. Each piece of siege equipment would have a damaged state that would yield less defense or offense in its damaged state.

I really want to make my Campaign more war-game focused giving my players more objectives and play similar to the Farcry and Wildlands outpost raiding style with some of my Runewars TMG minis. I want to give them friendly minion groups of spearmen and crossbow men. I just think it should be more natural to encounter more tribal monsters in various forms of strongholds. It's my first campaign and I do not intend to start this heavy out of the gate but I do intend to slowly progress towards it. I do have 2-1/2 years experience as a player in Edge of the Empire and am familiar with the Vehicle Scale Ruleset in it to give me a pretty good idea how Terrinoth / Genesys will handle the stats for this so I am fairly confident I will come out with something balanced. What I am looking for is feedback on this concept. Do you think its a good idea or how would you handle it differently.

See rock lobber for an idea of what it might look like if you aren't familiar with the now out of print Discwars.

https://boardgamegeek.com/image/1887496/warhammer-diskwars?size=large

TL:DR Discwars style siege equipment in Terrinoth seems like a good fit for walls and siege equipment. Easy to homebrew. How would you do it or do it differently?

Definitely doable, probably a Slow Firing weapon, Inaccurate too, with a decent Blast rating. Use the Vehicle Weapon stuff as inspiration and go for it.

The only advice I would give for your game plan is to not make everything a combat, come up with challenges that require a different approach. And warn your players of the type of game it will be beforehand.

Neat idea- especially on the flipping for moving (you may have solved a problem for me ahead of time), I was toying with having battles and the like including possibly a siege in my adventure, not sure if I will yet but I liked the idea of adding some variety to the campaign so it's not all the same, and for siege items flippable items are probably smarter than cluttering up space with characters around them moving them. Flippables would actually make more sense for doors too as 3d doors as per the game Descent don't have that 'they're open/closed' visibility, even if you get opening ones it gets in the way, so in an RPG what if you want to lock/close it behind you (the best you can do is unbase/rebase it), there's not a visible cue of this on the board. A small flippable could fix this well.

So good thinking!

Would take a bit more effort but for flexibility the discs could have four states (you'd stack two and use/move them as a pair like an upgraded piece in draughts aka checkers) which reflect their current active 'state' and allow for different results / on-the-fly story reactions to different die rolls as well:

Siege weapon

A1- active, stationary, fully functional

A2 - active, stationary, partly damaged thus compromised

B1 - inactive, being transported

B2- inactive, stationary, but damaged or unmanned (there could be the option to repair if it's damaged and repairable or replace a killed operative if that's the problem that put it out of use)

If damaged in transit or when unmanned or already damaged, thus when more vulnerable, it should be considered destroyed and taken from the board

Wall (cleverly allowing for 8 states from 4 tiles with each given the same status in terms of effect as the states can be due to how the wall is built or how in tact/damaged it is if compromised through attack etc- you can build walls of a certain strength level at relative cost or they could already be there in the setting, then degrade them if they suffer damage)

A1 - Extremely strong

A2 - Strong

B1 - Weak

B2 - Very weak or/and Crumbling

A destroyed wall allowing passage / firing through / viewpoint etc is disregarded thus is removed then replaced if repaired/rebuilt. And see X below.

Door or similar security 'path blocker'

A1 - Locked, high security

A2 - Locked, normal security (key or easier to breach security)

B1 - Closed, no lock

B2 - Open, no lock

A damaged door allowing passage / firing through/ viewpoint etc is disregarded thus is removed then replaced if repaired/rebuilt.

X - marker of some sort - Optional: You may wish to put something else there to mark a damaged door/ destroyed or damaged wall to show there's a hole that could be useful, or a structural weakness where too many could make the structure at risk of collapsing compromising the building altogether! (yes that idea came from another game, agh, the fire's spreading rapidly and the roof's started to fall down!). You may also need this if using map tiles or similar that have marked walls to show a gap has been created where there wasn't one.

Maybe don't put the dice on the discs to avoid having to remake them if you ever improve the dice mechanic, and just in case an actual play changes which dice you may wish to use (which could alter with which sides' using them or specific circumstances). You could grade them in other ways if you needed to independent of dice rolls so that you can separately change any dice rules/suggestions without redesigning the tiles.

As to 'is it a good idea?'- certainly- the medieval fits fantasy really well and siege weapons feature in some of the Terrinoth games- the more traditional and more creative such as the stone siege golem in Battlelore (totally using this in my campaign). In fact it feels like a complete Terrinoth experience should bring battle into it somewhere (if you don't want to RPG the battles you can always just include them in backstory- Descent's Heirs of Blood references past battles for example) or have an event that's just a scene in the battle or connected to it- but if as we do you're thinking of exploring the actual battles too that could make for some interesting play- but make it fit the RPG so it isn't too much a wargame, unless that's what you and your players are specifically aiming for, which maybe it is as a big Terrinoth battle could be exciting after all.

Sieges can have some fun thinking/ survival strategy behind them for an RPG whichever side of the defences the PC's are on- who lasts out longest and who's resolve/group breaks first? How does each side keep going?