Saturday, November 24, 2012

Dux Suecia first draft?


Here comes a first draft of some of the changes I made in my migration of TooFatLardies excellent game Dux Britanniarum to Dux Suecia i.e. Civil Wars in Sweden during the 15th century in the shadow of the Kalmar Union.


I and Jonas will run a campaign starting in the may 1466 to capture the struggle between the pro union Swedish Archbishop and Lord Protector Jöns Bengtsson of the of House Oxenstierna and his relatives and allied against the Swedish noble man Nils Bosson Sture of the House of Natt och Dag and his allied that claimed to fight for the reinstate of the disbanded Swedish King Karl Knutsson of the House of Bonde for the 3rd time...

I have tried to make as few changes as possible to the basic Dux Britanniarum rules most often just re-nameing the abillity or rule, like shieldwall are now considered "Close order formation", but it gives the same pro and cons.

Here are some of them that I changed a little bit more...

Welth
Welth was re-name to "Influence" as for us it was more appropriate, as in Sweden by this time you need to have a god influence on your surounding so you could use that influence to gain support from fellow noblemen and even more important the Allmoge. No nobleman could get long without the support of major part of the allmoge...yes, maybe if you got soms support from the Danish/Union King, but that also demanded influence and connectios:) Our Influence works just as Welth rules wise.


Campaign Structure

  • Campaign Seasons: As much of the medievla warfare in Sweden during the middleage was depending of that the Allmoge participated the nobles had to adjust their campaigns to the periods then the Allmoge didn´t have to work the field. This meaning that the campaign year are split in two and there are no campaigning take place during March and April as ther are spring time work on the farms and no campaigning during September or October as ther are harvest and autum sowing.
  • Raiding: In the beginning of the campaign both sides are allowed to condukt raids go gahter Influence to be able to be apointed Hövitsman (Rebellion leader) for the Swedish or apointed Marsk (Lord High Constable) for the Union.
  • Battles: After the Commanders have raise in ranks by using their Influence they have gathered enough strenght to start to conquer the opposition regions by Battles and Sieges. In the end they might be apointed Lord Protector of Sweden or even King of Sweden...

Troop Types 
To get the real swedish flavour in the gaming I also renamed the troop types, so you all have to learn sone Swedish;)

Frälse (Elit)
Frälse (literally ‘the saved’) was the contemporary Swedish term for nobles and churchmen ‘saved’ from paying taxes. There were no more than a few hundred actual dubbed knights ('Riddare') in the entire country. The Frälse units include Riddare, Svenner, militant Bishops (of which there were quite a few), and un-knighted nobles along with their retinues

Knektar (Warriors)
This is the trained soldiers and mercenarys that do the dirty work for the nobles. They are devided in 2 sub-clases.

  • The Skyttar (‘shooters’) were professional soldiers serving as mounted crossbowmen. They relied mainly on shooting and were more mobile than the Frälse, but did not really skirmish. Many of them were well armoured, but rode rather small unarmoured horses. They were often used to ride ahead of the main army to seize terrain defiles. 
  • The Fotknektar (‘Mercenary Foot‘) depicts the large numbers of mercenaries primarily used by Union armies. The mercenaries were often Germans and well equipped with good armour and halberds. 
Allmoge (Levy)
The Allmoge depict the yeoman infantry of Sweden. They were unusually well equipped and effective for non-professional medieval infantry and fought in mixed formations of men with polearms and crossbow-/bowmen. The numbers of polearms and crossbows in the formation seems to have been roughly equal with 2-3 ranks of crossbow-/bowmen and 2-3 ranks of polearms.

Allmoge units varied in quality during the period, especially regarding leadership, so some of them might be uppgraded to Battled Hardened Allmoge, using the stats as per Knektar but are considered Allmoge in regards of Fate cards.

Skärmytslare (Skirmishers)
Skärmytslare ('skirmishers') depict detached small units of mercenarys with handguns. At the Battle of Brunkeberg in 1471, the King of Denmark was wounded by a bullet from a Swedish handgun.

This was a some of the changes we will tryout and YES! the AAR of our first game "Raid on Penningby 1466" are almost finished, will come tomorrow or latest on monday...

Have a nice weekend !

Swedish Allmoge making a Bråte

6 comments:

  1. Love the idea.I am sooo tempted to buy the rules and have a go...

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  2. You have done a lot of work here. Excellent idea!

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  3. Good idea changing wealth for gold, i'm really interested to see how the changes work!

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  4. Keep coming with more, very interesting

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  5. Love what you've done with this. I'm noodling on how to do the same in Westeros - i.e. Stark vs. Lannister or possibly Greyjoy (raiding Saxons) vs. Stark or Lannister.

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    Replies
    1. Hi Wade

      Glad you like my work. Do you have a blog about your Westeros project?

      Best regards Michael

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