Rebuilding Oathmark

It goes without saying that Oathmark, by Joseph McCullough, is my favourite rank-and-flank wargame. It is also the one game that has disappointed me the most in terms of gameplay. So the news that there is a second edition of the game coming has pushed me to start planning to rebuild my Oathmark armies.

Some thoughts about Oathmark

So before I get into the gist of this blog post I thought I would do a short explanation of why I love Oathmark but don’t play it currently. At its core, Oathmark is a rank-and-flank game that has enough movement and manoeuvre in it to provide strategic choices, characters to add capabilities and options without overwhelming the game and magic. It is a fun system that can create some very fun and interesting narratives. It has more structure than the Age of Fantasy Regiments rules but less additional chrome and ‘fussy bits’ than Warhammer Fantasy.

Also, and I don’t know that this gets said enough, the books for the game are wonderful. Great art throughout and a very pleasing layout and design. Osprey has some fairly generic looking ‘blue book’ wargames but when they want to they can really put out a good looking product.

Sadly Oathmark was plagued with some balance issues. Most egregious was the point costs for the Elven faction that appeared to be about 25% higher than any of the other factions in the game. There was also some minor issues with cavalry and dragons but those really paled in comparison to the Elves. Not a problem if you didn’t have, or didn’t like, Elves but I had a sizeable force of them and quite liked them.

Joseph McCullough also clearly likes campaign systems. I think that this may be an offshoot of the British club atmosphere where you can regularly get a group of players together to play connected, campaign, games over the course of a few months. That isn’t the reality in North America. It is difficult enough to get people here to play something other than 40K or Age of Sigmar. Getting enough people to play an indie game in a month long campaign is, to my mind, impossible.

So between the balance issues, my ADHD medication and a move to a new city, I stopped playing Oathmark and, to my eternal regret, got rid of my fantasy armies.

Once more into the breach

So why, other than the hummingbird attention span of my ADHD, am I contemplating getting back into the game? I do quite like the Oathmark wargame and the idea that there is a possible fix for the Elves and some of the other balance issues is compelling. In fact, if that was all they did then the second edition of the game would be an instant purchase. As well, I have played a few games of Age of Fantasy Regiments and it has made me wistful about all the fun I had playing Oathmark.

Sadly this means rebuilding my fantasy armies. I have some dribs and drabs left from the original armies but not really enough painted miniatures to put onto the table for a game. I also, some time after our move to Edmonton, picked up a huge set of Undead and Orc miniatures. The Undead are mostly from TT Combat and the Orcs are Mantic metal and ‘restic’ figures. Additionally, I picked up some Oathmark Goblin Slaves to use as Skaven slave models for my daughter’s Skaven force. I am not without miniature but I will need to expand the Elf and Dwarf armies that I have so I can field full Oathmark armies.

Planning and purchasing

My original armies were primarily old Warhammer Fantasy figures. They are very nice minis but it was often difficult to fit them into an Oathmark army. Oathmark has a fairly wide range of unit types. Regular warriors, elites, archers, scouts, mounted archers, militia and sometimes mounted scouts. It doesn’t have multiple elite unit types so if you have an Elven Warhammer force with five different types of elite warriors you tend to have a lot of minis that you can’t use. You also tend to not have minis for units like the Elven Pathguard or Hunt Master.

Happily, North Star Figures makes a large number of plastic and metal miniatures specifically for Oathmark. There are metal character miniatures for your wizards, captains, kings etc as well as plastic sets to build most of the troops in the game. And since they are all from the same manufacturer you can mix and match parts quite easily. The North Star miniatures are also the same scale as quite a few historical miniatures from companies such as Victrix and Gripping Beast so you can use those plastic miniatures as fodder for conversions.

As I am 100% the type of person to do this, I have a small notebook with a list of all of the miniatures I have, their status as well as potential ways to use them in games such as Age of Fantasy, Saga: Age of Magic and Oathmark. It makes it easy to track what I need and how to build out boxes of figures to best fit into multiple systems. My Elf and Dwarf armies need the most work. I have two units of Elves left and no character models. I have five units of Dwarves and a handful of character models. So my first task is to get some Elves and Dwarves.

What can you build?

The Elves and the Dwarves have plastic boxes for regular, light and heavy infantry as well as a cavalry box for the Elves. No mounted Dwarves in Oathmark. The infantry boxes contain 30 miniatures and the cavalry boxes have 15 miniatures. Oathmark uses ranks of five miniatures and a 15 troop unit in the game is, except for Goblins, a fairly chunky unit. So a 30 model box can build two large units of infantry. The cavalry box can also be built out into a ten model unit of cavalry and, if you have the parts, some mounted archers. My only critique of the models so far is that the Elven Cavalry don’t have options to let you build them as archers. You either need to use the bow arms from the Elven Infantry or Light Infantry sets. Both the Human and Goblin cavalry have archer options available. I don’t think this is a serious issue though.

In Oathmark an army typically has Soldiers, Warriors and Linebreakers. Soldiers have shields, light armour and a hand weapon. Warriors have heavy armour, shields and a hand weapon and Linebreakers have heavy armour and a two-handed weapon. Oathmark also provides units for different types of archers. Those with armour and those without. So the infantry boxes have armoured troops that have spears, hand weapons and bows and the heavy infantry have hand weapons and two-handed weapons. The Light infantry boxes have all of those weapon options but on lightly/unarmoured models.

The North Star Figures plastic sets are really well thought out and great value. Especially in terms of using them for Oathmark since they so easily break into usable units so well. This is especially important since Joseph McCullough wrote the game to include a range of units for factions like the Dwarves that you don’t always find in your standard fantasy games. It is a nice addition to the options available in the game

What will I buy?

So the plan is (and of course no wargaming plan survives contact with my ADHD) to use my existing Undead and the Goblin slaves as the ‘bad guys’ and to build a mixed force of Dwarves and Elves to try to counter them. I have a serviceable core or Soldiers for each faction so what I need are some Elite troops as well as some lighter troops. I also want to bulk out the Goblins as bit so there may also be a purchase of some more Goblin Slave miniatures as well as some Goblin Infantry.

A Dwarf Heavy Infantry box will get me 15 Warriors and 15 Linebreakers. An Elven Heavy Infantry box will provide the same. Adding a light infantry box for each faction will give me more than enough options for light troops and even the possibility of some Dwarf militia.

I will also need to pick up some Elf and Dwarf character models as I don’t have anything suitable to use for those and I don’t tend to like making them from the plastic figures.

Happily, The Sentry Box in Calgary has almost all of this in stock so I may purchase what I need from them. If not, North Star Figures ships quickly and relatively cheaply from the UK.

Moving forward

While I am waiting for the minis to arrive I can work on rebasing some of the Undead I have. They were originally built for the 9th Age rules and the undead are on these ridiculously small 20mm bases. My only fear is that because they are all resin figures that it might not be practical to rebase them safely so I may need to have them either on smaller movement trays or space them out on trays matching the other units. I suspect that if I can’t rebase them that I will use smaller movement trays so the units at least look properly ranked and not as if they were in a loose skirmish formation.

Lots of work to be done though.