Monday 28 May 2012

Converting Song of Blades to 6mm Sci-Fi

Hi

I've been playing around with GANESHA GAMES Song of Blades and Heroes ruleset to convert it to allow me to use it to play 6mm scale skirmishes and thought I would give a bit of a guide to my work so far so if you fancy a bash you can!

The Rules

I play the rules pretty much as they are in the book to be honest. The only change I have made is that you cannot simply keep activating the same unit if you roll a success as I found that some units will rampage around too much! Instead I would allow for certain units to get a second activation reflecting their quick responses. For example a lumbering behemoth of a superheavy tank doesn't have the same maneuverability as a biker squad.

In combat in Song of Blades if one is beaten but not killed the model is either pushed back or knocked over. This makes quite a useful way of representing push backs and suppression or light damage in 6mm scale so I kept it as is with units knocked over becoming suppressed and needing to spend an action to recover. If attacked while in this state it became easier to destroy them.

Skills and Abilities

When it came down to sorting out what abilities different sorts of units would have I had to spend a little time looking through my copies of the Songs of Blades series to see which would suit best the models I have.

In some cases this was an easy process, most stands have some sort of ranged weaponry so using different Shooter abilities would cover this quite nicely. Likewise the Blast and Lethal abilities also came in handy to represent different sorts of weapons giving each unit a bit of variety.

An anti tank gun would be lethal versus tanks or mechs and less so against dispersed infantry while a flamethrower would have the opposite lethality and an anti aircraft gun would be lethal verus aircraft!

Transports such an an APC which has the ability to transport stands needs to have some way of representing this rulewise. I had to make up a new rule for it, Transport. For each time it is used it allows you to transport a single stand of infantry. Any attacks made against the transport vehicle will only damage it unless you manage a gruesome kill which will also destroy the transported stand.

Transported infantry must spend an activation to embark or disembark allowing for the vehicle to move forward and the infantry to rapidly take an objective.

Some vehicles are more resilient to damage, be it a titan or some sort of heavy tank so they will get the Tough ability to keep them in the game longer!

I must admit I haven't fielded any superheavy vehicles yet so I dont know how well they will handle themselves though.

I still need to work on artillery and vehicles with multiple weapon systems and will post my progress here when I get chance.

Game Size

At present I am playing 300 point games which will generally result in about half a dozen models a side. To be honest this makes for a brilliant skirmish with at most a platoon a side. I think that it would be a fairly straight forward process to up the game to 600 or more points a side but will have to see what it plays like.

The Units

Heres a couple of examples of a unit stat:

Castilian Battle Armour
Quality: 4+ Combat 3
Special Rules: Shooter: Short

This represents a regular squad wearing good armour and fielding small arms. It would be easy to turn them into green troops by turning their quality to 5+ or elite by moving it to 3+

Wildebeest Battletank
Quality 4+ Combat 4
Special Rules: Shooter: Long, Tough

This represents a standard battletank with a long range weapon and heavy armour. I could tweak it a bit by giving it a Lethal ability versus vehicles or make it a stealth tank by giving it the Stealth ability! Likewise it could be turned into a lumbering beast by giving it the Slow ability.

Theres lots of ways to show different characteristics in the rules and its often the case of playing around with them until you get something satisfactory. One thing I would say is that infantry should be limited to a maximum Combat of 3 and all vehicles a maximum of 4 or 5.

Hopefully my ramblings will give folks a little bit of inspiration and I will post more articles as I get chance!

All the best!

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