This is Albion: a Custom Tabletop Wargame

Heyo! ChapterAquila92 here!

Over the past couple of months, I've been putting some thought into a custom tabletop wargame after having had exposure to several others beyond GW's brand, along with a setting within which to use it.

To wrap things up with a bow, I've taken to calling the project This is Albion.

Core Rules

DISCLAIMER: This is not a complete rule set at the time of posting, nor is it particularly well-organized. I am also only one person working on this in my spare time, and I haven't had a chance to play-test any of this beyond rolling dice for hypothetical scenarios. I'm therefore welcome to feedback and thoughts as to what might be added, tweaked, or removed.

So, why the title?

Well, a few things came to mind as I was working on this.

A big part of it was a nod to the kind of setting I want to use it for, which while I will get into a little later can best be summed up as "the folklore and history of the British Isles in space". In some ways, I was re-connecting with my own Irish-Welsh heritage at the time, and since then it's metastasized into trying to push an Anglo-Celtic alternative to Gothic sci-fi, with of course Albion being a reference to the isle of Great Britain itself.

There is also of course a bit of a further nod to a rather famous cutscene from Fable 3 that really strikes a chord, but I consider that more of an amusing incidental that happens to play really well into the idea.

To a degree, it's also a bit of a personal dig at call-outs to other games that certainly have inspired the decisions I've been making with my own. I keep imagining the title as a recurring refrain whenever someone makes a reference to some other game that has similar mechanics or tropes, to the extent that it might even come up in-setting as a title drop.

A Brief Overview Of The Setting

As stated previously, the setting I have in mind for This is Albion is very much inspired by the folklore and history of the British Isles, of course with a sci-fi twist. Central to it is a region of space in a distant part of the Milky Way, far away from Earth, under the auspices of the Albion Confederation - an interstellar polity comprised of multiple human nations, loosely themed around regions of the British Isles, nominally under one banner.

Over the course of its thousand-year history by the time of the setting, Albion holds fast in the midst of its own maelstrom, doing its best to weather through brush wars between its constituent nations, interference from encroaching Terrans seeking dominion over the wayward colonies, the machinations of the Aes-Sidhe and Tiré'nua, and the predations of the Fomorians. It is unclear if other threats may be beyond the horizon, but Albion stands confident that it will be able to weather through whatever assaults come their way.

Base Game Concepts

Inspired a little by Blood & Plunder by Firelock Games, This is Albion is played using d10s. For consistency across all dice rolls, you're always aiming to roll high no matter the dice roll, with a Natural 1 being the lowest result you can roll on a single dice and a Natural 10 being the highest result.

Many of the rules for performing dice rolls are similar to how it's featured in SPQR by Warlord Games, wherein the dice roll after modifiers must equal or beat a target threshold. For rolls testing for a single characteristic by one player such as shooting or leadership, the target roll after modifiers is 10 or higher. For contested rolls, wherein the characteristic of one model is being counteracted by that of another (i.e. melee attacks or attempting to wound a target unit), the target roll after modifiers is instead 6 or higher.

Having said that, it's also entirely possible for a dice roll after modifiers to require a flat result on the die that is beyond the range of what a d10 can realistically achieve, which necessitates its own Confirmation Roll afterwards:

- For rolls requiring a result higher than 10, a base roll of a Natural 10 must be immediately followed by an additional roll to confirm that it was truly successful.

- For rolls with minimum results less than 2, a base roll of a Natural 1 must be immediately followed by an additional roll to confirm that it was truly a failure.

Much of the core unit characteristics would be familiar to anyone who's played a tabletop wargame before, so I won't elaborate too much on that apart from Size being a factor when it comes to some interactions in the game (large targets and impact hits, especially) and Toughness consisting of two values - a Natural Toughness value (which outside of one or two special rules cannot be modified in any way) and a Total Toughness value.

The latter characteristic takes a cue from GW's Middle-Earth Strategy Battle Game - This is Albion doesn't do Armour Saves like 40k, but instead adds the model's Armour Rating to its Natural Toughness for a combined defence characteristic, or Total Toughness. Naturally, some weapons have an Armour Piercing value, which is more or less a conditional bonus that caps at the target's Armour Rating.

For an analogous example using 40k references: say a Bolt Pistol (S4 AP2) has been used to hit a Guardsman wearing Flak Armour (Toughness 3/5). At Strength 4 going into Total Toughness 5, the Bolt Pistol would need a 7+ to wound if it did not have an AP value. However, as the Bolt Pistol has an AP value of 2, which is conveniently no higher than the Guardsman's Armour Rating of 2, the Bolt Pistol is functionally striking at S6 against T5, meaning it wounds the Guardsman on a 5+ instead.

I will further add that the game system in its current form also implements a hybrid alternating activation system. While you alternate activating units with your opponent, this is also in tandem with Initiative steps, much in the same way that's featured in games like Star Wars X-Wing. The general gist of it is that higher Initiative units activate later in the Movement Phase, but sooner in the Shooting or Melee Phases of the game.

There's obviously more I can go into, but feel free to read through the rules I've written, because I'd love to have some feedback on where to proceed with this.

 

Always love to see people play around with their own wargame settings... I'm similarly experimenting with a Steampunk Science Fantasy sci-fi wargame, and am similarly doing it as a one-man band in between doing my job, principally writing the rules down first before I consider any form of playtesting, so I very much understand your position.

As a big enthusiast of specifically Brythonic Celtic history and its role in shaping the destiny of England and Wales, a big thumbs up for your choice of theme for your setting and background . Presumably the humans of the Albion Confederation are going to be Space Celts, to coin a phrase? Would models for them have sci-fi armour and weapons, but have Celtic heads complete with big moustaches? What sort of aesthetics would the armour be? Futuristic trooper/power armour? More like Medieval Knight armour but souped-up? Or, being Celts, would they wear a sci-fi adaptation of mail, or even just in their standard tunics and trousers with just a helmet for protection?

And have you any aesthetic ideas for the other factions so far - the Terrans, Aes-Sidhe, Tiré'nua and Fomorians?

Also, I notice your starting background takes a lot of inspiration from the beginnings of Gaelic myth, which is fine if you're leaning in that direction, but something I do despair of across this day and age is how people in general always only ever think of the more outlandish Irish legends and folklore when anyone mentions the whole Celtic diaspora. Given your Albion Confederation is based on the British Isles as a whole, it would thus be excellent to see some aspects and themes of Brythonic legend covered too. The Brythonic Celts, and their Gaulish cousins on the continent, were absolutely the pinnacle of Celtic civilisation in terms of technological advancement and political and military capability, before Rome destroyed all their societal progress, and they absolutely deserve to play a key role in your setting. If you're in need of guidance in thinking of ideas for aesthetics and background of a more Brythonic feel, by all means tag me here in the thread or PM me, and I shall do all I can to help.

If you're looking for inspiration, this excellently talented artist breathed new life into Warhammer Fantasy's own island of Albion through taking almost his entire inspiration from specifically Brythonic Celtic themes, names and motifs. I consider his work to be THE definitive portrayal of Albion as a result, having written my own rules for both 8th Edition and TOW based on the units and characters he has illustrated. Of course this is going back to fantasy territory instead of sci-fi, but I hope it is of help to you nonetheless .

I certainly like the rules inspiration from different games so far, particularly the use of SPQR 'thresholds'. Will have to read your rules in more detail before giving my feedback.

Is your game purely going to be a Skirmish game, or will there be squad-based gameplay too down the line?

 

Likely a combination of the above, depending on locale. I will admit that Albion has more going on than just the Celtic elements - depending on where you go you'll also see Roman, Viking, Anglo-Saxon and Norman influences, as is the case of the British Isles IRL - but suffice to say that the Celtic roots go deep nonetheless, ideally tastefully applied to the sci-fi side of things. In some ways as well, the word of the day in some regions of Albion, especially on some worlds in Eire, Caledonia, and Cambria, is "techno-primitive", where the locals live seemingly backwards lives but in reality there's a lot of unseen tech around them. An Aes-Sidhe faction, the Duatha, represent an extreme example of this, especially in comparison to their voidborne cousins, the nomadic Liir and the revanchist Maeves. In other regions in Albion, you'll still see more "conventional" sci-fi fare.

Given that I went out of my way to include rules for tac-dreads - heavy exo-suits that blur the line between infantry and vehicle - it's safe to assume that powered armour and similar systems are also a thing, even if only as a more specialized piece of kit.

I Haven't put too much stock into what the Terrans are like yet. They're kind of my nod to 40k's Imperium or Starcraft's United Earth Directorate, but they're not exactly front-and-center for ideas at the moment. As much as I could dress them up as Romans in Space or French in Space they're probably the biggest blank slate beyond sharing a common ancestry and tech-base as their Albion cousins. I'd certainly want to lean in on their Imperial Colonial bent for the region however, being akin to the "threats from the mainland".

In the context of the setting, both the Aes-Sidhe and the Fomorians are as much of a nod to the works of Tolkien as they are to their namesakes in Irish folklore, being a form of space elf and space orc respectively. The (very elf-like - even early human colonists remarked on them as such) Aes-Sidhe were among the first settlers in the region, kind of comparable to the pre-Celtic peoples of the British Isles, and the Fomorians were a warrior slave race they genetically engineered to fight an apocalyptic war in the ancient past (kind of their version of space marines). Much to the shame and horror of the Aes-Sidhe, the Fomorians ultimately revolted in such a way that lead to the collapse of their interstellar empire. It's from the chaos that ensued that the three main ideological camps emerged among them. Of the lot, the Maeves want to re-establish the old empire no matter the cost, the Liir want to establish a new order, and the Duatha simply want as little to do with the rest of their kin as possible. Another point of note is that while all three Aes-Sidhe factions are extremely distrustful of space marine analogues due to their history with the Fomorians, the Maeves see no problem in using them as tools to further their own ends.

The Fomorians themselves are arguably more akin to Tolkien's Uruk-hai than 40k's Orks in that regard, though they still have a degree of the latter's bulk and collective psychic pre-programming. They're brutal and ill-tempered in disposition, with in-fighting being the norm when they don't have anything else to fight and ultimately lacking an ability to innovate on their own, but they can organize quickly and are exceptionally good at reverse-engineering when enough of them congregate in an area, which if left unchecked can snowball something fierce. It was this oversight by the Aes-Sidhe, either through arrogance or desperation, that led to the revolt in the first place.

As for the Tiré'nua, on one hand they're kind of modeled after 40k's Tau - they're relatively new to the region compared to humanity, they're technologically adept, and they embody manifest destiny according to their dominant ideology, even roping in humans and other aliens to be part of it. On the other hand, as much as the A'on Celestial Empire puts on one heck of a show as a unified front through their propaganda, even within their own monoculture there's rumblings of dissent that the state expends a lot of effort to try and stamp out. Some of them are certainly implanted by outside forces, but others stem from the Tiré'nua themselves, especially those that have taken residence outside the Empire specifically to get away from it. Suffice to say that the Empire does not tolerate rivals, and the Albion Confederation is in their crosshairs for it. I'm not intending them to be symbolic of the Red Scare or the Yellow Peril however, and it's even debatable if they're going to remain Tau-like in appearance.

Absolutely! I'd very much love to have that kind of history and dynamic featured in the setting.

I know I haven't gone at length about the individual nations of Albion, but here's a brief splattering of the major ones:

- Dominion of Cambria - Some of the oldest human colonies in the region and one of the original founding member states of the Confederation. Following a succession crisis in the wake of a major Fomorian invasion, Cambria has leveraged a lot of political and materiel support for the Benendanti, who maintain a cohort specifically comprised of gwerin draigg as part of the Cambrian Guard in return.

- Eire Republic - Formerly part of the Aes-Sidhe's empire, the human settlers here were among the first to encounter the Duatha, who to this day still fiercely maintain their enclaves in the region. The cultural exchanges between them led to Eire being the first of Albion's nations to develop a songblade tradition.

- Kingdom of Caledonia - a breakaway state from Eire over ideological differences, Caledonia inherited many of Eire's early exchanges with the Duatha - including a robust songblade tradition - but attacks from Maeve and Fomorian forces over the centuries have hardened the local colonists into being exceptionally discerning when it comes to the Aes-Sidhe.

- Umbrian March - Originally a buffer state between Caledonia and Anglia following two disastrous wars between the two nations, Umbria's value to the Confederation has ultimately been its resource-rich systems and its potential capacity for industry. This has also made it a most immediate target for Terran subterfuge.

- Anglian Commonwealth - one of the most mercantile of the Albion nations by far, Anglia earned itself a reputation as the first point of entry for many outsiders, both human and alien alike to the Confederation, making it a very active scene for innovation and commerce, at the cost of many societal teething problems and scrutiny from meddling Terrans. That the bulk of its alien population in recent decades are Tiré'nua has also earned Anglia the ire of the Celestial Empire, and subsequently made it strange bedfellows with the notoriously tyrannical Shova faction among the Tiré'nua.

I've largely been writing the rules as if it's going to be a warband skirmish game, but with the aim of paring down the rules to facilitate bigger games for scalability.