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.