Good Beans!

We finally tried some Ravenfeast again, a free viking age ruleset published by the great men from Little Wars TV. I've played it once or twice since I've steadily been collecting and painting a whole lot of vikings. I've also written three scenario's for it, which still need playtesting. Last night we tried one of them, called 'Destroy the Idol!'. One side tries to defend an idol, which can turn regular vikings into mighty berserkers with a lucky dice roll. The other side needs to destroy it, which triggers a morale check for the defending side, with a penalty. 

The defending side set up around their holy idol, desperate to defend it. Ravenfeast gives a huge buff to models formed up in a shieldwall. At least three models need to stand in a line to form the formation, facing the same direction. 

The crossbowmen on the attackers sides worried me, but they didn't get much luck. They did manage to kill both of my own archers, though. Rules for crossbowmen are specified in the Norman and Welsh supplement. 

One criticism that Ravenfeast often gets, is that two shieldwalls facing off against each other can become a tedious process, as most units will have their armor score buffed to a 5. This means that they only take wounds on a 6, after a successful hit. While it's true that two shieldwalls locked in combat can survive for a very long time, this just means you have try and flank around it with other units! I like to use berserkers for this purpose. Not just because they have two attacks, it also makes my opponent nervous.

After about three turns the attacker finally went for the idol, eventually destroying it just in time. The morale check this triggered made most of my surviving vikings flee. But, to the annoyance of my opponent, most of them rallied in the next turn. 

In the end it did feel like the scenario was favored towards the defender, so it still needs some tinkering. Still, as always, we hade a great time and Ravenfeast is certainly a great little ruleset. The rules are elegant and they can be learned or taught in a very short amount of time. Even so, they still have quite a bit of flavor, especially with the shieldwalls and the "Death Worthy of a Song" rule. The latter occurs when a viking rolls a 1 on his attack roll (the best possible result) and the poor sod on the other end of the attack rolls a 6 on his defense roll (the worst possible result). The attacker then gets to roll a follow-up attack. If that one hits as well, the victim is killed in such a gruesome way that it triggers a morale check for it's shocked friends. We used a rather unsavory token representing an impaled head to mark where the Death Worthy of a Song took place (don't mind the huge orange bead, it was used to mark a viking with the "Mighty" perk).

If your interested in my scenario's, even though they are still a bit unbalanced, you can check them out here.

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Cheers,

Merijn