NOLA Campaign Kicks Off

With things around the house returning to normal, I've had some time to finally gets my campaign rules organized and kick off the NOLA campaign at the club.

I was very fortunate to get 8 club members signing up to play in the campaign.  These test subjects -oops- "players".  The are 4 French players: Napoleon, Lannes, Soult and old baldy himself Davout.  Opposing them is an un easy alliance between the US (Jackson and Scott) and the British (Wellington and Crawford).  The sides are roughly equal in size but there are a lot of minor allies they'll be trying to influence to join their cause.  Both sides have roughly 100K troops to deploy and the sum total of all the minor allies can add up to 30K troops in total.  Given how the diplomacy system works not all those troops will come into plays and the sides should get maybe 5-10K each.

While an invasion of US by Napoleon is a rather silly scenario, during the war of 1812 there was a furious diplomatic effort to woo different Native American tribes and even the Baratarian Pirates (Jean Lafette) by each side.  For this campaign there will be 4 Native American tribes, the Baratarian Pirates, Texicans and even the Spanish that each side can try to enlist over the course of the campaign.

I'm really happy with the rules but this is the first time they'll be used on the table top.  I suspect there will be a lot of opportunities for improvement.  The rules may actually get published of assuming I don't get tarred and feathered by my players.   The risk of that form of retribution is non-zero, so I enter this campaign with some trepidation.

One thing I added at the last minute was personality traits and a set of secret objectives for each players characters.  These rules are completely optional but playing along with them will earn the player personality points which will be used to award the highest scoring general with the coveted MVP award.  MVP stands for either the "Most Valuable Player" or "Most Vile Player" depending on the personality traits of their character.  Some of the generals are not the most reputable of characters.

The majority of the traits are structured to encourage the players to get into tabletop battles.  One thing I've noticed when playing a campaign is that a player who is normally very aggressive in a single battle style of game can suddenly become rather timid in a campaign as outcomes matter for the next turn.  Your's truly has that affliction.  Hopefully these rules get the guys to mix it up a bit. 

Reporting on the campaign will be hard as there is a lot of hidden movement but I'll keep the blog updated and do a full turn by turn report and also list out all the things that need to be improved in the rules.  I suspect that will be a very long list.

Turn 1 order submissions are due soon!