Siege of Quitokai

A friend recently introduced me to Songs of Blades and Heroes, a fast-paced skirmish game using minis. I've had a good time playing it with kids (leaving out references to "gruesome kills" although I still use the rules.) I don't have much experience with these kinds of games, but they seem to generally combine the flexibility of an RPG with the closure of a traditional board game. For instance, I recently set up a scenario where one person was attacking "the castle" and had the objective of elininating the defenders. There were two players controlling two sets of defenders-- "the soldiers" and "the town militia." The soldiers' goal was to rebuff the attackers without any of the militia members being killed. The militia's goal was to participate actively in the defense and personally kill at least one attacker. So even though two of the players were co-operating, there was some tension in pursuing their goals.

As the title of this post suggests, I used the SBH rules to run a session in my Oriental Adventures D&D game. The PCs, while in the midst of a mission, have spent several weeks resting, planning, and training in the village of Quitokai. In the past, Quitokai has been targeted by slave-traders. The prescence of the PCs has discouraged the raiders from pursuing their previous strategies (sometimes deception, sometimes small-scale raids) not only in Quitokai, but in the general area. So they organized a larger assault on the village, attacking at a time when most PCS were out on patrol.

Rather than attack themselves, the slavers enlisted some of Quitokai's neighbors-- members of hunter-gather tribes who rarely fight openly with the agricultural people of Quitokai. Members of the Red Clan paint their faces red and they stayed in the background. Members of the Wolf Clan hunt with trained wolves and these were used in the initial attack. The wolves brought down one of the militia and frightened off many of the others. This gave the Wolf Clan warriors time to set the palisade on fire. But then the Quitokai militia re-organized, and using their bows from the safety of the watch-tower routed the Wolf warriors, the wolves themselves following close behind them. As the sun was setting, one of the PC-led groups (Gunjar, with some villagers) returned from patrol and the attackers retreated into the jungle.

(apologies to the real-world man in the photo below who is presumably peaceful)

Malaysian Native, a photo by Navin Bahl on Flickr.