Morituri te Salutant. Part 8

I'm Spartacus

Next up it was time to expand on the available combatants.

 

First up, the Cestus.

The Cestus wear heavy knuckleduster type gloves but little or no armour.  They were most often used in fights against slaves where they would literally beat their opponents to death.

Eventually they were banned because of the excessive brutality.  Hard to imagine given how brutal the condemned were treated.

Next the Hoplomachus.

The Hoplomachus carried a spear, sword, and shield.  Often with quilted armour on the legs.  This is a heavily armoured fighter, and this is reflected in my rules by its slower speed but better protection.  The spear can be thrown or used to attack its opponent whilst staying somewhat out of reach.

After that is the Murmillo.

The Murmillo was often paired against the Hoplomachus or Thracian.  This is probably what most people imagine when they picture Gladiators.  Armed with the Roman gladius sword and scutum large shield.  This is a medium weight gladiator in my rules with average armour and speed.

Noxii.

The condemned.  Ill-treated, poorly trained, and condemned to die.  Crude weapons, often blunted, the poor wretches have little hope of survival.  In my rules these always start the game in poor shape.  With low speed and no armour don’t expect them to last long.  However, they are cheap.

The Provocator.

One of the heaviest gladiator classes in my game, but also one of the slowest.  Armed with a straight sword, large shield, and decent armour.

Sagittarius.

The Sagittarius is an unusual one as they normally fought mounted.  This didn’t really fit with my rules, so I opted on a little poetic licence and designed two types.  The fast and lightly armoured Sagittarius and its slightly sturdier Armoured Sagittarius.   Armed with a bow and five arrows this gladiator can target anywhere in the arena.  Better make those arrows count though, as once that are spent, I don’t favour the chances of surviving with a bent stick and piece of string.

Scissor.

Also called the Contra-retiarius is a special gladiator type that is ideally suited for fighting against the Retiarius.  Slow but with good armour and a special action for countering net attacks.

Secutor.

The Secutor is also designed to fight the Retiarius and had a smooth helmet so that the Retarius net would not entangle it and small eye holes with restricted view.   In my game this gladiator is slow to react but has good armour.

The Thracian is next.

Probably a fan favourite the Thracian is the class of gladiator that Spartacus was.  Armed with a curved sword and small shield.  Slightly less armour than the Murmillo but also slightly faster.

Velite.

Velites are light gladiators armed with javelins and a short sword.  They also carry a shield giving them some protection.  Often used in pairs against more heavily armoured gladiators.  In my rules the javelins can be thrown or retained to attack from a distance.

Of course, there are still many more to do.  The Retiarius, what gladiator game would not be complete without this iconic fighter with its trident and net.  The Diamachaerius with its twin swords.  Then of course there are the Gladiatrix, female fighters although rare must be featured (especially when you have two daughters).  Then animals, Lions and Bears where favourites as were Giraffes, Ostrich, and Elephants, although I will probably leave those out.

The all the other bits and pieces.  The Summa Rudis (referee), bits of scenery so that those fighting against the Sagitarius have some hope of survival.  The list goes on.

All will require their own rules and record sheets.

Morituri te Salutant. Part 7

Close to the end.

I really wanted to add sunshades or Velarium, to my Coliseum but because I also wanted to be able to split the model apart it would not be possible to have a weighted ring acting as a counterweight.

I looked back at the rigging I had done for my Blood and Plunder ships and decided to twist lengths of wire together to imitate rope.   From those I could simply attach material beneath it to look like a shade cloth.

I used small heart shaped beads and BBQ skewers, cut down to size, to bend the wire ‘ropes’ over.

I anchored the wires to the base by drilling holes and screwing the wires into place.

The base was finished with sand and painted with sand-coloured paints from rattle cans.

A few scattered grass tufts and a couple of figures finished the base off.

on fabric, however I found that it frayed a lot.  I toyed with the idea of using fabric glue to hem around the edges, but figured I was just too lazy to do that.

A trip back to the haberdashery and I found an alternative material that I was reliably informed would fray less.

With that I cut 4 sections of material to fit around as awnings.

2 longer pieces that would be firmly and permanently attached and 2 smaller pieces that I would hide a small wire frame beneath that could be removed to take the Colosseum apart.

For the arena floor I used thin hexagonal MDF bases glued to an oval of MDF.  I then lightly covered the surface with sand and painted it to match the rest of the ground covering.

I then based up some Gladiators to use so I can start play-testing my version of the rules.

The fighters are mounted on 40mm Hexes, and the arena floor is slightly larger at 45mm.

I have kept the actual fighting area reasonably small, just 8 hexes at its longest point.  I will add some scenery elements to separate hexes so that they can be moved around and add extra strategic elements.  The scenery should come in handy when fighting against Sagittarius (Bow armed) gladiators.

Morituri te Salutant. Part 6

 Sample Rules

Of course, each style of gladiator would need its own range of attacks, manoeuvres and other identifying abilities.

The character sheets would show the speed, armour, life points, available actions and a whole host of other details needed to play each class.  After all I am aiming for a simple set of rules where as much as possible can be contained on one sheet of paper.

Dice are done and I must say I am really happy with them.

I have gone with 3 of each of the combat dice and 8 armour dice.

Although the maximum armour dice I currently have on any gladiator class is 5, I wanted scope to increase that during campaign play.

Morituri te Salutant. Part 5

 Plebs

With the stonework pretty much finished I set about painting up the many spectators.

I used grey primer with a zenith highlight in off white.  I then painted the entire crowd in a mixture of contrast paints and ink washes.

I didn’t go in to too much detail with these models as they would likely be seen slightly out of focus in the pictures anyway.

I stuck with a pretty limited Palette for the majority of the Plebs but added a few other colours for the occupants of the Imperial box.

I was quite happy with the overall effect once the crowd had been added.

Morituri te Salutant. Part 4

 

Dice

I started going over the rules I had in my mind and decided that I wanted to simplify how damage was worked out.

In the original rules the process was that each player would select an action.  Those actions were then cross referenced which would give a difficulty.  Then that difficulty was compared on a separate table and a D20 was rolled which would then cause a category of injury dependant on the defender’s armour level.  The lowest wounds were Nicks.  3 Nicks became a Cut, 3 Cuts become a Wound and 3 Wounds would result in death.

I wanted to change all that to just one chart and one dice roll.

For example, there would be a matrix like this to cross reference each players chosen action which would in turn dictate how many and what colour dice are to be rolled.   Some actions would have blacked out sections to show that those actions automatically fail against certain actions.

Of course, this is not the final combat matrix but should give some idea of how it will work.

I decided that I would use colour coded dice to represent how likely the attack was of causing damage and how serious the damage could be.

With my version each fighter still choses an action which is cross referenced to give both a colour and a number.

White dice are the weakest, through to red dice which are the strongest.

Then the defender rolls defence dice (blue) to try to mitigate damage.

Morituri te Salutant. Part 3

 

Adding Colour

I used simple rattle cans to paint the stonework.  I started with a cheap grey primer from the local hardware store and then used sand-coloured sprays to build up highlights.

I finished off with a light zenith highlight with an off-white spray.

Painting the stonework took less than 30 minutes thanks to the ridiculous Perth heat.

The inside wall of the arena was painted red with a black trim.  Again, I used cheap paints from the local hardware store.

For the many statues that adorn the walls I again used rattle-cans, starting with a blue-grey and working up to white.

I then Painted up 10 Roman Legionnaires to act as security for the Colosseum.  I used colours more akin to Pretorians because I figured that regular legionnaire would not have been used.

I added entranceways so that the combatants could actually enter the arena.

And of course, I couldn’t help but paint up a couple of Gladiators, just to keep me motivated.

Morituri te Salutant. Part 2

Rome wasn't built in a day

For this little project I really wanted to rewrite the rule book (for personal use) with my own version of what I wanted the game to be and bring it up to date.

The original rules were simply walls of black text on white paper and very dated by todays standards.

For my homage to the original rules, I really wanted to do the best I could so adding colour pictures was a good place to start.

Sure, I could have opted for a simple two-dimensional backdrop for the photos, but I wanted to do something a little grander, something to draw the crowds.

Thankfully the skilful mind of Iain Lovecraft had already created the STL files that would be instrumental in this project.

I set my little Ender 3 Pro to work.

The final structure consists of more than 30 different parts.  I wanted my Colosseum to come apart to allow easier access to the play area that I intend to put inside it.  So extra end sections were printed off to give a nice finish to the structure when it was broken down.

My initial thought was to create it in such a way that it could be split into 3 different pieces, however I finally settled on splitting the Colosseum in half.

With the stonework printed off and welded together I set my Elegoo Saturn to printing off the many Peons, Statues and other ‘miniatures’ I thought I would need for this project.

At 28mm (rather 32mm scale if I’m honest) this is a pretty massive structure.

Morituri te Salutant. Part 1

 

Introduction.

Many years ago, there was a set of Gladiator Skirmish rules simply titled; ‘Gladiator Skirmish Rules’.  They were simply produced and easy to learn and provided fun little games to simulate gladiatorial combat.

The game played on a simple hex grid and the fighting was done in the style of ‘Rock, Paper, Scissor’ where each player would pick an attack and compare it with each other to determine if the attack was easy, medium, or hard to pull off.  This was then converted to a separate table where dice would be rolled and compared with the armour value of the target and the difficulty of the attack to generate a level of wound.  Wounds would accumulate so that three nicks would become a cut, three cuts become a wound and so on.

I really enjoyed that dated set of rules and was looking for something that I could play simple quick games, mainly with the kids, but with friends also.

I wanted to keep the rules as simple as possible whilst keeping the feel of the original rules, or at least how I remember them to be.

This is my homage to those rules.  Some bits will be similar, some bits completely different (mainly because I can’t remember how they were originally) and some bits will be vaguely familiar.

I intend to do my best to create a fun little self-contained project using the little knowledge of our hobby that I have picked up over the years.