RogerRabid (id: Roger the Rampant) |
Posted on 12/10/02 @ 12:00 AM
File Details |
Ruleset: |
TS Standard Rules |
Map Size: |
Large |
Playable Races: |
Some |
Surface Levels: |
2 |
Difficulty: |
Normal |
Eleventy one years is a ripe old age for a Hobbit; can you last 111 days in this scenario? It's designed to be played with leaders off, with the Lizards fighting against the four good races. This is the co-operative version, with four players as the good races, and Lizards controlled by the AI. There's a five player MP version available too, four races against one. Also a single-player version, where you can play as any one of the good races - have fun! Here's the story:
The serpents had a new leader, Nessie, who was spreading discontent throughout their midst. Serpents had always been considered a sub-species of the lizard race, whereas Nessie was preaching that serpents were clearly far superior to common-or-garden lizards. Their 40 movement points was better than anything the lizards had to offer, whilst damage of 8 could only just be matched by the powerful turtle catapults. What Nessie seemed to conveniently overlook in her eloquent eulogies was the fact that the success of the lizards was often down to their amphibious qualities, but serpents were restricted to the water, and could therefore never capture a city or indeed any land-based resources. That appeared to be no hindrance to her rise to fame in the serpent community, and her claims that serpents were the master-race were well received
At the same time there was another worryingly subversive development amongst - of all places - the keepers. A new highman hero, Pitler, had wangled his way into a position of authority in Whyma. He was portraying lizards as being responsible for all of the problems and evils of the world, particularly democracy, communism, and internationalism, as well as the recent defeat of the keepers in the Brandywine Wars. Lizards were the keepers' true enemy, he wrote. They had no culture of their own, he asserted, but perverted existing cultures such as the keepers with their parasitism. As such, they were not a race, but an anti-race. The keepers could stop the lizards from conquering the world only by eliminating them. As the keepers embarked on a programme of ethnic cleansing against the lizards, the serpents broke off to form their own independent neutral alliance, and the shire started to polarise demographically. Most of the shire was inhabited by the good races, and hordes of lizard refugees flocked to the few pockets of safety. Those lizard ghettoes were fertile recruiting grounds for the lizard terrorist factions, and the keepers soon started to suffer a furious lizard backlash against the fascist policies of the keeper leaders Pitler, Pimmler, Pommel and Purring
Pacifists amongst the lizards were largely ignored, despite a pacifist song entering the hit parade, with this catchy chorus:
Parry, thrust and counter-attack, always checking at your back
Just a skirmish, or full campaign, war's for those without a brain
I've looked at war from both sides now, from win and lose, and still somehow
it's war's illusions I recall - I really don't like war at all
What was not so widely known was that Nessie had used the Orc dislike of the keepers, and quietly converted a number of Orc assassins to the serpents' cause. They loitered in the forests, happy to ambush any passing members of the good races, so the keepers' scouts always needed to go in pairs. The remnants of the lizard race were also dotted around the shire, and needless to say they were not particularly enamoured of the keepers either
More and more keeper cities fell into independent control, as anarchy reigned supreme throughout the shire. The four leaders of the good races were eventually exiled to small villages in the countryside, where inevitably they started to rebuild their forces, and planned their comebacks. When they awoke on 1st April they were all visited by an archangel, whose message was that the lord had created a new path for each of them to follow, and if those paths were followed they would lead them to true glory. They knew that they had to rid the shire of lizards before the rainy season began, which gave them just 111 days to complete their quests. Time was not on their side
Thanks to everyone at aow.heavengames.com for such a great forum, and in particular to Unicorn for a lot of help with playtesting, and to Tekk Zero for his Mapmaking gizmo that allowed me to create Bob the Builder, to use campaign portraits and to give unusual abilities to heroes and items
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