Steampunk Commander

By M.E. Brines

Steampunk Commander is a set of rules for tabletop gaming using any sort of miniature figurines or models. All that is required to recreate fantastic battles set in a hypothetical Victorian Age are a large table or other playing area, a deck of regular playing cards, an assortment of model figurines, military vehicles and whatever model scenery you desire.

You will also need some paper and pencil (or index cards and a pen, whichever you prefer) and some game markers to indicate figures that are pinned or panicked, or that have malfunctioning weapons. For this you can use small change or poker chips. Red chips or dimes are malfunction markers. White chips or pennies are pin markers. Blue chips or nickels are aim markers. You’ll also need two circular blast templates. A small one for grenades and a larger one for artillery attacks. The plastic lids from Pringles chips, a can of nuts, coffee or oatmeal cylinders do nicely. A bag of cotton balls is also useful to indicate smokescreens or fires. I use the regular cotton balls for smoke. If you like, paint or tint some of the balls with a red marker to indicate flames.

The playing area can be of any size. A ping-pong table works very well, but even an ordinary kitchen table can be used. Keep in mind the smaller the play area, the smaller the battle. The garage floor works great for really epic battles, unless you’re like me and have more junk in there than a construction-site dumpster and therefore have to default to the kitchen table.

Model figurines can be of any scale or type. You could use collectable, lovingly painted fifteen or 25mm scale metal figures like the ones popular for Civil War soldiers. But the emphasis of these rules is on inexpensive “quick and dirty” solutions. While you can carefully craft scale model land dreadnoughts and walking steam mechs with little hand-painted stormtroopers in spiked helmets to accompany them, by the time you’ve finished one figure, the rest of us will have played three games using little green army men purchased at a dollar store. It’s your call. But I’m going to provide a quick & easy game system with suggestions for converting easily available model kits and toys into steampunk themed military vehicles you can blast your friends’ armies with. (And there is a theory circulating between military history buffs that historically the army with the snazziest uniforms always loses the war. Just sayin’.)

Model scenery is easy to create. I provide some general suggestions for creating model terrain features that, while serviceable, won’t win you any diorama awards. But they will get you playing without having to spend a fortune and then require weeks creating something close to a model railroad layout. Again, while you’re perfectly free to take that route, I’ll show you ways to create tiny towns and entrenchments inexpensively in hours that you can then happily spend months fighting battles over.

• Language: English
• Publisher: M.E. Brines
• Release date: Jan 24, 2013
• ISBN: 9781301404889

M.E. Brines

M.E. Brines spent the Cold War assembling atomic artillery shells and preparing to unleash the Apocalypse (and has a medal to prove it.) But when peace broke out, he turned his fevered, paranoid imagination to other pursuits. He spends his spare time scribbling another steampunk romance occult adventure novel, which despite certain rumors absolutely DOES NOT involve time-traveling Nazi vampires! A former member of the British Society for Psychical Research, he is the author of three dozen books, e-books, chapbooks and pamphlets on esoteric subjects such as alien abduction, alien hybrids, astrology, the Bible, biblical prophecy, Christian discipleship, conspiracies, esoteric Nazism, the Falun Gong, Knights Templar, magick, and UFOs, his work has also appeared in Challenge magazine, Weird Tales, The Outer Darkness, Tales of the Talisman, and Empirical magazine.

Book preview

Introduction

Steampunk Commander is a set of rules for tabletop gaming using any sort of miniature figurines or models. All that is required to recreate fantastic battles set in a hypothetical Victorian Age are a large table or other playing area, a deck of regular playing cards, an assortment of model figurines, military vehicles and whatever model scenery you desire.

You will also need some paper and pencil (or index cards and a pen, whichever you prefer) and some game markers to indicate figures that are pinned or panicked, or that have malfunctioning weapons. For this you can use small change or poker chips. Red chips or dimes are malfunction markers. White chips or pennies are pin markers. Blue chips or nickels are aim markers.

You’ll also need two circular blast templates. A small one for grenades and a larger one for artillery attacks. The plastic lids from Pringles chips, a can of nuts, coffee or oatmeal cylinders do nicely. A bag of cotton balls is also useful to indicate smokescreens or fires. I use the regular cotton balls for smoke. If you like, paint or tint some of the balls with a red marker to indicate flames.

The playing area can be of any size. A ping-pong table works very well, but even an ordinary kitchen table can be used. Keep in mind the smaller the play area, the smaller the battle. The garage floor works great for really epic battles, unless you’re like me and have more junk in there than a construction-site dumpster and therefore have to default to the kitchen table.

Model figurines can be of any scale or type. You could use collectable, lovingly painted fifteen or 25mm scale metal figures like the ones popular for Civil War soldiers. But the emphasis of these rules is on inexpensive quick and dirty solutions. While you can carefully craft scale model land dreadnoughts and walking steam mechs with little hand-painted stormtroopers in spiked helmets to accompany them, by the time you’ve finished one figure, the rest of us will have played three games using little green army men purchased at a dollar store. It’s your call. But I’m going to provide a quick & easy game system with suggestions for converting easily available model kits and toys into steampunk themed military vehicles you can blast your friends’ armies with. (And there is a theory circulating between military history buffs that historically the army with the snazziest uniforms always loses the war. Just sayin’.)

Model scenery is easy to create. I provide some general suggestions for creating model terrain features that, while serviceable, won’t win you any diorama awards. But they will get you playing without having to spend a fortune and then require weeks creating something close to a model railroad layout. Again, while you’re perfectly free to take that route, I’ll show you ways to create tiny towns and entrenchments inexpensively in hours that you can then happily spend months fighting battles over.

Army recruitment

Once you’ve located a suitable playing area and a deck of cards, you’ll need an army. For this you can use pretty much anything but your sister’s Barbie’s. (They’re too tall and won’t stand up on their own anyway.) Unless you happen to have a bunch of your nephew’s old Star Wars action figures lying around, the best thing to do is go down to your local dollar store and pick up a package or two of little green army men. With steampunk as your theme, pretty much anything will work: Cowboys & Indians, spacemen, whatever. You can use Smurfs or even Lego men, but I prefer the military-themed plastic army men. They’re the perfect scale for a platoon-size action on a tabletop. And they’re cheap and easily available, often coming in sets with vehicles and heavy weapons.

Don’t be tempted to paint them. Paint just flakes off that soft plastic. Besides, all the effort you spend putting moustaches and tiny iron crosses on your Teutonic Horde will be wasted when your brother-in-law doesn’t watch where he’s walking (or so he says) while losing that epic battle to you on the garage floor. Besides, the time you gain by not painting them can be better spent leading them to victory over your buddy’s little plastic army – five or six times, probably.

The Battlefield

Now that you have an army, you need a battlefield. A table works best, and the bigger the better. A ping-pong or pool table is ideal, but the kitchen table will work in a pinch. Just make sure