Forge Of War

This set of rules is born of frustration with many mainstream and professional rule sets for this genre. Most of these treat the figures as automata and rarely consider the view from the foxhole, except with highly abstracted break/flee tests.

The idea was to produce a set of rules that could be used with any range of SF figures and their background.

I was also fed-up with the almost universal IGO-UGO mechanics of many of the more popular rule sets. This meant in reality that the gamer who got the first turn got an almost totally unfair advantage over his opponent.

These rules are based around two key mechanics, the Activation Roll and the D-marker:

The Activation Roll is an attempt to break away from the taking turns mentality of the more popular rules sets available for this ‘period’. In those rules one player can move, fire and attack with every single unit before his opponent can do anything, regardless of the skills, readiness or order of his units.

The Activation Roll makes the Player-General consider carefully which units to activate, and in which order, because to fail an Activation Roll passes the initiative to his opponent. It also makes him use his valuable leaders carefully as they often have higher command values than ordinary troops and are best used leading their men than zooming around like helicopter gunships.

The Activation mechanic represents the fog of war and the responsiveness of units to commands from their HQ which may have been made without an accurate understanding of the situation from the point of view of that unit.

The D-marker impacts considerably on the example above. When a unit or leader takes hits it has a choice. It can lose figures or take D-markers. The ‘D’ stands for Disorder, Disorientation, Demoralisation and Damage. A unit can only have a limited number of D-markers on them at any one time depending on their training and experience, and each marker places negative modifiers on their Command, Shooting and Fighting values (as described later) as well as their ability to move quickly.

 

This set consists of:

1. The Basic Rules: Forge of War – Second Edition (Word Version).

1.1 The Basic Rules: Forge-of-War Second Edition  (PDF Version)

2. Suggested W40K force lists by Kyle.forge-of-war-stats1

3. Suggested W40K Weapons Stat’s by Kyle.weapons

AT-43.

Since FORW was originally published  in January a development team has formed on a dedicated Yahoo Group. They have been beavering away on the second edition which we hope to publish in April. This clarifies all the parts I left hanging in the original set and has been based upon many hours of play testing.

Suggested AT-43 Stats: forge-of-war-at43-stats

 

One of these is Adam, a fan of AT-43. He has created a set of stat’s to make FORW work for that game. I have absolutely no experience of these rules so I’ll leave this entirely up to him 🙂