A Dragon Rampant Fan Made Suppliment
Click To Download the Rules and Mike Willis’s Home made Rosta
Over the past month or so the Table One regulars (Mike Willis, Chris Gibson and myself) have been playing a few games of Xenos Rampant, a draft sci-fi adaptation of the Dragon Rampant rules. I’m not much for painting, but Mike has kindly supplied us with a great variety of splendid figures and buildings.
Wastelander Mule vehicle with gunners
Ezoghoul rampant
All the ‘Rampant’ rules are very simple at heart, units can be groups of figures, single ‘hero’ figures or individual large vehicles/monsters and all work similarly terms of movement, combat, morale and ranged fire, with a modest range of ‘special ability’ rules adding some flavour. Typically we’ve been playing eight to ten units a side, there’s nominally a ‘defender’ and attacker’ to set initiative but this tends not to affect gameplay much after the first couple of turns.
I’ve included some pics from our last game, where Mike’s grim-faced force of Red Beret Troopers and shrieking Mourning Wolves backed with Big Tanks and Sentinel Walkers tried to bring some law and order to a grubby, irradiated, wasteland town.
Battle from above; Raider truck and Scrappers face the Guardian and the Mourning Wolves
Lurking Radwraiths (apologies for focus)
A tank on the flank!
The opposition (Chris and I) fielded an uneasy alliance of Scrappers, Cultists and Radwraiths with some makeshift truck-based artillery, all under the baleful command of the hideous Ezoghoul, a creature resembling a dinosaur caught half-way through doing something unspeakable to a well-rotted horse. A Giant Mutant Rat also joined us for its own unfathomable reasons (probably dietary). Battle was joined!
The things I like about all the Rampant rules are the simplicity and the quick turn-around between turns, which keep the game moving along nice and quickly. The key to winning seems to lie in exploiting the special rules for each unit and wise placement at the start of the game, as unit movement tends to bog down once engaged in fire, except for the fastest.
The end-game battle of attrition maybe shows a weaker side of the rules, especially when half-strength units end up blazing away ineffectually at each other for multiple turns. The range of heavy weapons also seems short (most ranges maxed out at 18 inches), this may be necessary to stop heavy units being over-powered but it felt odd to have a tank’s firing range limited to three times the miniature’s length.
None of this stopped us enjoying the game though, so I’d recommend Xenos Rampant to anyone wanting some quick, dirty fun in the mutant outlands or abandoned factories of the grim future!
