Of Stone and Iron
Of Stone and Iron is a fan-written campaign supplement by myself, originally for Warhammer Fantasy Battle 7th ed but it can be adapted to other settings, wargames and factions with minimal effort.
The premise of the campaign game is that your forces are attempting to conquer or draw resources from the regions around the Underway, a giant and ancient Dwarf road lying deep beneath the surface of the Old World. It includes a turn system, map exploration rules with some highly dangerous terrain and monsters available, and rules covering battlefield, income, buildings, and more besides.
There are special rules covering most of the classic Warhammer factions, giving them different special goals, buildings, and tactics, as well as significant restrictions to normal styles of gameplay that will pose new tactical and army list building challenges for players.
Design NotesI originally wrote
Of Stone and Iron in about 2009, and decided to do a quick job on proofreading it and ensuring a public version was available this year when I was looking back through the rules as part of research I've been doing into campaign systems for wargames and how they represent the past. I think the core thing that worked well in the Underway campaign was the exploration mechanic, which I've used since in one other Warhammer campaign supplement (which I may also re-release soon) but also in standalone games like
Hetairos and most recently the work I've been doing on a
Cepheida exploration game.
In aiming to be a "full" campaign, Of Stone and Iron also had some of the inherent problems of campaign games - some people juggling lots of battles in a campaign turn, others with none. The hero requirement reduced the extent to which players could simply divide their force into stacks, but they could certainly divide their force quite a lot. We played the game at a club, which helped because people could shift around to all get some games in, but a more divided group might find the sheer quantity of smaller battles a little tricky at times.
All that said - if it was chaos it was fun chaos, and if I ever got back into wargaming I'd enjoy running something similar again.
