Swashbuckling on the fabulous City Canals & Harbours!

Presenting a Swashbuckling battle on a "Medieval" Urban themed Pedion city setup at the local Club. A feast for the eyes, the 4'x3' board accommodated a fight of the famous Musketeers vs. the Cardinal's Guard!
This time we will deviate from our usual "production" blog post, to share this incredible spectacle. Games like this are actually the reason I started Pedion, and why our Battlefields exist: beautiful, diorama-like games, setup in 5-10 minutes, carried at your local club in any regular gameday, and all carried away in 3 boxes. All other scenery and miniatures well enhanced, to a mind blowing result. And at the same time, we enjoyed a solid, full gaming experience, where scenics were not "in the way" of the game. In case you like the Urban tiles, you can still pre-order them for a few days more at the eshop

Rue Richelieu

Battle Info

We set the fight in Toulouse of 1627, with Luis XIII visiting for the inspection of the first miles of Canal en Languedoc - destined to eventually connect Toulouse (and its river Garonne) with the Mediterranean. But the canal waters "hide" the mismanagement and misappropriation of funds by Cardinal's Richelieu people!

Toulouse, Spring 1627 - River Garonne and the start of Canal Royal en Languedoc

Outskirts and the use of our Slope Elevation system to create an uphill street

Their Majesties (and the Cardinal) admire the Canal works

Musketeers Porthos and d'Artagnan lead a continent of their fellows, to inform Their Majesties, as they exit from the morning Mass held in the Basilica of Saint-Sernin. But the ever-present Cardinal was informed by Lady de Winter, and sends Count Rochefort with plans to stop them!

Porthos and d'Artagnan lead a unit of Musketeers and Servants to find the King (NW corner placement)

Lady de Winter and Count de Rochefort lead the Guard and their thugs to stop the coming Musketeers (SW corner placement)

Rochefort leads Halberdeirs and Matchlock carrying thugs to take position on the west end of the main road, Rue Richelieu

The main Cardinal's Guard makes sure their master is ok before trying to cut the Musketeers from the southern access. The Cardinal orders Captain Marcheaux to stop the troublemakers!

The Game

The Skirmish was between two warbands, Musketeers vs Cardinal's Guard, with the main purpose of one routing the other. We used the *EXCELLENT* rules of "En Garde" from Osprey Publishing/ Osprey Games which capture the single-miniature swordfights' spirit admirably!
Many of the terrific images have some battle info on their descriptions. But needless to say, the Musketeers once more foiled the plans of the Cardinal and his lackeys and carried the day!

The Musketeers see the coming Guards and choose to cross into Rue Richelieu. The waiting thugs open fire, but to no effect. 

Porthos takes position next to the bridge, waiting for captain Marcheaux to come to him

d'Artagnan joins the fight on the street, to help his soldiers

The Cardinal's Guard storms the bridge

More Thugs come up a side alley and daring swordfight occurs!

The 4th Musketeer lives up to his legend - thugs fall to his swordsmanship, among them Lay de Winter herself (the rascal, striking at women!)

Rochefort starts to get anxious, as more Musketeers come his way

Porthos shows that his fame as the most powerful warrior is not understated: he single-handedly brings down Marcheaux and his horse!

On the Nwest end we have the final showdown: d'Artagnan vs Rochefort. The two duel like there is no tomorrow, but in the end, Rochefort has suffered a Grievous wound to a simple Stun for the Musketeer. The count knows when he is beaten and flees, vowing revenge!!!

You want more detailed info (and photos)? Check out corresponding facebook post!

What we used

The terrain is of course the pre-painted urban wargaming tiles from Pedion, as well as our new lines of Bridges, Walls and Trees - just check http://pedion.ecwid.com to get yours!

Miniatures are from the collections of George Panopoulos and Panos Mountis, originating mostly from the "Musketeers" line of Redoubt Enterprises with additions from the Renaissance lines from Warlord Games. They were beautifully painted by Fedros Dimitriou, Andreas Panagopoulos, George Manis and Thodoros Galanis.

Le Carrefour

Buildings are mostly from the David Graffam excellent papercraft line, along with 3D UMBUM kits. Several details, like the market stand and the wooden pier were created by George Manis and Andreas Voyadzis .

Le Pont

Panos Mountis starred as d'Artagnan and Andreas Voyadzis as Porthos, against the machinations of George Panopoulos as the Cardinal and Fedros Dimitriou as Rochefort.

I hope you like what you saw - I can only stress how great it was for us!
Good gaming,

George

P.S. (Historical) - The works for Royal Canal en Languedoc commenced about 50 years later, destined to become Canal du Midi - but why let this stand in the way of fun ;)

Less than 20 hours left, and even more Free stuff and Tile types available!

WOW - We have entered the last 19 hours, and Pedion has unlocked THREE more Stretch Goals
Now its free Wall pieces for everyone, Urban and Sea/Coastline Tiles!

This Kickstarter keeps surprising me, humbling me and my family over the support of the backers.  Just a few hours after the previous blog post, the next Stretch Goal was reached!

So you may now add Urban/SciFi/Modern tiles for your buildings and city fights, with magnetic tile surfaces!

Straight 7cm Urban Road Tile, with Aluminum Hoverway road, Illuminated roadsides and Plastisteel grid texture (fully magnetic) 

The new tile types are more suited to an Urban environment: either SciFi, Modern or Gothic, perfect for wargaming in in such an environment. The Urban tiles are mostly re-designs of the main Road tiles, with added texture and road options. Specifically:

• To the existing 7cm Road width there will be another width added, 14cm; Such a wide road can easily be considered a double-lane road at 28-32mm or a 4-lane highway in 15mm.  
• To the existing Road surfaces (cobbled, dirt, asphalt) two new, futuristic surfaces will be added: Aluminum Hoverway (a bright, aluminum textured surface, that can denote hovercraft or spacecraft lanes and landing strips) and Plastisteel (Square or Hex grid in light grey or blue coloring)  
• Roadsides are expanded; apart from dirt (magnetic), now three more types will be available: raised 1" sidewalks (magnetic), sloped 1/2" black/yellow caution hatch (magnetic) and the impressive 1/3" LED illuminated roadsides (non-magnetic).  
• Tile textures are expanded with an urban range. So far, road tiles included the texture of their greater set (eg Green grass for Spring Green theme). Now, many more more Urban-appropriate textures can be selected for your urban tiles: Grey cement (all magnetic), Irregular cobblestone (all magnetic), Stone pattern (Granite or Sandstone, plasticard, magnetic hardpoints), Brick Pattern (plasticard, magnetic hardpoints), Futuristic Plastisteel Grid (Square or Hex, all magnetic)  

Backers can choose whatever combination of surface, roadside and tile texture for their Urban Sets. They can even choose some tile to be "transition" tiles from the rest of their Set; that means that tile on one side of the road can have an Urban texture and on the other the regular tile texture, like Grass. The Urban tiles are available as add-ons in sets, of 2, 4, 6 and 9 pieces:

Expand your Battlefield with Coastline and Open water tiles

Everyone has a little Admiral inside... so how about some naval battles or coast landings? You can expand your battlefield with coastline tiles or open water ones. You can use them to create big lakes, or sea gulfs and coastlines. There is even a river delta tile, to connect your rivers to the open water.

Details and features of the Sea/Coastline tiles:

• There are Open Sea (water) tiles, Coastline Tiles and River delta tile (actually a specific kind of Coastline tile)
• The Coastline tiles are further divided into 3 kinds: Straight beach, Concave coast (inwards turn), Convex Coast (outwards turn). They can be combined to recreate any coastline you want.
• The Coastline tiles have a zone of 10cm of beach, and the rest of the tile is open sea. That means that the Straigh beach tile is 33.3% land and 66.6% "water"
• The Coastline tiles are not Flat. The "water" will be at 0cm (river water level), painted atop the 1mm plastic tile base. The land part will be mostly slope, starting at sea level and sloping gently upwards for the next 7cm of the tile, to reach the full 1cm height of regular tiles (the 7:1 grade is more than enough to keep miniatures from sliding). Then, the last 3 cm till the tile edge will be flat, and painted to the texture of the rest of the Set, to achieve transition. 
• The sloped beach will be mostly textured as sand and will be FULLY magnetic. There will be rocks, pebbles and other textures for aesthetic reasons. The texture flat 3cm zone on the landwards tile edge will include metal hardpoints
• The River Delta acts as a straight beach tile, with the gap of a river mouth. There will be some texture (mud banks) at the point the river joins the open water.
• The open sea tiles will be completely flat, at 0cm (1mm). The sea will have small breaking waves, but nothing too protruding to allow miniature sliding.
• The flat part of the tiles probably won't connect magnetically. So, Open Sea tiles and Water part of coastline tiles will connect with anti-slide PressLok connectors from Velcro, which we use on the Pedion gaming mats
• There is a liquid glass option for the Water parts, although it will be more rugged than the river tiles, and it requires much more effort and resin. Also there is the option to upgrade to liquid glass only the River part of the Delta tile, and to create a smooth transition (through mud banks or pebbles) to the painted open sea.
• The "Water" can be exchanged for Lava or Green Toxic liquids.

Wall pieces for everyone!

Since we surpassed the 165 backer limit, everyone who will receive a physical reward will get some extra, free pieces of the Wall system. In particular:

• For every backer who gets 1 to 6 tiles (through Sets and add-ons), he or she will receive 1 Hedge Fences Set (that's 2x 12cm or 4x 5.2cm Hedge walls, see add-ons)
• For every backer who gets 7 to 16 tiles (through Sets and add-ons), he or she will receive 1 Stone Walls Set (that's 2x 12cm or 4x 5.2cm Stone walls, see add-ons)
• For every backer who gets 17 or more tiles (through Sets and add-ons), he or she will receive 1 Magnetic Columns Set (that's 2x single connectors and 1 T-connector columns, see add-ons)
• All Wall System Starter Sets get ONE MORE Stone Wall piece.

Enjoy your free Walls!

Now let's see if we can reach the 180 backer limit and free tiles! only a few hours left for you to pledge!
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/georgepanopoulos/pedion-modular-prepainted-terrain-system-for-rpgs

Journal #6 - or, The Road goes ever on and on

The time has come to show you another major kind of tiles that will be part of Pedion - and of any wargaming board I know of: the Roads...
In case you are following our facebook and twitter feeds, you may have seen that most of the Pedion™ prototype tiles are ready and configured into various wargame layouts. The Road tiles were some of my first prototypes but I am quite happy with their design parameters.

As with the rest of Pedion™ tiles, there will be tile designated as "roads", ie a part of the tile can be used as road by moving units, with any bonus this may grant depending on the ruleset used. What really sets the Road tiles apart is that they must be designed in a way to connect to each other and form a road network when the table is set. Also, there cannot be just one or two Road tiles in a full layout; there will be either enough to form a road crossing between two edges of the table, or none.

By selecting square tile shape, there are some limitations on road tile design. The roads must "start" from specific places on the tiles, in order to interchange them without problem. An obvious starting point is the middle of each tile's side. That means that the generated roads can only have 90 degree turns, intersections or crossroads. This is not as serious a handicap as it sounds, since most human made/designed roads cross at 90 deg (this was one of the main reasons I preferred square tiles to hexagons since they allow only for 30 degree intersections).  However, I intend to design a 30/60 degree intersection system to allow for such offshoots.

Road Tile Variations

• For the time being, there are four (4) basic Road tile designs: two kinds of Straight road, a 90 degree road turn and a "T" shaped intersection. 
• The Road width is approx. 7 cm on the tiles (that's about 2.75"). I selected this size as it corresponds to realistic road sizes for the whole 15mm to 28mm scale range Pedion is intended for. Therefore, the road can correspond to a 4m (13') wide road in 28mm scale (1/56), up to a 7m 2-lane (23') in 15mm scale (1/100). For smaller scales there will be tiles with less wide roads.
• The prototype tiles represented cobblestone covered road parts. This will be one only of the available road styles; there will also be the option for dirt or asphalt roads. I went with the cobblestone since it is the most difficult to produce and presents a nice result. Asphalt roads may be more "scale-specific" as they will show road stripes. If Pedion™ expands, I am thinking of more road styles, suitable to sci-fi terrain.  

Check out the road tiles in the pictures below:

6 road tiles, suitable for a 4x4 game table

a T-shaped intersection, for more variety or urban enviroments

Road tile modularity

The Road tiles can be combined in an almost infinite number of ways over your gaming table. The final result is both practical and realistic, since the roads do not "protrude" from the surrounding surface, but look natural in the terrain. However, their modularity capabilities do not stop there.

Real roads have trees or other features on their sidelines, or are usually followed by lines of fences. In many of my games I have used roads next to walls, hedges etc.

So I decided to magnetically enable the roadsides, in order for the players to place any magnet-based terrain feature they want next to them! Instead of predesignating walls, trees etc, you can place and remove features as you wish (or your gaming scenario dictates!). All the "dirt" area on the tiles is actually capable of holding terrain features like the trees I created for the forest tiles. I will let the video speak for itself...

The magnetized features in the video connect because the roadsides are painted with magnetic primer. In this case, the magnetic primer remained strong enough fro the magnets to connect. However it is possible to replace the primer with metal hardpoints at regular intervals in future iterations. 

Basecoating over the magnetic primer

On general progress

As I mentioned above, most prototypes are ready, and I think I have enough hard data to finalize design decisions and move to the next step: bringing Pedion to the world, that is, you. It is my intention to create a crowdfunding campaign for Pedion, in order to scope if there is actual interest, and what would people prefer for their terrain tiles. 

The campaign will start rather sooner than later, since I am planing this for a long time, having made exhaustive calculations on manhours, development methods, costs, and shipping size & weight. I intend to make Pedion available in fixed, boxed layout sets, suitable for 3x3,4x4 and 4x6 wargaming tables, and allow each gamer to expand it by getting extra tiles as needed - check out a sample 4x4 layout including a river for your viewing pleasure :)

a 4'x4' layout variation, including 5 road tiles, as well as 1 forest tile and two hill tiles (soon to come)

There are still issues to iron out, especially cost-wise, since the tiles seem to be more costly to make than I anticipated, raising the overall set cost. However, I believe the sets will be more competitively priced than other solutions out there. Also, there is still  the selection of the crowdfunding platform, since, while I would prefer KickStarter, it is a nightmare to start a campaign from a non-supported country, like Greece.

All these will be discussed in future blog posts, and of course over facebook and twitter. So, if you think you would (or know someone who would) be interested in being among the first to get a Pedion™ modular battlefield, follow us there. Also, I would really, really apreciate comments and ideas on the Road tiles, to make them even better!

Good gaming all!