Monsters attack ancient Rome! Can your legionaries defeat them? I've been playing Broken Legions by Mark Latham, published by Osprey Games, and that's pretty much the premise of the game. I picked up the book because I like alternate history, and also because this seemed like an excellent excuse to mix my Pathfinder and Tales of the Valiant and Warhammer Quest: Cursed City miniatures with my Roman wargame miniatures. This is my review of the book and game.
The book itself is one of Osprey's blue book series. Like all the blue books I've seen, it's 64 pages and features a practical and useful layout. That doesn't mean it's boring, though. There are a few full-page illustrations and several photos of dioramas, and they're stunningly good and in full colour.
The illustrations are by Alan Lathwell and they're portaits of magic users or magical creatures that are worthy of just framing and putting on your wall. They're vibrant and expressive, and each one begs you to invent a character or a campaign around it.
The photographs are by Wargames Foundry and North Star Figures, and they're of little diorama scenes that could be right out of an actual tabletop game. There are several photos of Romans and Egyptians (from the New Kingdom, amusingly) and a pretty ferocious looking mummy (listed as an "Eternal Warrior" in the Cult of Seth warband list). It's a little funny that I picked up a game book for generic ancient Rome miniatures, only to find that I own the same Roman and anachronistic Egyptian sculpts as the ones used in many of the photos. It's a good reminder of just how niche this hobby is.
Broken Legions is a skirmish game, which means that you really only need a 6 to 8 miniatures, plus a few monsters. That's a great way to get into wargaming, because the investment for a skirmishing warband is a lot less than for a whole army of 30 or 50 or more soldiers.
It assumes two opposing players. The game's premise is that bands of Roman soldiers have been sent out into the borderlands around the Empire to uncover ancient treasures and relics. Some of the text suggests that your warband has been sent by the Emperor of Rome, but it never explains why your armies are then fighting one another. The book is light on lore, though, so it's easy to come up with your own backstory. Maybe the Emperor sent both warbands out, but has promised to reward only the one that succeeds and to punish the one that fails. Or maybe the Emperor sent both warbands out expecting them to co-ordinate and coöperate, but each warband's lust for glory gets in the way. Or maybe the Emperor isn't involved at all, and your army is just a band of treasure hunters.
Because it's a skirmish game and focuses on each miniature instead of units or contubernia or cohorts, the rules of Broken Legions provides lots of detailed action each individual miniature can make. A miniature in this game doesn't just move, shoot, charge, and melee fight. Each member of your warband is a free agent, moving independently of its troop, hiding and spellcasting and charging to the best of its ability. There are some troop tactics too, though. A good leader can rally, and a spellcaster can heal or empower, nearby allies, so it can be beneficial to have your soldiers work together.
All tests in the game are made with a d10 along with modifiers based on a miniature's profile and any external effects. Each miniature's profile has a value for its Melee ability, Accuracy in ranged attacks, Physique, Agility, Presence, and Hit Points. A designated Hero model also has Fate points, which can be spent to endure what would otherwise be a killing blow.
To make a test roll, you roll a d10 and add relevant modifiers. If the result is 10 or above, the test is successful.
For the first few times you play, you'll of course be looking up rules and keywords, even during a simple game. The game loop itself is easy to remember, but the it can be difficult at first to keep track of what requires a test and what requires a contested roll. In addition to that, there are lots of potential modifiers, and they're not all listed in one place. For example, a miniature in Heavy Armour gets a -1 penalty to melee Attacks, but that's not mentioned in the Attack Modifiers table, only in the Armour table (which you wouldn't refer to until defending against a potential wound, as a defender and not an attacker). A soldier with a Tower Shield gets a -1 penalty to Agility, but that's not reflected in the miniature's Profile in the Army Roster section, it's mentioned in the Armour table.
After my first game, I wrote up a cheat sheet to consolidate all the vital processes for Ranged Attacks, Ranged Damage, Melee Attacks, and Melee Damage. Beyond those, everything's pretty easy to remember or look up.
Attacker: d10 + Accuracy (AC) + Modifiers > 10 = Successful hit
Potential modifiers:
Attacker: d10 + Weapon Damage Bonus
Defender: d10 + Armour
Greatest result wins.
Should the Defender take damage, take a d10 + Presence test or become Broken.
Attacker: d10 + Melee + Weapon Attack Bonus + Modifiers
A melee attack is an auto success if your target is Broken. Other potential modifiers:
Should you happen to have multiple attacks, then you only need 1 success for all your attacks to land.
Roll damage for each attack you made.
Attacker: d10 + Strength + Weapon Damage Bonus
Defender: d10 + Armour
The greatest result wins. Each successful damage roll by the Attacker costs the Defender 1 HP.
When attacking, you additionally roll a critical die, a d10 of a unique size or colour. A 10 on the critical die means you impose 1 immediate wound, while a 1 means you unconditionally fail.
This is a game book with no miniature line of its own, so it's up to you to find suitable miniatures. My copy helpfully included an insert explaining what miniatures were used in the photographs, so it's theoretically easy to find a collection of Roman soldiers and monsters. Being in New Zealand, however, adds a layer of complexity to an already niche hobby, but luckily I already have a small Roman army and plenty of bog standard D&D monster miniatures. In my case, I bought the book to fit my collection, so I was immediately ready to build a warband.
Warband lists start on page 34, and each one provides a special rule for your army. The Soldiers of the Eagle, for example, are loyal servants of the Emperor and get to choose either an Attack or Defence bonus at the start of each round. The Order of Mithras, however, are dissatisfied with the trajectory of the Empire and are out to uncover the fading magical mysteries of the land. There are also non-Roman warbands, including the Barbarians, the Dacians, the Egyptian Cult of Seth, and the Parthians.
To build a warband, you match up your miniatures with a profile in a warband list. Of course, a miniature you're using for this game might not match up exactly with what the book lists as a profile, but fortunately the author includes piecemeal upgrade options. For a few extra build points, you can swap a sword for a battle axe, or a bow for a javelin, and so on. The book suggests that a typical warband is 100 to 150 build points in size, but as your warband gains experience you can hire Auxilia troops. By converting XP into build points, you can pay your mercenaries after each battle, and hopefully you'll have earned enough XP and treasure to make up the loss.
I had expected more monster profiles than just 5 or 6 mythical creatures. But I guess the tag line of "fantasy skirmish wargames" is fulfilled by the robust magic system and a few famously mythical creatures. I have yet to find a profile for a Gorgon, for instance, which surprised me because Petrify is a keyword ability, and the Gorgons are pretty iconic. Then again, they're iconic for Greece, and Rome is not Greece, so maybe it's a justified omission.
As with any game system you can always just choose a profile of any given soldier and use it for a monstrous miniature, or you can design your own. It's not a actually a problem, and the game actually only uses the monsters occasionally. There's a rule for wandering monsters, which appear within some scenarios, and otherwise don't actually come up all that often. I play solo a lot, so I tend to use custom monsters as my foes pretty often, and using a random profile works well.
Broken Legions has been everything I'd hoped it would be since discovering it and eagerly ordering it from Kapiti Hobbies in New Zealand (not exactly my friendly local game store, but then again in tiny New Zealand every game store is local). I was looking to use my Romans and Egyptians in more games, and this book provides me a way to do it. I've played Romans against a mech but for some reason it never occurred to me to add magic. This game has added new strategies and new subsystems that I never would have thought to try with my armies, and it's been a lot of fun to play. I've used these rules for fantasy games, as well, with great success.
There's a lot of game in Broken Legions, so if you're looking for a ruleset broadly applicable to anything from alternate history to fantasy, pick up a copy for yourself. It's well worth it!
Header photo licensed Creative Commons cc0.