Ranulf de Gernon rides forth

Catching up from a busy weekend when I had my first run out of the Lion Rampant rules. They are certainly causing a buzz and nearly every magazine and blog is picking it up. Previous posts have shown my Norman retinue in development, they aren't finished but I supplemented Ranulf's retinue with other dark age figures. They were up against a Teutonic knight based retinue also in the stages of development.

We had both read the rules before hand but as everybody has indicated the rules are pretty quick to pick up. We started with the bloodbath scenario, all went well until the Teutonic Knights managed to charge in against my archers. Surely a wipe out ? But they stood their ground and against the odds took a wound off the knights. Now the rules require a roll to check if the retinue lord is wounded, against all reasonable odds a double one was rolled and in our very first combat in our very first game  we had lost a retinue lord. The rest of the battle went fine swinging from side to side with Ranulf randomly charging about to test the rules. In the end though his retinue was pretty much wiped out.

We then rolled up a couple of scenarios from the book, we had less success with these as Ranulf repeatedly failed order rolls, this kind of detracted from two more good Teutonic wins as Ranulf's retinue effectively failed to turn up to the battle. I was extremely unlucky with order rolling so I don't think this is a fair test. We'll definitely be playing some more in the future, the scenarios require a flexible retinue which I like.