My regular Monday night gaming crew just concluded a simple Dragon Rampant campaign. We like the DR rules quite a bit, but the campaign, as they often do, collapsed of its own weight. But we haven’t given up on the idea and I volunteered to take another stab at designing one.

Our first campaign was a simple move-one-square-and-fight type arrangement, which being gamers, led to immediate questions about turn sequence, terrain, etc. So our second campaign would need to incorporate normal gaming conventions, but remain fast and require minimal bookkeeping. Given the brief, I decided to look for a boardgame to use as a shell. I have long thought Columbia Games’ series of “block” games would make excellent campaigns, so I made my first stop their fantasy game “Wizard Kings.”

Wizard Kings is fantasy empire building game. It comes with geomorphic maps so you can add/rearrange maps to get new play from the same scenario by changing out the maps. The maps are very water-heavy. Bays, inlets, islands and seas abound. Besides the four maps in the original game you can buy extra map sets of 4 maps each to add variety to your games. Each map features 10 points worth of cities (each city rated from 1 to 3) in addition to the usual terrain.

Besides a set of maps perfectly suited to a campaign, it includes a simple combat system that maps to Dragon Rampant fairly easily. This means small fights between one or two units can be resolved with a few dice rolls, instead of an actual tabletop battle with the Dragon Rampant rules.

With the Wizard Kings game as a guide, I wrote a set of rules for running a campaign in which larger battles are resolved using Dragon Rampant (you may download them at the bottom of the page). I also made up terrain cards for setting up the table top battles.

The campaign has modest bookkeeping for the GM, and almost none for the players. I made a Kingdom status sheet (included in the download) that needed updating in between strategic turns. We did our strategic moves at the end of the night. That way we knew what battles were happening next week. If we had no battles we would do a second strategic turn.

Campaign Rules Download:

You will need a copy of the Wizard Kings rules (available as a download from Columbia Games), and you will also need maps from the game which you can purchase separately if you don’t want all the game components.

Campaign Game Rules

Additional suggested items you will need (besides items needed for the tabletop battles):

• A place to leave the campaign map set up over time. We taped ours to a magnetic board to store vertically in an out of the way corner.
• Counters of various sorts. You will need flags to show city ownership/loyalty. Counters for each faction’s armies, and smaller counters for single units that may be on the map, but not part of an army. I made ours by printing them and attaching them to self adhesive sheet magnet so they would stick to our bulletin board. Just affix the sheet magnet to the page and cut out the counters with scissors.
• Terrain cards. I created table top terrain layouts on playing cards. I made one deck for each terrain type. This allowed us to quickly set up terrain without any tedious dicing system. I made about a dozen each for woods, swamp, rough and mountains. I made closer to two dozen for open terrain. I just printed “blanks” on card stock and drew the various maps with markers. You could also check out the very, very cool (and free!) map drawing program BattleChronicler.
• Gold coins. You could do this on paper, but I had a whole bunch of the gold coins from the Pirates of the Spanish Main game in 1,2,3 and 5 denominations. Added a little chrome to the game.

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