TERRAIN SPECIALTIES

There are four battles in the Tears of Isha campaign and campaign maps included with each scenario to give you an indication of how to set up each battlefield. The various High Elf fortifications and buildings are the central features of these battles.

For the rest of the battlefield's terrain, you will need to rely on the collection of terrain pieces that you will have, no doubt, been diligently modelling.

The battlefield on which you play out the campaign needs to be laid out on a large, level area. A dining room table or board laid on top of a bed and covered with a green cloth will usually do the job. For simple convenience, we will refer to the playing area, whatever it is made out of, as the table.

The best and most practical size of table for this campaign is 4 feet by 6 feet. This is about the size of a typical dining room table or single bed, and fits reasonably well into an average small room with enough space to sit around it. All the battles described here were fought on tables of this size. For convenience, everything is described as if for a 4 x 6 foot table. You will easily be able to adapt these guidelines to suit any other practical size of table, whether larger or smaller.

Campaign games often differ from the normal game layout, so it is important to define various zones of the table. These are useful for laying out scenery and deploying the troops in a variety of ways to fit different scenarios.

Whatever the size of your playing area, you will need to determine each player's table edge and each player's half of the table. To do this, first use an imaginary line to divide the table across the middle. When setting up the table for a battle all such lines can be marked with rows of dice, for example. The line joins the two short edges of the table. Each player's table edge is therefore one of the longer edges of the table.

Each player deploys his army within his half of the table, inside his deployment zone. The deployment zone is usually 12" from the imaginary line that divides the table in half, but this may vary according to the scenario. Usually, the opposing armies deploy no closer than a bowshot apart (24"). The zone may vary depending on the width of the table.

The deployment zone does not run right up to the sides, but stops 12" from each of the shorter edges. This creates space for troops to move out onto the flanks from the initial deployment zone.

The area from each table edge to the edge of the deployment zones can be described as the flanking zone. The area enclosed by the player's deployment flanking zones will be the middle of the table.

Each battle in the campaign comes with a map showing the layout of the battlefield. It is entirely up to you and your opponent how closely you follow these maps. If you do not have any of the terrain pieces marked on the map, now is a good time to start making them. Alternatively, you could both agree to change the layout of the map in any way you like to fit what scenery you do have. The maps are there to suggest the kind of scenery that is on the battlefield; use them as the basis for your own battlefields but you do not have to follow them precisely. Some terrain features are positioned so as to create tactical problems and opportunities, so if you vary the map, you will be creating different problems and opportunities each time.

Any item of model scenery is referred to as a terrain feature. This can be a hill, hut, river or wood, for example. There are endless different possibilities for model scenery, but any particular item will belong to one of several broad categories: hills, woods, obstacles, difficult ground, buildings, and so on. Some items of terrain are really impressive if they are very big, such as a gently sloping hill. Other items would be useless if they were too big or too small, because they would either restrict movement too much or prevent you from placing models on them. As a rule, the handiest size for a terrain feature is not larger than a dinner plate in area. If you do want to use a larger item, count it as a double terrain feature, worth two smaller features, when laying out the battlefield using the Terrain Generator.

The battlefields in this campaign can be set up using a modified version of the Terrain Generator system in the Warhammer rulebook as an alternative to the maps provided. The chart on this page is designed to create the idyllic landscape in which the campaign takes place. Don't worry if you generate items of terrain you don't have; in such cases just re-roll until you get a result you can use. Alternatively, such results provide a great excuse to go ahead and model some new types of terrain to add to your collection!

Begin with both players sitting on opposite sides of the table. Each player rolls a D6 and the highest scoring player goes first. To generate a piece of scenery, roll 2D6 and consult the chart on this page. The player places the terrain piece somewhere in his own half of the table, then the other player rolls and places the next relevant piece. Whenever it is his turn to place a piece of scenery, a player may choose to stop placing terrain and declare that he is satisfied with the battlefield as it is. The other player then has the option of generating and placing one more piece if he wishes. The layout of the battlefield is then complete.

Note that some scenarios require a fixed terrain feature, such as a road or village, which must be placed before any other terrain is randomly generated. These will be noted in the relevant scenarios.