The Northern Marches; An introductory preamble

Some time ago I had the pleasure of playing a co-op campaign of the excellent "5 Leagues from the Borderlands" (3rd edition). Sadly the campaign eventually fizzled due to a combination of various time eating circumstances.  A recent change in my working hours has allowed me the time to resurrect 5 Leagues from the ashes. The game is very much a mix of skirmish wargame with RPG like narrative elements, in a blend that I find very appealing. Rather than revisit a campaign that was already 30 turns in, but has been un-played for over a year I decided to start afresh. Once again I'll be linking up with the friend I played the last campaign with, whom I will hence forth refer to as Don and running this campaign as a co-op affair. So going forward I thought I'd start a blog to cover the campaign. I'm aiming to set up the introductory posts, then begin actually playing the campaign in the New Year. We should be getting in a game session at least once every month, but hopefully more.

For those not familiar, 5 Leagues from the Borderlands is a set of miniature agnostic solo (and co-op) wargame rules, with a procedurally generated campaign world, where you take on the role of a band of heroes (?) and adventurers exploring the game world. The feel I get from it is of a Low Fantasy world with a certain level of darkness to it. If that sounds like your sort of thing I highly recommend you take a look. If Sc-Fi is more to your taste, Ivan Sorensen (the designer), has also made "5 Parsecs from Home". Both games are currently being published as rather nice hardbacks by Modiphius Entertainment. Ivan's other games can be found by searching for his company, Nordic Weasel, on Wargames Vault. He's a highly prolific designer with numerous titles under his belt. Being a fairly big Post-Apocalyptic fan, I certainly aim to check out "5 Klicks from the Zone" at a future date.

Things may expand in scale at a later date to potentially cover other  related aspects, as I try to gather more terrain, and even shock myself with painting a few miniatures - striving to improve the look of our games. I'm hoping the fun of playing 5 Leagues again will generate some much needed impetus to kick my arse into painting some of the numerous fantasy miniatures I have, and hopefully knock out some terrain to match. Potentially a broader accounting of some of my trials and tribulations in various gaming hobbies may appear some time down the line.

For now I'll start with the chronicle of our warband's journey 5 Leagues from the Borderlands, then potentially add in the details of a solo campaign of Rangers of Shadow Deep campaign I'm planning to run if scheduling slows down the pace of the 5 Leagues games. Anyway I hope my own hack writing doesn't put me off, and we'll see where we go...