"Xenos Rampant" First Impressions Review

As I mentioned in my opening post, I generally like the various iterations of Dan Mersey's Rampant rules. When Richard Cowen's modified science-fiction version was revealed to be being elevated to the status of an official publication, with involvement from Mersey himself, I was certainly interested, and when my local stockist got hard copies in I promptly ran online and bought a much cheaper PDF version instead.

The Rampant rules have become a bit of an oddity because they now use the same fundamental rule set to cover every period and setting imaginable, something very few rule sets do; One Hour Wargames and FUBAR are the only other ones I can think that do something similar off the top of my head. Eyebrows might have been raised when the medieval system of Lion Rampant was extended to the Pike and Shot era, colonial warfare and horse and musket combat, but now it's gone sci-fi. This is very far removed from the "knights beat archers who beat spearmen who beat knights" meta (if you'll pardon the overused tabletop gaming expression) of the system's original leonine days. For one thing, the usual units of 6 or 12 figures rolling 6 or 12 dice has been reduced slightly to 5 and 10, with the occasional 15. This is presumably a sop to Games Workshop collectors and that company's tendency to release most sets with model numbers in factors of five. Another thing to note is that Xenos Rampant, unsurprisingly, goes a bit beyond what's in the other Rampant and Rampant-adjacent rule sets, covering as they do mostly pre-modern warfare. This manifests in Xenos Rampant in a couple of noteworthy ways:

-Rules for armoured, unarmoured and transport vehicles.

-Firefights: once per turn, when a player's unit is chosen as a shooting target, the player can try to shoot back on a 7+ activation test.

-Extreme range: units with shooting ranges over 12" can fire at targets past their maximum range, but the target benefits from +1 Armour.

-Fire Support: units can be upgraded to call in off-map fire support (e.g. artillery strikes) which roll 10/5 dice hitting on a 4+ and ignoring range. This is useful for targeting emplaced weapons.

-Units test for courage every time they're hit by a shooting attack, regardless of whether they take any casualties, so it can be worth trying to shoot an enemy, even if the odds of causing damage are very low, just to try to suppress them.

These elements make the game perfectly usable for twentieth century historical games without any sci-fi or fantasy elements, especially for settings like the First World War or asymmetrical modern encounters. In fact, playing the game within a First World War framework felt an awful lot like playing the "Foch" World War One fan modification for Mersey's The Men Who Would Be Kings. Second World War gamers, especially those devoted to World War II tank stats, may find the armoured vehicle rules a bit limited for that purpose, but the game isn't intended as that accurate a simulation. That being said, the "Light Armoured Vehicle" and "Anti-Personnel Specialism" downgrades allow a bit of relativism in vehicle strength if you need to be absolutely sure that Tigers outmatch Shermans etc.

I played three test games of Xenos Rampant, using the following settings:

-Star Wars, using Star Wars Legion miniatures, with various infantry and a couple of attack-oriented psychics

-pure historical First World War (Great War Miniatures' Germans vs Scarab Miniatures' French)

-anachronistic dieselpunk Victoriana using the defunct Spartan Games Dystopian Legions models: heavy infantry, some berserker infantry, and jetpacks

Overall, the Star Wars game gave the most fun experience, with Luke and Vader as psychic elite infantry with lots of upgrades to their close combat capability. Stormtroopers were short-ranged light infantry (they're bad shots and their armour is useless, so running them as heavy infantry makes no sense to me) and it all seemed to work reasonably well. The "historical" game and the Victorian sci-fi game felt a bit dry. In the former, appropriately enough, long-range firepower dominated the battlefield and the outgunned German side was sorely in need of an artillery strike I hadn't bought for them. In the latter, units dug in behind cover and the game abruptly ended right when the Prussian jetpack lancers had finally gotten stuck in to their British opponents. I think the game is probably more fun, and offers more tactical opportunities, when both sides have a mix of different unit types rather than just lots of light and heavy infantry. The units have plenty of options for customisation, both in their own profiles and in additional "Xenos Rules", so this certainly seems like the intention. For a simple historical fire-and-manoeuvre game I think I still opt for Nordic Weasel's Squad Hammer systems, and this isn't going to displace anything like TooFatLardies' Chain of Command for those who want a more granular simulation.

One other thing to mention in this first impressions review is Commander Traits. Lion Rampant Second Edition made commander traits something you could take as an upgrade or downgrade, with the option still existing for random traits. For some reason Xenos Rampant goes back to random traits only, a rule I'm sure many if not most players will simply ignore since there's a 50/50 chance you'll get one that's either negative or useless, while your opponent may get one of great benefit. This should have been a points costed system like in Lion Rampant 2.

To summarise, Xenos Rampant seems like a system with a lot of potential, and one that will sit nicely among other highly customisable rule sets like, as I've mentioned, Squad Hammer and One Page Rules' Grimdark Future. I can absolutely see it as providing a regular alternative way for people to use licensed products like the Star Wars Legion miniatures without using their official rules, and I have no doubt people will be using it (and modding it) for historical games as well. It only makes me wonder, with all this flexibility and customisation for the sci-fi setting, whether, despite official protestations to the contrary, a similar revision to Dragon Rampant is on the agenda for fantasy.

Oh and one other other thing: the title. "Xenos Rampant" sounds, appropriately enough, like someone's mod they made up so that they could play with their Warhammer 40,000 figures in the Rampant system. The official release should have been called something else. I dunno what, but it should have been. Yes, "Xenos" could arguably mean any extraterrestrial life, but its overuse in Games Workshop fluff just makes the whole game sound like a 40K knockoff.

Followup: I played another test game trying out a bunch of different units using Mantic Games' Warpath/Firefight/Deadzone/Star Saga figures. One side was Plague: Greater Xenomorph, Lesser Xenomorph, Berserker Infantry, Light Infantry, using the "Hive Mind" ability to represent their collective conscious. The other side was Forge Fathers, i.e. Space Dwarves: Elite Infantry, Heavy Infantry and a Fighting Vehicle. This again was fast and fun, with the Plague units racing across the field to tear into the Dwarves, while the tank (when it managed to activate) chewed through the lightly-armed Plague Troopers. In the end it was the Dwarf Lord Elite Infantry that carried the day, killing off all of the Xenomorphs while the tank and a surviving heavy infantry squad mowed down the rest. This seemed to support my hypothesis that the game worked better with a larger variety of units.