"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.

Aggressive Infantry for Lion Rampant and Dragon Rampant

In my initial post about simple rule sets, I observed that "rules-as-written may seem a little limiting at times" in the Rampant games by Daniel Mersey and published by Osprey Books. To elaborate further, one area in which I note that is how both Lion Rampant and Dragon Rampant represent infantry.

Lion Rampant was, I suspect, written initially to depict the battlefields of the High Middle Ages, which were dominated by cavalry charges. In these times, on many Western European battlefields, as I understand it, the day would often be carried by heavily-armoured knights smashing through enemy formations. At least, that's the theory; I don't know nearly enough about medieval warfare to know if this is actually true. Regardless, in this system, infantry were used largely defensively. Armed with shields and spears, they would form walls of hard points that horses would not approach, at least not with much hope of success. Hence in Lion Rampant, the primary infantry choices are heavy infantry (foot serjeants in the first edition) and light infantry (foot yeomen in the first edition).

These are both defensive units. More dangerous to their opponents when being attacked than when themselves attacking, they have a "Wall of Spears" special rule ("Schiltron" in first edition) which improves their armour if they stay in a close, immobile formation. In many cases they function better as a threat than anything else, as small cavalry units and unarmoured foot warriors may struggle to break them up without sustaining heavy casualties of their own. The slower, more heavily armoured heavy infantry are especially tough, but in a recent game even the faster-moving, more lightly armoured light infantry were able to hold their positions relatively well.

This is all well and good for representing defensive units and, as far as I know, for simulating the common tactics of the High Middle Ages (a period from roughly 1000 to 1300 CE). But what about infantry outside of defensive formations, and battles outside of those time periods? As I mentioned in my previous post, Lion Rampant, especially in its Second Edition, endeavours to also cover Late Antiquity, the Early Middle Ages (or Dark Ages, if you prefer), and the Late Middle Ages. In the first of those, while cavalry was certainly dominant in parts, especially on the eastern borders of the Roman Empire, many of Rome's European enemies (and allies) still fought in large infantry assaults. Similarly, the fighting of the Dark Ages, especially in Western Europe and particularly in the British Isles, again featured infantry to a much greater extent than cavalry. At the other end of the time period, the traditional knight declined and the role of cavalry changed with the increasing use of new tactics and gunpowder weapons. Infantry were again fighting more aggressively, with, for instance, halberds and in some cases large two-handed swords. The former weapon was used by the famed Swiss mercenaries, and the latter by their German imitators, the landsknechte.

So, how does Lion Rampant represent more aggressive infantry units? There are a few options. One is through warrior infantry ("fierce foot" in the first edition). This is a unit type with a generous roll to hit on the attack, but a very poor roll to hit on defence. They also experience wild charge, meaning that if an enemy is in range they must attempt to attack them. In the lists, Mersey uses these to represent a wide variety of units, including Germanic warriors at the fall of Rome, Norse berserkers, Swiss halberdiers and Berber infantry: basically any infantry unit more concerned with attack than defence.

There's also the option to upgrade one's heavy or light infantry to "veteran" ("expert" in first edition), improving their roll to hit on the attack but removing their ability to perform a wall of spears. Mersey suggests this can represent billmen, halberdiers and axemen. In the suggested lists they're mostly used, however, for more aggressive Late Antiquity and Dark Age troops of the British Isles and surrounding regions, along with Wars of the Roses billmen and Hussites on foot. This is all well and good, but "veteran" is an expensive upgrade in a small-scale game where points are at a premium. A unit of veteran light infantry is 5 points and a unit of veteran heavy infantry 6, and in an average 24-point game that's a quarter of your points gone. This seems like a particularly difficult investment to make on a unit that, firstly, has lost one of its best abilities (wall of spears) for the trade off of a higher attack value, but has also retained its decent defence value when, in all probability, it doesn't really need it.

I see this as the problem with infantry in Lion Rampant: there's a gap. Putting aside small units of elite infantry (foot men-at-arms in first edition), you essentially have two choices for aggressive infantry: hard-to-control, fragile units of warrior infantry, or expensive all-rounder veteran infantry. Furthermore, veteran units retain their activation roll preference for moving over attacking.

Thus, I would suggest an alternative troop type for Lion Rampant (and Dragon Rampant, but I'll get to that): aggressive infantry. This is infantry with the same points costs as regular light and heavy infantry, but with their attack and move values switched and their attack value and defence value switched. As for whether they can (or should) be able to take the existing options of their equivalent defensive troop types I would leave up to the individual player. In any event, these are my proposed profiles for "Aggressive Light Infantry" and "Aggressive Heavy Infantry", set out in the Rampant style with the right colours and everything:

AGGRESSIVE LIGHT INFANTRY
Models Per Unit	12	Points	3
Attack	5+	Attack Value	4+
Move	6+	Defence Value	5+
Shoot	-	Shoot Value	-
Courage	4+	Maximum Movement	8”
Armour	2	Special Rules	Counter-Charge Versus Infantry

AGGRESSIVE HEAVY INFANTRY
Models Per Unit	12	Points	4
Attack	5+	Attack Value	4+
Move	6+	Defence Value	5+
Shoot	-	Shoot Value	-
Courage	4+	Maximum Movement	6”
Armour	3	Special Rules	Counter-Charge Versus Infantry

  

You'll forgive my lack of access to the exact fonts and Blogger's inability to display tables nicely. The special rule is definitely something that needs testing. Should they have Counter-charge against infantry? They probably should.

I believe the same units should also be available in Dragon Rampant: warfare in fantasy is obviously even more varied than in history, and should have similar options. See below for the same units in Dragon Rampant style.

UNIT NAME	Aggressive Light Foot	POINTS	3
Attack	5+	Attack Value	4+
Move	6+	Defence Value	5+
Shoot	-	Shoot Value	-
Courage	4+	Maximum movement	8”
Armour	2	Strength Points	12

 SPECIAL RULE: Counter-charge versus foot.

UNIT NAME	Aggressive Heavy Foot	POINTS	4
Attack	5+	Attack Value	4+
Move	6+	Defence Value	5+
Shoot	-	Shoot Value	-
Courage	4+	Maximum movement	6”
Armour	3	Strength Points	12

SPECIAL RULE: Counter-charge versus foot.

I will note that a very similar proposition was made on this blog back in 2017, and credit there for the inclusion of counter-charge, although I arrived at the rest of this independently with a regular opponent. As I say, this needs testing. I don't have comments enabled on this blog, mostly to prevent Blogger's glut of spam, but if anyone sees this, or has tried something similar, I would be interested to see any testing of it on the Dux Rampant forums or on the Lion Rampant and Dragon Rampant Facebook pages.