The Chronicles of Üthdyn is an ambitious project here at Comrade’s Wargames. It aims to be a persistent narrative setting – a dynamic backdrop, if you will – that we can explore through fantasy tabletop games of all sizes … skirmish, medium-sized army games, and even big multiplayer battles featuring hundreds of miniatures. Plus regular tabletop RPGs as well!
This page hosts all of the battle reports and blog posts related to Üthdyn. Keep scrolling to see the links!
I’ve always been enamored with the idea of a persistent setting that offers narrative motivations for all of the games, large and small, that we enjoy playing so much. Not so much a campaign, since that implies that the players are collectively striving toward some conclusion, but more of a narrative world that exists as a backdrop. We as players can pluck out little plot threads to explore as needed in our games, to give them some meaning and context. So our games aren’t just “capture these 3 objectives” but instead it becomes “secure the vital crossroads along the road to Luko’s Holdfast” or whatever.
We developed Üthdyn over several sessions of the delightful Microscope RPG back in 2018. We ended up with a fantasy saga spanning thousands of years, with factions and personalities pushing the story at every stage, and featuring various pressure points, from political powder kegs to full-blown wars. All completely original and ripe for future games.
My own little corner of Üthdyn is a period of strife known as the War of the Coins, which is a decade-long clash between the duchies of Glostmurk (a collection of human fiefdoms led by House Begovic) and the dwarven city-state of Miravec. The “coins” in this case represent the mercenaries that were recruited by the thousands to fight for House Begovic, as well as the riches of the dwarven culture that were needlessly squandered in the war.
Toward the end of the war, it was common for the dwarven defenders to use hammers to pound the near-useless coins of Miravec into their oaken shields as a kind of ad hoc armor before they took to the field. The mercenaries, likewise, would regularly pry these coins out of the shields when they looted the battlefields following the dwarven defeats. Coins, dwarves, mercenaries, coins…you get the idea.
We know from our Microscope game that the dwarves were ultimately defeated and driven from their ancestral homelands. The games I’m interested in reflect the small border clashes and larger positional battles from the War of the Coins, as well as some skirmishes from the previous period of strife known as The Famines, when crops failed and raiders swept over the mountains to sack the lands of men & dwarves alike. Bummer all around!
I’ve been playing out these games for several years now, using a variety of rulesets. While most games fall within the timeframe of the War of the Coins, some are situated elsewhere and elsewhen in the Üthdyn saga.
Likewise, we didn’t stick to just one ruleset for these games. So the battle reports listed here don’t necessarily come from the same family of games. Nonetheless, they create an interesting chronicle of this tumultuous period in Üthdyn’s history. Check ’em out!
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