Into the Twilight

Part of the reason for slow progress with painting figures for the Thirty Years War armies noted in my last entry is that I a have been familiarising myself with the rules provided in 'Twilight of Divine Right', authored by Nick Dorrell and published by the Pike and Shot Society.

I find the concept of these rules very much to my liking - keep it simple so you can fight big battles fairly quickly but make sure that the system contains factors that encourage you to use your army and particular troops in a way that reflects how they fought historically.  Under the Twilight system, almost everything resolves to just two tests.  Action tests determine whether your troops can do what you want them to do.  Morale tests determine whether, in light of all the bad things that are happening to them, units remain in the fight.  There is no firing or casualty removal.  If you are being fired on, this is a modifier to your morale test roll.  If you fail a morale test but don't rout you lose a morale point and when you have lost the last of these you rout anyway.

Nick Dorrell has published some helpful material on YouTube while Sigur has provided some excellent battle reports and commentary on the rules in TabletopStories.

To help myself understand the rules and think through how I could introduce them to others in a club game I have been working on how to present key points in a format that is more user friendly on the battlefield than the rule book and the Quick Reference table provided with it.  Although the QR table - on the left in the picture above - is comprehensive, two sides of closely typed, small font, is a bit of a challenge to my eyes and speed of thought.  As an alternative, I have made a couple of sheets that sit in the bottom of my dice tray to provide an aide memoire on how to conduct each of the tests.  Each test will be accompanied by a half page width (aka mobile phone width) crib sheet with larger fonts and colours to help identify key information.  I'm also drafting some unit reference cards inspired by those developed for my ancient naval game - rules for which were inspired, tangentially, by my first reading of Twilight of Divine Right!  These will contain the specific modifiers - if any - that always apply to the unit, reducing the need to cross reference tables.

Dice tray insert for Action Tests and first draft of accompanying crib sheet - which sets out all the conditions when an action test is needed, or not needed, for the different categories of troops.

Morale Test insert and crib sheet - setting out possible modifiers, red for negative, green for positive.  I will adjust the colour scheme and revise this card once I have worked out what will go onto the unit record cards and so can be removed from this general reference card.

As I have read the rules and QR table to work out how to present things as simply and clearly as possible, I have found a number of ambiguities and uncertainties.  The author has been very helpful in responding to my questions on these points and I am incorporating the clarifications in the playing aids.  All of these, together with enough troops for a satisfactory first battle, are needed for the second week of January.  Onwards!