Empire of the Dead: Blissful ignorance scenario AAR

This weekend I also introduced Empire of the Dead to my friend Thomas, he has the rules but had not yet played a game. So I put together lists of roughly 150 shillings (starting point for a campaign) and used the contents of the Gentlemen's Club and Vampire starting boxes  which have everything you need (and reach the starting points with no problem) and that is a rare thing when it comes to starting boxes.

The lists were

Gentlemen's Club
President with light pistol
Vice President with light pistol
2x Membership with hunting rifles
2x Membership with heavy pistols
1x Membership with light pistol

Vampire clan
Graf with sword
Consort with knife
Guardian with sword
1x Thrall with light pistol
2x Thrall with hunting rifles

The scenario was "Blissfull ignorance", a fun scenario where the game uses civilians wandering about the table - not knowing that they are about to get attacked by the forces of evil. As my gang was "evil" and Thomas Gentlemen "good" our objectives were to kidnap/rescue as many civilians off the table while trying to prevent the other player to achieve his goal. Each kidnapped/rescued civilian was worth 5 shilling in victory points (and as usual extra points for inflicting casualties/surviving the scenario).





We rolled to see what time of the day the game would be played at, I was hoping to win and use the cover of darkness where my vampires would be a lot stronger - but Thomas won that roll and we played during the daylight hours.

What followed was a fun game, initially the Gentlemen ran up and grabbed hold of a bunch of civilians and started leading them to safety, I had to run after them and try to disrupt their little rescue by shooting with rifles and pistols, then I too grabbed hold of a few people and started dragging them to my lair.

Midgame things looked pretty even, Thomas had managed to save 5 out of 10 people but had lost a couple of Gentlemen to my Graf, Bat Swarms, and rifle fire - but I was only now starting to extract my kidnap victims and Thomas had his whole gang focused upon preventing this from happening. My Consort was shot and bled out, both Bat Swarms were destroyed and one of my gypsy Thrall's also bit the dust.

In the end, and despite panicking civilians running towards my edge and villains (due to random direction rolls) I only managed to kidnap 2 people, then my remaining clan started to panic due to losses and ran away one after another, releasing the kidnap victims just inches from my own table edge!

It was a fun game, and as me and Thomas think alike we both agreed that it would be fun to have like a 19th century map of London and divide it into districts to fight over (or maybe even a Gothic horror version of gangs of New York type of deal in New York). I think when playing a campaign that would add a lot of "progress" to your campaign game beside the leveling up of characters. The only problem is that we really lack city terrain for this period. However - if you take the idea of a "regional map" you could just as easily make it something like a Sleepy Hollow setting out in the rural outback.