The Turn Sequence

It's been awhile, but I'm back to talk about more basics of gameplay in Dark Century. Today's primer is on the turn sequence, and in particular, the Action Phase. From now on, I'll try to put specific game terminology in italics the first time it's brought up, and game terms will always be capitalized wherever they appear.

Turn Sequence

Anachron Legions is a game of alternating unit activation. Players take turns Activating individual units or Groups of units, and performing Actions with those units, until both sides are out of units to Activate. A roll-off occurs at the start of each turn to determine who gets the first Activation (called “rolling for Advantage”).

So the basic turn sequence breaks down like so:

Turn Sequence
1. Advantage Phase
2. Action Phase
3. Melee Phase
4. Recovery Phase

Nothing earth-shattering in there really. Let's start with the Advantage Phase - it's a roll-off between the players to see who gets the first Advantage during the Action Phase (i.e. who gets the first chance to move, shoot, or whatever).

Each Advantage is like a turn-within-a-turn - the player with the Advantage is moving/shooting/etc with a unit, then the Advantage shifts to the other player. So at any given time during the Action Phase there's an Advantage Player and an Opposing Player, and they switch roles throughout the Action Phase until everyone's units have had a chance to do something. This leads us naturally to -

The Action Phase - The Meat of the Turn

As you would expect, the Action Phase is, well, where most of the action happens. Like I said above, players are taking turns using their units, the Advantage is shifting back and forth. Using a unit requires something called Activation, where the Advantage Player gets to choose a unit that hasn't done anything yet this turn, and perform Actions with them. Each unit can perform two Actions, after which they're finished their Activation and can't do anything else this turn - this is called being Spent.

Actions are pretty self-explanatory - anything a unit can do is going to cost it at least one Action. So Moving, Shooting, issuing Orders, all of these things are Actions units can perform. Some of these things will use both your unit's available Actions at once, like firing certain heavy weapons - this naturally keeps units from both Moving and Shooting with weapons that aren't able to do so.

Quick Re-Cap

I don't want to try to go through too much at once, so let's just make sure we've got Advantages and Actions straight. A turn begins with players rolling off to see who gets the first Advantage. During your advantage, you may Activate a unit by picking a unit that hasn't done anything yet, and you can carry out two Actions, such as Moving or Shooting. Once that unit's done, they're Spent for the turn, and the Advantage shifts to your opponent. Advantage shifts back and forth until everyone's units are finished their Actions. Then it's on to the Melee Phase, which is a topic for another day.

The Basics - Units

We're going to take a little break from posting fluff today to talk about some of the basics of gameplay in Dark Century. We'll take a glance at the various unit types, then we'll go over the different kinds of unit organization. Finally we'll touch on the two different types of bases, Squad and Character.

Unit Types

The first important concept to understand is the way Dark Century organizes models into units. There are two categories of units, Infantry and Vehicles, and within each category are several unit types:

Infantry	Vehicles
Leg - Your regular infantry, getting where they need to go by leg/tentacle/pseudopod.	Ground - Any vehicle that moves along the ground via wheels or treads.
Mounted - This covers your cavalry-type units, your bikers, or your fast-moving beasts.	Walker - Built like a vehicle, moves like infantry, it's a walker!
Jump - These guys can fly, whether it's thanks to wings, jet packs, or anti-grav belts. They move quick and ignore terrain.	Hover - A vehicle that floats and moves over terrain with no penalty, but can't quite fly high enough to leave the table altogether.
Artillery - These infantry are manning the big guns - as a result, they're pretty slow and awkward to maneuver.	Flyer - Starts the game completely off the board, then breezes through over the course of two turns, flying right over any terrain.

None of this is particularly groundbreaking, but it's important to note that I'm trying to be comprehensive right from the start. These rules will cover everything from the weediest little leg infantry unit to giant hulking mecha to fast-moving jet fighters, so it's important to start with a holistic approach rather than tack things on later.

Unit Organization

In Dark Century, we aren't so concerned about where every individual foot soldier is standing, or even whether they're still alive. Infantry models are almost always grouped together onto large bases, with somewhere between two and five models per base. Only an especially powerful or important infantry model would find itself alone on a base.

Units can be a single base, or can be made up of multiple bases that are linked together for the entire game. We call each base within a Unit a "Unit Element" or just an "Element". That's a generic term for the smallest piece of a unit, and it applies to vehicles too.

A very sparse squad of Anglian Rifles.

Vehicles are slightly different though, because not every vehicle actually needs a base, and most vehicle models that ARE on a base are usually based alone rather than in groups. Other than that, the same nomenclature applies: a vehicle Unit is either a single vehicle, or several separate vehicles that remain together for the entire game. In vehicle Units with multiple separate vehicles, each vehicle is still called a "Unit Element" to keep terms consistent. Hopefully this makes sense, if not, leave a comment!

Base Types

Finally we're going to look at the difference between the two different infantry base sizes in Dark Century. Bases come in two flavors: Squad and Character. The majority of your units are going to be on Squad bases, which are 32mm x 32mm in size. The Squad base represents a robust group of Infantry moving and fighting together, like a Rifle Section in a Rifle Squad.

The Character base is half the size of a Squad base, only 16mm x 32mm. Character bases usually have a single infantry model on them, representing (duh) a character. Character bases are less durable in game terms, but also can't be singled out by enemy fire so long as they're near a Squad base. Your leadership units are almost always on Character bases, which allows them to act independently but makes them more vulnerable to damage. It also makes it easy for you to tell at a glance which base is in charge in a cluster of infantry units. This is a crucial point, and really aids gameplay, as leadership and morale are absolutely critical in effectively controlling your troops in Dark Century.

The Dark Plane

The discovery of the Dark Plane profoundly altered the course of human civilization - altered for the worse. The Plane exists separate from our own, having virtually no interaction with our own reality. Theorized in the late 21st century as the residence of dark matter and dark energy, the Plane's existence was confirmed when a rift was opened in a laboratory deep under the Badlands of South Dakota.

At that infinitesimal point in an infinite universe, the two planes had been merged, tearing a Rift in reality. Dark energy immediately spilled forth, corrupting all it touched, and a malevolent being of pure energy emerged. Bathed in the energies of its own plane, the being stalked the lab, exploring the alien environment and casually slaying the creatures of flesh that it found.

Thus began the inexorable mixing of the two dimensions. Real matter corrupted by dark energy, dark matter infused with the energy of our reality, the result was matter and energy existing in both planes simultaneously. The very presence of such material has a corrupting effect on all around it, further coupling the two planes. The laws of physics as understood by humanity cease to apply where the planes are coupled, yielding unpredictable effects both spectacular and horrifying.

Rifts

The first use of such Dark Weaponry occurred in Tehran - a crude Rift generator was delivered via ballistic missile, tearing a massive hole between planes and unleashing a torrent of Dark Energy. The Rift was modulated such that the initial burst of Dark energy affected a key regulatory hormone in humans, swiftly killing the majority of the city's population, while leaving other matter largely intact. However, instead of stabilizing as expected, the Rift grew until it swallowed a city block.

The weapon had severely weakened the boundary between planes, allowing the first Rift to expand uncontrolled, and causing spontaneous Rifts at other weak points across the globe. Many smaller openings appeared for miles around the city, growing fewer as the distance from the detonation increased. Scattered Rifts opened as far away as Brazil and eastern China.

The Zones

Nearly every nation on the planet was faced with at least one Rift, pouring forth corrupting energies and matter and forming deadly, uninhabitable Zones. Those unfortunate enough to be caught in a Zone, or those sent in to assess damage later, encountered unexplainable anomalies. Physics in the Zones had been changed, ranging from floating rubble or creeping phosphorescent jelly to areas that aged a century in a day. Those closest to the Rift experienced bizarre effects as periodic Events rang out from the holes in reality: timequakes and hellfire storms, space distortions and terrifying hallucinations. Many who lingered too long in the Zone died; those who survived were mutated into grotesque, barbaric creatures. Worst were what became known as the Demons, shadowy and apparently sentient beings of flickering Dark matter that emerged and withdrew along with the tides of emanating energy.

These early Zones were largely sealed off, with military forces deploying to keep Dark monstrosities in and the curious out. Some measure of order was reestablished in most nations, and an effort was made by the world community to police and explore the deadly and mysterious Zones. But as new uses for the physical anomalies of the Zone were discovered, exploitation increased, and fighting began over disputed Zone territory. International monitoring of the Zones quickly broke down as a new arms race began, the Long War that still goes on to this day.

A Brief History of the End of the World

The end of Mankind started in a blinding flash near modern Man’s own birthplace, in the Near East. The ancient, divided holy city was erased from existence by fundamentalists with a forbidden atomic weapon - a terrible act condemned the world over, even as regional fighting over scarce resources was becoming the new norm.

However, it was not the First Act that truly began the end. The bomb, with all its terrible power, was a mere pebble, dislodging to unleash a crushing rockslide. Weapons far worse than any man could imagine at the time were about to be unleashed in response. The Mad Prophet Abdul Alhazred later wrote thusly:

And He spoke with a voice like the shattering of the earth, and His words were searing light, and in the echo of those words we saw His true form, and He was not our God, but Theirs, and this was not our world, but a Shadow on the wall of Reality.

For in the years following the Unification Theory, man’s understanding of his very existence was fundamentally changed. What many expected to bring a paradise of clean energy, to be a solution to the resource scarcities and economic shocks gripping the globe, and to provide unique insight into the physical world, resulted in the opening of doors that should never have been opened - doors that could never again be closed.

The Dark Plane

The unification of all known physics explained many mysteries of the tapestry then known as reality. But with a single loose end, that tapestry quickly unravelled. For the first time in a laboratory deep under the Badlands of South Dakota, The Veil was parted ever so briefly, giving man his first glimpse of the Dark Plane.

It was hailed as the savior of first-world civilization. A dimension of pure energy, underpinning the fabric of reality - could that not be tapped to power our industry, to propel our vehicles, to light our homes? But a disaster of unknown origin occurred at the site of the initial discovery. The project was classified and all records were sealed, and the world was left in confusion and uproar. Surely such momentous knowledge must be shared for the betterment of mankind?

Not willing to fall behind in the greatest scientific discovery in generations, nations across the globe raced to start similar research, and all quickly discovered the same truth: this new dimension was not background energy waiting to be tapped. This was a Plane of dark, powerful corruption. Man peered into the darkness, and malicious intelligence older than our universe peered back. The darkness that spilled forth from the Plane warped the very laws of physics around it, and the creatures that followed were as hellspawn.

As many unfortunate researchers discovered, to look upon the Plane would destroy one’s mind. To expose the material world to it would unravel reality itself. The Plane was not a resource, not at first. Instead the Plane was the most potent weapon mankind had ever discovered.

An Opened Door

It was years later, after Jerusalem was destroyed, that the response came, swift and absolutely devastating. It was the first time the world had seen Dark weaponry, indeed the first time anyone outside the innermost circles of government and industry even knew such a thing could exist. Dark weapons, finely tuned to release Dark energy that would fatally corrupt human cells instantly while leaving all infrastructure untouched.

Not all life was ended though. Many on the edges of the blasts survived, changed, tainted by the Dark energy that played upon their forms at a subatomic level. They grew twisted and monstrous, walking empty streets, eating the flesh of the recently deceased.

Reality itself was corrupted as well. The Dark weapons thinned the Veil between this world and the Other, leaving Rifts between the planes. As outside teams moved in to assess the damage from the strike, mysterious and terrifying aberrations appeared near the Rifts. A hole of infinite blackness, floating in the air. Pavement and foliage transformed into indestructible metal of a type never before seen. A boiling lake with no identifiable source of heat. As the Veil slipped, physical laws as men understood them were cast out in favor of a new, alien reality.

Across the globe these effects appeared, cropping up after the first Dark weapon blast in an indecipherable pattern of harmonic Zones somehow linked through the Plane. Although the Zones were incredibly dangerous to explore, the resources they contained held promise for reality-bending Dark technologies. Soon nations were perfecting fantastic weapons capable of disintegrating matter, elements that could generate anti-gravity fields, and compounds that formed near-indestructible armor plate.

The Long War

Rather than solving mankind’s resource crisis, these Dark weapons fueled an arms race deadlier than any mankind had ever known. The Long War had begun. A hundred year descent into chaos, an unraveling of man’s lofty achievements, a dark century of violence where reality was torn by shadowy Rifts in space and time that scarred the globe. Massive social and economic upheaval, population crashes, and warfare of every kind transformed the face of the planet.

A century later the Long War still rages. a new era of unending warfare unleashed. A series of brief, desperate engagements over the span of a century, gradually grinding civilization to dust with increasingly terrible weapons, rending the fabric of reality irreparably and unleashing Zones of Dark Energy across the globe. Few of the Old Nations survive intact, either politically or geographically. The extent of the New Nations is determined not by treaty, but by the boundaries of uninhabitable Zones that cut haphazardly across old borders.

This is the age of the Legions. When war has torn civilization asunder and new empires rise, mighty Legions wield powerful weapons from before the fall of man, fighting in renewed struggle for control of a desolate planet, and standing watch over the shadowy rifts threatening to consume all that remained.

Welcome, internet!

This will be the start of many posts to come surrounding the development and not-too-distant launch of a new wargame, Dark Century. I'm Ted, more or less sole creator of everything here so far (my apologies to someone in Russia for this fantastic background image, I promise I'll send whoever you are a fiver in the mail someday). My goal here is to get anyone who's interested up to speed in the development of my game world in all its various aspects, from artwork and background to models and rules, and to encourage feedback from anyone else who wants to see this project grow to fruition.

Setting

My first few posts will elaborate on the setting of the game as it stands now. We'll take a brief tour of the state of the world, look at how it came to be so thoroughly corrupted, explore a few of the various races and factions that inhabit it, and hopefully generate a lot of good responses from any readers I might pick up. This game is turning out to be a synthesis of every gaming and sci-fi influence I've had in my life. It strikes a chord with me, but I want to be sure it works for a wider audience too - no more writing in a vacuum!

Miniatures

I'll also be showing finished work and work in progress on the range of miniatures I'm creating especially for the game, a slow but extremely fun process. I do the majority of my design work in Solidworks thanks to my background as an engineer, and as of now all miniatures are 3D printed through my store, Anachron Games, on Shapeways. This is a fine solution for prototyping, but eventually I intend to move to a more economical manufacturing method, bringing the price down for everyone.

Rules

Finally, I'm going to be dropping bits and pieces of the ruleset, in broad overviews and specific mechanics, for digestion and discussion. I eventually plan on putting the complete rules up as a pdf download, but right now we're in what I would call pre-alpha playtesting - ironing out details in some fairly major mechanics, adding and removing special rules, and fleshing out entire army lists. Once I've put a stable build through the wringer ("Hey Carter, see if you can break this game") I'll be looking for groups of volunteers for closed beta testing to try to improve playability and balance. After that, like most of Google's creations, the game will be "in beta" indefinitely as I plan on having a living ruleset, updated periodically with feedback from the community.

So there you have it, my rough outline for where this game is going. I look forward to sharing more of what's going on here and fielding your questions and hopefully constructive criticism as we go! - Ted