Skirmish Campaigns

I was just pondering ordering another of the Skirmish Campaigns scenario booklets when I suddenly realised that, apart from a couple of AARs, I have hardly mentioned them on the blog.

Whilst they publish the Arc of Fire skirmish rules and Check Your 6! air combat rules, the core of Skirmish Campaign's output is their line of scenario / campaign booklets.  These are softback, US letter format and staple bound books, generally in black and white (although I think the later releases have colour covers).  They are typically 50-60 pages containing around 8-10 scenarios which can often be linked into individual campaigns.

Some brief introductory material providing some context to the scenarios is provided along with a table to help translate their troop categorisation into a wide variety of rule sets - Skirmish Campaigns use Training, Morale and Leadership categories (the table is available for download from their website in MS Word format).  A useful bibliography is also usually included.

Each scenario comes with an overview containing the specific setting (date, location, history, victory conditions, orders etc.), any specific scenario or campaign rules and notes and a brief outline of the historical aftermath of the scenario.  This is followed by a map showing the key terrain features and entry/set up areas and finally orders of battle (OOB) for the two forces.  The OOB is normally a base force along with some variable attachments which may be added based on the attachment rules and a d20 roll.  The OOB for each side comes on a separate page so these can be copied and handed to the players if required (I prefer to produce my own after converting to Nuts! or I Ain't Been Shot Mum as appropriate).

I have found the booklets a great source for both pick up and play games, linked campaigns and to help generate my own scenarios.  The only gripe I have is that some of the booklets have scenarios which vary wildly in the scale of the forces required and this is not usually obvious from the published information.  I am planning to put up a post on each of the booklets I have and I will be including an overview of the scenario sizes which I hope will help with that.