15mm WW2 Terrain and Campaign

I've been working on a side project for the last month that has really turned into a much larger undertaking. It began one day with just an itch to paint a few of my 15mm WW2 figures that I have hanging around. These are individually based 15mm, not Flames of War stuff. After painting a few MG teams for my Germans, I felt like playing a game with them, and that's where things took off.

I've long had my eye on Britton Publishing's excellent scenario books. I stumbled across one called Solitary Soldiers, and knew I had found what I wanted. These are 10 scenarios for squad level action taking place over three months, starting from D-Day. The book provides you with a squad, all the background stories of the men, and a good historical background for the setting.  While meant to be a solo game, with the Germans being played by an "AI" (really, just 4-5 options for German tactics, and you play the rest), I convinced my son to play cooperatively.  He's played all the missions with me so far, but hasn't finished every one of them. Baby steps!

What this has done is caused me to get all the scenery and troop types that I need to put on a good game in 15mm.  With Battlefront's excellent range of terrain, and a little poking around the Net for deals, I've been able to get together some nice looking tables.

There's room to grow, but so far I'm pleased with what I've been able to do. The Battlefront houses are excellent, and I found great deals on ChaosOrc's Superstore. I snapped up all six they had there, since the price was a fraction of retail. Other stuff I've been adding over time. I made about another 14 trees to cover the ground.

We've been having some excellent WW2 adventures, going through these scenarios with characters that are PCs, so they can improve between missions. We completed the fourth scenario last night, which was a scary encounter with an 88mm Flak 36 supported by two MG42 teams that overlooked the whole town from a hill.

The rules we are using is Savage Worlds Showdown, with Weird War Two as the source book. The Weird Wars book is highly recommended, since the weird parts are totally isolated in the rules. This means you can use it as a purely historical RPG. The concepts are good and the game plays fast. Sure, it's not a perfect simulation of WW2 combat, but those games are tremendously dull. This is just a fast-playing, uncomplicated game that needed a few tweaks to make it work as we wanted.

I've been taking pictures of the games and keeping records of everything in a campaign diary. It's a lot of fun for me to do this. I even keep track of the "story" and write sections of it in POV of one of the PCs. Hopefully it will be a good memory for us one day.  I may even post the completed campaign diary online when the campaign is over.

So far most of the scenarios have revolved around taking a strategic location usually held by an MG team with a security section. The D-Day scenario was particularly brutal, assaulting a bunker via a trench holding a full squad of Germans. We lost a good chunk of the squad on that mission. Future missions are going to become more involved, with armored vehicles and larger numbers of enemies. For the next mission I've got to get a StuH 42 and a halftrack together. The scenario should be a challenge, unless we get some good heavy weapons reinforcements.

That's it for now. I'll post up pictures of all my completed 15mm "reinforcements" once I finish them.