Gen Con 2026 After Action Report (29 July to 2 August 2026)

Indianapolis welcomes us again

It has taken a little longer to get this report written than I had hoped, but here we are at last. A convention on the scale of Gen Con demands some planning on the part of an attendee. This was the 10th time I made the pilgrimage since we started attending again in 2014, after a lapse of more than three decades, so I have the routine pretty well practiced by now.  After taking last year off from running games, my brother was ready to be back at it this year, so we agreed that we were going to run two sessions of Dragon Rampant and two sessions of Burrows and Badgers, each for six players. All of them were to be titled “Strange Women Lying in Ponds”. We bought our badges (admission to the convention), but were not lucky in the February lottery to distribute the available downtown hotel rooms. We decided that we would stay with my brother in Bloomington and commute in the one hour drive each day.  My wife therefore elected not to attend this year, and we settled down for the next milestone, the publishing of the preliminary events list in early May.  Two weeks later the attendees’ event wish lists are processed.  When the dust settled from that, I had a personal schedule with two games, two seminars, and two dance events in addition to the four games we were running, and we had filled 23 of the 24 seats on offer in our games.

I’m going to digress here with a minor pet peeve. My brother and I have often heard people offer the opinion that Gen Con should arrange more of their favorite game, whatever that might be.  Gen Con organizes the spaces and runs the ticket distribution system to allot players to games, but they do not run any games.  All games are provided by companies who offer games to promote their wares, recruiting  whatever gamemasters may be needed by whatever means are available to them, or they are provided by individual gamemasters, either independent or gathered into gamemaster collectives, who volunteer their time, energy, and personal collections of material to run whatever they feel inspired to share. If someone wants to see more of their favorite game (especially older ones) at Gen Con, the best way to make that happen is to submit an event and run it. One does not need to let their hobby rely on the industry. I will hop off my soap box now… 

Since I needed to haul a fair amount of stuff to do my part in running miniatures games I decided that I would drive this year.  I have been regularly soloing on trips to visit my father, a distance of 560 miles, so I didn’t think that the 620 miles from my house to Gen Con would be that much harder.  I did figure I would need a recovery day after the drive, since my brother’s house is another 50 miles past the Gen Con location.  I set off on the morning of Monday, 27 July, and reached his house after thirteen hours on the road, including the rest breaks.  We used Tuesday to make sure everything was organized, laying out and repacking the troops for the Dragon Rampant game and finalizing and printing all of our handouts.

Three warbands sorted and double-checked

We took a leisurely trip up to Indianapolis on Wednesday after lunch to sample the “Day 0” activities, including sampling the food at the Block Party and attending The Stink, an ice breaker gathering to unofficially kick off the convention. (I do not have the credentials to be a participant in the Trade Day activities on Wednesday for educators and industry people.) While at The Stink we ran into Nelly from the long running vlog Nelly’s Nerdy Adventures and I ended up on the Day 0 report talking about looking forward to running some games. (It’s around 6:00 minutes in…)

Setting up for “Strange Women Lying in Ponds”, DR version

We got up to Indy on Thursday morning without any issues, loaded our scenery and miniatures into our collapsible wagon, and hauled them to our assigned tables, with a little side trip out to the Block Party to pick up my morning caffeination from the Helm Coffee tent.  They appeared to be doing a brisk business everytime I stopped by, and I remembered them fondly from previous Gen Cons. We had been assigned to Tables 21/22, Green, Hall C.  As you can see, the Green area was denoted by the table cloth.  We discovered that we were in the last row of tables next to an aisle, with the back entrance to the Exhibit Hall on the other side of the aisle, so we had a lot of people wander by to see what we were up to. 

For our Dragon Rampant version of “Strange Women Lying in Ponds”, we placed three warbands on each side of the central pond, with a command hierarchy (from first to third) designated.  The Lady of the Lake, depicted by a Ral Partha Elf Princess (catalog 01-021), would hear the entreaties of the most senior surviving leader on each side, and lob a scimitar, as it were, to whichever one first convinced her that they had what it took to rule the kingdom.  Bonuses to the entreaty roll were available to any side controlling the auxiliary objectives on either side of the table.  We set it up that way hoping that each player would feel that they were contributing to the overall effort.  

Note the table designator signs. A lot of effort goes into organizing for smooth running.

The Centaur general and some of his crew work to seize the Dragon Stones objective.

Eventually senior challenger leader made it to the pond and was granted the sword

For convenience, and not to spend too much time laying out a backstory that was irrelevant to the actual play, we designated the two sides the “incumbents” and the “challengers”.  In the first run, the challengers just barely got the sword, needing the die roll boost from controlling one of the auxiliary objectives, and managed to get it off the table.  

We were pleasantly surprised to find that all six of our pre-registered players showed up, although we had anticipated that anyone willing to sign up for a game at the same time that the exhibit hall was due to open was likely serious about playing. They all seemed to be having a good time, so we were happy to be running the game for them.  They were a mix of grognards and younger people, and we took the opportunity to jest that most of our miniatures were older than the young people.  While some of the miniatures may have been recently production from Ral Partha Legacy or Iron Wind Metals, I don’t think we had anything on the table originally sculpted after 1985. In addition to Ral Partha, our warbands included figures from Heritage, Hinchliffe, Minifigs, and even some early Citadel Dark Ages historicals from about 1980, before the release of the earliest edition of Warhammer.  One passer-by noted that it had been a long time since he’d seen that many “true 25s” in one place.  Our scenery was more recent.  We relied on commercial scenery this year, with mats from Cigar Box Battles and trees and pond from Monster Fight Club, along with a few more vintage pieces, such as some 1980/90s resin buildings from Hovels to form the village, the second auxiliary objective.

From this angle, you can see that we were right up against the Exhibit Hall

In submitting our events, we had allowed ourselves one hour to reset and find a bite of lunch between games.  I packed my lunch, since an hour is scant time to forage at Gen Con.  Our second game on Thursday was the only one that was undersubscribed, with five players signed up for the six seats. However, all five of them showed up, and my brother played the extra position.  Interestingly, for a game involving as many dice as Dragon Rampant, the second game played out as a near duplicate of the first.

Overheard from a passer-by, “Any game with a triceratops is already awesome!”

Once again the challenger leader rides up to the pond to be granted the sword

Once the games were over we packed everything back in the wagon and took it back to the car.  We then had time to spare to visit the Block Party one more time for some food and conversation with random fellow attendees about how their convention was going before we headed over to the stadium for a game we were both going to play.

Sometimes they play a different game here

The whole playing field of Lucas Oil Stadium is made over into more gaming space.  With the extra high ceilings and the industrial air conditioning, the stadium is a pretty nice place to play.  My brother noted that we should consider requesting it (again) next time. 

Kingmaker

We had signed up for what turned out to be a three player game of Kingmaker, in the current Gibson Games edition.  We have played more of this as the earlier first Avalon Hill edition, and I’ve even played the original Ariel edition.  In fact, we played the Avalon Hill edition when my brother visited in May, so that version was relatively fresh in our minds.  It ended up being my turn to be the goat (not the GOAT!); my faction managed to crown Edward of March (Yorkist #2) after Richard (Yorkist #1) died when plague struck York, but I was stomped on by my brother who revealed the office of Chamberlain of the County Palatine of Chester with 200 extra troops in Wales (guess where I was…) before I could escape.  I spent the rest of the game (not too long) trying to build up a faction to re-enter the scuffle, but we noted that the 3rd player could win by summoning parliament and assigning his faction most of the unclaimed offices, so he did.  Really, we had had a long day and had that hour-long drive to get back to our beds, so it was not the winter of our discontent, so to speak. 

We had arranged Friday to be a quiet day, with the expectation that we would get our shopping done and sit in on the Gen Con auction for the miniatures and the collectibles.  I was mildly disappointed in my morning seminar, as it turned out to be focused on getting your “actual play” channel to work, and I was hoping for something more actionable for my next home roleplaying game.  

The Gen Con Exhibit Hall is ridiculously huge

I had prepared for my visit to the exhibit hall by annotating a copy of the map with the booths that I knew that I wanted to see, and I got through most of them on Friday after the seminar.  I had to keep the shopping light as I had everything with me in a book bag (unless I wanted to try out the new bag check vendor implemented last year).  I did stumble into an opportunity when I found that the line was short at Ginny Di’s booth, so I was able to meet her briefly.

I thought she always carried a sword?

After lunch I played a short game of Dragonbane under the auspices of the Free League team (see above regarding sources of games). We accomplished our objective within the two hour window for the game and avoided a dangerous combat.  This was good for the characters, but did mean the GM didn’t have a chance to show off Dragonbane’s combat system, which is pretty good.  I’ve run Dragonbane at home, but hand’t had a chance to sit down and play. 

Auction lightly attended at some point during “miniatures”

After the game I met up with my brother at the auction.  If I had been a colletor of Battle Tech or Ogre miniatures, I would have been in luck, but as I am not I was able to keep myself from buying anything without too much trouble.  I even took a turn through the Consignment Store without finding anything that had to come home with me.  

Downtown Marriott’s Gen Con themed hot dog stand

The auction has space at the downtown Marriott, and I noted that they had put up a Gen Con tehemed hot dog stand this year.  Part of the atmosphere of Gen Con comes from the fact that a lot of the service industry downtown plays along with us.  So, to encourage them to continue to play in the future, I decided to have a hot dog for dinner between the “miniatures” and “collectible” sections of the auction.  Happily for my budget, there was nothing in the collectibles auction that I was deperate to own, so I did not buy anything. My brother had his eye on a rare set of Fineous Fingers miniatures, but eventually decided that getting home safely was more important, so we packed up and drove back. 

On Saturday we were back with our other two games of “Strange Women Lying in Ponds”, although this time the contenders were anthropomorphic animals as our rules were Burrows and Badgers, also published by Osprey Games.  As with previous years, we did not think it wise to try a multi-player version of B&B, so we set up three parallel two-player games.  Getting the sword from the pond was just a slight re-theming of the “capture the paychest” scenario we’ve used in previous years.

My board; different Cigar Box Battle mat, but more Monster Fight Club

As usual I got too busy gamemastering to take too many pictures. Most of the complications of B&B are in the warband creation phase, and we bypassed that by handing out pre-generated warbands.  Nevertheless, it takes new players a couple of turns to come up to speed with the rules, so we keep busy. Continuing with the trend noted above, all six pre-registered players showed up for the morning game, including a couple who had played with us in a previous year.

All three boards and six warbands laid out

Let the games begin

We reset the boards, had a bite of lunch (packed again), and then played our afternoon session.  I will admit that we were completely amazed when, for the fourth time, all the players showed up.  Now I know that everyone intends to show up when they buy their tickets, but travel mishaps and illnesses occur, and by Saturday afternoon I would not blame anyone for being too tired to show up.  In fact, that’s one of the reasons why we chose the run the two-player games on Saturday.  We can run with any even number of players, and one of us can substitute in if we should have an odd number.  Our record for the weekend was a first for us: 23 attendees for 23 tickets sold; perfect attendance!

We decided we’d have a decent dinner before heading home but it had started raining, so we found ourselves at the downtown Marriott again; their restaurant is acceptable.  That’s where we were when the tornado warning alarms went off.  Happily for us, that didn’t take long to clear, so we were able to head home after we finished dinner.

I didn’t really take any pictures on Sunday.  I had a seminar on fairy tales, and two sessions of English Country type dancing, all run by the wonderful ladies of The Revel Alliance.  It would have been more fun had my wife been able to make it, but I was still glad to take a little break from the gaming and be active for a while.

Getting home after Gen Con took a while.  I left my brother’s on Monday morning and stopped for the night in the Detroit area to visit my father.  I stayed over an extra day with him and then finally drove the rest of the way home on Wednesday.

It was Friday before I got the car completely unloaded, took a picture of my shopping, and packed away the miniatures I’d taken along. At my age, burning the candle at both ends requires preparation and recovery.

Overall it was a great time, and I am hoping to be able to go next year.  I’ve been thinking about what games it might be fun to run …

Gen Con Begins (officially)

My brother and I arrived at Gen Con yesterday for the unofficial Day Zero kickoff. Today we are starting off with an 0900 official game of Dragon Rampant for six players, and repeating it at 1300. The first game went well, and we hope the second game will go well too. More to follow in the After Action Report.

-- Mobilis in mobile

Reflections on 2022

 My brother and I had a chance to play a couple of games during our family Christmas visit.  We had agreed that the game this year would be Dragon Rampant, and that the theme would be “No Ral Partha”.  I certainly have nothing against Ral Partha, but we have been playing a lot of Ral Partha Chaos Wars in a demo game context, and we usually feel obliged to stick to Ral Partha figures when we do. We thought it would be nice to allow some of the other figures a chance to shine on the table.

My 1977 Minifig NS spearmen fend off my brother’s Archive wolfriders

1974 vintage Minfig ME Gondorian spearmen face some Adina hobgoblins

As you can see, we were restricted to a small space

We had intended to set up on a larger table at the local games store, but they have not yet re-opened their gaming tables post pandemic, so we made do with a space of about 4’ by 3’ at our parents’ house.  It was good to see all the very vintage figures on the table.  We had each brought two warbands, and, apparently inspired by the same thought, each had a warband of orcs and a warband of humans.  It was a bad day for orcs all around; my humans defeated his orcs, and my orcs were defeated by his humans.

While there are a few days left in the year, and while I do have a Five Leagues from the Borderlands solo skirmish game pending, it is likely that this will have been the final game for the year. (In my counting, I generally count multiple sessions of a single rules set played back to back as a single log entry.) If so, it was number 40 for the year. While short of the 52 games that are my notional goal each year, it is still a respectable total, and one that I am pretty happy with. Similarly, I might get another miniature or two painted, but if I don’t, I finished about 173 figures of 1/72 scale or larger this year, plus a handful of 6mm ancients which can’t be counted in the same way as larger figures.  It’s a few more than I completed in 2021, but it is a number which should prompt me to a bit of caution when it comes to taking on new projects.  

There was a thread on the Lead Adventure Forum recently, and someone was musing about whether the new projects that we are all prone to take on would ever see the table, and, if so, how many times.  I realized that I had some actual data on that.  Being a very Old School gamer, my logs are hand written, and contained in a series of notebooks.  I dug them all out, and was interested to note that I have been doing this for longer that I remembered, with the first year logged being 1999.  So I have 24 years of data (less the balance of December after the 5th when I did the counting) covering 805 games.  With an average of 33+ games per year, this year’s 40 is solidly above average.

Attempting to answer the question of which of my collections of figures had been on the table more frequently, I might be off by a few games here or there.  The results were tallied by hand, and the data was spread across about 15 different notebooks.  Sometimes it’s hard to decide whether a 25mm fantasy game played in 2003, say, had any of my own figures in it.  These counts are divided by the miniatures, and most of them represent the same collection being used with multiple sets of rules.

As you can see, the 25mm fantasy collection takes the top prize with about 96 appearances on the table, followed by the Not Quite Seven Years War collection with 74 appearances.  By the time you get down to a tie for 6th place by 25mm Dark Ages and 40mm Renaissance at about 21 games each, one might note that those projects have been on the table less than once a year on the average, and with a frequency less than a quarter of that of first place. I should note that both of those projects have been in a playable state since before 1999, when the records start.  Two of the most frequently played projects, 1/72 scale fantasy/medieval/ancients and 54mm medieval, are younger than the records, both having been started around 2003.  I was also interested to note that the French and Indian War project is still solidly in 4th place, despite not having been on the table since 2016.  There were a lot of F&IW games early on in the records.

When you put all those numbers together, I think that I am coming to the conclusion that it would make sense to try to concentrate on doing more with the top projects.  I would like to work on one side project which isn’t yet playable, with the main candidates being 54mm medieval/fantasy flats and 40mm 19th century/Franco-Prussian War from Schneider and other vintage German molds.  This is where this year’s painting numbers are a caution flag; even a simple One Hour Wargames pair of armies would amount to 10 units of 2 stands each per side (well, not the artillery), with 4-6 figures per unit, or something like 88 foot, 16 horse, and 4 guns with crew total, which would represent somewhat more than two thirds of the total I painted last year.  That’s not unthinkable, but would be a major commitment.  I suppose it’s time to paint a few of them and see what I really think about working with them.

Since Gencon Online ... catching up

It has been a bad month and a half for blogging, and a rather middling one for hobbies.  Hence, I have decided to go ahead and catch up on what has been happening lately.  

Inspired by Gencon, my brother was kind enough to run a Chaos Wars game on the 8th of August, with Ral Partha elves vs. orcs.  Run remotely from his house, I took the elves, and for the first time in a number of remote games, the home player (i.e. NOT me) won the game.  Chaos Wars makes a reasonable remote game; it doesn’t involve a lot of units (usually) and it’s not too fussy about geometry.

(Screen capture from my iPad near the start of the 8 August Chaos Wars game)

It was my turn to host a game the following weekend, and Ross Macfarlane and Norman, my older son, took command of my collection of 40mm home cast Renaissance figures for an “imagi-nations” Civylle Stryfe in Ardenn game.  We used Scenario 22 from C.S Grant and Stuart Asquith’s Scenarios for All Ages.  Without actually looking it up, it’s called something like “Best of a bad lot”, and involves a tired column running into an army in camp, so that neither side would have chosen to fight under the circumstances.  

Ross ended up with the column, as Duke Frederick (the usurper; see As You Like It, by the historian Shakespeare), and Norman ended up with the camp (the loyalists, commanded by Italian soldier of fortune Mercutio). We were trying out a new variation of the Rough Wooing home rules designed for 40mm home cast figures using 1 stand = 1 company of ~100 men.  This turned out to be fussier than expected, and perhaps need a few more tweaks. On top of that, it was not a scenario we’d tried with these troops, so my attempt to implement the scenario conditions and impose a mechanical penalty for the tired attackers was perhaps too much.  So, a reasonable game, but it could have been better.  As the central gamemaster in a remote game, I ended up too busy following both sides’ orders to take as many pictures as I would have liked.

The camp’s defenses (to the right) have formed up to meet the Usurper’s tired troops

Screen capture from the central game server...

Theat wasn’t a bad weekend for games; I also finally set up and played a Dragon Rampant scenario generated by my solo campaign, which had been awaiting resolution for several months.  The nice thing about a solo campaign is that the opponent doesn’t get bored while waiting for the next move to be resolved.

I used some orcs borrowed from Norman and some of my general purpose fantasy/medieval 1/72 scale figures to resolve an encounter out on the eastern borders of the human kingdom of Darmis. I ran the “Into the Valley of Certain Death” scenario from the rule book, in which both sides have stumbled into some inhospitable territory.  In this case, I considered it to be an area of traps left by the elves, who are happy to wear down either or both parties.

The board is supposed to have 50% of the area covered in scenery, and any unit entering a terrain feature for any reason takes hits.  The units were, for the most part, able to maintain control and stay out of danger, so I was glad to be playing solo. I don’t think that it would have been too much fun as a regular two (or more) player game.

Captain of the Darmish forces (upper right) faces off against two companies of orcs

Nevertheless, it wasn’t a bad way to while away a pandemic era afternoon, and the path was clear to resolve the next month in the campaign.

Norman provided the fourth (and final) game of the month on the 30th.  He has been working on various Bronze Age DBA armies, so we tried out his Sea Peoples (a new army to us) against the Egyptians. We played two sessions, because my Egyptians were quickly smashed by the Sea peoples in the first session, and I wanted to see it it was bad luck, or whether my plan was flawed, so we just did a partial reset back to the starting positions.  In DBA terms both armies are “Littoral”,  which gives them the option of an amphibious landing on their first turn.  We both reserved troops for this; switchin up the actual landing locations for the two games.  I lost the second game as well, though by a somewhat smaller margin, but I am nevertheless forced to conclude that my plan was probably fatally flawed. 😕 

There hasn’t been a game yet this month, so that’s it for recent games.

I’ve gotten a little bit of painting done.  Inspired by Gencon, I painted two more relatively random figures for my proposed Urban Fantasy game:

Leon is a Reaper Bones Chronoscope figure, rebased, and Lucia is a Hero Forge custom figure.  She’s a fae character of some sort, with faun legs and big ears, though dressed in imported human styles.  That’s hoof polish, by the way, not pink slippers.

The next time I sat down with a brush, I ended finishing up a stand of Hordes of the Things “beasts” for the Portable Fantasy Campaign, consisting of a Caesar Miniatures elf sorceress...

... and two Reaper Bones “saprolings” as tree creatures of some sort.  This is the second (of two) of these stands.  The first was finished back in March.  

For my most recent micro-project, I stayed with the 1/72 scale fantasy theme with some baggage and a camp follower/NPC.  While cleaning up recently, I found a group of figures I had washed prior to priming some months ago.  Included in the group was a small flock of sheep, which I had started when I did a campaign battle last October, for which I had needed three baggage train items for an escort mission.  I had two, and filled in the third with a mounted Maid Marian from the Airfix Robin Hood set.  The sheep are from the Pegasus farm animals set. I decided after I had started them that I wanted a shepherd of some sort, so another Robin Hood set figure was drafted for the purpose.  For figures the Plastic Soldier Review lists as having been released in 1964, they hold up very well considered alongside some of the modern manufacturers.  The pregnant woman came from the Linear-B/Strelets Roman transport set.  The review notes that her costume isn’t particularly accurate for Roman times, but she fits right in to the generic fantasy themed collection.

I’ve got several things on the painting desk this weekend, so I shall hope to finish something tomorrow.  I have been using the desk as my work at home space, and I will need to be cleared off again by 7:30AM on Monday.

 

Catching Up a Bit — Scenery and Remote Games

I haven’t done well at updating my blog the past couple of weeks, but all is still well here under lockdown.  I am still finding myself too distracted to paint as I would like to, but I have gotten the big brushes and craft paint out and had a go at some scenery.  First up is another of the resin village buildings I’ve been working on, the “Trader’s Shack“ from Apocalypse Miniatures.     

Apocalypse Miniatures “Trader’s Shack”

I am looking forward to getting the village into a game; at three buildings plus the outhouse, it’s starting to look like something.  A fourth large building, the Apocalypse “farm house” is on the painting desk with some paint on it.

Last weekend I pulled out all of the 25mm scenery boxes, sorted, consolidated, and labeled, so I now have an empty 12 liter Really Useful Box earmarked (and labeled) for transporting scenery for away games, and all of the scenery pieces have a labeled box to call home, so that can be sorted back after use.

Scenery Organization in Progress

In the upper right corner of the organization picture, a tan ruined tower can be seen.  I think I acquired this from a dealer at Huzzah a couple of years ago.  The manufacturer had already gone out of business, so I couldn’t get one in the grays I usually use for scenery.  Since I found it while organizing, I was reminded that I should try repainting it.

Wartorn Worlds ruined tower repainted...

...and with a little vegetation added to enhance it.

Happily, the recycled tire material seemed to take paint well, and I am pretty happy with the enhanced piece.  Now that it looks like it fits in with the rest of the scenery, I hope to have it on the table soon.

Following the scenery sorting, I set up a game of Burrows and Badgers.

My brother joined me remotely, seen in the upper right where a clamp to mount my iPad to a photographic tripod had arrived to make remote gaming easier.

We ran B&B last year at Gencon, so I used two of the war bands I had statted out, printed, and laminated.  I took the unlucky Reynard the highwayfox with his new-fangled pistol, and Norman took Sir Caradoc, a noble dog of the old school.

Reyanrd’s camp about to be attacked; ruined doorway by Reaper

A roll for scenarios brought us an ambush of a camp, and Reynard was elected to be the ambushee.  While he actually had some success with the pistol, for a change, Caradoc personally managed to bring him to justice.  I was reminded that I have an unfilled appetite for some detailed skirmish gaming; I should do something about that.

Just before everything locked down, I ordered a Hot Wire Foam Factory kit and picked up some 2’x2’ sections of pink insulation board from the Home Despot to work on my scenery upgrade.  The first warm day we had, I took the foam cutter outside and sliced up a few test hills.

Hot Wire Foam Factory test output

I recently acquired a neoprene mat from Frontline Games to be the usual basis for miniatures in the gaming table.  I hoped that Woodland Scenics flock would be a reasonable enough match; otherwise it’ll be post-lockdown before I can use the sand and house paint technique.  When I flocked the first test hill, I found that I had misplaced the reserve stock of flock, so I needed to reserve what I had for miniatures.  It was close, but I thought that it might be improved with some mottling of other flock shades. 

Small test hill with a rocky section

Eventually the flock supply arrived. (Thank you, USPS, for continuing to work during this!)  I tried again, and thought that would probably do.

Multiple flock colors

With the remote game this weekend, I was able to open up the table, which has generally been in use as my partner’s work-at-home space, and set up a game, including the test hills.

Corner hill...2.5” will be the limit if I want them to be flush with the top of the well.

You can judge the overall results from the set-up picture.

Terrain layout for this week’s game

This week’s remote game was played by Chris Palmer, who volunteered to help me out by taking one side in a pending battle in my Northlands (usually solo) campaign.  I shall hope to get a separate battle report up for that, but the short version is that the defenders of the kingdom of Darmis defeated a detachment of raiders from the neighboring kingdom of Verdance.  The small encounter was played out using the Dragon Rampant rules, and the “Crystal Gale” scenario from the rule book.  With that out of the way, I can figure out what the other pending battle looks like, and then get on with the next month’s worth of map movement.

The leaders of the two forces meet in battle, with the local cavalry sending the raiders packing

  At least with a solo campaign, nobody else is inconvenienced if it takes a while to resolve the next event.