Greetings! Yesterday, Warcradle Studios published a video and a blog post detailing their plans for the Dystopian Wars setting, which they aquired from the fire sale that resulted from the shuttering of Spartan Games. The blog post and video are both very well done and chock full of information, including hints at major changes in the background, previews of new models, and some expounding on the company’s philosophy behind how they are handling the games and settings. I recommend that you make time to go and have look for yourself, but I will be summarizing what I see as the main points from their presentation and addressing them in detail below. In addition, Alex Mann has put together an excellent reaction post of his own over on his blog, and that too is well worth a read.

The Main Points

To summarize,  the main points that I took away from Warcradle’s presentation are:

1. The setting for DW is now branded as the Dystopian Age, and includes the Wild West Exodus setting.
2. Dystopian Wars will be an air/naval game, and remain at 1:1200 scale.
3. Armored Clash is going to be the Land/air game in the Dystopian Age, and will be in 10mm scale.
4. Bunkers, shore fortifications, and landing craft will be included in DW, to allow for beach landing scenarios.

Lets take a closer look at each one of these!

Rebranding the Setting as the Dystopian Age

This strikes me as a good move from a marketing perspective; it was always a little awkward trying to find ways to describe how DW, AC, DL, and, later, Fleet Action all fit into the same universe. Having a unified name for the entire setting immediately solves that problem, and gives a more unified feel to the entire proceedings. Rolling in the background for Wild West Exodus into the Dystopian Age was a surprise to me! I’m not sure entirely how I feel about this, since I don’t know a lot about the WWX setting and how well it lines up with the existing Dystopian fluff. I do have some concern that having to shoe-horn one game’s fluff into another’s could cause problems, but I can also see this joining of the settings resulting in a lot of narrative and world building opportunities for both games. For example, there were some interesting angles being hinted at in the Warcradle video though about how some of the wilder aspects of WWX might be interpreted by the greater Dystopian Age powers. I’m looking forward to them exploring that as the fluff develops.

Dystopian Wars will be the Naval Game

The fact that DW will remain a predominantly naval focused game with air support, and will maintain a nominal scale of 1:1200, makes imminent sense and wasn’t too surprising. From all indications, including anecdotal evidence of remaining stock and informal surveys of the community, as well as public discussions of sales numbers, the naval side of DW has been the most popular of the various Dystopian games that Spartan made, both in terms of sales and the amount of games played. Thus, it only makes sense that Warcradle wouldn’t want to mess with that formula too much. What was particularly interesting to me is the discussion from the video that the high seas are being used as a bit of a testing ground by the major powers to conduct low-intensity conflict, rather than risk the ravages of war in their heartlands.

Armored Clash Will Be It’s Own Game, in a New Scale

This was not much of a surprise either, as Warcradle has been publicly discussing this planned split for several weeks now. The new wrinkle is that the revamped Armored Clash game will be in a different scale than the naval game, in 10mm. Now, the plus side of that change is that it will give a little more human context to the land side of Dystopian Wars; 1:120o is just too small of a scale to portray an individual human figure at. It will be much easier for players to get a feel for just how big their lanships are on the table when they can see a soldier standing next one. This lack of context may very well have been one of the reasons that the land side of DW never really took off with a lot of players; I know that I have had some state that to me point-blank in some of the demos I’ve given over the years. However, the downside of this scale change is that some of the existing land models will no longer be compatible with the new system. The Small Tank tokens, for example, are obviously no longer going to look right on the table, unless we are going to assume that our troopers are using steam-powered remotely operated vehicles! Also no longer viable will be the various mobile airfields, as the aircraft shown on them will be too small to look right. The medium tanks and the existing land ships should be alright with a little bit of squinting, and from the video it appears that Warcrdle is going to use the sizes of those models as a starting point for the new range, allowing players to use those models as proxies for the revised AC.

Leaving the Door Open for Linked Naval & Ground Games

It should come as no surprise that I’m a fan of having the ability to link ground and naval games. Therefore, the announcement that DW and AC are going to have two different scales was initially concerning. However, Warcradle was nice enough to address this in their video, by stating that they intend to provide the necessary models (bunkers, landing craft, etc) to allow players to conduct beach landings in DW that can then lead to an AC game. Now, this is not going to be a full-on land/air/sea game all at one time like what can be done now under the existing DW rules, but I think that this might very well be a reasonable alternative. As always, the devil will be in the details, and we will have to wait and see where Warcradle takes the concept. One of the interesting concepts discussed in the video was the possibility of being able to do a monster linked game of some kind, where a game of DW is played to represent a beach landing, followed by an AC game to show the breakout from the beach. That in turn could lead to a 35mm squad-level game of some sort, either using WWX figures or a revamped version of Dystopian Legions. Very exciting stuff! That sort of linked game really gets my gamer juices flowing, and I suspect I’m not the only one.

Overall Impressions

I think that Warcradle has consistently shown a very clear-thinking and logical approach to their acquisition of the Dystopian world and how they will approach its revival. I don’t want to put words in their mouth, but I can’t help but take away a sense that their primary goal is to make the setting and the games that come from it as interesting and engaging as possible,  in order for it to be as successful as it can be. Clearly, they feel a need to take a somewhat different approach than Spartan did, which is fair considering the circumstances of Spartan’s demise. Ultimately, I think that the existing DW community has a lot to gain and little to lose from Warcradle taking the game and the setting in new directions, as it will provide a lot of new avenues for the game to grow in and could ultimately result in the game being more popular than ever.

That should do it for now! I was originally going to take a detailed look at all of the new models and art concepts that were shown in the video, but this post has probably gone on long enough as it is. I’ll save that discussion for next time!