BELLONA Tabletop Battle System
A downloadable game
The inherent simplicity and modularity of the BELLONA system lends itself to quick learning, quick battles, and the ability to keep things clean by only using the portions of the system that you need for a given battle or campaign. As such, the BELLONA rules are divided into distinct levels that can be used together or separately to create exactly the experience you are seeking for your next sortie. Level 1, for example, is designed to be so simple that you can literally teach anyone to play it in five to ten minutes. The levels that come after add to the experience, each building upon the last and allowing you to offer additional levels of complexity (and therefore fun) as you and your friends learn the system together.
Start simple and build up your experience with this fast, easy-to-learn, modular ruleset for miniature agnostic tabletop wargaming. Built for competitive and solo skirmishes in any genre, BELLONA also excels at making epic battles and campaigns (solo, cooperative or competitive) easy to manage and easy to play.
The core rules (Level 1 and Level 2 - the first six pages of the book) are free. The rest of the book (Level 3: Synergistic Modifiers, Level 4: Legendary Modifiers, Level 5: Factions and Faction Abilities, Level 6: Active Terrain, Level 7: Curses and Blessings, Solo Campaign Rules, Sample Armies (separate files) and later, additional optional rules are all included in the paid version of the BELLONA Tabletop Battle System.
Additional optional rules added:
* 9 Sample Armies
* Rules for solo dungeon crawling campaigns run with BELLONA
* Additional Content for solo dungeon crawling with BELLONA, including On To The Wilderness Campaign Guide, Arcane Training, Alternate Ancestries, Character Sheets, Random Dungeon Generation, Druid Class, Valkyrie Class, Alchemist Class, Puppetmaster Class, and Revenant Class.)
* TANKMEKKA: Additional optional rules for mecha-centric 6mm sci-fi skirmish campaigns. Three supplements in total!
Download
Click download now to get access to the following files:
Development log
- TANKMEKKA pt 2 & 3Mar 13, 2024
- Second Edition?Mar 05, 2024
- Random Dungeon GenerationNov 04, 2023
- TANKMEKKAJan 21, 2023
- New Year, New ContentJan 02, 2023
- More Dungeon Crawling GoodnessDec 17, 2022
- More Content, More EasilyDec 10, 2022
- Minor Change, Major NewsDec 05, 2022
Comments
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Hello Ellie, do you have a system for randomly generating a dungeon map (similar to what's done in WarhammerQuest with cards or ConfrontationQuest with dice, in case you've ever heard of ConfrontationQuest - although it's unfortunately no longer available on the internet)? I thought I might find something about it in the special rules for dungeons, but maybe I just overlooked it. Cheers!
That's a cool idea, but I haven't really implemented something like this for BELLONA yet. I've tinkered with some ideas, but haven't settled on a form that works best yet. I think adapting something from the D&D board games like Ravenloft or Ashardalon would work. I've used their tiles in my own dungeon delves, and they're meant to be drawn randomly, even if I've just used them to create an interesting dungeon to battle in. Other than that, if you're using 1 inch graph paper, you could probably borrow the generation system from Four Against Darkness to generate random dungeons. For sci-fi, I actually took my set of space hulk tiles and numbered them, then rolled dice to build a random dungeon. If / when I make my own system for random dungeon generation, I think I'll take inspiration from IGG's Beneath The City Unsleeping which has an amazing die roll to deploy monsters mechanic that I absolutely love.
Thank you for the feedback!
Thank you. There are many suggestions in there that I will follow up on.
I just took a quick look at the complete rules and they look good. I hope to be able to sit down and play them soon, I particularly want to try the solo rules. I see you mention that a scifi dungeon crawler mode is in the making, looking forward to that too!
Thank you! I'm planning a big content release for Monday. It'll all be expansion material for the dungeon crawling, but I'm in the process of playtesting a sci-fi skirmish campaign mod for the game as well. Sci-fi is still probably a few weeks away. The built in solo campaign rules from the core document are pretty solid for running any genre, including sci-fi, but I'm having fun making these tailored, more specific campaigns.
Hello! Just thought I should point out that, rules as written, the 'Nullifying' modifier reduces any model to 1 health and opens them up for an easy one-turn kill, because under the rules 'Tough' is a modifier that gets stripped! I doubt this is intended, but I could be wrong.
Thank you for the feedback! It's intentionally written that way, which is why it costs an attack to perform the Nullification move, and why Nullification can be done only within the Nullifying unit's range. So, for example, a unit with only the Nullifying Modifier (2pts) would have to close to within 1 inch with a single enemy unit first and give up its attack in order to use its Nullifying Modifier. In larger point battles, you could have units with Ranged x3 + Nullifying + Acrobatic that could be devastating, but they would still only be able to affect one unit per turn, and only by giving up their attack. The enemy could just make that 6+ point unit a priority to destroy as a strategy.
Interesting! So it's sort of a hard counter to super expensive models.