Download Populous, Rich, and Rebellious – English Civil War Campaign

Populous, Rich, and Rebellious is a campaign game system for the First English Civil War (1642-46) in England and Wales. The campaign assumes Tilly’s Very Bad Day as the tactical rules, although you can any rules that suit you. The campaign uses a simple area based campaign map to drive tactical battles and weaves in a bit of flavour with campaign cards. The first version was a web page, but I thought folk might like a PDF version, hence a download page.

Populous Rich Rebellious - ECW Campaign - Logo


Backstory

I really like the ECW campaign system devised by Peter of Grid based wargaming – but not always. It is simple, quite DBA-Campaign-esque, but with some unique features. The map is area based with 13 regions in England and Wales. There are no complicated economics and no tracking of battlefield losses from game to game. The orders of battle have a random element (recruitment rolls, chance cards) so allow unbalanced matchs. Being a civil war, the facitons spend the first year of the campaign consolidating a base of operations by contesting uncontrolled territory, whereas later on the focus shifts to capturing enemy territory.

All of that is great and I freely adapted it for my purposes. However, my goals were slightly different to Peter’s and I have made some key changes:

  • Use Tilly’s Very Bad Day as the tactical rules
  • Allow all of my wargaming group to play all the time
  • Reduce the number of games to increase the likelihood we play to conclusion
  • Align the rules for 1642 and 1643+

If these ideas pan out I’ll do a version for the Thirty Years War.


Download Populous, Rich, and Rebellious

You can download Populous, Rich, and Rebellious as a PDF.

Quick Reference Sheet 1.3 (PDF; 12 February 2023)


Versions

The rules …

The Quick Reference Sheet (QRS) …

3 thoughts on “Download Populous, Rich, and Rebellious – English Civil War Campaign”

  1. Thank you, it’s really kind to release it to all and for having made such a professional job of the production.

    Reply

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