The Silver Bayonet

What is The Silver Bayonet

The Silver Bayonet: A Wargame of Napoleonic Gothic Horror is a skirmish game by Joseph A. McCullough, the designer of Frostgrave, published by Osprey Games in November 2021.

The setup: Napoleon’s wars are tearing Europe apart, and vampires, werewolves, ghouls, and worse are using the chaos to attack isolated farms, villages, and even military units. Most people write the reports off as the lies of deserters. A few know better.

You build an elite band of monster hunters drawn from one of the great powers. Riflemen, swordsmen, and engineers fight next to mystics, occultists, and the odd supernatural creature that can be controlled or reasoned with. Osprey’s pitch for it is “musket and sabre meet tooth and claw.”

McCullough says one of his design goals was to keep it small: low miniature count, quick playtime, not too many rules. He also encourages players to use any miniatures they want, though there’s an official range from North Star Military Figures.

How it plays

Build a unit. Pick a nationality, which gives you its list of soldier types. Create an officer, who gets attributes and extra equipment, then spend recruitment points on soldiers. Every soldier has six stats: speed, melee, accuracy, defence, courage, and health.
Nations with their own flavour. History of War counts 24 soldier types, 10 of them open to every nation. Most are Napoleonic regulars like infantrymen, riflemen, grenadiers, and artillerists, alongside stranger picks like the champion of faith, the occultist, and the supernatural investigator. Austria, Britain, France, and Russia each get a unique type, including a werebear for Russia and the half-vampire dhampir for Austria.
Two d10s. Most actions are a roll of two ten-sided dice, a skill die and a power die, plus a stat, against a target number. Hit an enemy’s defence or better and you damage them, and the size of the roll decides how much.
Keep moving. Melee doesn’t lock models together. The target either fights back or withdraws, and getting pulled into several fights in a round piles on fatigue. Guns need an action to reload after firing.
Monsters run themselves. Almost every scenario has monsters that attack either side. They follow a short script: load an empty gun, fire a loaded one, or otherwise move toward the nearest visible soldier, and failing that, toward the nearest Clue Marker.
Clue Markers. Most of the supernatural action starts when you investigate these points of interest. One might give you the artifact the scenario is about or a stat boost, and another might set a pack of monsters loose.
Fate. A pool of fate dice (five in a competitive game) lets you reroll important actions or cut the damage you take. You can also spend them on a monster, rerolling its attacks or cutting the damage it takes, though you never choose what it does.
Solo, co-op, or head to head. Play one unit against the monsters, team up against them, or fight each other and the monsters at once. In solo play you activate half your unit, then the monsters, then the rest of your unit, with fewer fate dice.
Campaigns. Soldiers earn experience, usually one or two points a game, and climb tiers that give stat boosts or new attributes. A soldier dropped to 0 health rolls on an injury table instead of simply dying, with a 1 in 10 chance of death. The rulebook has ten competitive scenarios plus solo scenarios.

How to start

Get the rulebook. It’s 208 pages and it’s all you need to play. Osprey sells the hardback for $35 and the PDF or ebook for $24.50. Art is by Brainbug Design.
Print the unit sheets. Osprey has free unit sheets, a form-fillable version, and a Bones of Albion recovery sheet on its Other Wargames resources page.
Find a unit and some monsters. Any Napoleonic or horror figures work. North Star Military Figures makes the official 28mm metal range, with eight-figure unit packs for Britain, Spain, France, Russia, Austria, and Prussia, plus monsters like vampires. North Star notes you’ll need a hobgoblin for the first scenario in the book.
Add a supplement later. Each one is a smaller campaign book, $25 in paperback or $20 as a PDF: The Carpathians: Castle Fier, Egypt: Shadow of the Sphinx, Canada, Italy: The Shades of Calabria, and Britain: Bones of Albion. McCullough wrote Castle Fier, Egypt, and Britain; the Carpathian and Egyptian books each have a five-scenario competitive campaign and a three-scenario solo campaign. Venice: The Alchemist’s Legacy is up for preorder at $28.

Community & reviews

McCullough says that when the book came out, people started painting units, building terrain, statting up their own monsters, and writing their own scenarios, and that enthusiasm is what pulled him back to write the supplements. He also puts extra scenarios and monsters on his Patreon and in his zine, Old Bones.