Welcome to Dark Realms!

Encounter28: Dark Realms is a fanmade ruleset for small skirmishes in a dark, brooding fantasy setting, with magical realms, horrible beasts and pretty much any fantasy trope you can imagine - but; you can use any miniatures and setting you like. That's the beauty of this system.

This game started out as an offshoot of Encounter28: Mortalis, where we liked the game so much, that we thought "how would it work as a Fantasy game?". We started working on it, at first just reskinning it, but some ideas took form and it slowly turned into its own thing. That said, there are only small differences, and if you play one of the settings, it'll take you less than 5 minutes to get into the other. This is very much on purpose - we wanted it to be simple to switch from fantasy to grimdark scifi. 


This game isn't simple, but much less complicated than many other skirmish games. 

We’re old. Bitter Old Painters, y’know? And being old and bitter, we just don’t have the necessary memory to remember a bunch of special rules, the processing power to navigate a huge amount of synergies, and actually have a good time playing the game. We just want to play with our little plastic soldiers, and tell a good story while doing it.

Hence the “28” moniker; about a decade and a half ago, a grassroots movement called Inq28 surfaced. The idea was inspired by GW’s long abandoned game “Inquisitor”, where the story, the miniatures and the setting is much more important than things like perfectly balanced rules, min-maxed lists and winning. It grew into a huge community, and Instagram and Pinterest are absolutely brimming with amazing miniatures, converted and painted to emphasize the “Grimdark”, the “Blanchitsu” and the dark, damp corners of a gothic future. We heartily recommend searching for “Inq28” and "AoS28" and getting inspired by the amazing stuff people come up with.

… But we digress; this isn’t a ruleset for someone looking for a tight, complex and competitive game, with constant balance updates. Other people do this very nicely. 

This ruleset is made for anyone looking for something a bit lighter, much more flexible in regards to building a team, and just wanting to move their cool little plastic dudes around and hopefully have a lot of fun doing it.
We’ve gotten ideas from lots of place, too many to mention - We’ve basically taken things we like the most from the official Grimdark Future Skirmish Game, combined it with a lot of stuff borrowed from a lot of different wargames, and forged it all into Encounter28: WarBands.

The most important things to us were that the game should be fast to play (about an hour), easy to learn, the rules should be simple enough to quickly fade into the background (only about a page of rules pr. Action), so the story takes the lead, and flexible enough to let you use pretty much any miniature or conversion you like. If this sounds interesting, please read on.

We hope you enjoy it, and please send any critique or suggestions to bitteroldpainters@gmail.com; we’d love any and all feedback.

Thanks a lot for getting through this wall of text - have fun!

The Bitter Old Painters