CATAPHRANT play materials

28 Jun, 2026

In June I ran a modified game of VANGUARD with Toasty, for which the scenario was inspired by the Austrian revolutions of 1848. Original inspiration goes to Louis's SimAnt 'phract outline. This is the second CATAPHRACT game I've run, and you can read about the first here.

This post is a collections of all¹ the play materials we used to run the game, hopefully useful as a teaching tool for what is useful and helpful for running the kind of 'phract I find most compelling.

Campaign Scenario

The colony of Queen Celia has had, for as long as it has existed, a very simple religion. Queen Celia has an immortal soul. All other bugs do not.

Queen Celia therefore lives a virtuous life in preservation of the karmic upward trend of the colony; all other ants are merely extensions of her will, with no need to worry about salvation or morality on an individual basis. The very idea of individual responsibility is unthinkable; ants exist only in relation to Queen Celia, in a state of obedient ignorance.

Under Queen Celia’s guidance, the colony has grown into an industrial powerhouse, hegemonic in its expansionist influence. So long as every worker plays her part in the great apparatus, so long as the mushroom farms are tended and the millipedes scurry along the rails and the aphids produce their nectar and the grasshoppers walk willingly to the slaughterhouse, the colony functions, and it functions beautifully. And so it has for generations.

This ideal state was shattered in a single instant with Queen Celia’s most recent birth. Three queen larvae were born, not one. Which is Queen Celia? Ants were forced to think for the first time in their lives, if only to make the decision of which queen was ensouled and which two were empty husks, deceivers. Unfortunately for the colony, the outcome was split as to which queens were deceivers; ants banded about all three infant queens, and a bloody civil war broke out. The workers stopped working; the great apparatus began to shatter.

QUEEN CECELIA has replaced her mother in as smooth a transition as possible, and she now rules from the royal nursery in pampered luxury, protected by the Royal Guard and doted on by breed-males. But while she holds the nursery, her rule is accepted by few. She is besieged on all sides by the army of QUEEN CELINA, who has amassed popular support following the advice of CONSORT HOFMANN. It was his counsel that convinced Celina to concede liberal sexual and economic reform and parliamentary monarchism to secure the aid of his industrialist allies. The third sister, QUEEN CELESTE, is assumed dead in the first frenzied battle of the war.

While the sisters fight their bloody palace struggle, the colony collapses in on itself. The aphids have formed a radical vanguard led by CHANCELLOR KAROLINA, publicly calling for the recognition of aphids as essential producers in the colony economy and the creation of a republican state with equal rights for aphids and ants alike.

Not every monarchist in Queen Celia’s colony is her own progeny, nor was she the only monarch. The colony of QUEEN ZSÓFIA has long been a dependency of Celia’s, subsumed when the demand for workers eclipsed Celia’s own ability to lay eggs. Now the time for independence is at hand, her remaining children scream in pheromone-scent. My children must be my own, she demands. Celia shall steal them and indoctrinate them and enslave them no longer.

Though some do not care to draw this distinction between ants. Civil war has drawn overseer attention away from the grasshopper caverns. Locusts manifest from unattended herds. They lash out in anger and vengeance and pain; MELCHIORRE leads the largest gathered band of locusts in a fight for freedom and revenge in equal measure. Every ant is complicit, they cry. Each and every one of them must suffer as we have. Only then will grasshoppers have the safety and security to rebuild their culture, their dignity.

The sun now rises on a war yet raging. In one day precisely, it will rise again on a queen firm in her power—or a colony totally destroyed.

Character Briefings

Part of the philosophy of what I have deemed the 3D4P school of 'phracts is the importance of detailed character briefings. Referee-established characterization is useful for enforcing tone and campaign goals, as well as maintaining a coherent and consistent sense of the fiction.

This isn't as hard as it may sound. The character briefings are all linked below, and you'll notice much of the language is repeated between them.

• Queen Cecelia
• Queen Celina
• Consort Hofmann
• Chancellor Karolina
• Queen Zsófia
• Melchiorre
• Queen Celeste
• Rewani BaşKadın
• Tsar Vasily Pavlovich
• Prince Agapetos

Bugworld means some pretty significant differences between characters.

Gameplay and Rules

The game was played using Discord, like most 'phracts at this point. In format it's pretty standard, though ruleswise CATAPHRANT has changed a lot from base VANGUARD. The biggest thing is that they're all bugs: infantry are worker ants, cavalry are soldier ants, wagons are grasshoppers, fieldguns are bombardier beetles, trains are millipedes. Supplies becomes food, and loot becomes nectar—an addictive, amphetamine-like substance produced by aphids. (Operations cost nectar because the bugs need to stimulate their brains to work complexly!) Other major changes include foraging only being possible at colony entrances, the removal of noncombatants, and the game running for four, six-hour segments—one day in real life translating to one hour in-game—0600 hours to 0500 hours. Accordingly, there is no "night marching," and forced marching involves marching faster each hour, rather than for longer. The pheromone net was a channel in the discord that only ants and termites could see and type in: instant communication at the cost of privacy.

Mostly we tried to keep things pretty size-accurate to real life, but we loved the idea of millipede trains so much that we were willing to overlook the weirdness with scale. Pictured is about 60% of what fits on a millipede (the other 40% is on the flank of the millipede that isn't visible). Replace each of those grasshoppers with 400 worker ants using the power of your imagination, if you'd like.

Queen Cecelia, Queen Celina, Consort Hofmann, Chancellor Karolina, Queen Zsófia, and Melchiorre began the game in the colony at 0600 hours. Queen Celeste and Rewani BaşKadın arrived at 0900 hours. Prince Agapetos arrived at 1500 hours. Tsar Vasily arrived at 2100 hours. The late arrivals' presence was not public (no nickname changes, no visible Discord presence) until they made their arrival known or interacted with a previously-arrived character. Prince Agapetos's player was never public knowledge.

An excerpt from the pheromone net. Only about half of the characters who encountered Prince Agapetos realized "the worm" was an anteater's tongue.

The Colony

The game took place entirely in Queen Celia's anthill. Brown hexes represent packed dirt terrain, grey hexes represent stony terrain, and green hexes are an abstraction of the outside—the only outside travel was flight from colony entrance to colony entrance. Roads represent larger, more-easily navigable tunnels, while 'offroading' means trying to travel through smaller, more labyrinthine tunnels not meant for mass transit. "Railroad tracks" are millipede lines, which represent tunnels excavated to be large enough to fit the colossal millipede-trains.

Initial holdings are marked on this map. The dark purple in the center of the map was held by Queen Cecelia, the pink to the south was held by Queen Zsófia, the green represents Chancellor Karolina's holdings, and the brown was the territory of Melchiorre's locusts. The holdings were all related to their power as a faction: Cecelia and Zsófia held their nurseries, the aphids held the largest nectar gardens in the colony, and the locusts manifested in the largest slaughterhouses. Everything else was held by the Queen Celina-Consort Hoffman coalition.

The map is fairly large for a miniphract, as I am led to believe, though the inclusion of millipede-trains made everything pretty quick to travel around. Most strongholds have either an extraction or a factory, which work as they do in standard VANGUARD. Foraging is only possible at colony entrances—except Kaisertor, because it doesn't go outside—which also work like ports for the purposes of import/export.

What follows is a full list of strongholds in Celia's colony:

The Storm

At 2100 hours, a storm began raging outside the colony, which had massive effects on the game. Characters and armies near one of the four colony entrances could see the stormclouds gathering, and at 2200 hours the flooding began.

At first, the extant river flooded its banks, destroying the roads in the hexes it traveled through and preventing anyone from fording it. An hour later, the colony entrances overflowed—flood infrastructure degraded and left without reinforcement because of the civil war.

I didn't get a good image of the flood while it was happening, so you get this bad one instead. SORRY!

Travel became impossible in flooded hexes, and armies in strongholds were stranded until the waters receded (something they weren't even sure would happen in the course of the game). Armies outside of strongholds hit by the floodwaters were washed away to dry ground, sometimes far away, taking significant casualties and losing a large percentage of their food. Garrisoned armies hit by the floodwaters were protected from the waves and didn't take casualties, but they also lost a significant percentage of their food stockpiles. Rail lines were destroyed (tunnels partially caved in, preventing millipede travel) and roads were degraded (in the VANGUARD sense—level 2 roads, the standard, have bridges, while level 1 roads do not).

Mid-game snapshot of post-flood life. You can see Prince Agapetos snacking away.

There were two hours of major flooding—one hour of continued storm, and one hour before the water drained away. After the floodwaters drained, there were many new rivers to deal with and zero bridges with which to cross them. The last few hours of the game was marked with so much river fording, leading to significant tactical implications—not being able to arrive in time to battle and not being able to bring bombardier beetles to stronghold assaults, in particular.

Foreign Powers

Foreign powers are, to me, one of the most important parts of VANGUARD, and yet they just aren't included in the rules. They're useful as a balancing factor, but especially in a globalized society they're extremely useful as a contextualization point. You are typically not "the 100 most important people in the world" in VANGUARD, and foreign powers helps keep that in check. Here is my brief on how foreign powers function, followed by a list of the foreign powers present in the game.

The colony of Queen Celia is not the only power in the world. There are many nearby neighbors with a vested interest in transforming the colony into a shape that best fits their interests.

You are encouraged to reach out to foreign powers at any time to assess your current relationship, receive action items to improve relations, and if relations are good, request foreign support. Foreign support can take many forms, depending on what you’re asking for, how much they like you, and what their specialties are, but is often equipment, volunteer troops, relief aid, and the kind of efficient logistical tricks that a colony at war cannot manage. Action items depend totally on the specific foreign power’s ideology and goals for the colony. Feel free to proactively suggest things you will do for them that you think they’ll like as well.

To contact a foreign power, write a letter addressed to them targeted at any colony entrance stronghold or appropriate border crossing.

Termite Empire

Ideological preference: Imperialist (Monarchist)

Queen Celia’s colony began at the start of time and will last until the end of the world. However, no ant in history has been able to recall a time when the great hill of the termites did not stand tall. Led by their Imperial Majesties the Tsarina Maria Andreyevna and Tsar Vasily Pavlovich, the termite empire exercises strange customs—monogamy among royals? Strange, indeed, although one would not say that to the Tsarina’s face. The empire has been an eager partner in trade since the great millipede lines were cut through the western stone, but it is rightfully wary of the colony’s expansion, and would prefer a number of weaker, junior partners as neighbors.

Empire of the Sun

Ideological preference: Nationalist (Monarchist)

The bugs to the north speak in terror of the House of Gulpaşa, whose mother is the wasp. Although their unknown home is far away, it is said the winged legions of Ayn Ferahşad Kerime Sultan can patrol all the area from the Ashen Sea to the Fields of Gold in just one day. The Sultan herself, they say, has lived for one million million days and felled entire colonies with one sting. It is said that the Sultan has a palace filled with a thousand thousand ant queens, pampered and beautiful, whose children she feeds to her own; this is why she sends her legions out to conquer ant colonies and steal their queens to make slaves of them while the colonies wither and die, they say. This is why her legions act as mercenaries in foreign conflicts, the flames of which they hope to stoke in perpetuity: to bring home the spoils of war.

First Workers’ Republic

Ideological preference: Nationalist (Socialist)

To the southeast is a former kingdom recently fallen in a civil war not unlike Celia’s own. The colony is firmly in the control of the Aphid Workers’ Directory, steered by the firm hand of Director Marceline. The ant queen is kept in the nursery, and her brood is taken from her before they might learn her scent and her religion; all bugs, ant and aphid, are raised by the atheist state. Much has been invested in their military industry and security apparatus; the Revolutionary Tribunal has broad authority to silence dissidents, and its borders grow more entrenched by the day. The Directory’s focus has been on internal ideological purification since its creation, but its revolutionary goals include the creation of socialist states across the world.

#CATAPHRACT #CATAPHRANT