[Mordheim] Back on the Rack

[Jonathan E]

Red velvet lines the black box... Bela Lugosi's dead...

In the aeons since my last post, I have mostly been playing disgusting modern Warhammer. I discovered an actual board gaming club just down the road, and the organiser revealed he'd set the whole thing up in the hope of finding other Warhammer people so he didn't have to be everyone's Kill Team dealer. We've played a fair bit of Kill Team and a couple of games of modern 40K, we've passed the sniff test and are allowed round each other's houses and, despite his crippling cat allergy, I haven't been able to leverage the home advantage into reliable wins, bumbling along at my usual cheerful 44% with the occasional spike of brilliance when I stumble beard-first into something so skewed even I'd struggle to lose.

Anyway, he's renovating his house at the moment and he found a Mordheim box in the loft. A mostly untouched box. He mentioned this to me at our last monthly meetup and the light in my eyes must have been visible from England, because we're playing Mordheim next month.

I still have my old warband roster from the last campaign I played. (Yes, I still had a roster sheet from 2008. No, I don't have a problem. Shush.) It's quite strong, what with a M9 T6 Vampire and a Frenzied Dreg and a Warlock who got lucky and scored both the magic missile spells and all those Dire Wolves - but I don't want someone's first game ever to involve the "so skewed even I'd struggle to lose" situation. If ten years of shilling for Warmachine have taught me anything it's that stomping someone in their first game ensures they'll never want to play a second.

So, I'm going back to basics. Fresh off the starting blocks Undead warband for a one-off game. In a way it's quite liberating: I don't have to faff about taking three Dregs just to stand at the back and not die so I can roll more exploration dice and not fall behind in my income. This was always a flaw of Mordheim in campaign mode, if you ask me. I don't mind Heroes being what you want and Henchmen being the filler, but when the Henchmen are more interesting than the Heroes (Undead) or the Heroes are so expensive you can't afford Henchmen (Possessed)... well. There's an internal tension there that I don't like.

Anyway, I can't find most of my Dreg models and I have a bunch of Heresy Miniatures' Ghouls I need to reassemble at some point, so that's where we're at. I'll be blowing the dust off the Mordheim Vampires, Necromancer, Warlock and Witch sat at the front of my display case and leaning more into Hired Swords than Heroes. I'm also restricting myself to one (1) Dire Wolf, the rather snazzy metal one that was originally released as a unit champion. The result should be a warband with a more consistent speed (no half dozen Zombies lagging behind everyone else, no wave of Dire Wolves outpacing everything else) and the appropriate melee focus, but still tough enough (with all those T4 Ghouls) and melee focused enough to feel like proper Warhammer Undead. Something like this:

Hero: Vampire with double-handed sword (125)
Hero: Necromancer with sword (45) (Call of Vanhel)

Henchmen: Dire Wolf (50)
Henchmen: 2 Ghouls (80)
Henchmen: 2 Ghouls (80)
Henchmen: 2 Ghouls (80)

Hired Sword: Warlock (30) (Dread of Aramar, Luck of Shemtek)

That's 490 gold crowns spent. I am trying to resist the urge to use the larger "heroic scale" models I have from Warhammer Quest for the Heroes - they dwarf the delightful little Perry and Heresy sculpts and have giant ham hands, but they also come as a nicely matched set. And it gives me an excuse to use the Lord Ruthven model again (swapping the greatsword for a sword and board). I hear vampires with hooked noses and impressive droopy moustaches are very in at the moment.

[Just Tony]

What I remember most about Mordheim back in the day was how difficult it was to keep people in the league. Attention spans seem to be a major issue with gaming clubs, and protracted campaigns always seem to fall flat.

[Jonathan E]

True dat. You'll observe from my previous report that we ran for a month of weekly games and then called a winner based on warband rating. It works for the same reason a round robin league works: it's finite. I think telling people there is an end, and when it is, helps with retention - they're not committing an indefinite period of their time, nor building up expectations that'll go unfulfilled and induce them to drift away.

[Just Tony]

That's honestly the only reason I never really dipped into Mordheim too heavily. That, and being a pick up gamer primarily. I'm looking forward to updates once you're in full swing, though.

[Kakapo42]

I wouldn't worry too much about skew myself. Even the most skewed Mordheim Vampire warband is still nominally Von Carstein and thus still has built-in crippling weaknesses to werewolves, fierce strong independent princesses (especially ones with no living relatives), the flamboyant depraved sire of the leading vampire and a beautiful ingenue that is the spitting image of the leading vampire's long lost true love. I think Mordheim might even have an actual werewolf in it somewhere.

I've actually been eyeing up Mordheim myself recently with the advent of the brand new Mordheim starter box GW released a short while back (I am not fooled, someone on the TOW team knew exactly what they were doing with that Militia box). A shame it doesn't include any bases for the figures but it still works out to a not unreasonable investment.

Maybe you can break out the Warhammer Quest models for when the characters gain a sufficient critical mass of experience/gear/infamy?

[Jonathan E]

Maybe you can break out the Warhammer Quest models for when the characters gain a sufficient critical mass of experience/gear/infamy?

That's not a bad idea. I've also been reminded that I have a handful of Wardancers (entirely compatible with the Shadow Warrior warband) and a couple of Witch Hunter heroes knocking around. It would be very easy to slap together a supporting cast for those... especially since my Witch Hunter captain has something of the "last daughter of a noble line" look about her...

[TinyLegions]

The specialists games were something that I did not get much into, mainly due to time, but every year that I read about games like Mordheim, the more that I think that I missed the boat on a few of these. Better late than never, right?

On another note, I got a a Dire Wolf blister for a good price on EBay so that I could take a look and see if I want to add it to my Goblin Wolf Riders. I do tend to like some variety in the ranks and the metal heads seem like a good start for that.

[Jonathan E]

The specialists games were something that I did not get much into, mainly due to time, but every year that I read about games like Mordheim, the more that I think that I missed the boat on a few of these. Better late than never, right?

Indeed! My white whale is Warmaster, a game I loved on the one occasion I played it - but it had no appeal at all to the other sixteen year olds in my "squad," so I ended up not buying in. Epic 40,000 too, although that one was always hamstrung by the lack of a proper Chaos re-release. Doomed before it started.

[TinyLegions]

Warmaster models to me were the fodder that I used to create banners for a campaign like what you see in the Generals Compendium. I have nothing against warmaster, but it was again not one of those games that I put a whole lot of thought into, even though there were plenty of great reviews of the game. With the advent of 3D printing, getting a warmaster army of old should be an easier task than a decade ago, even if you buy them directly. For 40K Epic, that is even easier today with 3D printing to get your chaos army of your dreams. Hopefully one day you can get some dice rolling on a game, and of course we want to hear it here.