(Frost)Grave of the Vampire - 20 OCT 2016

We squeezed in the 9th round of our Frostgrave campaign last night with some hackin' and slashin' and... another scenario we wrote ourselves! The next few weeks at work are going to be crazy, so who knows when our tenth game will be? But anyway -

Intercept the loot!
- By Donal

Word has gotten around that a Vampire is trying to accumulate wealth and Magical Treasures to challenge all these upstart Wizards that have turned up since he thawed out. Grab the treasure he’s sending his minions out to get before he gets too powerful!

Set-up

1 incoming group of 3 armoured skeletons per player, each carrying 1 treasure. They start 9” in from a table edge that a player is setting up on. Their base is on the side opposite them with a Vampire and 2 more Skeleton Champions (+1 fight, +2 damage - 2 handed weapons).

Set up 2 more treasures per player as usual.

Special Rules

The incoming groups make their way towards their base unless engaged in combat. They will force combat if within 1". They all move at half speed, but only one is carrying the treasure (mark as usual).

The vampire obeys normal rules for monsters up to 12" from their base. If he gets to 12", he stays at 12" until there's no one in his LOS. He then automatically moves back towards the door of their base. Unlike a normal Vampire, he also has access to Bone Dart at base casting ability (difficulty 8, +5 shooting attack). He will use this on the closest warband member within LOS outside 12” from the base every turn. Randomly determine any ties.

Treasure & Rewards

The carried Treasure chests are worth +50 gold coins. Killing the vampire nets a wizard +50 xp.

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I thought the Vampire would scratch our Frostgrave monster lust itch, but things were not to quite turn out that way. The Vampire's stats are badass and they're immune to non-magical attacks, so... dangerous, right?


A shot of the action just as turn 1 was in progress. The Vampire's crypt was on the long edge to the left, I'm coming in from the closest side. Ger entered from opposite the crypt and Eoghan is on the far end.


This is my crew working their way in. My plan was to Fog my war forward so the Vampire wouldn't Bone Dart me into oblivion. My Sellsword and my Thug have Magic Weapons and I was going to have them take care of the Vampire. The LOS rules for the monsters means that the Fog would stop them coming my way when I got close. This did not work to my advantage, so it shows you can be acting too smart. Also, the houses and things I assembled using a hot glue gun are already starting to peel apart, but the ones stuck with UHU haven't even dislodged. UHU is King, my friends.



My Apprentice, both Archers and my Ranger, New Guy, held the flank closest to Ger with instructions to pepper everything that raised its head with arrows. This generally kept Ger from putting the heat on my flank, albeit mostly cos of the stellar spellcasting from my Apprentice and less from the haphazard archery from the minions.



Ger came in strong from the middle of his side. The Summoner rules from the main book are starting to tilt in his favour a lot as his wizard becomes more proficient. He now tends to have a lot of Major Demons wandering the field. Necromancy's limit to one crappy zombie has me jealous. I suppose I have to diversify into the Darker Arts to catch up.



He was using some Age of Sigmar Khorne dude as a proxy for his Demon this game. That's him in the middle, rampaging through the ruins of a house.



Eoghan came in in a tight wedge from his side and crashed directly into the Skeleton convoy near him (see the scenario rules, above). As I've said before, Eoghan plays a bit more aggressively than us and has taken some weird turns. We use the Blue counters to indicate a buff on the miniatures, so you'll see a lot of blue tokens near his crew.



He's taken into the habit of buying half a dozen Potions of Strength before every game and basically having his guys go around hopped up on potions in every fight. It's becoming standard now for the first action for most of his guys to down potions and start charging!

So, what was I saying earlier about the Vampire and not quite adding a lot to the fight, never mind being too clever with LOS on my part? Well, with a big chunk of Eoghan's warband entering directly into his LOS, the Vampire wandered over that way - where an awesome roll on a spell from Eoghan's Apprentice destroyed him in one hit. The Vampire was never to have much of an effect on anything! Such is the life of a monster in Frostgrave.

Another cracking game of Frostgrave. It was very even, with each of us pulling out 3 treasures, including one special one each (50 extra gold by Scenario Special Rules, above). The XP drift can be amazing with the "successful spells cast" count - Ger's Apprentice barely succeed on any spell during the game, but I got every single one. The difference really begins to reel out over 7 turns. As I said, it may be quiet for a week or two on the game front, but we'll find some way to put up something here.

Oh, we also played a quick round of the new GW Game Gorechosen after, which is quite silly but very satisfying. I would recommend it to a friend. The guys over at the Scale Creep blog have been having some fun with its release with their "Haemo-Erotic Tag" posts, so that was actually what drove me to pick it up. It's a very reasonable price, although I have no idea how replayable it will be. I got a win by decapitating Ger and kicking Eoghan into a pit, so if that kind of story appeals, you'll like it!

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Keep an eye out for further updates and Art & miniatures on my Instagram profile.
You can find Eoghan and Gerard at various points on the Internet.

How many worms in your (Frost)grave? 11 OCT 2016

Another game of Frostgrave under our belts and straight after the last one! A great way to scratch the Frostgrave itch. We went with the scenario from the main book "The Worm Hunts". We lowered the Target Number (TN) of the Worm appearance to 14 with +1 on the dice roll for every treasure picked up. Also, it's not 100% clear whether the scenario rules can lead to infinite worms or if the intent is that there can only be 1 worm, so as lovers of carnage we decided that there can be up to and including infinite worms. This may have backfired on us somewhat. The worms are basically the same as those Werewolves we kicked to pieces last session, only with more Hit Points. So no problem killing those, right? Wrong. The worms, man, the worms. We'll see them in our dreams.



Yo.



Here's our initial layout. This is my entry side closest to the photo as usual, with Eoghan coming in on my left and Ger picked the far table side from me this time.



This is how I fanned onto the table. My zombie is obediently collecting a treasure chest. Ger brought this cool ship model, so my Ranger stood on the prow for a lot of the game. It afforded a nice view point over some of the terrain just beyond.



Eoghan came in in a nice tight wedge again. He's taking to tactical arrangements recently. He didn't quite get back the to casualty levels of his usual form this game either (he left that to Ger - 6 men down).



I forgot to get a snap of Ger's initial layout. He recently got Leap much like myself and Eoghan have since game 1 and was throwing his guys around with abandon. This poor soul got thrown to the top of this tower to serve as a vantage point for his archery and then everyone in his LOS shot him to pieces.



We needed some worm models so Ger created these great Graboid-esque dudes. When we left Pub Scrawl last night he had 0 and by midday today he had three ready to go. By the late game I think there were 7 active worms, so not quite enough, but pretty great.





Ger's guys collided with Eoghan's right at his initial set-up and kept piling in. I don't know if it's obvious from these pictures, but they almost had a traditional wargame there at some points, there were so many units piling in. 12 of their 20-odd Warband members were probably within the same 10" square, locked in combat for several turns.



Eoghan had a Treasure Hunter that he had spelled up to the gills - this guy had a Potion of Strength downed, was Fast Act-ing and had something else as well (Possession?) but I can't quite remember. There was one last Treasure Chest left and this guy did an epic run for it - running up the wooden stairs you can see in the back of this pic and then jumping across to this stone arch - chased by Graboids the whole way. He made it to the treasure, but died up there, as did many of us.



And why did many of us die up there? Well, the rules for the scenario state that if you generate a worm, it appears randomly beneath one of the remaining treasure chests. But, if, as happened to us, you collect all the chests but one and then start generating lots of worms every turn, they're all going to be at that location. And that location is going to be a death trap. Ger put one of the chests into the ruined tower, which was quite hard to get to. And so it became the TOWER OF WORMS!



If you walked anywhere near the place, you got covered in worms. Covered in worms! It got crazy. Basically, that chest was a loss - but who was it a loss for? Ger, as it happens. Myself and Eoghan walked away with three each but Ger had to lick his wounds with the cold comfort of two treasures.

It was another great game of Frostgrave! This one was punchy, fast. We were all back on form and the worms made it super, super dangerous. Magic flew about and blood was spilled, without it feeling like a horrible bloodbath. There was some nice sharp fighting between Ger and Eoghan without it feeling like they were trying to destroy each other.

Lessons learned - The spell Wizard Eye which I picked up recently and haven't really been using is a fantastic spell. I similarly wrote off Fog in the first few games but have discovered its facility. Wizard Eye gets stuck on the side of a piece of terrain and lets you cast spells through it with a 180° LOS which is crazy. I stuck an Eye from my Apprentice on one high building and one from my Wizard on a facing high building and could then Bone Dart anything in the centre of the table with impunity.

Nothing in the rules say you have to Leap your own guys. We have to check in on the errata yet, I suppose, but at one point Eoghan was able to Leap one of the worms away from his troops, which may have saved him enough to be able to retreat off the field.

edit - You can't Leap anything except your aligned figures, it turns out. The Author covered it during an errata Q&A on Lead Adventure.

More Frostgrave soon!

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Keep an eye out for further updates and Art & miniatures on my Instagram profile.
You can find Eoghan and Gerard at various points on the Internet.

Night of the Werewolf! Frostgrave 07 OCT 2016

So it was inevitable that we would try and design our own scenarios. And Ger had a freshly painted Werewolf, so.... here's the rules!



Night of the Werewolf
By Donal

On a dark and stormy night in Felstad, a Werewolf-construct is going to cause trouble for a bunch of looting wizards!

Set-Up

Set up 3 treasures per player as normal. Place a Werewolf figure in the middle of the table.

Special Rules

The Werewolf has fallen into a vat of Mind Control potion! If he deals any damage to any figure, that figure acts like a monster, obedient to the Werewolfs desires. It only desires them to kill! The figure becomes a monster like the Werewolf and wanders about in the monster phase like any other random encounter. If the Werewolf dies, they recover their wits and can act as normal.

It’s the dark of night, so LOS is reduced to 18” and all ranged attacks (Magic or mundane) suffer a -2 penalty.

Treasure & Rewards

A warband can decapitate the Werewolf for the usual bounty, or their Wizard can choose to study Mind Control from the liquids in the monster’s corpse. The warband who decapitates the Werewolf and carries the head off the table can choose to learn Mind Control for free or improve the existing spell by 1 if already known.

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When I wrote this, I skimmed the Werewolf stat block in the main Frostgrave rule book and thought "Wow, these guys look dangerous". In practise, the first Werewolf got ganked but quick. So we think that maybe it should be "One Werewolf per player". So, we re-tooled mid game to have 1 spawn on the same point until a total of 1 per player had been killed? They still didn't make a lot of impact, as we were having quite the brisk melee between our warbands anyway, but they were a factor. We got a LOT more monsters than normal on the random encounters rolls this time around and those very definitely proved to be a factor.



Here's a great example of a Werewolf-ganking. Eoghan just surrounded the poor Werewolf with infantry and hacked it to pieces. The empty space was a Werewolf 15 seconds before. We ended up feeling sorry for the poor Werewolves.



Here's where we came on the board - that's my table edge facing the picture. Ger came in on the long side on my right and Eoghan came in on the long side on my left. If you've been paying attention to our warbands, you can see that Ger is set up with only one building between me and him. Hrm. Well, this is how it goes. You make one generalisation about how Eoghan takes the biggest risks and takes the largest casualties and the very next game myself and Ger end up locked in a battle to the death and Eoghan would take the least casualties of all of us.



Ger rounded that building and smashed straight into me. Ger would go on to take almost 100% casualties (his Thug and 2 Summoned Demons carried his share of the treasure away. Everyone else bit the dirt) and in the post game recovery rolls his Wizard and Apprentice would both acquire the first "Niggling Injuries" results of our campaign. I had everyone go down except my Spellcasters and 1 Archer (more on this hero later).

edit - My thief also came out unscathed, but he also achieved nothing. I meant to acquire him a sweet Magic Bow but had forgotten. So he wandered in, hung around, and walked away again.



Now, my Apprentice/Archer back line would have made Ger's attack on my troops suffer, if it hadn't been for those extra random encounters I was talking about. The majority turned up on my table side and kept crashing into me. The Archer you can see engaged here went down straight away so my Apprentice and the hero-Archer had to make a run for it. We would have a Wild Boar, an Ice Toad and a Snow Troll all arrive in that side and turn myself and Ger's melee into a multi-sided bloodbath clusterfuck.



Eoghan played a nicely tight game. He stacked scenery with Archers, like this, to deny us big swathes of the terrain. The 18" maximum range because of the special rules in the scenario made this slightly less effective, but effective none the less.



And this little menace (his Treasure Hunter) through a series of lucky rolls mostly, but regardless, caused me endless grief lurking around my flanks. A few fights I thought would be easy had this jerk stagger away, covered in the blood of my loyal minions! Needless to say, I finally managed to get my revenge in the form of a timely Bone Dart, but it was a Pyrrhic victory.



On the bright side, we had gotten close to the equilibrium point - Eoghan had 3 treasures off the board, Ger had three treasures off board and I had 1 off the board and 1 in hand - and I was starting to despair about getting that third treasure to rival my competitors. The third treasure was surrounded by Ger's remaining warband members battling to death with the aforementioned Wild Boar, Ice Toad and Snow Trolls. BUT remember that last Archer I mentioned? I sent him into the jaws of death - mostly I just wanted to make it slightly harder for Ger to escape with the treasure himself! But after the blood had stopped flowing and the dust had somewhat settled, that mad, heroic, lone Archer staggered out of the combat with my third treasure! It was almost worth the extreme carnage of those crazy rounds of combat to get a chance to draw level in the treasure stakes!

What a game of Frostgrave! Bloody, quick paced, very violent. The scenario rules didn't have a huge impact, sadly, but I have written quite a few more, so we'll see if we can get more impact from some wacky rules. The biggest factor was the Night Rules, which we borrowed somewhat from one of the expansions. Once LOS range goes down, it really changes the power of the ranged game. We'll be having another game of Frostgrave within the next few days as our calendars align to give us another chance to play! Wooooooooo! We're going back to the rulebook for a slightly modified version of The Worm Hunts. Modified to have more worms, that is. We enjoy more monsters and more carnage.

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Keep an eye out for further updates and Art & miniatures on my Instagram profile.
You can find Eoghan and Gerard at various points on the Internet.