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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment