Bandits, bandits bandits! Frostgrave 01 DEC 2016

Our pursuit of building the better Frostgrave scenario continues with this one -

Bandits! Bandits! Bandits!
by Donal

A bunch of bandits are trying to profit from Felstad the same way our Wizards are - by grabbing treasure! They didn’t reckon on a pack of warbands turning up while they were trying to slip away with the loot. They hole up and try and sit the fight out, not realising that greedy Wizards will happily sacrifice soldiers to root out a nest of Bandits.

Set-Up

There are 1 bandit Archer and 1 bandit Thug (stats as per normal Warband members) per player, plus a bandit Knight as a “leader”. They’ve already collected one third of the treasure chests (1 per player) and have established a fort somewhere near the middle of the board. This should be a square about 10” per side with some high ground for the Archers to stand on. The Thugs should be grouped with the Treasures behind some barriers, walls or other 1”+ high obstacles.

Special Rules

The bandit Archers shoot at the closest visible Warband member every turn in the Monster Phase. The Knight and Thugs do nothing until a Warband member crosses the barricade. Once that happens, they move to attack the closest Warband member within their area. If a Monster Phase starts with only bandits in the area after they've been engaged in combat, the surviving Thugs each pick up a chest and attempt to make it off a random board edge, escorted by the Archers. The Thugs move directly towards the edge, only fighting if engaged (although they will force combat within 1” of a Warband member), using both actions to move. The Archers move first and then will either use their second action to shoot the closest Warband member within LOS or move again. They will stay within 6” of the Thugs. They continue until they are dead or off the edge of the board.

Treasure & Rewards

Each bandit a Warband kills (regardless of which member of the warband kills them) nets the Wizard killing them 10 extra XP.

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This scenario worked fairly well, in that the 3 treasures gathered by the bandits drew us all into conflict for the "pot" of treasures that they were guarding. It made for a bit of a snafu in the middle where no model I sent in came out alive! Eoghan picked the side facing the bandit's compound on set up, so as myself and Ger tried to come around at them and into his LOS, he punished us for it. And he ended up having the shortest escape distance (only by inches, but still). In the end, the bandit Archers were the most dangerous part of the equation, so we obviously wiped them out as soon as we could. The others didn't do so well, but more on that in a second.



Set-up time! Eoghan is coming in on the long edge on the bottom of this pic. Ger is at the top. I'm on the short edge on the right of the picture. The bandits are that little gathering just outside the round-topped building in the middle.



Look how tightly packed my set-up was! Close, tight, professional. There's no way a group this good looking could leave the game with 66% casualties, is there? Yes. Yes there is. 4 miniatures walked off the board under their own power, everyone else was broken somewhere.



Eoghan gathered under cover just outside the bandit's LOS. One of the bandit Archers on the roof one-shot no-scope killed one of Ger's Archers with a Critical Hit in the first turn, but then after that they didn't have a massive impact, except making us wary of ranged attacks as usual. Eoghan made devastating use of a spell he hasn't unleashed before - Scattershot, which makes a low-power attack against every enemy figure within 12". He hit my guys and the bandits again and again and again until all those low-power attacks added up and we were on our knees.



Ger came in behind the building and had to work around the long way for the pot of treasures. He definitely got in the mix though, and certainly caused me a whole mess of trouble during the game. In fact, myself and Ger ground up against each other so hard that Eoghan would have had an easy game - if not for wandering monsters!



Our love of wandering monsters destroyed Eoghan this game - a White Gorilla came in an single-handedly flattened 2 or 3 of his dudes and wounded his Sellsword. His left flank was decimated by one big monster wandering on field. Brutal. This left him without the reserve he would have needed to drive Ger away and really win all the marbles.



Ger had acquired a new Construct, so he made this charming home-made model with a creepy, creepy face on the front. It got killed this game though, so there's no need to worry about seeing this nightmare smiling at us again. At least until he gets another one.



The carnage rolled on and on in the middle of the board, but as I said no-one I sent in came out in one piece. Eoghan came out with 4 treasures in the end, I got 2 and Ger got 3. A slight imbalance in treasure return, but still close enough that the scenario seems kind of balanced. The bandits might need some kind of AI behaviour to make them do something. The poor Thugs and Knight got ripped apart without achieving anything except delay.

We might be able to get another game in next week? Who knows with the way schedules align. We can but hope!

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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.

Stay Frosty (Grave), unless you can stay a Dragon. Then stay a Dragon. 17 NOV 2016

Another day, another game of Frostgrave. Eoghan wrote a scenario inspired by Dragons, and especially the Reaper Bones Dragon that Ger picked up recently!



Ice Dragon scenario
By Eoghan

A large chunk of ice falls from the sky, nothing new in Felstad - only it is a hungry dragon, and its appearance has been foretold by a certain cult. While it has an egg with it, it’s hunger is greater - and the denizens of Felstad are either drawn to it or scared off, and of course Wizards are homing in on it!

Set-Up

Set up 3 treasures per player as normal. Place a Dragon figure in the middle of the table w/egg.

Special Rules

Dragon is inactive at start of game; it will activate if enemy warbands are within 10” and LOS on a roll of 14+ with 1 taken away for each treasure collected, for a max of 5+. Roll at start of creature phase. It will always activate and immediately attack if its egg is picked up or otherwise affected. It will immediately activate if attacked directly or at range.

Ice Dragon has following stats:

M 5
F +4
S +0
A 16
W +8
HP 20

Notes
Large, Flight,Ice Breath, Smart, Eat

Large target/weapon: -2 to hit on Shoot, +2 to damage in Hand to Hand
Flight: Can make a 10’’ move ignoring terrain if no targets in sight or ‘Smart’ activated (roll scatter dice)
Ice breath: free +3 shoot attack with a cone effect per round, not available if engaged in combat, creates difficult terrain where targets stand 1’’ diameter
Smart: the dragon will not fight to the death, if wounded (by even 1 HP) it make use of the 1 inch push rule if it wins subsequent combats and must make use of its Flight to escape in a random direction, if it fails a W roll it must stay and fight!
Eat: a defeated member of a warband is consumed for 2 HP (does not exceed max HP). The same of Acolytes who are immediately defeated and consumed if they are within 1 inch and reduced to wounded status. If they are still carrying their potion the dragon gains +1 Fight and +1 HP on top of its current stats, for a possible total of +13 Fight and 29 HP!

Cult of the Dragon - a certain special warband has been put together just for this scenario! They are scattered in their search for the Dragon so they arrive on random table edges in place of all Animals except those with ice-related names. If multiples, they appear alongside them eg. 2x Ice Toads is instead 1 Ice Toad and 1 Acolyte. The Cult Leader appears when Ice Dragon active. Constructs, Undead and Demons appear as usual, either sensing an opportunity to kill mortals, ice-aspected or awed by the dragon. Each Treasure picked up +1 chance so 9 treasures is +5 chance of monsters appearing on edge. Limit of 9 Acolytes and 1 Cult Leader. If the Cult Leader is within LOS of Ice Dragon, it gains +1 F, +1 W and +1 HP to its total.

Dragon Acolytes: M6 F2 S0 A10 W1 HP 11 Dagger, 1x Ice Breath Potion (+0 Shoot, Cone, Dif Terrain)
Cult Leader has M7 F4 S0 A11 W3 HP 14 Staff, Ring of Protection +1; Ice Breath Spell casts at 7 proficiency, may empower if within 1-5, will not reduce HP below 5. (+0 Shoot, Cone, Dif Terrain)

Treasure & Rewards

The warband that defeats the Ice Dragon receives 150 experience. Slain Acolytes are worth 20 each and the Cult Leader is worth 50 if slain by Wizards, half for Captains (10 and 25 respectively). If a Captain lands the finishing blow he gets 50 XP for kill resolution.

Optional: Wizards that engaged Dragon get 25 experience and 25 for surviving scenario with >0HP.

Any member of Warband may spend an action collecting the Dragon’s Egg, worth 200 gold +50XP. Treat as treasure in that the carrier can be killed and drop the loot.

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I took our entry picture at a weird angle. I might have been trying to be artistic? I'm entering at the short end on the right, Eoghan advanced in from the long side on the left and Ger was coming in from the far long side. There seems little point in too many pictures unless I diagram what's happening, so I'll just stick with a brief overview and some thoughts like last time.



Who has the time?



I like to keep it tight, tight, tight. My guys are never allowed wander outside activation range much. The guys work their crews more like a cloud, with warband members wandering away from leaders and joining other activation groups ad hoc. I don't know which approach is better, although it always feels better to keep the initiative gripped and act earlier in the turn. There were one or two turns where most of Ger's warband was activating at the end of the turn in the "un-led" section which gave him a lot of flexibility in reacting to how the turn had worked itself out. When you have Dragons and other objectives just bleeding their last because the rest of us have hit them hard and you can move in for the kill, it's pretty handy. Still, I prefer to act early.



We all kind of adopted a "get our treasures out early, then tackle the Dragon" strategy. So there was a lot of hiding behind terrain and creeping around, dropping LOS-blocking spells like Fog and Elemental Wall. For the first time ever, I got to use the Necromantic counter-spell, Spell Eater, which is actually pretty baller and will see a lot more outings in the future. For a straight, uncontested and pretty low roll, you get to cancel an ongoing spell - although you do take a point of damage in the process. I spell ate? one of Ger's Fogs and got to shoot his Captain and his activation group to pieces on Turn One. I was trying to spell eat my way through Eoghan's Elemental Walls to expose him to that damn Dragon but never quite got there. We've all gotten on point on our LOS-blocking spell effects.



Mobility is soooooooooo effective in Frostgrave. Ger Leaped this Archer to the top of Pringles tower to capture "my" third treasure. Luckily, spells that extend your range are also soooooooooo effective in Frostgrave, so the Wizard Eye I had stuck up there let me Telekinesis it off the edge before that jerk Archer could escape with it.



As for the Dragon, the guys piled in with a willingness to attack that put me to shame. I was trying to manoeuvre my Apprentice/Archery base around to engage it with Missile fire only, but apart from peppering Ger's Captain in Turn One, Archery remained pretty ineffective. The guys hacked and hacked and then Eoghan finally Elemental Bolt-ed the Dragon into its (Frost) grave. So Eoghan got the Kill the Dragon bonus. The stats Eoghan gave the Dragon were just right to make him a challenge, I think the Armour Value being 16 was key. Ger managed to roll the Egg off the board after some very sharp action between himself and Eoghan's warband. If wandering far infield is unusual in Frostgrave, one of Eoghan's Treasure Hunters must have come within inches of Ger's table edge, fighting for the egg all the way.

So we each managed to get three regular treasures, Ger got the egg and Eoghan made use of the Soothsayer Spell Reveal Secret for the first time to get to place an extra treasure (which he also escaped with). He also has picked up and got to use Absorb Knowledge, which gives you a chance to get 50 more XP after the game. When you consider the 50 XP for the extra chest as well, that's a lot of extra XP to pick up. As our wizards level up and become more like Swiss Army Knives, levelling up accelerates every game.

We'll probably squeeze in another game of Frostgrave next week (here's hoping). We also have our fingers in the Rogue Stars Nickstarter which is looking awesome, so we may move onto some Sci-Fi in the mix in the next few months!

Edit: I also meant to say that Forgotten Pacts is out as of today. I got it as an ebook, which represents good value. There's a mix of alright stuff in it, it's worth a look if someone is playing a Summoner, like Ger does. Demons get traits now depending on much you pass the summoning roll by. Our spell casting luck held up from last game, so he didn't get many trait-ed demons this time around, except for one two headed demon, but we'll keep these rules for the future. The scenarios in the book are pretty good, but multiple linked scenarios like there and in Thaw of the Lich Lord don't really suit our play style. Although the monster-Demons in it are the kind of challenge that we might enjoy facing.

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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.

(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.

Dungeons of Frostgrave 25 AUG 2016

So we went back to the Frostgrave scene, but we tried to incorporate the Into the Breeding Pits dungeon rules this time. Now normally you set up the terrain as normal but you put a "ceiling" on so that you get the underground effect, but I have over time collected several copies of the tileset from Advanced Heroquest, which makes a serviceable dungeon when you string it all together. It worked out okay, but the climbing over terrain aspect of the regular game is more appealing. The photos, however, are much less cool with the tiles than our normal set up. Next time will be The Keep, I think, with the random teleporting about as an excellent addition. More on that next time.

Some rules from Into the Breeding Pits do add some fun, with a chance for Secret Passages and Traps being in play (although we never got any) and a bigger margin for the chance of random monsters when treasure chests are picked up. We'll be keeping those changes as they worked for us. The fact that once the Treasure Chests have been lifted stops any risk of monsters turning up has been bugging me, so we discussed a new rule - from now on, between the last chest being picked up and the end of the game, we're going to roll a check dice every turn. On a 20 (?) or thereabouts, another monster will turn up on us.

There's a fantastic rule in Breeding Pits about placing the random monsters. When they're generated, every player rolls a dice and subtracts their Wizard Level. The highest remaining score gets to place them according to certain specifications. While we won't need to apply it in that circumstance "aboveground", the bonus it gives to the lower level Wizard is a very good mechanic. I'll be watching for more opportunities to wedge that one in.

Here's the original set up. We had to enter via the stairs on our board edges (we had two stairs each) but anyone could leave by any stairs they could escape up.


I split into two halves. My Wizard went in with his usual bunch and my Captain, who got seriously bloodied where they ground up against both Eoghan and Ger. My Ranger (aka "New Guy") was missing a game from his injuries from last time.


My Apprentice brought in all the quick movers. I almost headbutted Ger here, but he retreated back to the richer pickings of the centre of the board. This pack just kind of slinked around this end of the dungeon


Part of why I got bloodied was because ( unusually for me ) I took a risk and pounced on his captain with my captain from around a corner. Then half a dozen of his guys came around another corner and settled my captain's hash. The Captain (from the Sellsword) expansion are okay, but at this stage if mine was killed, I don't think I'd replace him. They're not quite good enough for the price you have to pay (and keep paying) for them.


Eoghan was right behind that group of Ger's though. Killing his thief, they worked around in a pincer to attack him from behind.


The mid game saw the guys slugging over the central avenue, where the most chests were. There were some sharp highs and lows. I left a thug behind to cover my wizards escape who I was sure would die in one combat, but he showed us the meaning of thuglife and lasted through several attacks.


Ger came in through two stairs, but ended up escaping out through one as Eoghan pressed him hard.


Another bloody game of Frostgrave, but this time down in the dark dungeons of Felstad.


A great game! It's a lot easier to tidy up dungeon tiles than cardboard houses and we started earlier. Someone did ask me since, so these three player games have been taking about 4 - 5 hours. That said, we're not pushing to be tight on time. You could probably get through them an hour faster if you were just taking turns as fast as possible. We won't be revisiting the dungeons again though, the climbing on stuff is much more fun than the claustrophobia of the rooms and passages.

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You can find Eoghan and Gerard at various points on the Internet.