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14 Tips on Warband Creation
By Donato Ranzato,
as appeared at
the
Inner Circle,
creators of
Lustria: Cities of Gold
campaign setting
For those of you who don't
know, Donato has contributed quite a bit to Mordheim by various articles in Town Cryer.
He is the Senior Developer of
Karak Azgal,
another scenario for the Mordheim game system, and the webmaster of
Ye Mordheim
Gazette. Donato initially wrote this to the Lustria design group to give
them some
guidelines to follow when creating the Lustria Warbands. I copied the
original article from their site, and later Donato was gracious enough
to allow us to re-publish it, with certain introductory changes, so that other
designers could benefit from his words of wisdom. So
here it is. ~The Mordheimer.
Hello, Below I will give some
suggestions that you can keep in mind when you are evaluating and/or writing
Warbands. These are also the things I look out for when reading through
submitted Warbands. The list is not in a specific sequence:
Keep warriors with special
abilities/rules to a minimum.
Decide on the primary strength
of the Warband (e.g., shooting or close combat or average in both).
Try to include at least one
weak and cheap troop type (e.g., NightRunners, Zombies, Youngbloods).
Try to keep to 5 special
skills for the Warband.
If the Warband has access to
Magic spells or Prayers, try to include some weak spells/prayers.
Watch out for an arms race (e.g.,
if you decide a "normal" good warrior has WS 5, what kind of WS would
Vampires have?).
If the Warband is good in both
shooting and close combat then keep the maximum size to around 12.
If the warband is only good in
one thing then raise the Warband size to 20.
Try not to let the Warband
have an advantage from the start (e.g., if the fluff says that they are good
explorers make that into a special skill).
If the Warband is average
overall with 2 or more weak troop types then give it a "Heavy Hitter" (Ogre,
Troll, etc.)
Don't try to translate the
complete army book into a Warband, but decide on a theme, region or race.
Try to keep the amount of
Heroes to five. Four and six should be exceptions. Don't give the Warband
less then 4 Hero types or more then 6.
If you decide to give a
warrior type a special rule or ability then see if a weapon or equipment
does roughly the same and then add the cost of that piece of equipment to
the basic cost of that type of warrior (e.g., If you give Saurus Braves
"scaly skin" which is roughly the same as Heavy Armor then add 50 gc to
their basic cost).
And finally KISS (Keep It
Simple Stupid!).
Well, these are the ones that I
could come up with from the top of my head. Hopefully they are useful to some of
you on the list.
