Spell of Awakening & Re-Animation

We have two spells; one raises a dead opponent to fight for you as a Zombie, the other raises a Zombie who has died during the battle.

These are the spells:

Quote :

Re-Animation Difficulty 5
At the spoken command of the Necromancer, the dead rise to fight again.
One Zombie that went out of action during the last hand-to-hand combat or Shooting phase
immediately returns to the battle. Place the model within 6" of the Necromancer. The model
cannot be placed straight into hand-to-hand combat with an enemy model.

Quote :

Spell of Awakening Difficulty: Auto
The Necromancer calls the soul of a slain Hero back to his body and enslaves him with corrupt
magic.
If an enemy Hero is killed (ie, your opponent rolls 11-16 on the Serious Injury chart after the
battle) then the Necromancer may raise him to fight as a Zombie in his servitude.
The dead Hero retains his characteristics and all his weapons and armour but may not use any
other equipment or skills. He may no longer run, counts as a Henchman group on his own, and
may not gain additional experience. This spell always succeeds (rules for Henchmen and
experience are described later). The new Zombie follows all the normal Zombie rules (immune to
poison, causes fear) except for retaining his profile, weapons and armour.

If one of the Heroes raised through Spell of Awakening dies during the battle, may you then use Re-Animation to raise him again?

To me, a RAW interpretation says yes, you may re-animate a hero that has been zombified via Spell of Awakening.

'The new Zombie follows all the normal Zombie rules...'

Makes it fairly clear that he's like any other zombie. If this is totally game breaking within your league, maybe a good house rule would be to raise the spell difficulty for Re-Animation in this special case.

That was my interpretation as well, thank you for confirming it!
I'll talk it over with the group, but as I see it, it was intended this way.

So... I took it up with the group and the reaction was as expected: "OMG, no way, that's too OP, never gonna play against that warband again!" - so I guess we're not going to interpretate it like that

Sad. Perhaps time will mellow them.

Definitely a pity. It is not like the Undead are a top-tier or even mid-tier warband.

Aye, undead really need all the cheese they can get to keep them in the game.

Hrmm... Would love some arguments for why they're not good later on, and that this rule should be interpretated as I would. Then I can take it up again

Undead are not good later on because most of their henchmen never advance. Therefore their henchmen are just the same late in a campaign as they are at the start of a campaign. This is in contrast to most other warbands that gradually build a small number of stronger, more elite henchmen to compliment the heroes. This also has the effect of requiring the heroes to participate in fighting especially later in a campaign which puts them at risk of being taken OOA and the subsequent loss of income. Players of Dwarf Treasure Hunters often complain about the Troll Slayers being heroes because they need to be put into combat but they fear the warriors being taken OOA and then having less dice for exploration, etc.

Pretty much what RationalLemming said.

Undead warbands are pretty quick out of the gate, primarily as their henchmen are cheap and fairly effective without equipment.

At 15 points zombies are a steal. They hit at S3, cause fear, and are harder to take down than a normal model. Dire wolves are crazy fast and can go after archers or other stragglers with great success.

The problem is that Undead warbands tend to get left behind as the league goes on. An undead band can easily put 15 good models on the table in game one. But 12 games into the league your zombies are going to be exactly where they started, and my marksmen are going to have longbows, backup weapons, armor, and a baller statline. The zombie rush that was effective in the opening games is now just an opportunity for my warband to farm experience.

Mmm... I agree, even though a lot of warbands have doggie/wolfie types (however much cheaper). Zombies are thrown out later on in my warbands, because as you said, they don't get any stronger. Also, they can't keep up with the warband, which leads me to winning or losing before they even join the fight, if there's some kind of objective in the middle. I'd say that Ghouls get weaker due to the lack of armour and equipment, but they're not weak even then, when they get a few good advances

About the Dwarf Treasure Hunters: Aye, the lack of armour is definitely a downside, but their Monster Slayer skill is horrible vs. my T6 + Resilient Saurus! -.-

On topic, I would say that yes you can reanimate a zombified hero. If you needed to persuade your group to let you do it (which I don't think you should need to, but that's just me) then offer to add a second difficulty to the spell- so that it's cast on a 5+ like normal when you reanimate normal zombies, but it goes up to 7+ or 8+ when you want to reanimate a zombie hero. It sounds fair and should still give you at least a reasonable chance of getting it off.

Off topic: I understand what people are saying about Undead being lower tier, as I find the lack of good missile troop options really hampers them when everyone else (at least in my group) is busy buying rope & hooks for their guys and putting them in any building they can find... Zombies have such limited climbing options that I find they (and the Direwolves, who can't use ladders either) rapidly can't keep up in terms of movement when the scenario/ table calls for lots of multi-level scenery.

I don't understand why people think they are low-tier because they can't keep up in the late campaign though. To my mind a good Undead Warband will use all of its profits from the early games into buying more and more Ghouls; so that every time a Zombie dies you can replace it with something much more powerful. I can't see anything bad about a mid/late campaign Undead warband who has 6-10 Ghouls and maybe a Dire Wolf or two as their only Henchmen :/

I've been thinking of trying an Undead Warband myself, as I introduce some friends to the game (they're Fantasy veterans so I don't want to take it too easy on them, however ) and was thinking of starting off with all three Dregs, but buying as many Ghouls in idividual Henchman groups as I can for the early games. That way I can maximise the chances of getting Ghoul heroes and I can dismiss the Dregs when it happens. Having a Vamp, Necro and 4 Ghouls heroes (and then filling out the Henchmen as normal, or with Ghouls depending on income) seems very solid to me- and the fact that you can give the Ghouls access to Speed Skills, after The Lad's Got Talent, really helps make up for the fact you can't climb well with other models.

Keep one dreg hero just for the shooting, if you are playing by normal rules.

One reason they are lower tier even with the ghouls is that ghouls are forbidden from using weapons and armour so, even though noone in their right mind buys armour for henchmen, all that free armour you have found over the course of the campaign cannot be used. Likewise the free good weapons. For example, my Marienburgers will often have a bunch of swordsmen with heavy armour and dual swords late-mid to early-late campaign. That adds to their survivability a lot.

Another reason is that, even if you do replace all the dregs with ghouls, you now have 4 melee heroes that cannot wear armour or use better weapons and can only be replaced with TLGT.

Another reason is their lack of access to equipment. This means you will have four heroes with no rabbit's feet, no healing herbs, no tarot cards, no ropes and hooks, no nothing of all the little bits and pieces that make the warband just that little bit more powerful compared to those that don't have them.

You are right though, the warband you described is quite solid. Once you get it. For a few games, and then you encounter the difficulty of the afore-mentioned ghoul-heroes-only-come-from-TLGT supply problem and find the peak is very difficult to sustain compared to the peak of other warbands.

That is my experience anyway, perhaps yours will be different. Everyone has different opponents after all.

What you say makes sense, but I'd look at it in a different light- as in, all the equipment you can't use is just free money, right? So you can fund more Ghoul/ Direwolf henchmen, once your Vamp and/ or Necro has had their share. I'd say that giving Ghoul Heroes access to Speed skills is critical, so that you don't need to worry about Rope and Hooks by taking the skill which allows free climbing during movement (I don't have the rules to hand to check the name, but I assume you know the one I mean...).

The supply of heroes, if one dies, would be something to worry about indeed; there's always the option to switch a Dreg back in until you're likely to get advances with Henchmen, if you have problems with cashflow. With regards to other things like lack of items and weapons, I wouldn't have problem if an Undead player wanted to take Weapons Training on a Ghoul after he'd reached Hero status. Perhaps the Vampire takes the time to show him a thing or two once he realises how well suited for it the ghoul is? I think the shooting weapon equivalent would be too much of a stretch, but melee only weapons wouldn't be too game breaking. Late Campaign the lack of missile weapons should be semi-off-set by the Necromancer getting reduced casting values on a host of very good, ranged damage spells like Lifestealer and Spell of Doom (I might also have forgotten the name of the Str. test one...)

My group will probably be fairly relaxed to begin with (as someone who's a fan of only using the official warbands most of the time, I had to persuade our resident Lizardman player that it would be a little over powered using them in Mordheim :p Then I had two other players opt for Dwarves and Beastmen anyway, haha) so I could probably get away with running Undead just for a personal handicap

Because you sell the equipment for half you are only getting half its value and regularly cycling out dregs until you get that last ghoul back loses you a non-trivial amount of xp. By itself either of these is not that big of a deal, but with all their other drawbacks it collectively lowers them to bottom-tier.

In my group we allow dregs to use ranged weapons and melee weapons with the skills. We also allow equipment use by ghoul heroes so if you give them academic they can be spell-casters.

In addition to this we allow necromancers to allocate stat level-ups to their zombies so any they hire have more St, WS, T, or what-have-you. It seems to bring them up to a mid-tier or so.