Mini-Heim

Howdy gang,

Just perusing and cannot find something readily available - but I have a question: What would the warband tweaks be for a smaller-scale Mordheim?

I ask because our toddler leaves us with little time, and setting up a 4x4' table with ~20ish miniatures takes very long. Looking to scale down on a 3x3 table for quicker games (30-60 minutes). Not sure if anyone has been down this road of trying to squeeze Mordheim in as quickly as I am trying.

My initial instinct would be to create the warbands with 300 crowns, and only require a leader? Maybe a leader and only one champion?
Tweaking the Wyrdstone table would kind of be a pain as well, I'd imagine.

Thanks for any and all helpful thoughts! (even unhelpful)

-Bill

Hey Mariner2011! Sounds like an interesting idea for sure, so I will be following this thread The first that came into my mind was actually games like Kill Team and Warcry that GW currently supports. Maybe you could look into these game mechanics and make them work for Mordheim? It sure is less of an indepth game, but it might do the trick if you're not having that much time

300 GC for a minimum of three figures including the leader sounds very possible. I’d be tempted to treat other warband members capable of earning experience as heroes even if they’re henchmen. Heroheim?

Another option that you might want to consider is collaborative gaming. So, everyone’s nominally on the same side fighting against the games master or enemies who act in a predictable way e.g. zombies who move towards the nearest living thing to them.

Tagnator wrote:

Hey Mariner2011! Sounds like an interesting idea for sure, so I will be following this thread The first that came into my mind was actually games like Kill Team and Warcry that GW currently supports. Maybe you could look into these game mechanics and make them work for Mordheim? It sure is less of an indepth game, but it might do the trick if you're not having that much time

Yeah! So I've looked into WarCry because that's EXACTLY what I'm looking for, but truth be told my hobby budget is a little stretched thin...like butter scraped over too much bread...but thank you for the suggestions!

The big mechanics I am looking at having to tweak are: Warband size, starting crowns, and the Wyrdstone search chart and warband upkeep.

I think some of the crazier critical hits can be particularly devastating with fewer models, but...you know what...that's Mordheim!

Citizen Sade wrote:

300 GC for a minimum of three figures including the leader sounds very possible. I’d be tempted to treat other warband members capable of earning experience as heroes even if they’re henchmen. Heroheim?

Another option that you might want to consider is collaborative gaming. So, everyone’s nominally on the same side fighting against the games master or enemies who act in a predictable way e.g. zombies who move towards the nearest living thing to them.

Totally. We did this with Necromunda in a research facility of plague zombies that got loose but our gangs were not cooperative. It's certainly an option and I'm glad you reminded me of it as I have ghouls I can use from my last campaign, but it'd make a 3rd turn which would increase the game length unfortunately to a lesser extent.

That's a really good point about the experience. Less warband members, but more cool skills? Heck yeah!

It's really interesting. If you want a faster game I think you don't want many heroes, since they make the game slower when they stock skills and injuries. It's a shame because it's what gives Mordheim that special flavour, but I'd said you want less heroes (4 max and no henchmen promotion?), less money for sure, much smaller maximum band size, and keep things as vanilla as possible, with quality of life house rules but less dice rolls as possible (no weapon critics, for example). The most important thing would be designing appropriate scenarios, more objective focused to keep some tactics involved and avoid games being just 5 guys clashing into 6 guys in close combat.
Changes will screw up warbands balance... but they aren't much balanced anyways.

Don't forget to post your experiences! I guess many of us would be really interested.

bitxo wrote:

It's really interesting. If you want a faster game I think you don't want many heroes, since they make the game slower when they stock skills and injuries. It's a shame because it's what gives Mordheim that special flavour, but I'd said you want less heroes (4 max and no henchmen promotion?), less money for sure, much smaller maximum band size, and keep things as vanilla as possible, with quality of life house rules but less dice rolls as possible (no weapon critics, for example). The most important thing would be designing appropriate scenarios, more objective focused to keep some tactics involved and avoid games being just 5 guys clashing into 6 guys in close combat.
Changes will screw up warbands balance... but they aren't much balanced anyways.

Don't forget to post your experiences! I guess many of us would be really interested.

Agreed!

We will probably only play 2, 3 games max before she gives a good review. If she likes it we'll play further? But I can revisit the rules and further tweak things as we go along. I think simply reducing the max warband size by %25 across the board would be a good guess.

Looking at just the vanilla Mercenaries and dusting off the rules, I think it would be a good idea to limit the warband composition to 1 Leader, 1 Champion and 1 Youngblood at any time - with just a Leader required at warband creation, with 300 GC. If the Leader gets knocked out in the first game, well...they're just starting all over again with a new warband anyway, so they'll just be one game behind.

Unfortunately, this will kind of force us to HAVE to buy a champion with our sheckles after the first game, but it's not a STRICT requirement? It will just force us to be a bit more careful with our Leaders than usual.

I'm torn on the Criticals. On one hand, it's what makes Mordheim crazy and gives it that impetuous flavor, but I agree in that it'd be one less roll to do.
Do you've any quality-of-life house rules you'd recommend? I've always played it straight out of the rulebook.
Bill

a smaller table is a great start, i think removing knock down and stunned would definitely speed things up, undead and dwarfs who have bonuses which resist kn / stun should have a reduced chance of death after game i.e. 1 dead 2-6 alivenot dead.
Timed turns have been trailed in our group as well, 4-6 mins seems to put on pressure and you can run out of time and not get to shoot or close combat if you spend too long moving or thinking and your first few turns shouldn't take too long (the dark elf player suffered the most as he wanted to climb everything).
Almost goes without saying but forget everything about the supplements to the game outside of different warbands, NO FIRE, NO WAGONS, NO RANDOM EVENTS, NO WYRDSTONE JEWLERY.

Phantasmal_fiend wrote:

a smaller table is a great start, i think removing knock down and stunned would definitely speed things up, undead and dwarfs who have bonuses which resist kn / stun should have a reduced chance of death after game i.e. 1 dead 2-6 alivenot dead.
Timed turns have been trailed in our group as well, 4-6 mins seems to put on pressure and you can run out of time and not get to shoot or close combat if you spend too long moving or thinking and your first few turns shouldn't take too long (the dark elf player suffered the most as he wanted to climb everything).
Almost goes without saying but forget everything about the supplements to the game outside of different warbands, NO FIRE, NO WAGONS, NO RANDOM EVENTS, NO WYRDSTONE JEWLERY.

Yes! We'll be just using the standard rulebook, fur sure! I DO still kind of want to keep the knocked down/stunned rules, but I think we can experiment with removing them for the first game (so it's easier to learn) and then adding them in the second game.

I LOVE the timed rules idea...that's fantastic! I don't think we'll need it, but definitely something to use when/if I get to play a full game again one day. I even have a chess-clock!

I think she is gravitating towards using my Skaven warband, and I will probably just use my Witch Hunter warband. I'll cut the max warband size in half for both, so 10 for Skaven and 6 for my witch hunters.

Off the top of my head:

Removing tables for wounding and To-Hit - migrate to the newer, "if WS>WS, 3+; if S>T, 3+, if S<T, 5+" across the board.
Eliminate Interception rule, and instead institute the 1" bubble, area-of-control that's in LotR SBG (at least from 2008)
Eliminating Initiative rolls for climbing and jumping, but keeping Diving Charge because let's be honest...it's badass.
Maces, Hammers, Swords, Axes...all just simple hand-weapons, cost of 10GC, no special rules.
Keep the Buckler parry-save, only Sword AND Shield grants parry-save
Keep All-Alone test
REMOVE Magic and spell-casting

Here is the link to the updated rules for Mini-Heim:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1huukCQj-hE80vj6a-cTPxFuD4pHII4nu/view?usp=sharing

Please let me know if the link works!

Basically did the following:

Removing tables for wounding and To-Hit - migrate to the newer, "if WS>WS, 3+; if S>T, 3+, if S<T, 5+" across the board.

Eliminating Initiative rolls for climbing and jumping, but keeping Diving Charge because let's be honest...it's badass.
Maces, Hammers, Swords, Axes...all just simple hand-weapons, cost of 10GC, no special rules.
Keep the Buckler parry-save, only Sword AND Shield grants parry-save
Keep All-Alone test
Removed initiative tests from jumping gaps
REMOVE Magic and spell-casting
Removed All Advanced Rules
Changed scenarios to 3x3'
Only tweaked Witch Hunters and Skaven warbands, max sizes, removed some special gear, changed Warrior Priest's special rule to Litany of Hate instead of spellcaster
Removed almost all Miscellaneous equipment
Paired down equipment available to purchase, significantly
Removed hired swords and dramatis personae