Playing with Bretonians

Yup. For a while my wife was running warband made up of the Croc Games Basti (cat) figures, using shadow elf rules.

The core ruleset gave us the three key human warbands - shooty, melee and well equipped. Its amazing what can be done with those three warbands. Though the witch hunters and sisters are good additons. I think I'd proxy one of the mercenary warbands for pirates too. Great models exist for pirates but the rules are a bit blah.

I promise to bug my shiftless brother to post the alternate pirate warband I did on his blog. They have seen some playtesting. Blah they aren't - but I'm not sure the balance is right. They are based ion the historical (not Warhammery) precedent that pirate crews were often very diverse in terms of nationality, race, and religion. (OK, mainly I wanted an opportunity to use all those nifty human, orc, goblin, and dwarf pirate minis).

I played a Bretonnian warband and it wasnot so bad.

But there are more than one ''strange'' thing about this warband so we gave it an edge by :

1- First in Mordheim you are only allowed one horse per warband. (we gave an edge to the bretonnians giving them the possibilty to have up to 6!!!) - I think this should have been an official advantage but well ... its not.

2- Lance : I'm not sure about this one but charging on horseback with a lance would give a total of +4S (+2 basic and +2 for the charge). That give the knight a very powerful attack. The opportunity to keep the lance for the rest of the fight (getting +2S) and still carry a shield, have an heavy armor + the horse barding give it 2+ armour save .. wich is very good !!

3- Knight errants have the speed skill list while the squire have the strength.. strange - we reversed that.

4 - We played that each squire is attached to a particular knight. If the knight is killed than the squire leaves the warband. But if the squire have at least one virtue special skill, we consider him a grown up knight instead (change is equipment list, give him the knight type and the immune to all alone test ability - (he gets the knight skill list too- losing the speed to get strenght.) but keep his advancement and XP. You can hire a new squire for the new knight !

5- Give the riding warhorse skill to all knights when you hire them ( but not to a squire grown up to knight !)

I hope those mods and clarifications will help you create a successful bretonnian warband.


*** - Bretonnians, even with those modifications are still a bit weaker than many warbands !!!

Well, in my version of the Brets, here are the following tweaks I'd recommend:

Leader - drop to 70gc (NO reason it's as high as 80.)
Errant - may take comb, strength, & speed (and special)
Squire - may take comb at & SPEED (instead of strength)

Squire only skill:
Knight errantry - the squire may choose to become a knight errant. He gains the skill "Knightly Virtue" and access to the Bret Special skills. As a knight, he must immediately switch his equipment over to the Knight equipment, forsaking all missile weapons.

If I were to completely redo the warband, I'd replace the lady's blessing with lucky charms, make squires a henchmen group instead of a hero group, and make the special skills more practical (shield bash, bulging muscles), but eh, that's only the ranting of crazed nerdboy.