Elven Bow

The Elven Bow does not appear in any warband's (save maybe experimental or with the Elf Ranger Hired Sword) equipment list. Does this mean that the only way to use it is with Weapons Expert skill?

Yes, and that's if you can get one at all. I imagine that they're quite a rare find.

My new Safari warband will have a Bowhunter skill that allows a model to use an Elf Bow, although you still have to find one.

They are rare 12, but that is often reasonably easy to get mid-game. Streetwise + Opulent Coach + Large Gem is a bonus of 2+3+1, so rare 12 becomes rare 6.

Large gem? Missed that one somewhere!

The elven doodads all seem to be quite rare.

@Lord 0... I'd like to play in your campaigns when mid-game it is safe to assume that at least some warbands have Opulent Coaches!!! We are always strapped for cash in our campaigns.

OK sorry for the off-topic post...

Of course you are strapped for cash - everyone is *always* strapped for cash for the whole campaign . Gold that is in your treasury isn't killing anyone or getting you moar loot.

Opulent coach is reasonable in mid-campaign if you want it. Heck, if you are lucky you can get it late early game, although that requires something like getting a tome of magic for a multiplayer reward or rolling particularly well on a dragon's horde or something.

The large gems are from '33333' on the exploration table so once you have three or four heroes with Tarot cards there should be two or three people in your campaign that have one by mid game.

If you play with the items from the annual you can use the Tarotcards and the wyrdstonependulum and get much better search results to boost your income (with my elves i like the 3-3-3 for cheap experienced henchelfs).

You have to decide to invest in items for more money or if you want more power to aquire money through combat results (i.e. winning games)

Thanks. We have never rolled that result, that I remember, We underuse Tarot decks, for one thing.

The Tarot cards are overpriced in my opnion. Use your rabbit's feet instead!

Opulent coach as well I'd say. By the time you can afford an Opulent Coach, you should have made a few hundred rare rolls

Nonsense. A warband of 9 members rolling averagely for 4 heroes will find 3 shards per game. Assuming they must replace a 25 gold henchman after every game that means it will still only take them 7 games to get enough for the opulent coach.

I did an experiement with my Marienburgers once and spend a bit of gold here and there on other stuff, but still got the coach after about 9 or 10 games. This meant that it was much faster to get Tarot cards and lucky charms and the like for the rest of the warband. It worked ok, but I didn't win a lot at the start. Happily, winning doesn't really matter in Mordheim - it is all about survival.

Saranor wrote:

You have to decide to invest in items for more money or if you want more power to aquire money through combat results (i.e. winning games)

It my experience it is barely a choice at all. Well, I suppose technically it is, but it is a choice between winning games, which hardly ever gets you loot, and surviving games, which *always* gets you loot.

Lord 0 wrote:

Saranor wrote:

You have to decide to invest in items for more money or if you want more power to aquire money through combat results (i.e. winning games)

It my experience it is barely a choice at all. Well, I suppose technically it is, but it is a choice between winning games, which hardly ever gets you loot, and surviving games, which *always* gets you loot.

I guess we focus on winning the games. This is a good thing about the BTB objectives that winning games advances Campaign Points a lot quicker which is an advantage. Of course the disadvantage is having less money to throw around!

Moar toys means moar fun! .

Part of our problem is so many of our campaign unwind at about the game 7 or 8 point, usually because the player mix changes (and often we are binge playing when my brother and friends are visiting here or my wife and I are visiting in Tennessee).

Lord 0 wrote:

Nonsense. A warband of 9 members rolling averagely for 4 heroes will find 3 shards per game. Assuming they must replace a 25 gold henchman after every game that means it will still only take them 7 games to get enough for the opulent coach.

I guess that is all well and true. In my group however, if you spend 7 games stashing your cash, you will be 6-10 warriors behind which means you just can't win. (where 10 would be Skaven). If you never win, you never get the post game treasure, leaving you even further behind.

Finding Lucky Charms isn't really a problem at all I'd say. You have well over 60% chance to roll 6 or higher on two dice.

What do you mean you never get the post game treasure? There *is* no post game treasure on the majority of scenarios. In fact, in the base rule book there is really only one where the winner gets loot - hidden treasure, so that is 1 scenario. One scenario out of 9 where the winner gets the loot.

In the multiplayer expansion they add a few more (3 out of 7) so that is 4 out of 16 scenarios that have loot specifically for the winner. Also, that 1/4 is even less than it seems because the scenarios where the winner gets the loot are 3,4, and 11 i.e. only the outer edges of the bell curve for probability. I can't be bothered doing the maths at the moment, but I would imagine it is about 15% rather than the 25% the proportion of scenarios would suggest.

In the previous projection I was allowing for a replacement of 1 fatality per game. Given that a henchman only dies on a 1 or 2 I don't think that is unreasonable. Granted, sometimes you will lose 2 or 3, but often you won't lose any. True, you might get hideously unlucky and lose all of them all the time, but very few strategies can cope with when the dice hate you.

With 8 in your warband this lets you lose only 2 henchmen before you rout which should let you get through your first several games fairly unscathed.

Oh, I am, of course, also assuming this is a fresh campaign and therefore you are against warbands similarly ill-equipped, unleveled, and prone to routing. Trying this sort of thing with a fresh warband against warbands that are heavily equipped and levelled would be madness.

Happily, in my group we play for fun rather than to win every single battle and because we are all so competitive noone has much fun doing the strategically non-viable thing. This means that the first 4-6 games in the campaign (depending on how lucky the loot and scenario rolls are) tend to be 2 or more warbands playing as hard as they can, but running away quite early to avoid taking expensive losses. Fighting tooth-and-nail until you are *forced* to rout is saved for after the build-up phase of the early campaign and for when there is actually a prize worth fighting over e.g. Wizard's Mansion or Monster Hunt.

Lucky charms were changed from being rare 6 always working (ah, the good old days ) to being rare 11 and working only on a 4+. They remembered to change the rules in the LRB, but it looks like they forgot to change the rarity in the trade table. Either that or they are reversing their earlier ruling of an increase in rarity, but of the two I would suspect the former of GW.

mweaver wrote:

Part of our problem is so many of our campaign unwind at about the game 7 or 8 point, usually because the player mix changes (and often we are binge playing when my brother and friends are visiting here or my wife and I are visiting in Tennessee).

I feel for you, that is barely enough to get out of the warmup phase, let alone into mid-game of the campaign .

Since your campaign time is so limited, perhaps you could try starting the campaign with 2-4 virtual Monster Hunts before starting the campaign proper? That way you would all have a few levels under your belt, one or two pieces of decent gear and getting close to the numbers you want.

We use virtual Monster Hunts sometimes when we need to add a few people to a campaign already in progress just to get them out of that 'brand new warband' phase so they don't feel like they are constantly on a hiding-to-nothing kind of deal.

A virtual Monster Hunt is the Monster Hunt scenario played RAW with the following assumptions:
Allied Victory is ticked.
Allied Victory cannot be unticked.
All warriors are standing somewhere that they have LOS to the monster, but are outside of the monster's charge range.
The monster has no cover.

The RAW monster stands still where they are until someone comes into charge range and can never leave the perimeter of their territory. This means that if everyone just stands around shooting at the monster then it will never attack anyone and is just a giant loot-pinata that you get xp for killing. Of course, it goes without saying that we have house-ruled the monster is played by some bystander during *actual* games of this.

A virtual monster hunt can be finished in about 4 mins or so, not counting the post game phase. I don't know how long you guys would argue about distributing the loot that the monster-pinata dropped though. However, it is something you could possibly do about a week before you all meet up via web-cam and an online dice rolling thingy. Then you would all be good to jump into a campaign and perhaps get to play with a few toys you don't normally get to see.

Could just give everyone equal amounts of extra money and extra xp at the start, rolling for advances as necessary.

You can, but I have found in practice that playing virtual games leads to a more organic result and also helps with remembering what levels you have since you grow up with the warband more.