The Merchant's Guide to Profiting in the City of Mordheim

"Come here Boy! Now what's this I hear about you putting together a trading expedition to the Cursed City hmm?"..."I see...and tell me Boy, what do you know about running this caravan of yours, hmm?"..."Oh of course, you are just gonna waltz on in there, set up shop and make your fortune hmm?"..."Kill anybody gets in your way!?...why you bloody...put down that sword before you hurt yourself!"..."Listen, if yer serious about this bloody expedition of yours, do us a favour, read this...and try not to fall asleep will you...I've already lost one moronic son to that bloody city, I'd rather not lose another..."

-What follows are extracts from "The Merchant's Guide to Profiting in the City of Mordheim" A small book containing advice and experiences from numerous merchant caravan leaders who have ventured into the ruins of Mordheim.-

Chapter 1: "Preparing to Embark"

Equipment: While it may be tempting for the novice merchant to equip themselves and their warriors with the finest weapons and armour prior to setting out, one must understand that this is folly. To do so is to waste valuable gold and resources that can be better used elsewhere, or to make a profit upon arrival in the city (see Chapter 2: "Arrival"). In most circumstances a visit to your local blacksmith will provide enough hammers or maces to equip your warband for the road into the city. Once you are making a healthy profit you can afford to splash out on more extravagant equipment, but upon embarking remember...always travel light!

Warriors: Always remember, your caravan is only as strong as the men and women who travel with it. when selecting your warriors for the road make sure to pick the best of the best. Knights, wizards and even bright young apprentices are invaluable once you reach the city, hire as many as you can. They will help you defend your expedition, and also aid in your exploration and advancement in the city.

Travel on Horseback: The journey to Mordheim will be long and arduous. Travelling the whole way on foot can result in exhaustion, delays and will make you easy prey for bandits along the road. I strongly recommend purchasing as many strong horses as possibly prior to setting out. The combination of these horses plus your caravan will make your journey much swifter, and if the need arises, these horses can be sold upon arrival for a decent profit (see Chapter 2: "Arrival")

Alert the Roadwardens: A Roadwarden is a merchant's best friend. These noble warriors are tasked with the protection of travellers and civilians across the empire, and if you alert them to your intentions they will most certainly send a representative to join your expedition, for a small fee of course. This fee will ensure the loyalty of a heavily armoured and mounted warrior, as skilled with a crossbow as any Tilean marksman and as fearless in battle as any knight. What makes them even more suited to your potential expedition is their outstanding expertise in all matters relating to the defence of wagons and carts. Whenever your trade wagon is in any danger, you can guarantee an astounding display of bravery and skill from this mighty warrior, I have personally seen roadwardens accomplish feats I thought impossible of any man. Keep him close and keep him happy, you will not regret it.


Chapter 2: "Arrival"

On Bravery: Being a new arrival in the city you will a attract a great deal of curiosity and attention, allot of this will not be of the friendly inclination. When the inevitable happens, and you or your caravan is attacked, do not succumb to the macho bravado rampant in these troubled times. Accept that you are not a great fighter, and you are not going to help yourself or your cause by ending up as another naked corpse in the street. My advice? throw a couple of your more expendable troops into the fray and beat a hasty retreat. Is it "brave"? no, is it "cowardly"? arguably so. Let the neanderthals and savage races have their petty victories, let them scrabble around in the mud for trinkets and territory, you should have your eyes set on the big prise, fortune. Once you are wealthy and have a whole army of mercenaries, warriors, marksmen and hired swords under your command, you can destroy your old enemies at a whim. Remember revenge is a dish best served cold.

Don't Spare the Horses: Upon your arrival in the city the first thing one should aim to do is substantially boost one's income. Selling any warhorses one has in one's possession is a simple and elegant way to achieve this goal. While these beasts of burden may be plentiful and cheap back in one's homestead, they are perceived as a luxury item in the city of the damned. Using one's expert trading skills, one should be able to sell said beasts to an established and wealthy member of the community for a substantial profit. I myself sold two warhorses in quick succession upon my arrival and made a total profit of 160gc. These funds can be re-invested into further rare items, hire more men, or of course used to outfit one's more violence inclined members with superior weapons and arms.

Use Local Knowledge: The city of Mordheim is a complex and dangerous place. Upon your arrival you will be confused and no doubt lost, no amount of reading or discussion beforehand can prepare you for the sheer chaos that is the lost city. With this lack of knowledge you will find yourself missing vital opportunities or even endangering your caravan. To counter this I recommend finding the sorriest most filth stained beggar you can and bringing him into your employ. Why you ask? Well these downtrodden civilians are more often than not survivors of the cataclysm itself. They have been in the city all their lives and know it's streets. They are also ignored in most circumstances, which means they will often hear rumours and gossip that may be vital to your advancement. All this information will be valuable when exploring the ruins, as long as you can put up with the smell.

Befriend the Thieves: Thievery and looting is a staple in Mordheim, their is no way around it. Taking a moral stance against this type of activity is not only foolish, it is also pointless. If a thief comes to you with stolen goods and you turn them away, they will simply proceed to the next merchant and offer them the goods at a reduced price. The goods have already been stolen, there is nothing you can do to change that, so ask yourself, why should you not take advantage of this opportunity? Using your skills as a respected merchant, you can take these lost objects and put them to good use, make some additional income, and all the theives ask for for a small cut of the profits. By befriending local thieves you open yourself up to fantastic opportunities, once in my younger days my favourite little scoundrel even managed to steal some pompous barons opulent coach! Rode it right up to my stall. What did I do? well I re-painted it and sold it right back to the baron...for more than it was worth! 375gc straight in my pocket, ah those were the days.

Guide Your Searching: While some morons may be content with stumbling around the ruins looking for shiny objects, I for one prefer to take a more guided approach. Rather than instantly offloading all of your Wyrdstone, attach it to a chain and use it as a pendulum. With a little practice you can easily use this pendulum to find further Wyrdstone stashes and other valuable items. Some people also whisper that the use of Tarot Cards can lead to fortune and long life. While I don't necessary advocate this type of behaviour, it is outlawed after all, I must admit that one drunken night I visited a gypsy woman who drew some interesting cards for a friend of mine, encouraging him to venture into the ruins the following day. Well the following day he did just so, and by chance encountered an old friend of the family who had turned mercenary! Well of course he joined our warband free of charge, much to my despair. The damned Ogre ate just about everything in sight.

Beware Dubious Incomes: While the temptation to become involved in the numerous methods of gaining dubious income in Mordheim may be rather strong, one must ask oneself if they are truly capable of managing these operations. While it is true that those with the leadership to run these services can make a tidy profit on the side of their other activities, one with sub par leadership skills can indeed lose a great deal of potential income. One should always weigh one's options, gaining 20-30gold may allow one to purchase a little bit more supplies, but losing 20-30gold could result in one coming up short on wages or not affording the upkeep of one's less loyal compatriots. Always ensure that one is not relying on the income of these dubious practices, and that one can afford for them to go awry.

Hire the Best: Once your income is steadily increasing you can begin to build the foundations of your fledgling empire. Hire as many talented individuals as you can to your cause, and once you can no longer accommodate the permanent members take a trip to one of the countless inns and begin looking for hired swords and mercenaries. There are countless different individuals in and around Mordheim, each with their own unique set of skills. To cover them all would take a whole book in itself, but I shall highlight a handful that I have used in the past and that may be of particular interest.

Coachmen: These men are experts at driving and maintaining coaches and wagons, attaining one's service will ensure a much greater chance of your valuable wagon escaping harm should it fall under attack.

Elves: All elves are magnificent warriors. They have superior skills and agility to any man and importantly if they are riding your wagon when it suffers damage, they shall never lose their footing or fall, making them excellent ranged guards.

Bounty Hunters: Bounty hunters are tough and tenacious individuals. Their one concern in life is capturing their mark and claiming their reward, and they are good at it. Should you aid them in this endeavour you can be assured a handsome share of the reward. This means that you are gaining not only a valuable combat asset, but also potentially boosting your income.

Ogres: These lumbering brutes are expensive to house and feed, but by Sigmar they are worth it. Deceptively fast, fearsome and monstrously strong they are the perfect bodyguard for yourself or your caravan.


"Well there you have it Boy, has that opened yer eyes a bit hmm?"..."Any questions?"...

Fantastic. It makes me want to go play Merchant Caravan now.

RationalLemming wrote:

Fantastic. It makes me want to go play Merchant Caravan now.

Thanks, that's the desired effect ^^'

Was thinking about doing a series of these "quasi in-character strategy guides" for a bunch of different warbands (Name one and I have no doubt played it extensively, or at least played against/talked to people who have), But they take a while to write and I wasn't sure how it would be received.

So I figured, if I was only going to end up doing one, that I would go for one of the more obscure warbands in the hope that it encourages more folk to try them out. I'll see what kind of response I get and decide whether too do more later.

This was great, and I would love to see more of these! Can I repost and link this on my blog? Would provide credits and a link to your post as well if that's ok.

Wow, what an amazing work!
I have played the merchant caravan and i never even thought of buying and selling warhorses for profit - a very clever idea that is fitting well into the background story of a merchant caravan. I like it
The only thing missing from the article is advice on some tabletop tactics. Personally i found the wagon full of crossbow-wielding marksmen to be very effective. The wagon can move pretty fast and the marksmen can still shoot. An obvious but effective tactic, sadly it does not work very well on a table full of buildings.

Heya

This is a great little warband guide. I have been contemplating making a Merchant Warband for quite some time now, and this surely made the disision much easier for me. Thanks for taking your time with this and sharing it with us all here!

This is a really nice description.

I like it very much!

I am thinking to play a merchant warband for some time until now. But i do not have an appropriate wagon for them.

What are you using as wagon?

Count Lucius wrote:

This was great, and I would love to see more of these! Can I repost and link this on my blog? Would provide credits and a link to your post as well if that's ok.

Sure feel free, I will of course require an altar be built in my honour and regular blood sacrifices be made as payment, but I will accept insects and other small creatures ^^

Horatius wrote:

Wow, what an amazing work!
I have played the merchant caravan and i never even thought of buying and selling warhorses for profit - a very clever idea that is fitting well into the background story of a merchant caravan. I like it
The only thing missing from the article is advice on some tabletop tactics. Personally i found the wagon full of crossbow-wielding marksmen to be very effective. The wagon can move pretty fast and the marksmen can still shoot. An obvious but effective tactic, sadly it does not work very well on a table full of buildings.

Cheers, one of the things I love about the Merchant Caravan rules is that they encourage you to look at campaign development in a completely different light, suddenly you are not necessarily looking at the trading lists and hired swords as ways to boost your combat potential, you are looking to make a profit from them xD

In terms of actual tabletop tactics, I agonised over whether to add another "Chapter" on "Surviving Confrontation" but really the guide is aimed more at high level campaign/development tactics rather than tabletop suggestions. There are just far too many different warbands out there and strategies for me to provide sound universal advice on them all, besides, discovering how you should best play with your warband on the table is, for me at least, the most fun part of trying a new warband! I wouldn't want to deny anybody of that experience ^^

One thing I will say though is that I personally try to keep the wagon out of combat as much as possible, even with a coachman driving it, you are just one bad roll away from losing not only your caravan, but all its contents to an enemy warband xD I have been known to use it as a mobile firing platform against warbands with little or no ranged potential, but never otherwise. remember that if you can shoot them, they can shoot back...and you're the large target!

In most cases I place at least a couple of ranged henchmen (marksmen ftw) close to the caravan, but between the enemy approach and the caravan itself (which is normally hiding round a corner etc) while the rest of the warband carries on about their business. That way the marksmen can still cover the warband as they advance/fight, but should the enemy decide to send a few members to try take out my caravan, I can try take them out with the marksmen, and if that doesn't work, charge them into combat, sacrifice them and voluntarily rout. Remember that in most scenarios all you get for winning is 1 extra exploration dice and +1 xp for your warband leader, neither of which you really need, but if you lose...well trust me when I say it takes a loooong time to recover from a lost caravan... ^^'

Horatius wrote:

This is a really nice description.

I like it very much!

I am thinking to play a merchant warband for some time until now. But i do not have an appropriate wagon for them.

What are you using as wagon?

Thanks, I currently just use the old mordheim coach model (picked one up years ago when it was much cheaper, but you can still get it http://www.games-workshop.com/gws/catalog/productDetail.jsp?prodId=prod1120069 )

At £30 it's rather expensive though, and lacks a bit of character. My next modelling project is actually going to be making a nice trade wagon out of foamcore and cheap craft wood. Much cheaper and I'll aim to make it more appropriate for playing as well (putting models in/out of it etc). I'll document it's design/creation and post a guide in the modelling section when I am done, so keep an eye out ^^.

Too everybody else: Thanks for all the positive feedback! As a random question, what other warband would you like to see similar guides for?

Really great guide and written in an interesting and fun way! Good work

Quick question, you mentioned befriending the thieves. What exactly do you mean by it?

As for guides for obscure warbands I'll suggest the nechrarcs and strigoi. Monster vampires are the best

Alex wrote:

Really great guide and written in an interesting and fun way! Good work

Quick question, you mentioned befriending the thieves. What exactly do you mean by it?

As for guides for obscure warbands I'll suggest the nechrarcs and strigoi. Monster vampires are the best

Glad you enjoyed ^^

In terms of the befriending of the thieves? There is a thief hired sword you can recruit that is fairly cheap in terms of upkeep and once per post battle sequence lets you to try to steal any one item from the trading list. If it is a common item, then you can successfully steal it on a D6 roll of 2+ and if it is a rare item then you simply try and beat it's rarity value on 2D6, if you do then you steal it and voila! Free income/rare items which you can then sell using your merchant's trading bonuses xD

You can find it in this wonderful hired swords compendium.

http://cianty.ashtonsanders.com/mim/pdf/swords_of_the_empire.pdf

The great thing with the thief is that it's a hired sword that will almost always pay for itself, even if you don't want to try for the high cost "rare" items, you can easily just steal high cost common items like heavy armour and sell them for a profit (since the hired sword only costs 15gc upkeep, but you can easily steal and sell heavy armour for 25gc second hand, as a resut you make 10gc profit just for having the thief around).

Ofc if you don't mind factoring the 15gc upkeep into your expenses then you can try gamble for some awesome items, like the above mentioned scenario, where I successfully managed to steal an "Oppulent coach" post game on a rarity role of 10...which is worth 250gc standard...or 375gc if you manage to get the right trading roll!

So yeah, having a thief on board can be an amazing boon to your income, if you like to have a bit of gambling in your income ofc ^^

Marvellous expose. I love the way Merchant Caravan trading rules impact on campaign play. When we played BTB by having a Merchant player in the group it made the whole experience more rewarding than any other I've had.

As a result there is an adaptation of the trade rules included with the 'Swords of the Empire' Hired Swords compilation to allow any warband hiring a merchant to buy a vehicle and become traders. If you are lucky enough to get a player in your group who plays up to this them it makes for all kinds of entertainment post-battle!

We currently have a Battle Monks warband with a Merchant using a cart to offload there wares. As you describe, the player spends most of his time scrutinizing equipment, assessing purchases and offering deals. All of his tactics and objectives revolve around this. It enriches the post battle sequence.

I am a big fan of the Thief Hired Swords, his equipment and skills, particularly the 'Tea-Leaf' skill. This was a feature of existing rules (not being played much) that I chose towards forming part of the basis for a new warband of thieving smugglers in my campaign. The first time the player used his Hero (with Tea-Leaf skill) he got lynched! After that he was more careful with pilfering. But greed has a habit of taking the reins... And the Tea-Leaf went on a mugging spree in the post battle rounds!!

As you've astutely highlighted, the Thief is a great business assiciate to the Merchant because he can fence the stolen items. This leads the Merchant player to assess the price charts for the most profitable equipment to steal for himself, for resale to 'the house' at half-value, or to auction between other players in the campaign.

The criminal cartel in my campaign is currently meeting it's quota for picking pockets, although the thief could be lynched again at any time! The most enterprisimg thefts so far were when the Thief stole away with a wagon, then a few games later he managed to pass the roll required to hijack a riverboat!!

Regards,

Werekin

About the merchant hired sword, the rules states that any warband with humans or dwarves can hire him. Is it enough that only a few members are strictly human?

I thought about starting a strigoi warband (Brahms version) and it occured to me upon reading this tread that with a merchant and a thief and perhaps a slaver I could start an evil trading empire. I think I'm going to do this anyway but are the rules on my side or am I bending them?

That's really well put together.

I'm a bit behind on Mordheim warbands so I'll have to dig out the rules for merchant caravans from somewhere.

I love the befriending the beggars advice (reminded me of the beggars in Baldurs gate 2 give them a coin and they give you a rumour to follow )

It's not an obscure warband but I'd love to see a guide like this for skaven. I've played them extensively and read most of the books featuring thanquol. Just gotta love those ratmen.

Keep it up!

@Werekin: Thanks for the praise ^^ I totally agree that a campaign is best when you have some merchants in the mix, any way to enhance the post-battle experience is golden in my book, and a merchant caravan can do this in spades!

@Alex: I'm not on sure whether this is 100% rules legal or not, but if I was running the campaign I would allow it! I have a wonderful image in my head or an evil cartel of merchants going up against some good natured merchants, each group trying to outwit, undersell, steal and generally muscle out the competition. The merchants would have fun, and the other players would no doubt love the "deals and offers" that the merchants would each be throwing down, to steal each others customers

@RobinTrevize: Believe it or not, I did get about halfway through writing a skaven guide(they were my first ever warband, and still have a place in my twisted blackened heart), but in all honesty, outside of the flavourful text and descriptions, there a rather simple warband to play with in a campaign. As a result I felt like I was just covering well trodden ground which isn't really what I was aiming to do. The goal of these in-character guides is to shine a light on unexpected play-styles or obscure warbands and I guess the Skaven are just too popular for it. :'(

TheEnemyWithin wrote:

@Alex: I'm not on sure whether this is 100% rules legal or not, but if I was running the campaign I would allow it! I have a wonderful image in my head or an evil cartel of merchants going up against some good natured merchants, each group trying to outwit, undersell, steal and generally muscle out the competition. The merchants would have fun, and the other players would no doubt love the "deals and offers" that the merchants would each be throwing down, to steal each others customers

That is exactly the image I had too! And in the end the rules are only of any use if they allow for fun and character

I'll put up some pictures when I get the warband painted, look for it in my gallery post

Love the guide.
If you do more I recomend that you maybe link to them in your sig or at the bottom of each link back to a master list (it's own post) as it will be easier to find them all.

This makes me smile .. I just finished painting my merchant caravan warband. Still, I have to find a coach however,,,

Thx master.. as an apprentice I'll remember your teachings.

4Ground make some cheap good looking wagons

http://kamar-zinnfiguren.de/catalog/index.php?cPath=408_409