BTB Siege! And Ghartoks tomb questions.

We're about halfway through our campaign and the Siege! Is coming up after our Scion of chaos plays the horde approaches next turn. A few questions about the scenario have been raised.

About the gate, it has Toughnes and Wounds so how does it react to being lit on fire? Like a building or like a model?

Also Ghartoks skull, is the only ways to find it by accessing the tomb by getting 40Cp with Celestial Protectorate, getting 55555 on exploration, getting 555555 on exploration, or getting a lesser artefact
Rolling a 12 then a 1-4? Is this enough ways? Will it show up in our campaign? I'm fine if it is the only way I'm just a bit worried it will never show up and the Scions will never be able to win. Has everyone who's played a BTB Campaign always found the skull?

There is a cheat sheet on the BTB website that lists all of the ways that each chaos artefact can be found. The list you gave sounds about right to me though.

I don't think it really is that hard at all. Of course, you can't rely on pure luck here. Tarot cards and pendulums should suffice though.

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Tarot cards and pendulums should suffice though.

And Rabbits Feet are cheaper and easier than the pendulums.

I notice no one is answering the question about the gate...

Sweet thanks guys, I'm going to make it my next mission to find that skull! After the abandoned trading post, I am a merchant after all. The tarot cards are a good idea, do the pendulums I've you warp touch? There's a few other hired sword that can help, such as the Kislev hunter and the imperial tactician.

Any advice about the gate?

So I looked up the scenario. Then I looked up the BtB rules for fire and buildings.

Obviously the gate has been given wounds and T so it can be attacked in melee. The author of the scenario has so far declined to comment, but from the wording of the scenario's rules  I'm not sure he intended the gate to be the target of fire attacks, although this was a tactic of siege warfare.

The gate is part of a building (if you use the old Warhammer castles or one of your own design). Its wounds and T are there for a different mechanic, so if you want to burn it, use the rules for burning buildings.

Now that I have read the scenario, how do the victory conditions work? Is it enough that each house has been set afire once during the game? Must they all be burning at a particular time, say at the end of a Defender turn? What if the defenders put one or more of the fires out?

Is it possible to extinguish building fires?

Under Let the Damned Burn rules it is.

Unfortunately for me, I read the Let the Damned Burn rules first. So I have those in mind. I have no idea if they are intended to apply to this scenario. (But my experience with similar Warhammer scenarios is that they should. Usually that is part of the dilemma of the defender, fighting the attacker or fighting the fires started behind the lines.)

The fires seem easy to set compared to similar rulesets, couple that with not being able to put them out...

BTB has rules separate to Let the Damned Burn for fire that are based on the rules for fire from the League of Ostermark article in Fanatic Magazine 1. I have written an article that combines the rules from both articles because I like the rules in Let the Damned Burn better as they are more comprehensive.

https://docs.google.com/file/d/0B6hZG8hQqDwrcGZlSG5aWWVCU1k/edit?usp=sharing

As stated by VK the rules for burning buildings should be used on the gate. The walls are stone while the gate is wooden so the gate is easier to set on fire than the walls themselves.

Edited to update link to latest version...

Correct me if I missed it, but you have also left out the rules from Let The Damned Burn for fighting fires in buildings.

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Extinguishing fires
In the chaos-infested ruins of Mordheim there are few who are willing to risk life and limb to save the festering ruins if they are burning to the ground. In very rare circumstances there may be a reason to attempt to save the building - if it contains something of value, such as Wyrdstone. A minimum of three warriors may attempt to extinguish a fire before it gets out of control using whatever comes to hand; blankets, cloaks, old dogs etc. If this is the case when rolling for the fire to see if it spreads you may use a -1 modifier on the dice score. For every additional warrior assisting the original three (up to a maximum of six warriors) you may use an additional -1 modifier

Including these rules seems key to defending in scenarios like Siege, where the attacker's goal is to burn things and to scenarios like Defend the Find that might find the objective building on fire.

The funny thing for me is that I have played the scenario Battle for the Farm way too many times, but I never associated the brief (and incomplete) scenario rules for burning buildings with 'REAL' rules. It didn't occur to me until today that I had a copy of this famed 'League of Ostermark' article.
(I tend to think of those rules as being part of the Battle for the Farm.) 

The BTB supplement has fire rules on page 70. The purpose of this section is to consolidate and unify the existing published rules from "Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe" (pages 84-87 Mordheim Annual 2002) and the rules from "The League of Ostermark" article (pages 34-39, Fanatic Magazine 1), thus providing the players a single point of reference for fire rules.

These rules do not allow putting out fire, except that it may incidentally happen when rolling a 1 on the burning house table.

The Siege! scenario rules explicitly mention wooden houses, so they are wooden buildings.

The surrounding walls are obviously made of stone so they count as stone buildings. Also note the "hints and tips" box on page 63:

"All of these weapons can be used to set buildings
(including walls and watchtowers!) on fire as
described in the Fire Rules section of the Forces
of Nature chapter. They count as stone buildings
for this purpose. "

This includes the gate section. If the gate were meant to be considered a wooden building then this would be stated explicitly. So you can set the gate on fire, treating it as a stone building, and you can attack it in combat.

Of course, you can house rule otherwise, depending on the terrain models you actually use. Or if you have a very strong defender or simply too many defending warbands, then this can also be something to tweak in order to balance out the forces.

Check the top of page 3 in my updated fire rules linked above, VK. :)There is a good chance that I might have missed the rules for extinguishing fires in my original version of the document though because I realised that it was missing some major sections from Let the Damned Burn when I last reviewed it.

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The BTB supplement has fire rules on page 70. The purpose of this section is to consolidate and unify the existing published rules from "Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe" (pages 84-87 Mordheim Annual 2002) and the rules from "The League of Ostermark" article (pages 34-39, Fanatic Magazine 1), thus providing the players a single point of reference for fire rules.

My problem with the BTB consolditation of rules is that it missed the Let the Damned Burn article on fire that was more comprehensive in scope. BTB mentions fires spreading in the weather rules for a 'gale' but the BTB fire rules do not mention how fires can spread so the weather rules make no sense. The goal of my merged rules article was to take the good work done for BTB fire rules and include the extra rules from Let the Damned Burn (e.g. fire spreading) as well as covering other scenarios like wagons and boats (the latter came about from discussions with werekin).

Cianty, the scenario rules for 'Siege!' specifically state that the gate is wooden. Therefore the houses and gate(s) are wooden while the walls and watchtower(s) are stone.

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Main Gate: The fortress town must have at least one wooden gate. The gate is locked from the inside but can be opened by any model inside the fortress by spending a full turn in base contact with it. From the outside the gate can only be opened through its destruction. A warrior may attack the gate in close combat just like any other enemy model. Treat the gate as Toughness 8, Wounds 4 and being immune to critical hits. Once it is opened the gate remains open.

Thanks guys, I put it to my group and they like the idea of being able to extinguish fires, every blockade so fair has ended in a burning building and the defenders fleeing.

One other problem with burning down the gate, collapsed things become impassable terrain? I guess a quick house rule for this exception fixes that.

Also ramming the gate with a cart, I assume the gate takes the D3 S7 hits (that hitting another cart incurs) rather than the one S4 hit another model suffers for getting hit by a cart? I want to provide as much incentive for battering ramming the gate, Because even though I'm defending I think it would be pretty epic haha

I would agree with D3 S7 hits if a wagon is driven into the gate.

Quote :

The BTB supplement has fire rules on page 70. The purpose of this section is to consolidate and unify the existing published rules from "Ye Olde Curiosity Shoppe" (pages 84-87 Mordheim Annual 2002) and the rules from "The League of Ostermark" article (pages 34-39, Fanatic Magazine 1), thus providing the players a single point of reference for fire rules.

While I appreciate any post that cites sources I don't really understand citing the sources above.  Ye Olde Curiousity Shoppe introduced 3 items of equipment that could be used to set other warriors on fire.  Thus in all those pages there are 3 short paragraphs that refer to fire as an anti-personnel weapon.  

The fabled "The League of Ostermark" article is much cited in our discussions of fire rules.  It includes one paragraph and a table about setting buildings on fire.  The paragraph is in no way a  comprehensive discussion.  It only gives rules for starting fires in farm buildings with torches:

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A model may torch a building
at any time. If they are inside a building (setting fire to
furniture and other belongings) then the fire starts
automatically. They may also throw the torch up to 6"away
to light a building and the fire will start on a roll of 2+ on
a D6 (a 1 indicating it has bounced off a roof or merely
sputtered out). Once a building is lit, roll a D6 at the start
of each player’s turn (not including any farmers who
might be on the board) to discover if the fire is spreading.
Add +1 to the dice roll for each turn the fire has been
burning.

[Note the D6 is rolled to see if the fire can spread, except there is NO option for the fire TO spread on the table provided or in the paragraph above.]

By contrast the article "Let the Damned Burn", TC#8, pp. 20-23.  Is actually ONLY about using fire in Mordheim games.  It contains several tables, cost charts and rules for starting fires, the possibility of the fire spreading and putting out fires.  Comprehensive and simple rules, I highly recommend it as a source.  The only weakness being the odd firebrand rules instead of torches...

Which is a roundabout way of saying that Ben's article is even better, based as it is on good scholarship and broad research. 

Fire rant over.  Well except that Ben includes this +1 to start fires with fire arrows and torches.  What's THAT about?  

I cited the sources to explain how the rules came about. That's all. I'm not saying it's the best thing ever or anything.

Yieks, it does say the gate is wooden? Weak. I explicitly looked it up to understand where the question came from and didn't see it at all. So that one's clear then, isn't it?

EDIT: Wow. I just opened the PDF again to look up the wooden part, didn't see it, went back to your post, Rational, and then finally I noticed the word in the PDF too. Weird sh--. I think I have a blind spot there... 

lol

cianty wrote:

I cited the sources to explain how the rules came about. That's all. I'm not saying it's the best thing ever or anything.

Sorry about the rant, you, werekin and RL kept referring to this "League of Ostermark" article and I got the impression that it was important. At first I thought I had missed an article, but then I realized you were talking about the Special Rules section of the scenario "Battle for the Farm". Needless to say I was somewhat disappointed.