A few beginner questions.

To make two handed weapons more useful, would it break the game to have them keep their one handed abilities? Like a two handed sword gains parry.

Also, what are some good ways to fix armor? Would using the specific weapon Crits help?

With the ostermark rules, they don't say what skills they choose from, do I just pick from the original 3 mercs?


What unofficial warband are broken? What about the nemesis crown ones? The relics of the crusades ones?

Are the tileans, araby tomb robbers and clan pestilians broken from town crier?

Sorry for the influx of questions.

Two handed weapons are pretty good in that they give +2 strength (making them likely to wounds just about anything). In the original rules their are still not great compared to dual wielding but do become more favourable for warriors with more than 1 attack.
A couple of common house rules that help make two handed weapons and armour more viable are:
1) impose a -1 to hit modifier on all attack made when dual wielding.
2) start negative armour modifiers at strength 5 rather than strength 4.

between these two rules two handed weapons don't seem always like the wrong choice and while armour is still expensive it has a chance to do something more often. You may also want to add a skill to remove the -1 to hit modifiers for dual wielding.
As for you question about warbands I will have to let someone ells step in. Hope this is helpful.

Regarding 2h weapons:

I just played a couple of matches with my group.
Our new house rules stated that 2h weps are +1str, -1int, and retain the weapon bonus.

We do use the -1ws on Dual Wield, and armour modifier at str5.
(similar to how PowerFist has described above)

This combination seemed to be balanced, and had the desired effect that several warriors chose 2h weps to start, without feeling overpowered.

While not tested, our proposed redesign of the 'Strongman' perk was to remove the -1int penalty, and make that hero's 2h weapon attacks un-parry-able.

The blandness of DHWs is something that I think was grandfathered in from Warhammer Fantasy. The group I am in is using the method where you pay for the DHW + either a sword, axe, or hammer and then combine the rules for the two. Doesn't seem to be less fun so far.

For armor, depends on what you mean by 'fix' armour. RAW, armour is working as intended as being something over-priced and more of a bragging-rights thing for wealthy warbands rather than something everyone gets fairly early on. In my group we lowered the cost of armour and a few other things, but we found after a while that the 'feel' of the game was lost - it was no longer a struggle for survival in a post-apocalyptic city and more like you were overseer of a group of standard DnD murder-hobos with minions. That being said, to make armour a bit more interesting we *did* allow shields and bucklers to grant an additional +1 AS in melee. We also use the optional crit tables, but where a result does something *and* ignores armour saves we drop the 'ignores armour saves' bit. We also class toughened leathers as a kind of light armour and therefore available to any henchman or hero that can use light armour.

For the dual-wielding thing we use the -1 to hit for offhand attacks thing. That, combined with shields being more interesting has made dual-wielding less prevalent.

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To make two handed weapons more useful, would it break the game to have them keep their one handed abilities? Like a two handed sword gains parry.

Also, what are some good ways to fix armor? Would using the specific weapon Crits help?

Since when are two handers not useful? We use the optional crit table, but not from any need to fix anything, we just thought it was fun...

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What unofficial warband are broken? What about the nemesis crown ones? The relics of the crusades ones?

The easy answer is Blood Dragons (cause the author says so, and he's right.)

Nemesis Crown--The Hochland Bandits take a bit of getting used to. If your unluckiest player takes them, they are no problem at all. (This is true of most warbands.) The Gunnery School has silly rules that are pretty annoying, especially where they negate other official rules. We see the Black orcs often. If your most beardy player takes them, they will be hard to beat. Otherwise fairly average.

Relics--We never tried the skaven or the undead one. Slavers are potentially crazy, but only our unluckiest plays them, so they just annoy me. The Tribes are interesting, but are potentially more powerful than any rulebook human band.

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Are the tileans, araby tomb robbers and clan pestilians broken from town crier?

The Tileans will be better than their rulebook counterparts as a rule. The tomb robbers will be so much weaker than the rulebook warbands as to be not worth playing. (This is my advice about the Tomb Guardians as well, awful warbands.) The original Khemri website versions are much more competitive.

Clan Pestilens is much less 'broken' than the original skaven band. It is my skaven band of choice when I play rats.

So the black orc are strong? They seemed weak.

I have not played them myself, but I am about to - I have a warband written up and everything. Of curiosity, why do you consider them weak? To my eye they look like almost everything that is good from an ork warband with none of the poopiness.

I mean, you get 3 heroes at start that have access to all basic skills except Academic (eventually 5), You get a troll for 5 gold per game instead of 20, you get (eventually) 2+ armor saves without having to be mounted, and at your racial maximum T with Resilient you are immune to S3 hits in melee. The main things you seem to be sacrificing are Goblins (all poopy) and Squigs (dangerous to everyone at best, dangerous to user at worst). You have specialised Boys instead of generalised Boys, but that isn't really much of a factor either. Oh yeah, and you also can only have 12 instead of 20 in your warband, but anyone going higher than 12 gets out-earned by everyone else staying at the sweetspots of 9 and 12 anyway.

Admittedly, I do miss the Shaman and access to the halberd, but I am willing to TLGT a shaman with Lesser Magic and skip the Halberd in exchange for all the other goodies.

Never got to use them, but it was the smaller numbers, and the higher cost, didn't see that about the troll upkeep though. I figured they were like a more expensive version.

The Black Orcs are rock hard. The first time I took them, I used them in a crazy OP campaign with Possessed and some kind of killy undead. (Lhamians?) The orcs held right in there. T5 with resilient, the troll, did fine.

I see.

Has anyone used the Clan Skrye rules from Relics of the crusades?

About the unofficial bands, I've experienced a few of them, and the only one I've found completely broken is Shadow Warriors. Tilean and Pirates are pretty balanced (at least if you don't use the swabbie pirate rule), just Mercenaries with slightly different equipment and elite henchmen. The Lustrian bands are balanced among them (never tried Amazons, tho) but top tier compared to any official band, including the better ones. Dark Elves have OP reputation because elf, but unlike Shadow Warriors don't have any cheap way to exploit shooting and are mainly a close combat band, making it much less powerful than their cousins. Remove their special equipment and skills, and forbid hired swords, and they are even more balanced. I've also tried Bretonians and they are weak, pretty limited compared to any Merc band.

I've never tried Khemri warbands, but they have reputation of being pretty bland. Never tried Pestilens, Stirwood Bandits or Pit Fighters either.

Those are the unofficial bands AFAIK. Black Orcs, Marauders, Chaos Dwarves, Skryre Clan... and many other fan made are considered experimental, and not very balanced in general, but there are some really well made bands that could fit with some tweak.

We play lots of pirates with the Sartosa setting rules. If everyone can press swabs then it all evens out (actually if the pirate band is pretty awful without da swabs).

What about the border town burning warbands?

Fullork12 wrote:

Has anyone used the Clan Skrye rules from Relics of the crusades?

Not personally, but my wife is using them. Only a few games so far - too early to tell. Nothing seems particularly broken about them so far.

Btb warbands are imho balanced in they own settings. And can be considered a "strong" choice in a casual play....

So like the lustria warbands only allow them in their setting?

In our group we allowed any reasonably right warband. (official, unofficial, experimental)

Has anyone used the fallen warband? From relics of the crusade.

StyrofoamKing said his group had used them. He did not have a good review. We avoided them.

Ah, what did he say was wrong about them? I can't seem to find any type of review of them.

IDK if the setup or the campaign are popular enough to make much people try it.

I've never experienced that band since I tend to avoid Fanatic Magazine stuff, those bands are usually quite unbalanced. Taking a quick look, the Fallen look a lot like the undead warband without any of their flaws. The undead are one-man-army warbands without ranged, they cause fear and have the most terrific single warrior in Mordheim, but their other heroes are mediocre and the two speeds the warband has makes them more vulnerable when trying to reach mission objectives. The fallen have a second beast of a hero and 3 other decent heroes instead dregs, with access to shooting and speed skills. It's a much faster warband overall, and eaters of flesh sounds like a completely innecesary penalty to rival warbands.

Sounds pretty OP to me.

Eaters of flesh seemed like a drawback. Or I'd it supposed to be an autokill?

I won't touch them though, not looking to allow a warband that's completely stronger then another like it.