Wyldhunt's City of the Damned

Alright folks, it's back and renamed. So as not to confuse people that this is "real, original" Mordheim, it's now named Wyldhunt's City of the Damned.

https://sites.google.com/site/wyldhaunt/

There you'll find the 449-pg PDF of our gaming group's current Mordheim rules, and a jpg of a tabloid-size Mordheim Map showing all of the locations we named.

Who would want this? Well, yes it is my CotD-piece, offering our gaming group's take on a more-balanced experience while still attempting to retain the flavor of the original rules, and expanding Mordheim into a full campaign system with a plethora of options which can still play well together.

However, you may want it just for the scenarios - 80 of them over 164 pages - all in one place.

Enjoy!

Thanks for going to all the trouble (and for giving the compilation a real name)

huh. This is worth a deeper look for sure. At first glace many of the changes are similar to things we have done, but yours has the added benefit of being much more organized and accessible. To much of what we do is in our heads or written in the cover of the rulebook.

You have however included warbands that we ditched as being gamebreaking. It'll be interesting to see if you've managed to bring them inline. Our next 3 month campaign is about to start, so it'll be awhile before any of it gets tried. But I'm at least going to read it and see if it's something I might want to try for the next one.

This is really great, thanks for taking the time to put it together, and for sharing your groups systems of organisation. There are several interesting similarities with systems we've developed independently, but yours seem much more thought out (fate points are specifically well done - we just allow a re-roll per fate point). I like the updated insanity table too.

I agree with Von Kurst - naming your edition will make it easier to reference in the future. Hopefully more groups will start to do this.

A bit of an open question to the group - would it be worth starting some sort of mega document/google doc which lists all the rules on a table, with columns highlighting how each 'edition' has adapted the rules (and why). I'm reading through this rulebook, and its not always initially clear if something has changed, and I know I'm always hesitant to incorporate changes until I fully understand the thinking behind it.

Thanks for taking a look at this! A few responses:

Back in 2010 or so, there were many alternate settings still being made, and most thought we were just making house rules for Mordheim itself. Then Coreheim really changed the ruleset they were using with a focus on balance what they saw as the core of the game – I didn’t think of mine as changing the heart of the game, and so just called it initially a compilation, then a revision, even as others disagreed and thought I was beyond left field. So hopefully naming it differently will alert everyone that much has been changed – and honestly, in the future, more will be. I no longer feel a compunction to keep with the core of a rules set that is retired by GW, though since there are aspects of Mordheim that keep calling me back, and I’ll keep playing it for those aspects. Perhaps we’ll regard our City of the Damned as an alternative shard (or whatever GW calls it) in the Age of Sigmar. Doing so, we could mix in some other interesting units, especially if the timeline goes all wonky.

Friedrich – I’m interested which warbands you identified as being overpowered in your campaigns. The two we still identify as top-tier power after the last two playthroughs are Dwarfs and Beastmen. You’ll find we ditched the Carnival of Chaos and instead implemented the Blood Theatre Troupe. The jury’s out on the Shadow Warriors and Druchii – I’m playing the Druchii this time around to see whether the Long-lived ability helps balance elves. You’ll also find we changed the model cost for many warbands, using a rudimentary balancing formula, which we’ll likely refine some more after our current campaign.

Benjamin – your suggestion reminds me: back in the years around 2010, cianty and some others led a charge for a consistent, fan-wide ruleset which everyone could accept. I’m one of the holdouts (along with the creators of Coreheim) who just couldn’t agree to that without some core rules changes, which the others were not open to implementing in the Mordheim setting. Not that cianty and the others were wrong, however they weren’t right for our gaming groups. While I’ve done a good deal of work in making this edition, it’s for the fun of our group. I don’t think you’re proposing what cianty did. Even so - while I’ve sourced a lot of the information I included, documenting each change and its reason is something I’m just not going to spend a lot of time on.

Also, if you see some things you’ve thought of separately, there’s likely a good reason for that – Tom’s Boring Mordheim Forum, The Mordheimer’s old site, and several other compilation and discussion locations. My first goal was to gather ideas from all locations I could find and meld them into a semi-coherent whole, and so much of this work is still a compilation of others’ ideas. The compilation work is almost done – check the back page for what’s still to include, and what we’ve decided to exclude.

Thanks again!

You've named what we found to be the two worst offenders in Beastmen, and the Durchii. We play with terrain that is probably a bit to dense, and that seems to be enough to keep the shadow warriors as good, but not a problem. As to the Dwarfs 4 starting heros holds them back in our shorter campaigns. In the long ones they become very good, but still struggle with many scenarios. Because of this it's been a long time since anyone took them. I just painted up a full warband rather nicely though, so a couple of the guys are thinking about playing them this time.

I think what I'd be after is just an understanding as to why each edition makes the changes they do. The Coreheim group made their opinions clear on various pieces - and it really helped understand what they were about. To do that retrospectively however, especially on a beast such as yours would be a massive undertaking! But perhaps in the future a cross-reference resource might be interesting to see.

On another note - would it be possible to get a word-doc version of your ruleset? I was planning on printing a portion out at work - but would adjust it first to save on paper.

Hey there, just wanted to say this is an incredible document, thank you for putting this together. I've been thinking about taking a dive back into Mordheim, and have been inspecting the various fan made revisions (Coreheim, Wyrdwars, etc...). This one is incredibly massive, I'd be interested in some sort of changelog/discussion on what and why things have been done.