Wishing's Adventures in Mordheim

The Averlanders are really cool Wishing, great take on them with you conversions

Thank you! I finished more of them and got more photos. Almost finished now.

OUTSTANDING! The Lads from Averland are BEAUTIFULLY painted creations. VERY WELL DONE!

Very cool! I love them Great use of the older miniatures, they fit the Mordheim setting just perfect!

The Averlanders are almost all based on the 6th ed WFB starter, so not that old (from my perspective anyway), but I had a bunch of them and it was awesome to do them! I got a token halfling in the mail today, I think he will complete the crew. Although I imagine I will make a couple of mounted warriors for my human mercs at some point too...

For the last few days I have mainly been working on terrain. Here be some shots.

The gaming board is LOOKIN' GOOD! I love your choice of colors,

Ohhh, those Averlanders came through beautifully! Congratulations on those, & some good looking scenery too.

The board really looks good! Already looks like a proper city of the Damned!

Yay thank you!

Right now I am going a bit horse crazy, because I realized I can make magnetized horses and riders so I can have unmounted horse models too. So I am trying to make as many of my various heroes in mounted versions as I can. Really fun. Will post pictures once some of them are painted... both Averlander and Marienburger heroes on horseback coming.

Meanwhile, I got a zany idea. There is an Empire Outriders warband for the Nemesis Crown supplement, where the whole warband has to be on horses. Hooray! So I ordered some, and waiting for delivery now.

But then I thought about how outriders have funky chainguns and stuff. I love funky guns. Then I thought of how the crew of the Empire War Wagon have funky guns too.

So... outriders on foot could be war wagon crew? Double duty? The outriders might have a wagon that they can hunker into if in a situation where their usual horse strafing tactics wouldn't work, and they just want a gun tower.

I am missing the actual outrider models, I think I foolishly ordered them from a place where they were on backorder. But I can build a war wagon! That's just wood and horses after all.

So this is it so far. Instead of outriders, I put some Tilean mercs in it for this photo, since they would look good with their pikes. It doesn't really belong to Mordheim proper, but I still think it has a Mordheimy terrain vibe so I put it in this thread.



I obviously can't use it as part of the normal warband, but I figure I could write some special scenarios for it, since it is basically just an alternative wagon type.

Hmm, but the outriders in the warband list can't actually take the funky chainguns, only handguns, blunderbusses and long rifles. Shame, since the kit seems to mainly come with chainguns...

On the other hand maybe that opens up some other options for you model-wise as you don't need models with the funky guns.

The War Wagon is as delightfully silly as the original G.W. one. OUTSTANDING WORK!
The problem with models made for war games is that they are limited by the imagination of rule makers who are not necessarily modelers.

But the outrider kit specifically comes with the funky chainguns for the troops! But at least they also have the option of being pistoliers, so I guess I will just give them pistols instead, and handguns. I need enough to be able to arm both the mounted versions and unmounted versions of the models.

As far as I can tell, the kit comes with a blunderbuss, but most likely just one, so I won't be able to use it...

That's my own fault though for, as Deafnala says, modelling for the rules of the game. But that's what I think is most fun, translating game rules into models.

Actually the outriders come with a hand held mortar. That is close enough to a blunderbuss I suppose.
The Rules Boys are laboring under a misconception with the speed of loading a blunderbuss anyway. Having made & used one myself, I can attest that they are VERY easy & quick to load.

Armoury Nerd, go go go!

The Outrider carbines are Volley Guns, rather than chainguns (the barrels are loaded individually & fired together in a volley, rather than rotating so only one fires at a time to avoid overheating, like on a chaingun). So it would make perfect sense to use the Volley Gun as a proxy blunderbuss for Mordheim -- actually it fits the rules better! Volley Guns take a long time to load, because you're essentially loading six or eight muskets all together. Here's a historical example (basically the only one, actually):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nock_gun
Disadvantages: slow to use, inaccurate, tends to break the user's shoulder. Advantages: looks Metal As Hell. Recommend immediate adoption.

DN's also right (of course from experience! Man, don't mess with Texas...) -- the flared barrel of a blunderbuss was basically a funnel for loading a gun while moving, so it should be the easiest gun in Mordheim to reload. (A good rules fix would be to rename the in-game 'blunderbuss' a 'volley gun', & make a new blunderbuss item which can move & fire, doesn't need a turn to reload, but has short range & low strength. But then we'd be trying to make Mordheim historically accurate, which seems like a mis-use of our efforts...)

DN's also right (when is he ever not?) about the blunderbuss-looking thing on the Outriders kit being a hand-held mortar. You could use it as a conventional blunderbuss, or hang on to it for another project -- I'm pretty sure the hand-mortar is an option for the Artillery School of Nuln...

The point of all which is that you can (& should!) use the multi-barrel outrider guns as blunderbusses for game purposes.

That, & nice work on the war wagon! It's a fun piece of craziness, which I have to admire. & hey, Tilean mercenaries fought in the War of the Three Emperors, so those guys are canon for Mordheim.

Wow! Hand-held mortar! Crazy stuff, I had no idea...

But great idea about the volley guns as blunderbusses! And, really, for an alternative blunderbuss. Now you've put the idea out there I don't know if I can let it go...

Just thinking out loud, I feel like it would be most elegant to say that any warband that can buy a blunderbuss could alternatively buy a volley gun. So guys like chaos dwarfs and human mercs could get volley guns too - I see no problem with that myself. To keep it simple, the two weapons could be exactly the same in terms of cost, rarity and all that, just different effects.

And then swap the rules as Rhydderch says. So the blunderbuss rules in the book actually apply to the volley gun. Then we need rules for the "new" blunderbuss. Consistent with the 30gc cost it had before.

Going by Rhyd's comments... how about no special limitations (so shoots like a bow), and a range of 12". Draw a straight tube 1" wide in a target direction, as in the original rules. Models (friend or foe) within the first 4" of the tube take an automatic S3 hit. Models between 4" and 8" away take a S2 hit. And models between 8" and 12" away take a S1 hit.

Does that seem alright, or too good with auto-hits every turn, even with super-short range? Could give it the "+1 enemy armour save" rule too, since buckshot isn't great at penetrating armour...

Loving this idea either way!

Also took a shot of the cavalry models I am working on just now. The various riders aren't painted much, but most of the horses are.



Here is the mounted version of my Averland captain Zacharias on an unorthodox mount.

The various mounted Warriors & their steeds, living & otherwise, look WONDERFUL. WELL & IMAGINATIVELY DONE!

Thanks! Any thoughts on the rules I mentioned, Nala?

That's a nice looking bunch of cavalry! Is that an undead winged lancer? or just another 'unorthodox' mount until the regular horses arrive? Either way, I look forward to seeing more in future! I especially like the look of that Bretonnian out near the front.

As for Blunderbuss rules: I think 12" seems too long a range for the blunderbuss. The short barrel & flared muzzle made them wildly inaccurate beyond a few feet (compare to a regular shotgun, which has a full-length straight barrel & often a 'choke' at the muzzle to limit the spread of shot), so I'd be inclined to limit it to an 8" range. That means that, while it could be fired every turn, it could only be used within charge range, which is pretty thematic, & should balance the power of automatic hits. I really like the idea of it hitting at full strength within 4", then reduced after that -- good thinking! I also like the armour boost , but with reduced range it might be too weak a weapon... On balance, I'd suggest making 0-4" S3, no armour modifier (the full force of the weapon hits in a tight enough cluster to punch through armour or at least rattle through the gaps), 4-8" S2, +1 Armour. But this is the sort of rules issue that's difficult to judge without just playing them a few times & seeing what works in the field!

Well damnit, having said that I wasn't going to try rewriting the Blunderbuss rules I now want to model up a bunch of blunderbuss users to play around with. Because so few warriors can get blunderbusses under the main Mordheim rules (only Mercenary Marksmen can start with them), I never bothered before. Only once, & then as a Volley Gun anyway! (One comes with the current GW Hand-Gunners kit) But hmm, could do some blunderbusses to go with my Estalian/Marienbergers...

Thanks for the suggestion on the weapon! Sounds good to me.

As for the horses, I am having fun just putting the riders on random horses since they have magnets and can be swapped freely! The winged lancer, who has a morning star, is riding a barded chaos steed in that photo, which I think is the only all metal horse I have.

Most of the horses are normal old school horses, but there is one empire barded one, one bretonnian barded one, the chaos one and the undead one.

I played my first game of Mordheim the other day! Most fun, my pit fighters were wiped out by my friend's Sylvanian undead. Gonna write some special campaign rules for our games.

Congratulations on your first game! Gotta watch out for those Vampires... What sort of 'special campaign rules' are you thinking of?

Thanks! My friend suggested that we should have a map, so I guess a lot of the rules will be about how to move around the map and what effect it has to be in various locations.

My idea is that the campaign is based around a search for a secret hidden tomb underneath Mordheim. Four different nobles are interested in finding it, so they hire a bunch of warbands to seek it out and look for clues. Based on this, my basic idea is that the warbands we play will move around the map and do searches. During this, they may bump into each other and fight, or they may have to fight NPC encounters. Depending on which noble they are working for, they can get various benefits when they are back in camp selling wyrdstone.

So far I have written up some basic rules for map movement in campaign rounds, noble patron rules, NPC encounter rules, and started on the rules for the different locations in Mordheim. My friend found a cool campaign map with 40 different locations mapped out, with arrows connecting them.

Ahh, I think I might know the campaign map you mean: I think it was tied in to this --
http://broheim.net/downloads/fo/88ExpandedCampaignRules.pdf

If it's not too late, you might want to harvest parts of that for your own system. Your ideas sound really good on their own though! Especially the narrative hook of the search for a tomb, which gives both a story & a potential end-point to the campaign. A map-based campaign is something I'd like to do... if I had a larger/steadier Mordheim group. It's also something I've thought of working into my Bretonnian setting -- so if it works for you, let me know & please let me harvest!