Quest!

The Whys…

In Warhammer Quest we have the big old monster tables, with a fantastic bestiary of villains and critters to go up against in our adventures, which is fantastic to play through, but can lead to some very hodgepodge adventures as we’re working our way through a dungeon that contains anything from Snotlings, Dark Elves and daemons of Chaos all in the same two or three rooms. 

We also have the events cards (mainly covered in the Events folder), which include spawn cards for monsters… but this is limited to the ones in the original box and are limited in scope to the models in the starter set, or the two campaigns.

We’ve had some fantastic additions to these over the years  from the likes of Greywolf way back in the day when the game was still sold, all the way through to LittleMonk who has been keeping things rocking ever since. Each has added new creatures, new cards and new spawn tables… but this doesn’t *quite* scratch that itch that I’ve been wanting in WQ and doesn’t allow scalability or flexibility, so this is an experiment to see how far I can push the cards to make it much more customisable.

In looking at the cards I’ve seen various people attempt to create spawn decks for each of the entries in the original rulebook, and even had a go myself as a project and things become… crowded fairly quickly on them there cards as you start to spawn multiple creatures in one event and each has a different statline, gold value and special rules. There’s a reason there aren’t any level 10 spawn decks… the original design also doesn’t take into account being able to differentiate which cards are suitable for different levels.

The What…

So what are we trying to achieve here?

1) Spawn cards that can cover all of the current options in the Roleplay book, all the way up to level 10

2) Spawn cards that are clear, all the way up to level 10

3) Something that is easy to add new creatures or NPCs without having to create new D66 tables to roll on

4) Something that can be customised to just the models that you own, or to a specific race/faction group for specific adventures

I also like the simple AI that has been introduced to creatures in the more recent attempts at Warhammer Quest by Games Workshop and wanted to have a go at providing that element for people that want to introduce something beyond the generic monster rules in the book. To be fair, this is aimed squarely at me as I’m a solo player; anyone GMing most likely does something like this anyway… but it’s fun to add these things in.

So looking at all of those elements above, it’s clear there’s far far too much to include on just one card, so it’s time to take a leaf out of how they do things in other WQ-like games. We already have the bestiary entries for all the creatures in the book; again this needs updating every time someone wants a new creature and there’s no central bestiary… LittleMonk’s is the most up to date but is limited to original OW creatures and I want to add in some of the Age of Sigmar monster compendium that I feel still fits into the OW. 

If we look at Shadows of Brimstone, or the newer WQ games there are creature stat cards, which are a larger format that includes AI elements, options and all the rules in one place; saving you having to go hunting through the book to know what something like Poison does.

If we have these cards at hand, then all we actually need on the spawn cards are details of what types of enemy appear and how many… which leaves us plenty of space to start adding in new information that we didn’t have space for originally, such as:

1) Keywords. What race is this, what faction, what environments do they frequent? This can help us organise the cards into enemies that will appear together and make sense. Does a shark (silly example, but you get the drift) make sense in a Khemri tomb? No… not really. 

2) Special flavour rules. Not every group of goblins that spawn will necessarily be the same. We may have one time when they actually are setting a competent ambush; or others where they are sat around a fire and are completely oblivious so the heroes effectively gain Ambush instead.

3) ID numbers. Why? So adventures can give you ideas for mandatory cards to include in the story, or ones to explicitly exclude that would make no sense.

4) Level! Finally we’ll be able to create card decks for a specific difficulty  

The How…

This… is to be determined! 😀

There is an earlier card post (about 2 years ago!) with an initial concept for this, but it seems I’ve switched software and can no longer open the files… time to start again! doh…