On Design Principles

by Tuomas Pirinen

Greetings all,

I am exhausted at formulating points costs, so I thought I'd drop a line to the list to explain some of the principles behind the design and development of Mordheim.

When I was putting together the Mordheim warbands, I thought long and hard not only about the strengths of each warband, but also their WEAKNESSESS. For example Skaven are fast, lethal, and seem to have everything -but Ld 7 is the best you are gonna get -ever, and they have no access to heavy armour -in a long campaign this starts to tell, especially since the other leaders will buy Gromril armour. Every warnband has such an achilles heel, be it the equipment, number of warriors, their power, the cost, skill aviability and so on. Some of the decisions were hard to make, but I think the game is better because of it.

Other important decision was the relationship Between Heroes (the characters, the important people) and Henchmen (the useful but less-detailed 'r-n-f').I fully expect people to play with as many heroes as possible -in fact I encourage them! However, it might be wise in a long run to have couple of slots free for Henchmen upgrading into Heroes -some of the best and most useful combinations in the game can be created this way. I also already made a limitation to the number of Heroes - to make record-keeping easier and stop experienced warbands from becoming unbeatable. Critical hits also enforce this -you are never completely safe.

What about future, then? I fully intend to support Mordheim as much as possible (though this obviously is not my decision, but in the hands of th Powers That Be). But hopefully the game will be so popular that it will warrant its own mag and more miniature support. I certainly have several additional ideas I want to explore (like proper narrative campaigns), as well as several new skirmish settings.

Next Town Cryer, BTW will include new Rare equipment, modelling tips for ruined buildings, and Marienburger tactics. Please write what you think about the Town Cryer -I've actually tried to include some useful articles instead the normal 'informercials', but I can only make the mag better if you tell me what you want to see.

That's all for now -the WD readers survey just came in.

Back to Mordheim.

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