Tuesday, 16 July 2013

Back To Warhammer Quest

What? Who? For those who clicked on the blog title thinking it was about Warhammer Fantasy Battle, well, no, not really. Possibly a little bit anyway. If you're still in the dark, then Warhammer Quest was a rather excellent game that Games Workshop produced around 1993 I think. You take the role of a brave adventurer entering the depths of the Warhammer world is search of riches and fame, where many find a quick and painful death. The game came with five playable characters Barbarian, Elf, Dwarf, Wizard and Trollslayer, and Games Workshop released many more.

So, in case you haven't guessed I have managed to gather up some disaffected youth to play Warhammer Quest with, started last weekend we managed 2.9 quests. The first one was a straight forward dungeon crawl to allow the players to get a feel for the rules, while at the same time refresh my memory. The first quest from the rulebook had the Barbarian single handedly defeat a Minotaur that had slain his father and stolen his enchanted sword (Inigo Montoya style). The second foray was where the party had to stop a Skaven attempt to flood a dwarven underground fortress. Unfortunately due to a cave in and the fact that the Dwarf character had lost his pick meant that the quest came to a short, and ultimately fatal end for Karak Azgal. The third and 90% finished quest was to rescue a wealthy merchants daughter from Skaven, by this time the party was up to 6 (the games monster matrix is designed for 4), so I had to ramp up the lethality of the dungeon, (tee hee). The party reached the objective room which contained gutter runners, giant rats and Throat-Rip-Death-Hell my favourite painted Rat Ogre model. Throat-Rip-Death-Hell was at the end of the room guarding the maiden, so the party eventually slew the gutter runners and rats without too much trouble. Then instead of going for the kill, they faffed around with the intention of shooting poor ole Throat-Rip-Death-Hell instead of duking it out with him. Then the dice gods decided that discretion is not the better part of valour and dumped 9 Chaos Warriors on their asses! After two party members have come to within a whisker of death, three Chaos Warriors are slain and Throat-Rip-Death-Hell is raring to go! That is where Sunday nights session ended and the weekend is where we finish it!
Chaos Warriors ruining the adventurers day.

Birds Eye view

One of the more enduring features of the game was that you could take your character from the dungeon and into a warhammer game. This was all very well if you had an Elf, Dwarf or Human but not much cop if you play with one of the evil armies. Luckily there appears to be plenty of people on the web prepared to create rules for them. Now then, as I've stated before one of my favourite things to do with wargaming is making new rules, so with any more preamble here is my first addition to the bestiary of the WHQ world.

Stonelings

Deep in the cavern systems and dungeons of the warhammer world live snotlings, a kind of simple semi humanoid green skinned thug that is a nuisance if not a menace to the intrepid explorers. Despite their small size snotlings are quite resilient to the dangers below, one such example is stoneling. A stoneling is an immature snotling pup that has unfortunately come into contact with the dung of a Cockatrice, Gorgon or Basilisk. Now normally this is a death sentence but something in the snotlings metabolism allows it to frolick with childish glee in the essentially magical feces, but not without a cost. The creature formally known as a snotling is transformed into a stoneling. Stonelings look for all intents and purposes like grey snotlings but are far more dangerous. The stonelings are much tougher than before and also have strong anti magical powers caused by the metamorphosis. Despite (or perhaps even because) of these changes stonelings are very difficult to hit.

Dung frollicking Stonelings

Wounds: 2 
Attacks: 1
Move: 4 

Gold(each): 50
Weapon Skill: 1 

Armour: 2
Ballistic Skill: - 

Damage: 1D6
Strength: 2
Toughness: 2(4)
Initiative: 1


Enemies Weapon Skill12345678910
To Hit Foe 4456666666


Special Rules: Ambush, Magic A, Gang Up, Magic Drain 5+, Magic Resistance, Small Target.


Small Target: Because Stonelings are extremely small there is a -2 modifier to hit them with a ballistic weapon and a -1 to hit in hand to hand.

It is a fairly safe assumption that once Stonelings are encountered a creature with the ability to petrify won't be far away. On the other hand the Stonelings may have moved on to dungeons new. It all depends on how sadistic a Gamesmaster you are!

So as with all my other fads, all previous painting schedules are being put on the back burner while I prep lots of unrelated roleplayingy figures to add to my ever growing started-but-not-finished heap.
*sighs*

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