Mordheim

My latest obsession is Mordheim.

Mordheim is a tabletop skirmish game by Games Workshop that was published in 1999.

It is a variant of Warhammer Fantasy on the scale of a warband (<15 models).

Mordheim also features a campaign system similar to role-playing games.

In Warhammer Old World lore Mordheim was the former capital of the Ostermark. It was destroyed by a twin-tailed comet made of Wyrdstone in the year 1999 IC. Mercenary warbands from all over the Warhammer world battle with one another for the Wyrdstone.

Mordheim was designed by Tuomas Pirinen, Rick Priestley and Alessio Cavatore.

The lead designer and illustrator of the rule book was John Blanche. This gives it a very distinctive 'gritty' aesthetic.

The game is not about magical superheroes riding dragons. It is about alcoholic rat-catchers knifing insane cultists in a post-apocalyptic slum. Naps don’t heal stab wounds.

I have been looking for a game with a gritty old-school feel, gray morality, high stakes, where life is cheap, and the landscape is a player, for a while. If you can throw in witches and the inquisition, all the better. Mordheim is that game.

The fact that it also has a secret society of evil, rat-people science-ninjas that may or may not exist, and that are totally building an atomic bomb under Middenheim is the icing on the cake, as far as I am concerned.

I actually owned the first edition of Warhammer in 1983. I bought it for a fiver from a friend who never played it. I tried to play 'The Ziggurat of Doom', but it seemed inferior to B/X (Moldvay/Cook) D&D that I was regularly playing at the time. I loved the box art.

Life happened. I ignored RPGs/tabletop games for 30 years. In 2012, I decided to look at how RPGs had evolved while my attention was elsewhere. I ran some one-shots in 3.5e, d20 Modern, d20 Cthulhu, and d20 Delta Green. Then I went looking for something other than d20, and played in, and then took over GMing a year-long Sagas of the Icelanders game. Most recently, I ran an Eclipse Phase campaign for strangers on the Internet. After a year, it lost traction, and then Covid-19 killed it. I've been filling my slivers of recreation time with Mordheim.

I'm going to put useful stuff I find here.