Gnome-mageddon 2024 - part 1
Moleny woke up with a start, clutching the bedsheets to her chest with an iron grip. She wasn't sure what had roused her from such a dead sleep, but she scanned the room with wide eyes for anything amiss. Something within her had demanded that she wake, but what for? Her eyes traced over the foot of her bed, followed the grain of the floorboards beyond, and slashed at the shadows with nervous swipes. Nothing in the moonlit curtains, nothing on the dresser, nothing at her slightly ajar door. Nothing. Maybe the reason for her rousing wasn't a sound or a object that shouldn't have intruded upon her bedchamber, but instead just a symptom of old age. People just didn't sleep the same after the borders changed and the walls went up.
Things in places they shouldn't be.
Knowing that something is out of place could keep someone up, but snatch them from sleep? Perhaps that extra sense of aged folk could recognize that time-soured and ill-seated feeling from beyond the waking world. Hopefully, such senses could be calmed with some honeymilk. Moleny tugged the covers off, and swung her legs over the edge of the bed. She'd just pop down to the kitchen, and heat a cup of her favorite drink over the hearth: simple as that. With her toes, she felt for her slippers on the hardwood, and she appreciated its chill. Some folks lost that sense with age. Better to feel something than nothing...
Her foot stepped on something cold. Colder than the floor. Harder than the floor. Her heart froze, and so did the rest of her, in some synchronized prayer that if nothing moved, then none of this was real. And then the thing twitched like a fish out of water, clattering on the floor and battering against her foot in an effort to free itself from Moleny's accidental capture. She recoiled, jumping feet in the air as the grim thing scrabbled loudly across the boards. Moleny watched transfixed, as something that was not a spider scurried from beneath her bed, tapping hastily back to the door to her bedchamber wherefrom it had presumably come. It leapt into the shadow between panel and frame, and the scrabbling abruptly stopped. The night held its breath as the gnome stood on her bed and watched the door. What could she protect herself with? All of the things she could think of were beyond her reach. A candlestick, a broomhandle, a jewelry box, all too far away if she really needed...
The door rocked gently on its hinges, widening the black chasm just enough for the curtained moonlight to peek inside. A sliver of white at just about head height shone briefly in the dark; the impression of something natural and recognizable, but utterly alien all the same. Heads have skin and lips and eyes, and yet this thing had none of those at all. It peered back ruefully from the other side of the entrance, and with a boney hand it pushed the door the rest of the way open.
Things in places they shouldn't be.
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Longtime enjoyers of Squalor and Dice might recall the name Gneil the Gnecromancer, and the army titled The Quiet March. In celebration of my shop's 35th Anniversary and also Halloween, I've decided to dust them off for an event I'm tentatively calling "Gnomemageddon."
The game I'll be running is a board-crawl, where the gnomish folk of Gnomishire repel the undead from their burg, and then take the fight to the wicked necromancer who raised the besieging skellignomes in the first place. This is to say that I've contrived a way to play my two gnome armies against eachother while also sharing some very important holiday cheer*.
So far the rules are very light, mainly because I want the game to be accessible to new players, and because I have no idea how many players will be participating outside of myself. Essentially, I'm riffing off the dashboard elements of RUNE RPG, so that each player gets a character who can roll some dice, and then decide how to allocate them. The rules below are very rough and subject to change, but enjoy them if you like!
Here's a brisk outline of the gameplay loop.
- Each undead unit determines what they're doing this turn. Simpler units might have a binary if/then statement which decides their behavior, whereas boss monsters might have more nuanced systems, random tables, or even a dashboard like a player character.
- All undead units that have an action labelled A perform those actions. Those actions may be movements, damage dealing, putting up their guard, or some other behavior or special move.
- In order from left to right, each player rolls dice equal to their initiative, and then allocates those dice to actions on their dashboard. Actions generally have a threshold, and can only be used if a die or multiple dice score equal to or greater than that threshold. Once those dice are allocated, that player's character performs the associated actions. These might be movements, damage dealing, putting up their guard, or some other behavior or special move.
- Once all players have taken their actions, any undead units with actions labelled B perform them.
- End of turn events occur, then return to step 1 for the next turn.
I want the interactions to stay pretty simple, and keep things boardgamey enough for newcomers to feel comfortable in trying new things. Really, the big thing is that players have the advantage most of the time, but enemies are tougher and good at that war of attrition stuff. Units of enemies can also scale based on the number of models they have, so with some clever teamwork, less powerful threats can be neutralized to ineffectiveness if players don't want to take the time to 100% KO them.
Important notes are that movement are leapfrogs of Short, Medium and Long distance, and that measurements are within range of those same ranges. This could be inspired by Marvel Crisis Protocol, or maybe Song of Blades and Heroes, but basically pick a number and have it scale for each degree of distance (short = x, medium = 2x, long = 3x). I'm likely going to use 4, 8, and 12 for my rulers, but that's because my board is 12 feet long and I can't stay in the shop all night. Also, if models reach 0 hp, they die. This seems self explanatory, but also this blogpost may end up being the ruleset, and so in case you wanted to try it yourself, now that's an established rule. Also, you dont have to move the entire length of your ruler if you don't want to. Also, the board is six 2*4 boards that form a longer 12*4 board. There ya go.
- This post from Portcullis Games' blog where the author starts a gorgeous oldhammer army of the undead. I love me an army that comes pre-haunted. This is the fairly new hobby blog of someone I follow on Insta, but their name escapes me, so hopefully someday the dots will connect and I can clear up this very dumb mystery that is only a mystery because my memory is shot.
- That post reminded me of the barrow kings for Heinrich Kemmler's Barrow Army, so I went and found the rules for those. I love that statuary played a prominant role in the list, where simulacrae of forgotten rulers do battle alongside their reanimated remains. This will likely come in handy when I'm cooking up cool rules.
- Rob Hawkin's tutorial for Graveyard Hills will no doubt come in handy! He's the former hobby manager from Privateer Press, and has done diorama/terrain work for all of the big games. The whole blog is really an invaluable resource, but this one has the most immediate application, as I'll need to make a ton of assets to really make this experience pop.
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