Sunday Musings - City Breaks Of The Damned

Ah yes, Mordheim. Dream vacation place for undead and ratmen alike. A place where all thoughts or glory are ambushed by a rival gang and stabbed until the blade goes blunt. Mordheim is where tetanus goes for a working holiday.

Released way back in 1999, Mordheim was something of a turning point for Warhammer Fantasy Battle. It marks the point where the more colourful, often exaggerated designs and art where pushed back with a return to pre and early 4th-Ed Mud and Blood. By this point, all of GW's output (save Blood Bowl) had shifted from Mark Gibbons and Wayne England to Karl Kopanski and a return to Blanchitsu. It does feel like the question was asked "what if warhammer but with more injuries and eyepatches".

Set in the apocalyptical ruins of a once prosperous city, Mordhiem is a city wrecked by a cataclysm, a comet that fall from the heavens to, as the Sigmarites say, punish the heretic and sinner. Funnily enough, what crawled into the city after it's destruction is more of the same. The focus is on warbands experiencing Gold Rush Fever, or to be more precise, Wyrdstone Fever. Wyrdstone is a halfway point between fabled treasure and long suffering death sentence. It's a cold, damp Wild West with mutations and less Stetsons.

It took a lot from Necromunda and ran with the concepts. Skirmish combat meets campaign progression where the delighted heights of triumph were kicked back to earth by the often comical tragedies that befell your warband. You don't lose your troops here, you gain stories, acquire injuries and have to explain why your miniatures are kitbashed to include peg-legs. The experience points take the second seat to the burning hatred and need for vengeance against your last opponent. The progression for the warbands is a rollercoaster all in itself, as every post-battle injury roll could equally create a fearsome commander of a broken wreck of a man who hops for Sigmar daily.

There was a wonderful bite-size delve into the races of the Warhammer World, everything from the Skaven who knew how to make stabby even stabbier to the not-at-all-sisters-of-battle called the SIsters of Sigmar The Undead strode out with a wonderfully dire collection of horrors and tame Crypt Ghouls. All the major player races got a chance to huddle in the mud, with later creations like the Cult of the Possessed bringing further tentacles and power metal fashion. It's sometimes strange to think about how much Mordheim's character based kits pushed forward the multipart plastic kits of the time. They came on leaps and bounds from the Chaos Warrior and Space Marine kits that preceded them, it was the start of GW looking at plastic as a long term solution, with metal slowly being phased out over the next decade

Despite (or even because) it's genuinely punishing chaotic nature, Mordheim is deeply loved even to this day. The Living Rulebook goes from strength to strength within the communty, with past GW staff writing new rules and warbands even now to support it. It came to video games in 2015 with a almost great experience that captured the atmosphere but felt somewhat lacking in longitude.

All that being said, I have a need to hunt me some Wyrdstone now, and let me know of your thoughts and memories of Mordheim!

As Always, I remain,

Adam