Monday, September 21, 2009

Determining Interest Level

I am not a big fan of the Warhammer fluff. As a result, I have given a lot of thought to somewhat altering the naming conventions for the armies I play, specifically the Warriors of Chaos since they are about 75% there towards being the type of army I like to play.

However, a careful perusal of the Games Workshop website suggests they would frown upon that, even for a semi-private gaming group that does not play on the tournament scene or anything like that.

However, they encourage people to make their own army lists such as the Chaos Dwarf lists or Forest Goblin lists. So my interest turned somewhat in that direction as I have in the past created games as diverse as Baseball Card baseball in which you could play entire seasons of Baseball with 2 6-sided dice, paper for score keeping, a pen, and baseball cards and a futuristic role-playing game set in a post-apocalyptic age. Both were pretty well received by my friends growing up and received fairly heavy play, so I feel I have the experience and ability to do so.

My own interests lie more in a historical range and I have found a group that fits in quite well. The Greeks in general or Spartans in particular would provide excellent source material.

Overall, the Greeks as a whole people might be superior as it would allow access to their rich mythology with Minotaurs, Gorgons, Medusas, Harpies, Sirens, and so forth as well as numerous heroes along the lines of Theseus, Jason and the Argonauts, Hercules, and so forth.

The Spartans would also be intriguing as you could fit in some of those elements but it would be a much narrower field with which to work as you would need to work in the factionalism of their Helots and so forth, but it would allow some very cool specialized units such as the Crypteia.

The Crypteia was sort of a Spartan KGB. Their role as secret police included the ritualized murder of Helots. Their roles as scouts and assassins could be a really fun unit.

Anyway, over the past couple weeks I have been developing some ideas for special rules such as Greek Citizen, Sing the Paean, "The Oracle at Delphi, Form the Phalanx and so forth while developing units such as the Peltasts, Hoplites, Skiritai and so forth.

I have been playing with a variety of stat lines and trying to accurately cost them so they would be very well-balanced, able to win or lose any game.

To this point it has all been theory and comparison shopping against the current books that are out.

Is there anyone who plays Warhammer that has an interest in history that would like to be part of the project?

4 comments:

Unknown said...

Sounds very cool. Not sure how much help I would be since I know almost nothing about Greek history, but I would be happy to assist in any way I can.

Darth Weasel said...

you can certainly be a play-test opponent and give feedback as to fun factor, balance issues, and so forth

Liam said...

I would certainly be interested in house-rule modifications and ideas. Let me know what you guys are up to on the subject and I will see if i can show up or something.

Anonymous said...

awesome blog, do you have twitter or facebook? i will bookmark this page thanks. jasmin holzbauer