Hinterlands: Skirmish Campaigns in the Mortal Realms

[Grand Exemplar]

I can explain mordheim. Henchmen could only advance once on each statistic without skills. Whereas heroes had the maximum statistics table and can gain skills. It was only when a henchman group got the lads got talent on their advancement when they would become a hero. 

[Kevlin]

If i remember correctly you could have up to 5 (I think) other heroes and then the henchmen so the heroes could all roll on the same advancement but the non leader heroes had a head start since they got fewer XP to start with hence levelling faster.

In the Hinterlands every model is equal so it might be an idea to let them start out on the same page instead of paying 50XP to be a hero. I haven't played any campaigns with it yet, how has it worked out for you who has a few campaign games under your belt? Might be nothing since the heroes is too far ahead already as they are compared to regular soldiers.

[Dotification]

I assume the Destruction Command Trait: Rampaging Destroyers triggers in the Hero Phase?

"No more than half your Warband may be Heroes" rule is by model-count, or points, or . . . both??

Love the rules pack, prolly gonna try it out tomorrow!  Thx for your hard work!

[bottle]

Hey everyone! It's been a little crazy for this project since version 2 came out. Hinterlands 1 had around 550 downloads from when it was released in mid-October  till mid-January. The current download count for the file now sits at 1275 which means version 2 has been downloaded 700+ times and hasn't even been out for two weeks!! It blows my mind that a fan project could garner this much interest and I am humbled and honored! I try and read every comment, PM and tweet I get about it, so please forgive me if I can't get back to you straight away.

I'm getting some really good rules questions coming through and it seems a few grey areas need to be addressed. I thought about running another update, but I think it would be annoying to have to regularly re-download the file for corrections and clarifications, so instead I thought a living FAQ would be better. I'll post it here, and also in the first post and the file notes. Here's what I've got so far:

 

Please keep sending through rules questions and I will be happy to answer and might put them in the FAQ if I think it will throw off enough people.  Thanks for your help everyone!

9 hours ago, Dotification said:

I assume the Destruction Command Trait: Rampaging Destroyers triggers in the Hero Phase?

"No more than half your Warband may be Heroes" rule is by model-count, or points, or . . . both??

Love the rules pack, prolly gonna try it out tomorrow!  Thx for your hard work!

Great questions! The first one got put in the FAQ above and the wording will be altered in version 3 to correct it. As for Heroes, it is based on model count so if you had a full roster of 15 only 7 of them could be Heroes.

[bottle]

23 hours ago, Kevlin said:

This is an amazing fan product Bottle, 100 gold stars for the effort.

I have a question about the XP system. Why does the Hero have to start at lvl 5? You have paid for her in GP already so there is no unfair advantage between her and a regular soldier. But the regular soldier will have gained two advancements at the same time as the hero have gotten only one with her 20XP. I understand that there must be a progressive curve for advancements but the hero have the unfair disadvantage of skipping the first cheap advances.

Say you have a cheap hero lvl 5 vs an expensive soldier lvl 5. The expensive soldier have the same stats since power level is connected to price but he has had 4 advancements to the hero making him much better. 

Morheim and necromunda have the same system so I see the reason to include it but I could never wrap my head around the logic back then either. Maybe someone could explain it to me like I was a 6 year old so that I could see the reasoning behind it once and for all.

Cheers for all the hard work!

This is a really great question (and thanks for the 100 gold stars!)

Heroes starting midway down the table is something I took from Necromunda so didn't particularly question why it was in place. I have thought about it today and think it is a good rule and can be looked at from a few perspectives.

If we were to take a top down approach to the rules (story first, rules originating from them), the Heroes in your warbands have already been battling across the Mortal Realms for some time, that's why they are "heroes" after all, and their superior stats reflect this.

On the flipside, if we were to look at this from the bottom up (rules and balance as a priority), I worry that allowing heroes to level up quickly is going to make them such dominating killing machines that your little guys might not get to impact the game much other than being easy pickings for the enemy heroes. I also think it is important to offer incentives to not max out on heroes, especially later on in the campaign when you start retiring models out of your 15 to make way to buying much more expensive models. Lastly, as your heroes will already be doing more killing in the game than your other models they are likely to be leveling at a similar rate.

[nicromancer]

How is it that you haven't been employed by GW yet? 
Also that piece of artwork on the FAG sheet is great, Never seen it before!

[bottle]

3 minutes ago, nicromancer said:

How is it that you haven't been employed by GW yet? 
Also that piece of artwork on the FAG sheet is great, Never seen it before!

Haha, thanks! And yes, it's one of my favourites from AoS. This is the original, but I cropped out the Stormcast to focus on the people in robes. I hope we get some models like them!

[Kevlin]

It may not be a problem or even an issue in most armies but in the Slaves of darkness there is a 8 GP difference between a Chaos Chosen and an Exalted hero with very little to differ them statswise. But a lvl 5 chosen is a monster compared to a lvl 5 hero.

Just my 2GP :-)

Now I'm going to enjoy just building and painting for a while until I can find the time and someone to play with. Love your energy and creativity Bottle. Keep it up, it's an inspiration to us all.

[bottle]

3 minutes ago, Kevlin said:

It may not be a problem or even an issue in most armies but in the Slaves of darkness there is a 8 GP difference between a Chaos Chosen and an Exalted hero with very little to differ them statswise. But a lvl 5 chosen is a monster compared to a lvl 5 hero.

Just my 2GP :-)

Now I'm going to enjoy just building and painting for a while until I can find the time and someone to play with. Love your energy and creativity Bottle. Keep it up, it's an inspiration to us all.

That's a good point! Let's monitor it and let me know if anything really out of whack in your own campaign. After listening to the recent @scrubyandwells episode with Vincent Venturella (which is one of the best episodes to date) I am quite inspired about Vincent's comment of balancing through scenarios. Maybe a '3 Places of Power' style battleplan should get added in if we feel heroes are not being chosen in favour of elite footsloggers.

[Kevlin]

I for one play solemnly for the narrative but I can see the glitch with the XP in rare cases.

Going to try and get a friend to try it out. He just went all in on AoS so I might hijack his slaves of darkness and get a small marauding team together. I'll keep you all updated.

[bottle]

Hey everyone, I have just updated the first post with some community expansions. First is AoS28, which has been causing quite a stir on the site. You can use the Hinterlands rules as default for it (or any ruleset), but we also made a quick expansion on to allow players to break the rules in certain ways when they want to! The second expansion is called Shardsfall and it was put together by @Grand Exemplar. It takes my Hinterlands rules and then marries it to lots of classic Mordheim rules, so if you are missing your mordheim fix it could be a cool little resource to take some mordheim rules and plug them back into your Hinterlands games.

This is the first step in me really wanting to open up Hinterlands to the community here on TGA. I get tons of emails, and PMs and tweets about what people would like to add into Hinterlands, and while I want to keep the scope of the core rules to be clear, simple and concise, I love the idea of players having a wealth of different rules to pick and choose from and want to start building up a collection of those rules in this thread.

So if you have a cool idea. Could be small, like a selection of 5 additional battleplans, or creating command abilities for subfactions (like Sylvaneth), or could be massive, to creating your own campaign setting with unique warscrolls, let me know and we can get it added into this thread!  

[Mohojoe]

5 minutes ago, bottle said:

Hey everyone, I have just updated the first post with some community expansions. First is AoS28, which has been causing quite a stir on the site. You can use the Hinterlands rules as default for it (or any ruleset), but we also made a quick expansion on to allow players to break the rules in certain ways when they want to! The second expansion is called Shardsfall and it was put together by @Grand Exemplar. It takes my Hinterlands rules and then marries it to lots of classic Mordheim rules, so if you are missing your mordheim fix it could be a cool little resource to take some mordheim rules and plug them back into your Hinterlands games.

This is the first step in me really wanting to open up Hinterlands to the community here on TGA. I get tons of emails, and PMs and tweets about what people would like to add into Hinterlands, and while I want to keep the scope of the core rules to be clear, simple and concise, I love the idea of players having a wealth of different rules to pick and choose from and want to start building up a collection of those rules in this thread.

So if you have a cool idea. Could be small, like a selection of 5 additional battleplans, or creating command abilities for subfactions (like Sylvaneth), or could be massive, to creating your own campaign setting with unique warscrolls, let me know and we can get it added into this thread!  

Great update fella, finally convinced my group to give it a go and hopefully will be working on my own AoS28 warband. glad to see you going from strength to strength, keep up the good work

[Phantajisto]

This is sweeet. Seems pretty balanced but undoubtedly some units will be a bit broken. Pink Horrors are wizards for 14 gold for example....

[The Jabber Tzeentch]

This is sweeet. Seems pretty balanced but undoubtedly some units will be a bit broken. Pink Horrors are wizards for 14 gold for example....

Yeah there's always going to be a few outliers. Just have to self manage it in your group.

[bottle]

Yeah, the pink horror is a smart choice for a Warband. The rule of one does make taking lots of them a little redundant, but it's still a strong model for the cost. I would never want to have an appendix of specific alterations, ("this model costs this much more in hinterlands, this model is banned, this model is altered in the following way..." Etc), so the trick is creating rules that can catch out any particular odd balls. The new Rule of Three is specifically designed in that way, for example in Hinterlands version 1 the Knight Azyros' lantern bomb became ridiculously powerful (with every model counting as its own unit), which led to some outrageous stories! The rule not only curtails that, it also keeps super shooty heroes (like the Waywatcher) in check too. If the Pink Horror ever proves a problem then we might need to add in another rule that can hopefully catch a few problematic models in one go - it might not be that bad though, so let me know if you use one in your campaign!  

[Popisdead]

Thanks kindly for your effort. We are taking this up locally cause we all have wee ones and no time to play longer games.


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[Dotification]

I thought I would finally post some feedback from last week's trial game with my fellow powergamer.

MoonClan Grot Warboss - 40

MoonClan Grot Shaman (MVP) - 30

x5 MoonClan Squig Hoppers - 80

vs.

Nomad Prince - 40

Wayfinder - 50

x7 Eternal Guards - 56

BattlePlan: The Ritual--no bonus to your roll for having a Wizard or Priest within 3" of it, or anyone at all??  20 is a high target # to hit then.  

Anyways . . . I let him go first, & he proceeded to biff his Hail of Doom Arrow & only do 1 un-saved wound on my General, the Warboss w/ squig, leaving him on a single Wound.  The game really swung when I soon managed to get a double turn, and wiped out both of his 3W Heroes with Arcane Bolts + a lil shooting from the Boss's prodder.  My next turn I started deleting his grouped up Eternal Guard with Curse of Da Band Wound, after my Shammy got over a bad 'shroom, while the Squig Hoppers hit a flank to stop the Ritual.  Sometime during the battle an Eternal Guard charged my Boss & punched thru 1 last Wound to avenge his superiors.

On turn #6(?)I wiped him out, but let him have 1 last d6 roll to see if he could hit 20, needing a 5 or 6, which he did.  I said that seemed like (Pyrrhic) Minor Victory to me & we shook hands.

Our thought was me getting a double turn of spellcasting & shooting really wiped him out, as most Heroes are not Wizards and cannot unbind.  When you downscale their Wounds like that, then Arcane Bolt really messes them up/wipes them out.  I did it with a 30 gold Shaman that could wipe heroes and any mooks standing near him, while our Tzeentch guy could do it for 14 gold!

We then brainstormed how to balance out spells vs Heroes.

1st thought; give Heroes back their full Wounds.  Heroes only having 2-4 Wounds while starting @ Level 5, thus leveling so much slower than their minions, means they could be surpassed by their mooks with good luck.  But if they still only cost half their gold then they would prolly be too good.

2nd thought; Heroes get some kind of unbind roll for spells targetting them, prolly at a small penalty so they don't outshine actual Wizards, flavored however (dodge, ward save, etc. etc.) 

As the rules currently stand, we thought a Witch Hunter + 2 Kurnoth Hunters would just ruin whatever they came up against.  As the point/gold costs and leveling curves favor high Wound Level 1 models like the Hunters, Stormfiends, Orruk Brutes, Khorgoraths, & so on.  

1-2 of them + a cheap Hero & maybe a couple cheap mooks for objectives/chaff seem the way to go.

[bottle]

Thanks! Feedback like this is super useful, and it was feedback exactly like this that fed into the first update. I would recommend you try and get a few more games under your belt before you tweak the rules, as if the Wanderers player had targeted the shaman first turn it would have been a very different game (2 wounds with a 6+ save wouldn't be hard to kill with the Doom Arrow). It is not explicitly stated in your report, but I thought I would just remind you that curse of the bad moon is limited to 3 models a turn due to the 'Rule of Three', (you probably played it like that, but just wanted to clarify)  Also make sure you have double the terrain for Hinterlands.

I'll look into the ritual too, from my play testing it was okay, taking 7 turns means he must have rolled a 3 or under on average every turn. But everything you say is being considered alongside the revisions for version 3. Here are a few changes I am play testing currently that you might want to try out too:

1. Models start a campaign with 10 experience for each additional wound above the first (for example a 3 wound model starts with 20 experience). This means heroes would only start with 20-30 experience usually and so would elite units like Kurnoth Hunters.

2. A second 'Rule of Three', only the first 3 mortal wounds a player inflicts in a turn bypass the model's save characteristic. Subsequent mortal wounds may have saving throws taken against them. (This would help curtail some powerful spells and units).

3. For the Ritual, I am in favour of making the defenders a bit more duarable and think I will add in the Artefact having the "Inspiring" terrain rule (which in Hinterlands gives a 6+ ward to models within 3") - this seems fluffy and a good boost.

So, these rules aren't set in stone - they are just some I am playing with at the moment. You might want to consider adding them in if you feel the problematic units are too problematic in your campaign  

 

[Mrmattywoodz]

So I posted this on Bottle's blog, but thought I would post it here too. When a model has "exploding" hits on 6s, and then levels up and gets +1 to hit do you guys now count it as exploding on 5s? (Just like it was buffed with a hero).

RAW says it works that way, but I was curious as to what other groups were doing, and how it is working out for them. 

[Goodapollo4]

My local group is getting set up to start Hinterlands on our off-weeks, really interesting to see the process of developing this rule set!

[Shaloo]

One thing that I have been thinking about is how to incorporate the bonuses that some units would receive from having large numbers.

For example, Several Seraphon units gain benefits from having 10, 20 or even 30 models in their unit. These benefits would be difficult, if not impossible to obtain with the small force aim of this style. I'm not sure how this could be incorporated.

Alternatively, some Skaven units, like the Stormvermin gain a bonus when they outnumber an enemy unit. I think this is one is easier to implement. Simply rule that individual models within melee range count towards outnumbering an opponent. (Clarification Example 1: Two stormvermin in direct base to base contact with the same opponent model would could as outnumbering 2-1. --- Example 2: Two stormvermin, one in base to base contact and a second one 3" away would not count as outnumbering because the second is not within melee range.)

[Dotification]

As for Stormvermin ganging up on someone, I could see being within 2", as I recall that's the range of their halberds.

[Kramer]

12 hours ago, Shaloo said:

One thing that I have been thinking about is how to incorporate the bonuses that some units would receive from having large numbers.

For example, Several Seraphon units gain benefits from having 10, 20 or even 30 models in their unit. These benefits would be difficult, if not impossible to obtain with the small force aim of this style. I'm not sure how this could be incorporated.

Alternatively, some Skaven units, like the Stormvermin gain a bonus when they outnumber an enemy unit. I think this is one is easier to implement. Simply rule that individual models within melee range count towards outnumbering an opponent. (Clarification Example 1: Two stormvermin in direct base to base contact with the same opponent model would could as outnumbering 2-1. --- Example 2: Two stormvermin, one in base to base contact and a second one 3" away would not count as outnumbering because the second is not within melee range.)

I like the second suggestion because it fits that the feeling of outnumbering would still be there even in small numbers. 

The bonusses for bigger units are more difficult as you say. I personally would just drop them or keep the requirement and even require them to be within 2" of each other. As most of those rules (as far as I know) relate to a unit being trained to fight in a certain manner together to get a bonus. 

Example: Dark Shards (and quarrelers) get extra shots if their unit size exceeds 20. I imagine that they can shoot more often because they are trained to fire in groups. The second line does not aim but follows the trajectory of the first shot while the first line reloads and in that manner shoot more often. For me this doesn't translate to skirmish battles. 

Example 2: units like executioners, dread swords, dwarf warriors get a bonus to wounds in combat. I image them fighting in a strict formation to gain that advantage. Think 300, Vikings or similar shows with the roman testudo being the obvious example. Again this doesn't translate to smaller skirmish games. 

 

But it that's just me and my interpretation. Anyone that thinks that similar rules should translate? 

Edited February 15, 2017 by Kramer

[Mrmattywoodz]

So far i have played a few games and i'm loving the system. My FLGS is doing a AOS game day this weekend, and many of us are going to try and get in some hinterlands games in between normal AOS games.

 

I have decided to start my own blog telling the story of my warband as the their games play out. Ill also be posting WIP pictures and finished of my warband as it grows. I also will be posting pictures of my opponents warbands. Take a look if you feel so inclined. Comments and critiques are welcome.

 

 

[hellalugosi]

Here's what i'd do to allow the large unit abilities. I'd just make it so when you level up you can take one of those abilities instead of rolling on the chart. It could represent immediate training that the model can learn. And each time they level up, they can take the next increment of the same ability if it gets stronger when you have more models.

 

I think this is simple enough, any thoughts?