Shifting Loyalties Campaign: Welcome to Malifaux at Otherside Games in Edwardsville, IL

[ResserProfessor]

Where: Otherside Games 
231 N Main St, Edwardsville, IL 62025 
Phone: (618) 692-5525              facebook.com/othesidegameshq 
When: Saturday February 4th through April 15th or so
Starts at 6:00pm goes to Close (though we will likely be done by 10pm) 

Registration:
None officially; though I do have Gaining Grounds 2017 Strategy & Scheme decks available for purchase especially for this event. They are $7.50 a piece (at cost from Wargamesvault.com, minus shipping), and you can purchase one from me with cash or pay Alex by having him give me store credit so I can buy more Malifaux goodies! I will sell them until I run out, so if you want one immediately, let me know, and I’ll hold one for you.

The Campaign:
We will be using the Shifting Loyalties book, with a few of the optional rules included, so for complete details, check out that awesome book or hit me up at the shop. I’ll have my copy with me. The campaign is tentatively planned to last 10 weeks, with maybe an extra week thrown in somewhere in case people can’t make it or we want to go to another tournament that weekend or something. Each week you will play one or more games to earn a campaign currency, Scrip, which will be used to hire additional models, regular upgrades, and special campaign upgrades (skills and equipment). If your models perish during play though, there will be a chance for them to gain injuries as well, and possible even for them to be “annihilated” or removed from your deck (don’t worry; you can always hire them back).

The Basics:
Choose a Faction. You will play this Faction for the whole campaign.
To start, Saturday, February 4th, you will need a Henchman led 35 Soulstone crew. This Henchman will be designated as your Leader for the campaign (until he/she is “annihilated” or is replaced by a Master). You can include other Henchman in your crew, but one of them must be designated as the Leader. You can also include ONE upgrade that one of the models in the crew can take. Once the campaign starts, upgrades will cost double the Scrip, so it is not a bad idea to take one upgrade right away, especially if it is kind of expensive. You may include any number of models, including Totems, Minions, Enforcers, and Henchmen, but you cannot have any Master to start. You may not include any model that your Leader could not hire or that you cannot take in your faction. So you cannot have any Master specific Totems at the start. You can take Mercenaries, though if they are out of Faction, they still cost 1 extra, as normal. If you cannot use all 35 Soulstones to hire models, up to THREE can be converted to Scrip to use to hire models later in the campaign. Any more left over will be lost.

HINT: Every week you will be able to, and in fact must, hire at least ONE new model into your crew. The first model that you hire will come at a discount of 5 Scrip. When hiring a model after the first week, after starting the campaign, a models Scrip cost is equal to its Soulstone cost for the most part (Masters and 0 Cost models are a little different). For example, a 5 Soulstone cost Rotten Belle, if it is your first hire for the week (starting week 2) is basically free to hire. Because of this, I recommend that you start with some of the higher cost models in your starting crew. Even if you have a bad week and do not earn much Scrip, you will almost always be able to add in a scheme runner or cheap support model, but you may not always be able to hire in a high cost Enforcer every week. However, it is also a good idea to have a scheme runner to start the campaign. The crew I have been considering running though myself is two Henchmen and two Enforcers, so bare this in mind as you theory out your starting list.

0 Cost Henchmen: For campaign purposes, a zero cost Henchmen will be hired in for 13 Scrip minus its cache. So if the Henchman has a Cache of 1, then he/she costs 12 Scrip to hire.

Adding a Master: Masters will not become available until the halfway point of the campaign (likely March 11th, though we might adjust it by a week or so). In order to earn a Master, a crew must first have completed a Bounty. These are basically special achievements that crews will attempt. I will have the list available for you at Otherside Games, but it is also from the Shifting Loyalties book. Bounties must be purchased at a cost of 4 Scrip. You may only have a single active Bounty at any time. If you purchase a second one before completing the first, it replaces the first one and all progress on that first bounty is lost. Some Bounties can be accomplished in a single game/week. Others take longer to complete, but are more easily achieved. You cannot start the campaign with a Bounty. If come March 11th (or any week after), your crew has completed a Bounty, you can hire a Master for 10 Scrip. You may only have ONE Master in your crew.

Weekly Events:
Every week there will be a new event which will be flipped for at random out of the Shifting Loyalties book. We will never repeat an event, and I reserve the right to re-flip if we do not have access to an appropriate model or terrain piece to run said event (though I have every intention to gain access to such pieces when I am able). I will announce the weekly events a week ahead of time. So the February 4th event will be announced this weekend, January 28th. I will announce it in store and post it to the Facebook Group: Otherside Games Malifaux. This is actually NOT how Shifting Loyalties does it, but I want players to have some time to prepare for each event. I do not anticipate seeing anyone power gaming or taking advantage of this. The goal is for you to be able to understand the event ahead of time and not be just reading it for the first time the day we are playing it. I also want you to be able to plan accordingly with your new hires each week. If you know you need another scheme runner for the coming weekly event, you can hire one before going in and try to get that model assembled and painted.

Earning Scrip
Every week you can play as many games as you like, but you can only earn a maximum of 16 Scrip total and a maximum of 6 Scrip from the Weekly Event. This will prevent any player/crew from skyrocketing ahead of everyone else. When playing a game of Malifaux, players can earn 1 Scrip for every 2 VP earned, plus Scrip for Weekly Events, plus 1 Scrip for winning the game, plus a differential for your Campaign Rating—a way to see how powerful your crew/Arsenal Deck is (so playing against “harder” crews/opponents can earn you extra Scrip). So, as an example, if you win a game and earn all 10 VP while doing so, you earn 5 Scrip from the VP and a bonus Scrip for winning, for a total of 6 Scrip. If your Campaign Rating differential was higher, you would earn even more. You will likely earn some also from the Weekly Event. Theoretically, it is possible to earn all 16 Scrip from a single game, but it is more likely that you will earn less: between 4 and 8 Scrip each game.

Playing Games
To determine the amount of Soulstones to play with each game, you can either decide together to play a specific cost game (say 35 the first week or 50 once you have that many Soulstones in your Arsenal Deck) or you can use the Shifting Loyalties book to decide: to do so, you take the total Soulstone cost of all models (not Upgrades) in the Arsenal Decks of both players. Whichever play has less, use that number and add 5 to it to decide what size of game you will play. This prevents players with a larger Arsenal Deck from winning just for having more Soulstones worth of models. For example, if Player A has 42 Soulstones worth of models in her deck and Player B has 38, the maximum Soulstone game these two can play is 38+5=43. This extra amount could be used to add to the cache of either player’s Leader or to attach Upgrades and such. You never have to include all of the models in your Arsenal Deck in your games. Though you do want to have enough to counter your opponent and play a good game, so much strategy will still be involved in both building your Arsenal and decided what models to place on the tabletop. Good luck!

Painted Models:
You are NOT required to have painted models for this event, though it is recommended. Every week that you start your game(s) with only painted models on the table, you will earn 1 free additional Scrip. Please do note that I have worded that deliberately. It only matters that the models you start with at the beginning of the game are painted. This includes any models that start the game buried: these must be painted too to get the bonus. However, any model that is summoned or ends up on the table as another result that didn’t start in your crew at the beginning of the game does NOT have to be painted to earn this bonus Scrip. I have done this because I want to encourage you all to get your models painted, but I do not want to deliberately make this impossible for certain crews. If you plan to go with a Summoner Master, I don’t want you to feel like week 5 you have to paint your Master plus every single model he/she can summon. Of course I still recommend that you paint all your models, but I am a realist too. :-p

Additional Optional Shifting Loyalties Rules:
The Good Doctor: this optional rule includes the ability to spend 2 Scrip at the end of a game to try to heal a model, removing one or more Injuries, and possibly saving the model from annihilation. This optional rule is from the Shifting Loyalties book.

“Winning the Campaign” – Hide Outs: 
This is both an optional addition and a way to determine the “winner” of the campaign. Personally, I am playing more for the fun of it and the narrative, but this method will allow us to have a technical “winner.” This too is straight out of the Shifting Loyalties book, and it involves picking a Hide Out and building it throughout the campaign. Each week you will win Construction Material points that can be used to upgrade your Hide Out. Hide Out upgrades give you certain buffs to your crew each week. Whoever has the “best” Hide Out at the end is the “winner.”

Building your Hide Out – The Hobby Winner/Terrain Builder Extraordinaire
If I know my local Faux gamers, many of them are excited to take their hobby to the next level. Some already don’t play with anything but painted minis, which makes me look bad, frankly. :-p So to give these extraordinary gamers occupied and hobbying, here’s an additional challenge. If at the end of any week, you have your Hide Out actual built as a piece of terrain, you earn a bonus 1 Scrip. If the Hide Out is not only built and usable as a piece of terrain to use in a Malifaux game, but also painted, then you earn an additional 1 Scrip for your crew.

Tracking Scrip and Arsenal Decks
As you earn Scrip and build your crew you will be adding to your Arsenal Decks. Basically this is a pool from which you will choose what models to include in your games. At the beginning you will likely use everything in your decks, but once we get over 60 Soulstones or so worth of models/upgrades in the decks, we will start playing what will amount to our normal games of Malifaux: 50 Soulstone matches. From here on, you will start to customize your crew more for each individual match.
To track your Arsenal Decks and how much Scrip you have earned, I am writing up a spreadsheet that will be available to you via Google Sheets. I will have the link available soon on our Facebook group. I will help you with all the calculations. Don’t worry: it will be pretty simple. All you will have to do is write in what models/upgrades you have hired/purchased with your Scrip, and add in the Soulstone/Scrip costs. The spreadsheet will do the rest for you. In the past we found that the calculations for Shifting Loyalties, since they were so new to us, were kind of confusing. For this reason, I plan to us Google Sheets to simplify everything. If you need any help getting it set up, I will of course help and/or take care of everything for you, so don’t worry too much about this part of it.

Ending the Campaign
The campaign may end in some sort of campaign tournament using the Arsenal decks we build over the course of these ten weeks. But I’m going to leave that open to the players and see how we are feeling at the end of the events.

Conclusion
Our goal will be to have fun, play some games, and bring in even more new players. For this reason, you need not join into the campaign at the beginning. So if you are reading this and it is mid-February or even March, you can still get in on the fun. You will start with an average amount of Scrip equal to all the players in the event. Likewise, if you have to miss a week, you will still earn that average amount of Scrip, so you will not fall behind just for missing a week. If you want to join in mid campaign, just message me on the forum or on Facebook or via Twitter. I’ll gladly get you caught up to date and help you build your starting crew! Can’t wait to play some Henchman led games as we fight for control of Malifaux!

Dan @ResserProfessor