The Disappearance of the Masters

[LordZombie]

Here are the rules for the campaign I am currently running at my local game shop. Feel free to check them out and discuss any rules or ideas you might here. The rules were made my me, the pdf by Tumling, and the pictures by Wyrd themselves. Enjoy everyone.

http://soulstones.dk/upload/random/TheDisappearanceOfTheMasters.pdf

[explorator]

This is a very fun format, and gives an opportunity to play without Masters, which is a new challenge.

[LordZombie]

152 veiws in a week, that is not bad. Hope everyone is enjoying the rules and having fun.

[LordZombie]

234 views? Very Nice. Hoping everyone is enjoying, we are about to wrap up our campaign. Maybe I will post up a campaign report.

[LordZombie]

So the campaign has been over for a week and everything got all wrapped up nice and near. So was the campaign as cool as you think it was? Well, here is a breif report. There were a total of ten people playing. Two Guild, four Outcast, one Neverborn, two Arcanist, and one Ten Thunder. There was also me playing the Resurrectionist (as usual). The campaign started out pretty random. First couple games, everyone would split up and head off to get their own clues. They soon found out that splitting up was a bad idea. Flipping a low enemy can get you swarmed very quickly. It was soon pointed out by the Ten Thunder's player that you should not flip clue markers unless you got the cards to cheat if you flip a clue. As the campaign went on, toward the end, it started to become an every man for himself rush. Everyone really seemed to enjoy the campaign and hopefully some of them on the forum will toss their comments on here also. There was only one player that did not like the format, but he had just got into Malifaux and had not got to that point some players do where they want something different. So there you go. Try it out, enjoy, and if you don't like something, change it. Malifaux is your game, enjoy it.

[EnternalVoid]

All right, so report time on the disappearance of the masters. I will start off by saying that much of what I expected at the beginning turned out very true by the end. So let’s start.

First off, as expected the positive flip to everything they do makes the enemy very dangerous. What hurts most is the positive flip to damage as often when they hit it is enough to cancel out the 1-5 difference in attack to defense. The ability to get strait flips means they can do surprisingly amount of damage that leaves players who are use to Malifaux surprised as they are used to weak damage on flips. The second most annoying part of the positive flip is the defense as some of the enemies, such as piglets, get some pretty terrifying defense due to this. It was not that we could not hit, but that often we had to give up our share of good cards for offense which in turn meant we did not have them for defense.

The second thing that held true was the clue counters. As stated it quickly became the norm to not flip a clue unless you had the cards to cheat your faction’s clue in. It meant that often players would hold onto even low cards if they were the only ones they had of that suit. The random nature of the clues also made it rough to predict a game. Early on it seemed that some players were cursed with enemies and I know in one game the total value of the enemy was over 90ss and the players between the four only had 59ss. Nasty clash for little rewards. Basically when things went well with the clue tokens they were good, when things went poorly they could quickly go downhill. Having 5 molemen pop up around you is nasty, more so when you may have used your first AP to get to the clue token and then your second to flip it. Giving them a whole turn to get swings in can quickly mount the damage. Sometimes it was better to get a bigger nastier enemy so that a good card or three can stop all of it. When everyone works together this matters less as the first person will flip the clue and the rest can pounce on the enemy models before they act but that would mean only the first could control what the clue was if they flipped high enough initially.

What was found out quickly by some was that manipulating how the enemy models approached was important. Every AP they spent walking was another they were not swinging and the less AP you needed to engage them eventually. Quickly the group learned that one of the best ways to migrate the initially enemies were to lure them forward in such a way that forces other to help you destroy them. Every casualty you inflicted before they swung was another advantage in your favor.

I could go on and on for a bit about other stuff but as this is already becoming a long post I will get into the final parts. What would I suggest changing or for others that might want to try it to do differently. I would first implement a rule that no attacking each other first turn. This became somewhat of an issue later in the campaign when people were starting with 1-3 wounds do to being taken out the game before. People would pounce on them and take them out to further deny that player. It made it very hard to regain your momentum as two players found out. The second thing I would consider is not having models drop their healing flips, damage prevention flips, and possibly soulstones when they go out of action. Again this made it very hard to recover from one bad game and made models very big targets to their fellows if they were loading up on stuff other than damage prevention flips. It made the people who did manage to take out the other likely to do it game after game if they could. I would also consider letting people spend their Healing Flips between games to recover lost wounds. Why would you go into a fight with 1-3 wound if you had three things that gave you healing flips? You would take them then walk into the fight.