Frostgrave: Mortal Enemies - Introduction

Mortal Enemies is the newest supplement for the fantasy skirmish wargame Frostgrave from Joseph A. McCullough! Here's a sneak peek inside the book at the introduction...

Welcome to Mortal Enemies, the latest volume in the Frostgrave library. It’s a collection that has grown well beyond what I could have ever hoped or imagined. I’ve now been working on Frostgrave for over eight years, and there are days when I think I have nothing left to say about the Frozen City. But then I play a game, or paint a miniature, or talk to a fan, or jump on the Facebook group, and suddenly my imagination starts firing in all directions like a spell. Creativity is so infectious. It spreads from person to person, from game to game, from one aspect of the hobby to another. For me, it is what makes this hobby so wonderful. It contains so many ways to be creative and to share that spark with others.

That is what I have always wanted these books to be – sparks for the imagination. While most of this book, and all Frostgrave books, consists of ‘rules’, it is my hope that players will use those rules as tools for their own creativity, as stepping-off points for whatever aspects of this hobby they find most enjoyable. A new creature can be just a collection of stats, or it can be the seed of a new scenario, a reason to research miniatures, a chance to paint something new and different, or an example for creating your own monsters. Take it and run with it!

When I sat down to work on Mortal Enemies, there were two specific areas I wanted to explore in the hope of sparking player creativity. First, I wanted to give players the tools to create unique adversaries in the Frozen City – the titular ‘mortal enemies’ – that could return from time to time over the course of a campaign to plague the wizards and that would grow in power each time they appeared. Like the wizards, these mortal enemies are spellcasters, though they follow slightly different rules for using their magic. While the process for generating mortal enemies is random, players are encouraged to interrupt the random process at any point to shape their mortal enemy in any way they choose. These mortal enemies also lead their own gang, so players have a reason (or excuse) to paint another warband.

I have constructed the rules for mortal enemies to be equally useful for solo players as well as those who typically play in groups. I have also included five scenarios designed for using mortal enemies. These are presented for solo play, but I have included conversion notes for most of them if players desire to use them in two-player games.

The other major area I wanted to explore was wizard bases. I have done a lot of work over the years on giving character to a wizard’s base, but always they have remained in the background, a set of rules to be used between games. Even in the earliest days of Frostgrave, people asked me to write a ‘base assault’ scenario, where one wizard could attack another wizard’s base. I demurred. Not because I thought it was a bad idea, but because I could never make it work mechanically in a way I found pleasing. Thankfully, my subconscious has had a lot of time to work on the idea, and I finally felt ready to put it on paper. So, a good chunk of this book is devoted to representing a wizard’s base on the table, the kinds of traps and defences a wizard would use to protect that base, and rules for how to run a base assault scenario. What excites me most about these rules is giving the players a reason to construct their wizard’s base. Sure, you can represent it on the table with just a paper footprint, but I know there are lots of modellers out there who have just been waiting for the excuse.

While it wasn’t intentional, it turns out these two pieces fit together nicely. If a wizard has a mortal enemy, sooner or later that mortal enemy is going to attack the wizard at home!

So, as I said at the beginning, I hope that reading this book feeds your own imagination and gets you excited to dive back into the hobby in whatever way you find most enjoyable. I have encountered a lot of miniature gamers over the years that told me that ‘they aren’t creative’, but it’s just not true. What they usually mean is that they don’t enjoy writing their own scenarios. That’s fine, I have written plenty for you. Those same gamers will often then show me a miniature that they painted in some interesting way, or a cool piece of terrain they’ve built, or tell the complex backstory of their character. The truth is, it’s hard to participate in this hobby without being creative, and if you think you aren’t, you probably just haven’t recognized your own area of creativity (hint: its generally the part you enjoy the most!).

Whatever you do with this book, and wherever it might take you, I hope you enjoy the ride. I hugely appreciate the support you’ve shown me by picking it up and allowing me to continue to indulge in my own favourite aspect of the hobby. It seems that I am far from finished exploring this frozen fantasy world. If you would like to keep up with all the stuff I’m working on for this game and others, check out my website at www.josephamccullough.com.

Until next we meet, happy base-building and treasure hunting!

Frostgrave: Mortal Enemies is out March 28th in the UK and April 30th in the US.

Pre-order now.

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