Necropolis28

 Labelled as a "diorama skirmish game" in a horror fantasy theme, this free ruleset caught my attention recently.

 

And the catchphrase being "The age of the living ended long ago.  Only the dead remain." gives a good impression what this game is all about.

 

 

The book, 59 pages long, starts with the outline of the idea of the setting: most importantly, everything is undead.  It uses an alternation system with action points, and is played on a small area, focussed on Narrative campaign play, and the gameboard is only 16 x 16 inches in size to encourage the diorama like tables as mentioned above.

 

The setting of the game is the Endless City, the remains of a world that is now filled with Undead, and ruled by mysterious lords like the Rotten Goddess, all ruling from their towers in the city.

 

The ruleset is meant for a 2 player skirmish system, with options for solo and co-op play.  Needless to say, I grabbed it for the second mode, the occassional solo game, with all those Undead models I acquired over the years, even the heaps of them from the various Warhammer Underworlds warbands.   Every warband counts between 1 to 8 models, and for the rest you will need some D10's and some tokens.

All measurements, in inches, are taken from the bases of the models, and at deployment your leader gets his mana which can be of three different sorts.  The turns then start, and contain 4 steps: Initiative, Gathering, Others and End.

To determine Initiative, the highest roll of a D10 wins.  In the Gathering step, starting with the player with the Initiative, models begin activating, alternating, one by one.  In the Others step all the models not part of the Gathering step activate, these are the NPC's of the game system, and this happens by bidding with your mana dice to see who gets to control them.  And the End step is just that, the end of the turn.

Models can undertake a variety of actions, all costing an Action Point or even multitudes: Move, Attack (a pretty basic system is used for this, basically D10 result - armour = damage), Pick Up Relic, Lurk (a pass action until later in the turn), Traverse, and some Free Actions for minor things that won't cost any of your AP.

The Core Rules detail some special cases that models can perform or become inflicted with, and explains most of the terms used in the game.  And then we go into the creation of your warband, always a fun thing to do in any skirmish game.  With your 300 obols, the currency in the game, you first chose or forsake a Covenant, then you buy your Leader and his minions, and finally generate a lair.  Mind that for every battle, when your warband grows, you can only bring a maximum value of 350 obols to the table!

Covenants are the "houses" of the leaders of the city, and you can choose to join one, each granting other benefits, or forsake joining one and become a Wretched Undead with their own traits.  Your Leader can be a Lich, a Revenant or an Ascended Undead (this is a big beastie taking almost all your obols to recruit), then you buy them equipment and give them their Traits.  Minions come from a variety of stereotype Undead, like Husks, small Beasts or Horrors, all encompassing multiple archetypes.  

The next section goes about spellcasting, a rather important thing when playing a heap of Necromancers after all, and again pick your spell lores and the spells that come with it, restricted by your Covenant that you picked!  Finally you get to pick your Lair, and then we are off to the scenarios.

For these, you determine a few things, like the Environment where the battle is fought.  A game normally lasts 5 turns, and you roll for the victory condition next, which also details the lay-out and number of objectives.  Dread Omens can be brought in, which affect the whole battlefield both for good and bad.  

You also pick Ambitions, which are the things your Leader is really after, the battles and opponents just being obstacles on his way to his goal, and some minor ambitions which he sees as bonusses if they are achieved in the game.  The Campaign ofcourse also has an after action phase to go through, seeing the wins and losses you obtained during the game.  Here you can also see how many ambitions and minor ambitions are completed, in order to get more treasure, and if you recruit any sellswords or even named characters to your warband...

And that's it, you can now venture into the city and vie for becoming one of the high rulers of the Undead.  I will definitly be trying this game out in the future, although I can't put my finger on when exactly... but it has me intrigued and fascinated!

See you at the first battle report!