The wild and goofy imbalances were part of the appeal. The ability to win the battle but lose the war (with post-battle rolls) was wild. And the fact that you could paint 9 models and not 60 made it much more accessible. But of course GW realized that it wanted to sell more models and so it focused on its war games and not skirmish games.
Nowadays they could do it again and make a killing selling terrain in the style of the latest LoTR stuff and releasing warbands like Warcry. Game came before the business model
Probably one of the best discussions I've heard about mordheim in quite a while..all bases covered..from lore to art to game mechanics.. excellent! We have a mordheim group here in NYC ,we play every Sunday and our numbers are growing
Thanks for the video. My favorite Mordheim memory: we had a Orc warband in our group and the poor boss ended up rolling leg wound twice, he basically had 2 peg legs and never got into combat again. One of the black orcs was the de facto leader and leveled up and became genuinely dangerous. He always hoped that his warboss would die so he could replace him, but he never did.
There was more than just Empire in Flames, through Town Cryer there was the Lustria: Cities of Gold which took us to, obviously, Lustria! There was also a Khemri: Land of the Dead expansion, of which there are two versions, there was the one published through the Town Cryer series and again on their own website with some rules and warband refinements and a couple different warbands as well! There was quite a lot of white dwarf support, too, for a splash release. I know in Australian White Dwarf there was consistent page space dedicated to it, even after Fanatic was formed to pick up the old Specialist titles.
Mordheim could be the GW game that suits me best but in 1999 I was a couple of years into my GW hiatus and college period. When I got back into Miniature games Mordheim was long gone.😢
It's funny how this game has such a great reputation now, because for the first ten years after it came out, I swear the conversation on the internet was "Why does this game not work?" and "Why could this game not succeed?" It really defined the need for non-shooting based skirmish games to do extra work to stop every battle from just ending in a scrum in the middle of the table, and also the need for actually doing the math of your game ahead of time, before release, to see if it makes sense. Like making a second hand-weapon give you +1 Attack, if you added a +1 Attack to a character's profile the designer would have doubled their recruitment cost... or just give them another club for 2GC, whatever! I like to think GW actually is keeping this game in their back pocket just in case they ever royally screw up, the stock starts to tank, they can play the Mordheim card to fix everything.
Personally, Gorkamorka was more about fun than balance. Mordheim was the most narrative driven of the Holy Trinity (Necromunda, Gorkamorka, Mordheim). All three games truly are the pinnacle of gaming for me, games that I'll play for decades to come, pass on to my children. That Mordheim is played at events such as Adepticon is a credit to Tuomos Pirinen and the team behind Mordheim.
It took me a while to sit down (actually walk to places lol) and listen to this. What a joyous thing it is, listening to you two talk about the best game ever!!!
The game system of Mordheim is much like the event that lauches it’s story: it landed and left behind a treasure trove to those who knew where to look and it is that to this day. Ich bin ein Marienburger with extra cheese and mayo!
This is an awesome breakdown and analysis of my favorite GW game. It came out when I was 4, and when I discovered it later on I was amazed at how unlike all the other GW games it is, in a good way. 🤟🏼
Tuomas comes off as an incredibly nice person too on the Trench Crusade discord. I’ve spoken with him many times and every time I’ve been impressed with how open minded and willing to make changes he is. A real professional.
I'm so glad you mentioned Roadside Picnic in this episode. I've enjoyed Mordheim since it was just a collection of white dwarf articles, and it wasn't until your Roadside Picnic episode that the similarity dawned on me.
You are the exact two people I would want to be doing a sort of retrospective on this game. I was already mildly into WH and 40K when Mordheim came out (thanks to one of those free GW mini-catalogs that used to be laid out in stores and the amazing High Elf ranger figure pictured therein) but getting that boxed set is what solidly pulled me into miniatures gaming and not just RPG's. With the excellent box contents and simple rules I was even able to get casual friends to join in, which had yet to happen again until Core Space.
There is just something about Mordheim that other games dont hit quite as well. I mean Frostgrave is excellent but doesn't have the same chaos Mordheim achieved.
Great video guys, as usual. I vividly remember also first engaging with Mordheim via WD first and then the starter, but I was too young to appreciate the thematic winks, nods and callbacks - I just liked it because it felt different and edgy (punk, like you said).
I'm hearing rumors that warcry is going to be re-launched as the new mordheim, with a starterset of cities of sigmar and new skaven. I hope it's true. With the coming of new skaven and CoS, the axing of those warcry sets and it being the 25th anniversary of OG mordheim, it would be a cool 'all coming together' moment.
I missed Mordheim as it came out during a wargaming hiatus for me, but when WarCry came out I think a lot of people thought it was the second coming of Mordheim…only to be disappointing at the lack of customisability in the warbands. If a refreshed WarCry added this back in I think it would do really well.
@@kierdalemodels I think so too. As for me, I joined the hobby after mordheim was taken off the shelves, so I never got to play. Enjoyed the video game adaptation though!
Great video with fascinating reflexions on Mordheim. I think you're really nailing it about the game designers' choice to totally go against "game balance" just for the sake of the feeling, art and atmosphere. Yes, armors are crap in Mordheim. Yes, some weapons are completely uninteresting in comparison to others. Yes, henchmen are disposable and your heroes must act cowardly if you want to have bigger gains in the aftergame campaign phase. And yes, your band can totally be destroyed just by a few bad dice rolls. Yet, what happens in game or outside of it tell a story that cling in your memories, in glory or in infamy. It would be interesting to make a comparison with Warcry, the current AoS "skirmish" game that is inspired from Mordheim but with a focus on balance instead. I still firmly believe Warcry is one of the best games GW ever made - easy to learn, quick to play and still plenty of strategy to do. But the campaign mode is made in such a way that it doesn't matter what the warriors / bands lose or gain - in the end, you can always ignore it to some level. Lose your leader ? Replace it for free ! Gain a minor artifact ? It won't last for long anyway ! Got a serious wound ? It will eventually go away ! While I love Warcry, I must say that the stories I'm telling with it are more dull and less exciting than the ones I tell with Mordheim. There's no glory in balance and fairness.
Hey Ash Messaging as I've recently discovered a new RPG called 'Lancer', and it seems right up your street. It's about Giant mechs fihgting each other, and I know how much you like giant mechs. It's a modern RPG, but the kicker is that it is almost a wargame. the combat is AMAZING, and most sessions are all about missions and fighting. Anyway I will post some links in the discord as can't do them on youtube! Best dude.
It’s got wonderful art! I’m well aware of it because they were commissioning artists around when Gamma Wolves was being laid out and we had to fight for time to book them to get art for my mech game too!
I did like the "check box" experience rather than points than used in Necromunda and Gorkamorka (certainly made bookkeeping much easier) and while you could get a bunch of random characteristic increases (like Leadership or Initiative) it was great seeing a youngblood become absolute monsters (poisoned star machine gunner Skaven). I know you can design stuff like that but I don't know if Toumas (sp?) realized it'd work so well. Of course the tarot card was great and reminded me of the WFB Magic box with all the cards and the included errata stated that the Sword of Unholy Power had a duplicate card (it was a weapon but the duplicate was a magic item) that "should be kept in a hidden/dark place". I keep mine under my mattress.
Wonder if Darkest Dungeon was influenced by Mordheim? Or I guess as you guys say that gw games were always taking influences from media at the time/pop culture. But without having played Mordheim and listing to the descriptions of it sound like it could be table top Darkest Dungeon.
Trying to find a community where I can learn to play this game. Wonder if there is a Discord or something to find groups. I asked a few game stores, but the reaction was like I was asking if anyone still plays Dreamcast.😅
I have played a fair bit of Mordheim here again recently, we had a nice campaign, ending with one player running vampires in a lair as NPCs for the big finale. Anyway, I strongly suspect that this and some other games I played in the 90's and earlier strongly formed my belief that the more you balance and form a game to be "fair" in a tournaments, the worse it is. In the end you sit there with a very expensive handpainted set of quirky-chess, and that's not very epic, is it? Mordheim does not really work to play with players who try to squeeze everything out of the rules in order to win either, "Please, you are a good friend but he's not carrying a sword and helmet in his backpack. We never even said anything about wysiwyg!" Warcry is a fun game, but the campaign rules there to keep things "balanced" knocks it down from greatness to a fine game that there's no real reason to play a campaign of, just play games with a fresh warband each time, there is no story to tell there.
Whatever it is it won’t be Mordheim. You can’t replicate the year in which it was made or the people that made it. At best I think you’d see something like the Coke Zero of Mordheim. Too many factors are outside the control of the company to replicate the experience.
