Creating a Warband - 14 Tips.pdf - Tactics - RPG

14 Tips on Warband Creation

by: Donato Ranzato

For those of you who don't know, Donato helps to run Games Workshop's UK

Website. He has also contributed quite a bit to Mordheim by various articles in

Town Cryer. He maintains his own website which you can reach by clicking here.

Donato initially wrote this to the Lustria design group to give us some guidelines

to follow when creating the Lustria Warbands. I saved it in my email and thought

that others could benefit from his words of wisdom. So here it is. ~Galtero

Hello, Below I will give some suggestions that you can keep in mind when you

are evaluating and/or writing Warbands. These are also the things I look out for

when reading through submitted Warbands. The list is not in a specific sequence:

1. Keep warriors with special abilities/rules to a minimum.

2. Decide on the primary strength of the Warband (eg, shooting or close combat

or average in both).

3. Try to include at least one weak and cheap troop type (eg, Nightrunners,

Zombies, Youngbloods).

4. Try to keep to 5 special skills for the Warband.

5. If the Warband has access to Magic spells or Prayers, try to include some

weak spells/prayers.

6. Watch out for an arms race (eg, if you decide a "normal" good warrior has WS

5, what kind of WS would Vampires have?).

7. If the Warband is good in both shooting and close combat then keep the

maximum size to around 12.

8. If the warband is only good in one thing then raise the Warband size to 20.

9. Try not to let the Warband have an advantage from the start (eg, if the fluff

says that they are good explorers make that into a special skill).

10. If the Warband is average overall with 2 or more weak troop types then give it

a "Heavy Hitter" (Ogre, Troll, etc.).

11. Don't try to translate the complete armybook into a Warband, but decide on a

theme, region or race.

12. Try to keep the amount of Heroes to five. Four and six should be exceptions.

Don't give the Warband less then 4 Hero types or more then 6.

13. If you decide to give a warrior type a special rule or ability then see if a

weapon or equipment does roughly the same and then add the cost of that piece

of equipment to the basic cost of that type of warrior (eg, If you give Saurus

Braves "scaly skin" which is roughly the same as Heavy Armour then add 50 gc

to their basic cost).

14. And finally KISS (Keep It Simple Stupid!).

Well, these are the ones that I could come up with from the top of my head.

Hopefully they are useful to some of you on the list.

-Donato Ranzato

Creating a Warband - 14 Tips.pdf