Back To Frostgrave

We played a four-plyer game of Frostgrave yesterday, using our Diet Frostgrave rules. These are designed to give a quicker game with four players: each warband is limited to a wizard and an apprentice and four soldiers, and there are only two phases to a player turn - Wizard Phase and Everyone Else. I think the GP costings of the warband are reduced as well but I've not read the rules so I'm not sure exactly what the changes are there. 

Anyway, Ed set up a lovely section of city for us to explore. There were four items of treasure up for grabs, and wizards and apprentices could gain wisdom by drinking from the fountain in the centre of the board as well. Drinking was OK. Falling in wasn't. Falling in was Very Bad. 

I ran a similar warband to my first game last year. I had an illusionist, Fabulina, with her new apprentice (the previous one died), an archer and a couple of kobold thieves. Instead of an armoured swordsman I opted for a barbarian. Here's Fabulina.

And here she is with the barbarian and one of the thieves wandering through the city. 

I'm not sure what Ed was using but his group covered their flanks with magically generated walls. 

My apprentice and the archer took up positions atop a building (left), whilst Fabulina and the barbarian headed for the fountain. A kobold thief had already grabbed a treasure chest and was dragging it back to the start line. 

When you grab treasure in Frostgrave it can cause wandering monsters to appear. They appear randomly, which is why a ghoul popped up right on my kobold's escape route.

Fabulina cast her trademark Transpose spell, swapping the positions of the ghoul and the kobold. THis allowed the barbarian to charge in.

The ghoul killed the barbarian, leaving Fabulina in close proximity to an angry ghoul. 

However Caesar had an archer on a nearby building so a quick transpose put Fabulina on the building and the archer in the path of the ghoul. 

However the swift archer ran off, and the nearest treat the ghoul could see was my apprentice atop a building. An apprentice who was very surprised to see a ghoul clamber over the edge and attack him. 

So another transpose swapped the archer with the apprentice. 

The archer killed the ghoul. 

Meanwhile my kobold had got the treasure off the table. 

At this stage I decided that it was unlikely that I was going to get a drink from the fountain, since there were a lot of people around it intent on killing each other and anyone else who appeared. However Fabulina did magically push one of Caesar's soldiers into the fountain. A well that is clearly marked 'Do Not Fall Into This Fountain As Exposure Will Cause Weird Magical Death'. The soldier suffered the advertised Weird Magical Death. 

Anyway, things wound down after that, and the survivors of each warband headed home. A few peripheral incidents though ...

My archer lost his bow to a decay spell. So he headed across the rooftops towards Ed's archer intent on taking his bow. He won it after a brutal knife-fight atop a rickety ladder. 

Ed's warband was seriously mauled by a wild dog that turned up close by. 

And my apprentice sneaked back for a quick drink from the fountain and was shot in the back by Caesar's much transposed archer. 

Anyway it appears that future games are going to be part of a linked campaign, so we tested for all kinds of post-game stuff. I got a decent experience total from casting spells, but missed out of the big points from the fountain. I picked up a few coins from the treasure and some robes that will protect someone from arrows. So that was nice. It also turns out that my dead barbarian and dead apprentice were just mostly dead, and a quick miracle sorted them out ready for the next adventure. 

Everyone else got money and nice toys as well. 

Frostgrave

I played my first game of Frostgrave last night. It's a fantasy skirmish game in which you play a magician, their apprentice and a merry band of hangers-on venturing into a lost city in search of treasure. Whilst the city has dangers of its own, the biggest problem is that other magicians also have the same idea as you.

In our case there were five such bands of treasure-hunters.

Here's mine. Led by Fabulina, an illusionist, they were: Salaris (her apprenctice), Saran (a brutal skilled fighter), Yalan (an archer), Klin and Klest (a couple of Kobold thieves-for-hire).

(Apparently a full Frostgrave warband consists of the wizard, the apprentice and eight followers. We kept the forces small for this game.)

We were exploring this magnificent set of ruins, produced by the talented Ed. Dotted around it are five stashes of treasure.

My crew sets off down an alley.

Towards the top of the picture, Daniel had magicked a thief next to the pile of treasure on the roof of the quarter-circle building.

My team ambled through the ruins, and exchanged some harsh words (and an arrow or two) with Caesar's gang.

However Fabulina could see Daniel's thief on the roof, and used her Transpose spell to swap him with one of the kobold thieves.

The other kobold thief, and the archer, butchered the somewhat surprised opposition thief.

Salaris and the swordsman Saran did for one of Caesar's men. He should have stayed in his own bit of the board.

When you pick up treasure it may generate wandering beasties. One of these was a large boar, which attacked Ed's archer. They fought for several turns and the board was at death's door when it got in a lucky blow and eviscerated the archer.

Fabulina used her Transpose spell a couple more times. First she used it to bring Klest (and the treasure) back to the safety of the crew. However you also need to get it off teh board and it slows movement, Klin was sent to the nearest board-edge and then the treasure-carrying Klest was swapped with him.

Klest barely took a step of his own all game.

Here's Klest with the treasure

Elsewhere Caesar's barbarian was stuck in a long fight with some of Stuart's men. Every time the barbarian was brought close to death his accompanying magician's apprentice healed him. And so the fight dragged on for most of the game.

One of Caesar's men dispatched another wandering monster.

Caesar's crew. They'd got a lump of treasure off the table and were working on a second. I sent some of my men to try and stop this, but they couldn't catch the hunter. Caesar got two loads of treasure off the table.

Meanwhile my apprentice tried to heal himself, failed the casting roll and took damage sufficient to kill him. He was my only casualty (although Fabulina had taken some damage, mostly self-inflicted from all that spell-casting).

Anyway, that was all I took photos of. The game was actually very busy (as you'd expect with five teams in play), and lots of spells were flying around. 

At the end Caesar was the winner with two of the five treasures. Ed and I got one each and, by the end, Daniel and Stuart were still squabbling over the fifth stash, so agreed to split it.

The game was a lot of fun, with what would seem on the surface to be a standard fantasy skirmish game actually very much driven by the use of magic.