Four months of prep and the big weekend goes by all too quickly, unfortunately...
This weekend we had our annual Mordheim campaign/tournament. I've been doing this for quite a while now, probably about 10 years.
When it first started, I was still doing most of my gaming in a local game store, so me and some of the other customers from the shop would organize a campaign once a year. This was after the game had already gone out of print, so it wasn't too popular at the store - with either the customers, OR the owner! Fortunately he was a nice enough guy and didn't have a problem with us playing there... after all, people could always buy Warhammer miniatures to play Mordheim (when there was still a Warhammer Fantasy Battles).
As my local gaming buddies got older we all started buying houses - which meant we could play at home! At that point we started taking turns going to each others' houses and trying to get games in about once a month. We are lucky enough that a few of us in our group have dedicated game rooms.
There were two problems with this - first, some of my best friends are not local. And second, even the ones that are local have a hard time committing to playing a game once a month! Kids, work, houses, etc.
A few years ago we started doing it as a marathon gaming weekend once a year. Mordheim works best as a campaign game, so you always want to get several games in rather than play it as a one-off. So we pick a long weekend and hole up for a couple of days of non-stop gaming!
This year I tried to run a map-based campaign set in Lustria. It worked OK, but I think we had too many map locations for the number of players in the campaign. This was compounded by a couple of last minute dropouts, and meant that there were more turns than I would have liked where certain warbands had to "sit out" because they did not encounter any enemies on the map.
As usual, I managed to finish the warbands and terrain I'd been working on at the eleventh hour. Here is the spawning pool I used for the "Mirror Pool of Tepok" scenario:
It looks much better (and more like a Mirror Pool) with a coat of gloss varnish on the water! I think it was literally still drying when the first player arrived.
Here are the last few Norse I painted for my warband. They were older painted models that I just had to touch up and add shields to. I painted them about 15 years ago - I am glad the style still fit in with the ones I painted last month, but a little disappointed too actually! I guess I have not improved too much over 15 years, haha...
And the two new warbands for this year, in all their glory.
Norse:
Nurgle:
I really liked the way the Nurgle heroes came out, and their warband leader became the thorn in everyone's side during the campaign!
We ended up with a nice mix of warbands: Amazons, Lizardmen, Norse, Carnival of Chaos (Nurgle), Skaven, 2 different Orc warbands, and Dark Elves.
I used the table and temple buildings I had scratchbuilt (modeled after Tulum in Mexico) that you can see here:
Along with a whole bunch of new Mats and prepainted aquarium terrain for the Temple Cities and various monuments on the map.
Without further ado, here are some pics from the weekend!
