Let's Review: Deth Wizards

 

What is it?:

Deth Wizards is a skirmish miniatures game that can be played solo, cooperatively, and standard skirmish with players duking it out.

 

The setting:

Deth Wizards is set in the kingdom of Deth, a once typical fantasy world with kings, villagers, paladins, wizards, and the like. And necromancers. You take control of one of these necromancers, cast out for your dark interests, and have now returned to the kingdom of Deth, to cause havoc and have some revenge!

One interesting thing about this setting is how there seems to be something wrong with the land now. In the lore, there’s talk of how the sun doesn’t shine fully or for as long as it used to. And the land is becoming fallow. I imagine it’s because of the return of the necromancers, but who knows?

 

The system:

To start, you’re going to make a Necromancer. You get to pick a spread of stats, a legacy, and then some powers of your choice. The legacy is how you figure out what “kind” of necromancer you’re playing. Some build up hordes of cheap zombies and skeletons, while others are drawn to the spirit type of undead. There’s only six of these legacies, but you can put a spin on them with the stats and powers.

When it comes to powers, you’re going to have powers that boost your necromancer and those that boost your undead minions, but there’s some that can effect the enemies you’ll be facing. You only get to pick three, after the three everyone, and the ones you might get from your legacy. While you can pick up so more powers and abilities later, it’s really hard to pick just three powers to start off with, especially when you’re just getting started. I’d suggest playing a game or two before setting everything in stone.

The next part of getting ready for the game is picking your minions. Minions have a rating, which will roughly tell you how powerful they are. The higher the rating, the more powerful the minion is. However, that will also depend on your necromancer and your play style. Sure, zombies are low rating and hard to put down, but are slow as hell. This is another thing you should play test before you pick them for sure. Since I tend to play horde style in most games, I know I had to switch myself away from zombies, because of how slow they were, when coupled with the other stuff I wanted to take.

The final part of making your necromancer is selecting a lair for your necromancer. There’s only three of these, and they provide a few abilities, a cap for the amount of undead you can have, and a limit of improvements you can make. You’ll need to leave some undead behind, because your lair can get attacked between games, which you don’t play, you just roll for. And I think that’s kind of lame. I’d rather than it be a thing you play or it doesn’t happen until you reach a certain level of power.

Each mini has a series of stats, the usual ones that you can expect. You’ve got move, Offense, Defense, Resist, and Durability. For the most part, you should be able to puzzle these out and you’ll be rolling d10s equal to the number you have in a stat, with the enemy’s stat being your meet-or-beat on the dice. Resist is the stat you’ll use when you’re trying to effect an enemy model with one of your necromantic powers. Given how you can play against other people, you should think about this as well when picking your minions, if you’re going to being playing that way.

One interesting thing about the game is how your necromancer’s health works. You don’t have any. Instead, you have energy that’s used to power your spells and is how you take damage. Once you run out, you’ll start draining power from the nearest of your minion, continuing until you spread the damage around. I think this is an interesting and unique way of handling this, regaining power isn’t easy. At the start of the turn, you gain 3 energy. That’s the cost of most powers. Your necromancer is going to activate at least twice in a turn, able to move, attack, or cast a power each time, so you’re going to be burning power quickly if you’re going to be running out of it before too long. There’s too other ways to regain power: kill a minion or collect energy from killing enemies. Regaining energy by killing your minions might be a good idea for a minion that’s already badly hurt, but you only gain energy equal to the minion’s rating. That’s 1-4 energy. For the necromancer that’s quote Caligula (Quantity has a quality all its own), you’re boned, getting only 1-2 energy. And to collect energy from a dying enemy, you have to be within 3” of the enemy when it dies. So, you decided to go for a long-range necromancer with a horde of cheap minions, you are screwed for energy. You need to be in the face of the enemy if you want to use more than one power each turn, and if you expect to heal damage. Clearly, the way that the creators what to play the game shines through here. 

As I mentioned at the beginning, you can play one of three ways: Solo, co-op, and skirmish. For the most part, solo and co-op are played the same, just with some slight changes for additional people. In this version of the game, you pick a scenario (attack innocent villagers, raiding a castle, and robbing a graveyard, just name a few) and then set it up. As common with Snarling Badger games, the terrain is the same from Reign in Hell, with crags, forests, and pools of water. What makes this version of the game so interesting to me is that they have “AI” enemies. These enemies are the typical “heroes” you’d see in other games; paladins, priests, rangers, and so on. When they get to go, you roll a d10 and see what they’re going to do this turn. This can be absolutely brutal, if you get the worst result at the wrong time. And there’s a lot of enemies you’ll have to face in a game. Unfortunately, the scenarios are mostly “attack this place, face ever increasing enemies, and try to kill everything in five turns.” Which is going to get boring quickly. And requires certain type of terrain (anyone got a “magical college” building laying around?), which is a bit taxing. Also, you either kill everything in five turns or you lose. There’s no minor victories. There’s only succeed, really succeed, or do it again harder and get even more success, or you lose. That’s it. It’s all shades of success or total failure.

And while there is the skirmish version of the game, it’s much more “roll dice to see what we’re fighting over and how we win” which doesn’t feel engaging. I admit that I haven’t read all of the rules about it, as I picked this game up for the co-op or solo play, because that’s what interests me. That said, it’ll be nice to try out, once I finish the campaign in the rest of the book.

After you’ve finished a game, there’s a roll to see if your minion has survived (even if you blew it up, which some necromancers can do), which is pet peeve of mine. After that, you get to choose to raise one new undead. You can either choose to create a new minion from the list at the beginning, or you can raise one of the heroes you defeated. When you try to raise a new minion, you roll a die and hope for the best. Some of the scenarios give you an automatic success on some type of minion or a bonus on the roll. It does it easier to succeed the more you fail. When it comes to raising a hero, you get a hero with the abilities it has, with the rating equal to what it had when it died, but it loses all the AI stuff. I do like how you get a choice of what you want to do, it’s really nice to customize what kind of force you can build. Once you’re done with this, you can spend any experience you were able to earn to get more powers, select some abilities, or save it up. And then you can improve your lair, every other game. The bookkeeping isn’t too much but it seems to be a little too random for me. 

 

Is it worth it?:

Yes, if you have the stuff for it. If you’ve got an evil wizard mini and some undead monsters, go for it. It’ll be a fun change of pace for you. If you’re looking to be evil, there’s a lot of evil stuff to do. It’s less than $20 for a physical and digital copy.

However, the game isn’t a hard, crunchy system. Stuff is really swingy and I bet you could math your way into the best minions to take for every scenario. It’s an indie game, it’s going to be flawed, so you have to be ready for that. It’s more about fun than setting or rules. And that might not be the best for everyone. Plus, it’s not going to be much for replaying after you finish the campaign once or twice, or play the skirmish version a dozen times.

Let's Review: Pulp!

 What is it?:

Pulp! Is a skirmish miniatures game that aims to replicate the feeling of old books and movies from the “pulp era” of media.

 

 The setting:

As mentioned above, the setting isn’t really one, but a genre instead. The book references a few of the more famous pulp series and media, but they do include two scenarios in the book. One is about a New Rome thing being discovered and the other is about ninjas and poison during the WW2 era. Otherwise, it’s up to you to come up with something.

 

The system:

The game is based around pools of d6’s, with the number and amount depending on a few things.

When it comes to the amount of models you’re going to have, it’s going to depend, but it recommends that you start with maybe a dozen models. Each of these models are going to have a rank, which is going to be the main factor in how many models you’re going to have and how good they’re going to be. To put it simply, the more powerful the unit is, the fewer models it will have. In the beginning of the book, they recommend one Hero/Villain model (or two), one or two 2-Model Elite or Veteran units, and three 3-Model Seasoned units. And we come to one of my first problems with the game. It doesn’t clearly state that you should have either one Elite Unit or two Veteran units, plus I don’t think this really reflects Pulp genre stuff. Usually, in the old serials and films, you’d have a main hero, a “trusty sidekick”, maybe a love interest and maybe a scientist or “Kenny” (young kid that’s going to cause problems but also be helpful) for the heroes. The villains were usually the main villain, be it the king, the priest, or whatever, and then a second in command (who might be traitorous), and a bunch of grunts. By requiring both sides to be matched like this, it doesn’t quite line up with how we see most stuff in the old stuff. Hell, even modern stuff doesn’t have things like this.

Anyway. Once you pick your models, you get to equip them. After a few games to learn the rules, which is fair. Models can have one ranged weapon, one melee weapon, and one explosive. In addition to the stuff you’d expect (pistols, knives, grenades, etc), they do have a nice list of Mad Science or Alien Technology weapons, with is kind of cool. I say you could also make them into spells or super powers, if you need them. That said, there are some special powers that a unit/model can use a few times per game. There’s a fairly sized list of them, but it’s not well organized, and they do have that “roleplaying element” where your Heroes can pick from a list of things that limits what general powers you can use, but also gives you another power instead. One the other side of that, there’s a list of drawbacks that you can use to balance it out. Not that this game really cares about balance, but it at least gives it lip service.

The game is broken down into several different phases in a turn, like a lot of games, based around movement, combat, and typical end of turn stuff. However, one thing that makes this game a little different is the “continuing combat” phase at the start of the turn, for hand to hand fights that hasn’t been resolved yet. When it comes to picking your actions, there’s a lot of leeway in how much you can move and what you can and can’t do in the next phases depending on what you choose to do. Out of everything they have, this is one thing that I like the most. Getting to choose between moving zero and four inches for the same action is really nice, because it reduces the sense of urgency or need to “do something” when you’re trying to set things up, and might make it harder for an opponent to guess what your plan is based on what action you’ve picked. Plus, I think I rather enjoy combined actions these days.

Now, on to some of the stuff that I feel like doesn’t quite work with this game. While you do have a rather nice list of classic wild and savage animals (yes, including dinosaurs) to include in games if you want to, I don’t feel like the rules work quite as well as I would like them. I can’t explain exactly what it is about them, but it’s just not clicking for me. And, as much as this game wants to be like character driven game, there’s no real rules for experience and campaigns. Part of this is because of the loose rules they have, but it’s also the fact that this game is trying to be everything to everyone, which is the downside of “universal” games and settings. What compounds this for me is the fact that the scenarios they give you are more outlines than real scenarios. While this is great for the intent of the game, as you don’t know what kind of games and settings your players are going to come up with, you can’t really give them firm games to play. There’s also several variations they discuss, should you be trying to run a campaign. Not that you can, not like other games, because there’s nothing but an outline of an idea of how to improve models and groups.

 

Is it worth it?:

If you have the models already, and it’s on sale, yes. Otherwise, probably not. Honestly, this feels unfinished or cut short. It’s almost there but there’s too much missing for me. I swear, it’s got to be that full page art that Osprey uses that must be cutting down the page count just enough to leave things undone.

Honestly, it reminds me a lot of Zona Alfa. However, ZA has two supplements that make it better, which is where it feels like the author wanted to take it, but didn’t have the space. If this game could do the same, I’d put this as a firm yes.

I only picked up this game because I’d heard really good things about it and I’ve been on the hunt for a good Pulpy game. Nothing in what I found pointed out the problems I found, which is a shame, because I’m still hunting for that game…

Random Update: Making terrain

 Okay, it's been way too long since I've updated here. I have been working on things here and there, but sitting down at the keyboard has been a little hard to do. So I thought I'd share some terrain I made. I may do a How To article about it in the future, but time will tell.

If you're curious, I found one of those novelty check in a Dumpster years ago and bough it home. Over the years, I've used about 2/3 of it now, as well as some other pieces I've been able to find here and there. I do have a lot more projects I'd like to do, too.

First off, let me explain how I started. I drew some outlines on a piece of card stock and then used them as a template on the piece of foamcore, trying to fit as many of them on there as I could. All in all, I think I did a decent job.

Here's a picture of the pile I ended up with:

With this done, I started using some bones I picked up at the Dollar Tree, some tropical trees I ordered on Amazon, and then some rocks that came in a bag of stuff I also ordered on Amazon. That is something I'll need to talk about in the future, too...

Anyway, here's what it looked like when I finished:

Now, that pile to the right is everything left over. That circle piece is about 6" around, so I'm setting aside in case I need something in the future. The thing in the back with the skull and bones is going to be used as a "Shrine" in Reign in Hell (when I get a chance to play that again). 

When it came to making the various "forests," I wanted to have them work as terrain, rather than have them look realistic. That's why they have trees around the edges and not in the middle. To break them up a little bit, I used the rocks and bones. I also made a thing of bones to act as area terrain, as well as the collection of rocks. I left some of the smaller pieces aside to be used as some ponds or pools.

I also made myself a little graveyard.

Yeah, I know, I should have left some more space along that one edge. I don't care.

Anyway. The next step is putting some sand on them, putting down some primer, and then painting everything up. I already have some craft paint I've been using for other terrain, but I might wait until I grab a kind of sandy yellow color instead of the browns I've been using. 

Before all of that, I have a lot of other pieces I've put together that are further along, so it'll be some time before you get to see the finished product. If there's anyone actually reading this, let me know if you want to see some more of the terrain I've thrown together and I'll share it.