Playing Warhammer with Midgard Heroic Battles

I’ve been talking a decent amount about Midgard Heroic Battles over the last few posts, and that’s unlikely to change as I’ve been thoroughly enjoying the game. Part of what’s made it fun for me has been the flexibility and general simplicity of the ruleset. It’s meant that for the last few weeks, units that I haven’t put on the battlefield for years have been taking part in some really fun games.

While most games we’ve played so far have been Lord of the Rings themed, we’ve been wondering if the rules would work well for games in the Warhammer setting. While we enjoy the new Warhammer the Old World rules, they’re quite complex and don’t necessarily make for a beginner friendly game. We have a few friends in our gaming group that are not wargamers (board games and roleplaying games are their usual fare), and haven’t really been interested in playing Warhammer before. They have however been enjoying the games of Midgard we’ve been playing, and have been happy to play more, which is great news for me!

This week I had a few of those friends over and we played a big game involving four armies: a loose alliance of Skaven and Undead against Dwarves and Bretonnians. Two of the players were wargaming novices, one is relatively new, and one is an enfranchised wargamer. I was running the game as a games master. Despite the lack of experience of most of the players, and the relatively large size of the game, we comfortably got through the game in an evening which is a testament to the rules.

The scenario I set up was as follows: the Skaven and Undead armies needed to hold onto a warpstone meteor while the Dwarf/Bretonnian alliance needed to get them clear of it. To spice things up some, I placed four isolated trees on the board (i.e. not on the forest bases), and after turn one revealed them to actually be treemen who were generally opposed to the idea of big battles being fought in their forests and went after whatever unit was closest. Despite this extra chaos the game was extremely close and ended with both sides within a single reputation point of each other (reputation tracks your force morale, if it’s at or below 0 at the end of the turn, you lose the game). The Skaven/Undead forces won the day, but it really could have gone either way.

Overall, the game was a success I’d say, all the players enjoyed themselves, the game was fun, and it generally felt like playing Warhammer without the big rules overhead. What was missing however was some of that Warhammer atmosphere that is generated by things such as wizards miscasting and Skaven wargear blowing up. Midgard as a low-fantasy/historical wargame does not really cater for this out of the box, but it is easy enough to add some house rules to capture this, and I’ll be doing that going forwards.

After this successful foray into playing Warhammer with Midgard, I’ve been excited about the possibilities. As I said in the opener, Midgard is a very flexible game system, and looks to be able to cater for some of the more esoteric things that can be found in the Warhammer setting and are not catered for in the normal Warhammer rules. With that in mind I’ve been reading through the late 80s/early 90s Realm of Chaos books which are probably about as esoteric as Warhammer gets (I’m sure I’ll be shown something more esoteric in the comments!), and having a great time imagining what that could look like in a game of Midgard.

Needless to say some of this energy was redirected towards miniature painting, and in this case towards this Chaos Sorcerer that I found in a case while scrounging for Chaos models for my Midgard/Realm of Chaos plans.

This is a really cool model that was released for Games Day 2010, and that I bought back then. It’s therefore been undercoated in a case for 15 years, and I was well past time I got some paint on him!

I had some fun with the skin (especially the parts with the extra limbs!). I’ve been trying to work on painting darker skin tones and I’d picked up some of the Duncan Rhodes/Two Thin Coats paints made for this purpose (Druid Flesh and Bard Skin). I really like how they worked, although I did feel they needed a touch of extra warmth so I glazed some Citadel Contrast Wyldwood over the top which did the trick.

The model has a lot of nice little details on it which were great fun to paint, the small hand holding the key to the book being my favourite.

I’m sure we’ll see this Sorcerer lead a Midgard contingent at some stage!