Hear ye! Hear ye!
Today's the terrible day that we all knew had to come eventually.
I can't keep calling this game GRIMLITE, so everybody's favourite game of apocalyptic horror hunting is now The Doomed and a couple of the factions have had a new coat of paint.
As mentioned on my stream, this game will be getting some serious attention soon, with a proper release on the horizon. Our future is full of doom and horrors.
I've just split GRIMLITE into two documents. The first is the booklet-sized rulebook, complete with faction rosters and campaign rules, and the other is just the Horrors/Scenes that can be printed separately and mix-and-matched together.
The selfish reason for this is because I'm sick of reprinting the whole thing whenever I add a new Horror/Scene, but I also just want to write a lot more of them. I'm aiming for 36 of each, doubling what's in there right now, but I've no idea if this is realistic.
They're straightforward enough to write, but I want each of them to feel unique. Each should break a rule somewhere, or do something that makes them stand clearly apart from the others. I have a big notes document where I scribble down these ideas, with Horrors usually starting as a quirk of how they'll play, with the flavour moulded around this concept.
So let's do now now, because apparently I need to write 18 more.
Looking down my list of concepts there are three that I'd like to work on:
If you're interested in seeing how the recent changes to GRIMLITE at working out in play, you can see me running through a game here.
In short, the game feels much more about Horror now. Both the monstrous Horrors that chase you around the table and the lurking atmosphere that this world doesn't have much hope of a happy ending. I've got some of that tone across in the Factions, but I wanted to add in some of those little flavour bombs that can happen between games.
Some miniature games have entire secondary game systems for what happens between battles, but I've always known that wasn't the right direction for GRIMLITE. The whole "No Stacking, No Tracking" philosophy had to extend to this side of the game too.
It's more about Flavour. For a while I considered making it pure flavour, like you just rolled to see what happened to your Warband between battles and got a little bit of fluff. But I wanted it to connect to the game without giving you another thing to track at the table.
So these events should focus on what you're actually doing before each battle, building your warband. They generally aren't going to make you outright weaker or stronger, but give you an additional option to consider or, more likely, a restriction to force you to build your Warband differently to how they looked last time.
Let's see how it looks in its first iteration.
This forgotten land is still changing, always being pulled between five forces. Not the factions, but the very elements of reality on this husk world.
They pull towards five dooms, shaping our torture on the way.
HUNGER - Survival is all that matters now. There isn’t enough for all of us, so take with both hands and gorge deep.
HATRED - Nothing gives purpose like an enemy, and there’s plenty of blame to go around for our current condition.
CONTROL - The world needs strong leadership, and complete submission from those below.
DEATH - The only constant we can rely on is the welcome embrace of death. We should be thankful, and hurry along to our journey’s end.
RUIN - This world has been left without a purpose. The natural decay into rust and embers must be allowed to proceed at its own pace.
Element Trackers
Make a Track for each of the Elements, beginning at 0 and with a maximum of 6.
World Events
Between each battle, roll a die to determine which Element is in force at this moment.
1. Hunger
2. Hatred
3. Control
4. Death
5. Ruin
6. Whichever is highest on its Track. Players break ties.
Turn to the Event table for that Element, with each Warband rolling a die and adding the number on the Element Track to determine the event.
These Events often put a limit on how you build your Warband for the next battle, so they are best used for campaigns that want to embrace this extra challenge.
After all Warbands have rolled, add 1 to that Element’s Track.
When a Track hits 6 then that Element’s Climax is initiated. This Scenario is carried out just as with a normal Climax and has a special objective that all Warbands are trying to achieve. The Warband that achieves it wins the campaign. If no Warband achieves the Objective then the campaign ends as a loss for all Warbands.
Unless specifically mentioned, Element Events only affect the next battle.
HUNGER EVENTS
1: Poor Harvest: Your potential recruits have left or died. You cannot buy units from your Faction list for the next battle unless they were in the previous battle.
2:Thieves: Your suppliers were cleaned out. You cannot buy equipment from your Faction list for the next battle other than what you had in the previous battle.
3:Traitor: A random Follower in your Warband has abandoned your cause for a better deal. Your opponent can recruit them in the next battle if they wish.
4: Resource Hoarding: Nobody is sharing anything. Any units you are rebuying from the last battle must keep all equipment they were carrying.
5: Feral Beasts: Choose 1-3 Beasts to deploy anywhere on the board as Unbound units. They treat all other units as enemies, even other Beasts.
Beast (Fierce 5+,T2x1)
6: Brief Respite: For just a moment there is enough to go around. You eat among friends and all Warbands in the campaign gain 1 Renown.
7: Uneven Portions: Those that eat last at your table are beginning to feel unfairly treated. Any QL5+ units you bring to the battle only perform 2 Actions on their first turn.
8: Encroaching Wilderness: The trails between settlements grow wilder every day, making them especially difficult for the heavily armoured. In this battle you cannot field followers with Tough unless they also have Nimble.
9: Savage World: Every day your followers get more feral and desperate. You may replace any Skill with Fierce.
10+: Extinction: A Settlement you planned to visit has been overrun with choking vines and hostile creatures, cutting off a vital supply. Permanently remove access to 2 Follower types and 2 pieces of Gear from your Faction list.
This is all in the latest version of GRIMLITE, and I'm interested to see how it plays out as a long form narrative. I suspect it may be a bit brutal in places, so there will be plenty of tuning-up to be done.
It's tricky to have a large variety of events that don't add more complexity to the actual battle, and I've let a few things slip through the net there (the Feral Beasts and Uneven Portions Events), but I'm hoping they don't tip the balance to making things too complicated.
The intention is that most Campaigns will end with a regular player-initiated Climax, with the winner of that final showdown being the ultimate winner of the campaign. But I like the idea of this building threat in the background. It'll probably be fine, but it's lurking there in case the dice feel cruel or you delay too long in your own ambitions.
The actual Elemental Climax Scenario is going to be a single scenario, with a twist dependant on which of the Elements reached the top of its track. Expect that to show up in the doc in the next week or so.
So after being tied up for most of January, I'm back onto GRIMLITE.
Since their arrival in the game, Horrors have felt pretty central to GRIMLITE's identity. Fighting your friends is fun, but throwing down a terrifying monster between the two of you makes things even more interesting.
But I sort of wanted them to be more horrific. Not just big scary things to be avoided, but even more firmly planted at the core of your warband's story.
So let's look at how Horrors have been shoved into the spotlight for this latest version of the game. I'll get there soon, but it all starts with Glory Tokens.
I'd been thinking a lot about the Glory Tokens that acted as both battlefield objectives and currency to spend between battles. They worked okay, but it felt a bit familiar and safe. Dare I say boring?
GRIMLITE diverges from the norm in so many other areas. Am I missing something more interesting I could be doing with this structure?
I guess it all comes down to victory and rewards.
To quote Sean McCoy from this post talking about introducing a High Score system to Mothership:
Finally, the hardest beast to kill: Your character’s Level. I love levels, I love the sound of a “Level 3 character.” I like the way they make me think of video games and progressing to new levels. But I think there’s a new phrase from video games we can steal to have a great impact on Mothership: The High Score.
So, instead of Level, which is just sort of an abstract measure of power used as a holdover from D&D. Let’s just cut straight to the arcade and call it your “High Score.” And let’s have that score increase by 1 every time you play a session.
This tracks something that, to me, is really interesting. It just very simply tells you how long the character has been played. This is a survival horror game, how long has your character survived? And can you beat that number next time? Got a level 0 character? Oh tonight is your first night. Meeting a level 53 character? Whoa, you’ve seen some shit.
Obviously Mothership isn't even the same type of game as GRIMLITE, but it sums up an attitude I've wanted to explore for a while now.
Maybe some victories are just victories.
Winning at the Olympics gets you a medal, you don't suddenly unlock a new pole-vaulting technique. But you still want that medal, right?
Tying victory to your Warband's growth in power, and failure to its potential decline, sounds like it would generate some good drama. It sometimes does, but in practice I've found it far too unreliable. At times I even found it was outright sucking the drama out of a situation. Glory was so valuable that I found myself playing safe, doing the "play to win" thing rather than the "play to find out what happens" thing, stressing about the rules. Everything I wanted to avoid with GRIMLITE.
So how do I want to treat victories in this game?
Winning should be, to a certain point, its own reward. You're playing to win because you want to beat your friend at the game, and you want your beloved miniatures to succeed.
BUT you want your warband to change over time, and ideally their history of success/failure should dictate this as you move through the campaign.
To summarise the changes:
There's a shift towards a looser style of play in some of those changes, but I figure I need to start walking the walk with regards to Kitbash Attitude. I want to embrace the stuff that I love about this sort of game, and break the obstacles that get in the way. This is not a tournament game.
I want you to be afraid of the Horrors, but I don't want you to be afraid of permanently stalling your warband by having a few bad defeats and bad luck on the Casualty rolls.
Remember, this is all about the Horrors. All these changes above sound nice and generous, but really they're just allowing me to make Horrors that are actually horrifying.
So now we've got all that reward stuff of that out of the way, and we're all going into the game with a fresh attitude of "play to find out what happens". Well, that means now we can really unleash the Horrors and makes them truly nasty.
Previously, Horrors sat separate to the two scenario halves, and felt like a sort of icing on the cake. The Mission gave you the main objective you were focusing on, and the Scene gave you a smaller secondary objective and a random event at the end of each turn.
Some involved killing Horrors to gain Glory, but often the Horrors were just there to threaten you and get in the way. Again, this worked just fine, but I want them to feel more impactful, like the Horror might be the most important thing about the scenario you're playing.
In the new version, Scenarios are still split in two, but this time into the Horror and the Scene.
The Horror half gives you a (usually) singular Horror that you're trying to defeat, like a beefed up version of the Greater Horrors from past versions.
They might also have some Minions that are closer to the old Lesser Horrors.
But most importantly, three Nexuses are deployed. These could be nests, graves, abyssal breaches, but they're something that's keeping the Horror alive and corrupting their environment.
Horrors cannot be killed until all three Nexuses are destroyed. So we're going hard into that boss-fight feeling.
Oh, and rather than the Scene giving you random events, you now roll a random event for the Horror at the end of the Round, giving them one last sting in the tail.
It gives a lot more design space to make a monster feel unique. So far there are 6 and they all do their own thing.
The Devourer is the simplest, being the introductory Horror. Its gluttonous hoarding has attracted a swarm of vermin to the area, and destroying these stashes only makes the Devourer more furious.
The Warped Hunters are a trinity of unique alien jerks that act as each other's Nexuses, so you can only kill any of them once you've wounded all of them. They're so arrogant that sometimes just wounding one of them will leave the rest of them shaken, or could motivate them to raise their game.
The Abyssal Colossus doesn't start on the board, but emerges from the first of the Abyssal Breaches that you destroy. Unfortunately there's no way to close these breaches without being blasted with its unnatural energy, so choose somebody tough or expendible.
The Winter Harvester (pictured above) revels in death, and the death of any unit makes this Horror and their Pale Knights stronger for the rest of the Round. The Knights guard their graves, and giving them a proper death is the only way to seal their souls away and eventually take on the Harvester. This one is probably busted, too difficult, but it's good to have something to aim for.
The Chameleoid spends half of the battle off the board, with the Nexuses representing illusory shadows that could be acting as their hiding place. You never know for sure when they're going to appear or vanish back into the shadows.
Twin Leapers are a pair of sting-tailed nightmares that are dangerous just to be next to, even when Exhausted. Worse still, whenever one of them acts, the other springs into action, and destroying their nests only releases their Twisted Spawn. When this whole family are on the board together things can quickly get overwhelming.
Be sure to let me know if you try out this new version. As always, expect the living document to keep changing as I work on this, so make sure you're on the most recent version.
Good luck...
Working on GRIMLITE keeps me thinking about the connection between RPGs (especially the type that I enjoy and make) and miniature wargames.
I'm especially interested in looking at ideas that might seem out of place in a miniature game. It feels like the design space is much tighter than that of RPGs, and I'm only really interested in making a game if it does something different to what's already out there. How far outside that typical space can we push?
How much RPG-stuff can be crossed over? What must be left aside?
I wrote a list of the key strengths of RPGs for me, and gave some thought to their place in GRIMLITE as a miniature wargame. There's lots of blurring between these topics, so think of it more as a series of prompts then an analytical breakdown of each one in order.
Rulings Not Rules
Perhaps the biggest difference I've encountered between miniature games and roleplaying games is the desire, almost need, for watertight rules. Some RPG players like these too, but here it's right at the forefront. Can you ditch this rules-focus for more expectation that rulings will be made as needed?
There's a long history of wargames that have one player acting as GM or Referee, making ruling calls for the two or more opposing players. This is even more precarious than the GM-Player relationship of RPGs, as you've got to be firm but fair and make sure both sides feel they are being treated equally.
To be honest, it's never really appealed to me. I like miniature games to focus on the relationship between the players, typically one-on-one, and the idea of inserting a neutral party in the middle doesn't feel right for what I enjoy at the table.
But that really makes the next point a problem...
Tactical Infinity
For me, the core selling point of an RPG when talking to prospective players is "you can try anything!". This is perhaps inseparable from the point above, and a folly to consider allowing it in a competitive game without a GM.
And yet...
The idealist in me believes that two players could be trusted to make judgement calls for actions outside of the rules. For solo and coop this is easy, but when we're also trying to beat each other? I feel like I could do it when I'm playing with somebody I trust. I mean I have done it during GRIMLITE games on both the physical and virtual tabletop.
Perhaps the difference is that those battles were always framed as a playtest. We all wanted to win, but we were having fun toying around with the system too. Would that spirit disappear if we were playing a finished game where the rules were cast in ink? Is it unthinkable to hope for this attitude in a pick-up game with a stranger at the local club?
I think it's possible with the right framing...
Play to Find Out
This is a line originally from Apocalypse World, and it's been interpreted in numerous ways. Regardless of any of these, I like it as an alternative to play to win or even play to have fun. You should definitely play too win to make any victories feel earned, and fun for me is really an outcome rather than a process. But ahead of all that, I'd urge anybody playing GRIMLITE to adopt the Play to Find Out attitude.
This is the story of your warbands. For miniature games I'll always favour an exciting, memorable story over a perfectly balanced tactical contest. I don't want to remember the time I triggered a powerful synergy of three different special rules to mathematically crush your army. I want to remember that time we had three Greater Horrors appear on three successive rounds and ended up just trying to get off the board alive.
There are ways to encourage this, but it's a balancing act. You want to reward victory and have consequences for failure, but too much and the players will only be thinking of those carrots and sticks instead of what's unfolding in the miniature reality on your table.
For GRIMLITE it sucks to end the battle with most of your Warband dead and no Glory to show for it, but if even those casualties can give you advantages in the next game. Getting lots of Glory is great, but if you can scrape even one or two Glory then you'll have some good options for rewards.
I've previously looked down on campaign-based wargames that had permanent death be an impossible or very unlikely result. I thought they were overly precious and concerned with maintaining balance, but I'm starting to see the error of my ways. Characters dying makes for memorable moments, but it comes with a hefty dose of punishment that can leave more of a mechanical sting than a dramatic one. So in GRIMLITE it's now quite rare, and often avoidable entirely if you have a Glory or two to spend.
But isn't this all contradicted by...
Big Impact
This is when you make a tough decision, then get to see massive consequences sweep across the game. Tabletop RPGs aren't like some old CRPG where you can't fight the King's advisor that's secretly the villain until the designated moment. Want to stab them right here and now? Sure, but this decision will drastically alter the course of the narrative. It's a great feeling!
I'm working on some systems for GRIMLITE now that will ramp this up. At the moment battles feel quite separate from each other, with the thin campaign layer draped on top.
Horrors are especially ripe for exploration in this area. At the moment there are only a few Scenarios that reward killing Horrors, but what if leaving them alive meant they were more likely to reappear later? What if killing the Horror was actually the risky choice, with that warband member suddenly facing the wrath of those that worshipped the monstrosity?
These touches are tricky to include without adding in lots of elements to track, so I'm exploring a number of approaches, none of which I've been entirely happy with so far. Stay tuned.
On Balance
Originally, I really wanted to fully embrace the ideas in this brilliant post. Fully narrative wargaming, no points, no army composition limits. That OSR attitude of putting a Purple Worm on the first level of your dungeon or rolling 3d6 down the line for your Ability Scores. Or, as Emmy suggests in that post, just making the character you want, to hell with costs and restrictions. We're all reasonable here, right?
Truth is I just can't hack it. Not yet, at least.
I like picking things from a menu with certain restrictions. Maybe I need to work on my own attitudes here, but building warbands completely freeform feels like I'm cheating, and not in a good way. I didn't feel the same sense of ownership and permanence to the miniatures as when I built them within some sort of mechanical framework.
Random generation would help with this, but it's not worked for me so far. I tried warband advancement that was purely random (roll d66 on this big table of stuff after each battle) and while it was fun to spin the wheel of fortune, I did miss the feeling of being able to steer the direction of my warband. If my theme is "small, elite squad of Exiles" then randomly recruiting some 1pt grunt feels like it's working against that. In moderation it's a fun "restriction breeds creativity" thing, but I don't want it happening between every game.
Joseph McCullough spoke about how Frostgrave was designed as a both way to use his dust-gathering monster miniatures, and an excuse to buy new ones. I hate the idea of somebody getting excited about adding a new miniature to their warband and having to wait for the right roll to come up. As it stands now your options are restricted, but you can at least work toward getting that new creation onto the table.
Again, Horrors are where I really get to go wild with things, and encourage players to do the same.
Horrors break the rules. They should be horrifying. Some Scenarios require a warband to kill them, so you shouldn't make them all entirely invulnerable, but other than that it's a free-for-all. As the neutral enemy of both warbands I'd always lean towards making them too scary rather than too weak, but the best balance is to have both options. Not all Horrors are created equal, and I like the idea that some encounters are especially bad, rather than aiming for some ultra consistent experience.
Fear and Laughter
When I think about the two things I expect to see in a particularly good RPG session, I think of Fear and Laughter.
Not every game needs to have Horror elements, but even the standard dungeon-crawling fear of death is rocket fuel for any table. We've got to work together here or we're all dead. Tread carefully, watch the darkness... wait, what do you mean I hear breathing from around the corner?
And of course laughter is almost inevitable when you're having a good time, even when your game is playing it straight. In fact, I've always enjoyed the idea of the game that takes itself fully seriously while the players have fun laughing at the shocking consequences, unexpected twists, and of course the unceremonious PC deaths.
I'm glad to say this is one of the RPG strengths that's super easy to translate to Miniature Games. The Scene Events and Shock tables were basically designed to create those moments. Your prestigious fighter getting mauled by an overgrown rat and crawling away in panic, your Grav Gun pushing a nasty Horror right into the middle of my warband, or both leaders simultaneously stabbing each other to death through a nasty roll on the Shock table. You're horrified at what might happen to your precious warband, but when it happens you can't help but laugh.
But now onto what I feel is the strongest connection between these two styles of game for me:
Kitbash Attitude
The first miniatures I bought at the start of my 2020 revisit of the hobby were a box each of Genestealer Neophytes and Adeptus Mechanicus Skitarii and assorted bits from bitzbox. As far as I can tell I didn't build a single miniature from those sets using the proper instructions.
In fact, the idea of having a miniature that already exists on somebody else's table genuinely saddens me. When I look at other people's creations from the incredibly versatile Frostgrave sets, I cringe when I see that somebody chose the same combination of parts as me. I want my miniatures to feel like my own. I can't make miniatures that look amazing, but I want them to look like my own unique creations.
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| Work-in-progress with bits from six kits across three model lines. They're janky, but they're mine. They don't have names or a proper identity yet, but they'll get them when they're ready for the table. |
It's sort of adjacent to the idea of anti-canon. This is a creative endeavour. Don't look for permission from above to carry out your ideas. If you want to do something, do it. Make the thing you want that doesn't exist.
In the OSR there's a joke that everybody ends up making their own Frankenstein's Monster of a system by chopping bits off existing games and stitching them together. I love this spirit of not being satisfied with what's out there. Not waiting for permission to become a game designer, or in this case not waiting for Games Workshop to release that creature you're imagining. Get some sprues from different miniature lines and slam them together. Make something weird and put it in your game.
You made a bunch of bug-men with big guns? Give them some names and get thinking of how to get them on the table.
Let your Horrors emerge as a mess of plastic and putty, painted in whatever way you like. Throw away that official painting guide. I've never felt like my painting was good, but I felt a real sense of achievement when Grant mentioned that my painting style said something about the game.
I'd never thought of it that way before, but he might be onto something.
Of course you can be creative within the official Warhammer 40,000 or Age of Sigmar Canon, but those games sit under the shadow of a greater authority. You can't bring your Imperial Guard to the table in a Games Workshop if you've used the Frostgrave Soldiers 2 set to make an all-female Valhallans squad. You can't show up and run your own Inq28 system, even if you're using all GW miniatures.
I understand it from a business perspective, but it certainly sets the tone of what's permitted here. It's a different focus.
But I want that untamed creative spirit. I want to feel like we can do anything on our tables. That RPG spirit of "you can try anything", whether we're talking about rules or modelling or painting.
Chop up the bits you like.
Stick them together.
Get it to the table.
Scenarios can tell you about the world around your wargame.
Yesterday I played GRIMLITE against Zach in the first live test of the new Scenario system I've put in place. It works like this:
A Scenario is essentially made up of two halves: the Mission and the Scene.
The Mission sets the main goal of the battle for at least one of the sides. Maybe your leaders are facing off in a duel, one side is trying to break through to the other side of the board, or both sides are just trying to withstand waves of Horrors until they can be extracted.
The Scene sets the environment. There's often a special rule at play, random events that trigger at the end of each round, and a secondary objective for one or more side to compete for. Maybe an immortal guardian watches over a powerful relic, precarious towers offer vital intel, or exterminators are purging swarms of horrors (and you if you get in the way). It even gives you some special rewards you can earn at the end of the battle instead of drawing from your Faction's normal list.
Both of these halves also have Twists available if you want to make things really messy. Maybe the Relic is guarded by three immortal guardians instead of one, but they're dormant and you might be able to bypass them altogether, or maybe your Breakthrough mission involves giant turrets that can be controlled by either side.
Grab a Mission and a Scene and smash them together for an interesting two-layered Scenario.
Both of these halves have notes for how to alter them for solo or coop play.
This all fits with my goal for GRIMLITE to be more of an RPG-syle toolbox than a dense swiss-watch ruleset. Short, simple rules followed by a big pile of stuff that you can use them for.
This sort of composite-scenario system is certainly nothing new, but with some expansion I think it could inform the player about the world in a direct way, a method I've obviously enjoyed in the past. Bounty Hunts and Relics and Warzones aren't anything ground-breaking, but they each imply something about the world. This is something I want to push further as work on the game continues.
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| Unfinished Horrors waiting to prey on your Warband |
So about that playtest against Zach.
I got trounced pretty thoroughly, but through a fortunate finish I was able to grab two Glory against his three. Getting beaten but still having a good time, and never quite losing hope, is a reassuring result.
But the real measure of this game is whether a narrative emerged from the battle, and I'm pretty confident it did. I should clarify that neither of us really spoke about the narrative of our warbands or the battle beforehand other than "right, this is the mission, this is the scene, we're using these Horrors, and let's look at each other's warbands".
Yet after the battle I looked back on it and really felt like there was a story unfolding, and that story was telling us something about the world.
I was concerned that the combination of Mission and Scene would make things feel too complicated, but with the rules themselves being so simple it's all very manageable, especially once both players are familiar with the game.
It feels like if we played the same Mission with a different Scene, or vice versa, it would have felt significantly different.
Maybe next time a Breakthrough in Darkness? Would have certainly helped me avoid all that sniper fire.
Or back into the Warzone for a Duel between our leaders? Feels like there's a score to be settled there.
Next in line is the Campaign system. In the mean time let me know if you manage to get GRIMLITE to the table as solo, coop, or competitive.
I should stop giving my games stupid joke names that end up being impossible to shake.
GRIMLITE is clearly a nod to wanting a rules-lite version of certain Grim Dark games. I was experimenting with the name Husk 28 as a nod to some other inspirations but I'm starting to think I should accept that GRIMLITE might be here to stay for the time being.
But despite that, I feel like I have a stronger sense of the game's identity after continued testing and getting carried away with building warbands and horrors. More specifically, I feel like the identity of the game is informing the identity of the world.
The game started as an excuse to kitbash 40k miniatures with other lines and bring some of that Inq28 feel to a very simple, fast game. Now I feel like I can go further than "40k with the serial numbers filed off". I could avoid all reference to 40k and pretend the influence isn't there, but I'd rather highlight the differences while embracing that initial inspiration.
My settings are always going to reflect the reality of what happens at the table, and in this case that reality is moulded by both the game table and the modelling table.
As with Into the Odd and Electric Bastionland, this isn't a game that will ever come with pages of lore. I want a setting infused into the actual content of the game. This is more of a style-guide, equally intended for myself and anybody else that wants to explore the game.
Inconsistent Technology
Blending sci-fi and medieval elements is past cliché at this point, but it works and I love it.
It might vary among the factions, but as a rule-of-thumb I like giving my Leader and their favoured followers more of a sci-fi look, while keeping the grunts of the warband in more of a medieval light. Remember, this world is forgotten. The Company brought peace, but that's a slice of sci-fi sandwiched between two more grimy periods: the faded legacy of the pre-Company world, and the neo dark age abandonment of today.
Of course it's all an excuse to mix 40k accessories in with the Frostgrave plastic sets, kit out some Skitarii like feudal knights, and throw those creations against each other.
Modest Scale
Warbands, not armies. Chapels, not cathedrals. Today, not ten thousand years of lore. This forgotten world, not an unknowable galaxy.
Even the most formidable opponent can be brought down with a piercer shot and have their throat cut as they lie on the ground.
They might be robots, mutants, or aliens, but there's a certain modesty implied here compared to towering Primaris super-soldiers. My Paragon (4+, Tough) is basically a bulky bloke with chain and plate armour. Even my leaders have a certain fragility to them, with oversized power-fists and plasma-guns looking slightly out of scale next to their very mortal bodies.
Personal Focus
You are not a nameless individual among a billion humans, doomed to die a pointless death. Even your most humble followers will likely stick with you through multiple battles. Name them, watch them grow, and remember their deeds.
Likewise, even though your warbands will be one of four types, the term "Faction" is misleading. There's no grand council of the Inheritors, no centralised Welder government, and no Splicer Queen. Think, instead, of these warbands options are more of a "best fit" for your particular group of individuals. They don't really owe allegiance to any higher power than your Leader. It's small-scale feudalism in a fractured world.
The Company abandoned us, so why pledge loyalty to any besides your closest companions? Why trust a name on a piece of paper when you can trust the one person you know that has a machinegun?
The campaign is more likely to be a personal vendetta or quest rather than some chain of missions in service of a planet-wide operation. Your world is firmly rooted in the 5-9 models that you've built and brought to the table.
If you've been exploring your own version of GRIMLITE, be sure to let me know, and if you're curious then you can watch live gameplay on Twitch and catch up on Youtube.
Working on a miniatures game has been an interesting contrast to RPG design. It's a narrative-focused wargame, but the fact is miniature games rely a lot more on their rules than RPGs do.
With RPGs so much of the joy can come from situations outside of the rules. Even with a narrative wargame I don't feel like I can let go of the mechanical wheel quite so easily. As a result the mechanics in GRIMLITE feel like they're carrying a lot more weight than the mechanics in Electric Bastionland. You can tear through a good RPG session on pure GM and group cohesion alone, barely touching the game itself, but that just isn't possible on the miniatures table.
But I've quite enjoyed that. It lets me really focus in on every single rule in GRIMLITE, thinking about the impact it has on the game. Even more so, it lets me look at typical wargame rules that GRIMLITE doesn't include, and what effect their omission has on things.
I thought it might be interesting to look at some specific examples here. It's too early to judge GRIMLITE as a whole, but I've done enough test games now to get a grip on the impact of some of the individual parts.
Advancement through Trophies and (sometimes) Dying
In GRIMLITE there are two ways to improve your warband: getting trophies from killing Horrors or getting a lucky roll (1-in-3 chance) on your Casualty roll falling in battle. I considered having units gain experience through killing enemies, but much as with D&D I found that had undesirable consequences. Battles would be more about wiping out the enemy than actually chasing your objectives, and the first side to get a numerical advantage would be encouraged to grind away at the remaining enemies rather than focusing on the trophies.
This approach is very much the equivalent of "Gold for XP" that's so popular in OSR games, and I think it translates nicely over to this format too. You'll still want to kill your enemies, but you'll be doing it for strategic reasons instead of chasing abstract points.
Withdrawal or Slaughter
There are two possible triggers for the battle to end. Slaughter is easy, one side is wiped out. Withdrawal can be triggered by either side at the end of a Round if at least half of their remaining units are touching a table edge, with these units immediately leaving the board safely.
After either trigger occurs, players perform one final Round, trying to sweep up the remaining Trophies.
Endgame always felt weird to me in wargames. I remember playing Warhammer Fantasy Battles and wondering what happens at the end of that last round. My heavy infantry that got so close to charging the enemy now just turn around and go home? Everybody agrees to stop shooting each other?
It's an abstraction of course, and a necessary one. It might be more realistic for battles to end on a whimper but it's more satisfying for a game to have a clear finish. I think the Final Round element here at least gives a bit of narrative sense to the whole thing, and on Husk 28 it's easy to imagine a dust storm sweeping in or more Horrors on the horizon to provide that time pressure.
My goal here was to make Slaughter generally less common than Withdrawal. This is a wargame, and the two warbands should fight each other, but again I wanted to keep the focus on the objective, not a fight to the death. The opponents are rivals more than arch enemies, at least until grudges inevitably form.
So here if one warband takes losses it's relatively easy for the remaining members to form a retreat, but giving the other warband a full Round of uninterrupted action means Withdrawal isn't seen as an absolute solution for any battle that's going against you.
No Stacking
Each type of roll you make has exactly one modifier that can ever be applied to it, and it's always plus or minus 1.
Shooting into Cover is -1.
Fighting a Downed target is +1
Recovery is +1 when an Ally is touching you.
Moving is +1 when you can see your Leader.
Resist is the exception here, currently having no modifier applied to it. I'm leaving that design space open but also I'm not going to put a rule here just for symmetry's sake. It's also arguably the most useful type of roll, so any modifier would have to be very carefully considered.
This was an outright goal early on (No Stacking, No Tracking) but as well as the desired effect of keeping things simple I think it also shines a spotlight on that particular modifier. Without dozens of little +1s to remember you know that when somebody is Downed you should get a melee fighter in there. You know that your Leader is best kept in sight of your units, and your Initiates are more survivable if kept in pairs to help each other back onto their feet.
By honing in on a single modifier for each type of activity it makes those modifiers feel all the more important to exploit.
No Weapon Ranges
As you'd expect, when you remove the range element from shooting it becomes all about line-of-sight. Precise range management gives way to getting into a position where you can duck in and out of cover while having a clear view of the battlefield. Makes everybody feel a bit more daring and active. Less incentive to sit still in that ideal firing spot.
This certainly relies on a small board and dense terrain, but that's clear from the start of the document. I think with anything above 3x3ft you're going to run into weird niche situations where a unit gets just-about line of sight on an enemy 48 inches away and gets to fire their pistol across a football field.
Weapon Transparency
Barring the weapon mods, weapons are generally split into two types: one high-damage shot or several one-damage shots. In terms of raw damage potential the former are always more efficient, but you're putting all of your eggs in one basket. And maybe you just don't need that much damage.
If you're shooting an Initiate, they're resisting damage on 5+, so 3 damage will on-average kill them. This happens to be the damage score of a basic high-damage weapon. But even hitting this Initiate with a one-damage shot will likely Down them, and their chances of recovery are low, especially if they're on their own. Do you really NEED that full three damage or are you better using a 2x1 weapon that can reliably down these low-quality troops?
Meanwhile, against a Leader or other powerful target that's resisting on 3+ your 1 damage probably isn't going to do anything. Even if you hit with both your 2x1 shots you've only got just over a 50% chance of downing the target, and an 11% chance to kill them.
Hit with that 1x3 Rifle instead and you've got a 70% chance of Downing them and around 33% chance to kill. A lot better, and even if you just Down the target you've got an opportunity to get a Melee fighter in to finish the job.
So you might be looking at all those percentages and think "this isn't very transparent", but the key is that there are really only two types of weapon. Those that are good for killing grunts, and those that are good for killing high-powered targets. Not that each of these can't also perform the other task, but the specialisation is clear. You don't have to look a target and consider 3 or 4 ways in which they might be mechanically "tough".
Are they hard to hit? High Toughness? High Armour? High Wounds? Have an invulnerable save? Some other bullshit? No, forget all that. You know that your rifle is good for toughies and your shotgun is good for grunts. Now get your attention back on the battlefield and out of the stat-blocks.
Shoot Once, Fight Twice, Move Thrice
I wanted the game to feel mobile, so having three potentially long-distance movement actions in a turn was scary at first, but combined with the need to roll for Moves after your first I think it gives the game the desired mobility. It especially makes the Nimble skill feel impactful, a fact you'll appreciate after your first few attempts to get your QL5+ units to move where they need to be.
With Ranged having an innate advantage over Melee combat I wanted to give Melee some sort of advantage to even the scales. An easy fix is just making Melee weapons cheaper than their Ranged equivalents, but this isn't a game of finely balanced point costs. Shooting was already limited to once-per-turn, so allowing two Fight actions felt right. If you could charge in with your first action then getting to wail on your opponent twice felt nice and deadly, especially if you Down them with your first attack and get that juicy +1 on your second attack. My Exile Hounds (Nimble 5+ T2x1) were especially useful in my last game, darting around the battlefield somewhat reliably and proving especially useful for finishing off downed enemies, especially considering their cheap cost.
There's plenty more work to do on GRIMLITE but I'm pretty happy with the core right now. Expect to hear more as I try and polish this up into something a bit more complete.
As such this might end up being quite a long post, so buckle up.
So let's start from the beginning. Forget the Sample Warbands, we're making two from scratch.
SPLICER COVEN
The twisted and warped arm of humanity that believe we need to fundamentally change our biology in order to survive this new world.
While the four factions were initially designed to cover broad modelling concepts (humans, mutants, cyborgs, aliens) and inspire kitbashing, they've picked up more mechanical identity along the way. Splicers have some really cheap Initiates they can hire to bulk out numbers and have some of the more interesting big-gun options for their Leaders and Initiates. As you'd expect they also have much more Skill flexibility than other factions, able to morph their form to whatever needs you have.
But back to reality, I'm going to base my purchases almost entirely on the models I want to bring to the table. I have a couple of Engineer guys that I'd like to bring to bear, so let's keep the Leader cheap to maximise the points we have to spend on them.
We'll keep our Leader relatively lean, a Host (3+) with a nice cheap Shotgun (2x1). We can choose any Skill, so we'll take Elusive to give them the best chance to grab Trophies without getting shot down. They bring the Polymorph tactic that, one per Round, lets us permanently change that Skill, so we can always adapt if things turn ugly.
That leaves us with 14pts, enough to take our two Engineers and give each of them a full 3pt weapon. We take one with a Grav Warper and one with a Storm Cannon.
So we've got a very small warband with a fast, lightly armed but flexible leader and two heavy gunners. Lots of points tied up in very few models, so let's see how that works out on the table.
Lucida - Host (Elusive 3+) [6pts]
Shotgun (R2x1)
Tactic - Polymorph: Permanently swap one of your leader’s Skills for any other.
Neutron - Engineer (Precise 4+) [7pts]
Grav Warper (R1x5. On a hit, move the target)
Reaper - Engineer (Precise 4+) [7pts]
Storm Cannon (R3x1. Shoot Twice if you do nothing else this turn)
EXILE BAND
Well since I made an elite warband from the faction with the cheapest options, let's see if I can make a more numerous list from the most highly priced faction. The Exiles had the weakest identity for a while, initially trying to cover all bases as a stand-in for multiple alien forces. Now they're more focused on the warrior-hunter angle. They feel more like they don't belong back in the more civilised parts of the galaxy they once called home. My personal canon is that they all have dramatic superhero/villain names too, just to further inflate egos.
So despite aiming for a larger warband, Exiles are all pretty expensive but come with some very nice perks. Looking at the Leaders I like the sound of the Mercy tactic that the Veteran gets, so we'll take a Veteran kitted out with a nice fusion gun to take down any tough targets.
Now we know that we want numbers, so let's take two Hounds to pad things out. I've kept the unit names vague so that you've got maximum flexibility to interpret them to suit your models. When I wrote the Hounds I was picturing literal alien dogs, but it also works for any sort of mindless swarm, so we'll use a couple of these clawed monstrosities.
6pts remaining means we can grab an Agent. I've been wanting to try out the Synergy Rifle, so let's get a Predator armed with one of them.
So we have our Exile Band.
The Faceless - Veteran (Grim 3+) [8pts]
Fusion Gun (R3x1, Targets resist at QL5+)
Tactic - Mercy: One of your units makes a free Shoot/Fight action against a Downed Enemy.
The Inevitable - Predator (Elusive, Precise 4+) [6pts]
Synergy Rifle (R2x1, x2 Damage if an Ally can also see the target)
The Starved - 2 Hounds (Nimble 5+) [6pts]
Claws (T2x1)
Keen followers of GRIMLITE will notice some models here have previously been used for other factions. Well that's the beauty of not caring at all about canon. One week you're a Splicer that's been mutated too far from humanity, the next you're an Exiled predator, the next you're an irredeemable Horror only good for trophies. We make efficient use of every mini here!
Likewise you'll see that The Faceless has a Whip that isn't reflected in her profile, but as every character can make a standard Touch attack (T1x1) we'll just assume that it's mostly for show and no more effective than just putting the boot in.
Now the fun part, selecting the Horrors. We won't be using any fancy battlefields or twists for this, just keeping things simple for now. Looking over my limited miniature options I'm drawn to these beauties that I found in my parents basement and finally painted after 25 years.
They get some nasty claws and soporific pheromones that make them dangerous to be near. Any resemblance to certain Fiends from that other game is purely coincidental.
As they're worth 2 Trophies each we need another 2 Trophies worth of Horrors. We'll take 2 Enforcers to fill our the Horror Roster.
Now these are obviously inspired by those old Necromunda scenarios I previously wrote about, where Adeptus Arbites would rain fire down on the gangs as they fought each other. But Rules-As-Written in GRIMLITE all Horrors are considered allies to each other. So really we have two options when faced with a team-up of vigilante Enforcers and inhuman Fiends.
