A while back someone mentioned on the Wyrd boards about using the Malifaux city map as the basis of a map-based campaign. Malifaux itself does not lend easily to a campaign system unlike Necromunda or Mordheim from Games Workshop.
Essentially with campaign games you are linking your games in a structured way with other gamers to evolve your crew/warband/bunch of rats/whatever and tell a narrative of how they came to be. Not only does each crew member get better they can also receive serious injuries and get worse. It might be easier to just kill them off (and then sell the body to necromancers for some gold!).
So how can we translate this to Malifaux? The Wyrd Chronicles released a campaign system where each crew member could get better or worse but I think this might be a more difficult way to go with Malifaux.
My thoughts, compiled yesterday morning over a coffee, boil down to this:
- Start with 30SS fixed crew and master
- Start at a point on the map
- Get an objective from that location (collect items from locations)
- Each round you decide where you need to go
- Draw a line from starting point to end point
- Each player flips a card, highest resolves his path first.
- If his path intercepts any other player’s path he can decide which player to do battle with
- The lead player will decide the story encounter that will happen (from a list)
- If his path does not cross another player he WILL be investigated by the Guild at the location he ends up.
- Guild patrols will be 30SS squad led by a Guild Sergeant, controlled by the GM.
- Each battle a player wins earns him 2SS
- A player who loses will be deducted 2SS for the next battle only.
- The core crew of the player cannot change but extra earned SS will allow extra recruitment to the crew.
- During a battle the player with the lesser SS total will get bonuses
- At a location the player can select another objective or get given an item.
- Once a player has the items required for an objective he must get to the destination to score campaign points
- Once a player earns 20 Campaign points he wins the campaign.
Essentially it’s a treasure hunt with brawls along the way. Win a few games and you have an advantage, lose some games and you are hampered for the next round. If you win yo will be building up a bigger crew to help you win the campaign. This can be tied in with new players who wish to expand their forces.
I’m still debating whether the items at each location are randomly given or a player can select from a number of items from the top of the deck. Maybe players can exchange/barter their loot or maybe the winner can steal some loot from the loser.
If anyone has any thoughts on how to progress this I would be very interested.
