Let's Play Some FrostLanders

Designing a Miniature Skirmish Game for Parents and Kids

Starting with Field of Glory in 2008, and continuing with the excellent Bolt Action in 2012 Osprey Publishing has published a number of high quality rules for use with miniatures in a wide variety of genre. This multi-genre approach to miniature wargaming is best highlighted in the series of blue spined paperback digest books (Little Blue Books? LBB) they began publishing in 2012. This series started with the Dux Bellorum “Historical” Arthurian rules and has included a number of excellent games like In Her Majesty's Name, A Fistful of Kung Fu, or Black Ops: Tactical Espionage Wargaming.

Books and games like these are a continual reminder to me of how creative the British gaming community is in general. There are significant portions of British gaming culture that I wish we’d channel a bit more here in the United States. For example, in the United States many great game designers like Jay Little (Star Wars RPG and the underrated Warhammer Fantasy Role Play 3rd Editon), Geoff Englestein (GameTek, the Expanse, Space Cadets), and Alan Emrich (too many war games to count) have taught courses in game design, but I haven’t seen any of these programs partner with a professional game company in the same way that Crooked Dice did with Edge Hill University. If any school was to do it, it might be George Washington University with their excellent Wargames program and they’d be a perfect fit for direct partnership with GMT Games. I’d be remiss if I didn’t mention that the largest wargame ever played was played in Glasgow. There was a time when I could imagine an event like that happening in the United States, but even though most of the gamers I know are academics we don’t develop these kinds of events.

Osprey publishing built on the success of the Little Blue Books and released the first edition of the Frostgrave fantasy miniature skirmish game in 2015. A couple of years later, they streamlined and clarified the rules with a second edition.

Like many of Osprey's offerings, Frostgrave has an easy to learn system that is highly flexible and moves quickly. The focus of the rules are on casual fun and not on tournament play. In some ways, this is a similar approach to the one that Games Workshop has with their smaller minigame offshoots of Warhammer 40k and Warhammer Age of Sigmar such as Space Marine Adventures or Blitz Bowl, only cheaper and more ecumenical with regards to which miniatures can be used.

Unlike Games Workshop’s current Brandon Sandersonesque epic fantasy game Age of Sigmar, Frostgrave is firmly entrenched in longstanding and traditional fantasy tropes. My daughter History and I were chatting about changes in the fantasy genre and D&D over the years the other day and she discussed what she thought were various “phases of D&D” and how D&D and fantasy were now in a kind of dialogue with one another. D&D was initially based on existing fantasy, but it came to shape fantasy, which came to shape D&D, which came to…you get the point. She finished by saying that D&D was in a kind of Brandon Sanderson mode right now where players often wanted to play the kinds of flawed and internal heroes of Sanderson stories rather than the action oriented heroes of the past. Sure, they wanted epic battle against demons or dragons, but they wanted to experience angst first. I don’t know if I fully agree with her, but it’s an idea I’ll be exploring more in the future.

Frostgrave goes a different direction and shares many thematic elements with Games Workshop's classic Mordheim game, with one major difference. It is much easier to learn and is more focused on plotted scenario play than Mordheim was when it was first released. Even though it has some advancement rules, again similar to Mordheim, advancements in Frostgrave are limited to a few characters in your warband. This minimizes bookkeeping from session to session and prevents “super squads” from developing.

Frostgrave is so easy to learn that when it came out, it inspired me to begin creating a derivative game I could use to play with my then 7 year old twin daughters History and Mystery. I was inspired by James August Walls’s many Google+ posts about gaming with his family, I began designing a mashup of Disney Infinity and Skylanders to play with my twin daughters.

The game never quite got finished, so we never got to play the game. As the twins approach their high school graduation, it’s still more than a year away, and I begin to panic with “empty game table syndrome,” I’m looking for special ways to play with them before they flee the fortress. With this in mind I thought I would take it back up again and finish the rules. Maybe with a little help from all of you.

We still have a ton of Disney Infinity and Skylanders figures around the house and since both of those games are unsupported by their designers, I’d love to put those wonderful figures to good use. I even designed a couple of potential logos for use in my home game back in the day.

As easy as the rules for Frostgrave are to learn, they do have a couple of "fiddley-bits" that might have made things a little complex for playing with my daughters. For example, in the Frostgrave rules as written it is possible to hit an opponent and not injure them and most rolls in the game are contested rolls. By and large, I am not a fan of contested rolls. I understand their utility in competitive games, but I plan on running this game more like an RPG than a competitive wargame. So I want to move away from having contested rules as much as possible and use a Monte Cook and Numenera inspired mechanic where the players to all the rolling. Additionally, Osprey has not published a fan license that states what we as fans are and are not allowed to do with their rules, so I've decided to use a rules set inspired by the actual Frostgrave rules.

So here are the beginnings of the simple rules I came up with and which I want to get feedback on to expand. I’m happy to change themes later so that these can become the basis for something more, but I’d love to have all of you pitch in on the development with your thoughts.

1) All die rolls are made with a d12.

2) Turns follow the following pattern. 
                 a) Hero Phase 
                 b) Ally Phase 
                 c) Villain Phase

3) Player Characters are rated in the following areas:

All characters are given a base movement stat represents how many inches a character may move in a single combat round. For normal characters, this ranges from 4 to 10 inches, but can be as much as 24 inches for characters with Superspeed or Flight powers.

Every character has a rating in Melee combat which represents a wide variety of factors ranging from combat skill to raw strength.

Every character has a rating in Ranged combat that either reflects their ability to use thrown weapons or a ranged super power.

Some characters will have a rating in the Mental/Mystic combat statistic to represent their ability to wield the forces that shape the universe. While one might argue that Mental and Mystic energies deserve their own statistic, there are enough examples in the Marvel Universe of mentalists battling practitioners of the Mystic arts or characters who combine the two like Magik.

This statistic represents a character’s innate ability to resist physical and energy damage from non-mental or mystic sources.

This represents a character’s innate ability to resist mental or mystic damage. A character might have a high value in this statistic even if they lack any mental or mystic powers of their own.

This is the number of points of damage a character can suffer before falling unconscious.

4) Villains are rated in the same statistics, but their numbers are 5 higher for all values other than Health and serve as difficulty numbers the players must roll better than.

5) On a player's turn, the player may move and take 1 action. 

That action may be an attack, a power activation, or additional movement action.

6) When a player attacks a Villain, the player rolls 1d12 and adds their relevant statistic (melee in hand to hand and ranged for ranged attacks). 

They then add their statistic to that value. 

If that value is greater than the Villain's equivalent statistic, the Villain has been hit.

7) On a successful hit, subtract a Villain's Resistance from the total and what remains is the amount of Health lost.

8) If a character is "prone" then it takes half of their movement to get up.

9) To activate a power, the player rolls 1d12 and compares it to the activation score of the power. If it is higher than the score, the power is activated.

10) When a Villain attacks a Hero or Ally, the Player rolls a Melee or Ranged test. 

If the roll is higher than the Villain's value in that area the attack misses.

11) Villain powers activate in the same manner as Player powers. 

This is one of the few rolls the Game Master will make.

I've only done stats for a couple of characters, but I have a feeling that this will be fun. None of these characters have a Mental/Mystic attack.

I’d like your feedback on the basic outline and the characters and will come back to this in about a month with more refinements.

What are your thoughts?

All icons used in this post were made by Lorc. Available on their website.