Sometimes Fluff Is Plain Weird

Hail and Greetings!  Things are moving along very well in my second Mage Knight career (5-1-1 if anybody cares), and my group is actually getting along fairly well.  Not bad for a game that's been dead for more than a decade.


It's actually almost frightening how readily available most of the figures are, even more that there enough of a market out there that I actually run into competition when seeking some of the choicer goodies out there.  There's even a small but active trading site for this stuff out there (seems to have a very elitist attitude about it, though).


I've managed to collect enough to get the flexibility I need to actually be something resembling competitive against the higher level player I have; we're whaling the stuffing out of each other when we play, through our new blood is starting to catch up.  We've all managed to learn new things about the game, and actually making use of some of the abilities and unit that were usually left by the wayside in the old days.  All we really need are some of the bigger units and a nice big terrain pool and things should really start to heat up!


Right now I'm focusing my efforts on the Black Powder Rebels faction, with some Knight Immortal for both aesthetic reasons and to give my army a much needed melee boost.  I just find something appealing about having a bunch of gun-toting underdogs being backed up with elven badasses right out of the better fantasy books. 


I always found the fluff behind the Knights Immortal/Atlantis Guild alliance before 2.0 to be kinda shaky, even from a realpolitik perspective.  I had a very hard time seeing the awesome, law-and-order High Elves willing to deal with the expansionist, racist, and morally bankrupt Wizard Rome that is Atlantis.  It's telling that the current Emperor rejected a Faustian bargain and the mages collectively lost their minds over it, deciding that he wasn't evil and power-hungry enough to rule.  Then the avatar of Voldemort Augustus Tezla crowned the guy, declaring him the true heir to the empire.  Vecna Junior Tezla put his 'favored' wizards in their place there.  The High Elves supposedly find these guys to be vaguely amusing evil upstarts, by the way.  Supposedly it was a mutual attempt to being order back, but it was clear a backstabbing was coming.  At least we got really awesome dual-faction units out of the deal.


I always felt the Rebels were a better fit, especially with the idealistic 'Free Armies' Knights running around all over the place.  But no, we got belly dancers and 40k Orks instead.  At least the way Mage Knight is put together encourages players to put together their own army the way they want and work out their own fluff about their dudes if they want.


Well, I need to wander off.  Go Forth, and Conquer Some Tables!

Release the Info Dump!

Hail and Greetings again!


Things are slowing down just a bit, since there's a few schedule conflicts.  Nothing I can consider serious, since we all had a blast playing and most of us are waiting for reinforcements to arrive anyway.  I hope my camera reappears soon, I'd love to post a few pics of the battles.  But it can't be changed for a while yet.  Therefore, I have decided to go ahead and talk about the various expansions for Mage Knight, at least up to 2.0 to give a bit more background.


The expansions will be listed in chronological order, with a separate list for the Dungeons spinoff to be posted after the 'main' list.


On Rarity:  Mage Knight until 2.0 used six rarity tiers, with 1-3 acting as something like 'common,' 4-5 like 'uncommon' and 6 being somewhere between 'rare' and 'very rare.'  There is a lot of overlap, and the rarity curves can be fairly wild.  Rarity 6/Unique figures are few and far between, though not horribly so.  Your average booster usually has two common figures, two (later just one) uncommon figure and one rare (with that rare having a chance of being a 6/Unique figure).  The mix is a bit different for MK Dungeons, and there is a Rarity 7 (incredibly rare and valuable chase figures, only seen on one original expansion and one 2.0).




Rebellion -- Welcome to Mage Knight Rebellion.  This is the set that started it all.  Despite being the first release, boosters and starter sets are still widely available, and just about every figure is still quite viable for games, right up to 2.0.  "The Big Four" started here (Atlantis Guild, Black Powder Rebels, Elemental League, and Necropolis Sect), with a very good figure spread and representation along the entire rarity curve.  Knights Immortal, Orc Raiders, and Mage Spawn also started here, but were restricted to higher rarity levels, with the bottom line being that you usually just got one figure from one of those three in any given booster, two in starters.  This could be very frustrating if you were trying to collect just one of those factions.  Draconum also started here, but were all in the highest rarity tier.


Lancers -- Notable for introducing large base 'cavalry' figures and elevating Knights Immortal and Orc Raiders to major faction status, including lots of 'common' figures making it much easier to collect and build armies for them.  Draconum also got a generic figure, and most everybody got nice beefy uniques and more specialists to work with.  Sculpting and painting was somewhat improved as well. 


Whirlwind --  This is where things started to heat up.  Twelve new special abilities were introduces, as well as the new Shyft faction.  The Shyft were notable for being teal lizardmen with dreadlocks and having the ability to use Mage Spawn in formations.  Everybody who didn't get cavalry figures in Lancers got one here, including Mage Spawn Ogres riding war yaks.  Sculpts took a bigger leap up in quality here, though at the price of having more delicate parts on some figures (I'm looking at you, Standard Bearer).


Unlimited -- The 'new' starter set, Unlimited was a major step forward, combining and updating the rules and special abilities into something more unified and compact (though still very simple and to-the-point).  This set also reused generics from Rebellion and Lancers and updated the models to a new standard both in sculpts and painting, while adding in a new set of unique figures.  Also notable for using green bases instead of the black seen in every set before.  Boosters and especially starters good a lot of extra little goodies, mostly in the more of 'lore card' bookmarks and clicker rings.  Ironically, this is hardest set to find intact starters for, despite having a very wide release and lots of product.


Sinister -- Hmph.  A very good set overall, with the introduction of yet another faction (the Solonavi, notable for being made from translucent plastic), plus new 'dual faction' figures for more flexible army builds (Zombie petards!) and very nice uniques for everybody.  This is where the smaller boosters became the norm.  Unfortunately, a lot of the good parts of this expansion is marred by the inclusion of the Horsemen of the Apocalypse, rarity 7 chase figures that were extremely rare (to the point that I have never seen one in person).  This was bad enough, but WizKids also decided to hold a contest with ridiculously awesome prizes for whomever could get all four Horsemen together.  This resulted in loads of people (mostly idiot rich kids) using their disposable income to buy whole cases of this expansion, searching for the blasted things, and dumping them into the secondhand market or outright tossing them out, making this the hardest overall set to collect now.  I hate the Apocalypse faction for this reason alone.


Minions --  A more stable release, with no chase figure nonsense.  Everybody got more 'flavor' figures to expand the roster.  Unfortunately, 'flavorful' doesn't always mean 'good' and there was a lot of meh-level generics here.  There were a fair few bright spots, with the uncommon figures being actually fairly nice and a set of awesome dual-faction Draconum being released here, plus some generic Solonavi.


Uprising -- The last gasp before 2.0.  This set is actually very awesome overall, with more dual-faction generics, including Orcs with chainguns (!) and Knights Immortal using Atlantis Guild guns to create some really great figures.  The overall power level exploded upward, and to make things even better, the usual roster of a uniques was replaced with dual-faction Heroes, allowing for all sorts of flexibility and crazy awesome ideas.  As a final hurrah, Uprising was very good, and actually gave us a lot of hope for 2.0.  Boy we were wrong.


Conquest -- Not so much an expansion as a rule set for using much bigger armies and a basis for creating narrative campaigns.  The rules for using multi-dial figures and larger 'titan' figures was collected and made more cohesive here, as well as the rules for castle figures.  Four siege engine titans were released, as well as three 'warlord' uniques.


There were also a good number of large individual models released, like chariots, dragons, and tanks.


Mage Knight Dungeons --  Started a new spinoff game, something like a cross between Mage Knight proper and a Dungeons & Dragons dungeon crawl.  It wasn't a bad game, though I found that tossing out the tile-based dungeons in favor of dumping lots of crazy terrain down worked a fair bit better, while retaining the Dungeons ruleset with some tweaking.  Notable for introducing the Heroes faction, most figures being a Mage Knight spin on traditional adventurers.  Also lots and lots of Mage Spawn.  Heroes were all unique, but every booster had one unique inside (very rarely two, a Hero and a unique Mage Spawn, usually just one or the other), making for a very different rarity curve.  This would be constant through all three MKD expansions.


Pyramid --  A second starter set, with the Heroes being dual-faction this time around (making this better for players more interesting in the core game).  As can be expected from the title, there was a heavy Egyptian slant, especially in the unique Mage Spawn (the Jackal Guardian pretty much walked out The Mummy Returns), though for some reason, every generic mage spawn is a slightly tweaked palette swap of the generics from Dungeons.  Whether this was a cost-saving measure or a big joke at video game dungeon crawling (or both) is somewhat unclear.


Dragon's Gate -- The final major MKD expansion.  The emphasis was on 'lost races' Mage Spawn, including 'Drakona,' ancient evil Draconum that counted as Mage Spawn.  For some reason, Heroes reverted to single faction here.  Uprising balanced that a bit, however.  The hardest of the MKD boosters to find but still not hard.


Heroic Quests -- A pair of special sets, each coming with a team of dual-faction Heroes and an Altantis Guild 'master adversary' unique plus scenarios and maps.  These are very much worth getting, especially for the powerful uniques here that fit in just fine with regular armies.


And there you have it, and quite a mouthful at that.  I hope it helps, and All Your Clicky Base Are Belong To Us!

The Elephant In The Room

Hail and Greetings!


Managed a four-player battle of Mage Knight tonight.  I finally had to chalk up a loss (4-1 if anyone cares), mostly due to uncovering a fellow veteran that kept most of his collection intact and therefore having a much bigger pool with superior figures overall.  I managed to make my army count in the end, though.


The battle amounted to the fellow veteran and I choosing a new player to side with and making a scrap of it.  Both of the newbies acquitted themselves well, though there were some missteps and hiccups along the way.  We all had a good time, and it looks like everybody should have a burgeoning collection of their own soon.


Which brings us to the main point for this point.  The other veteran happens to have a very large accumulation of figures, including many from the oft-aligned Mage Knight 2.0 edition of the game.  As can be expected, while the figures themselves got a lot of attention, the very different dials and stats created a fair bit of confusion.  We managed to not bring any into play, but soon that will have to change a bit.


So I need to go ahead and say it straight out:  Mage Knight 2.0 is not a bad edition, nor is it a bad game.  A lot of people knocked it, and there are some very on-point criticisms to be leveled at it, but it is still very much Mage Knight, and still pretty fun to play.  My personal beefs are that it added a lot of layers of complexity to what was supposed to be a fundamentally simple system, presenting a deeper learning curve to what was supposed to be a beginner-friendly game, plus some minor gripes. 


But what WizKids did with it...that was horrible.  The biggest negative is that every figure from the previous editions was null and void as far the rules were concerned.  No 'casual' rulefix was presented, no compromise offered until the very last major expansion (too little, too late).  If you wanted to play a tournament-legal army, you needed to buy the new figures, period.  This would have bad enough, if everybody just had a starter and a few boosters of stuff, making it something like a CCG block format with figures instead of cards.  It would have been a bit painful, especially for the players willing to gather big collections of the stuff (like me).  But Mage Knight has lots of large-scale 'Conquest' figures, meant for big games.  Dragons, artillery pieces, giants, chariots, tanks...they were big, they were fun to play, and they commanded hefty sums.  They were gone, too.


Maybe the money got to their heads, maybe it was what being bought out by a baseball card company does, maybe they really wanted to try a block format but screwed it up, maybe Mage Knight was ultimately an experiment that nobody thought would work, but it succeeded immensely, so they didn't know what to do after a while.  Ultimately, it doesn't matter.


But things...things are different now.  The fanbase is still there, the demand is still there (do some Google-fu if you don't believe me), and the game still have plenty of appeal to the gaming crowd.  So let's break out the minis, roll some dice, and start conquering the tables again.  All Your Clicky Base Are Belong To Us!

A Time of Beginnings

Hail and Greetings once again!


Things are actually cooking along very well in my renewed foray into Mage Knight.  Hopefully things will progress enough that games and meets will start happening without my instigation (though not without my inclusion). 


I still find a bit of bittersweet and very nerdy irony in the fact that I spent more than a decade in something akin to mourning over what I thought was a dead game.  In many ways, it is; WizKids had dropped support of it and largely ignored the property except for occasional video game cash-ins or (a supposedly excellent) board game that eventually lost support as well.  But at the same time there is a surprisingly thriving market for this stuff.  Granted, the prices for many things involved are utter peanuts compared to when the game was active, but stumbling across bidding wars for figures that are almost old enough to drive for a game nobody has heard of is very heartening.


Finding old players that will cart out advancing hordes is one thing, but managing to get new players?  Players that want to bring still more new players in?  That's simply special, and that seems to be what MK is doing.


With any luck, it'll progress along enough that I can actually introduce the semi-dreaded 2.0 edition and mechanics.  I doubt it'll be completely painless, but since there are no tournament rules and regulatory oversight to deal with, the glory of houserules ought to help immensely.  For the moment, it is time to bring in the Mage Knight Unlimited ruleset and start running through old-school conquering the way it should be played.  Hopefully I can even find my camera and show some pics without resorting to stock images again.


All Your Clicky Base Are Belong To Us!

Faction Politics

Hail and Greetings!  While things seem to be shaping up rather nicely, I wanted to go ahead a put forward a bit of an info dump on the world of Mage Knight, specifically on the political factions that all this fantasy combat ballyhoo is about.


The world of Mage Knight is imaginatively called The Land, with a focus on the lands throughout and surrounding the Atlantean Empire.  Fun Fact:  The geography of the place is very clearly an inverted (the coastline is in the south instead of the north, with the mainland northward from there) map of Egypt, complete with of the names of ancient Egyptian cities and locations here and there.  Like any good fantasy wargame, there's lots of feuding and fighting and general upheaval, with the trigger point being the uprising of the Black Powder Rebels to throw off the yoke of Atlantis, and all sorts of happy fun times that brings.


This is a list of the major players.  NOTE:  Mage Knight allows a player to mix and match factions for his armies without penalty (though there are some good bonuses for using at least a predominance of one faction), so you see all sorts of merry bands out there.


The Big Four. 


These are the factions that were considered the major factions at the release of the game.


Atlantis Guild (later Atlantean Empire):  Wizard Rome.  Founded by the great Voldemort Augustus Tezla, Atlantis is fairly unique take on the usual imperial overlords.  They have a fondness for bigass war golems, wizards that kill you with mind bullets, and loads of brazen-mailed infantry with lightning guns and cool mohawks.  They get some really nice toys, including a sphinx tank that shoots heat rays.  Still have the grimdark baggage of Rome with mage elitism on top.


Black Powder Rebels (later Black Powder Revolutionaries):  The Rebel Alliance.  They have a far more pragmatic take on things than you see in fantasy, with lots of guerilla warfare, dirty fighting, and outright assassination.  They're still fairly nice and idealistic, with an emphasis on freeing the downtrodden (especially the enslaved dwarves) and nascent republic-based nations.  They also get guns of all sorts, cannons, giants that act as mobile gun emplacements, dwarven axe addicts, armies of Xena ripoffs, and a steampunk tank.


Elemental League (later Elemental Freeholds):  Hippie wood elves, but throwing out the traditional elven xenophobia and being very inclusive.  Lots of nature and painting with all the colors of the wind and all that crap.  The good news is that they also have badass centaur warriors, sneaky ranger types, wood golems and angry trees, and the best trolls ever.  These trolls are pretty much eco-warrior Klingons raised on HGH and Captain Planet, and they're awesome.  They got screwed over in the fluff as time went on, mostly in favor of the next bunch.  Also, dragons.  Big ones.


Necropolis Sect (later Dark Crusade):  Castlevania: The Army.  Rampaging hordes of vampires and necromancers, these guys want nothing less than to bring everything into the long night.  Lots of zombies, really metal golems, and blood-crazed warriors.  They can be very badass, when done right.  They also got a big leg up in the fluff, mostly for good reasons (Sect armies rocked in tournaments), but with one bad one (a major amount of later fluff resulted from exhibition battles between two devs, using a narrative campaign that had very Sect-slanted bias in the endgame to begin with, if the League player lost just the first battle, they were screwed fluff-wise).  Have elf bondage chicks as light infantry.  I'm not kidding.


The Minor Factions. 


These guys started out as a sort of specialist buy to fill in gaps or roles in other armies.   The Knights Immortal and Orc Raiders were promoted to big people's table very quickly after release.  Not so much the rest, but they didn't have to and never became irrelevant.


Orc Raiders (later Orc Khans):  WAAAAGH!  Well, almost.  More like Mongols than anything else, barring the  seriously ripped muscles and green skin.  Cunning, dangerous, but very fractious at times.  Suprisingly good at being team players, and tend to have a death-or-glory click of berserk before death.  Have goblins as fodder, and half trolls for beatsticks.  Some lunatics handed them guns before the 2.0 reboot.  And they have females for once.


Knights Immortal (later Elven Lords):  These guys come in two flavors:  Tolkien-style high elves, with plenty of heroism, chivalry, and all-around awesomeness with just a hint of elvish snootiness, and Dragonlance-style high elves, with loads of ethnocentric xenophobia and just a hint of justice and honor.  Which one you got was supposed to be up to player choice, but as time went on the Dragonlance elves became predominant, mostly because an alliance with Atlantis went very sour at a very bad time.  You were still free to say your dudes were the Tolkien elves, which is what I did since I though they were awesome.  Had the only 14-inch range unit for a very long time.  Papa Johns is their (un)official pizza.


Draconum:  Awesome dragonmen.  Their whole shtick was to gallivant about and seek challenges of all sorts, and after they got enough XP they could evolve Pokémon-style to the next stage.  Not nearly as silly as it sounds.  Figure-wise they tended to be big pricey unique specialists of one sort or another, with a mysterious champion sort of vibe.  Later on got some mini-mes and fanboy grunts so you could have a pure Draconum army if you wanted.


Shyft:  Started out as lizardfolk with crazy empathic powers, their deal mostly revolved around controlling hordes of Mage Spawn monsters.  2.0 turned them into mutant Smurfs.  Not much else to tell, really.


Solonavi:  Somebody worked out how to make figures out of translucent plastic, and so these came about.  Magical energy beings that traded their power for future rewards, mostly favors and promises and other vaguely sinister stuff.  Manipulated a great deal of the storyline once they showed up, including wrecking the Orcs at the last minute before 2.0, and claimed they were behind Voldemort Augustus Tezla.


Heroes:  Not really a faction, mostly just various adventurous types that specialized in dungeon crawling.  Points of interest include having multiple 'levels' you could purchase and field them at, and later having lots of members that were also parts of other factions.  Originally part of the Mage Knight Dungeons spinoff that limped along until 2.0 screwed things up for everybody.


Mage Spawn:  Random Encounters.  The various and sundry monsters and mutants tearing around.  Just about every fantasy critter not part of a formal faction is here.  Mostly just hung out in dungeons and other bad-but-treasure-laden places, though they found places in player's warbands, too.  Most of the really cool stuff was in the Dungeons spinoff releases, just to piss us off.


Apocalypse:  Ugh.  Not really present outside of fluff before 2.0, and that's a very good thing.  Originally started as 'Four Horseman' chase-figures that were both ridiculously rare and the object of a contest to find all four.  The initial proof the WizKids secretly hated the game and its fanbase and wanted everybody to play HeroClix instead.  After 2.0, they got some regular figures, but never really took off as a faction crunch-wise until just before the end.  Fluff-wise, a bunch of nihilistic, omnicidal pricks that want to watch the world burn.  I hate these guys.




Okay, that's pretty much all of it, and quite a handful at that.  I do plan on a few more info dumps (mostly about the actual expansion released and such), but this blog is going to at least attempt to focus on the battles I'll be playing and the collections my fellow players and I will be building.