Meet the New Old Boss.

Hail and Greetings once again!




While my group and I are working out of the details of the campaign being put together, I decided that it was time to talk a bit about Mage Knight 2.0 and the "totally shiny and new factions we swear" that came about when it was released.  Mostly I need to scratch the scribbling itch without letting the cat out of the bag just yet.




Anyway, here we go:




Mage Knight 2.0 was a whole new incarnation of Mage Knight.  Maybe they were going for a block format, maybe not.  I've ranted enough about that anyways.  Everybody got updated and renamed.  I'm gonna try to be concise about how they worked now, but expect gibbering insanity anyway. 


On subfactions:  Yeah, now we had subfactions, too.  Basically they acted as a permanent special ability and usually ran along a theme of sorts, i.e. "wizarding school of mindbullets and killbots," or "gun ninjas,"  or "I'm an abomination and I'm coming to your house after school!"  Some were useful, some were sorta just there, and some were close to broken.  Most of the big boys stated off with two, and everybody got one or more as time went on, including Mage Spawn (lolwut?).


Atlantean Empire:  Same Wizard Rome, only now a muggle is officially in charge (and the Babylon 5 Bathrobe Brigade have their jimmies a-rustled about it).  Getting its crap mostly together, but lots of Byzantine-style intrigue is going on and openly (to us) messing things up.  Still have all the cool magitek killbots of doom, plus the base set gave out significantly more badass versions of their old mooks, trading the lighting guns for mortars.  Oddly enough they lost two of their big tricks (Magic Levitation and Magic Enhancement) but gained some staying power.  Later sets gave us kung-fu wizards, Gauls, grenade launchers, and MOAR KILLBOTS.


Black Powder Revolution:  "Cool we've won, now what?"  Thanks to winning pretty big before the Edition Change of Annoying Doom, the not-Rebel Alliance have managed to become nation-states in their own right.  Their base set mooks were also mostly improvements, bringing in new goodies like dwarven mechanics that come at you with blowtorches and totally-not-Warjacks-we-swear.  Odd decisions include getting clearly ranged figures classified as melee troops and taking an important character (Blackwyn) and giving him a very situational subfaction that relied on metagaming to be useful.  Later sets would see the return of Leech Medics as the kickass Khamsin Surgeon rider units, steampunk shotgun scorpions, magic carpet-riding wizards, and the Snow.  Also home to the Bloody Thorns subfaction, AKA Mage Knight Equilibrium.


Dark Crusade:  The Necropolis Sect gets a facelift, trading in Castlevania vibes for Legacy of Kain vibes.  They've trashed the Elementals and are getting ready for the coup de grace so they can go find different bloodbags to feast on.  The base set gives us a cool centaur zombie and archers that can fly and drain your life from a distance, plus a troll vampire that looks like a gargoyle joined the WWE.  Mechanically, not all that much got changed, though their signature Necromancy got nerfed while they got a subfaction with a scarier version.  Their lore would degenerate pretty quickly, however, going from evil badasses to disjointed and oddly depressed soap opera characters with fangs (seriously, there was a second civil war that read like it was written by Strong Sad for a Vampire: The Masquerade campaign).  Later sets would give us badass undead knights, more zombies, blood cult priestesses, and a freaky skeleton naga demon...thing.


Draconum:  Not all that different, really.  They got to be other colors besides green now, and got some interesting characters in case the "Elder Scroll muderhobo dragon people that evolve like Pokémon after they get enough XP" was too pedestrian for you.  Got only three uniques in the base set, but got more in expansions, plus Wagner-style Valkyries for cavalry and non-unique adult Draconum (!) and got cool recolors in the final set.  They managed to take "purple dragon man" and make it look pretty badass.


Elemental Freeholds:  Thanks to getting wrecked by the fangheads, they went from being a militant hippie commune to Druid Vietcong.  They got totally shafted in the base set, only getting one generic and two uniques, none of which has a subfaction despite having one listed in the rulebook.  Fortunately, they got a much better shake in the expansions, getting archers built like brick houses, fireball chucking priestesses, sword swinging priestesses, and Hircine from The Elder Scrolls.  Oh, and they got a subfaction that let them just ignore a lot of terrain.


Elven Lords:  Because Knights Immortal just didn't sound cool enough.  Oh man.  Dropping the Atlantean 'toy magic' and gear since the wizards crapped their bathrobes and left them high and dry, the high elves went from vaguely racist Tolkien elves to freaking Thalmor.  On the plus side, not everybody bought into the whole "everybody not us is too corrupted, genocide the hell out of them" schtick, so we got the pretty bro-tier Free Armies subfaction out of the deal.  Got lots of really cool sculpts right out of the gate, including archers that didn't specialize into irrelevance, Final Fantasy Dragoons, and solid melee dudes.  Expansions would give us snow leopard centaurs, old uniques making a triumphant comeback and a huge griffin as a 2.0 titan.


Orc Khans:  Having decided that dakka was for sissies, the orcs took their ball and went home.  Of course the ball in question was an absolutely insane amount of plunder from pillaging the crap out of the Empire's westlands.  But where's there's loot, there's loot drama, so a sizable group of dissenters decided to sneak off with what they had and lord it over the weakling humans.  This gave us vengeful traditionalists and a budding Khanate.  Base set mooks would be cool stuff like melee dudes with ramshackle-but-deadly swords and javelins, angry war beasts, and shaman that would rip your heart out Temple of Doom style.  Expansions would get us wolf-themed berserkers, eagle-themed shaman, and magic-users that zapped so hard that their limbs would melt.  And the great return of Podo himself!


Solonavi:  Taste the Rainbow!  Fluffwise, they didn't really change except that now they had openly declared themselves and their powerbase as separate and opposed to the Altanteans.  Short version:  they offered their usual power-for-a-price deal to the Emperor Nujarek, and to the shock of all, he turned them down.  The Solos got an acute case of butthurt.  As the figures themselves go, the creators figured out how to do translucent colors besides teal and now we have hordes of angry eldritch Jolly Ranchers to deal with.  The base set would give us one figure, a unique at that.  Expansions would give us more, including non-uniques and mortal minions (including Amazons and Oracle Kastali herself), with the final set giving us the Seekers back.


NOTE:  The following three factions were not released in the 2.0 base set but gained prominence in expansions.


Mage Spawn:  The usual menagerie of freaks and monsters.  We wouldn't see Mage Spawn again for quite a while, and when they arrived they were mostly a totally different bunch.  Their whole thing was also altered to include a subfaction of mercenaries that could temporary allegiance to other "proper" factions.  Releases included things like giant death bees, giant death worms, mutant bat things, the return of the Krugg, plus non-aligned dwarves.  They also got supremely rare legendary figures. and for some reason the fabled Dragonslayers (mechanically it makes sense, at least).


Shyft:  Didn't really get off the ground for a while, just like the Mage Spawn.  But when they did, they had gone from isolationist lizardmen with the power to command monsters to...well the comparison is anachronistic but apt:  Huge, jacked Navi with four arms and no mouth, but still able to command monsters.  They also got a lot darker, becoming harbingers and heralds for their long-slumbering masters.  Showed up alongside the Mage Spawn, getting mind-warped servants and cultists along the way.


Apocalypse:  Harumph.  They weren't really a faction before 2.0, with just the incredibly rare Four Horsemen chase figures from Sinister.  They would surface again in the expansions, with new versions of the Horsemen and various cultists, soul-shriven slaves, and assorted other edgelords.  They also had heavy ties with both the Shyft and some of the Mage Spawn, while everybody else had a deep, abiding enmity with these...creatures.  Their whole thing was to call forth their dark gods and destroy everything.  There were hints that something a tad more meaningful was going on, but things were just one big death metal concert in practice.  They got a lot of 'corrupted' versions of old figures in the final set, and also the Apocalypse Dragon, a huge muti-dial monstrosity with ludicrous stats and absolutely, hilariously overpowered rules.  The final, most damning evidence that WizKids wanted to do more BattleTech and comic book stuff while sweeping the game that brought them to fame and fortune under the rug. 


Anyway, I hope you enjoyed my ramblings, and hopefully I can share some of the new project with you guys soon.  All Your Clicky Base Are Belong To Us!

The Dork Side Never Dies

Hail and Greetings once again!

It has been a long time, hasn't it?  Believe it or not, things have been going very well in my resurgent Mage Knight addiction.  Played lots of games, clicked lots of dials, and even got something resembling a regulation play area now.  Of course, I had to let my blog about my active gaming become stagnant, like some sort of avant-garde lunatic. 

I, uh, I need to work on that.  My group is getting ready to try something a bit more complex and try out something like a campaign.  Some of concepts and mechanics are up in the air, but the high concept itself is sound.  I can't talk about it just yet, because the story wasn't my idea and I don't want to make it look like it was.  That I added to it some and subjected it to my own special form of madness, yes, but only after I obtain permission to do so.

What I can say is that it will be very "your dudes" focused.  Mage Knight, at its essence, I felt always best when about your personal army and its deeds, trials, and accomplishments.  I know that this isn't anything like a universal opinion; this is gaming, and gaming should ultimately be about personal choice. 


What we're going for is going to be more like the wild tales of mongrel armies gallivanting about and clashing that you see in 'casual' games than the focused scenarios where mono-faction was the only way to go.  Don't misunderstand, everybody will have a heavily favored faction or two in their forces (I've got loads and loads of Black Powder Revolutionaries, and I'm not giving them up anytime soon), but penalizing somebody because they want to throw some Atlantis into their otherwise Dark Crusade vampire edgefest just misses the point.  We're also going to do lots of scenarios, but with added quirks and maybe even some craziness like lopsided build totals or other 'unfair' stuff.

I'm also trying to get and/or make some more terrain to work with.  Things like wrecked villages, big rocks, makeshift fortifications, maybe even some of those constructed terrain thingamabobs if I can find a genie.


TL;DR  Time is like a river, and history repeats...