Wow, 11 days since my last post. I'd apologize for not being up to date, but we've been so busy here at the Wargate!
It is a special post however - this is the 100th time I've published to this blog. It's been over a year since we started this new version of the Inner Sanctum website, and our club keeps growing with membership and views. Though as a club we've had several websites up and down over the years, I think we've finally found a way one site can keep all the different events and narratives going at once in the best possible fashion. Why didn't we try a blog before?
We've added a lot of stuff to the range of games and activities we take part in, and I just want to thank everyone who's had a hand in keeping us relevant!
The last few weeks we've been in hard practice mode for our Warmachine campaign! Now that the first Event Week has begun, the Blood of Menoth campaign page has gone up! You can keep track of what's what there, and see which of the factions is currently leading.
There's not a whole lot of time left in this Campaign Season, but Blood of Menoth resembles more of a long-form tournament rather than a traditional campaign model. As this is the first campaign the club has run with this particular gaming system, there are naturally not as many players involved in it. This allows a lot more room for rivalries, however - and the purpose of the campaign is to decide where in the Warmachine universe our narrative will go.
In most of the miniature games the club plays, there is a marked tendency to avoid named characters from the canon of those games. I don't know if it's a throwback to the old rules of "special characters need opponent's permission", but we here at the Wargate almost never throw a special or named character on the board. Instead, we favor creating our own warriors along the guidelines of the army list and background to create our own narratives for campaigns.
Indeed, there is usually a "campaign world" such as Warhammer Fantasy Battle's Old World - and when we play the miniature campaign, it's results will show when we play the RPG version of that game. Ditto for almost all other titles you'll play here.
Warmachine is a little different. Though the Iron Kingdoms was a d20 RPG back in the days of the OGL, it's very hard to find copies of the books without paying a large sum of money for each one. PDF's are available, but the physical object is a tool for gameplay - pdf's aren't going to cut it at the Wargate. Therefore, don't expect to see Iron Kingdoms break out onto the d20 RPG campaign schedule. Warmachine is therefore, the first system that has no rpg analogue here - a refreshing change for some folks.
So, we will approach the narrative in slightly different manner. For Warmachine, the game is tied to the existence of warcasters - named special characters that lead the army. So, instead of playing characters of our own creation through the narrative (which will carry over from season to season and game to game) we are going to take the "premade" warcaster characters and play those as our own instead.
Therefore, Skim is High Exemplar Kreoss and Dirty Greg is Drake MacBain. We'll be using the "plot armor" device for defeated warcasters - more Skeletor vs. He-Man than Patton vs. Rommel. This sort of approach will be a fun and different way to design narratives based on the background material for Warmachine.
We'll be sticking very close to all canon material published for Warmachine and Iron Kingdoms. We will be taking creative license with events and characters, however - these characters will do new things and maybe even visit new places during the course of our continuing narrative. We might even shoehorn in some dialogue or quick piece of fiction. That's just the way that we play the game!
Good luck to everyone in the Blood of Menoth campaign! See you on game day!
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