Frostgrave Run Through

Looking at my blog feed the Frostgrave posts are starting to come thick and fast. Obviously MacSver was noticing as well as he suggested we give the ruleset a tentative poke this week. So like so many others, the first FG post is up.

The first outing for my new Deep Cut Studios cobble mat.
All buildings\ruins are Dave Graffam Kits.

A busy\tiring week along with the late suggestion meant that MacSver's patience was probably tested more than his tactics this particular evening, as I fumbled through pages, printouts and decisions. I'd made the poor choice of a Thaumaturge as my Magic School. This is a "buffing" spell type, so tactically a bit challenging for a tired first try-out, with no real attacking spells. MacSver had chosen wisely with the more offensive Elementist list. But even a tired run through was well worth it for laying down the groundwork for a proper game next time.

An Elemental Bolt takes out the x-bow man in turn 2,
completely catching out the figure and his alleged controller.

The system is pretty simple and runs in a phased Igo-Ugo style. The turns being one player's Wizard actions, Apprentice actions and Soldier actions followed by the same for the other player. Player Initiative is rolled before ever turn to keep things mixed up.

One thing to get the hang of (especially after coming from Song of Blades and Heroes) is the ranged combat. SoBH is quite openly based around melee. Spell and arrow effective ranges are very short. In Frostgrave the arrow range is by comparison huge at 24". A lot Spells are just plain Line of Sight  which can be very dangerous, as one of my crossbowmen found out as an Elemental Bolt fizzed right across the table on turn two and took him out!

Combat runs with 3 different checks ("to hit", "armour piercing" and then "damage") but for all these there is only one d20 roll. This means that in most cases a low winning roll of less than a 10 is immediately recognisable as useless, as it won't beat the enemy armour. Every figure has a number of Health points, so there is a little amount of book keeping to keep track, but "fortunately" the health is low enough that a good\bad hit can still take someone out in one whack!

Casting spells is a case of rolling higher than a required target casting number. The majority of these are a base 8 to 12 on a d20 before modifiers. If the casting is failed there is a chance of a small amount of damage happening to the caster, which I like. Also good is the ability to "spend" health to boost the spell, be it's casting or effectiveness. Spell lists hopefully will be varied enough as we go through games to have different approaches to play, which should keep things exciting.

I'm off now to look through my painted (and unpainted) spell caster options...