One Man Warband

The Problem with Shields Shields are a perennially unpopular choice in Mordheim, which seems strange considering what they do. For the low price of 5 gold crowns, a warrior can improve their armour save by 1, which admittedly doesn’t sound like much. Consider, however, what one would normally pay for this benefit. Toughened leathers offer a 6+ save for 5 gold crowns, but inexplicably prevent the use of a shield to improve this save. Following those, the next cheapest option for an armour save of any kind is light armour, which comes in at 20 gold crowns, four times the price of a shield. If you want to improve your save from there, you’ll need to fork over an extra 30 gold crowns for heavy armour (with a total cost of 50 gc), and from there it’s another 100 gc to get to a 4+ save with gromril. Compared to these increments, a shield seems downright economical. So what’s the catch? It takes one hand to use. To someone unfamiliar with Mordheim, that may not sound like a huge ...

A couple of years back, I backed a game on Kickstarter called The World of SMOG: Rise of Moloch. It wasn't a smash hit in the same way that many other projects by the same company (Cool Mini or Not) have been, and continue to be, but the theme and setting hold a special place in my heart, which I have to travel about ten years back in time to explain. Promo image from the original line of miniatures. Rewind to me, a teenager, just getting into the hobby of miniatures painting and gaming, and devouring all the related content I could find. I came across a line of miniatures called SMOG 1888 (interestingly enough, on CMON's website), and was immediately intrigued. As I recall, they were 54mm resins without a set of rules behind them, geared towards collectors. (A ruleset for a game called SMOG, The Thirteenth Hour would come out later, but the high price point and nonstandard size of the miniatures was a huge entry barrier, from what I read.) I was already interested in the...