Fluff and Crunch (Part Two)

Welcome back to the Vault my fellow Venturers.  In mu last post I discussed some "Crunchy" aspects of wargaming; in particular the finer details of the Chapter Approved points changes made to my 40K armies.  

I've also acquired "Perilous Dark", the new Frostgrave source book.  I have managed to play a grand total of zero games of Frostgrave in 2019, not a great statistic really.  And whilst the purchase of Chapter Approved is important to my 40K play group (so we are all on the same page), the addition of Perilous Dark to my gaming library will bother a grand total of no one!

And I'm completely fine with that, as Perilous Dark contains rules and scenarios for cooperative and single player Frostgrave.  My gaming is firmly rooted in fantasy RPGs (D&D and so on), including the various single player systems like Fighting Fantasy.

An aside before we venture further into the post; a lot of gamers will interpret "Fluff" as the background and narrative surrounding their worlds their games are set in.  Rules can also be Fluffy in that they define mechanically embody some of the story onto the table top.  I'm really talking about the latter definition.

Perilous Dark does a good job in explaining some of the issues associated with solo table top gaming, and provides solutions; here "kill them all" doesn't become the main challenge, rather time pressures or rising threat levels through Monster Spawns (overwhelming odds) provide the pressure to solo player.

The source book also deals with the topic of "player knowledge"; in the solo gaming environment how do you maintain an element of surprise? This is covered through clue markers (exploring elements of the table to progress to latter stages of the scenario) through to random room and dungeon generation.

I'm very excited for random Dungeon Crawling! This has been a facet of fantasy gaming since year dot (go look up the random Dungeon Generator tables in the 1st edition Dungeon Masters Guide), and this system allows players to run games straight to the table top with terrain and minis.

Perilous Dark provides a number of scenarios and a set of modified core Frostgrave rules (remember the "Fluffy" rules I mentioned above) to allow a new Warband to try out the solo gaming straight away. I'm looking forward to trying some of these out before having a go at writing one or two myself.

The Ragged Court will be the first Warband to attempt a solo foray into Felstad. Once I've finished my Space Shark army for February's doubles tournament I'm tempted to paint up a new Warband.