OK Folks,

I know that what's left of our community is decimated by the announcements back in January and the subsequent "Game is Complete" notice at Gen Con last week. There's nothing I can do about that. However, as I noted in an earlier topic, I refuse to let it go and wanted to share what me, Jukey, and Church have created to fill the void. You will find below download links for compressed .pdf's of the card files for our first, fan-made expansion.

I'm still getting the Latari and Uthuk cards into their graphic format, but for now, here's the Daqan, Waiqar, and Generic cards. There are approximately 75 new cards for just these three portions of the expansion and we're targeting another 25 or so each for the Latari and Uthuk bringing the total expansion to 125 cards. We realize that this is a lot to digest but we feel that it addresses several key points:

1. Unique units - Each faction gets at least one unique unit for each of it's unit types. Designed to make the many of the non-standard unit sizes playable, each of them will change the dynamic of your army building.
2. Hero builds - Each hero gets one or more new ways to play that hero influencing your overall army building and tactical decisions. 'Nuff said... 😀
3. New Units - Each faction gets one or two new units to nominally address things they're missing or to perhaps buff up an underpowered unit. Waiqar get trash cavalry and Daqan get a golem unit that is a little more balanced (and useful, we hope).
4. Unit building options - I get frustrated by force-building games that limit choices due to cards which are just more useful or cheaper than their peers. We've tried to create some options here to shake things up. To be sure, we don't want things to be overpowered, but the three of us agree that there's an opportunity cost to a card as well as it's points cost and so we've tried to address that dynamic here as well.

In the next day or so, I will be preparing a spreadsheet so that folks can share their opinions on the cards in a standardized way. In the meantime, you can reply to this topic or start a new one. Please post any battle reports in that section of the forums.

I owe folks here the Latari and Uthuk which I should be able to finish in the next couple of weeks now that Gen Con is over and my work travel has a small gap. Rest assured I will get this done. In the meantime, there's something new for each faction even if you can only use the Generic cards...

We know that not every card or idea will survive playtesting, so part of our thought were to get the cards out there and let folks decide. We are happy to receive any feedback, all we ask is that if you find something we missed, please offer one or two suggestions on how to fix it.

After we get this out, we will start working on new units using currently available models from other companies. I already have two such units for the Latari (using the Sylvaneth from Age of Sigmar) and some ideas for the Daqan. Anyone with suggestions for Waiqar and Uthuk, please share them with us.

With that, enjoy... 😎

Daqan

https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/0xNhvA0UQlQybSVJ0cRJGGdaQ#Daqan_Card_File_Hi-Res-compressed

Generic

https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/0PzIW0f231LRag9SUv9RL4f3A#Generic_Cards_File_(Hi-Res)-compressed

Waiqar

https://www.icloud.com/iclouddrive/02eAU284BAW73wkS4D_bg3emA#Waiqar_Cards_Hi-Res-compressed

Great work on getting these up! I will go thru them again and give you some more input.

After a quick scan of daqan, I'm liking what I see. A lot of good additions that dont push the power level too far.

One thing I noticed, a lot of the range restrictions you wrote as within. If you want the abilities to affect units larger than 1 tray, these abilities should be written as 'At range X', otherwise many units will never be fully 'within' the range restrictions.

I have some concerns about orderly withdrawal, but realize latari are miles ahead in this area, my concern is oathsworn dodging a heavy melee the round after they charge late, and then charging again the round after. Possibly make it affect only the unit it is attached to, or a discard?

This all looks really great though! I'm really glad to see it getting off the ground.

I'll get thru the generics and waiqar soon.

Generics:

Drilled formation should have 'you cannot perform this shift if your march was modified by charge'.

I think Kari and Meagan break gauntlets of power, kari would get 4 auto damage, and meagan would get 2 auto splash.

Runebreaker I think needs to be discard, or bumped up in price significantly, it's just too much otherwise.

Suppressing fire I would make a discard to give the stun.

Field medic could be too strong, but easily fixed with being an exhaust.

I like lifegiving ward, but I dont think anyone but daqan should have access to vitality.

Darken the skies is a bit overpriced. I could honestly see it being a 1 point card.

Coordinated movement should probably exhaust as well, it's a good ability, and should not be spammable.

I think inspiring banner could be a figure upgrade.

Saying of which, it would be cool if there were a few generic figure upgrades. Simply use the existing figures, just opens up more options. Several of the cards in here would be good candidates.

A lot of this has really great potential! I'll keep working thru it.

Meta stuff:

Modification cards, in general: that's a lot of stuff that you're changing, and it's easy to miss out on what changed. I mean, it's easy enough as it is to forget what upgrades a unit has, let alone a whole card full of them. It would be better to simply make new unit cards.

RuneWars standard wording is that a unit "receives" tokens, rather than "is assigned". It's a small thing, but one of those things that helps smooth transitions. Also, "[unit type] only" text usually received its own line. On the other hand, if you want to make an improvement to the cards over what FFG had, and if you're sizing these similar to the full-sized cards that FFG switched to (probably something you want to do, just for the amount of text you can put on them), then I always thought it would be nice to have the card name across the top of the card, for those times when you're stacking everything up to make extra room.

I didn't quite follow the explanation for Command. If I understood it properly, it acts as a signal booster for other units' abilities, right? So, for instance, if the command unit is at distance 1-3 of a dispatch runner-equipped card, you could have the command unit "pass along" the dispatch runner ability, up to its command range.

It's sort of disappointing that few, if any, of the musician/banner/etc cards require figure upgrades. Personally, I think that more of the existing ones should have had figures. (Dispatch runner comes strongly to mind here: it should have been snipeable.)

You definitely have some cards with cost imbalances, but I think you knew that (compare Runebreaker with Malcorne's Bequest, for instance.) Bane removal, in particular, seems incredibly inexpensive.

Individual cards:

Orderly Withdrawal doesn't have anything to indicate what triggers it.

Rune-crafted Pennant: I assume that first ability (the one after the skill icon) is supposed to be a shift-1, right?

Betrayers of Carthage should be spelled "Carthridge". Also, most "it's" on the cards should be "its".

I didn't get around to looking at Waiqar, because I hit the My Eyes Glaze Over stage before I got that far.

Thanks for taking a look at this if only for a moment. To be sure, I knew I would have some cards incorrectly costed, I certainly tried to compare a given card to as many as I could think of, but to be sure, some are going to fall through the cracks.

Command is like Relay from Armada (if you play Armada). The idea was that you could issued commands through that unit to effectively extend the range of your abilities.

Point taken about adding more figure upgrades. I guess I never thought about it that way, but I also wanted the cards to be useful for more than the base infantry unit. If there's a particular card or two that you think needs to be balanced by making it a figure upgrade (thereby restricting its use), that would be helpful.

I'd love to get more of your feedback after your eyes re-settle from being glazed over 😀

21 minutes ago, sarumanthewhite said:

Point taken about adding more figure upgrades. I guess I never thought about it that way, but I also wanted the cards to be useful for more than the base infantry unit. If there's a particular card or two that you think needs to be balanced by making it a figure upgrade (thereby restricting its use), that would be helpful.

Well, there's absolutely nothing preventing you from making cavalry figure upgrades, as well, and releasing two or more versions of the same card. We may not have dedicated figures for cavalry upgrades, but that doesn't mean that one couldn't be painted differently, or modified, or something like that.

All right, coming back and going through Waiqar:

Meta:

I dislike the way Unhallowed works, on thematic grounds. Why is there, randomly scattered through the battlefield, a bunch of spots that are evil? Unhallowed grounds tend to be associated with ceremonies performed at a specific location. In other words, the tokens should cluster around a specific evil spot, not scatter across the battlefield—or, alternately, instead of placing tokens, the player would be able to place actual Unhallowed terrain (which is not available normally—things like graveyard, ritual altar, hanged man's copse, or the like) after the regular terrain placement has happened.

Unfortunately, most of the cards using Unhallowed do it in a way that implies a battlefield with scattered evilness, so I'm having a real hard time warming to the Waiqar part of this thing.

Individual cards:

Runic Siphon: the wording on this is a bit awkward. And you might want to swap "perform a rally" for "gain 1 inspiration token".

Thanks for the feedback. I’m working through some of this later tonight and tomorrow so I can share my thoughts behind the design after that...

I was thinking cav figures would be cool too.

For unhallowed, maybe it needs to be treated like overgrow, and you place X unhallowed tokens on terrain pieces at setup?

Further down the road we could experiment with what happens when a terrain piece becomes unhallowed and overgrown. Maybe it becomes dangerous as the vines become corrupted or something....thoughts for a later time.

The other option would be to assign unhallowed to units. Thematically an evil power up which will allow these units to act as moving map effects.

Hey guys,

Sorry, I got a bit busy yesterday. Here’s how I came up with the Unhallowed design:

1) I wanted something to create positional significance on the board beyond terrain which is frequently placed in the corners so folks can Killdozer each other... 🤣

2) I was inspired by the Latari Overgrowth ability as a mechanism to achieve this positional significance but was concerned that it was largely limited to terrain locations

3) I was concerned that allowing Overgrowth and Unhallowed to be put on the same terrain piece could create a bit of a trump effect where one player’s benefit is essentially cancelled out by the other player’s benefit. I was concerned that this would make people less likely to use it.

4) Moving the Unhallowed to be beyond range 1 of the terrain seemed to remove this conflict, but I’m certainly open to other ideas. 😀

5) My original thoughts around the Alighment theme for the set was that there was this release of magical energy across all of Terrinoth due to the Alignment of natural forces with time. This magical energy lies just beneath the surface of our world ready to be pulled into it by those daring or powerful enough to do so. Thematically, I was thinking that an Unhallowed token would represent places where the negative energy was pulled into this world by the Waiqar prior to the battle.

So, just to make sure I’m understanding your comments (which I appreciate), are you OK with the game mechanic of placing it beyond Range 1 of terrain or is it that the theme doesn’t fit with your expectation of the word Unhallowed. To be sure, I do like the idea of Unhallowed ground, but I dont’ see what that has to be limited to terrain pieces. It would seem that any location on the map could be effectively cursed prior to battle which is what the upgrades represent.

I do like your idea of allowing them to place an additional terrain piece, but I’m concerned that it could make the battlefield unmaneuverable for large units. This was part of the reason why I settled on tokens which don’t disrupt movement but still grasp positional significance.

Perhaps we could have one of the upgrades add the Graveyard to the map while the other upgrades must be placed on the existing terrain as with Overgrowth?

I share your concern of adding terrain to the field. I feel like unhallowed within distance 1-2 of terrain would be fine, but playtesting would be needed for me to know for sure.

The theme works for me just fine.

1 hour ago, sarumanthewhite said:

So, just to make sure I’m understanding your comments (which I appreciate), are you OK with the game mechanic of placing it beyond Range 1 of terrain or is it that the theme doesn’t fit with your expectation of the word Unhallowed. To be sure, I do like the idea of Unhallowed ground, but I dont’ see what that has to be limited to terrain pieces. It would seem that any location on the map could be effectively cursed prior to battle which is what the upgrades represent.

Before I begin, I'm really hoping that more people will chime in here on the topic, either for, against, or whatever. So far, you only have me and Jukey responding to this, and while I get strong opinions on a subject, that doesn't always make me right. But, my take on it:

Placing tokens beyond range 1 of terrain isn't the problem. The problem, for me, is having multiple evil spots, scattered across the map. There are two reasons for this: first, as mentioned, is thematics. Having an area where evil lurks fits thematically. Having four areas on the map doesn't fit my notions of how it should work. If there is some release of magical energy in the world that scattered unhallowed energy everywhere, then logically it should have scattered large amounts of other types of energy—bestial fury energy helping the Uthuk, hallowed energy helping the Daqan. And that's not something I think would be good for the game.

The other reason is for gameplay: this is very close to the Larari's Overgrown abilities . And while I don't think that any one faction "owns" a particular mechanic, I think that if you're replicating any signature mechanic, it's a good idea to give the new mechanic enough differentiation that it actually feels different. Moving the location out of the terrain into the open doesn't change the mechanic all that much. Making the tokens cluster together, or something else that is noticeably different than Overgrown, would be good.

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I do like your idea of allowing them to place an additional terrain piece, but I’m concerned that it could make the battlefield unmaneuverable for large units. This was part of the reason why I settled on tokens which don’t disrupt movement but still grasp positional significance.

I liked Jukey's idea of having unholy units, as well.

My idea of having unhallowed terrain was just throwing out ideas, and trying to explain what I was talking about, not something I'm pushing hard to get. I like the idea conceptually, but understand wanting to keep down the clutter.

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Perhaps we could have one of the upgrades add the Graveyard to the map while the other upgrades must be placed on the existing terrain as with Overgrowth?

For me, the sticking point is scattering the tokens around the board. Adding the graveyard is fine; adding to other terrain would make it even closer to Overgrown than it already is. I would rather see it be something like: "Add the graveyard to play, then everything at range 1-X of the graveyard is considered Unhallowed, where X is the number of unhallowed tokens on the graveyard." And, of course, the Waiqar player is the one who gets to place the graveyard.

But, I'm also interested in seeing if other players have any other ideas. Like I said, I think Jukey's idea of having units being unhallowed has some good potential, too.

How about this? Choose X units equal to your highest unhallowed card, place 1 unhallowed token on their unit card. Unit gains skill: discard 1 unhallowed token and places it within range 1 of the unit. This gives unhallowed a 'winds of winter' white Walker feel, like the unhallowed aura follows the undead. It also allows waiqar to keep unhallowed power level up even as they lose units.

Spoilers, the uthuk are getting a ynfearnal token effect, and latari will be getting more out of overgrow. Each army having a map effect will be pretty cool, but more on that when those go up.

OK, I thought I’d give some other folks a chance to jump in, but I guess @Jukey , me, and @Xelto will continue... 😣 (BTW, where’s @Church14 ?)

@Xelto If I understand you correctly, you’d like to see a mechanic for Unhallowed which is perhaps more thematic and similar but different to Overgrowth. I’m on board with you directionally as well and one of the things I like about Runewars is that each of the factions is quite different (although some of their upgrades are identical).

Here’s the dilemma I faced:

• I didn’t want to add a piece of terrain to the game because of it’s ability to shut down movement of large units when there’s 4 pieces of terrain on the board
• I was concerned about putting tokens on the same piece of terrain that the Latari could end up putting Overgrowth tokens on as this could create a sort of trump effect making folks less likely to use it.
• The token placement is not random but rather represents locations where the Waiqar have performed specific rituals prior to the battle, sort of preparing the battlefield with field entrenchments, etc. The Latari do have the Greenwatch Herald which allows them to put a token in the battlefield albeit at a particular range of a unit.
• There are Unhallowed units which are always considered to be at Range of token but don’t create the effect themselves. I kind of like the idea of units being one source of the effect, though. I think you’re both onto something.
• Placing the Graveyard in place of one of the existing terrain pieces seems to fit with your thematic expectations and accomplishes much of what a placed token would.

As @Jukey noted, the Uthuk are going to get their own token placement, board position effect. I need to think how to make it similar but different from Unhallowed and Overgrowth... We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it... 🙄

So, how about this:

• I’ll make a couple of the unique units to be sources of Unhallowed. When the unit dies, the token goes away if it hasn’t been used.
• I’ll add a rule that says, “During Setup, at the start of Step 5- Place Terrain, you may replace one Dangerous terrain piece with the Graveyard or one Defensive terrain piece with the Blighted Ground terrain piece taken from outside the game. The next time you are to choose and place a terrain piece, your opponent makes that choice instead. After Setup, place X Unhallowed tokens on the terrain piece you chose where X is the highest Unhallowed rating from a unit or upgrade in your army. You may then move each token to within Range 1 of the terrain piece.”

I kind of like the idea of reserving the unit sources to being Uthuk, but thematically it has a great feel for the Waiqar. What would you suggest for Uthuk?

Once again, thanks for your thoughts and let’s see if we can move this forward. I’m working on the Latari, that should be finished by the end of next week...

I like where you are going with unhallowed. The idea of switching to the graveyard is interesting to me because I'd like to give that terrain a waiqar only boost (regen natural when at range 1? Infantry only of course).

Church had worked out a neat ynfearnal token effect but I forget how it worked. I'm not sure if he is still wanting to commit time to the project, but I dont want to speak for him. I'll at least try to get the stuff he had made.

The Ynfearnal (spelling?) Ward (YW) that I wrote up is basically a token that is placed in the board. At the end of every turn, ANY unit at distance 1 receives a panic token if they don’t have one already. Like thresher but everyone is afraid of it.

Then various upgrades allow Uthuk to trigger effects if an enemy or you are near the tokens.

As I just stated buying and playing I love this. Great work.

21 hours ago, sarumanthewhite said:

So, how about this:

• I’ll make a couple of the unique units to be sources of Unhallowed. When the unit dies, the token goes away if it hasn’t been used.
• I’ll add a rule that says, “During Setup, at the start of Step 5- Place Terrain, you may replace one Dangerous terrain piece with the Graveyard or one Defensive terrain piece with the Blighted Ground terrain piece taken from outside the game. The next time you are to choose and place a terrain piece, your opponent makes that choice instead. After Setup, place X Unhallowed tokens on the terrain piece you chose where X is the highest Unhallowed rating from a unit or upgrade in your army. You may then move each token to within Range 1 of the terrain piece.”

It sounds like you'll want two different keywords: one for "this unit is unhallowed" and one for "place unhallowed tokens near the Waiqar-specific terrain".

21 hours ago, sarumanthewhite said:

As @Jukey noted, the Uthuk are going to get their own token placement, board position effect. I need to think how to make it similar but different from Unhallowed and Overgrowth... We’ll cross that bridge when we get to it... 🙄

That's going to be a challenge. The only idea I could come up with are tokens that move, either away from or toward units, depending on how the runes come up. I'm not sure if I like the idea or not.

Thanks again for your perspective and suggestions on this. Like anything in life, a second set of eyes on it usually makes it better.

For the Uthuk, I’m thinking that they could place tokens on the map as @Church14 designed, but perhaps we could tie their activation/inactivation to the runes cast at the end of the turn. One rune could be tied to Stable, another tied to Natural, and another tied to Unstable. Alternatively, you could make the effect radius strength tied to the quantity of a given rune (ala Fire Rune).

Thoughts?

21 hours ago, Embermore said:

As I just stated buying and playing I love this. Great work.

Great, welcome aboard to our community (whatever is left!). There’s a ton of game here for you to play and we’re going to be producing additional stuff, so enjoy!!! 😀

57 minutes ago, sarumanthewhite said:

Alternatively, you could make the effect radius strength tied to the quantity of a given rune (ala Fire Rune).

Just to make sure I'm understanding what you're suggesting: the Uthuk have upgrades that allow them to place Ynfearnal tokens. But instead of placing one or more generic faction tokens, they would place either an Ynfearnal [stable], Ynfearnal [unstable], or Ynfearnal [natural] token. Then ranges for game effects would vary, based on the amount of any given rune in play. So, for instance, instead of units and upgrades saying "If at range X-Y of [faction token]", they would say something like "If inside Ynfearnal influence". The effective ranges of upgrades will fluctuate during the game.

Yeah, that definitely differentiates them sufficiently.

7 hours ago, Xelto said:

Just to make sure I'm understanding what you're suggesting: the Uthuk have upgrades that allow them to place Ynfearnal tokens. But instead of placing one or more generic faction tokens, they would place either an Ynfearnal [stable], Ynfearnal [unstable], or Ynfearnal [natural] token. Then ranges for game effects would vary, based on the amount of any given rune in play. So, for instance, instead of units and upgrades saying "If at range X-Y of [faction token]", they would say something like "If inside Ynfearnal influence". The effective ranges of upgrades will fluctuate during the game.

Yeah, that definitely differentiates them sufficiently.

Yep, you got it and it makes their effects a bit unpredictable like many of their other powers. Keying it to runes emphasizes army building and game timing to a larger extent...

13 hours ago, Xelto said:

Just to make sure I'm understanding what you're suggesting: the Uthuk have upgrades that allow them to place Ynfearnal tokens. But instead of placing one or more generic faction tokens, they would place either an Ynfearnal [stable], Ynfearnal [unstable], or Ynfearnal [natural] token. Then ranges for game effects would vary, based on the amount of any given rune in play. So, for instance, instead of units and upgrades saying "If at range X-Y of [faction token]", they would say something like "If inside Ynfearnal influence". The effective ranges of upgrades will fluctuate during the game.

Yeah, that definitely differentiates them sufficiently.

That’s overly complicated from my suggestion, though not bad.

The tokens themselves just had a range 1 panic effect. Similar to the threshers but it affects all opponents. The Uthuk upgrades I set up would trigger either at a range 1 or range 1-RUNE TYPE of those tokens. Also, one of the upgrades turned an Uthuk unit into an Ynfaernal ward but also damaged it every turn.

The simple example was an upgrade that lets you use your skill to spend a panic token on up to unstable number of enemy units at distance 1 of the Ynfaernal Wards. Each of those takes 2 damage. Then the unit which triggered that skill suffers one damage for each panic token spent. It’s a sandpaper effect.

i leaned into the idea of Uthuk doing a lot of 2 damage effects. It embraces their generic units’ lousy ability to deal with high armor. I also leaned into generating a haze of panic and leaned into spending that panic on things besides morale.

Part of the idea behind generating a haze of panic where almost every unit has a single panic token was to undercut the usefulness of threshers. With the YW tokens they really don’t anything special except pile damage on.

Also, all of my stuff was balanced around our errata that doesn’t allow entering or exiting terrain outside of your activation. .

Hi Church14 !

First, thanks to extend our enjoyment with your runequest extension 🙂

I hope you release Latari and Uthuk cards soon, so next holidays perhaps I can play with them !

Thanks to all people who have trying to fan made something for runewars, it's very cool 🙂 🙂 🙂