I'm sure it has been asked many times but is there ever going to be an expansion for this game? It could use some additional armies, neutral units, board pieces and characters. I know there are additional characters out there if you buy other FF products but i'm not about to go buy an entire game for a couple extra characters, that is absurd. So, any love for runewars or are they just basicly done with this at a single box?

Alas, there has been no word either way. My guess is, though, that if an expansion is made, we won't hear about it until shortly before it releases. Lately, it seems that FFG doesn't announce upcoming things in too much advance like they used to.

One thing that I think is great about Runewars is that even if it were never expanded, it would be an awesome game that I can see myself playing for a long time. Yet it still lends itself to being expanded, which means that they didn't paint themselves into a corner.

Anyway, if you are interested in more heroes, at least, I've created a set of unofficial hero cards for every hero from the Descent/Runebound games that didn't already have cards in Runewars (except the Runebound Mists of Zenaga and Midnight expansions). I've been playing with them for several months, and they really help to give a lot more variety to the hero game.

I'm also working on another project, but I don't want to tip my hand too much until I've got it polished more. (Obviously, it's also completely unofficial, but so far, it has been fun to work on and play with!)

A 6 Players expansion would be perfect. Four is ok but our playround now sometimes got 6 players and so runewars unfortunately is a no play

FFG has a tendency to release expansions to game they intend to expand on a roughly annual basis (one expansion per year, give or take some exceptions.) This game was released last January, so it's only now starting to approach one year in print. If FFG is planning an expansion (and there's no indication that they are) I wouldn't expect an announcement until Jan/Feb 2011. Even if nothing surfaces by then, I wouldn't seriously rule out the possibility that they have an expansion in the wings until sometime in 2012 or 2013.

That said, this game was designed by Corey, who doesn't usually release expansions just for the sake of making more money. If he expands on a game, its usually because he has some seriously new ideas to add, not just "more of the same." That's obviously a good thing in some regards, but it also means his games don't always see an expansion. Runewars is pretty tight as it is.

I would love to see an expansion for 6 players. I'd also love to see dwarves and orcs as playable races, as has been discussed here ad nauseum in the past. I'm also confident that the fans can provide such things if FFG deigns not to (as a side bar, there is one fantastic looking homebrew of a dwarven race cooking over on BGG right now.)

I just recently played my first game of Runewars and loved it. I will be purchasing a copy of it shortly to add to my collection and I would love to see an expansion!!! More races would be nice, as would quests and map tiles.

I have all the Runebound games as well as all the Descent games and building a wargame in the same world worked out quite well! I think that FFG will be taking special care that any new expansion to Runewars fits into the game world properly.

I own a copy of Warrior Knights which I really enjoy (and has many similarities to Runewars), but it is really meant to be played with three or more players. Runewars on the other hand scales well with only two players and I can imagine a six player game would be incredible!

without expansions this game is not really interesting. especially because of the models small size. an orc - dwarf expansion is a must, also more units for each race. a fith spot is open on every race tablet, thats maybe a hint for future plans. everything else is ready for houserules, lot of them.

I'm not sure i agree that it's not really interesting. I think even if FFG never made an expansion, the game is plenty good on it's own. It doesn't NEED any expansion to make it good. Sure, expansions would make an already awesome game even better, but none of them are needed to "fix" things or to keep it from getting stale - I've been playing it since it came out and it's not even CLOSE to being stale for me

magicrealm said:

I think the game is fantastic, just as it is. Furthermore, if you think it's boring now, I don't see how an expansion will make it any better. Any figures included in an expansion will be the same scale as those in the base game, and although some new rules options might emerge, the basic game play won't change all that much, I don't expect. Maybe you just picked some bad examples there, but it doesn't seem like any of the things you cite as making the game "not interesting" are the kinds of things that would be radically changed by an expansion.

I think the fact that each race has one initiative slot open is just to mix up combat a bit. If every race had something in each slot then every army could hit on all 5 cylinders, so to speak. With an opening in there somewhere, you have to plan for that much more of a delay before your top end units get to attack, without having anything in that spot you can use to fill the time. It's a small effect, granted, but it's one of the many things that combine to make each race unique. Like how every race is missing one base shape in their roster, or how every race has a unique tactics/influence combination. An expansion that "filled in" those missing bits would actually remove something from the game, IMHO.

Steve-O said:

Well, every race except the Uthuk Y'llan They have one of each shape.

i didnt say the game is boring or bad made or something like that. i said its uninteresting for me, because its half of the world i want to play in. the thrird basic and fundamental good aligned fantasy race are the dwarves. a game with just humans and elves, without dwarfes, or just without any one of the three is an unfinished game to me, board or pcgame. humanoids, that are orcs, goblins, lizards, skaven, ogres, trolls, everything evil aligned standing on two feet (more or less) hold a kind of weapon speaking a kind of language, is the third fundamental evil race in fantasy. so with human, dwarfes, elves, orcs, undead and demons the world is complete in view of races. highelves and darkelves give a plus. all fantasy worlds consist of these 6 fundamental races.

the chances are very high that an orc- dwarf expansion will come. one reason is the 6 player game that is should be. another reason is that dwarfes and orcs are part of runebound basic game, the cities of forge and dawnsmoor, denizens to hire and even the characternmodels included in runewars show this. there are 4 orc characters in runewars. i suppose the game did not sell that bad that a major expansion would be out of ptofit. so lets hope it will come first half of next year.

magicrealm said:

Are you talking about Terrinoth, or generic fantasy? Dwarves aren't necessarily "good" in Terrinoth. They are just as likely to be neutral aligned. And Orcs aren't necessarily evil (as evidenced by all 4 Orc heroes in the game being neutral). I'm not sure if Terrinoth has "goblins", they definitely don't have "skavens", and lizardfolk seem to be very uncommon.

In short, I'm very glad that the Terrinoth universe seems to define their own definition of "fantasy". Sure, they borrow some of the tried and true things as well, but they also make their own fantasy rules, and what is/isn't true in their universe.

Personally, I think one of the main things I kind of dislike about D&D these days is that many people try to portray D&D as the definitive standard for fantasy settings, and then try to bend every other fantasy world to suit it. I personally prefer that different fantasy games can have their own definitions of what belongs and doesn't belong, what factions belong to which alignment, etc. I think it's what gives Terrinoth it's own unique flavor rather than just being a rip-off of D&D.

That being said, I think Orc and Dwarf factions would fit very well in Terrinoth, but they probably won't (at least I hope they won't) follow the so-called "traditional" roles that they have in some fantasy worlds.

they started with the traditional roles, so they should go ahead with it and complete it. making good things bad and bad things good is the way of the evil. of course evil like to be evil, so evil looks good to them. thats the status of our time now. orcs are good ? whats evil then ? dwarfs are bad ? what are dwarfs then ? highelfes that are corrupted by undead join the undead ? thats wow since bc and sounds real political. good means to live from your own work. evil means to take others work and live from that. instead of work you can also say energy or time. thats the difference, simple explained.

for armies , the traditional warhammer game is stil unreached by any other game of that kind. reaper started a different style of fantasy with their warlord series in the beginning, coming back to the traditional warhammer style soon. there are no fairy armies, angel armies, gnome armies, ant armies. i agree fantasy stopped developing decades ago. the games from the 80s are sometimes better than those from today. thats why so many of them are remade, especially from ffg. the way to mix fantasy with science fiction is no way for me. fantasy is etheral, not technoid.. d&d tried an technologic version and it did not show the sucess of the classic faerun.

because fantasy features are archetypes. they are symbols , deep working in human underconsciousness. pictures and tales from energetic higher and lower worlds working at and in humans. i dont want to become theosophic here. but its the reason why any attempt to change the classic roles and meanings never suceeded. you cant replace thousands of years old archetypes with a simple homemade fiction..

by the way, gamesworkshop has the full warhammer program in runewars size with their warmaster series, much cheaper then their larger brothers. unfortunately, without the woodelves and these are the elves in runewars. battlelore has goblin and dwarfs, no elves, orcs, undead or demons. however, the original size has much more appeal to look and play with, especially the fantastic reaper legend miniatures from sandra garrity. thats art, no toy. these are the reason why i still handle with fantasy minaiture games.

my dream is a complete fantasy boardgame where all aspects are included, runewars fullfills that, but, to my taste, at a very beginning level. character adventure is far greater in runebound, talisman and others, strategic games are warhammer, battlelore, titan, mighty empires, blood royale, fief, both componets in one game have been rare, magicrealm, king arthur, dragonpass. these are those i remember.

Well, I guess all the things you are saying you "want" in this game are the very things that I'm absolutely glad have NOT manifest themselves thus far in the Terrinoth universe (Runebound, Descent, etc). Sure, there are types that are common, but the details are what make it set apart.

I do NOT want to see skavens in this game.... EVER.

I do NOT want to see lizardfold be a staple race in this game, at least not in the traditional D&D sense. (The Mah'kim of the old Disc Wars game were a very different type of lizard race, and I think the Mists of Zenaga game, which I've not played yet, continues on with the same view of them).

I hope that if an expansion to this game comes out, it does not just pander to the stereotypes that D&D, Warhammer, and Warcraft make about "elves" and "humans" and "dwarves". For instance, I don't want to see Dwarven Griffon Riders, or Orcish wolf riders, or anything that is cliche in other worlds, but has no place in Terrinoth.

There was an older tabletop miniatures game I played a lot called Mage Knight. I liked it a lot largely because it defined it's own factions. Sure, the Orcs weren't all that great, but they were more marauders and barbarians than outright evil. The elves were an interesting schism; there weren't really any "dark elves" per se, but the elves of the Rivvenheim and the elemental elves didn't see eye-to-eye, and fought each other at times, despite them both being relatively altruistic. The humans came in MANY different varieties, and none of them were necessarily "good". Dragon folk were present, but they had their own agenda, as did several of the other "minor" races. In short, while it did borrow SOME common elements from fantasy, it also decided not to just succumb to cliche temptation in making it "just another fantasy game".

I hope Runewars does the same - ignore the way it supposedly "should be" based on other fantasy games, but simply do what works for the Terrinoth world, even if it flies directly in the face of everything else. I like that it has done so thus far (not just in Runewars, but in all the Terrinoth-oriented games), and hope that they continue to write their OWN flavor of fantasy.

@ sigmazero : highelves and darkelves ARE a part of Terrinoth as shown in the overlord Ardherin in the runebound midnight expansion. now dont come and say midnight is another world. sure it is , but it touched Terrinoth and showed a darkelf Overlord. in Descent you have Deepelf enemies, which are same as Darkelves. the only new races in terrinoth i remember are the farrox and farrow and those are some kind of kobolds and goblinoids. terrinoth shows not much difference to traditional warhammer worlds, if at all. and i like that. i dont like that the games with the same characters show different attributes and values and are uncompatible with each other. i would prefer a compatible, expanded world.

magicrealm said:

Um.... Yeah, I'll say it. Midnight is NOT Terrinoth, and never was meant to be. It was basically a game that used Runebound mechanics for a completely different game universe. Midnight is NOT part of the Terrinoth canon. And I don't think it ever "touched" Terrinoth from a theme perspective; the fact you could use non-Midnight items and heroes was simply for game compatibility, not because of any thematic "tie-in". In fact, that is the very reason I got rid of my Midnight game - it was completely out of place, because it wasn't part of the same world/story.

I had forgotten about Deep Elves, but even still, while simliarities to cliche Dark Evles may be present, I don't think they would be more than superficially the same as they are in other fantasy environments. Again, there ARE tie ins to other fantasy genres, but in pretty much every case, the direction they take with them seems to be unique. And more often than not, they simply invent their own monsters and creatures, and just use the more "traditional" ones as bit roles (for the most part).

I guess we just don't see eye-to-eye on it, but what it sounds like is you want a more generic fantasy themed version of Runewars, rather than one that is tied to Terrinoth; either that, or you want Terrinoth to be molded to fit the more "traditional" fantasy themes out there that have been "tried and true"... and which, to me, have become as boring and uninteresting as your original post makes Runewars out to be.

To put another example, the game Heroscape is one I've enjoyed... up until they started making D&D pieces for it. They starting trying too hard to take the fantasy aspect of Heroscape and mold it to D&D's standards that it ended up causing the game to stagnate and die (and hence canceled). What made it work before, what people in general liked about it, was that it defied standards by putting futuristic beings against historical figures against some "fantasy" themes - but even with the fantasy themes, they didn't go overboard with tradition. Not until D&D-heroscape that is.

I don't want D&D Runewars. I don't want Warhammer Runewars. I don't want Warcraft Runewars. I want Terrinoth Runewars, and I think the theme works exceptionally well for that.

magicrealm said:

Orcs are still orcs, dwarves are still dwarves. I personally prefer not to pigeonhole races into standard cultural or moral views. The idea that every single member of a given race feels aligned to a particular philosophical view is shallow and unoriginal. I understand why it's done - because creating a whole race of people with one outlook is much easier than trying to define a whole society of individuals, but I still applaud those who at least try to shake up the standard stereotypes.

In Terrinoth, orcs are civilized (mostly.) They're still pretty savage and warlike overall, but they've earned their place in society and they work with the other mortal races. Are they "good?" Maybe not. They aren't exactly evil, either. As has been said, all the official orc heroes are neutral in alignment, and if they were to become a faction in their own right I'd expect them to be such. Does that make them not orcs? Of course not. They're still orcs, they just aren't the mindless hero fodder they are in other fantasy settings. You've got beastmen for that, if it makes you feel any better.

Dwarves aren't necessarily bad in Terrinoth, but even they were they'd still be dwarves. Just a bit darker than you're used to. They have pulled out of Terrinoth, for the most part, being fed up with all the violence of the Dragon Wars and returned to their homeland of Dunwarr. So they're neutral in a more Switzerland-y way. They've chosen to isolate themselves.

As an aside, high elves in WoW weren't corrupted by the undead as a race. Some of them were corrupted by the plague and became banshees, one of those banshees regained her free will and became the leader of a group of free willed undead. The rest of the high elf race was mislead by another single high elf who was corrupted by demons, and by the time they figured out what was going on they had already cut political ties with their former allies, so they joined up with the other major faction in an effort not to get left alone. There are still some high elves in the Alliance who never followed Kael-thas in the first place.

Sorry for the nerdrage, but it seems like you prefer simple, clean cut races without much motivation or personal history. Defining races by their sterotypical alignment and so forth. I prefer just the opposite.

magicrealm said:

There are no high elves or wood elves in Terrinoth. There are only elves. Midnight is not part of the Runiverse. It was an RPG before it got a Runebound expansion and like all Runebound expansions, it was a separate affair from the base game. The other RB expansions tie themselves into the Runiverse with their fluff, Midnight does not.

You've got a point with deep elves, although it's worth pointing out that deep elves are not a separate race from the rest of the elves. They're just a faction of elves who went underground and became assassins. They may have cut political ties with Latari but they're still the same race, genetically. Also, from what I gather in the fluff (which there isn't much of), I highly doubt there are enough deep elves to form their own faction in Runewars. So yeah, they are essentially dark elves, but there's still a personal twist in there.

Ferrox are a mystical combination of razorwings (another unique, albiet non-sentient, race in Terrinoth) and humans. They may look like some kind of goblinoid, but they don't have any connection to kobolds (which do exist in a fairly standard fantasy role) or goblins (which don't exist so far as I know.) Kellos only knows why they turned green, perhaps spinnach was one of the more important ingredients in the spell that created them. =P

PS: Ferrox aren't sentient, either. They're savage animals that happen to have a humanoid form.

Other unique races in the Runiverse include yeti (two-headed nomadic primates), ulfen (a race of sentient wolves), onoit (essentially halflings), ice wyrms (at least one of whom is known to possess intelligence) and the Weik (who I suppose are human, technically) - those races all live in the northern wastes of Isheim. Then there's the hybrid races - minotaurs, loryne, leonids, verman (vermen?) and "dragon-men" (who don't have an official name other than "hybrid.") There's the Dragonlords, of course, who are mostly what you'd expect from dragons in a standard fantasy setting, although their body shapes vary dramatically. There's the Mah'kim in Zanaga. There is mention of a more traditional lizardman race (sorry Sigma) who once had an empire spanning the known world. That empire is long in ruin and whether or not the race continues to exist anywhere is somewhat vague. I think there's more details on them in Zanaga, but I don't have that expansion yet so I'm not sure what it says. I'm not even counting the "standard" races like giants and ogres here, mind you.

Then there's the Jef'a with all their "ancient machines," if you want to count stupid alien races that I prefer to ignore. =P

sigmazero13 said:

Hear ye, hear ye.

Another standard fantasy race that I hope never shows up in Terrinoth is gnomes. *shudder.*

I love Warcraft and D&D for what they are. I like the Runiverse for what it is, too. Each has it's own similarities and differences to what we consider "standard" fantasy. And for the record, I think the bulk of that "standard" is still set by Tolkien more than any other source.

D&D, particularly with 4th edition, seems to be moving away from the generic Tolkein clone it was before. There are still elements of that, of course, but there's new stuff too. Warcraft has always had a special place in my heart and I think the (somewhat unexpected) success of WoW in particular has gone a long way to making it seem more generic than it really is. People are familiar with it, so they call it "standard." Maybe nowadays it is setting some standards for fantasy genres, but its roots were pleasantly original, at the time.

Another example of a unique fantasy setting that I really enjoyed is a CCG called Warlords: Saga of the Storm. The mechanics were remarkably similar to D&D (you know, for a card game) but the fluff and the races were all twisted a little to make them unique. Dwarves were highly religious and had a large number of divine spellcasters. Elves were short-lived and obssessed with necromancy. The two human empires were about what you'd expect - one good and one evil. Orcs were definitely bad guys, but they were a united nation instead of a bunch of scattered tribes. And their leaders were albino shaman types. The whole game had a very rich history which made it stand out from other fantasy settings, and new expansions drove the story forward just as much as the gameplay. That's what I like in a game, that's what I like in the Runiverse FFG is creating. I don't need to hear the same old song for the hundredth time, I want to hear something new.

I've seen magicrealm exhibit political jingoistic behavior on other forums here...

...but this is the very first time I've ever seen Jingoistic Sectarianism of FANTASY.

I have officially seen it all.

Oh, and for what it's worth, in Terrinoth, there is at least one Evil Dwarf - Krutzbeck