A gentlemen at our FLGS (Gauntlet Games) is going to run a Malifaux Campaign using the campaign rules printed in the most recent issue of Wyrd Chronicles, allowing for your crew members to acquire injuries and upgrades as the game moves along. He's planning on running it as a one-game-per-week campaign, much like is suggested in the article, and pair us up to have us play individually and see how this thing turns out. Now, I entered the Miniatures gaming world thanks to a little game called Blood Bowl (thanks, Jon Goulbourne) and one of the hallmarks of Blood Bowl is the League system where your players grow and change as you play games and eventually your team modifies itself to become quite different than what you start. The new Malifaux campaign system contains a very similar style of game, and I love the idea of that. My concern with this system is the notion that, should things go horrifically wrong in a particular game, you can easily get left with, like, 2 models alive in your crew, no master, and a 6 SS minion to lead you the rest of the way. Now, that would take some horrifically poor luck, but it's not impossible, and the fact that a 25 SS crew is going to have a pretty low model count means you can be pretty vulnerable to things going that way in a hurry. There is, however, a mechanism built in to correct for this by giving you a refund in "Guild Scrip" or the cash to buy new minions, based on the relative sizes of your crews. I would feel better if there was a way to buy a new Master if you lose yours, but cest la vi, it's a game and we'll see what happens.
So, since this thing is firing up, it's time for me to think about who I'm going to use for this campaign. As a henchman I generally try to do what I can to improve diversity in leagues, so I tried to get a feel for what others were going to bring out for this shin dig. Two players were running a practice/warm-up game for it and were playing Neverborn on Neverborn, so that crossed my most familiar faction off of the list (drat.) Another player was leaning towards running McCabe as Guild, so there went my first love, Perdita (double drat.) No one is currently planning on playing Resurrectionists, but my biggest crew in the Ressers is Kirai and some folks pointed out to me (rightly so) that your typical Kirai crew is going to behave rather strangely in this format, since you're only going to have Kirai and the Lost Love survive most games, and boosting them up would be moderately pointless (relic hammer for Kirai! Woo!) So this leaves me with Collette, an interesting crew that I don't know that well, and....Ten Thunders.
A bit of back story. When Storm of Shadows (Malifaux Book 4) came out, I was excited by the new models but not over the moon about the Asian faction. I don't know why, exactly. It's just not one of the themes that has ever really tripped my trigger, despite the fact that I've developed (what I think is) a relatively good method of creating bamboo bases on the cheap using spaghetti. As such, early purchases for me in the book 4 era involved getting Lynch (woo Neverborn) and McCabe. Then, during the Winter organized play event, I needed to play a game with a different faction and picked up the Ten Thunders with McCabe as master to play against a Misaki led crew. And...Misaki gutted McCabe turn one, and then I spent the game playing movement tricks and blowing things right the hell up with my TT Archer...and discovered how sick the crew can be. Then, shrouded in secrecy, I went out to go purchase the Misaki boxed set and assembled it.
If you look closely at the painted crew, you can actually see the drops of shame mixed in with the paint.
As such, I'm going to give the 10T a run (I'm trying out all the abbreviations to see which one I like. It isn't that one.) If nothing else, I'll want to get some practice and learn all I can to prep for Gencon tournaments and what-not. My initial list will look like this:
Ten Thunders Campaign Crew
Misaki
Shang
Torekage
Ten Thunders Archer
Yamaziko
8SS
My rationalization is that, if you're playing a TT crew, you are doing so to include Torekages and do the Tore-flop, so you need at least one ninja-guy. The Archers are maybe one of my favorite parts of this crew, as they flat-out kill things dead, so one of them is going in. I want to test Shang to know whether I feel he's worth the points, so in he goes, and Yamaziko adds some much-needed healing and area-denial to the crew that should help out in missions and preventing loss to attrition during the course of the campaign. My concern is that, typically, a crew will include a hitter minion to back up Misaki, but at 25 SS you have to make some cuts, and I think this is the best way to go for a crew in a campaign format. Misaki will just have to carry the water on her own.
I'll be updating this as the campaign moves along, to allow for reflection and analysis on my strategy and campaigns in general.
