Let's chill with: FROSTGRAVE

With the amount of interest and discussion in various places we have seen, I think it's time to create a thread dedicated to just Frostgrave, by Osprey publishing.

For those not yet in the know, it is a small warband skirmish game similar to fare such as Mordheim. This game uses a single d20 instead of buckets of d6's. The twist is that your keystone piece is a Wizard who is trying to accumulate treasure and magical knowledge by looting a long forgotten city buried by an icy cataclysm that has thawed enough to adventure in. Your wizard is accompanied by an apprentice and a band of hirelings to do this task, but you must contend with other mages for this newly unearthed arcana. Ready? Fight!

Several sourcebook type of expansions have been released quite regularly, including Ghost archipelago which removes the snowy theme altogether along with the heavy attention towards magic users.

Add whatever you feel like to this thread. Thoughts on the game, how to improve it. The models and terrain you use, and where to find them or how to make them. Whatever, just keep it relevant to Frostgrave.

This is merely for localized discussion, but if you want some exhaustive places that this is being discussed, then the subforum at Lead Adventures is probably the best place to read. www.lead-adventure.de/index.php?board=92.0

Another great resource is this warband builder I found online. It takes nearly all the work out of listbuilding and gives you a tidy print which includes spells on your page.
www.table-top.space/

TERRAIN

For myself, I have a lot of heroscape terrain, and cant bring myself to go through the process of terrain building and the cost it incurs to play this. I really want a lush board filled with great looking terrain, but prudence says my time would be better spent in tweaking the design to fit hex movement than buying and painting more terrain.

So after over a dozen tries, I've come to a decent way to implement this. The main hurdle is movement and the half measure for the second action.
I have fixed this by increments of 1.5". So if a model has a movement of 6", then it is now 4 hexes. If it is an odd number, then you round down. a move of 5" is now 3 hexes, with the second move being 2 hexes. For the very fast models with a move of 7" and 8", the move is 5 hexes. The models with a move of 8", the move of 5 hexes is rounded up instead of down (on these 8" move models, I just added an entry called "Fleet" with that round up ruling for quick reference.. But all of this has to be put on a crib sheet so that you don't have to calculate this and is just written on profiles and the rules crib sheet.
Spells and their effects likewise need to be tweaked, and this gives me an opportunity to go into photoshop and make new spell cards for all the spells with this conversion in mind.

RANDOM ENCOUNTERS
I also think that the random encounters are pretty important and fun, so using the rules from ghost archipelago, I am house ruling that monsters arrive on a 12+ instead of 15+ found in frost grave rules.
And since my collection isn't the same as what is in the random encounter table, I decided to kill a couple birds with one stone and create a random encounter deck, with a card for each random encounter. No more rolling and referring to the table then referring to their separate entry in whatever sourcebook they are in. Just draw a card, and the stats and pic for that encounter are on each card. This allows for 'counts as' to be better implemented for the models that I have to fit a particular rules entry. No ice toad? No problem, it's now an Ogre or whatever and not look silly.

if you're making a thread about minatures and you're not posting pics, you are doing it wrong.

True. Miniature pornography is pretty hawt. All in due time.

I'll have to take pics of a 3'x3' heroscape terrain set up next time we play, to help illustrate that isn't as bland as one might imagine.

It's not cheap, but if you already have it then the obvious stuff that seems to fit are the Thaelenk Tundra, the Fortress of the Archkyrie set, a few sets of the ruins from the original Rise of the Valkyrie set, as many trees from Road to the Forgotten Forest as you can wrangle. If youre handy with graphic design, then creating new stickers for glyphs can be pretty handy too.

One thing that is pretty helpful for playing is a copy of Dungeon Saga models. It gives a really huge boost to not only monsters for random encounters, but also gives a few much needed bits like a well and treasure chests for treasure tokens, etc. Thanks for selling that to me a couple years ago, Josh Look.

Frostgrave should be a town in Nunavut.

or Skyrim

I have never been sold on Frostgrave's rules or models overall, but I do dig their Wraith Knights.

If I were to travel down this road, I'd probably pick up older GW LotR plastic minis. You can get a good amount pretty cheap now...and they would double as LotR Battle Company warbands.



(Is it just me, or has the 'image link' tool stopped working? I've had to manually type in the img html the past few weeks.)

I apologise if I repeat anything that has been posted before. And I'll try to post some pictures later.

We've been playing a campaign locally for about a year. Terrain wise we have some scratch built stuff, Age of Sigmar, Heroscape, Reaper Bones, thrifted Lord of the Rings chess pieces for statues, and pet shop aquarium terrain. You really want a lot to break up line of sight so elemental bolt doesn't over power the game, although we have seen crit arrow shots take out wizards as well.

We've had as many as six players in a game which kind of stretches the system. What we do is break it up into two teams which alternate activations but it is still every wizard for himself.

Before we started we read some of the threads on the author's website and some other places and came up with the following house rules:

Flat 25 XP for anything your wizard kills

20 XP for spells successfully cast (Out of game spells do NOT count for this)

35 XP for treasure recovered

6 turn game limit (5 if we play on a 3X3) with a 50% chance for 1 additional turn.

Wandering monster threshold drops by one every turn, AND one for each missed roll until a success when it resets to the baseline.

You can sell any and all items you want between games but you can buy only one and buy costs are double.

Only one upgrade to a base per turn.

You are limited to one 100 GP soldier and two cheaper ones a turn.

As far as a catch up mechanism how about a 50 XP bonus for the lower level wizards.

They seem to work pretty well for us.

I like some of the inspiration in this thread

Jennifer's Frostgrave

Haven’t gotten into a campaign but I am totally into this game. The random monsters really do it for me...grab a treasure and then OMG A BEAR. It’s really fun...definitely capricious due to that wacky d20, but the game is fast and fun enough I kind of don’t care. I really like how easy it is to get into at a casual level. 40k/AOS is much more serious and involved, this is more of a good times first thing. And it is playing a little better with my son, he doesn’t get as frustrated as he does with the complex unit rules in the GW games. And he totally gets right into the “go to treasure, steal it, leave” feedback loop.

Working on terrain for it is my main priority right now. It does want a lot. I am doing 3x3, and I have at my disposal (lots from AOS since I had a lot of it anyway):

1x Warscryer Citadel (I tried to resist...)
2x Arcane Ruins
3x Ruins of Osgilliath
2x Baleful Realmgates
1x Dragonfate Dais
1x Ophidian Archway
2x Citadel Wood (6 trees)
2x repainted Christmas village hills
1x Magewrath Throne
2x monoliths
3x rock outcroppings
1x Battles of Middle-Earth Helm’s Deep (rescued from 10+ years in the basement - perfect for miniatures)

Plus the Pegasus stuff I have for 40k works for Frostgrave.

Granted, I’m not going to use ALL of that once...but you do really want a ton of scenery.

Here's a few shots of tonights game using heroscape terrain and models. I snapped these right after the spawnlings thug picked up a treasure and rolled a 17 for an encounter. A frost giant shows up not five spaces away from his mage. Good thing he had elemental shield up.


This scenario is a campaign prologue. The Gate of Felstad, a scenario we devised. Just a generic set up. Each player places 3 treasures. Deployment is on opposite corners of the left side of the map where the elevation is lowest. No turn limit.



Here are our mages and apprentices. I chose a witch, he chose an elementalist.



But even though that frost giant is on his doorstep, my apprentice is about to have to contend with both the knight and a damned werewolf on my six that crawled up from the road entrance last turn. I chose to shoot the knight with a poison dart. The werewolf made my apprentice wounded, and after game wound up with a nasty injury. A lost eye.


Two ice spiders were about to assault my wolf companion, but I moved him far enough away that they both jumped on his apprentice instead. A she tried to sneak up and steal the treasure, she died for her troubles.


It was a mad rush on both our parts to get the hell out of dodge and be glad for the treasure we were able to carry away before the fauna of frostgrave could devour our bands of greedy looters. Any victory today was pyrrhic.

I'm pretty satisfied with how well it works with hex movement. Less fussy too. Just need to pretty everything up instead of hobo index cards and scrawled reference rules on paper.

Colorcrayons, what are you playing on? Is that some rubber paneling under the heroscape tiles? Is this on the floor?

Mage Knight plastic minis are also a great source for cheap figs.

Hell, this giant Cyclopes is on ebay new for about $20 shipped. I'm considering picking him up next year as a giant for my Ironjawz destruction force. Of course, I'd repaint, but still a great deal.

Obviously there's a lot of buzz about this game, but I don't know much about it. To play I need rules and a bunch of figures I don't have and I'm busy painting Shadespire at the moment (almost ONE WHOLE ADDITIONAL ORC done since the New Year). But one thing confuses me: it looks like some of you are playing on hexes, and some on tables (presumably using rulers). Does it support both? How?

Mr. White wrote: Mage Knight plastic minis are also a great source for cheap figs.

Hell, this giant Cyclopes is on ebay new for about $20 shipped.

I have that guy! One year at Gen Con I picked up 2 large Mage Knight figures as souvenirs for my kids. They didn't care about them so they are in my room somewhere. You are correct, you can usually find them pretty cheaply at cons. Perhaps a dumb question... but is that version of Mage Knight a good game? Does it compare to Frostgrave at all?

I have idea. Never played Mage Knight.
I use the cheap pre-painted castle stuff in my AoS games though. The two towers in the background, I picked up for about $15 shipped each. Look great and very resilient. Not nearly as fragile a the GW terrain.
Of course, I repatined...



I've also used the mage knight prepainted dungeon dressing for shadespire. Just toss it in the box when done. No repainting necessary here.