Warheads: Medieval Tales
| Designer(s) | Mark Brendan, John Robertson |
|---|---|
| Illustrator(s) | Stuart Beel, Nick Sawyer, Debbie Keys |
| Publisher(s) | Urban Mammoth |
| Players | 2+ |
| Age range | 14+ |
| Website | Home page |
Warheads: Medieval Tales is a tabletop medieval wargame produced by Urban Mammoth.
The game is played with 28mm white metal miniatures, manufactured by Urban Mammoth and representing fantasy characters from the bimonthly Warheads: Medieval Tales magazine. Each issue of the magazine builds upon the rule base, provides new scenarios and expands the comical narrative, which is set in medieval Britain shortly after the Norman invasion. Warheads: Medieval Tales has an unusual, super deformed anime style and the fiction is in a humorous and irreverent style inspired by T. H. White.
The fiction for the game has an historical context, taking place in and around the area known as the Welsh Marches in the late 11th century. It tells the story of a feud between the two central playable characters, Sir Hugo of Deangard and his half brother Gui le Bȃtard. History and fantasy are blended in terms of locations, characters who appear throughout the narrative and the enemies that are encountered.
The core gameplay is a blend of pen and paper fantasy role playing and miniatures based tabletop wargaming. The game is presented as a strongly character and narrative driven episodic campaign, in which the characters fight set piece battles against each other and earn experience points which can be used to improve their core stats and skills. Treasure and money can also be earned to improve their equipment.
Issue 1 introduces the basic gameplay concepts such as movement and combat. Central to the gameplay mechanic in Warheads: Medieval Tales is a test table which is used any time a character has to perform an action or determine the outcome of an event. In one axis of the test table is the POWER value and in the other is the RESISTANCE value, and by cross referencing these values, a player finds out how many standard six-sided dice to roll. How the power and resistance values are determined varies depending on the situation, but in general they are composed of the core stats of characters involved in the test, and any equipment or powers being used, and in some cases the difficulty of the action being attempted. Each die roll that scores 4 or more is considered a success (so in this way success is generally measured in degrees rather than being a binary success/failure result—though not in all cases). Dice rolls are modified by environmental factors and the skills of the characters involved, and as a consequence of these open-ended modifiers, dice rolls of 1 are always considered to be failures and dice rolls of 6 are always successes, regardless of modifiers. Each successful die roll made by a character earns it a point of experience (or XP). XP is also earned by achieving specific objectives in the set piece battles.
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