Into the Frostgrave

Ahh, Felstad. Ancient, illustrious, doomed. An icy hellhole. Perfect for pilfering and chock full of dead secrets and money.

I had the original Mordheim - after Necromunda it seemed like a good bet. We tried it a bit, and it didn't go over as well as Necromunda, and so it was shelved. I confessed at my gaming group yesterday that in a fit of pique at lugging that shit around for a decade, I threw it all in a trash can and sulked off. I recanted (of course!) but the trash was gone in the morning, and I've always had a little bit of great deal of remorse about it. I still have the pretty perfect rule book.

The good thing is that Frostgrave scratches that itch quite nicely. We started up a campaign yesterday and it was great fun. The focus on the game is not really the combat so much between the two groups of wizards and henchmen, but rather on Getting The Phat Loot and Getting Out Alive Intact. There was a great deal of stuff going on in our 3x4 stretch of wintery wasteland - the group has a house rule that collection of treasure tokens spawns a random monster from the Frostgrave Bestiary and of course I am thinking of ways to tweak that out to fit scenarios of my own devising... You could alter (add/elide) the list, insert monsters, change spawn points with special rules. I mean, it bears hacking which is maybe my favorite thing about the game, after its simplicity and speed.

Anyhow, I will tinker with it and we'll see what we'll see. Painting of zombies from TWD:AOW is slow, but getting done. Assembly of Necromunda has not even started. I'm liking the rules and figs but not totally sold on the modular approach - I note with some chagrin that I don't mind the modular approach of Frostgrave (by comparison) owing to the relative costs!

Rust Phoenix

So this guy, a really unpleasant Beast Wizard, he captured a Rust Phoenix. They’re not related to the standard immortality kind of Phoenix, but they have beautiful coppery red and (you guessed it) rust colored plumage. Owing to quirks in their biology and diets, they concentrate certain sorts of magic. Feather Fall, turn arrows, dimension door. That kind of thing. Something to do with ferrous metals and breakdown at the nuclear level. Unstable magnetic fields. Tachyon and gluon shedding. It’s beyond me. They eat electric mice, mithril-laced beetles, drift for days on thermals above the dead strongholds of the Dvergr-men and their quiet Gold Purifiers

So, you crack a Rust Phoenix egg before it is ready to hatch and you get a little smear of long lasting residue that (provided you know a variant of Teleport, Planar Step, or Dimension Door pretty well) you can BLOOP right over there to where the egg was broken, or pretty close. A paradimensional scramble right there. Easy to commodify. Very cheap to produce, highly useful, and pretty delicate and short-lived. Because If you don’t break the egg, then the little bird’s accelerated embryonic development completes and it hatches at full size, irritated, and causes weird degeneration of non-magical metals. Rust. Every metal thing within about a 100’ radius of a properly incubated Rust Phoenix egg gets rusty, pocked, and pitted.

This Beast Wizard, he captured a male and a harem of females and he pumps out a fortune, selling the eggs (for which there is a long waiting list) for a king’s ransom to teleporting-interested groups and also for warfare.

The males are generally very striking in terms of appearance: jagged, sharp, crumbly, prickly. An amazing ventral plume that is dangerously sharp. A fine sediment of rust precipitates from the air around them and settles on things. Also, the males have a warbling and haunting song that causes metal objects nearby to degenerate and shatter - magical items are more or less resistant but common metal ones can actually cause damage to bearers by forceful explosion into fragments

Rust Phoenix DCC Stats (I don’t know, just regular bird stats let’s not dwell on minutiae, eh?)

Rust Phoenix Dungeon World stats (maybe more on that later, but a motive/driver definitely to escape captivity, nest in secure locations, revenge upon captors I mean no need for a noble beast to be a good one)

Related spells (Transition Egg, Magnetic Cascade, Singularity Song)

Related items (Rust Phoenix Egg, Rust Phoenix Down, Feathers)

Caught in a Faraday cage, warbling a sinister tune, a legendary beast become a machine for the wealth of a greedy merchant