I am increasingly coming to enjoy these campaign packs. They’re still worthless to me, don’t get me wrong, and I desperately hope this format gets entirely rethought. But what they represent is a vision of utopia. A career in game design, where every day you are free to engage for eight hours a day in a wargame/RPG with your friends, with fully painted armies and the fate of the world hanging in the balance. As the primary parent of a one year old I get about three hours painting in a week and one game a month, so reading these campaign booklets and their exciting faction-specific multiplayer scenarios is a glimpse of a bachelor’s idyll.
The Canberra Conquest community, meanwhile, despite having some healthy growth still lacks a single Nords player, let alone the two you will need to play this. Still, let’s appreciate it for what it is.
Let’s get into it.
The Models
Andronicus represents one of the most important evolutions in Conquest’s miniature design: the first serious contender to the Hat Game. Conquest has been surprisingly lacking in Hat Game, with most characters wearing frustratingly normal helmets with maybe some plumes, or bare head. But Andronicus is a significant step forwards with his magnificent headpiece. I call it a good start.
But the sculpt and pose are very well done, extremely powerful necromancer energy with a single withered finger directing his legions. There’s a lovely mix of patterns and tassels on his robes that can easily be painted as fabrics or metals. Notably his legs seem to fade into a column of smoke, which can either be painted with an ethereal effect or just as dramatically flopping fabric. All the Old Dominion characters are standouts and this guy is no exception.
Magos Sockbert:
As a model, Reginlief really channels the Nord/Norse/viking history of exploration and discovery. Specifically, the left horn of her head piece, which has now been in significantly more rooms of my house than the rest of the model.
Adventurous headdresses aside, Reginlief is a rare model for me: an art project, rather than a game piece. Painting Reginlief let me explore building a little narrative with the model; her little squirrel friend holding a berry, the butterfly in the flowers, even down to her colours hinting where she comes from. Infantry characters in this game give us the opportunity to create dioramas that we so rarely take; my stylized desert Wadrhun are a prime example of prioritising getting something on the table above telling a story.
I haven’t read Ashes and Faith; I leave that to Thanqol to tell you about. But just in painting Reginlief, she let me build a story in my head. Volvas are the wisest and most ambitious of the Valkyries, leading their followers to terrifying heights of religiously fueled violence. But what if she didn’t have to be? What if there was tranquillity for just a moment, the invaders pushed back, and she was given the opportunity to simply lead her people to a greater future? Be at peace, daughter of Ragnarok.
The Lore
This is an unusual campaign by the standards of these books. It’s extremely high concept, dealing with setting-shaking mysteries and murdered gods, and the stakes have never been higher. The Stone Faced King had a campaign whose stakes came down to ‘Does Shur get punched in the face or not?’, whereas this one has ‘creation of new race of supermen’ on one hand and ‘only I have the brains to rule Eä!’ on the other.
Because it’s going to get so wild towards the end, fully 60% of the setup page is just going through the backstory of the Old Dominion and the Nords as factions – which is appreciated. I knew that the Nords had fought Ragnarok sometime in the past but I actually had not known until this moment that it had been against the Old Dominion. One of the prizes the Old Dominion had taken was a Waelcyrge – implicitly, some sort of Spires Biomancer.
Faithbearer Reginleif
In two pages of backstory there is not a single detail anywhere of Reginlief’s personality. Hot or cold, stubborn or proud, there’s absolutely nothing here to set her apart from the next available replacement Volva. The only thing we do know about Reginlief is that when two crows show up one day and start talking to her she not only accepts it but unquestioningly lets them make all of her major career decisions, including stealing from her father. That could be because she is from a culture that stands on the border of the supernatural, living in the mystical ruins of a glorious former age, deeply entwined with the natural earth, as the book indicates. But I also like to think she’s just very suggestible.
Andronicus the Firebringer
Now this is a character with some pathos to him. Andronicus had a standard priestly career, being granted visions by his God Hazlia to go and spread the good word, rising up the ranks until he was sent to fight in the Crusades in Mannheim. There he sees so much horror in the war that he starts to waver, right up until the point where he breaks into Ygdrassil and sees that the tree is a biomantic terror with a giant fleshy megabrain. At this point God informs him of his true purpose: to act as the conduit for a divine fire that would kill this ancient being.
Andronicus realizes too late that his faith is hollow and his God is weak and fearful, but by this point his miraculously recovered body is entombed in a mortuary city and he gets to spend the next few thousand years of undeath slumber agonizing over his wasted life, until now – when he is raised as a puppet to once again do the bidding of the god he hates.
Storied Regiment
I always complain about this section, AND FOR GOOD REASON. For the Nords we have two regiments who are the coolest guys, veterans of countless battles, unquestioningly loyal, etc, and notably a Jotnar named Mountainsplitter who – as the blurb is quick to point out – cannot actually split mountains. The Old Dominion doesn’t even have that little moment of levity – you’ve got the unquestioningly loyal guys who set themselves on fire, the coolest guys who are veterans of countless battles, and then the unquestioningly loyal guys who got set on fire again.
The treasures earn a special mention this time around, notably the 30 point upgrade that gives you army-wide +1 Evasion. Added to Reginlief’s natural aura of +1 Evasion I pity the poor Old Dominion and their Cleave-based gameplan.
The Missions
Mission One: The Necropolis Awakens
Other campaigns have been – well, campaigns. Major military operations over months. This one is more like an event – a couple of high intensity days, a single smash-and-grab raid on a tomb complex.
In this, the Nords have walked into the tomb and begun the smashing and-or grabbing of everything valuable in sight, starting with the Waelcyrge – described here as a maiden entombed within a stasis capsule, set at the base of Andronicus’ throne as a prize. Naturally, the looting leads to the rising of the dead, but Reginlief figures if she kills Andronicus before he can get his bearings then it will slow down the mass reanimation and give them time to escape.
This is a First Blood scenario (importantly: these are still optional), and it happens simultaneously with Scenario 2. It has a fun gimmick: Cart control! Yes, the player who controls the center objective at the end of each round moves it 6’ towards their ‘pit’. Three rounds of movement from the center will get it to your pit, which is worth a cool 15 objective points.Once again, I really like this one – these first blood scenarios always are the most creative with their scenarioes, and there are a lot of ways to approach it.
Mission Two: Before the Gates of Ierapetra
There is, disappointingly, no additional setup – this is just the other half of the Nords being attacked by the other half of the Old Dominion, featuring the B characters of each side. That means it lacks any sense of stakes or momentum like the previous campaign books had where each battle was the outcome of weeks of maneuver and escalation.
This is a deployment zone mission and, great news! This time around they’ve explained what that actually means given that TLOK’s core mechanics don’t have that concept. It’s important too – the deployment zones are funky, with the Old Dominion player coming in off the short table edges and the Nords player coming in on the Long. This is particularly relevant because there’s a center objective zone and if the Old Dominion player doesn’t have some sort of Light regiment deployed there to slow things down then they risk the Nords getting hold of it in a way that’s very difficult to contest.
Mission Three: Wrath of the Forgotten Legions
This is a weird one to parse. The setup is just Andronicus conjuring a dust storm to do a The Mummy style ambush of the retreating Nords – and do you see what I mean about this being a bit disappointing? These mission setup blurbs are just all tactical maneuvers, nothing’s changed about the setting or been revealed about the characters because we’re just slowly working through one big drawn out battle. Anyway, the point is the Old Dominion wants to whittle down the Nords for a killing blow later.
But the mission’s design feels exactly backwards. The Old Dominion gets VPs for seizing three central objective zones, while the Nords player gets VP for destroying regiments. And I’m honestly not sure how the Nords can win this one, especially if the Old Dominion player builds for the scenario even a little bit. It’s a mess.
Mission Four: The Traitor’s Fury
You know what they say: The best time to betray your allies over treasure is when the army of the dead is closing in.
In Gunnar’s defense, his plan is pretty sound: we’ve got the treasure, we can ditch the weird crystal lady and live like kings. Andronicus is on board with this plan, happy to let the Nords escape so long as he gets the Waelcyrge back.
This is another one of those three-player scenarios, needing a 2000 point Nords army, a 1500 point Nords army, and a 2500 points Old Dominion army. As usual, both players can secretly bid any amount of VP per turn to Gunnar to get him on side – and as a kicker, Gunnar can only perform two Actions targeting the player he’s currently loyal to. Gunnar also gets a special 4VP if either warlord dies for any reason, other than that objective zones are 5VP each and 2VP for each regiment destroyed. Notably, though, the scenario only goes for seven rounds – and that’s very important because if it went the full normal 10 then there’d be no chance at all for Gunnar to win. As it is, if he can keep a steady collection of 4vp per turn bids and pick off a warlord or unit then he’s in a good place, especially if the other objective swings back and forth.
The Aftermath
And yet despite all that there’s no special victory writeup for Gunnar achieving victory. Both chapters assume he just somehow died off camera which, rude. I suppose if he wins then he just sails away with the treasure and lives the rest of his life as a rich asshole, which I guess doesn’t need particular narrative focus.
Nords Victory
At the end of the day, Reginlief makes off on her boat with the Waelcyrge as Andronicus looks on from the shore. Here she obtains a series of visions – of the Einherjar, semi-divine champions of the Nords, amassed in huge numbers. She sees her place amongst them, and she sees how they can be made anew. Then she communes with the Waelcryge itself – implicitly, a Spires biomancer who once worked upon humanity, empowering them into superpowered paragons. She sees in its lessons that she need not stir ancient bloodlines or awaken slumbering champions to restore the Einherjar – that this gift might be granted to her generation, even to she herself, creating a new army of divine warriors to raise the Nords to greatness.
I love this – how deeply the influence of the Spires reaches into the backstories of other factions, of how beings understood to be the Norse gods are alien elven tricksters, of how the potential for biomantic uplifting is a technology that could change the fabric of the world and yet the Spires keep to themselves according to their own agendas. But it still somehow manages to be the second place ending compared to…
Old Dominion Victory
Andronicus spends most of the climax of the battle reliving memories of the past, of a peaceful golden age as he watches the failed taming of a beautiful stallion. This is one of the best traits of the Old Dominion, the fact that as the battle intensifies and more of them fall the survivors begin to experience ever more vivid memories of their mortal lives, empowering them from shambling horrors to the ancient legions of old. Reginlief survives here too, but far more important than reclaiming the Waelcyrge – who was never more than an ornament to his throne – Andronicus captures Reginlief’s library. This allows him to concoct a far more interesting plan than a mere army of divine super-soldiers. It allows him to recover the location of the slain Ygdrassil.
The Ygdrassil with a giant biomantic brain growing underneath it.
The giant biomantic brain that is now currently dead.
Just like his God.
So what if he could use necromantic sorcery to animate the brain and use it as a vessel for Hazlia’s thought? To turn Hazlia from an indistinct screaming ball of hatred and death energy into an enormous undead brain – possibly under Andronicus’ control?
This is one of the coolest ideas that has come out of the Conquest setting so far, and I sincerely hope that this is not only the canon path but gets followed up on as part of the main storyline. This narrative campaign series is all worth it just for getting this idea across and I am intensely invested in this storyline now. I can’t wait to see the next part.
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