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Given the Silver Bayonet is a Goonhammer Historicals staff favorite and can be best summarized as “What if Napoleon but also Werewolves?”, it should be no surprise that Devilry Afoot, which can be briefly summarized as, “The Witch Hunters were right,” met with considerable interest. Coming in at 128 pages, Devilry Afoot, published by Irregular Wargames and written by Nicholas Wright is a game that I think is tremendously full of promise, but some rough edges remaining. In terms of aesthetics, this book absolutely nails it, with little quotes and snippets from the literature as well as woodcarvings and other pictures scattered throughout the pages in a way that perfectly sets the tone.
Table of Contents
The Core Concept
Devilry Afoot very helpfully (and I would love if more wargames did this) lays out the “Central Tenets” of the game, which helps give some insight both into how you should interact with the concept of “rules as intended,” but also gives insight into…well…the vibe.
The game is a pseudo co-operative game (which can also be played solo), meaning you and anyone else you’re playing with are on the same side, but may not always be strictly helpful to one another, while the baddies – witches, demons and whatnot – are controlled by a table-based algorithm. Every game is being assumed to be being played in the dead of night, with the looming darkness hiding monsters, and those hunting them being at the very least slightly broken people.
Played with a few d10s and a 2’ by 2’ table, the game is very accessible, and if one wanted to make some very focused terrain for the game, you could achieve a proper level of density in short order. That this would potentially double up for games like Rangers of Shadowdeep or Silver Bayonet if you kept much of it either era-agnostic or were willing to accept “Because it looks neat” as a reason for slightly anachronistic styling, is also a plus.
What are you going to do on this board? Venture out with a handful of brave (and flawed) Hunters to do battle with the creatures of evil that thrive on the ungodliness of the era, while hopefully keeping yourself, and the innocent among us alive.
A healthy bounty is yours if you manage it.
The Hunters
The players command small forces, primarily of Hunters – singular individuals divided up into a few key archetypes. Gentlemen are wealthy individuals, handy with a sword and more importantly handy with a coin purse, which means they automatically have a follower along with them to bulk out their numbers. The Goodman/Goodwife are civilian smallholders who have found themselves drawn into affairs, possessing some qualities that make them pillars of their community that offset their rather modest martial abilities. Religious Hunters are pious individuals who are remarkably poor in combat, but who are particularly adept as an action in the game involving quoting scripture, with the ability to buff it further. Scholars are similarly poor in a fight, though slightly better with a gun, but likely possessing a large number of skills. Finally, Soldier does what it says on the tin – they’ve got solid combat abilities, and skill selections to improve them over time.
Alongside these archetypical characters are followers, who can range from lifelong companions of the hunters to reluctant conscripts forced into service with the threat of a torch. They bulk out a hunting party but are very much secondary characters.
Hunters come with Traits and Skills, which can enhance their abilities – Charismatic characters making it easier for those around them to activate, while skilled Astrologer Hunters roll 2d10 before the game begins and may bank these for later use.
Alongside these positive traits, each hunter also has a Secret. As mentioned, the fundamental assumption of the game is that those who venture out into the darkness to risk their lives fighting monsters are at the very least a little bit broken. Drunkards have to roll to see if they’re hung over at the start of the game, while Gamblers are likely to see the rewards of their hunts end up in the hands of local sharks. And then there’s Secret Witch, which is exactly what it sounds like, and such characters may find themselves slightly at odds when the rest of the party when it comes to hunting their Siblings in the Craft or in some scenarios.
In principle, I love this, and it helps flesh out the characters. Our Lustful Theologian Religious Hunter is basically Claude Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame. Our Strong Sadist Soldier is apt to cave a monster’s head in with a hammer – and then linger slightly too long taking in the aftereffects of doing so. It does however, at least for a beginner, mean there’s a reasonable amount of keep track of, and I found myself wishing I had an index card or something for each hunter. In the back of the book are Hunter Rosters, and using these, even if not in a campaign, is highly recommended just for keeping things straight. With a 2’x2’ playing surface, there should probably be enough room, even on an ordinary table.
Starting characters also buy gear, and at the beginning of the game things will be fairly lean, especially if you’re equipping characters with the various gunpowder weapon options, but as the campaign goes by one can expect relatively well-equipped hunters. Followers get no discounts here, and if they die or leave service their gear goes with them, so it’ll be a long while I suspect before they make sense to recruit and equip generously.
The Monsters
Lurking in the darkness are a wide variety of Monsters, each of which has their behavior governed by an Activation Table. Possessing three columns, generally “Human within 6””, “Shot at since last activation” and “Any other situation”, you roll a d10, add or subtract any modifiers that exist (generally wounded monsters are more likely to hide or flee), and do what action it says. These monsters range from aggressive Barghests to mundane Outlaws, swift and vicious Redcaps, and covens of Witches. There’s a pleasant variety in here, although as with The Silver Bayonet: Canada, the use of the W****go as a monster is disappointing at best.
The Innocent
One of the most unique mechanics in Devilry Afoot, in my opinion, is “The Innocent”—human beings on the map who are not Hunters. Driven by a simple algorithm, these civilians start the game unaware of the very real peril they are in, and move either randomly, or towards certain creatures capable of luring them to their doom. They become aware if a Hunter moves in base contact with them, or another aware innocent does – or when a Monster comes within 6” of them.
Appropriately, when this happens, they leg it directly away.
Innocents may also be in buildings on the table, asleep in their beds, at prayer, or doing whatever else normal people might be doing in the dead of night. The presence of Innocents, and how many, are determined when the building is explored, either by a Hunter or Monster. The table for that has both how many Innocents and what happens if found by a Monster. Spoiler: The verb “slaughtered” appears six times in a table with eight possible outcomes.
Innocents make for, I think, compelling and relatively straightforward objectives for scenarios, allowing gameplay beyond “Just kill the witch!”, though they are very fragile. There’s also a great opportunity for modeling characters that don’t often appear in tabletop wargames.
Which feels like a good time to take a brief detour into sourcing miniatures.
Where To Find Miniatures for This
When my local club was trying Devilry Afoot out, I had assumed we’d be able to draw a fair amount of figures from our 30 Years War loaner army we use for Pikeman’s Lament and other more standard wargames. I was, frankly, wrong.
What you’re looking for is weirdos.
The Warlord Games Band of Clubmen is a promising start, with a variety of weapons, and a definitively less regimented look than most figures who find themselves in actual, organized units. The Wargames Atlantic Conquistadors kit (available using our affiliate link), similarly, is a handy source for roughly period appropriate armed men with a variety of weapons, though this will give your hunters a decidedly martial bent.
But the source of miniatures that I think is likely the most promising (and judging from the number of pictures in Devilry Afoot the designer might agree) is Bloody Miniatures. We featured the obviously appropriate Witchfinder General kit last year, but Bloody Miniatures is an amazing source of figures to add character to English Civil War/Thirty Years War armies, and for Devilry Afoot all your looking for is character. Four figure packs like The Night Watch, The Militant Tendency or The Gallant Ladies would all work rather well, and in my experience are excellent quality metal minis, which I will sometime have time to paint.
Now back to the game.
The Mechanics
The mechanics of the game are straightforward. A token for each Hunter, a token for the Innocents (if there are any) and a number of tokens for the Monsters are placed in a bag, and then drawn. When monsters activate, they perform a single action, such as attacking, hiding, or summoning a familiar – but they will generally get several activations during the turn.
When a Hunter is activated, they roll 2d10. Any results that are over their Resolve statistic, which is somewhere between 3+ and 5+ mean they can do one action, which means generally they can do between zero and two actions, with double 10’s meaning you can take three actions. Being near a light source improves this roll, while being wounded, in base contact with a monster, being charmed, or certain secrets like Drunkard or Sadist all make it slightly harder to activate.
The actions themselves are intuitive – one can Attack (you can also Move and Attack as a single action with a penalty), Climb, Concentrate (giving yourself a +2 bonus in exchange for giving up one of two+ activations), Interact, Move, Sneak, Swap Equipment, Quote Scripture, Reload, or Shoot.
Of those, Quote Scripture is really the only one that isn’t self-explanatory. Targeting a monster within 6”, a Hunter can quote scripture, which practically means rolling a d10 and trying to beat your Resolve with a -4 penalty (so generally looking for somewhere between a 7 and a 9). If you manage this, the monster immediately makes a Flee action. This can range from mildly useful (buying your compatriots a bit of time to perhaps land a pistol shot or two before you get into the “red in tooth and claw” aspect of most monsters) to potentially game winning if you can make a monster flee off the table. And while it seems hard, you can stack the deck. A Religious Hunter has a resolve of 3+ and rolls 2d10 taking the highest, and if you give them the Theologian skill, the penalty effectively drops to -2. Looking for a 5+ on 2d10 means you only really have one trick, but you pull that trick off 75% of the time.
For more mundane combat like shooting and attacking, you roll a d10, add modifiers (is the monster in light, or close to a dog, is it flanked, etc. as well as modifiers for your Hunters archetype and weapon) and try to equal or exceed the target’s defense statistic, which ranges from 5+ to 7+. Having actually hit, you then roll to wound, again on a d10, with 1-3 having failed to wound, a 4-7 dealing 1 wound, an 8-9 dealing 2 and a 10+ dishing out 3 wounds. As with hitting, there are modifiers for particular traits, weapons, etc.
Monsters come with a similar set of actions, Attack, Charm (which is essentially crowd control if aimed at a Hunter and will draw an Innocent closer if aimed at them), Flee, Hide (which keeps a Monster in the shadows), Intimidate (which forces a Resolve test for everyone in 6” or they run), Shoot (for the Outlaws), Stalk (which moves the Monster towards a human) or Summon Imp, which will summon a fairly weak but reasonable fast minion that activates along with the Witch.
Gameplay Impressions
I haven’t had a chance to play as much Devilry Afoot as I’d like to, but I did get a few games in and have formed some general impressions.
The first is that the author should be commended for the volume of scenarios in the book – an appropriate thirteen. These range from the straightforward “A discovery of witches”, where the Hunters must kill (not allow to flee…) three witches before a storm rolls in and forces the hunt to stop, to trickier scenarios like “The vigilists”, where four Hunters (and their followers) must defend four freshly dug graves from being dug up by Ghouls, while also protecting the Innocents in nearby buildings. Also some wolves will be arriving midgame.
Players should, in my opinion, be prepared to fail, and they can either as a group or as individuals retreat if things aren’t going their way. Amusingly, there’s at least one scenario where Secret Witches get an XP bonus if the mission fails. Bounties for killing monsters may still be collected, so even failed missions have the potential for progress. And my experience is that, like with many small skirmish games, especially solo or co-op narrative games that have the luxury of not worrying too much about balance, things can turn one way or the other fairly quickly.
When we played “The beast in the fog” for example, which involves a scattered hunting party trying to track down and slay a Barghest, a few early lucky rolls saw our Goodwife Hunter, who is not exactly a combat powerhouse, deal three wounds to the creature in a single shot before beating it to death with the butt of her musket when it attacked her and failed to do anything and she got to attack back. That’s generally not how “Housewife vs. Hellhound” should be expected to go.
In contract, when we went to go hunt down a coven of three Witches, we were simply overwhelmed by their continued summoning of imps, when hampered the party’s mobility enough that we only managed to get the occasional shot off. That was a bad series of rolls – Summon imp doesn’t occur that many times on the table, but we just had a long streak of them. At the same time, Witches have an ability to turn into another creature, and as we had an excess of wolf miniatures, we had them turning into wolves, which would have been a significant threat in combat, except that invariably the next roll was Summon imp, which turned them right back into a person. It was, to be blunt, a less than satisfying gameplay experience.
I think the two biggest pain points for us were simply game management, and the lethality (or lack thereof) of the game. Addressing those in reverse order, at baseline, except for the Soldier, most Hunters aren’t particularly good at hitting things or shooting them for that matter. Skills will start to improve that over time, but at the outset, most characters are likely to miss most of their attacks and/or shots, won’t get very many shots as they need to reload at well, and then ~ 30% of the strikes that hit will ineffectively wound. It’ll be even worse early on, when the Monsters are less likely to be illuminated, firearms are worse at long range, moving and shooting incurs a -1 penalty, etc. Given the relatively few rolls any given Hunter will make over the course of a game, and that the d10 produces a uniform distribution of results, we found that it’s somewhat vulnerable to feeling like one or more of your Hunters is just frustratingly ineffective.
The flipside of this of course is that the same system applies to the monsters, which means your characters are reasonably durable, even without loads of armor.
The second aspect we struggled with was simply game management. While we set out with each player controlling one or more Hunters, the dynamics of having to run both the monsters and the Hunters meant we often ended up using them like a shared pool, which meant less opportunity to become intimately familiar with the Hunters and their abilities, at least without a number of games under your belt. The alternative would be to rapidly switch who was managing the monsters or accepting a degree of rolling against yourself. This, in turn, caused us to feel a little pulled out of the narrative of the game itself. Especially when it was going poorly, or there were lots of monsters on the table due to the aforementioned tsunami of imps.
Closing Thoughts
I want to love Devilry Afoot. It is extremely my jam – Thirty Years War-era minis, narrative skirmish games, and solo and co-op play is basically a keyword list of things I adore.
Instead, I find myself merely liking it.
That’s not a bad thing – it’s a solid and enjoyable game, just not that “I’m going to reach for this if I don’t know what I want to play” kind of title. It’s well done, atmospheric, with a great variety of scenarios and a ton of flavor.
One thing I think it would be absolutely brilliant for though? Convention games. Have a dedicated GM handling the monsters and assign each player a Hunter or two that they can figure out the mechanics and synergies for deeply. With a simple set of mechanics, very few dice, and an absolutely amazing sense of atmosphere, I think Devilry Afoot is potentially a very promising and easy to run event game, either at a smaller event like a “Geekend” with friends, or something more organized. And with a small demand for terrain and tablespace, a good starting place for people who might be interested in running a game table as part of an event in their local area.
Happy (witch) Hunting.
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