Something I made for a homebrewed game using Necromunda rules

[Antarius]

I figured some of you might find this interesting.

I've developed a set of co-op/"light roleplay" rules, allowing us to play cooperative games in the Necromunda/40k setting. Just for fun/to make the whole thing more immersive, I whipped up this "dataslate" to keep track of initiative order, objectives and shared resources. I thought you might wanna see it:

 

[Antarius]

The Incoming/Active thing is an "initiative track", so instead of regular turns or alternating activations, the card drawn determines which model activates next. That way you add some excitement and skip the decision of who to activate - you just have to use the model that activates as best you can.
In our case it was mostly to make sure that we couldn't game the system too much (this being a co-op game), avoid the drudgery and predictability of "player turn - enemy turn" and not fall into the Cursed City trap of making managing the initiative order a (rather boring and time consuming) minigame in itself.

I'm sort of considering incorporating it into regular Necromunda, as it worked quite well and makes things more exciting. But I guess it might also make things too random.

Another way would be having a set of cards for each gang and alternate between drawing from them, in order to keep the randomness regarding what model activates next, but not risk one player having several activations in a row.

[Ripper.McGuirl]

This is totally awesome!!

[Akrim]

Thats a cool custom slate there Antarius - I would love something similar for Necro gang cards.

Those tokens can get bumped or lost so easily.

[Antarius]

On 5/11/2023 at 12:23 AM, Akrim said:

Thats a cool custom slate there Antarius - I would love something similar for Necro gang cards.

Those tokens can get bumped or lost so easily.

Thanks :)

 

It’s actually not *that* difficult to make (although there were moments of intense frustration, due to not being a super good builder/painter). It’s basically just some mdf, a few bits and a bit of planning.

The great thing about doing something like this is that it really shows you how much everything is just about putting simple elements together - I actually feel much less intimidated about trying out bigger projects now.

[Deus_Ex_Machina]

On 4/6/2023 at 7:42 AM, Antarius said:

The Incoming/Active thing is an "initiative track", so instead of regular turns or alternating activations, the card drawn determines which model activates next. That way you add some excitement and skip the decision of who to activate - you just have to use the model that activates as best you can.
In our case it was mostly to make sure that we couldn't game the system too much (this being a co-op game), avoid the drudgery and predictability of "player turn - enemy turn" and not fall into the Cursed City trap of making managing the initiative order a (rather boring and time consuming) minigame in itself.

I'm sort of considering incorporating it into regular Necromunda, as it worked quite well and makes things more exciting. But I guess it might also make things too random.

Another way would be having a set of cards for each gang and alternate between drawing from them, in order to keep the randomness regarding what model activates next, but not risk one player having several activations in a row.

Good idea on the initiative aspect. The new Doom boardgame (released a few years ago) has the same mechanic.

[Antarius]

On 10/15/2023 at 12:46 AM, Deus_Ex_Machina said:

Good idea on the initiative aspect. The new Doom boardgame (released a few years ago) has the same mechanic.

Nice. I had no idea. We just came up with it because we had this experience with Cursed City a couple of times, where the initiative track being visible sort of turned the game into a rather boring game of "manage the initiative track and tell everybody what to do" rather than us actually playing the game 

[Dr_Ruminahui]

Your tracker looks great - you did a great job of capturing that industrial medieval look that 40K and necromunda have (though, I'm not sure only 2 skulls meets the necromunda quota ).

 

I was wondering, how do you plan to address model rules (such as those on leaders and champions) that let them activate multiple models?  Not sure if that is an issue in co-op play, but I expect it would be in regular games.

Edited October 16, 2023 by Dr_Ruminahui

[Antarius]

On 10/16/2023 at 6:22 PM, Dr_Ruminahui said:

Your tracker looks great - you did a great job of capturing that industrial medieval look that 40K and necromunda have (though, I'm not sure only 2 skulls meets the necromunda quota ).

 

I was wondering, how do you plan to address model rules (such as those on leaders and champions) that let them activate multiple models?  Not sure if that is an issue in co-op play, but I expect it would be in regular games.

It wasn’t an issue in our co-op game, but I think the easiest way of going about it would be to just skip past the models that’s already been activated when their cards come up. It’s not a super elegant solution, but I think it’d work and be fairly easy to implement (perhaps using tokens or similar to place by models have already been activated).