Playing Call of Cthulhu with Mordheim: A mad experiment

Over the summer months I tinkered with an idea for a warband-based short skirmish game set in the Call of Cthulhu universe, specifically the witch-haunted city of Arkham. This really followed on from our successful game of Pagan Publishing's The Hills Rise Wild. I was looking for a similar feel, but ideally something with more modern mechanics.

The plan was to have an urban setting with players running small groups of rival 'gangs' competing for a central objective. In the end, I determined these would be -

• Miskatonic University
• The Arkham Police Department (with FBI back up) - not played in this game!
• Innsmouth Interlopers (Deep Ones and friends)
• The Arkham Witch Cult

I decided to adapt the Mordheim rules for a circa 1925 setting. My initial plan was to use a hybrid of Frostgrave and Stargrave, both of which I'm very familiar with, but I wanted to give Mordheim a try. Both Frostgrave and Mordheim are very similar games in terms of intent and feel. One, however, is better than the other...

In the end we had three players on the day. Each faction had its own special rules, and apart from the primary objective of securing an artefact from the secret lab of a long-dead 18th century alchemist under Arkham, each could also score VPs from their own specific faction objectives. The rest of this post breaks down into my own critique of the scenario I wrote (for future reference) and of Mordheim as a game system.

A graduate occultist and the bruiser are surprised by a couple of fish creatures from Innsmouth. The occultist is carrying a relic. He was later treacherously shot dead. The bruiser was torn apart by Deep Ones.

The Scenario

First off, I think I made it overly complex. Apart from each group having its own special rules and objectives, I also added events which could be rolled for every turn, and special rules which allowed the Witch Cult and the Innsmouth gang to kidnap other characters for sacrifice/breeding, while at the same time the Arkham cops had rules to arrest other warband members. 

If there is interest, I will publish these, but I felt it made the game too complex; also it made it hard to achieve the victory conditions. The Deep One player did his best, abandoning any plans to go after the artefact (3 VPs), instead focusing on trying to kidnap some luckless Miskatonic graduates. In this he was twice thwarted by over-enthusiastic Deep Ones which instead bit their heads off.

The evil Arkham witch Keziah Mason with Brown Jenkin lurks in the Witch House - next to her one of the ritual sites. The house later collapsed during the fighting!

The Witch Cult, which had the ability to score VPs by activating three sigils in Arkham through a ritual, abandoned that strategy in favor of going after the artefact. This could have cost them the game, as I did not properly explain that the game would continue even after the artefact left the board. Upon realising this, their cultists loitered in an effort to thwart the other factions. They ended up the winners regardless!

I think the absence of the police in this scenario was also significant, as a good part of the board (where the police would have deployed) saw no action at all. This is something to bear in mind when creating future scenarios for these type of skirmish games. 

Two graduate investigators take a closer look at the library building - inside Shub Niggurath cultists had discovered the entrance to the old alchemist's lair.

I also wonder whether the artifact was too easy to grab - the Witch Cult player sent his toughest and fastest character after it, with little oppostion as Miskatonic (me) were too focused on finding relics in Arkham (my faction objective), and Innsmouth decided early to simply go after Misktanoic for victims. There was no NPC opposition in this game, but I think its addition would have just further complicated things. Maybe the inclusion of faction-specific objectives was an error?

Giving the players lots of options meant that they did not need to focus on the main objective. I spread my Miskatonic team very thinly initially, hunting for relics, while the Innsmouth player kept his group together as a single clump of nastiness, making it tough for my team to cope with when he started hunting them down. Impossible, actually! I was lucky to get a second place draw, having lost a couple of graduate students, a hired bruiser ("security guard") AND a graduate occultist shot in the back no less! I'm a big fan of sub-plots, as I feel they enrich scenarios, but maybe you can get too much of a good thing?

An aerial view of Arkham - the library is top right with the Witch House to the right of that - investigators and cultists have fanned out across the town in search of relics and sacrifices!

The Rules

Mordheim draws very heavily on the Warhammer Fantasy Battle rules. It is a very faithful skirmish adaptation of those rules, which I wish I had discovered earlier. That said, I am in two minds about it, and this is because of Frostgrave. Mordheim - and to a less extent Warmaster - does seem to involve a lot of dice rolling to reach resolution, perhaps too much. Roll to hit, roll to wound, roll to save. Plus lots of potential additional rolls, like Fear checks.

"That's not a dog!" A lone investigator encounters a monstrosity from Innsmouth in an alleyway - the Dagon cult was still hunting for sacrificial victims in the last few turns.

Attacks are also prioritised according to Initiative, which seems fine, but things slow down once you have 3-4 characters engaged in the same ruckus. I could not help thinking of how Frostgrave handles this so much more smoothly as we were playing. Warhammer and Mordheim were of their time, just as other, older rule sets from the 1980s are full of that other bugbear of mine, modifiers. I still have to play Warhammer, but can't help feeling that successor rules sets are doing things better these days.

It may have made more sense to use Necromunda for this little scenario, but in retrospect next time I will go with something that has been written specifically for this genre, like Strange Aeons or When Nightmares Come.