Saturday 1 October 2016

Song of Gods and Glory - Part I: Pestifex

During a campaign in the buzzing south, a young mercenary had suddenly fallen ill. At first, and for many weeks, it merely manifested as boils in the crevices of the body. Painful if touched but discrete enough to go unnoticed by his comrades. But then came the fever, and the young mercenary spent more and more of his time retired in the wagons or in his tent. Until there came a time when the company had been camping for a week and he had not shown his face but once.
At last, his fellow soldiers grew worried. What they found as they entered the tent was as repulsive as it was horrifying. Sitting, hunched over and draped in ragged cloth, was a pale wretch of the young mercenary, surrounded by the rot and filth of numerous dead beings.
And he turned his head and spread his arms wide:

“I welcome you, my brotherssss.”

From the filth crawled forth numerous demons, cackling and grimacing.




I finally managed to finish this guy. Pestifex is a champion of plague, and starts out with the following profile (for Song of Blades and Heroes):

Quality: 3+ Combat 3
Hero, Leader, Squishy, Spellcaster: Wall of Worms

He has been generated using my own "Of Gods and Glory" fan supplement, which I have been working on for quite a while. It obviously draws inspirations from a lot of different places, and we are set to start playtesting it next week. 

Using the tables, I rolled up a human veteran soldier, choose to align him with the Plague-Father (as that is the part I've written so far), and then rolled for both a mutation and deity-specific reward. This resulted in his mind warping, turning him into a spellcaster, and his body bloating, granting the Squishy-trait. (Something I've only mildly modelled by making his skin diseased and/or covered. Rule-of-cool etc.) 


For the rest of his warband, I rolled up a Minotaur, a Chaos Warrior (Who ended up gaining the same mind-mutation, turning him into another spellcaster - quite ridiculous odds) and 4 little plaguelings.
More on these as I get them painted over the next few days, hopefully.

The system comprises of a series of charts, and obviously takes a lot of inspiration from the old and venerable Path to Glory. I feel SoBH is ripe for this sort of thing. It has a plethora of Traits to draw from for weird effects, and I feel the game plays best when players are forced to work with "sub-optimal" forces of varied quality and combat-ability. It adds a lot of tension and risk-managing.
It is also though of as a hobby-project generator, in the sense that you can roll up some wild and varied ideas for miniatures that you probably wouldn't have though about otherwise. And that's always fun.
Besides, we love both SoBH and PoG so much, a fusion inevitably had to happen. 
Of Gods and Glory is still very much a work in progress, needing both proper playtesting and development (ie. writing of more glorious tables).

That's it for now! Thanks for reading. 
~Affun

2 comments:

  1. He looks fab. Great idea mixing SoBH and Path to Glory, looking forward to seeing the result.

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    Replies
    1. Cheers and thanks for the comment :)
      I'll be posting bits and pieces on here while I work on the system.

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