Frostgrave Rewards Killing More Than Objective Play – When either by lucky rolls or good play or both, one player gets ahead on the board (eg luckily kills one of his opponents’ casters, or gets a few soldier kills, etc), it is no longer good play for that player to leave the board with treasure counters. Rather, it is better for him to keep his soldiers on the board and push on wiping the opponent off the table, since that gets you all of the treasure anyway, and likely more than you would be able to carry off.

Unlimited Game Length - Because the game length is unlimited, there is no urgency to remove your treasure tokens from the board and unless there is some kind of agreement between players, the game can actually stalemate quite easily over the last treasure counter or two, with neither side wanting to make a break for it, and neither side having a compelling reason for their soldiers carrying treasure to actually leave the table with it when they could continue to fight instead.

Frostgrave Rewards Wizards For Killing Stuff – but it doesn’t reward them the same for doing all of their other cool things such as movement tricks, heals, or debuffs. We found that our damage-focused Wizards outlevelled our Sigilist and Witch significantly (by 6 levels over 3 games) and this didn’t seem fair; it just makes damage spells a no-brainer, which pushes the game away from “do cool stuff with my wizards” into “make my wizard a walking turret”

Snowballing – when one Wizard gets a small advantage from a won game, uses this to win his next game and get a bigger advantage, and continues to get exponentially better until no one can keep up with him – we observed this after just one game! This also happens through dumb luck on treasure rolls – for example, in one game I won 4-2 in treasure and my treasure rolls netted me nearly 1000g plus some items, whereas my opponent from two treasure rolls picked up just 80g.

Too Easy to Buy/Sell/Upgrade - Because you can buy and sell whatever you want whenever you want, it’s very easy to simply sell every scroll, potion, and item that you find or make and then buy your ‘perfect combination’ of Wizard and Apprentice items. It took me just 3 games to have both my casters in full magic gear; not only did that contribute to the snowball, but I felt like I’d “done” my magic items already and took a bit of the excitement out of the campaign for me (short of losing them to a close call, at which point I’d probably just buy them back). In the same vein, it’s far too easy to simply drop an injured soldier and buy a new one, and it’s too easy to simply buy a pile of base upgrades all at once after a big haul of treasure.

Wizard Death - This is more of an early game problem that will likely go away later on, but that said; if a Wizard dies early (pre level 10) then the loss of levels combined with the loss of all of your gold, items and soldiers is devastating. It’s incredibly difficult to go anywhere from that point, as even a non-snowballed enemy Warband are likely to have levels, items, and higher solider quality over you.

Game Length Restricted to 5 Turns

We had some debate about this length (and whether to use random length) but we settled on what we knew empirically:

- We’d seen more than one 4-2 treasure win in 5 turns, so we knew that it was possible to do well in this amount of time
- There was generally 3-4 treasure left on the table at the end of turn 4, so we knew that 4 turns was probably a bit short
- Wiping out a warband in 5 turns was possible but not easy, wiping out a warband in 6 turns had been done a few times, but mostly it took 7+ turns to do so

This led us to 5 turns as our fixed game length, which seems like a good number; it’s not so short that you can’t claim multiple treasure tokens and maybe even some that are on the other half of the board (especially if you have decent movement and/or movement spells), but it is short enough that grabbing treasure feels like a scramble and the game is exciting. It is also generally not long enough to wipe out an enemy warband, which promotes objective play over simple combat.

From a narrative perspective, we figured there were a number of reasons for this. Frostgrave is a dangerous place; the sounds of battle, Wizards casting spells, and the attraction of heightened magic use for creatures like Wraiths mean that Wizards don’t exactly want to end up in a pitched battle lest they suddenly become swamped with wandering monsters. Frostgrave is also an inhospitable place, and the warbands would likely not want to spend more time in the cold than necessary or prudent – no one wants to get caught in a sudden blizzard or ice storm.

Worth noting, is that this turn limit is intended for a 3×3 table (a “standard” Frostgrave table). If you regularly or even occasionally play on a larger table, you’d certainly need to increase this to match your specific games.

You Only Keep The Treasure You Steal!

To further promote objective play over straight combat, to tie in with the limited turns mechanic, and to stop “wipe enemy warband for a 6-0″ syndrome, we decided that you only get to keep treasure that you actually move off the board.

At the end of the game, any treasure that is still not off the table – whether it is carried or not (the soldier or caster drops it as their warband retreats!) – is worth 25xp to both Wizards. This also in part gives you a reason to stop the enemy making off with tokens beyond simply denying them treasure, something that we felt was a bit lacking in our games too (“oh well, it isn’t worth my time to try and catch that guy anymore, might as well let him have that treasure”).

No Kill XP For Wizards, More XP For Spellcasting

It really didn’t sit well with us that our Sigilist and Witch were so far behind our two Elemental Bolt casters for no reason other than kills, and it wasn’t fair mechanically either. I really wanted to play an Illusionist, but why would I when schools with access to Elementalism are just as effective and I can get 50-160xp for casting Elemental Bolt rather than 10? We did consider simply reducing kill XP down to lower numbers – from 40/80/150 to 10/20/30 or similar – but the principal remained the same; why should a damage spell be rewarded more than a timely weapon enchant or leap?

We decided to completely remove kill XP for Wizards, and bump XP per spell cast up to 20xp per cast to compensate.

Too Easy to Buy/Sell/Upgrade (by Lotan/Dave who wrote our out of game changes)

The major change to the way the postgame sequence is handled was to add some structure to it. In the situation where you and some friends are playing informal ad hoc games but want to level your wizards and buy items, the current system is brilliant, but these changes may help bring some balance to a long term campaign. I also wanted to impose some fluffy narrative limitations on the warbands actions that would also help prevent runaway wizards.

One of the biggest changes that I wanted was a limit on what could actually be done by the warband between games. It struck me that you get your big list of hard won loot, then you do the typical computer game thing of running to the nearest NPC vendor and unloading your items on him like some spoilt kid with unwanted Christmas presents. Once you’ve got rid of these “rare and treasured” artefacts it’s straight down to what felt like Tesco Extra Frostgrave (Walmart to our US comrades) to buy literally anything you wanted. This took a lot of the fun out of it for me, because you have these cool items that you should be using, but there is no incentive to keep them. This magical relic blade gets melted down in a “cash4gold” type scheme and there seems little value to items you find. You can also access whatever grimoire you want, which seems to favour the “metagamey” players more than the fluffy ones, or equip everyone with whatever potions you choose, allowing for potential gamey tactics.

To address this, I added in some limitations on both what you could do, and what you could buy. The only people in your warband of any note are your wizard and your apprentice, and their time is limited. So the first change I made was to how you buy and sell items. I needed to change it from the feel that there was a single multinational magic item hypermarket sitting on the edge of Frostgrave to the wizard or apprentice heading out with a few men to try and find the travelling caravan crazy enough to be heading through the ruins, and to emphasise the fact that these artefacts are relics of a bygone age. By limiting the items the trader is carrying, it leaves the player salivating at the chance to buy his Staff of Power (3) if he comes across one. Spellcasters are now limited to selling relevant items only to relevant vendors (what does that smith really need with a potion of speed?), and only having a list of 3 randomly generated items to choose from per visit to a vendor between games. Now, if you really want to get the item you want, you could send both spellcasters to the same type of vendor, increasing your chance of rolling the correct item – representing the resources and commitment shown to hunt out that fabled ring or staff!

The next problem we found was that bases could be upgraded far too easily. One of our players (it was me! – Calmdown) had literally bought every one of the upgrades he wanted to have by the 3rd game. Again, to limit this, the “Oversee Improvements” action was added, showing that the spellcaster has to oversee his peons and ensure that they don’t foul things up.

Whilst visiting the Frostgrave Tesco/Walmart, it did sometimes seem like there was also a recruitment agency there; lost a soldier? Here’s another! Soldier injured? Retire him and get a new one! It all seemed a bit too easy to find recruits in the frozen city. To try to add a more narrative bent to this, I wanted to make the spellcaster have to work for it, so he now has to take a trip out of Frostgrave to outlying towns to find people to hire or buy dogs for his warband, spend his time buying supplies and armour to upgrade that thug’s gear to make him a tracker, or hiring barbarians from local brothels. This also led to a change to Carrier Pigeon in the optional rules (as it isn’t very useful in the default rules); the Carrier Pigeon upgrade now allows you to hire a single soldier of any type without using an action, as the wizard sends out calls for new recruits to outlying towns by pigeon.
“Barbarian deaded. Please send another. Love Brian the Wizard.”
Finally, as an extra for Warbands who have really tough or unlucky games, I added the “Scour the Ruins” action. The idea for this was that it is a pity action, worthy of the mockery of the other wizards. You didn’t get any treasure? Send out your men to pick through rubbish and snow troll dung in search of undigested rings or trinkets. It’s not glamorous, but if you’ve got nothing else to do, hey, it’s gold!

Wizard Death (by Lotan/Dave who wrote our out of game changes)

There is one last thing that I want to talk about, and it is a point on which the Frostgrave community seems divided: opinions on how survivable wizards are. In one camp you have the people who think “Hey, wizards are squishy, they’re supposed die if you’re not careful, it’s fluffy”, then in the other camps you have more of a “Hey, wizards are the heroes, you want them battered and bruised – but if this is true fantasy, I want to care about my wizard’s life and accomplishments, it’s fluffy.”

Personally, after playing a few games, I find myself falling into the latter camp. I want my wizard to be Gandalf in my stories, to not truly die, but be brought back from the brink scarred but unbroken. I want more J.R.R Tolkien than George. R.R. Martin. I want Tiberius the Undying, vanquisher of the Frost Giants, tamer of the Great Wolf, not Ted the 3rd, identical to every other wizard who got squished but with 10 less levels. To represent the more “Tolkienesque” style, I created an optional change to the injury chart. Now, instead of a 10% chance of death, the Wizard can continue with injury whilst also adding a cool story to add to his saga. I imagine my Wizard rolling this result to have been left for dead, stripped clean by brigands, and attacked by all manners of evil as he hauls his broken body through the ruins to his camp; he comes stumbling through the door, points angrily at his apprentice with an accusatory look and then collapses from exhaustion. In game terms, I changed the “dead” result to give an injury, lose all items, but gain some experience as the Wizard overcomes his trials.

 Alpharius wrote:
If magic is rare, there should be far more buyers than sellers!

The rules for an apothecary (and only an apothecary) to give someone else a potion. If an Apothecary is in base contact with another figure, he can spend an action to use his healing potion on that figure. That figure immediately regains 5 health. Other figures may not exchange items during a game unless specifically stated in the rules.