Ironically, all the furore over MkIII and the squeezing of
PP's forums has made me dig through the lead pile to find my old Cygnar starter minis. I don't have much interest in playing WMH with them, though, so I wondered how well they'd slot into certain other rule sets. I only have the old MkI cards for the translation, but it's less about the details and more about what the minis show, and the general capabilities.
Firstly, Dragon Rampant. Units in this game work along the lines of 'strength points' (roughly corresponding to wounds) rather than individual minis, and can be spread among any number of minis. So heroes and big minis (like giant robots) can represent the strength of an entire unit of basic grunts. Let's try that...
Stryker
Offensive heavy foot (more proactive than regular heavy foot)
Spellcaster (the wide range of spells a spellcaster gets can easily include the effect of Stryker's disruptor pistol)
10pts
Defender
Elite foot
Missiles (Again, the shooting strength of a full unit of human-sized beings, wrapped up in one big cannon)
Fear (causing fear, and immune to it)
10pts
Charger
Light foot (Could be heavy foot, but
HF can't take ranged weapons)
Mixed weapons (ranged capability)
Fear
7pts
Sentinel
Heavy missiles (a less melee-oriented unit type than light foot, but perhaps representing the Sentinel's chain gun better)
Weighty projectiles (cuts the range and unit cost a bit)
Fear
5pts
32pts
The four minis alone fulfil the four-unit minimum for the game, with a relatively high points total. That's no problem, though to match the 24-point standard suggested in the book,
offensive and
fear could be stripped out.
Taking things a bit bigger, I could imagine them as part of an army in a fantasy block-manoeuvre game. Mayhem's my choice. It has a number of mechanics that I like, but for the purposes of this topic the one to focus on is the unit creation system. Part of that is an interesting one - the
construct rule, where a machine or constructed creature is controlled by a battle sorceror's magic point pool. Sounds familiar. It also gives a unit
fear,
attrition (in a game where units normally take a
KoW-like one-two punch and they're out,
attrition makes a unit pretty hard to kill),
siege, etc.
Different stat and rolls use the polydice
d4,
d6,
d8,
d10,
d12 and
d20. Higher (max
d12) is better for army leadership and movement (MOV), lower (min
d6) is better for combat quality (CQ) and ballistic armour/avoidance rating (BAR). So...
Leadership d10
4 crowns (points)
Stryker
MOV
d6
CQ
d8
BAR
d10
General
Battle sorceror
Heavy armour
Spear (effective vs. behemoths i.e. constructs)
Pistol
Blast (spell)
Magic missile (spell)
57 crowns
Defender
MOV
d4
CQ
d8
BAR
d10
Construct
Blunt (weapon trait, anti heavy armour. Great weapon might be appropriate too)
Rifle
32 crowns
Charger
MOV
d6
CQ
d10
BAR
d10
Construct
Blunt
Heavy crossbow
28 crowns
Sentinel
MOV
d6
CQ
d10
BAR
d10
Construct
Shield
Repeating crossbow
30 crowns
147 crowns altogether, as part of an army that can be anything from 200 crowns (small beginner army) upwards.
Again, like Dragon Rampant the combat and shooting stats represent an entire unit's worth of strength and shooting in one model. The Defender here isn't shooting with just one wee rifle. Still, there's a bit from the description of the
construct rule:
As more unusual or very unique models are many times used to represent constructs, I give people a greater degree of creative freedom when building their profiles. So, if your 'big stompy steam powered robot of destruction' has a massive hammer in one hand and a giant harpoon in the other, then feel free to add the blunt trait and the bolt thrower profile to the unit.
Big stompy steam powered robots with big hammers. Hmm. War machines in Mayhem are outside the usual unit creation rules, with fixed unit profiles. Here though, you can buy one and stick it's ranged attacks on a construct. So I can put a cannon on the Defender and an organ gun on the Sentinel, and bump their crown costs to 58 and 50 respectively. The Charger might have a cannon too or just bump up to rifles.
On the other hand, Stryker, as a battle sorceror, can generate a max of six magic points a turn. Plenty for spells but perhaps not many for telling three big stompy robots what to do; although this is where the standing orders rule would come in, and Mayhem turns tend to be short anyway -
IGOUGO but feeling like something between that and alternate activation.
Still, control of the jacks can be represented by Mayhem's standard command and control mechanism - command points are generated by leadership and heroes, and extra points are used up by issuing multiple orders to a unit, or by the distance of a unit from the ordering hero, among other things. I'd have to take the cannon off the Defender, but I could downgrade the jacks from
construct to cheaper
behemoth, and Stryker from a battle sorceror to bog-standard sorceror. Decisions, decisions.
Taking things back in more of a skirmishing direction, I could try something like Advanced Song of Blades and Heroes. That's a more recent purchase though, and I still need a proper read through it and all those traits. (
Artificial and
Oblivious seem like certs, though) Ditto for In Her Majesty's Name - steampunk skirmish with added weird powers seems appropriate. Or give it more of a sci-fi spin with Rogue Stars, Rogue Planet, Victory Decision:Future Combat, etc. etc. etc.
What can you fit your WMH minis into? Apart from, y'know, WMH...