Writing Our Own Chapters - An Index of the Unknown Review

Buckle up folks, I’m a bit giddy about this one.

My very first article for this blog was about my love for narrative. I talked about how I first came to wargaming as a storytelling exercise, before I discovered RPGs, and how my love for Malifaux is rooted in the evocative nature of its rules and how they make the game world come alive narratively. In many ways this article feels like coming full circle. I’m here once again to talk about narrative and storytelling in my favourite miniature game in the context of a review of the campaign mechanics of Index of the Untold, the first expansion for Malifaux 4^th Edition.

Given my origins in wargaming, it should come as no surprise that I am a huge fan of campaign systems. I’m currently wrapped up in two different campaigns for other games, I’ve played in half a dozen or so in the last couple of years, and I can’t wait to get the ball rolling in Malifaux.

In some ways I’m shocked that we never had a campaign system for 3^rd Edition. In other ways I’m shocked that we now have one for 4^th. Malifaux has a serious narrative focus in its rules writing, but it’s also a very tightly written game from a mechanical perspective and my experience with wargame campaigns is that they often feel like they fit best in somewhat “loose” gaming environments. The whole premise of a campaign system guarantees that one player will have an advantage over another. One player will have a crew hampered by injuries, another will be loaded up with a ton of new skills and loot from their many victories. Players have to be ok with that premise, and it’s easier to lean into it with games that make luck a major deciding factor and allow for surprise underdog victories and dramatic story moments than more clinical game systems where disadvantage can easily snowball into one-sided gaming experiences.

Index of the Unknown understands all of this. The writers know the kind of game that Malifaux is, and they know the kind of systems that campaigns need, and in my opinion they have threaded that needle beautifully. I’ll touch on how a little bit later, but as a reward for sticking through the preamble let’s jump straight to the value judgement part of this review:

I love this book!

 

Self-insert OCs and other fun

The core pitch of Index of the Unknown’s campaign mechanics is this:

Pick two Keywords (they don’t need to be of the same faction). Squish them together. Then design your own Master to lead this newly Frankensteined Keyword. McMourning would be so proud.

This is a wild idea. The developers are upfront that when given the choice between a balanced system and one that allowed for creativity and player expression, they went for the latter. It’s a good idea to chat with your fellow players regarding their expectations and what they want from the campaign. I suspect most folks are down to see some crazy combos but probably want to avoid facing anything that straight up tries to break the game, but the fun part is that if you and your friends all agree then you can have a great time trying to do exactly that!

Broadly speaking, designing your own Master has you pick from one of a five templates. Those templates give you some starting stats (Defense, Willpower, Health) and tell you how to choose your actions and abilities. A template might say that you get an attack action on your Master chosen from a model in the same Keyword(s) with Cost 7 or less. You don’t get any triggers, but you will get the signature symbol if it has one. Then you repeat for the tactical action and the abilities. The number of actions you get and the Cost value of the models you can steal rules from will vary depending on the template. Then you get to just decide what base size and Size value you want your Master to have, and slap some characteristics on of your choice like “Beast” or “Undead” or what have you, and your new creation is ready to be born.

You also need a Crew Card, and you’ll start the campaign with one of ten different simple Crew Cards to pick from. These are all pretty straightforward, some general Abilities and Actions that all require Soulstones to activate, but crucially a few allow you to hand out Tokens, Upgrades, or Markers associated with the Keywords you have picked for your Master.

I love these systems. By picking actions and abilities from existing models in your Keyword rather than having generic attacks and special rules, your new Master gets to interact with the special tricks and gameplay of their Keywords. It’s a great shortcut to making sure some of the truly unique mechanics in the game are still attainable for your custom character.

One quick word of warning. Your Master and Crew Card (and Totem, if you get one!) will develop over the course of the campaign, but it’s actually quite unlikely that you will get to copy an action or ability from your Keyword later the campaign. You have to flip, not cheat, a Joker on a table that you’re probably only flipping on a couple of times in the course of the campaign. The rest of the time you’ll be choosing from lists of actions that are very cool and may open up all sorts of wild synergies, but you won’t be gaining actions and triggers with Keyword specific text like “flip at a positive if the target is within 2” of an Echo Marker” or “Heal the target +2 if it’s near an enemy with an Abandoned Token”. It is quite easy to start the campaign with a powerful bruiser who can dish out a ton of Damage 3 swings, but it’s a lot easier to get access to generically powerful attacks after a game or two than it is to get weird and specific rules text like “summon a Rat when you take damage from an enemy attack”. For myself, that means I want to start the campaign with the weird garbage, and turn my character into a death dealing monster later on.

 

Companions and Consequences

You also start the campaign with up to 25 Soulstones-worth of models. You pick a Faction for your Franken-Keyword to belong to (choosing from one of the ones you stole a Keyword from), and add models to a list called an “Arsenal”. When you play games, you can only hire models you have added to the Arsenal. As the campaign goes on you might gain equipment to give to your models, and when models die in a game they may accumulate injuries or even die outright, being removed from the Arsenal permanently. After every game you will gain Scrip, which you use to hire new models and buy equipment and pay back alley doctors to fix your injured characters, you’ll flip cards to determine these outcomes, and in true Malifaux style you’ll have a small hand of cards with which you can cheat fate. You’ll also level up your Master, accumulating new actions and triggers from beautifully lengthy tables, though the big winner here is the immense Equipment table which has a truly staggering number of frequently ridiculous items to choose from.

It is in these systems that I think the Index of the Unknown writers proved they understood what Malifaux is and what it needs to be to make for a good campaign. Let’s start with the Aftermath Hand. You draw a small number of cards, maximum of four, after a game before you start flipping for equipment, injuries, etc. Drawing a small number of cards is pretty rough, you might not get anything above a 6, and you might not flip enough cards in this post-game sequence for the luck to average out. Thankfully, not only does the Equipment table have absolute banger options at practically every tier, the Injury table is flipped so that low cards are far more favourable than high cards. Models die if they get a 13, but a 1 or a 2 means they survive without a scratch.

But let’s dig further. Arguably the single biggest problem with campaigns is the snowball effect. At the start of Week 1, everyone is on the same level. Then the first games happen, and half the players lose. The players who win get greater rewards, the players who lose probably end up with more injuries. And then Week 2 happens, and half the players have a ton of advantages over the other half. It doesn’t get better from there.

Index of the Unknown accounts for this in a few ways. First of all, players choose the Encounter Size for your game of Malifaux together, but it is capped at the size of the smaller of the two Arsenals plus 6. Say you’re on Week 3 and one player has invested a ton of Scrip into bulking out their roster, while the other has been getting hammered with Injuries and burning Scrip like crazy trying to keep their starting models alive, you might have an Arsenal with 60 stones worth of models facing an Arsenal of 32. The maximum game size these players can choose to play is a 38 stone Encounter, preventing the larger roster from getting a completely outsized advantage.

That system doesn’t account for Injuries, advancements on your custom Masters, or Equipment though, which is where the Campaign Rating comes in. The Campaign Rating is a tally of every equipment and leader advancement you have, minus the number of injuries in your arsenal. The crew with a lower Campaign Rating gains additional Scrip equal to the difference at the end of the game, and gets a bonus to their starting cache (to a maximum of +3 stones, which can take them above 6).

What I love about the Campaign Rating is that it understands that campaign games need to be lopsided, but that one player being at the bottom of the heap for the whole campaign is not fun. A few extra Soulstones in your cache probably won’t swing the balance of power between two wildly different crews, so the game is still going to be one that tells the story of a wounded gang struggling to survive against better equipped, more powerful opponents. But once you’ve pushed through that uphill battle, you get a cash boost equal to the difficulty that you can use to play catch-up.

 

Say Hi to Wart! (Wart says Hi!)

Let’s pull this all together with an example.

So I’m about to start a campaign, and as a 3^rd Edition player I have a few models lying around that aren’t real models in 4^th. Rather than use them as official proxies, I’m going to grab one of my favourites (a Winged Plague) and use that as my new Master. I’m in the midst of painting a Forgotten crew too as I write this, so let’s merge Plague and Forgotten together over their shared feature: Child soldiers.

Introducing: Wart. Wart was a loyal little pus boil happily spreading filth in Hamelin’s name, until the Piper abandoned him. Cast aside like so much refuse, Wart was found by a back-alley street gang called the Bellson Burrough Boys (and Girls). The street gang in question was made up of more street urchins than grown thugs, and they took on the little disease demon as their mascot and revelled in the tide of Rats and other horrors that seemed drawn to the truly vile excretions seeping from its skin.

I’m going to choose Outcasts for Wart’s Faction, and for his Crew Card I have a few options. Both Plague and Forgotten have unique Tokens that I could get access to with this Crew Card, but honestly I like “Loot Their Stash” more than that option. It lets me spend Soulstones during the game to draw random pieces of equipment from the equipment chart (which go away at the end of the game), and honestly that fits my mental image of the Burrough Boys. A crew of mostly children, some alive, some undead, frantically looting what they can before they get cornered and have to fight their way out.

As for Wart himself, it’s hard to pick a starting template. He could honestly work well using four of the five templates (I don’t think he fits the Heavy Hitter archetype), but in the end I was drawn to the Lucky Upstart. It is undoubtedly the weakest of the five starting templates, drawing an attack and an ability from fairly low-cost models, but in return Wart gets to start the campaign with a random piece of equipment that will never go away and a big part of what makes campaigns fun for me is letting luck tell a story.

So I flip for my equipment and I flip a 12 of Masks (sidebar: I’m so annoyed I flipped this for my teaching example, I desperately want this result to come up when I play this crew for real in a campaign and now I’ve all but guaranteed that I won’t). The 12 of Masks lets me choose one of the following three pieces of equipment:

-The Badge of Honour, giving the equipped model Heroic Intervention as a Signature.

-Neverborn Hide, which gives enemy models within 1” an Injured token when the equipped model suffers damage.

-Strange Portal, a truly wild little item that does different things based on the card you flip at the start of activation, which can’t be cheated. One particularly ridiculous option removes the model from the game but adds it to your next game at no cost. I want this item so badly. It’s normally one use per campaign, but flipping it as my Lucky Upstart upgrade means I would get it back every game.

Obviously I take the Strange Portal. Wart doesn’t use it himself, he probably doesn’t know how to make it work, but one of his child soldiers can probably wield it.

At the end of the day, that means that Wart looks something like this:

 

There is a handy little template for your custom creations!

I’m a bit torn on whether “Hide and Shriek” or “Pattycake” from the Crooligan works better as his attack action, and I should tack “Vermin” in his Characteristics, but I think I’ve spent enough time futzing around with image editors for this example.

Finally, I need to spend up to 25 stones hiring models for Wart’s Arsenal. I think I want two Rat Catchers. They’re adults, but they bring Rat friends along for the crew to play with. And then a Crooligan and a Stolen would help round out the gang pretty quickly, though bringing Nix in to give the gang an attack dog is also quite tempting. It’s not hard to hire the cheaper models in as the campaign rolls on, as the first model you hire each campaign round is heavily discounted and it would let me keep gathering Scrip for equipment. Speaking of which, at this point I’ve spent 22 stones and you can bank up to three stones to turn into Scrip at the start of the campaign, which I think I’ll do. I want to buy all the Equipment I can. If you haven’t noticed from the design of this crew, I really, really like the Equipment table.

 

The End… but only of the Beginning

Folks, I am so excited for this expansion. Campaigns can be hard to organise, getting people to keep showing up week after week can require a lot of coordination and dedicated buy-in from a large group, but they’re so rewarding when they work. I also think this campaign system would work relatively well for small one-day events, where you try to get a campaign from start to finish instead of running a tournament. The early games are going to be pretty small (Wart’s gang here turned out to be just 4-5 miniatures to start with), and by packing it all into a single day you only have to schedule your group to show up together for one occasion instead of the kind of demoralising feeling when people start dropping from the campaign as it rolls on. I definitely have some ideas for exactly this sort of format, and it’s the sort of concept that should work well even with only four to six players, numbers that wouldn’t be ideal for a tournament.

I haven’t even touched on the Coop mode presented in this book, but the owner of this illustrious blog has a video going through that system at this link:

 

The Coop mode can even be integrated into campaigns! After scrapping in the slums of Malifaux City for a few weeks, maybe your crews need to band together to survive as the Guild sends in its enforcers or Zombies attack from the Quarantine Zone! The potential of this book is truly wild, and I can’t wait to start telling stories with it.

Now you've read all about the Campaign mode, jump on over YouTube to see the Cooperative Mode in action