Event Recap - The Battle for Bellson Burrough

 Well folks, it happened! I managed to rustle up a pretty healthy eight players and persuaded them to commit to playing four games of Malifaux in a single day as part of a narrative campaign using the rules in Index of the Untold. As described here, I wrote custom scenarios for the day so that we could follow the story of Bellson Burrough as the factions of the city sought to reclaim it from the Quarantine Zone. Our local store, Vault Games, kindly hosted us from around 10am until sometime past 7pm, and it was one hell of a journey. Gather 'round, and let this very tired storyteller describe to you the events that befell Bellson Burrough this day. I'm writing this in the immediate wake of the event, so apologies in advance if I ramble or trip over my words to some degree, it's been a long day.

Dramatis Personae

The eight crews warring for control of Bellson Burrough were:

MSU agitators who had successfully reprogrammed some Augmented constructs to help mechanise the revolution.

An alternate universe version of Viktoria Chambers, if she had fallen into Leveticus's clutches and become a Hollow Waif.

A scientist who had gotten his brain transferred into a fish, leading trash heap robots from Ampersand and a swarm of Rats that had infested his lab.

Swarms of Lovecraftian entities, some drawn from beyond time and space, others gathered from the land of dreams.

Lawyers hired to ensure a mischievous Fae's contracts were legally enforced.

Tormented ghosts and fungal creatures determined to prove that their leader, the famed Mushroom Killer, would be proven innocent.

A treasure hunter who had successfully persuaded Dabblers in the arcane arts and Experimental necromancers alike that she knew the location of a cache of ancient, powerful tomes.

And also Lilith. She came back. Returned, one might say, with some additional Nightmarish allies courtesy of wounds left upon her by Lord Chompy Bits.

 

The adventure begins

The story of Bellson Burrough begins one foggy morning, the day marked to bring this part of the Quarantine Zone into the fold of Malifaux City proper. In this opening strategy, crews were tasked with marking terrain pieces with their colours to mark their territory. 

With crew sizes quite small, this early in the campaign, the battles were mere minor skirmishes as the freshly minted Masters clashed with each other for the first time.

Down in the sewers, Doctor Fishman was overwhelmed by the steel and unity of the MSU robots.

Fiah, the little Fae so enamoured by the idea of legal contracts, snuck through the casino and managed to plant enough deeds and titles to convince the treasure hunters to look elsewhere.

Fungal monsters in service to the Mushroom Killer sadly stood no chance against the brutality of the Empty Room (Hollow Chambers, get it?).

And in the ruins of the old Asylum, Lilith cut down the eldritch creatures crawling in from other dimensions and began her quest to take back her city.

Paths Diverge

After the first game, we gathered together and did an Aftermath phase as a group to make sure everyone was up to speed on how it worked. Folks got very lucky in Injuries at this stage, almost everyone either flipped or cheated for Just a Flesh Wound, but Bishop walked away with a Blood Debt. 

At this stage, I split the players into two groups. Those who had won their first game played a strategy called Rampant Populism, where they fought to persuade the people in the territories they had just marked that they were deserving of ruling. Threats, bribes, and lies flew thick and fast. Lilith took her campaign to the casino, smashing aside the wall of steel the union deployed to try and keep her out.

Fiah the Fae, meanwhile, fought to a bitter draw against the servants of the Empty Room. Though the Fae and their Lawyers dominated when it came to scheming, the sheer speed of the mercenary followers made it difficult to keep control of the flanks and sentiment towards the legal profession began to sour. Not even Agent 46 in a Giant Pink Sombrero was enough to break the stalemate.

Meanwhile, the crews that had struggled in their first game realised that their losses had not been due to any tactical mistakes! No, it had been a witch's curse! Treasure seekers, Mushroom Killers, fish scientists, and eldritch monsters each struggled to complete a ritual to rid themselves of the cursed fate bestowed upon them by some cackling hag.

Heists!

Lilith had taken a clear lead at this point in victories, the only undefeated Master yet in play, but we weren't playing a tournament and for this round I wanted there to be a light reprieve from the competition for territory. With that in mind, the crews each realised that Malifaux's authorities had left stockpiles of supplies exposed during the conquest of the Burrough, and that an opportunity to seize them in a daring heist was available.

I also had each player flip a card, and the player who flipped the highest crow was paired against another player who flipped a crow and we quarantined them. Instead of a heist, they had to play the "Under Quarantine" strategy I detailed in my previous blog post. Also we all pointed at them and called them stinky and smelly. Ew.

The quarantined crews in question were those of the Mushroom Killer and Fiah, the Fae backed by contract law. While they were busy rolling around in the plague pits, the other crews tried to grab and carry away what loot they could find.

 

The heist strategy was one I was rather proud of. For Turns 1 and 2, players needed to get to the centreline and pick up the strategy markers there to gain Loot tokens to score. For Turns 3 and 4, they had to get to a table edge in the enemy deployment zone and interact to get rid of their Loot tokens to score. Unfortunately I was TOing with an anxious eye on the clock, knowing that we had a 50 soulstone game to play after this and it was getting a bit late, so things became a little rushed towards the end. A couple of games were called draws as the clock ran out, and crews gathered for the final battle laden down with scrip from their crimes. It was the Union that suffered the most at the end of this round, as a critical Black Joker on an Injury flip saw their Guardian Construct abandon them to join a rival crew for the final battle.

The Fate of Bellson Burrough

For the final strategy, the skein of Fate had risen close to the surface and each crew had gained the ability to manipulate it. The two most successful Masters of the day, Lilith and Fiah, were squaring off, but the Burrough's Fate was not solely in their hands. For this final strategy there were some strategy markers on the centreline, and the crews could interact with them to push them back and forth. You wanted markers on the enemy table half to score. But the kicker for this strategy was that in order to interact with a strategy marker you had to take a card from your hand and set it to one side until after the game. Then we revealed the cards and tallied them, adding the numbers of each suit together to determine the Fate of the Burrough. Jokers, if set aside, could have particularly spectacular effects...

In the old asylum, Doctor Fishman and the treasure hunter known as Zoe clashed for ownership of the magnificent arcane treasure. Unfortunately, Fishman set aside a Black Joker and during the game and declared that the "treasure" was, in fact, an ancient bomb from the Tyrant Wars. The Asylum, and all the crews within it, would be remembered only by the crater left behind.

Down in the sewers, the Empty Room was able to largely stonewall the remnants of the Union and keep them bottled up away from the weave of Fate. The Amalgamated creatures and their mercenary hires leaned particularly heavily towards Rams, enforcing the rule of law down in the sewers and guaranteeing its orderly functioning for the Burrough.

The casino, meanwhile, was a narrow contest between the Mushroom Killer and the Lovecraftian entities (with a new pet robot), teetering between Tomes and Masks. Magic and secrets alike gathered around the hallowed halls of the casino, its Fate as yet undecided.

And finally, in the market square, Lilith clashed with Fiah but the diminutive Fae was victorious as though blessed by Fate. A fairly remarkable result, given how many high value cards Fiah poured into manipulating Fate including the Red Joker on the first turn of the game. Masks and, to a lesser extent, Rams were chosen by both players, and the Red Joker allowed Fiah's player to write a substantial addition to the Fate of the Burrough. With secrets and conspiracies dominating life in the Burrough, and the swirling magic of an emerging Leyline all around them, it was determined that lawyers seeking to profit from those seeking compensation for their exposure to magical fallout would have an absolute feed day. Small legal practices would swiftly spring up across Bellson Burrough as it was integrated into the rest of the society, ruthlessly hunting for victims of the asylum's explosion to add to a class action lawsuit.

Not... quite the direction I thought things would go in, but that's to be expected when you leave so much of the narrative up to the players! The day was an absolute riot, and the Index of the Untold's Equipment tables were a huge source of merriment Fiah's crew had two different Giant Pink Sombreros by the end, for example, while seeing a model switch sides right before the final battle was really dramatic. The new rules do a great job of leaning into Malifaux's sense of narrative and turning up the dial on the more unhinged elements of the game, to beautiful effect. I had a ton of fun crafting custom strategies for the day, and while some of them probably wouldn't hold up to repeat playing, they all seemed to lend themselves to a fun day as a one-off scenario. I'd like to give a couple of them another go under less time-sensitive conditions, particularly the Heist strategy. Might be something to toy around with while waiting for GG1 to drop.

If you haven't yet given Index of the Untold a shot, I highly recommend it. It's a fantastic change of pace to the normal experience of Malifaux, and one of the best wargame campaign systems I have ever had the good fortune to experience. We're planning on doing a more ongoing campaign, probably playing around once a month, now that we've had this experience, and I'm looking forward to actually being a player this time around. I hope folks have enjoyed this read, and perhaps been inspired to check out the campaign system for themselves!

Until next time...