Frostgrave: Fireheart

By Joseph A. McCullough and RU-MOR aRU-MOR

This supplement for Frostgrave provides players with new tools to build, animate, field, and face constructs in their games.

In the glory days of Ancient Felstad, artisans competed to produce the most beautiful, the most functional, and the most enduring constructs. These living works of art could be seen everywhere in the city, fulfilling many of the day-to-day tasks that kept the magical metropolis running. They provided transportation and security, worked on construction and cleaning, exterminated vermin, butchered animals, and tended furnaces. Then came the cataclysm. The ice and snow not only buried and destroyed most of the constructs active in the city, but nearly wiped out the knowledge of their creation. Certainly, the constructs animated by the explorers of the Frozen City are crude in both form and function compared to what once existed.

This supplement for Frostgrave: Fantasy Wargames in the Frozen City provides a study of constructs, offering expanded rules for their creation, modification, and even re-animation. It examines enchanters' workshops, detailing new magic items and base modifications that aid in the animation process, and also includes a bestiary full of new constructs. Of course, much of the knowledge that was once lost still exists in the frozen ruins, so the book also features several scenarios set in the once-great factories where the art of construct creation reached its pinnacle.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
• Release date: Jul 21, 2022
• ISBN: 9781472852243

Joseph A. McCullough

Joseph A. McCullough's first brush with writing for games was as co-author of The Grey Mountains supplement for the Middle-Earth Role-Playing Game, and he has remained passionate about Fantasy gaming since, going on to become an award-winning game designer. He is the creator of the “Frostgrave Family” of skirmish wargames (the Fantasy titles Frostgrave, Ghost Archipelago, Rangers of Shadow Deep, and the Sci-Fi evolution, Stargrave) and of the Oathmark Fantasy battle game and The Silver Bayonet, a game of Napoleonic Gothic Horror. The latest information on his game design and other writing can be found at: josephamccullough.com.

Book preview

CONTENTS

Introduction

CHAPTER ONE

Advanced Animation

Casting Animate Construct (Before or After?)

Scroll Animation

Constructs and Potions

Repair and Re-Animation

Construct Modification

Modification Penalty

Animated Prosthetics

Animated Prosthetics Upgrades

CHAPTER TWO

New Soldiers

Construct Familiar

Construct Hound

Scrounger

Tinkerer

CHAPTER THREE

Interactive Terrain

Interactive Terrain Tables

Interactive Terrain List

CHAPTER FOUR

The Construct Palace Scenarios

Scenario 1: Meet in the Middle

Scenario 2: The Turbine

Scenario 3: Fire Hardened

Scenario 4: The Re-alignment Chamber

Scenario 5: Incinerator Island

CHAPTER FIVE

New Treasure and Base Resources

CHAPTER SIX

Bestiary

Blade-Dog

Candle-Jack

Construct of Burden

Demonic Prison

Glass Man

Gnawgrubs

Magmite

Rat Swarm

New Traits

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to Frostgrave: Fireheart, the latest volume in the ever-growing Frostgrave library. Since Frostgrave is a game about collecting magic books, it seems right and proper that players can collect their own library of arcane material to support it! As always though, I have tried hard to ensure that none of the Frostgrave supplements are necessary to play the game. Each one adds something new and different, not because those new rules are needed to make the game better, or more complicated, or to sell more miniatures, but simply because I think the topics are cool and that some players, at least, will want to explore those aspects of the game or world. This book is mainly devoted to two topics: the strange interactive terrain that can be found in the ruins of Felstad, and the building and animation of constructs. Neither are necessary additions to the game, but both contain the potential for a lot of fun!

More than any of the supplements that have gone before, this book harkens back to my earliest days as a wargamer. Unlike many, I can’t point to a specific moment or event and say, ‘That’s when I became a wargamer’. I didn’t have that epiphany moment where I was introduced to a game by a friend, or walked into a gaming store, or stumbled upon a convention. Instead, I just grew into wargaming independent of any specific game or line of miniatures. My earliest memories of miniature gaming are of playing with toy soldiers. Sometimes I would do the classic toy soldier thing of setting up two different sides and then knocking them down, but other times, I would send my select group on a ‘special mission’. These missions were played out on a piece of paper. I would draw a path along the paper marked with various death-traps and dangerous terrain. I would then march all my soldiers up to each point, one-by-one, and roll a die. I had already noted on the paper which die rolls resulted in death and which ones would see the soldier safely across. So really, it was just an exercise in dice rolling, but in my imagination, my poor soldiers struggled and fought in cinematic excitement, and always a few would emerge victorious at the end, despite horrendous casualties.

In many ways, Frostgrave has always had that element of a death-trap drawn out on paper. So many of the scenarios I have written over the years feature strange and deadly terrain that can kill, maim, or misdirect due to little more than random chance. I don’t apologize for this! Unlike my poor plastic soldiers, Frostgrave players are still in control and can choose the movements and actions of their figures. The fun is working with that deadly, random potential and seeing if you can make the most of it to win the day!

In that tradition, I have included a long chapter in this book called ‘Interactive Terrain’, which includes 20 different pieces of strange terrain designed to scupper plans, strike at the unwary, and generally create chaos on the tabletop. Players can either use this terrain to construct their own scenarios, or they can roll randomly on the table provided to see what terrain might be found in the little patch of the Frozen City that they happen to be investigating. I have also used this terrain as the basis for the five scenarios presented in this book.

Of course, eventually, I moved on from my solo death-trap missions for plastic soldiers. I discovered ‘real’ miniatures in both metal and plastic and became an enthusiastic painter. Perhaps more importantly, I found a school friend who was also into such figures, and we would meet-up all the time to play ‘wargames’. The thing is, we didn’t actually have any wargames. We had plenty of figures, plenty of dice, but no rules. So, we just made up our own rules as we went along. If someone shot at someone else, we rolled some dice. If the result was high, it was a hit; if it was low, it was a miss. If the dice returned a middling result, it was a near-miss, or a grazing shot, or basically whatever was best for the story we were telling. The more we played, the more complicated our rules became, not because we wanted to create a more realistic experience, but because we had specific stories we wanted to tell for our group of soldiers. So, if we wanted to make a team of specialist tunnel fighters, we’d come up with some quick rules for tunnels. If we wanted to make one of our guys a mad-scientist or biochemist, we’d create rules for designing new drugs.

It’s that same spirit of ‘let’s have rules for that because it is cool’, that I have always tried to bring to Frostgrave. It’s in that spirit that I have presented the other main part of this book, the chapter on ‘Advanced Animation’. Put simply, this is a chapter devoted to different things you can do with the Animate Construct spell. Now, instead of simply creating a new small, medium, or large construct, you can do a host of things, including re-animating dead constructs, modifying your constructs to have some new special ability, and even animating a prosthetic limb for a character that has lost one. If selected carefully, these rules might help your strategy in future games for the acquisition of more treasure, but really, it is a toolbox for storytelling. Is your wizard paranoid about invisible foes? Maybe he’d build a construct with Soulsight? Does your wizard like to hide behind the lines and let others take the risks? Maybe a construct with a construct eye-socket is in order? Further, although the Enchanters will always remain the masters of construct building, there is no reason that any wizard can’t have a construct or two in their warband. It’s always fun to ask the question – what kind of construct would an Illusionist have? Or a Witch? Or a