Good news fellow painters, gamers and miniature enthusiasts. We finally tied all loose ends together and released Bladestorm Second Edition this weekend.
From 1990 until today, this is indeed a 25th anniversary update (well, +1). Instead of letting the setting have control over the rules, we decided to turn the spotlight over to the miniatures and the stories they have to tell. Quite early on, we took the 1st edition rulesbook apart and started work on an Excel based calculator tool. This, together with some scratch made forms would produce playable combatants with Bladestorm rules. The mechanics are fast and intuitive. Every weapon has an attack value (usually some 6 and 10 sided dice) and does some damage when it hits (read the highest or lowest dice results). All you have to do is roll higher than the target's defense.
This easy approach has been and continues to be the basis of Bladestorm rules. Everything else is topping.
One might ask: why go through such an ordeal to release an update when the game already exists? The answer is easy. 1st edition was sort of rushed when it was released back in 1990. If you look closely at the latter chapters, especially the generation of forces for the game, you find lots of type errors, wrong stats and simply missing information. Worst of all, battle values (total point costs) were introduced but applied nowhere in the entire material, nothing! Now if you wish to include any kind of balance for plays or introduce a concept for advancement and challenges, you need battle values.
This is one of the strong points that you will find with the new release. The streamlined creation of forces takes center stage this time and is supported throughout the entire rulesbook:
- The combatant calculator lets you create a playable combatant, unit or vehicle plus it's value
- There are predefined summoning charts to allow quick summoning of entities plus their values. No math necessary in game unless you wish to create the summoned creature yourself.
- More than 80 mercenaries all with stats and values in the Campaign Rules, so you can harvest experience points from them ;-)
- 14 predefined archetype heroes (one for each profession), also complete with stats and battle values.
Now we do have these really cool miniatures that we want to call heroes. Those that stand out from the regular crop. 1st edition didn't give any further details on what really sets heroes apart from other combatants. This is where the new edition also plays a major strength. You can now assign a profession to a regular combatant to create a hero. A profession usually has two benefits and a penalty. Most importantly, each profession consists of four skills that sort of identify strong points of a miniature and the character it depicts. A fighter for example has "1-Handed Weapons", "Blocking", "Polearms" and the "Fighter Specials". These four skills each consist of four passive and four active ranks. The more ranks you add to the fighter, the better he gets and the more funny stuff he can do outside the regular rules. This goes on for all 14 professions we included in the game. If that isn't enough, you can remix them to create new professions that resemble your style of play. Over all, there are 26 skills to choose from.
When I said "add to the fighter", I am referring to a simple experience system. Now that we have Total Point Costs (battle values) for each entity on the table, we can start counting our successes by adding the TPC of slain opponents. This is especially nice when playing any kind of campaign game, be it competitive or an adventure path. After an encounter all experience is distributed between one player's combatants. A fraction is turned into development points (the calculator does that for you). Spend it all or save it for later. It is a level-less system that lets you gradually improve any combatant of the game.
I know there are countless systems out there and there is no time to get into all of them. So in order to make it easier and quicker to decide if Bladestorm is something you might like, we opted to make all material except the rulesbook free items. Together with the Quick-Start Rules, the calculator and the templates you can already setup encounters. The 14 archetype heroes can also be played out-of-the-box.
If you check it out and have any questions, I am looking forward to help out.
Best wishes
Sebastian
MX Bladestorm Dev
bladestorm.mx
