Tag Archives: Sellswords & Spellslingers

Fantasy

Adventuring in a dungeon in Sellswords & Spellslingers

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Sellswords & Spellslingers is a fantastic co-op fantasy skirmish game, but it does have one small challenge – it works well for games that take place outside or in large areas, but not so well for a classic dungeon crawl, where bits of the dungeon are revealed as the players explore. So I thought I would set out to design some basic rules for this.

What’s the challenge?

Sellswords biggest challenge comes with how it spawns the foe – continuously and in great volume. This means that if players are in a small space, that is going to get really deadly, really quickly.

Creating a dungeon that gets discovered as you go

Sellwords usually works where you lay the whole board out in the beginning, so I had to create a way to have the dungeon, some foes and a few lost adventurers show up. I used a standard deck of cards and split it up – you’ll see the cards in the shots below. We tried two different versions – the first with 10 terrain pieces + 10 foe cards and then a second version with 6 of each. The second worked much better

So how does it play?

Just as deadly as regular Sellswords. Our second game we took 7 PCs into in, found 2 lost adventurers and still finished the game with nobody alive.

It began quite well. Up until the photo below, we had killed most of the skeletons that had popped up, we’d recovered the lost friendly Goblin (metal figure furthest up the picture) and we’d discovered another lost adventurer (a friendly gnoll), but we has Out of Action behind a pillar in a far room.

Beginning of the game
Near the beginning, as we have got out of the initial corridor and are headed into the linked rooms on the upper left

And then it all started to go downhill. One little group of skeletons – one horde and one ambush, did for 3 characters – two dead outright.

Middle of the game
Right when it all started to go wrong. Sean’s witch leader is down, his archer already dead and my mousling archer about to go down.

After the massive death in the upper left room, death was soon to follow us into the next rooms. Quickly enough my first mousling archer and one of Brian’s were downed. All that remained were two. We did discover the NPC merchant, but he only watched as the skeletons slaughtered us.

And then there were two – Brian’s witch finder and my last mousling – Robin the Good.

And a few turns later, it was all over. Brian’s witch finder was able to revive the friendly Gnoll – Fur Face – but he quickly fell to an ambushing skeleton.

All down, just a short distance from the end.

What’s Next?

Not sure, I’ve got some rules, but I also know that the author Sellswords & Spellslingers has been working on some dungeon crawling, so likely going to wait for that.

As for my hell terrain, it will soon be much more colourful, but that’s a post for another time.

Science Fiction, Terrain

Where does it go? Painted board edges for Sellswords (and other games)

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Sellswords & Spellslingers, like a lot of similar games, often has bad guys (foes in Sellsword parlance) appear at random locations or randomly along the board edge. This process can slow down the game, so I’ve been dreaming up ways to speed it up for a while now. Given I own a 3D printer, I decided to do some designing FreeCAD to create some board edges for Sellswords, Warcry and the upcoming scifi Sellswords variant I’m working on.

Screenshot of the edges in FreeCAD

As I knew I was designing these once, I took some short cuts with my FreeCAD and just bodged it together. The base is a pair of 3″ Openlock templates, with Oxanium font and some ticks extruded onto them. Once printed and with the border corners designed and printed, I got a finished product, numbers from 1 to 35, as a Sellswords board is usually 36″x36″.

Printed but unpainted board edges and corner piece, with an empty 6″x6″ tile

And that is how they sat for many months with little action. I had a convention (BottosCon 2022) in November, so I spent a bunch of time painting up buildings but didn’t get to the edges. So they were black for that first con. Only after the con did I get a base coat of rust on them.

The rust is mostly Liquitex Burnt Sienna Acrylic, with some Liquitex Raw Sienna and Red Oxide, all sponged on to provide texture.

Which brings us to this week, where I finally got the paint job finished. I gloss coated the edges, then put down Vallejo chipping medium with an airbrush. After that was dry, I added blues – mostly Reaper’s True Blue, but also some Sky Blue and Brilliant Blue for accents – all by airbrush

All the many colours of blue!

After the blues were down, I chipped them using a tooth brush, then hand painted on some a cheap craft titanium white and rechipped them. The white nicely toned down as the chipping medium + water means the paint runs a bit.

Just before I finished, I also added some 18 to 21 edges, as we also play Warcry, which has the very strange board size of 30″ by 22″.

Where can you find the files?

I haven’t uploaded them anywhere yet, but will get them on Thingiverse shortly!

Fantasy

Necromancer necro-d, a Sellswords & Spellslingers adventure

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We’ve been playing a fair amount of Sellswords and Spellslingers, a fairly light coop fantasy skirmish game. I picked it up on a lark, as I wanted something different it looked fun. Years ago Brian and I played a fair amount of Song of Blades & Heroes by the same author, which is a competitive, fast-play fantasy skirmish ruleset. You can read about one of our games many years ago here:

And Then the Golem Threw Another Stone…

We recently we played through the Necromancer in the Tower scenario, something we’ve tried and failed before. Be warned, SS&SS can be a brutal game and losing your entire team is not unknown.

This scenario is pretty simple – fight your way through to the necromancer in the tower, kill them and then fight your way out. Like all SS&SS games, the game begins with a few foes scattered throughout the map, some deployed as hordes and some individually. To makes things interesting, I pulled out some skeletal dinosaurs I found a few years ago and meant to turn into museum exhibits for pulp but never did.

Start of our Sellswords game
Opening of the game, with the tower in the middle

The game opened with the three dinosaurs nicely split across the board and us on the road into the tower. Early turns had us pick off the straggler skeletons and make good progress towards the tower. It looked to be going swimmingly, save for Brian rolling a 1 with his wizard, putting him out of magic. Which is where things go wrong.

We run a custom event deck, one that takes a few of the monster spawning cards and adds a few new monster moving cards. One of which is Target on your Back. It causes the nearest non-Minion foe to target that PC to the exclusivity of anybody else.

Custom event cards for Sellsword
Some of our custom event cards, including the Target on Your Back card

This card has caused chaos in previous games – a bear ran across the table, the PC it was attacking ran off the table, so it promptly killed two other PCs in revenge. In this game, it was no different. In two turns, the ceratops charged pretty much all the way across the map, attacking my main character, the wizard Green Hat. Who promptly went down, followed by my bruiser fighter, Mohawk. And then one of Brian’s figures. Here is where the necromancer’s ability to save their undead came in – the ceratops saved 3 different hits that would have killed it, each by a figure that later died by its horn.

Final battle with the skeletal ceratops
Hordes of skeletons attacking Sean, a skunk keeping Brian at bay and the skeletal ceratops having taken down 2 out of my 3 PCs

At this tense moment, nobody could really help me, as Sean was battling 12 skeletons in and around the tower, a merging of about 4 hordes of them, some in the tower, some outside. And Brian’s PCs were pinned by the skunk, a wandering monster that while it can’t harm directly, can you make you smell real good.

Thankfully a few targeted ranged attacks took out the necromancer and with it, most of the skeletons evaporated. And then the ceratops finally went down, but not before doing a lot of damage.

All in all, a fun game and while lethal, we actually managed to succeed, unlike a decent number of our games.

Game Details

We were running 80 XP parties, with Sean and Brian each having four figures to my 3. Each of us had a spellcaster and a ranged figure.

Stats for the Dinosaurs

All the dinosaurs were run with the following:

DL 14 HP 4 DMG 2

All had Bony Undead as per the Skeletal Warrior card – which makes them harder to hit by arrows and easier by crushing weapons (which apparently none of us had)

  • Brachiosaurus
    • Tail Sweep – everybody with 1″ takes DL 12 attack or falls prone
    • Trample – everybody in path of moving is attacked
  • Centrosaurus
    • Gore – when charging, DL is 16 (as per Greater Minotaur)
  • Hadrosaur
    • Trample as per above

The board

The board was pretty simple. The mat itself is a custom SS&SS mat I have been working on for a while now and will write up soon. The necromancer’s tower is a 3D print of the Abandoned Lighthouse by escaroth on Thingiverse, while the trees are from Vegetation B by terrain4print. The bushes are new, adapted from Luke @ Geek Gaming Scenics. Will write those up too soon.