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Justin N
United States
Seattle
Washington
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Here's a little project I've been thinking about/working on for a while, that I thought readers of this forum might be interested in.
I like to tinker with games, both mechanically and physically. I like me a good dungeon crawl, and on several levels, Mutant Chronicles: Siege of the Citadel is among the best, rules-wise. It plays quickly with a minimum of bookkeeping, it works very well as a competitive/cooperative game, giving the various teams reasons to work both together and against each other. The bad guy player changes every game, making sure no one player gets 'stuck' in the role, and since he still earns points for his team it gives him an incentive to not pull his punches.
On the other hand, there's the theme. The MC universe always seemed like a poor-man's Warhammer 40K, and is, to me, unappealing. Also, the game was released 20 years ago, and while pretty fancy for the time, it looks kind of garish and dated now.
I've been a fan of Rackham's Confrontation universe pretty much since I was first exposed to it. Amazing artists and graphic designers working over there. I bought Hybrid and the Nemesis expansion pretty much as soon as I heard about them. Weird, badly translated and organized rules, but man, what a neat setting and beautiful figures. I also noticed at the time that the boards for Hybrid were physically identical in size and grid-size to the MC boards. What can I say? It's the kind of thing I notice.
Fast forward six (eight?) years. I've bought a ton of the Confrontation figures for Hybrid. All the relevant Cry Havok! magazines, the Cadwallon RPG and Gaming tiles, the Cadwallon: City of Thieves boardgame and painted figures (the game really isn't that good.  ). I really like the universe, as implausible as it is, and the art and graphic design remains top-notch.
Rackham, however, is no more, having gone into bankruptcy back in 2010. This, however turned out to be a neat resource. The website www.miniaturemarket.com bought up all the remaining stock of their pre-painted plastic miniatures and are selling them at rock-bottom prices. I bought up a bunch, ostensibly to play Hybrid, since not really being much of a painter I never got around to doing most of mine. How could I resist? Which made me start to think about other uses for the miniatures. Could I do a (to use computer-gaming speak) Total Conversion, to bring Mutant Chronicles into the Confrontation Universe, up to the standards of Rackham itself?
To get to the point of this, the answer is an unequivocal 'Yes'. Using art assets, background material and text copied and compiled from my store of their products, I've reproduced 'Mutant Chronicles: Siege at the Citadel' as 'Cadwallon: The Free Leagues'. The game rules, as written, are unchanged. I re-worded a few things, and reorganized them, mostly for clarity, and for future upgrade potential (more on this in a bit). I used Universal Head's rules summary as a guide. The boards for this base release are the aforementioned boards from the Hybrid boardgame. Unfortunately, while the same size, they did take extensive re-jiggering to get them in the same shape (walls, etc.) as the original MC boards. Which, of course almost defeats the purpose of using them altogether (since I had to reprint and remount them), but hey, whatever. 
What do I mean by 'first release' and 'upgrade potential'? Well, like I said, this version has everything from MC:SotC, pretty much unchanged. It has the heroes from the Free City of Cadwallon exploring a Dirz laboratory underneath the city. The enemies in it are all designed to be pulled from Rackham's line of pre-painted plastic miniatures,Army of the Scorpion, since that's what the boards of the Hybrid game depicted. I feel pretty confident that what I produced was pretty faithful to the source material, even if not completely slavish. That said, the scenarios and mechanics of the game are nearly exact replicas of the SotC game. What about the future?
Well, when buying up all the old Rackham stock, I kinda went hog-wild. The prospect of picking up reasonably well-painted miniatures at absurdly cheap prices was too much to pass up, and looking for the few figures that were sold out put me in contact with some people unloading their other armies for cheap. At this point, if I was playing Confrontation: The Age of the Rag'Narok I could field *huge* armies for the Lion, Ram and Scorpion factions. That combined with the aforementioned Cadwallon Reversible Gaming Tiles and knowledge of the lore that I have makes me want to expand the game into a new campaign using those factions. Have the Free Leagues fighting the forces of Acheron under the city, or to the countering the ambassadors and embassies of the Lion in the streets. Could be some neat stuff in there.
At this point, I'd estimate I'm about 80% done. I have a few more of the cards to finish/translate. After doing test prints, I realized that I'd like to re-do a few of the board tiles (the first few I did- I hadn't really established my method yet, and they look notably worse than the others). I have to finish the layout of the initial campaign/scenario book (Assault on Lab SO-58, the Dirz lab buried beneath the Free City). In the next few days, I'll be chronicling that, putting the files up for download, and starting work on the second campaign pack (completely new, using the Cadwallon Reversible Gaming Tiles).
I know that all this is probably of limited use to really anyone out there but me, but hey. Why not show off a bit?
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