Mordheim

Everything About Fiction You Never Wanted to Know.

Mordheim is a fantasy boardgame made by Games Workshop, creators of Warhammer Fantasy Battle and Warhammer 40,000.

Being an example of what are known as "warband games", boardgames that occupy a small junction point between a Role-Playing Game and a wargame, Mordheim‍'‍s ruleset hearkens back to the much more complex rules of earlier editions of Warhammer. It can be seen as a Fantasy Counterpart to Necromunda.

Set several centuries before the "present day" of Warhammer, it revolves around a city called Mordheim, once the jewel of The Empire, now flattened after being crushed under a meteorite of wrydstone. This magical substance can, among other things, turn lead into gold, and so the ruins now crawl with adventurous treasure seekers hoping to make it rich. However, wyrdstone also causes rampant mutation and corruption, and so the ruins are crawling with monsters, maniacs and mutants.

Tropes used in Mordheim include:
  • After the End: Well, technically. Mordheim has been utterly destroyed -- the rest of the world is fine. For a given value of "fine".
  • Badass: Anyone who survives more than one visit to Mordheim is going to become this soon enough.
  • Black Humor: This is a Games Workshop game -- naturally, it's full of it.
  • Black Magic: The magic used by the Chaos Cult, Beastmen and Skaven, of course, but the Witch Hunters consider all magic "black".
    • So? The Witch Hunters are right. What's your point?
      • Teclis of Ulthuan wants a word with you...
  • Everything Trying to Kill You: There are tables for environmental effects that include the earth underfoot trying to swallow you, shadows coming to life and trying murder you, and spontaneous rains of fish.
  • Green Rocks: Wyrdstone... better known elsewhere in the Warhammer setting as "warpstone".
  • Religion Is Magic: The Sisters of Sigmar have mystical powers as a result of their devotion to Sigmar. They even managed to use their prayers to shield their monastery when the comet hit.
  • Retcon: In the 6th Chaos Warriors sourcebook for Warhammer, The Shadowlord was explained to be Be'lakor, the Damned First Daemon Prince of Chaos Undivided, having possessed the Chaos Warrior who should have been the Chosen of Chaos for that generation, in an effort to cheat his destiny.
  • Rodents of Unusual Size: The Skaven.