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When shall we three meet again? in turnip, parsnip or swede?
Just girly things like consorting with demons.
Marsh Covens: Each of your snobs is considered a Witch! Witches behave exactly the same as Snobs, with one exception. They have access to the Mundane Arts.
To avoid reprinting half the cult, I’ll just summarise, we get as many spells as we have snobs, each witch can cast a spell once and we roll 2D6 + Panic against the spells casting cost. If we succeed, the spell goes off, if we fail the witchsnob get’s a panic, and finally, if you roll any ones when targeting something with 3 or more panic tokens the witch blows up after the spell happens. This is going to put a time limit on your Witches and will severely limit how much you want to cast in headless chicken scenarios, your normal 2D6 casters are going to pop on 30.6% of their 3 panic tests.
It’s important to note, currently there are absolutely no range or line of sight restrictions on spells and they do not cost an order.
Time for what you’re all here for, how good are the spells?
We’ll cover the relics later, but it’s worth mentioning here, that while most of your snobs are going to be stuck on 2D6 for tests, you have access to a very cheap relic that lets you do 3D6 in exchange for a panic once per round.
You may cast this spell when target enemy unit initiates a melee or shooting engagement. Target unit must use the Inaccuracy or Vulnerability of the unit it’s fighting until the end of the engagement. Your Choice.
That 6 is really nice, even with no panic we’re going to be able to make it 72.22% of the time. So how good is the cheapest spell we have access too? We’ll we can only target enemies and we can choose to nerf their Inaccuracy or Vulnerability when they shoot or melee our units.
It’s tough to tell without an FAQ if CCW users still get their bonus or not, but I think they will use the exact same Inaccuracy score as the unit their attacking, not setting their inaccuracy and then getting a CCW bonus.
So for Inaccuracy, CCW brutes or bastards charging your fodder will go from 6 expected hits to 2, which is a big turn around, even if you need to protect something on a 5+ then it still goes from 6 to 4 expected hits.
The only thing I can think of using Vulnerability for is the Lump or Snail Knights, but it’s probably the best answer to the lump in the game. You just turn off it’s ability, it takes hits like normal and only has three wounds, fodder have a decent chance of killing it outright on a volley fire and anything approaching a good roll from chaff or whelps on move and shoot can wipe it in one order too.
In general, I think it’s a useful tool for making people think twice about slamming your 6+, and basically an auto win for engagements with snails and lumps. It’s niche but if it can massively skew a couple matchups it might be worth bringing.
You may cast this spell when your opponent gives an order, before any rolls to blunder. Target unit must choose to perform another order, or suffer -2 to all rolls for the rest of the round.
Now we’re cooking with Gas, we can blank charges, turn off volley fire or turn marching orders into some kind of an engagement. It’s not foolproof, there’s a few situations where you’re opponent would rather take a -2 and carry on (e.g. Bastards with BLC, charging high panic units that are fairly close, or them getting clever and taking a move shoot in volley range to bait you), but most of the time changing an order keeps them off their gameplan and gives you more space for yours.
All that said, if you give your opponent a choice you should expect them to always pick the option which is worst for you. It’s a flexible tool, but it’s not a solution to every case.
You may cast this spell when your opponent’s unit is made ready. Move target friendly Witch 18”, not within 1” of any other unit. The Witch gains D3 panic.
Good utility to keep your witches from getting picked off by chaff/whelps, and a decent way to farm panic for a couple of the big spells.
Hard to say if this is worth a slot, but if you’re going for the big 10+ cost spells it’s very nice to be able to net some extra panic on a well screened caster, but sadly it’s only really scalding sluice and Duck that helps with.
You may cast this spell whenever an opponent’s unit retreats. The target retreating unit must reroll all successful DT tests. You may cast this spell more than once per round.
Now this is pretty interesting, generally when a unit’s retreating it will have at least one panic on it from the engagement that it lost, so generally you’ll be on 58% or more for this to go through. How much scarier is rerolling successful dangerous terrain tests? Normally you had a 16.7% chance for a model to die in the mud and that’s jumped to about 30.6%, put another way if a unit of 12 fodder walks into DT normally they lose on average 2 models, now they’ll be losing 3.7 on average.
It’s a nice bump to dangerous terrain, giving us a chance gain an equivalent rule to swellings but given it takes one of of our three spells for a round it’s hard to say a slot is worth it.
Just a note rules wise, I’m also not a fan of having two separate ways of doing this mechanic, it feels a bit weird that swelling is on 1s and 2s while this is reroll successes when there’s less than a 3% difference between the rerolls and kill on 2s, and yes I understand that swelling only kills 1 model units on 1s, I just mean the rolls.
You may cast this spell when your Witch is made ready. Draw an imaginary line fro your witch to any model in the target unit. Any unit which that line intersects, excluding the target suffer D3 wounds.
Hi, it’s Barry Scoff with Cistit Bang, and I’m hear to talk to you about Cistit Bang Snob Remover, simply march and or dash your whelps into a problematic position for your opponent, and give it a spray. Bang and the Snob is gone.
This is pretty huge, straight wounds. Sure it’s only D3 and doesn’t give panic but you don’t even need to rely on the whelps, you can target any unit. You will have to mind your positioning a good bit or at least think about how much you care about friendly fire, but in the right situation this is a tonne of wounds on the table for free every round.
Now we’re starting to get up to the numbers that are hard to cast normally, but don’t worry we’ll cover a relic later that will help a lot.
You may cast this any time a unit charges or shoots.
Roll 2D6. Change the target unit’s Inaccuracy to the value of one dice, and its Vulnerability to the value of the other. This spell lasts until the start of the next round.
On the surface it’s pretty RNG, it’s not. Sure, you only get lower than a 3 on both dice a quarter of the time, but you get at least one that’s less than 3, 75% of the time. The math on this is actually extremely favourable, getting one 4 or less is going to happen 88.9% of the time, 4s is a good breakpoint, because nothing in the game hits naturally on 4s bar grogs, who have historically been a very strong unit because of this.
4s mean you go down to 3s with CCW or Volley Fire, 3s mean you’re converting 2/3rds of your attacks to hits, even on a stand and shoot or in melee without ccw 4s on their own are going to let full strength fodder hand out 6 hits on average. That’s all before we even consider beefing up our Vulnerability to win surprising trades.
I think this is broken in half, sure you’re going to roll two sixes sometimes and it’s going to suck, but you can cast this every single round, this is not a once per game ability. I expect this to feel a lot worse for your opponent than it feels for you and in a way that is pretty exceptionally unfun.
You may cast this spell when the target Witch is made ready. Pick a number. Every time the number is rolled for the rest of the round, move an objective marker 1”. You may not move the marker within 12 of any unit.
It’s pretty fun to slowly pull markers away from your opponents, but 1 inch every six rolls in a round is probably only going to be a handful of inches. Still this is good honest turnip fun and is going to make for a great story to hear about the game.
You may cast this spell when a Witch is made ready. Pick a target unit, if the unit is slain this round you gain 1 Victory point, which can be added to your total number of captured objectives, at the end of the game.
This might well be very close to an auto include. Basically turns every unit of chaff and every snob into a free objective on death, and I think the timing works out that you can slam this before you Cowboy Soup as well, to really make sure that you can take this home.
If you can reliably cast Crouton and Cowboy in the same order every round you can probably pull an extra 2-3 objectives over the course of the game that are really going to weigh the scale in your favour, to the point where your opponents only real chance to win are going to be bountiful harvest or headless chicken.
This fundamentally alters how you can play the game, it massively impacts using chaff ablatively to protect big threats and punishes the rootling factions for providing easy farmable units.
You may cast this spell when target enemy unit initiates a shooting engagement. Both units make simultaneous melee attacks against each other instead of their normal shooting attacks.
This is very funny, a nice bit of counterplay for positional shooting against your CCW units. Very difficult to pull off without some panic but high model count high panic units are the ones that are going to be most susceptible to getting shot, run into a board edge and taking a bunch of wounds.
You may cast this spell any time a unit is slain. Place a disgustingly spherical Lump unit on the board in place of the last model removed from the table.
The lump may be ordered once by each player each round.
Assuming you use the slain target’s panic then it might be a little easier to cast than it looks at first blush, but we may be required to hardcast at 12 given there’s no target clause currently.
I like the idea of a surprise lump after your last model gets wiped to crash into your opponent’s threat, but I’m not a fan of such a high casting cost for something that my opponent get’s to control too. Maybe I’d consider it if it was a once per game get a lump only you control, or if it didn’t compete with my other high cost spells.
Maybe easier meatballs makes the game devolve into an endless lump attrition match, maybe that’s not strictly a healthy thing either but at least that’s funny to play.
You may cast this spell when your Witch is made ready. Target two follower units, adding all panic tokens together for the casting cost. Both targets suffers D6 wounds (Roll for each unit).
So we can’t cast this on units without panic, casting normally we need at least 7 panic to have a better than even chance at it going off and with Wilfred we’ll need 3 panic for better than even.
This makes another very contentious pick for your Wilfred casts, handing out 2D6 wounds for no action is obviously deeply insane, but you’ll be hanging around doing nothing with your third spell until at least round 2, probably 3.
That is of course, unless you’ve been Buttering up one of your witches with D3 Panic, then simply sacrifice that slippery hag to dump some wounds on your opponent.
This is a powerful ability, but it has a real cost if you want to use it early, and is about as good as any other option if you want to do it late.
Can be cast at any time. target unit transforms into a rotting chicken coop overflowing with eggs that scream incomprehensible gibberish at passersby. The unit becomes a hovel.
Pick them up and put down a delightful little cottage. They can’t move, they can’t attack. Sure you can shoot them pretty easily but don’t even bother you’ve already successfully removed them from the game bar some shenanigans if it gets blown up.
It’s tricky to cast, you’ll need 4 panic on 3D6 before it becomes even odds, and there’s easier ways to kill things on four panic. But for the sheer flex, you’re going to want to do this to someone at least once. This is turnip, this is pure unadulterated silliness in the best kind of way. Up with this sort of thing.
Units gifted this relic may gain 1 panic token to add 1 extra dice to a single casting attempt this round.
Now you have a 74.07% chance to cast cowboy soup without any panic and a 62.5% chance for Crouton. You take this relic every time. There’s no way in hell this releases at 6 Norberts with the current spell list.
This relic may only be gifted to a Witch: At the start of the round, pick a column from the spellbook and roll a D6, you may cast that spell from the spellbook this round instead of one of your chosen spells. If you do, this unit gains a panic token.
You’ve got norberts to spare, if there’s literally anything remotely good in the neutral relics you take that instead. If it said pick it would be auto include, if it let you reroll duplicates or two and choose one then maybe we’d try it.
This relic may only be gifted to an friendly or enemy unit after deployment. The unit gifted this relic can have any number of panic tokens.
You don’t generate panic very well, 6 panic and wilfred’s 3D6 give you 74% chance to hit 15 or more. You don’t need Barry.
You will however sculpt or kit bash a barry because he’s a little soup cat, and like hell am I playing this cult without a little soup cat.
Nuts. Broken in half. Never have we seen a cult with so much built in free action economy without any unit restrictions or penalties. It doesn’t matter if your witches start blowing themselves up from turn 2 onwards, I genuinely believe that by the end of round 2 you should basically be able to force an unwinnable position for your opponent almost every game.
The good news is, I’m 90% sure this is a very workable problem.
The biggest offenders are Wilfred, Cowboy Soup and Crouton’s Direct. At least one of these needs to change, probably two. I think Wilfred can probably be spared, the witches deserve a good way to reliably cast at least one cheap spell per turn. Cowboy & Crouton however need to be balanced around the 3D6 to stop them from being deeply problematic. Luckily you can’t reliably land it as a one two punch, since you only have one Wilfred cast a game, but once there’s a little bit of panic around you can start throwing some very nasty attacks that convert to victory points.
I think if I was balancing it, I’d probably swap Cowboy Soup and Meat Sphere’s casting costs and completely redesign crouton. It just isn’t really the positional tug of war that turnip really is, and even despite that we have the killy approach to winning games already it’s called headless chicken. Maybe crouton becomes more like Yolk’d where you put a piece of Defensible Terrain on the board in that location as a new objective and it starts captured by you.
In general I think that the Witches biggest crime isn’t handing out bags of free action economy, fixing probabilities or dumping out wounds, I think it’s just not quite as thematically tight as I want, which is to be expected from playtest rules after all. Half of the spells point towards it being a tricksy technical cult that lets you bluff and gotcha people and the other half just kind of feel… also there. I appreciate the nostalgia for old warhammer fantasy weird spellcasting shenanigans but those had thematics, they shared a core narrative and mechanical space within their schools. It feels like there’s just a few too many oddball spells currently on top of some of the more busted interactions, but your opinion might differ.
They are however, extremely cool and I think that there’s a space for them to grow into a faction that wants to play some slippery shenanigans in the early game while slowly working the panic levels up, then hits hard at the end. They offer a lot of flexibility in how you want to list build and what you want to focus on. To the point where I don’t really want to suggest a list because I feel like it’s unfortunately obvious what the most optimal decisions are.
One last note, I do wish that witches blowing up was a bit more tied to failing big spells, I feel like casting something small on a high panic unit should be a little less scary.
I had tried to hack away at the original template to get the logo to show up in the top right and absolutely mangled it, let me know how you feel about the new design and if you run into any other problems on mobile, tah.
