Welcome back to the next installment of Custom Rules on Spent Glory!

A recent White Dwarf introduced a Skirmish mode for Warhammer Underworlds, wherein players select a Warband and Warscroll, omit the use of cards, and score glory off Bounty from slaying fighters as well as holding Treasure tokens as the end of an action phase. I suggested a very similar thing called “Kidhammer” for teaching younger players and non-gamer friends which certainly can be a lot of fun and a fast, casual pick-up game mode. Unfortunately, the White Dwarf also included special rules for fighters holding Treasure tokens 1-5 which may not provide the tactical depth players hoped for and can be potentially imbalanced if you remember to use them at all. Several in the Underworlds community received this game mode with middling to poor reviews.

Now, there’s no reason not to try and enjoy the White Dwarf Skirmish mode, and it may be more fun than people think at first glance, but I fear it may not draw in many skirmish game players. Ideally, we can cook something up that will appeal to the Warcry fans who own Underworlds models, or the AoS/40K people who could potentially be drawn in.

I see a huge opportunity for cross-pollination and community outreach with a modified Warscroll skirmish. Once component of standard Underworlds that scares people (at least ‘regular’ Warhammer players) away from WHU are the cards. The other thing is that the game has ‘no Listbuilding’. Multiple people over the years have expressed hesitation to get into WHU because they don’t like that you can’t customize which fighters you bring. However confusing it might seem to have somebody that wants to build a models list with points but not to have to build a card list, I have met several in my time. They exist. And I think I have come up with just the game mode to draw them in.

What if, instead of the silly ‘this Treasure Token gives you a wild rule you’ll never remember’ one pager from White Dwarf, we instead make a unique ‘no cards’ spin? One that that didn’t rely on arbitrary and confusing Mortis Lens-style effects for being on a token, and that also includes the Listbuilding the Kill team/AoS/40K fans so crave? Something to throw our Warcry friends a bone since they are languishing with no content?

Spent Glory would like to foolishly introduce Underworlds Skirmish: Grand Alliance Listbuilder Mode.

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Grand Alliance Listbuilder Rules

The rules are exactly as presented in the Embergard rulebook, with the exception of three major changes:

1) Do not select cards for either the Objective or Power deck, as this will not be played using wither the Rivals or Nemesis Rules, but instead a no-cards format.

2) Glory points will be acquired through only two means. Bounty for slain fighters, as per the rulebook, and additionally each player will earn one Glory point for each Treasure Token they control in an End Phase. The maximum score a player can accrue across three rounds is thus 23 Glory, should they slay every enemy fighter and control all five Treasures for all three rounds.

3) Do not follow the rules for ‘Choosing your Warband’. Instead:

Choose a Grand Alliance (Order, Chaos, Death, Destruction).

Select fighters from that Grand Alliance to comprise your Warband.

• No more than 1 fighter in your warband can have the Leader (crown) runemark.
• Your warband’s fighters total Bounty characteristics must equal exactly 7.
• You may select no more than 7 fighters per warband.
• You must select a minimum of 3 fighters per warband.

4) From the Grand Alliance you have selected, choose one ‘Generic Warscroll’ for use in your game. Grand Alliance Warscrolls can be found here.

5) Players may, if they choose, modify their Warscrolls depending on the fighters they have selected in the previous step.

For each fighter you have selected, you may choose up to one segment of their original warband’s warscroll per Bounty characteristic to use in your game (i.e. a one-Bounty fighter allows for one substitution, a two-Bounty fighter up to two, etc). This segment will replace the comparable segment of your Grand Alliance warscroll.

You may change any one warscroll section per fighter bounty chosen, but you must exchange ‘like for like’. You can replace the inspiration condition with another inspiration condition, a ‘grey sidebar ability’ with a ‘grey sidebar ability’, and a ‘white main box’ ability with a ‘white main box ability’.

For example: A player has selected Farasa Twice-Risen for their GA: Order warband. Their base warscroll they have chosen is Order: Crusaders. They have chosen to erase the ability Zealous Resolve from the Crusaders Warscroll, and have replaced it with The Raptors of Sigmar from the Emberwatch warscroll. They can do this because they have Farasa, an Emberwatch fighter, as a member of their Grand alliance Warband. They may also change a second ability on the Crusaders Warscroll, such as Staunch Defender to a second one from the Emberwatch warscroll, such as Deadly Sentries, since Farasa is a 2 Bounty fighter.

If they also wanted to change the inspiration condition to that of the Emberwatch Warscroll, or a third ability from the same, they would need a second fighter from that warband. If they wanted an ability from a different Warscroll, such as from Myari’s Purifiers, they would need to select at least one fighter from that warband.

You may choose not to replace a Warscroll component for a given fighter if it suits you. You may choose not to replace the full bounty characteristic’s worth of abilities for a given fighter (i.e. you can choose to replace two or fewer abilities for a fighter with 3 bounty).

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Theory Behind the Game Design

In the old Grand Avatars format from first edition you had little incentive to choose certain fighters beyond their base stats and how ‘well costed’ they were. In Listbuilder games such as Age of Sigmar, a huge consideration players talk about is whether or not something is ‘worth their points’. Our ‘point’ system here is Bounty, and surely not all fighters with a given Bounty characteristic are equal from a Combat perspective. However, if you can start to bring in Warband-wide rules for use from multiple teams, you have meaningful choices beyond “average damage per activation” or “total number of wounds” that an Underworlds listbuilder might devolve into (and absolutely did, in previous iterations).

The ability to substitute Warscroll abilities gives you reasons beyond stat block optimization to pick somebody, and allows for truly ‘custom’ Warband/Warscroll generation for our Listbuilding expercise. But if you want more cool things from a Warscroll you’ll need to pick more fighters/bounty from that team.

Why did I choose to take a number of warscroll items per Bounty characteristic instead of one per fighter? Taking a zero bounty Venomites to get Savage Mauling is maybe too good. Taking a three bounty leader but only getting one of their cool things might be not good enough. But three things for a single fighter might be too good too, and we will have to see after some test games. It also opens up a few more niche warbands though – it could be too restrictive to take a fighter from Khagra’s Ravagers, for example, since they need the actual act of desecrating to use any of their abilities. So you’d need two fighters to get one functional ability, and that’s half your warband right there. Changing the number of abilities to a per-Bounty rather than a per-fighter basis can open up more options for customization.

Please Provide Feedback and Suggestions

I’d like to invite feedback on this idea – it’s by no means perfect.

One change I’m toying with is whether we need to limit to ‘like for like’? It could be restrictive for warbands that don’t have a grey box or GA Warscrolls that don’t have a normal number of white box items, for example. GA: Death’s Dark Majesty has effectively one giant white box and it sucks, but this means you could only bring in one other white box item in its place.

Some items might be super strong in the wrong hands. Imagine Squort giving you access to ‘you can only take 2 damage when uninspired’, and then taking The Gorehulk and Dromm to round out your 7 Glory. Hopefully people wouldn’t go so crazy in a casual funsies game mode, but if we’re using this to lure in 40K people…

Another sticking point is what do you do for special runemark things? Hexbane’s Agents Azyrite runemark limits their abilities’ transferability to other warbands. Blackpowder’s need for swag without the swag runemark on weapon abilities for other Destruction fighters means he can’t enjoy this mode as much. I don’t have a great answer for this kind of issue right now.

The last thing, which could take some considerable work, is ‘re-pointing’ fighters for this format. Since regular underworlds requires 7 bounty per warband, some fighters have some balance issues where they have ‘a wrong bounty’ – and that could spill over here. Some leaders are forced into being 3 bounty in their warbands (Zikkit and Vasillac come to mind) but reasonably should be 2 bounty. Some fighters are ‘unexplainably low’ bounty (Alathyrr, Grib and Herax are both 1, but are solid fighters) and maybe should be bumped up for this format. It would take a big, living list to ‘adjust bounty’ for the listbuilder format, but might be a potential balancing tool if this format gains popularity and people want to houserule it to be more competitive.

I would love to bring this mode into a fuller, more complete product, and I plan to continually update this document as we fine tune the game mode as a community. Please let me know your comments, concerns, suggestions, and tweaks by emailing SpentGlory@gmail.com