Mordheim

What is Mordheim

Mordheim is a warband skirmish game Games Workshop released in 1999. It’s set in the Warhammer world, in the ruins of Mordheim, a city destroyed by a comet. Warbands of mercenaries, cultists, witch hunters, Skaven, and worse fight through the ruins for wyrdstone, the shards of the comet, and the money it brings.

The rulebook credits it to Tuomas Pirinen, with Rick Priestley and Alessio Cavatore. The warbands you know it for, like the Sisters of Sigmar, the Witch Hunters, and the Clan Eshin Skaven, were there from the start. Plenty of stranger ones came later through Town Cryer, the game’s magazine.

Games Workshop stopped supporting its Specialist Games in 2013, and Mordheim went out of print. It never went away, though. The rules have been free for years, and there’s a big community still playing, fixing, and adding to it. As of this writing, Games Workshop has announced no return.

How it plays

Warhammer, but personal. It’s built on Warhammer’s rules without the ranks and unit break tests, and adds rules for wounded warriors, climbing, and parrying.
Four phases a turn: recovery, movement, shooting, and hand-to-hand combat.
Vertical fights. Models climb the ruins, jump down up to 6”, and leap gaps up to 3”.
Heroes and henchmen. Your warband is a leader and up to five heroes, plus groups of henchmen who gain experience together.
Rout tests. Once a quarter of your warband is out of action, you roll to see if they run.
The campaign is the game. Between battles you roll serious injuries, spend experience, sell wyrdstone, and hire more fighters.

You start with 500 gold crowns and at least three warriors, one of them a leader. Most warbands top out at 15 models. The table is about 4 × 4 ft, dressed with as many ruins as you can fit, and all you need is d6s.

Officially it asks for Citadel models. In practice people build their warbands from anything.

How to start

Download the rules. Games Workshop’s free Living Rulebook, in three parts (rules, warbands, and campaigns), is hosted on Broheim. Broheim also has an editable version with the errata applied, and the Town Cryer archive.
Or read it online. The New Mordheimer has the rules as web pages.
Build a warband. Pick one, spend your 500 crowns, and kitbash it out of whatever fits.
Build ruins. Mordheim wants a crowded, tall table.
Find a campaign. It’s best with three or more players over a series of games.

The community projects

Broheim: the long-running home of the rules, the Town Cryer archive, and the community-approved warbands.
The New Mordheimer: the rules and warbands as a website. It’s unofficial.
Border Town Burning: a free, unofficial supplement written by Christian Templin and Stuart Cresswell.
Mordheim Community Edition: a community revision of the rules.

There’s also a video game, Mordheim: City of the Damned, by Rogue Factor, on Steam, Xbox, and PlayStation.