So, Feast of Blades is coming up.
For those who don't know, I designed the missions for the qualifiers, and I'm doing the main event as well.
"Qualifiers?", some of you may be saying. Well, yes. Feast held qualifying events at 32 stores this year across several states, and the 1st and 2nd place finishers from each store earned themselves a place in the Feast Invitational. 64 players, straight win/loss format, for HONOR.
Also prizes.
In addition, there's an open tournament available to everyone. This is in the traditional Battle Points format, as we have no idea what final attendance number will be, just that there will be a lot of players. The open runs parallel to the invitational, and uses the same missions, modified to use battle points. My understanding is that is too has sweet, sweet prizes. Also prestige.
There's also Warmachine and Malifaux, if that's your thing, but I'm not involved in those areas so I don't know too much about them.
So, after I bitched about last years missions, I was contacted by Chandler, the TO, who asked me what I would of done. Or would do. Would I do the missions? It was really cool, and one of the major reasons I'm excited about the event: everyone involved is really keyed in and open to criticism. People are working very hard to make this event the best it can be. You should really check out the site, there's lots of cool things I'm not even covering here.
So, for the missions, I had a tough task. The goal was to design 7 balanced, unique missions. In other words, missions that don't cater to any particular army or build. These were all hand-crafted by me, images, text, etc. are all from my own hand, in a program that lacks spell check for some reason. It was a ton of work and now I put them here for you all to rip into. I'm a big boy, I can take it.
We took a cue from NOVA and had primary/secondary/tertiary win conditions with VP final tiebreaker. However, instead of just rotating the basic three missions of objectives, KP, table quarters, we decided to go with unique primary objectives. The secondary are still the classic missions, but all the primaries do their own thing.
I will be going over each mission individually, explaining the massive playtesting and design decisions that went into it. For now, here they all are, in more-or-less final form, with a brief explanation of what they are.
If you run a blog and want to talk about these, let me know in the comments! I would love to read what anyone has to say about them, feedback is always appreciated.
EDIT: Thank you for the corrections, people. I have also switched the order of missions 4-5, to avoid having back-to-back similar missions. Also, if you comment, even just to say I suck, I will thumbs up you!
Mission 1
: We only have a single W/L bracket for 6 rounds, but we REALLY wanted a way to have 7 missions total. Enter the seeding mission. It has a different format than the others, allowing players to go after any NOVA-style objective. We can use the score from this to get better brackets, which means more exciting final rounds and better vetting into individual brackets early on.Mission 2: Objectives of differing value, with the
only placed objectives worth the smallest amount of points. Note that you don't have to cross the centerline to win, defensive and offensive armies should have an pretty roughly even chance, which is what was found in playtesting.
Mission 3: Table quarters classic. Not too much you can do creative in table quarters, except make them diagonal and confuse everyone during the qualifiers. (Whoops =P)M
ission 4: Dusk Raiders, also known as the one I love and no one else gives a shit about. Modified from the qualifiers, it's now spearhead! Woooo!
Mission 5: KP, with a secondary objectives. So if you can't win by murder, at least try to keep it close and do what you're good at.
Mission 6: So, those objectives are pretty close to each other, 12" from friendly to enemy. It's kind of a game of choose-the-flank and press.
Mission 7: the finale. (sp?) The goal was to make an exciting game to cap off the series. Note that even though there's only one objective, vehicles can't contest. So that's fun.I will be going into depth on each mission in individual posts. These posts will also have the battle points version of each mission, and an explanation for why they are scored that way. For now, let the love and (I'm sure) hate fly! I'd love to hear from you all.
