The adventures of Tim the Necromancer: Dark Alchemy 1

So, after what feels like an age of prep, I finally had everything I needed to start playing Frostgrave! 

I’m starting with Dark Alchemy, the short solo campaign from the Frostgrave Folio, and set up a little board accordingly:

And thus began the adventures of Tim the Necromancer (named partly for the Monty Python character, but equally for another blogger). Not particularly strongly, to be fair, repeatedly failing to cast any spells at first, but my warband were handily plugging away with arrows and bolts to start whittling down the Alchemical Monstrosity’s health. Until it shambled towards them, at which point they decided discretion was the better part of valour and MGS style his praying that it would go away:

Tim finally managed to conjure up a zombie minion at this point, which was duly flung towards the horrible beast to lure it away from the squishy henchmen. This zombie was actually very briefly MVP, managing to win the first combat against the beast, and then hold it off for no loss of health in the next turn. 

Unfortunately, it went rapidly downhill for my zombie from there, as he was reduced to his component parts with little ceremony.

The rest of the warband continued to plunk away at the monster from a distance, reducing it to one health.

While all this was going on, Tim had made his way to one of the doors that was potentially the exit. With only a 30% chance of the first door you check being the correct one and my historically disastrous ability to roll dice, I’d sent the rest of the warband towards the second door, expecting to roll low, and then happily Leap Tim across the board to rejoin his companions and exit to safety. Obviously the one time I thought I’d roll low I did the exact opposite, meaning the rest of the gang had to bundle their way across the width of the board, past an angry monster…

Which is where I made my biggest mistake.

Figuring that as my knight and the monster had pretty much the same stats, with the exception of my knight having 12 health to the monster’s 1, I charged him into the beast to finish it off:

(You can just see Tim bravely hiding behind a wall in the top right of this picture)

Obviously, this was the time that the creature rolled a 20 in combat, knocking my knight down to a single remaining health. And at this point I realised that my knight was carrying two treasure tokens…

Not to worry, I thought, I’ll Leap my knight to safety and shoot the monster to death. On uttering these words, I rolled low enough on initiative for the first time all game to have a rat appear, but more importantly for the Alchemical Monstrosity to act before my wizard, at which point he duly smashed my knight into the ground.

The next three turns saw theee more rats spawning, but my wizard and crossbowman between them blasted them off the board as they appeared, and my Tracker snuck behind the monster to finish it off with an arrow to the face. Everyone then bundled through the exit door, dragging the knight behind them, and it was time to count XP and treasure!

My bad luck rolling initiative the last few turns did actually have a silver lining, as I was pretty much farming the rats for XP turn after turn, and my treasure tokens left me with 60 gold, a Control Construct scroll (handy if I play the Golem mini campaign), a potion of strength and a Construct Oil, plus a Grimoire with the spell Strength that I immediately learned and lowered the casting cost of. It would be handy to cast on a Knight to make a +6 fight wrecking ball, but unfortunately he has to sit out the rest of the mini campaign so I’ll be using it to try and make a Thug as tough as a Knight most likely. I’m still torn as to whether I should have spent a level to increase Tim’s Fight or Health rather than lowering the cost of Strength, but on the other hand without my Knight Strength could come in handy, and as I regularly fail to cast much easier spells, who knows…

This morning, I found something I’d missed while tidying up after the game last night:

Which does make my coffee seem a little more menacing. 

When planning the warband, I’d envisioned the crossbow spending every turn reloading then firing again, but in this scenario there was a lot more ‘getting the heck out of dodge’ than there was ‘raining down death from above’!

So what’s next? All I need to be able to play the next scenario is 5 teleportation tiles, which is very doable. But then again, I’ve also got these to be getting on with: