Frostgrave: Wildwoods

Osprey Games has just released Wildwoods, my latest supplement for Frostgrave. The release is accompanied by a few new figures from North Star Military Figures, including some awesome-looking soldiers.

By my count, Wildwoods is the twelfth official supplement for Frostgrave (not including Grave Mutations or any of the Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago books). It’s an incredible milestone for any game to reach a dozen supplements, especially a game that isn’t owned by a big company.

But what is Wildwoods and why is it special? In many ways, the book is my attempt to write a Wilderness Survival Guide for Frostgrave. It is a manual for playing games set outside of the Frozen City in the forests, mountains, bogs, and ice-plains that surround it. It replaces the magical traps and weirdness of broken Felstad for the natural dangers of avalanches, forest fires, and hypothermia. It greatly expands upon the bestiary with numerous natural creatures that live in those frozen lands (and several not-quite-natural ones as well). It gave me an excuse to bring gigantic, vicious walruses into the game!

Also included are rules for the supplies that warbands will need to survive in the harsh wilderness, including rules for cargo transports. While these transports have an important mechanical function and have their place within a game, I admit that my main desire to include them was to give players (and myself) an excuse to paint up a cool model. Transports can really be anything – a necromantic wagon pulled by undead horses, a heavily-laden woolly rhinoceros, a very large load-bearing construct… It’s only limited by the player’s imagination, and I can’t wait to see what people come up with.

A couple other notes of interest about the book:

·       The first two scenarios in the book purposely use specific terrain pieces used in scenarios in the main rulebook – the mausoleum and the stepped-pyramid. I thought if you were good enough to buy the official terrain pieces from Kromlech or have made some yourself, you deserve the excuse to use them again.

·      The book includes a few rangifer subtypes that originally appeared in Spellcaster, Issue 3. 

·       The wizard on the cover of the book has appeared before. Anyone recognize her?

·       It’s now possible to have your construct do the cooking for the warband.

·       The bestiary includes a creature that has previously only appeared in Ghost Archipelago.