Heroes of Might & Magic is one of those long standing game-series I spent a lot of my time experiencing from the sidelines growing up, either watching my dad take a crack at a few games or seeing it up on the shelves of the shop where I rented an age-inappropriate game every week. (Love you dad, you rock, but I probably shouldn’t have been playing The Punisher game at age 9.)
My only interaction with the series is the frankly weird but equally wonderful Dark Messiah of Might & Magic which was on the Source engine. I have hours in that game kicking orcs and goblins into precariously placed spike-walls. It was an awesome game and a real foundation for what Arkane would go on to do in the future.
I’ve never been a big RTS guy despite playing so many growing up. I don’t have the mental flexibility to leap around the mini-map queuing troop movements while managing my economy at home base. It nauseates me. I’ve never shook the fantasy though, there’s something special about the idea of building an army from the bottom-up, unit by unit, and then sending it forward to clash against another.
It shouldn’t be a surprise. Goonhammer is a website dedicated to people who enjoy that fantasy, really.
Heroes of Might & Magic is the latest offering in Modiphius’ 2D20 TTRPG line-up. If you aren’t familiar with the 2D20 system, I’ll give a quick rundown but it isn’t the main focus of these impressions.
2D20 is a simple system of roll-under the target number and earn the required number of successes. It utilises a narrative meta-currency system for both the players and the gamemaster to spend to create effects. In Heroes of Might and Magic, players use Morale to improve their chance of success or obtain a narrative benefit. On the flip-side, the GM influences play by using Threat to increase the difficulty of rolls and add additional complications to scenes.
What made the quickstart for Heroes of Might and Magic strike me in a particular way wasn’t the system (but that is part of it) so much as it was the core premise. It wants to capture that fantasy of growing and marching your army without sacrificing the personal ‘your guy’ element of it.
You have this interesting system of distinct, interlocking phases that try to seamlessly zoom in and out on different scopes of the adventure. You prepare your army and party through appropriate busy-work, like sending scouts, sorting logistics, and giving grandiose speeches before you set out to tackle something out in the world, whatever that may be.
Or you could even branch out from the town yourself as a party from there, deciding from the reports that this is a task best settled personally. There’s a lot of play with it, and the quickstart hints that you can be fluid with it. It’s perfectly plausible you might, in the middle of an army battle, need to undertake a heroic challenge against the enemy general and zoom in on that instead of using the army mechanics to solve it, or call in the cavalry when an adventure goes awry and escalates beyond what the party can handle on their own.
It’s charming and I haven’t played a game that’s attempted to take on a similar concept before. It scratches an itch that games that focus solely on a nomadic band of heroes never quite do. I know a lot of people enjoy the inherent freedom in playing a bunch of powerful vagabonds but there’s something really engaging about playing characters with roots that they can’t just dig up easily. Having a narrative anchor like that just provides so much opportunity for engaging and memorable roleplay.
It definitely stands out against other TTRPGs for that element alone, but it only gets better if you’re a fan of Might and Magic. I can’t claim I am, I’m just not familiar enough with the franchise, but everything in the book feels like it came from a fan of the series with the attention and care to detail you would expect. Units are taken straight out of the game and provided to you as options for your army, and each nation and lineage is written to entice you to dive into the lore and make yourself part of it even if you aren’t familiar with it. If you’re coming in with zero knowledge you don’t necessarily feel like you’re diving into too much, and that’s a good thing. You don’t want wiki-level paragraphs to be your barrier to enjoying something.
Most importantly, this book presents an easy to follow adventure path that gives you a taste of all these systems in action. It gives a solid impression of what play feels like with the system, and provides ideas and options to GMs when player agency inevitably strays from the page. Better than that, it encourages GMs to embrace the improvisational nature of roleplay and attempt something not written down at all. It’s good advice. You’ll only ever get better at something by doing it, and that applies to improvisation as much as it does anything else.
The most important question out of all of this, though, is: Who is this game for?
First and foremost, it’s for someone who already loves Might and Magic and also plays tabletop games. .If you grew up playing Might and Magic and took that love into fantasy roleplaying, then this game is worth checking out, no doubt. If you’re totally new to TTRPGs, this might be a good entry point for you too but so long as you go in with the expectation it’s not necessarily trying to emulate the games one-to-one.
Secondly, and I think more importantly, this system is perfect for D&D players who are feeling a little bored by the standard murder-hobo adventure style of play D&D encourages, and want to transition to a system that properly represents playing characters of status and command.
There is a lot of fun to be had roleplaying the politics and intricacies of leading a fighting force in addition to going on adventures as you would in any game. There is great roleplay to be dragged out of nurturing a township or a war-campaign together, arguing opposing ethics, enacting schemes and consequences for all that. You can interact with these elements lightly and have all the fun of commanding an army forwards and back, or dig really deep into the minutiae. It’s an idea with a low floor and high ceiling of engagement, and that’s always a good thing to have.
The Quickstart for Heroes of Might and Magic is available here and the Kickstarter is live here.
It’s worth checking out, and if you have a group that’s looking for a break, run through the adventure and see if it’s something you vibe with.
Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com. Want articles like this linked in your inbox every Monday morning? Sign up for our newsletter. And don’t forget that you can support us on Patreon for backer rewards like early video content, Administratum access, an ad-free experience on our website and more.
