Welcome to the fifth Malifaux Faction Focus article! Today, we’ll be talking about bandits, mercenaries, madmen, and Tyrants. It’s time to focus on the “none of the above” gang, the Outcasts.

Remember that you can also check out the accompanying video on Danger Planet, the premier source for Malifaux video content!

The Lore of the Outcasts

It’s tough to talk about the lore behind “the Outcasts” because part of what defines the group is its sheer lack of coherence. The Guild all fight beneath one banner, the Arcanists and Neverborn share uneasy alliances of convenience, and even the Rezzers stick together (if only because everyone else hates them). But what makes an Outcast an Outcast is their sheer, bloody-minded individualism.

Nonetheless, the lot of them have some things in common. For a long time, Outcast was just a catchall label for those inhabitants of Malifaux who didn’t claim any allegiance in the great struggle for power and Soulstone. Many of them were mercenaries, willing to fight for whoever paid them. Others were just so darn weird that they were driven to the fringes. They eked out a living on their own, occasionally working together out of desperation (if nothing else), but recent events have forced them to at least try some unity.

One of the most notorious Outcasts is the mercenary leader Leopold von Schill. The Freikorps, von Schill’s mercenary band, sold their swords (and guns, and flamethrowers…) to anyone who could pay. Von Schill got rich, and all manner of wealthy people had their problems handled in a discreet and professional way.

This happy arrangement ended shortly after the Burning Man went up like a torch. The new Governor-General, Franco Marlow, took a dim view of the existence of a mercenary army that rivaled the Guild. He offered to bring von Schill and his men on board, but when the Freikorps commander refused, Marlow outlawed mercenary work with a stroke of his pen. The Freikorps, having lost their livelihood overnight, decamped from Malifaux City. Von Schill had long dreamed of a place where men and women could stand free from Guild tyranny, and Marlow’s decree was the kick in the ass he needed. He took his men out into the Badlands to the site of the abandoned prospecting town Hope. There, he founded Freiholt– the first new city on Malifaux to be totally independent of the Guild.

Freiholt has attracted all manner of shady characters, and now hardened mercenaries rub elbows with rat cultists, train robbers and the occasional Gremlin pirate. It’s a dangerous place, isolated and occasionally under siege, but it’s a wealthy one, too. Everyone looking to hire troubleshooters outside of the watchful eye of the Guild knows where to go. Others have followed the Freikorps, setting up shop in a place where there aren’t too many questions and jobs all come with a “no questions asked” rider.

Some Outcasts aren’t in it for the money, though. There are all manner of secrets in Malifaux, traps from the ancient past that can snare the unwary. Sometimes people hear the Whisper and start skulking around underground stealing corpses. Sometimes the voice in their head is a bit more subtle.

The Tyrants have long groaned under their slabs. The spiritual and metaphysical wards that restrain their essence fade with time. Their bindings loose, they seep into the world like radiation or toxic gas. Two of them have worked free the mortar around their cells through centuries of patient effort and now walk, disguised, among the living. Plague and Obliteration, those ancient sorcerer-gods, have both chosen their pawns and even now move them across the world like a great chessboard. The gifts of the Tyrants set their chosen ones apart, peeling them away from the human herd. These nightmare-touched godlings are Outcasts, too, and have their own designs on Freiholt. Plague recently attacked the settlement, and only with the help of Obliteration was He turned back. Time will tell what the freed Tyrants will demand of the Outcasts, and whether any of the mercenaries and sellswords have the will to deny them.

Why Should I Play Outcasts?

Many miniature wargames have a “mercenary” faction– Dogs of War, Warmahordes’s Mercs and Minions, and so on. The Outcasts got their start there, though Second Edition firmed them up into their own thing. With the dawn of Third Edition, the day of the mercenary is over– Outcasts are a faction like any other. They still have vestiges of those early days, though. Remember how I said Arcanists were diverse? That’s nothing compared to the Outcasts. Literally anything you can imagine could show up in the Outcasts. Some crews are fully human; others are utterly monstrous. And some are a mix of both.

That diversity shows up in playstyle, too. Malifaux has long been famous for the sheer weirdness that shows up on the tabletop. Even with its rules simplified and standardized, one thing that sets the system apart is how much emergent complexity can arise out of a relatively simple ruleset. The Outcast crews exemplify this: many of them play completely differently from any other army in this (or any other) game. They can easily catch enemies by surprise, though they have a rather steep learning curve. Then again, Outcasts also have two of the most forgiving, beginner-friendly crews in the game.

Since we’re all out of Malifaux suits, Outcasts’ symbol is the rose, due to their affinity for Seal’s 1994 hit “Kiss From a Rose.”

Play Outcasts if:

• What drew you to Malifaux is the legendary weirdness and complexity of its play patterns. A lot of the cruftiest, strangest rules have gone by the wayside since first edition, but the ones that remain are concentrated in Outcasts.
• You want a wide variety of options. As perhaps befits the “catchall” faction, Outcasts have a huge range of models, both mechanically and aesthetically. You’ll end up sampling a little bit of all of Malifaux’s archetypes: steampunk, weird western, horror, wuxia mashup…
• You like to be the scrappy underdog. Insofar as the Outcasts have a unifying theme, it’s “rah rah fight the power!” Of course, you won’t be an underdog mechanically– Outcasts are a very competitive faction with a high ratio of extremely powerful Masters.

Masters

Leopold von Schill

The Big Guy himself, the Man With the Moustache, von Schill came to Malifaux shortly after the reopening of the breach. Like everyone else who flocked to the new world, he had one thought in his mind: time to get $$$paid$$$. Von Schill was a soldier Earthside, and after he mustered out he turned to mercenary work. Malifaux presented the perfect opportunity for a man of his skillset, but for one detail: von Schill and Governor-General Kitchener hated each other from their first meeting.

A career with the Guild was a nonstarter, but there were plenty of opportunities for a licensed merc, especially one with the skills to train his own Freikorps. Within a short time, von Schill’s company became a byword for professional excellence in Malifaux. When someone needed not just thugs or muscles but soldiers, drilled and trained, they went to the Freikorps, and the Korps and their founder soon became rich indeed. Of course, mercenary work is dangerous, and Malifaux mercenary work more dangerous still. Von Schill was present at Nythera when Titania awakened, having been hired to crack open the vault to get whatever treasure was inside (turns out it was an ancient undead queen), and he lost an arm and a leg to Rasputina’s frost. He’s got some new mechanical parts, though, and he’s back on the warpath. Right now his biggest priority is getting Freiholt up and running, which would be hard enough even without supernatural plagues and mercenary politics. But such is life in the Freikorps.

On the table, von Schill’s crew is the epitome of a solid all-rounder. Freikorps members are all well-armed and armored, and the crew has a balance of melee punch, ranged support and magical capability. They also make heavy use of equipment, from grenades to rocket launchers, that von Schill can pass around from inside his Steam Trunk.  Von Schill’s title form dons a set of powered armor and gets into combat himself to mess things up with a big set of steam-powered metal claws.

Freikorps are straightforward but powerful– I wouldn’t say they’re the “Space Marines of Malifaux,” but if someone has to take that title, it’s this bunch.

Play von Schill if:

• You like being a little bit good at everything, with a preference for range over melee
• You’re one of those historical gamers whose eyes let up when people talk about Germans (please no)
• You feel naked if your troops don’t have at least some armor

The Viktorias

Earthside, Viktoria Chambers was one of the best Mercenaries alive. This side of the breach, she’s two of them.

Viktoria crossed the breach in the early days, looking to sell her sword and earn her fortune in the brave new world. Of course, she had rather more sword to sell than most. Viktoria was a skilled fighter, but what set her apart was the Masamune Nihonto: an expertly forged blade, folded 999 times by a master swordsmith etc. etc. etc.  You know, standard weeb stuff. But unlike literally every other time someone has made this claim, this Hanzo steel actually matters. Unbeknownst to Viktoria (and pretty much every other human, but very much knownst to some of the oldest Neverborn), the sword contains the restrained essence of the Tyrant Shez’uul, a (literally) bloodthirsty entity that managed to cross over to Earth thousands of years ago. It’s trapped in the sword, but the Nihonto has enormous spiritual potency. Neverborn agents lured Viktoria to Malifaux in an attempt to reclaim the relic and re-imprison Shez’uul.

That was the plan. And it almost worked, too. They sent a shapeshifter to kill Viktoria and take it, but the swordswoman’s cut severed the spiritual ties that enslaved the creature and set it free. Nobody knows what passed between the two of them, but they emerged from that fight as sisters: twins, in fact, as the other-Viktoria kept her stolen shape. The two have been inseparable ever since, their bond in combat making them nearly unstoppable. They’ve surrounded themselves with a gang of fellow mercs, all of whom respect the women and fear the sword– even if they don’t fully understand why.

The Viks (as they’re called) are unique in one obvious way: there’s two of them! Hiring one to lead your crew gives you the second for free. Of course, they don’t get a Totem, but having two Masters is definitely a trade up. The crew’s playstyle epitomizes the term “glass cannon.” Each Vik is fairly fragile, but they’re absolutely whirlwinds of destruction, and the ability to activate them back-to-back lets you put out truly horrific amounts of damage.  Their title form consolidates both Viks onto a single base, adds a totem, and cranks the mobility to 11 – title Viks are a pinball of slaughter.

Play the Viktorias if:

• You think the Kill Bill movies are Tarantino’s best
• You realllllly like killing things and don’t so much care what happens afterwards
• You like alternate sculpts. There are probably more alt Viktorias than any other master in the game (and that’s not even counting the fact that each set has two models)

Leveticus Rusty Alyce

Was Leveticus human? Technically, probably yes. Was he evil? By any normal definition, you’d have to say so.  Was he immortal? Many people thought so, but in the aftermath of the Burning Man’s dissipation, Fate seems to have finally caught up with the man who died a thousand deaths.  Nobody is quite clear on where he is, or what his status is (a question that was already difficult to answer), but in Leveticus’s absence his erstwhile apprentice/uncomfortable May-December romance Rusty Alyce has take the reins of Captivating Salvage & Logistics.

That’s not to say that Alyce is all that much nicer.  Leveticus had bent his life to conquering death, and managed it, after a fashion.  Alyce has picked up where he left off, and has managed to harness Leveticus’s Hollow Waifs: soulless husks that act as anchors for her life force.  When she dies – not if, when, given Alyce’s total disregard for risk – she can drain a Waif’s life force to resurrect herself.  She’s as trigger-happy as she’s ever been, but her newfound inability to die has given her a reckless streak.

When she’s not dying and returning to life, Alyce likes to delve into the secrets of Old Malifaux– specifically, the art of amalgamating flesh and steel. These Amalgams are often horrific blends of dead flesh and rusty metal, or constructs like the sentient storm Ashes and Dust.

Leveticus famously had one of the strangest playstyles in First and Second Edition; you mostly tried to get him killed every single turn, whereupon he’d return, hale and hearty, from one of his Waifs. Levi is gone, and these days the Waifs are more “emergency extra lives” than “core part of a resurrection-based gameplay loop,” but Alyce is still very hard to put down for good. She and his crew can do a lot of damage that ignores various pieces of defensive tech, and can summon plenty of Abominations: nasty little things that can combine into a powerful Desolation Engine.  Alyce’s title form, from horseback, can command the loyalty of Malifaux’s four faction Riders, if you wish, though she has two crew cards to pick from in case you wanted to play a more normal crew.

Play Leveticus if:

• Death is but a door, and time is but a window… you’ll be back
• You like blasting people right in the head and don’t care much about what else you do
• You like the weird, gribbly fleshmetal monsters, but Von Schtook isn’t your style

Hamelin

Hamelin wasn’t a very nice man.  He was technically a rat catcher, but it would be more accurate to call him a bully and a thief and an occasional murderer (when he could get away with it). Then he took shelter from a storm in the sewers under Malifaux City, and was washed into an ancient part of the buried Necropolis, and, well, he died.

Something walks the earth wearing Hamelin’s skin, but it’s not Hamelin. No, it’s the most active and aggressive of the reawakened tyrants: Plague has emerged from his prison, spreading his sentient disease. Hamelin’s fingers dance across Hamelin’s pipe, but Plague’s tune burrows into the ears of Malifaux’s wretched and forlorn. They follow the Piper, a crowd of Stolen, their sore-pocked skin glistening with feverish vitality. In their wake come the rats: an endless swarm of them, yellow-eyed and jagged-toothed, piling on one another in their haste to devour and befoul.

Plague has tried to ascend multiple times, and has gotten frighteningly close; the first time, Kirai stopped him, while more recently his attempt to conquer Freiholt was blocked by Obliteration’s pawn Tara.  Still, Plague remains patient. His influence spreads, and with each new coughing victim, his army gets larger…

Hamelin’s crew focuses on handing out Blight Tokens, representing the spread of Plague’s disease. The plague slowly grows in strength, making Blight Tokens more and more debilitated.  Along with the Blight comes a tide of Malifaux Rats– individually the weakest models in the game, but you can have a lot of them, and you can summon a basically endless supply. Hamelin’s title form focuses on his command of these rates, compelling them to tangle together into Rat Kings and slowly gnawing enemies to death.

Play Hamelin if:

• You worship at the altar of the Great Horned Rat.  Or possibly Grandfather Nurgle, I’d say both gods have an in here.
• You prefer swarm tactics. It’s not enough to outnumber your opponent– you have to bury them in bodies
• You like to drag out your victories. Make ’em last, make ’em suffer.

Tara

Tara had a rough life from childhood.  Life’s not easy for an orphan, and it’s even harder in Malifaux. Her circumstances hardened her, turning her into a killer, and she became a feared gunslinger and Neverborn hunter. She was a hard woman, hollow inside, without compunction or mercy.  Maybe that’s why she fell into the prison of Obliteration— maybe she fell into a trap that had been set to snare those who thought like her.

Obliteration had once been one of the Tyrants, a terrible force of destruction, and after the Tyrant War It was imprisoned in an extradimensional space. Its prison was Its body; it could not destroy Its cage without destroying Itself. Others had found their way into that pocket dimension over time, most of them quickly driven mad, but not Tara. She struck a deal with the entity and It vomited her back out into the world, along with a woman named Karina who had been trapped into the timeless void for what (subjectively) felt like a lot longer.

Tara is Obliteration’s pawn, spreading Its destructive nihilism across the face of Malifaux. During one pitched battle, a sniper shot her dead, but thanks to Karina’s quick necromantic work she walks again– a self-willed, autonomous undead, retaining her connection to Obliteration. Since then, Tara has quietly built Obliteration’s power, using Its control over time and space to call forth entities of pure nonexistence from Its prison and sending Its enemies to the void.

Whatever meter of playstyle complexity you care to keep, Tara sits at the extreme end of it. Obliteration has granted her mastery over time, and she can harness that control to rewind her failures and try again. She can summon time-lost echoes of her keyword models, calling them out from the past or future for exist in the present for.a brief moment. Her title form focuses on creating echoes in time, which they can use to damage enemies or return, briefly, from death.

Play Tara if:

• Five-dimensional chess has become dull and lost its spark for you
• You love the Cloverfield monster’s weird little tick things. They’re cute, aren’t they?
• You wish you were allowed mulligans in everyday life

Parker Barrows

In contrast to the gods and monsters we’ve been reading about, Parker’s a refreshingly straightforward guy. His older brother took his inheritance? Pah, Parker don’t need it. He just needs a couple of six-guns and a train to rob. At the head of the Barrows Gang, the most feared group of Bandits this side of the Breach, Parker takes aim at the Guild, the Union, and whatever bank teller is unfortunate enough to be on duty the day he rolls into town.  He doesn’t particularly love killing people, but he’ll do it if he has to, especially if they’re shooting at him.  People always take offense, even when he asks for their valuables politely.

Parker’s gang is accompanied by Doc Mitchell, an alcoholic doctor and hostage whose job is mostly to stitch up whatever wounds aren’t immediately fatal, and Mad Dog Brackett, whose job is mostly to put out lit cigars in people’s eyes and then blast them through the wall with a giant shotgun.  Parker’s an easygoing guy, and he’s made friends with Zipp, a Gremlin pirate chief.  There’s solidarity, out in the badlands. Parker may be a robber, but he’s no murderer, and the Gang look out for each other. Of course, following Zipp’s plans is more than a little foolish… especially when the little green fellow talks about wanting to steal the Hanging Tree…

Parker plays exactly how you’d expect a classic Wild West bandit to play. He and his men (and women) are armed to the teeth, and surprisingly mobile.  They’re also prone to stealing anything not nailed down, including Scheme Markers.  Like any good Bandido, Barrows’s followers can demand your money or your life – whatever you pick, you’ll regret it.  His title form walks a darker path, focusing more on blasting people off the table than looting their goods, but it turns out the bandits are good at that, too.

Play Parker Barrows if:

• You’re coming from 40k and want a familiar experience
• What drew you to Malifaux was the Wild West aesthetic
• You can do a dead-on “Reach for the sky!” from Toy Story. Or at least “There’s a snake in my boot!”

Captain Zipp

Daring tales of adventure and danger!  Sky pirates swooping down from their floating fortress!  Dashing adventures and glittering prizes!  There’s only one place you can find all of these things at once: the aethervox airwaves.

Zipp isn’t the bravest gremlin, or the strongest.  He sure talks a lot, though, and for some reason, other gremlins listen to him.  He also listens to far, far too many aethervox dramas, and has internalized some very strange ideas about how the world works.  For a while, he led a gang of Infamous raiders who fancied themselves sky pirates, but all they really were were gremlins in gliders.  Their loquacious leader might be constantly monologuing about their “feats of infamous courage!” but they were happy enough just going where he pointed them and stealing what they could. But then Zipp got his lucky break.

The Guild’s Bloody Sky project was the ultimate top-secret, off-the-books operation.  Under the supervision of the brilliant Abyssinian engineer Dr. Hackeem Tewolde, it brought together cutting-edge soulstone-powered science from multiple fields in order to create a weapon that would impress the dominance of the Guild in the minds of all who saw it: the enormous airship Bloody Sky.  In order to keep the project secret, it was run out of a hangar far outside Malifaux City, on the outskirts of the Bayou.  And when Tewolde and his chief engineer Earl Burns took it out for a test drive, Zipp happened to look up at just the right time.  Right then and there, he fell in love.

Tewolde and his hired security never knew what hit them.  One moment they were fine-tuning the Bloody Sky’s technology, then next the hangar was on fire.  And when they frantically opened the doors and wheeled the airship out, it kept going… and going…

Zipp and his Iron Skeeters had taken their prize.  It was only by pure luck that they also happened to steal Earl Burns, the one engineer who could keep the thing aloft.  Burns was pressed into service, motivated by promises of glory but also by fear of the First Mate (a silurid who ate the previous First Mate; it’s unclear if he knows his rank, but he seems to like his hat and the cigars Zipp gives him).  Now Earl maintains the Infamy (as Zipp rechristened his floating headquarters) and the various devices that the gremlins have “appropriated,” like Captain Zipp’s jetpack and lightning gun and the hovering Skeeters that his crew fly around.  Earl is just trying to keep the gremlins from breaking things or lighting the hydrogen-filled airship on fire, but he’s also fervently hoping that they haven’t figured out the controls for the airship’s main armament: an experimental device called the Mechanism…

Zipp has left the Bayou behind, seeking adventure in the badlands.  Zipp’s raiders are incredibly fast, darting around on skeeters, and the sputtering exhaust gives them some measure of protection from enemy ranged attacks.  Zipp himself is incredibly annoying, and excels at simply interfering with whatever your opponent is trying to do – including by calling on his crew to drop pianos from the Infamy to clutter up movement lanes and block line of sight (or just land on people’s heads).  Zipp is fast, disruptive, and a nightmare to pin down, and his crew is much the same… except for the hulking luchador Mancha Roja, who simply likes hitting people with broken pieces of piano.  His title form focuses more on the piratical aspect of his career, stealing loot and blasting people with the Infamy’s cannons.

Play Zipp if:

• You’ve spent hours refining your trollface in the mirror
• Your idea of fun is dropping 9 pieces of blocking terrain right in front of your opponent’s crew and letting them figure it out
• You THRILL to DASHING TALES of REAL-LIFE ADVENTURE!!!

Clockwork Queen

Way out in the Badlands, there’s a town that’s not on most maps.  Ampersand is an odd place: there are dozens of little frontier towns, and quite a few of them have no living inhabitants, but that normally means they’re deserted.  Ampersand is definitely not deserted, even if its inhabitants are largely deserters.  There are lots of reasons why a sentient construct might flee Malifaux city: a cruel master, a false accusation, a true accusation, or even just a desire to make one’s own destiny, free of the meatbags and their fleshy demands.

The Clockwork Queen welcomes them all, and takes good care of her wayward charges.  Out in the Badlands, repair shops are hard to come by, so the inhabitants of Ampersand make do with whatever junk they can buy, steal or trade for.  Somehow, the town keeps ticking.

The Ampersand keyword focuses heavily on the Remains markers that dead models drop, finding new purpose for these spare parts.  They’re durable, all sporting at least some armor, and they’re good at patching each other up, so enemies who are counting out your battered bots may be surprised to find them revving back up.  The Clockwork Queen’s title form instead uses all of that junk to fuel a powerful Trash Cannon, and makes use of improvised parts to let her models copy each other’s actions.

Play the Clockwork Queen if:

• You don’t mind a little whimsy.  Look at that little bucket guy!
• You are splitting the two-player starter with another player, and prefer the “steampunk” half of “steampunk horror”
• You are disgusted by the weakness of your flesh

As has become traditional, we will close with a review of an Outcast Nightmare Edition box set.  In this one, Hamelin trades his pipes for a cup of tea and his rats for, well…

That’s all for this week, and we’re more than half done! Join us next week as we begin the home stretch with the rootinest, tootinest, shootinest, moonshine-drinkenest pack of yokels this side of Ten Peaks, the Bayou!

Have any questions or feedback? Drop us a note in the comments below or email us at contact@goonhammer.com.