Gunter Aisler looked into the old, cataracted eyes of his grandson, Tomas.
“Grandfather?” Tomas, asked. The young man’s face, which was that of a woman five times his age, only drew level to his grandfather’s breasts, so hunched and shriveled had the boy become. He craned his neck awkwardly to meet the wizard’s gaze. “Why do you look like that?”
The arcane winds had changed. The old wizard had felt it that morning. With the change came echoes of his mother’s voice “if the wind changes, you’ll stay like that.” She was the one who had instructed Gunter in the illusionist school of magic all those years ago. He was foolish not to have heeded her warnings.
Now he would have to explain to his teenage grandson why the boy would now be trapped in the form of a shriveled old hag for the rest of his life. He’d also have to explain why he, himself was stuck in the shape of a beautiful young woman.
The lad was once handsome and vigorous, and showed immense magical potential. He was popular with the maidens. A little too popular. Gunter had become worried about his grandson’s womanizing and had warned him sternly many times to change his ways. Tomas swore to his grandfather that he would.
But one day the boy met a beautiful young woman in a tavern. She was the daughter of a nobleman, escaped from her manor in search of some distraction in the town. Tomas was all too willing to help her in that pursuit. They drank and flirted all evening and eventually found their way to one of the upstairs rooms.
Gunter will always remember how the look of carnal desire on his grandson’s face warped into utter shock and embarrassment when the fair maiden vanished and he revealed himself to the boy.
As punishment, Gunter Aisler used his illusionary arts to alter his grandson’s appearance into that of an old krone, hoping that, deprived of his pleasant looks and youth, he would soon learn respect and decorum. Without the distractions of the fairer sex he would also be able to apply himself fully to his studies. The scheme had worked, and for the past months Tomas had come along by strides. Gunter was considering giving the lad his own appearance back when the winds had changed.
Gunter looked at his grandson with a heavy feeling of remorse in his gut. Gunter was exhausted, having spent the morning performing every rite and ritual he knew to try and reverse the effects, but there was nothing in his power that he could do. Anyone who was currently under one of his illusions would be stuck that way indefinitely, including himself.
Tomas was, once again, looking into the face of the beautiful young nobleman’s daughter. “Why do you look like that, grandfather?” Tomas asked once more, confused at the sight of the woman who his grandfather had used to entrap him.
Gunter fumbled over his words for a while before he began to explain the situation to his grandson, taking great pains to avoid giving an account of why he had taken the form of a beautiful young woman in the first place. He explained that the winds had changed directions, and that he no longer had the power to give Tomas his own face back. He watched as the little old woman smashed the laboratory to pieces with the anger and strength of a young man in his prime.
Once Tomas had calmed enough for Gunter to be heard, the old wizard raised his young, manicured hands to speak. “But there is hope…”
A Narrative Skirmish Game Set in a Dead City
Frostgrave is a wonderfully narrative skirmish game based in the city of Felstad, once the capital of an ancient, magically attuned civilization. Due to some over-ambitious wizard dabbling in forces beyond their control, a cataclysmic arcane event overtook the city and a supernatural blizzard enveloped it, freezing it in perpetual winter for a thousand years.
The city then became known locally as Frostgrave.
A millennium later, the city began to thaw. Its secrets were revealed for wizards and treasure hunters alike to discover. Warbands, led by knowledge-hungry spellcasters began to descend upon the ruins to explore its sprawling maze of spirals and catacombs, each hoping to find long lost artefacts and writings to help them in their mystical pursuits.
However, dangers also abounded. The adventurers would not only find treasures of unimaginable power, they also discovered wild animals, horrific creatures, scores of undead, evil demons and reanimated constructs along the way – not to mention fierce opposition from other wizard’s warbands.
In Frostgrave, each player is tasked with telling the story of their wizard as they command a warband through the frozen city. In my campaign, I’ll be discovering the story of Gunter Aisler, an illusionist who has decided to enter the city in the hopes of finding a way of returning himself and his grandson back to their original forms after they became trapped in their altered states following a change in the arcane winds.
There are ten different schools of wizardry in Frostgrave, and you start by choosing which of them your wizard belongs to. The main reason I chose the Illusionist school was that I wanted an excuse to look through the strangest corners of Etsy to fill my roster with the weirdest looking models I could find. Frostgrave is model agnostic, so lends itself to boundless creativity when selecting your warband.
Indeed, that was one of the big appeals for me to check out Frostgrave in the first place. The game is populated by all kinds of strange and terrifying beasts. This means it’s easy enough to find pretty much any fantasy model you like the look of online and then find rules for it to be used in Frostgrave. If there aren’t rules that fit, you can probably just make them up. Frostgrave opened up a whole new, limitless world of hobby for me to enjoy.
Frostgrave does have its own models, produced by North Star, but you don’t have to use them. Some of them are really characterful and are definitely worth getting hold of, others… not so much. I had already picked up the Frostgrave box of female wizards and built a few before deciding on my illusionist theme, but looking at the models I had built it didn’t take long before the narrative hook took form in my mind.
When I looked at these two models, I instantly saw a dirty old man who used his illusionary powers to disguise himself as a beautiful woman for all kinds of nefarious and grubby reasons, and his poor, unfortunate grandson, trapped in the body of an old krone, missing out on the prime of his life.
Creating Your Wizard
Now that Gunter and Tomas Aisler were cemented as characters in my mind, I needed to look at the Illusionist spell lore in the rulebook and give them their spells. There are ten different schools of magic in Frostgrave – Chronomancer, Elementalist, Enchanter, Illusionist, Necromancer, Sigilist, Soothsayer, Summoner, Thaumaturge and Witch. Each school is related to the others in different ways, being either aligned, neutral or opposed.
When selecting your starting spells you can choose three from your own school, one from each of the three aligned schools, and two from among the neutral schools, for a total of eight spells. Spells are cast by trying to reach their casting value on a D20.
You are given various casting penalties when casting spells from schools other than your own (adding 2, 4 or 6 to the casting value, depending on how close the spell’s school is to yours.) Your apprentice knows the same spells as their master, they’re just not as good at casting them, meaning they have a further plus 2 casting penalty.
Each of the ten schools has eight spells. This means there are a total of eighty spells in the game to mix and match from, giving the game a lot of variety and making it really flavourful. If there’s a playstyle you want to experiment with, chances are there’s a combination of spells to suit you.
Illusionists are typically the least fighty of the wizard types. They prefer to rely on misdirection and trickery. Therefore, I didn’t have much in the way of damage dealing spells available to me in my own school, so I built my strategy accordingly.
I chose to make the illusionist spell Transpose the bedrock of my strategy. It’s a spell that lets you switch two figures on the board. I figured it would help me with getting around the table (especially using hounds, who are pretty quick) to snatch treasures away from under my opponents’ noses. The spell also has defensive uses, helping to get rid of any of those nasty creatures that might get a little too close for comfort and make them someone else’s problem.
I also chose Invisibility from the illusionist school, which would enable me to sneak about without getting attacked. The final spell from my own school was Illusionary Soldier, which would let me manifest holographic soldiers to distract and get in the way of assailants. I then had to think about what spells I wanted to take from the other schools, knowing these would be harder to cast.
Firstly, I had to choose a spell from each of the three aligned schools. For the Illusionist, the aligned schools are Soothsayer, Thaumaturge and Sigilist.
From the Soothsayer school I chose Wizard’s Eye, which lets you project your caster’s eye on to any flat terrain surface and measure spell ranges from there. Not only is it quite a low casting value, meaning I still have a fair chance of getting it off, even with the -2 penalty you receive for casting spells from an aligned school, but it also allows my casters to stay far away from any violence, so fitted well with my overall strategy.
From the Thumaturge school I chose Blinging Light, another very defensive spell. It literally blinds the opponent giving you a chance to either get away, or throw a sneaky punch while they’re incapacitated. Once again, it’s also cheap to cast. Both of these spells were also pretty thematic for an illusionist.
My third aligned school spell was from the Sigilist list; Write scroll. It doesn’t have the lowest casting value (it casts on a D20 roll of 12, meaning my wizard would be casting it on a 14 once the penalty is applied,) but there was nothing else from the school that I was likely to use much in-game, and I already had a pretty solid compliment of in-game spells.
Write scroll is an out of game spell that you use at the start of each game. I figured that, despite its high casting cost, I’ve got nothing to lose in trying it before the start of the game – as there’s no limit to how many pre-game spells you can try. If I get it, great – if not, then nothing lost!
I’d recommend thinking about out of game spells when considering which spells to take from schools which aren’t your own. If you go for a huge range of in-game spells, there’s a big chance that you’re not going to use a lot of them, especially if they have higher casting values, as during the heat of the game you’re more likely to go for spells that are more reliable to execute. My own preference is to have a tight, integrated and reliable set of in-game spells, and then a number of out of game spells which are less dependable, but not essential to my plans, for those nice little bonuses they can give you at the start of a game.
With Write Scroll, both your wizard and your apprentice roll before the game starts and for every successful cast, you can write a scroll of any spell you already know. During the game you can then use it as a form of spellcasting insurance. If you cast a spell and it fails, you can then choose to use the scroll instead (it’s single use, so you can only use it once) and then cast the spell automatically.
Finally, I had two spells left to choose from neutral schools, which for the Illusionist is Chronomancer, Enchanter, Necromancer, Summoner and Witch. These spells would incur a +4 casting value penalty, so can be incredibly hard to get off. However, there is a huge number of spells to choose from in your five neutral schools, so this could be a great opportunity to mix and match a few spells to really fill in any gaps in your repertoire.
The first neutral spell I went for was from the witch school: Animal Companion. This would go off on a 14 for me but, again, was a before game spell, meaning I had nothing to lose and a lot to gain by it. Its effects would also last for multiple games, because if successful, it allows you to add an animal of your choice as a permanent member of your warband.
Finally, for my last spell, like a madman, I went against all of my own advice for selecting spells from outside of your school, and chose a spell which was a very high casting value, and also an in-game spell. Time Walk, from the Chronomancer school, casts on a 14 normally, which makes it an 18 for me! Barely worth taking, right?
Well, firstly, if it does go off, it allows my wizard to activate two extra times in a turn. This is very powerful, giving me lots of transposing and movement shenanigans to play with. But who cares how good it is if you never actually get it off! Thankfully I also have a number of ways of increasing my chances of casting it.
Firstly, this was my main reason for including the Write Scroll spell. If I manage to write a scroll before the game, then I can write a scroll of Time Walk, which gives me an automatic cast in the likely event of me failing my roll during a game.
Secondly, there are ways, as the game progresses and you level up your wizard, of lowering the casting values of your spells, so in later games I could make Time Walk a more reliable spell. There are also artifacts that let you add to your casting rolls.
Finally, you are able to push spells in-game. This is where you can sacrifice health points in order to improve your casting roll. So, if I roll a 15, but need an 18, I can push the spell by losing 3 health to get it over the line. Still, needing an 18 to cast still means a lot of lost health to get it off, and that’s where my warband comes in…
You get to choose a warband of 8 hired hands to accompany your spellcasters into Felstad. You can choose from a selection of different roles, and I immediately knew I wanted two apothecaries. Each apothecary has the ability to restore five health to any character, once per game. The way I see it, this gives me scope to push a spell like Time Walk pretty aggressively in order to get it cast, because I can heal myself straight back up again. Once the apothecaries have helped me get my spells done, they’ve served their purpose and I can use them to cart treasures off.
I’ll talk a bit more about warband assembly in the next article, and also about building your base and the general structure of playing a game.
Understanding the Game
Once my wizard was created, and my warband assembled, I worked on the slightly more challenging job of assembling a group of people to play against. Eventually 9 people from my local games club expressed an interest, which is a pretty decent number for a campaign, but you can easily get away with playing it with far fewer people. Some of them had never played a game before and others were more experienced.
The most important thing about playing Frostgrave is that everyone playing understands the nature of the game – it’s fun. You’re not ever going to see competitive Frostgrave tournaments, it just doesn’t work like that. The game mechanics are such that in each game you’re going to get little stories emerging, and your minis are going to end up taking on little personalities of their own.
Yes, you want a warband where all the mechanics work – but don’t go trying to build a meta list. You’ll just frustrate yourself and anyone you’re playing against. That doesn’t mean you’re not going to be engaging your strategic brain during the game, there’s loads of problem solving and planning involved, but you’re also going to need to apply generous portions of imagination too. The main thing is, the game is a really good laugh!
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.
