Meridian: One Year On

I’ve had a chance this year to hack Meridian into a playable state, and do some actual testing, and discover some holes in my original concept. Some of it works. Some of it I’ve edited and works slightly better than it did. Some of it I know definitely doesn’t work. But it’s playable now! The links page has links to enough content to play right now; it’s still organized like classic Mordheim and hence requires a lot of flipping back and forth between documents, but it all works!

Stuff currently in the game:

• Core rules: The core rules article from January still accurately represents the basic function of the game; it’s still largely a hack on N17 with a few elements slightly simplified and a bit of extra content added in.
• Warbands: I’ve currently got a basic representative set of forces written up; Space Marines, Imperial Guard/generic humans, Mechanicus, Chaos, Eldar Corsairs, Tau, and Necrons. These may not be the most obvious choices to start us off, but they were the simplest to write, and each has faction-wide rules, several sub-factions, a good selection of profiles, and a fairly complete arsenal.
• Equipment: Almost but not quite a complete arsenal; we’re still missing Chaos Gifts and some of the more esoteric faction-specific equipment, but the equipment list does have stuff for everyone, including draft profiles for the Tyranids and Orks.
• Campaigns: At the moment it’s fairly basic; income is currently just a straight roll, experience advances are all purchased rather than rolled, and there are five fairly generic scenarios.

Things that have been Fixed

• Cost Balance: One major issue that’s plagued every edition of Warhammer I’ve played is trying to balance the cost of equipment for expensive base bodies versus cheap base bodies. Older editions of 40k and Mordheim often had equipment priced for characters that were far too expensive to take on units, and later editions price the items for units and they’re far too cheap to take on characters. Rather than trying to make separate prices for characters and for grunts on everything (which would be very complicated and raise further questions about whether it’s fair to charge the same price for equipment on expensive grunts as on cheap grunts) I’m experimenting with a system where grunt teams pay the price of most equipment just once to put it on the whole team. I haven’t done a lot of pricing out what that means more broadly, but it seems to have the desired effect in test games at the moment.

What’s Happening Next

• Hit Rolls: At the moment we’re using the basic Necromunda structure where any attack rolls to hit exactly once and rapid-fire weapons get bonus hits after the fact if that one initial attack hits. The goal was to make rapid-fire weapons stronger shooting at groups in the open and force players to take blast and template weapons to suppress or clear enemies out of cover rather than just throwing more dice at them; at the moment it’s leading to stalemates where both players get to positions in cover where they can see each other and then just fish for 6s to hit the targets in cover without moving. In theory smoke, grenade launchers, fast mounts, or simply designing tables with easier approaches to cross the center break up this stalemate, but I’m worried that I might need to somehow make it clearer to people what’s going on.
• Too Many Documents: I’m working on reformatting everything to put force lists, their equipment, and their costs into one document in one place to reduce the amount of flipping back and forth between documents and doing a stat-edit pass while doing so. This may take a while given the sheer quantity of tables and it’s going to produce a very large document given the quantity of repeated stuff, but when it’s done I should be able to present something easier to use, even if it is bigger.
• Damage: The Damage stat is based too heavily on Necromunda right now; when boltguns in Necromunda are D2 that’s not that much of an issue because it’s a rare and shiny weapon that’s difficult to get ahold of, but in Meridian I think handing out D2 basic weapons is devaluing H2 models, and combined with the adjusted wound table at bare minimum the T5/H3 profile on things like Ogryn isn’t tough enough. I’m probably going to end up backing off on the damage stat rather than pumping Health, just because it’ll make the bookkeeping issue of tracking damage on the table easier.

And that’s the state of Meridian. Hopefully it won’t take me a year to come back and post more about it this time!

Meridian: Core Rules

What’s going into the core rules and why?

Statlines. Warhammer has traditionally defined its models’ base characteristics with a set of roughly 9-12 numbers. The basic M, WS, BS, S, T, W, I, A, Ld statline will be familiar to longtime Warhammer players; Necromunda 2017 and the original Rogue Trader rules had additional mental stats that got rolled into Leadership in other versions of the game, I’ve chosen to split Willpower (primarily used for psychic effects) and Technical (used to interact with complex gear and scenario rules) back off from Ld. Saves are back in equipment rules only, and I’ve added a Size stat to allow for some more granular terrain rules.
The extra problem with the Warhammer statline is that the writers have never been very disciplined about how the set of mathematical interactions work. You may have to determine the target number of a die roll by rolling over a target number produced by cross-referencing a stat on a one-dimensional table, cross-referencing two different stats or two of the same stat on a two-dimensional table, rolling under the stat on one die, or rolling under the stat on two dice. N17 and newer versions of the core 40k rules have revised some stats so that the stat itself is the target number; I dislike that change because it puts a hard cap on the best possible stat in that category, and makes the statline harder to read since higher is better for some stats and lower is better for others. I’ve tried to standardize things in the other direction; higher is better for all stats, and while the dice and the target number are different for Ld, Wp, and Tech, and Strength v. Toughness is still a comparison table, higher is still better for all dice rolls. This also gives more room for stat growth in the campaign rules since WS and BS don’t have an absolute cap of 2+.

Status and Conditions are heavily inspired by N17; Mordheim has similar rules, but they’re less standardized and don’t fit as easily into an alternating activation structure. Actions, similarly, are largely inspired by N17 but have been cleaned up and simplified.

Group Activations exist in N17 but I’ve expanded the concept to account for alternating activations using warbands with very different unit counts. In N17 Leaders can activate two models and Champions can activate one; in Meridian heroes have a Group stat, so heroes in large model count warbands can activate more extra models than heroes in small model count warbands.

The basic gameplay rules for movement, shooting, melee, and damage are all structured like the N17 rules; I’ve made an effort to simplify some of the more complicated bits and extend others to help expand the amount of possible content in the game. Particularly noteworthy changes are the addition of move modes to accommodate things like flying or wheeled units, and a stripped-back implementation of the weapon accuracy rules to make the weapon tables less complicated.

Psykers, Technomancers, Cavalry, and Vehicles/Monsters are included in the core rules to give me more flexibility when adding content later. The psyker and technomancer rules are cleaned up and expanded versions of the N17 psyker rules, while the Cavalry and the Vehicle/Monster rules are largely built from scratch.

Project Introduction: Meridian

Meridian is a homemade skirmish wargame using the Warhammer 40,000 setting and miniatures. The core content is built for small skirmish games featuring roughly 10-20 models to a side, but it is also built to be highly extensible and work at a variety of scales.

Why make a different skirmish wargame?
There have been a number of different Warhammer 40k skirmish games over the years; Kill Team, Shadow War: Armageddon, and the Heralds of Ruin fan project. They’ve all had their strengths and weaknesses, but to me they’ve all been let down by two problems: the design space is artificially compressed by a desire to keep all the numbers as close to the main company-scale 40k as possible, and the campaign system is half-baked.
Games Workshop, the people who make Warhammer 40k, have also made two skirmish games with much broader design spaces and much better campaign systems: Necromunda, set in the 40k setting but built for human street gangs rather than the full spectrum of armies in the setting, and Mordheim, set in the related Warhammer Fantasy setting. These two are my picture for how Meridian ought to work.

What are the design goals here?

• N17 Activations: The N17 revision of Necromunda has a flexible and highly extensible alternating activation structure that should be a good foundation to build on.
• Maximize Content: I don’t want to tie Meridian so strongly to the main game that every 40k army book corresponds exactly to a Meridian warband, but I do want to make sure that every miniature has a role and that there’s as much space as possible for conversions. This extends somewhat to my notion of “balance”, which is that every option in the game should exist for a reason.
• Scalability: Meridian is intended to be primarily a skirmish game, but I want to try and include mechanics that can allow for games larger than the roughly 10 v. 10 skirmishes of Necromunda and Mordheim. There should be play space for vehicles, squad rules, and more expansive content.
• Campaign Progression: Experience gain, stat growth, equipment growth, new recruits, persistent injuries, death. While you should be able to play a static game the soul of the game is in many ways the linked campaign structure and the evolution of your force over several games.
• Wackiness: Many people, myself included, have criticized Warhammer over the years for having lost its sense of fun. It is in its modern form bland and overly-abstracted, its fans happy to continue playing the same narrow mission pack with the same lists over and over again in the name of the tournament standard, and its gameplay narrow and overly-constrained. Meridian should be able to do strange things; there should be vehicle chases over rolling boards, models falling off of things and dying, vortex templates wandering the field and eating models, shokk attack guns accidentally teleporting the firing model rather than the ammunition, aerial duels over bottomless pits, troopers from one side’s vehicle boarding and taking over another’s. The core game needs to be flexible and extensible enough to support the wackiness, and I need to build the content and expansions to help people be wacky once the core game is done.

Great! What next?
As I write this I’ve got a playable pre-alpha built and working, the full game remains a work in progress. The Meridian category on this site will be updated with design articles if you’re interested in following the process, and the Page of Links will contain links to the rules when they’re ready to go.

Disclaimer
I am not affiliated with Games Workshop in any way. Setting concepts from Warhammer 40,000 belong to them. The rules belong to me.