AnimosityI

Last weekend I ran one of the many Animosity events that took place around the world.  You can read up on it at www.animositycampaigns.com if you're interested in learning more, but I'll review some of its interesting facets below!

The back-of-the envelope version of the story is that Amasya is a city that arose during the Age of Myth back when Sigmar was hanging out with his pantheon of cool kids.  It is a holy city in which there was one district dedicated to each of the deities (more or less).  However, as went Sigmar's pantheon, so went the city.  It suffered from a fracturing populous, some groups left while others pushed them away, and eventually the city fell into ruin and was lost to the ages (more or less).

Now with Sigmar paying more attention to Ghyran and the mortal realms in general, he wants to rebuild the city, but a bunch of other people have opinions about that (not least being Nagash, who also would like to rebuild the city).

One of the cool things about this event is that it has six Coalitions that are used to define the teams for the event instead of Grand Alliances.  Each of these coalitions has different intentions for the city, so we may see some strange teamups.

I ended up having eight players in attendance (including myself), five of which were Chaos.  We had representatives for each Chaos god, and two for Khorne!  Because of the Coalition system we really had three Varanpact armies and two Horde of Rot and Rage armies.  Also in attendance were Gutbusters, Free Peoples, and Nighthaunt.

Because the event had these Coalitions, and also was a map-based campaign of sorts with nine distinct locations, I cooked up a narrative battleplan and matchmaking system for it.  At the start of each round, players (in a randomly generated order) got to pick a location to battle at.  Once half of the players were at different locations, they had to pick locations that had already been picked so that everyone would have an opponent.

Each location had an objective that was shared between both players, and each coalition had an objective that was unique to its players.

By tying objectives to the locations and coalitions, I aimed to create a somewhat more engaging narrative where armies could tactically assault different locations, choose their opponents to some degree, and then have a battle featuring thematic elements of that location as the objectives.  Below are the Coalition/Allegiance and Location Objectives that players were choosing from.

And here are the Coalition/Allegiance Objectives:

We're still awaiting the narrative conclusion of the event, but in the meantime you can enjoy these photos!

Lots of endless spells were afoot at AnimosityI.

Here Arinath the Dreadful's forces face off against an elder of Tzeentch whose name is so complex that it cannot be spoken by mortal tongues.  If one were to do so, they would immediately be transmuted into a Chaos Spawn.

Khadroth's Choir faced off against the forces of Klak'nar the Bloodthirster.

There was much licking.

Jack Vorpal was one of the most daring duelists of the day.

Here he can be seen facing off against an Exalted Deathbringer of Khorne.

The gnoblars of Da' Grey Tide travel along the waterways of Grung Esik.