You Can Make Your OWN LORE in Wargaming?

To some folks, the 'lore' or story of a wargame is very important. But you don't have to just take what you're given.

Original art of the 'Sir, this is a Wendy's' meme by SRGRAFO.

[slowking]

The answer is yes. I have made a custom Luna Wolves army to use in warhammer 40k so I have the simple lore for them. They got trapped in the Warp during travel and then came back out when the Great rift opened and now have heard of the Horus Heresy and are on the hunt to kill Abaddon. Having your own Lore makes you more emersed in the game so even if someone you know won't like it do it for your own entertainment.

[JustQuitePro]

I recently got interested in playing some Frostgrave, but none of my friends were particularly invested in idea of playing wargames at all. But some of them are players in my D&D campaign, so I did this thing: I integrated Frostgrave lore in my D&D campaign with some tweaking, and after my players got through it, I pitched the idea of returning in this frozen ruined city they now know and love, but in a different format of a wargame. Now I'm finishing a ruined terrain set and all of my D&D friends are excited to try a new game. So I feel like lore is a great motivation to try something new.

[NightfireGamingYT]

Even if there's not a big overarching narrative, I like giving personality to my minis and teams. With my friends the phrase "That's not very Orky" gets thrown around a lot, which basically means don't take it too seriously and do whatever is the most entertaining move.

[kallisto]

Emergent narratives are what I love about RPGs. Good games lead to unexpected places that neither players nor DM could have anticipated. That's the real gold.

[ProrokLebioda]

I really like idea of Mordheim, due to how meta-narrative around a warband was growing after what happened in and after a game.

[harrisharris]

I love making my own lore for homebrew factions. I run a custom order of Sororitas who have the quirk of believing the Emperor is actually a woman. It gives them a reason to fight any other faction that shows up on the tabletop, and it's kind of a funny idea. My local tabletop group appreciates the level of effort I put into my faction (especially since I won't field anything not fully painted), regardless of their thoughts on the concept

[johncaisse]

I've noticed this on a few of your videos now, but I really enjoy your "no-frills" approach to you videos. No music, few to no sound effects. It's more like a conversation in a room with nothing going on in the background, I dig it.

[dakkaflakkaflame]

I mostly think about lore for my army when building and painting it. It has a very similar feeling to creating a campaign world as a GM. Most of the stuff nobody else will ever hear about, but it's fun to do for its own sake.

[rutgaurxi]

Yes, it's barely a question.

It doesn't matter if you just have the barest framework of a story, as long as it works as a setting and leaves room for your dudes.

[trevorharvey]

The simple lore is one of the reasons I'm really into Frostgrave at the moment, there's only a simple scene setting page or two - the rest is up to you. I do agree that emergent stories are more present in skirmish gaming but also every wargamer has a story or two about that plucky guardsman (or other basic troop) that did something amazing once....

[timothyyoung]

One of my favorite campaign skirmish games is This Is Not A Test. The playing card system it uses can generate after mission events that can really create some nice emergent narrative and our group has had a lot of that in the game. My son had a raider who always kept getting eliminated, but every condition roll after the game was over always resulted in him being disfigured and gaining an intimidation bonus. This happened so often that the running joke was the raider never died, he just got uglier. I played a crazy cult in a few games and my warband was new, so had less experience and good gear than the other warbands. In one game I was able to take a bunch of extra men to even the odds, so the narrative was my cult put out a call to all members because they wanted revenge on another warband from the last game that defeated them. My son also made up a cult warband at the same time as me. We never discussed anything about the warbands and found it funny we both created the same type, and both were led by women. So in a four player game we teamed up and decided the leaders were sisters who each had a cult that fallowed them. This led the other two players to join forces and the emerging narrative for the mission was that the sisters joined forces to take over a town that had banished them when they were younger and the other two warbands were mercs hired by the rich merchants of the town to protect it from the encroaching threat. We have a lot of narrative to our games, but we are also a bunch of roleplayers on top of minis gamers so it's just second nature really. And we all love characters, so skirmish games are all we play.

Fun fact! The first version of dnd described itself as rules for wargame campaigns, and the first version of warhammer called itself a role-playing game!

[noahdoyle]

Well, you're describing pretty much exactly how I play. Stories build from the models and crafting decisions, up through play. I have a loose WarCry campaign going on with my oldest son, which has organically turned into the saga of my hapless Skaven furious at his Chaos Warriors who stole their warpstone, and it's a blast, even as I keep losing.

Re: large army games. I tend to give personality to units, rather than each model, just scale up the characterization. Space games, each ship becomes a character. Same for stompy robots, etc.

[onceuponakillteam-sean]

This is such a good topic of conversation! Its literally the reason I started the Once Upon A Kill Team podcast.

Narrative play is so important as otherwise it all becomes very cold and detached, even those in the ultra competitive scene are still imagining these epic battles in their heads and making a story of it all! :D

[saintcityriot]

I write narrative skirmish campaigns (Hobby Dungeon on wargame vault - sorry for the shill!), and I usually take a new skirmish crew through one of these campaigns to help build up their story and myth. Once you play 5 or 6 games with your squad, some character starts to emerge, maybe you have lost some friends along the way. That's the fun stuff.

[KevinoftheCosmos]

I've been working on my first Warcry warband, which is The Unmade. When reading the Black Library Warcry short story, I really started resonating with the idea of a warband that lavished in pain. Being in a sort of exctatic bliss while getting carved up in battle, contrasted strangely with being relatively chill towards one another for a Chaos warband. They love pain so much that they flay their own faces off for decoration, adapt exceedingly well to amputation, and rank up the more pain and injury that they take on. I thought it was terrifying that a group of psychotic wanderers relish in the agony that results in battle whilst heeding the calls of either their trauma-inflicted psychosis or their actual chaos god.

The subtle and scant lore lends so well to creating your own gang, setting, and story. For example I've written so much about them:

The pack were all once young nobles; unsatisfied with their life of excess, relative safety, comfort, boredom. A surgeon's daughter, a former artist, the inheritor of a vineyard, a torturer, the son of a tax collector, and an herbalist were among the first. Over time the feral and sadistic blood drunk pack grew greatly in number, and were impossible to kill due to their total lack of fear and cunning ferocity. They'd pick enemies off by baiting them into traps before going head-on. Gleeful shrieks and laughter, moans of enraptured bloodlust, and a cackle of adrenaline laced excitement were the first thing their victims would hear as they'd sprint into fray. No doubt, seeing them slicing into their own skin with implements of rusty metal along the way was enough to shock or disturb even the most stalwart. Even if they didn't win a skirmish, they effectively retreat due to one or more always happily staying behind to meet their orgasmic ending. The two leaders, blissful ones, tower over the rest, bounding foward on spiked metal stilts strapped to the bloody stumps where their lower legs once were. Rentokk - The Taker, their senior packmother, is so enraptured in exctacy that she can nary utter a sound. The other is nameless, a seamstress that lovingy provides sewn scalps harvested in victories for her pack to wear when not in the throes of battle. Additionally, they know much about nature and build immunities with concocted brews, hinder the advancement of infection with salves, ward off tetanus, poisons, etc, with what they gather in the wilderness. They all dream, or are tormented by, nightmares of a looming red obelisk. They wordlessly follow the visions of their clairvoyant whom paints what he sees in stretched canvases of other's flesh and his own blood. The pack fears only one thing, if you can even count it, which is not being able to live another day to feast on and inflict more pain; to not please their god.

See what I mean? I could keep going all day with this mad bunch. I'm so excited by the thought of future narrative play as soon as I find some other people interested. I'm getting my partner her chosen Gloomspite warband (which was calling out to her, as well as the Daughters of Khaine) and encouraging her to paint with me. She loves the modeling and painting aspect so I'm sure she'll gradually craft some lore for her own little guys.

[nerdfatha]

In all my years of gaming I have had emergent story pop up twice in games where I didn't expect it. once in a 2000 pt game of Age of Sigmar. Sons of Behemat vs Gloomspite Gitz. after a brutal encounter with a mega Gargant, a squad of Squig Hoppers was reduced to 1. That little guy kept the gargant busy for two more rounds biting at his ankles, while the Mega kept missing every attack . We were literally role playing it at the table of this brute trying to swat this tiny little stubborn bastard.

[basiliskprime]

Anthems of War does a neat thing where the lore is written into the gameplay. Your battles are told by bards in a tavern and the story of your battle can be anything. It has lore and flavor text all through the book but it gives you a blank slate to put your lore on top of that. There is even a system in lore where that bard can affect the weather and rolls by embellishing the story

[MstrPhoenixMHD]

This was a wonderful think piece. I actually came up with a short lore to justify fielding rocks in Warhammer as a unique army. My thought starts with a living sentient planet, which was exceptionally rich in some Zenth-metal. After some humans eventually found said planet they soon set up a mining operation of sorts. Unfortunately for everyone involved this was the first time said planet had ever felt true pain and it reacted rather violently, consuming the entire mining depot and all who had moved planetside. Some amount of time later it was deemed wholely beneficial to harvest this planet, despite it's opinion. And so an anti gravimetric warhead was used to shatter said planet. However when the people came along to harvest the asteroid field of the dead planet, the found far fewer samples than they had expected. Even more alarming was that these asteroids had retained sentients and now were quite happy to squash any organic that crosses their path. This is just a quick summation of my thought but it opens up the option of an ad hoc army of any size that could show up any where or when thanks to spatial temporal anomalies.

[magimon]

About the opening. When people ask I'll usually just say "you buy you soldiers, you build toy soldiers, you paint toy soldiers, you argue online about toy soldiers, and occasionally you play against someone else's toy soldiers with yours"