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Wednesday, May 29, 2019
Warmachine: Oblivion Campaign Preview on DevChat
On their DevChat stream today, Will and Oz revealed how the narrative campaign will work in Warmachine: Oblivion. It's a branching tree campaign built for 2-4 players to play.
The Oblivion System
Oblivion is how they're referring to this style of campaign system, and it'll be the basis for future leagues and events. Future leagues and events will plug in the 16 scenarios and scenario tree. I'm assuming that this will be a way for them to update fiction as they go as well.
Agendas
Players in the campaign will team up according to two agendas. Guardians and Corruptors. Players of the same agenda never play against each other and in the case of 3 player campaigns they have rules how to split the games.
I think they said they'll have suggestions for who or what will be part of each agenda, but of course that's always going to be open to what you and your players want to play. I would say that some would see this as an opportunity to try another faction to fill a void in a particular storyline. If everyone in your meta is playing boy scouts of some kind then maybe this will be your opportunity to play something evil/chaotic/whatever.
I think you might also want to even out player skill and not team up all newer players.
Oblivion Storyline
The Oblivion Storyline of course introduces the world of Warmachine to the Infernals, but Infernals are not necessary for playing the scenario from what I can tell. The plot described in the stream is that reality seems to be unraveling, tensions are increasing, paranoia is spreading. As players, of course, we realize this is because the Infernals are coming.
Guardian agenda players are trying to enforce order, quell panic, stem the tide of lawlessness. It might seem weird for someone like Cryx to want to do this, but even the Dragonfather has an Empire to run, so if he thinks things are going wrong I can see even him wanting his warcasters to clamp things down. Another way to look at Guardian agenda players is that they're pursuing their faction's interests and those interests are probably counter to the coming of the Infernals in some way shape or form.
Corruptor agenda players are either actively trying to bring about the coming of the Infernals (and may even be an Infernals player themself) or their actions are trying to take advantage of the chaos which only makes the coming of the Infernals even worse.
Campaign Structure
If you look at the mock up of the campaign they showed on stream above, the campaign has 5 stages which are intended to be played out over 4-5 sessions. Each circle on the tree represents a scenario unique to the campaign.
Tier 1 of the campaign is the the bottom three scenarios. They called this the Prologue. The reason why each player can play all three in a weekend is that they are smaller battles, like a warmup to the campaign games ahead.
Tiers 2-4 are the branching scenarios. The campaign doesn't advance from tier 2 to 3, 3 to 4, or 4 to 5 until each player plays what they're calling their protagonist game.
Tier 5 is the final battle, 100 points split between the 2 players on your team.
Active Scenario, Protagonists and Antagonists
So each week/tier of the campaign a player has to play one Active Scenario in which they are the protagonist. The scenario played is indicated on the tree for guardian or corrupter. For example in Tier 2, the Guardian Player plays A War for Peace and the Corrupter player plays Fuel for the Fire.
Victory means that no matter what happens the rest of that tier, the Guardian player's next active scenario in Tier 3 will be Seeds of Hope. Defeat will mean Sanguine Trail.
Players on the same agenda CAN BE following different trees. Two Guardian players could be going down differing paths of victory or defeat.
If they're the protagonist and their actions determine the tree, then what's the incentive to play as antagonists? Omen Cards.
Antagonists and Omen Cards
Same agendas can't play against each other, so the antagonist of the active scenarios will always be someone playing for the other side.
When antagonists win an active scenario, not only does the protagonist player advance down the Defeat track on his scenario tree, but the antagonist gets 1-2 draws from the Omen Deck.
The Omen Deck is one of the other things you're paying for in the campaign box. They have various effects and up to 3 cards can be played for a match.
So both protagonists and antagonists have incentives for winning. Presumably there are advantages to protagonist scenario victories. It also seems like you want to win scenarios to deny your antagonists the omen cards.
More Tomorrow
Going to try to put together a sample of play for Thursday. For now enjoy this pic of Oz showing off how the Green spells on his lich shirt screw with the green screen background and make it look like his body is an empty shell you can see through:
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