New Rulebook Coming Soon

Howdy folks!

I just wanted to take a minute to talk about the status of the rulebook. Right now, it’s being rewritten and updated with a bunch of small changes.

I just need a few little bits and pieces to add to it before I can make the new PDF version. There will also be a printed version available in stores along with our models. The printed book will be a smaller sized book and will be around 80-85 pages. A lot more content compared to the 36 page rulebook we have now.

The biggest change is that we will be packaging Character Cards with every model. These pre-made characters will make it easy for you to jump right into the game if you’re not into building gangs yourself. However, if you do like to build your own, there’s rules for that too, same as always.

Each of the gangs we release will work best as a team, the leader will have a special ability that applies to everyone else in his gang only. You can add members from other gangs if you wish, they just won’t get to use the special skill. So, for example, if you have  Wilt Jackson from the Clancy Gang is your gang leader, every other member of the Clancy Gang will get a bonus if they attack someone from behind (since they’re dirty, rotten scoundrels). If you want to have a few members of the Bloodwolf Tribe team up with the Clancys, the Bloodwolf characers won’t get the attack-from-behind bonus. So this will allow you to build unique gangs with the premade characters, and give you an advantage if you try and stick to one gang. In time we hope to have a large collection of characters for every gang, way beyond the 5 in the starter sets.

To add even more variety, we’ve added Hired Guns. These are unique characters that will have special abilities or weapons not available to average folks. Our previously available Bounty Hunter Gang Leader and Gambler Gang Leader figures are being repackaged and will be Hired Guns named John Blackwood and Mickey Finn. You can have 1 Hired Gun in your gang for every 5 normal members.

Here’s some of the other changes that are mostly for custom gangs:

The Point Blank skill has been removed. It just wasn’t working for a lot of folks, being something based on Melee Combat, we decided to replace it with the new skill, Charge! .. this skill allows you to run and if you end your movement in an enemy’s personal space, you can attack him with a +1 to hit your target number. This stacks with the Quickness skill Run & Gun, so if you have both, you won’t have the +1 to hit.

The amount of skills a character may have is now based on your Intellect, you don’t automatically earn a skill for raising attributes anymore. But, you can now choose which skills you want, provided your Attribute for it is also high enough. This was done to give a lot more variety to characters, especially Gang Leaders who have a lot of points to spend on Attributes, and can end up being mostly similar in the end.

Gang Leaders now share their profession abilities with every friendly model within 12″, instead of learning special new abilities that effect only them. So now for example, if your gang leader is a Gunslinger, other members of his gang may also aim their guns instead of move… or if he’s a Doctor, he can tell his buddies how to patch up someone else allowing other nearby gang members to heal their fallen friends.

I think that about covers the changes for now. If all goes well I hope to have an updated PDF done some time next week, if not sooner! Any questions feel free to leave a comment below