Advanced Rules
Once you’ve reached this far, you will have read all of the basic rules of the Warmaster game. The following section introduces new rules to cover magic, engines of destruction, ways to improve the fighting qualities of your armies and, for the very ambitious, we’ll discuss how to fight entire campaigns of conquest. You don’t need to use any of these rules to play Warmaster but they do make the game more fun. We’d recommend that you fight a few games using only the core rules to familiarise yourselves with the way that the game works. Once accustomed to the basic routines, further rules can be introduced as you wish.
The aim of the game
The advanced rules in this section describe ways of extending the Warmaster game to cover new weapons, campaigns and scenarios. Unlike the earlier sections of this book, many of these themes are presented in a discursive fashion so that players can decide for themselves how to develop their Warmaster battles. This might strike some readers as a little odd in a book of gaming rules but Warmaster is no ordinary game.
Most other games provide fixed and finite rules and leave very little up to the players themselves. Warmaster invites players to change, invent, expand and super-detail the rules to their liking. Indeed, it would be impossible for us to provide rules for every single imaginable aspect of warfare or which would accommodate everyone’s individual tastes. Players are positively encouraged to invent their own rules, to change bits they don’t like and to expand the game to suit their own purposes. For example, you might wish to represent novel and potent sorceries, or vast and exotic war machines of your own devising. You might have a burning desire to fight games which involve shipboard action on the high seas, waterborne assaults, lengthy sieges, aerial warfare between soaring beasts, whirling machines and so forth. All of this would require some effort and no little imagination but lies well within the capabilities of the experienced gamer.
The spirit of the game
Winning isn’t the most important thing, honest! Sure, we all want to win but we want to do so with superior tactics, well taken decisions and just a little luck, not by bickering over the rules or bullying our opponents into compliance. The really important thing is that all the players involved have a good time.
If players find themselves quibbling over a particular rule or are confused over how to proceed, it is best to agree what to do and get on with the game. Later, once the heat of battle has cooled, there will be plenty of opportunity for the players to check over the rulebook or come up with a new rule of their own to apply in future. If you really are stuck and can’t agree what to do then roll a dice to decide which interpretation to apply. This might seem arbitrary but it is fair and keeps the game going where it might otherwise bog down.
