Scenario Review: The Periphius Gate (Malign Sorcery)
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Best Case Scenario is a regular column written by Martin from Narrative Labs, reviewing narrative play scenarios, missions and battleplans for Warhammer 40,000, Age of Sigmar and more. This week Martin shares some exciting narrative play ideas that spring from a battleplan in the second edition Age of Sigmar Supplement, Malign Sorcery. Check out Narrative Labs on Twitch, Twitter and Facebook for the latest streaming times, and for some fantastic interactive narrative gaming.
On Narrative Labs we recently ran an Age of Sigmar narrative campaign controlled almost entirely by the viewers. We created a very loose narrative around a secret vault and three keys. Three armies fought over the keys, with the two factions that ended up holding these artifacts meeting in the finale where the ‘Vaults of Nessalam’ (also the name of the campaign) finally opened. The viewers picked a narrative twist for each game as well as deciding what battleplans we would play and, ultimately, what would be in the vault when it opened. It was great fun to play through, waiting to find out what the viewers chose for us each week and seeing how the players reacted to it – I look forward to doing more campaigns like these in the future.
One of the battleplans selected was The Periphius Gate from Malign Sorcery, so I thought I’d pick that as the batteplan to review this month (I’d be lying if I said that wasn’t part of the reason for running the campaign the way I did).
The Periphius Gates are a network of realmgates that connect each of the Mortal Realms. As such they are of vital strategic importance and entire wars are often fought to control them. The gates are so powerful that part of the realm they connect to seeps through the gate to affect the area immediately around it. The battleplan represents the battle to control one such gate.
In a sense this is a straightforward ‘objective control’ scenario where players earn points for controlling the single objective in the centre of the board. In this case the objective is a piece of terrain and ideally should be suitably large and impressive to represent just how important this realmgate actually is (however, when we played it we only had an ordinary Baleful Realmgate).
Given the narrative around the scenario is to capture the gate, I would have expected the scenario to have end-game victory conditions rather than a progressive scoring system, so I felt that the narrative was a little bit at odds with the victory conditions. At the end of each battle round, the player who controls the gate scores a number of victory points equal to the battle round. So, on the one hand, controlling it at the end of the game (round 5) does gain a significant number of points, but that alone is not enough to win the scenario. In addition, the gate is controlled by the number of heroes within 12” of the gate rather than the normal rules for controlling objectives, and there’s not really anything in the narrative of the battleplan to explain this approach. Potentially, I think there are a lot of good narratives you could wrap around those victory conditions, and I’ll talk about those later on.
While the victory conditions might not mesh with the supplied narrative as well as they could, the scoring mechanics do make for an interesting scenario. Given that points are only scored at the end of each battle round, the player that wins the roll off to determine turn order each round is faced with a tricky choice to make and I particularly enjoy scenarios that do this. With only heroes being counted for controlling the objectives, the battle can become quite interesting – when we played this on the channel the game did come down to the wire, but I won’t say which way it went as you can watch the game and the entire campaign on the Narrative Labs website or YouTube channel.
Without the round-by-round scoring and hero control, I think the scenario would be pretty flat, so this is one of those situations where it’s okay if the narrative and victory conditions don’t entirely fit, since the scenario works well and we found it a really entertaining game to play through.
I’ve already mentioned one mechanic that the battleplan brings in which is the objective being controlled by a player with the most heroes within 12” of it. While this is a variation on an approach used in other battleplans it’s always nice to see a slightly different take on it and the size of the control area helps make it a more interesting scenario.
There is a command ability that allows a hero controlling the gate to bring back a unit that was destroyed, effectively a new unit that comes through the gate. I think the concept of reinforcement units is an okay one, but you have to take care with it when you’re creating your story. The assumption you might make here is that this battle is taking place on both sides of the gate between the same factions and that units are moving through the gate to reinforce one side or the other. I think that works fine, but it does assume that whoever controls the gate on the side you’re fighting for is the same as on the other side. Making it a command ability helps to counter that, as effectively you’re paying a command point to create that narrative justification, which in itself is an interesting mechanic – yes you gain an in-game benefit, but you are using your command points to create narrative events, rather than for purely tactical benefits. While you can arguably say that all command abilities do just that, I think there’s a lot of story-telling potential that could come from exploring that further.
However, the key mechanic from this scenario, in my view, is the gate itself. As noted above, the effects of the realm the gate links to seep through and affect the area around it. Any unit wholly within 12” of the gate counts as being in both the realm the gate is in and the realm the gate leads to, and this creates some very neat situations. One important aspect of this is the effect on Endless Spells which could become empowered if they end up wholly within 12” of the gate leading to the realm the spell is associated with.
It’s worth noting that this scenario came with the Malign Sorcery supplement that was released alongside the the second edition of Age of Sigmar, accompanied by the Soul Wars boxed set. At the time, the core rulebook introduced a table of realmscape features you rolled on for each of the realms, along with a command ability and spell. I say this as newer players might be more familiar with the rules from the General’s Handbook 2020, where the effects for each realm were simplified for matched play (not that this invalidated the original rules for narrative players, and I encourage you to go and check them out if you’ve not done so). In addition, Malign Sorcery came with 6 additional spells for each realm which could be used by any and all wizards fighting in that realm – again these were removed from matched play in the General’s Handbook 2020, so some readers may not be aware of the current rules at the time the scenario was released.
For this scenario you would be free to use either the table of realmscape features from the core rulebook, the simplified version from the General’s Handbook 2020 and/or the full set of spells from Malign Sorcery. For our game we used the more recent rules from General’s Handbook 2020, but part of that was due to the remote nature of the games we were playing. Even with those limited rulesets the different mechanics this created in the game created a unique atmosphere and ended up being key to deciding the final outcome.
I think playing with the full list of spells (14 in total – 7 from each realm) and a random realmscape feature could really add some great effects to the game and mean you could play the scenario several times with a lot of variety. If the gate goes to Ghur, you might even end up with a monster strolling through it to add some chaos to the surrounding area! There would be a lot to remember and keep track of, but the flexibility in terms of spells, command abilities and effects really make it feel like the two realms are seeping into each other.
There’s a lot you could do with this mechanic in other situations. There are known locations that exist between realms (like Uhl-Ghysh, the shadow realm between Ulgu and Hysh) and you could use these mechanics for battles in such a location. You could also use them in relation to powerful artifacts that carry some of the power of the realm they were created in. Perhaps such an artefact is wielded by a model in the game, creating a mobile aura of power. Wizards, endless spells and even terrain features could find themselves changed by close proximity to the artefact and maybe recover when it moves away. I think it’s a great tool to add to some narrative games.
Let’s have a chat about different narrative contexts you could use the Periphius Gate scenario for. I mentioned earlier that the victory conditions and the narrative don’t really mesh, and the challenge is then to look at what stories you could create that would fit the victory conditions.
One potential implication from the points scoring is that both armies are trying to move something through the gate, or bring something through from the other side (this doesn’t have to be physical, it could be some form of magical energy) and the points represent their success with this goal. However, I can still see some challenges with this. If both forces are trying to move things through the gate then there’s going to be a bit of a ruckus at the other end as different faction’s forces, cargo or whatever make it through at the end of different battle rounds, so it feels like you’re only playing half the story.
On the other hand if you’re bringing something through the gate then surely there must be something on the other side moving these items through, but why would one individual or group or mechanism be sending through the items player A wants one round, and the items player B wants in the next? How does controlling the gate from this side control what items come through? It just so happens the items player A wants come through just as they control the gate, but the items player B wants come through as they take control of the gate? That still isn’t quite working.
One solution would be if both factions want the same thing. You might still have to ask who is sending them through the gate in the first place in complete ignorance of what awaits them on the other side. However, if it’s more about energy flowing through the gate naturally, then that gives a nice narrative justification.
However, perhaps a more exciting prospect is to not just tell one half of the story, but rather to tell both at the same time! What if we played two games alongside each other, with the realm rules reversed (for example, one set in Chamon with a realmgate to Ghyran and the other set in Ghyran with a realmgate of Chamon). The Warhammer 40,000 Chapter Approved 2019 supplement introduced the idea of parallel play games – separate games happening at the same time where the events in one could directly affect the other(s). While no equivalent rules have been published for Age of Sigmar the concept is just as valid. Units and/or cargo could be moved between the gates. Maybe one player’s goal is to get a particular hero, unit or item through the realmgate and off the table edge of the opposite table. Maybe one player starts entirely in control of the realmgate, with the opposing player launching simultaneous assaults from both sides. I think there’s lots of potential here for some epic games and awesome stories!
And with you dreaming over the concept of playing multiple linked games, with units swapping from one game to the other, weapons clashing and endless spells jumping from realm-to-realm I will leave you to start planning one for myself!
