By Peter Cowderoy

In this article, I'm going to explain how I (Peter Cowderoy) went about creating my own wargame, Warhammer 25K. The game is in fact a derivative from Games Workshop's Warhammer 40K, set during an earlier period of the game's history and written with the intention of removing all the cheese and all the holes in the rules.

I got started after a friend and I were discussing 40K and were messing around with ideas to make it better. The suggestion was made to re-write the rules, and then to set it in a different time period so the fluff could be altered. This would allow us to get rid of races we didn't like, or modify them heavily. The first suggestion was to do 50K, but we couldn't decide whether to be serious or to take the piss. Numerous silly suggestions based around the prophecies in 40K were made, including a somewhat silly version of the 'wolf-time' - the Space Wolves' final battle. Later on, after my friend had gone home, the idea to set a game in the Age of Strife hit me. After a quick check with some old fluff, the millenium was picked and 25K was born.

>From there, I had to sort out the core rules and start producing armies. For the main rules, I took the 40K ones and then sorted out all the bits that I thought were broke, and filled in a couple of other bits, namely pinning and opportunity fire. After bashing out a preliminary set of rules, I created a very simple army list (with just assault, tactical, heavy weapons and veteran squads) and gave it a playtest game. As it happened, the basic ideas seemed to work quite well, with only a few tweaks necessary. So I went on to create a large human army list.

If you're writing a game from scratch, then it will probably be a little harder to set up your core rules. The best way to do this I guess would be to start considering how the thing is meant to operate in general. Turn based, or something a little more simultaneous? How do you want to represent the way troops carry out their actions? For example, how are you going to handle the mix between moving and shooting? Two methods of doing this are action points and giving movement allowances for walking and shooting and for running without shooting. If the game's turn based, are you going to allow shooting in the opponent's turn, or even movement? These kinds of question are far more critical than how you determine the whether shots hit, wound and so on. These kind of rules are fairly easy to make up once you've looked at the way a few systems handle them, and so I suggest taking inspiration from your favorite games here. However, just bear in mind the way you want the game to play. Getting the balance right between say, how powerful hand-to-hand combat and shooting are can have a pretty big effect - you'll really notice it if you don't.

So on to army lists. At this point it really pays to have some kind of background, some idea what the personality of the armies is. Now I'm still a little inexperienced at army list writing, but my suggestion is to keep in mind the way each army is supposed to operate on the battlefield and create troops appropriately. There are several basic varieties of trooper, e.g. tactical, assault, heavy weapons that need to be put in balance. Other important ones include scouts, maybe snipers, and vehicles (split into most of these groups again). You may well wish to include 'personality' squads, in a similar vein to the Blood Angels Death Company. These squads should also have their roles picked accordingly. A good place to start is looking at why other people's lists work.

A lot of the squads in my human army list for 25K look as if they've been taken from a 40K Space Marine list, or maybe pinched from Necromunda. This is fine, as it creates exactly the feel I'm after. The rest of it is added by the character section of the list. My heroic leaders aren't as strong as those in 40K, and not as heavily armed or armored, but there are some other, useful types in there. For example, the sniper. I knew I wanted to have a sniper in the game, and past experience has taught me that making them too easily available is a big mistake. However, they *do* have to be able to pick off the target of their choice in one shot. Hence, the unarmored guy with a powerful gun that's a sod to move-and-fire with. To avoid cheese, I've kept away from giving the ability to buy items that can work in combination. There are a few, of course, but these are carefully vetted, and any big holes someone shows me will be closed up pronto.

The real nasty bit is of course game balance. Balancing different troop types and armies can be a real pain in the ass. In 25K, I've managed to get by mostly on intuition. For some troop types (say veterans vs. ordinary troopers) you can work out how to price them with a few probability calculations. For others, such as infiltrators, the best method is to pick a value and playtest a bit. As for different armies, I unfortunately have little experience of this. Maybe next time?