Tanzanica Rules

What do I need to play?

A copy of the Mordheim rules, the usual dice and rulers.

What is different from Mordheim?

• Added pinning from Necromunda. This means if a hit is scored by a missile weapon but no wound is scored the figure is pinned and must pass a leadership test to move from cover or must fall back to cover if in the open. The pinned figure may check leadership before he moves to remove the pin. If leadership is passed, he may move normally.

• Dropped armor saves as the only armor used is shields. Shields now act like swords in Mordheim and provide a parry. This may be combined with a sword to roll two dice to beat the attackers hit roll, pick the parry you want to use do not combine the numbers. You may only parry one attacker per turn. A six still cannot be parried.
• We do not use Mordheim's critical hits but do use Necromunda's ammo roll. This means that if you roll a six to wound when firing a missile weapon you make an ammo check vs. the ammo roll on the equipment chart. If you roll equal to or higher than the ammo number on two dice you are fine, if not you are out of ammo for the duration of the scenario.
• We have replace wyrdstone with Tusks and supplies. We use bearer figures to represent this on the table and have the bearer follow the first one to touch them around until they are captured by someone else. We let the player sell it using the wyrdstone chart.
• Only Witchdoctors get spells and only from their own list. When casting spells that affect a European character, +2 is added to the difficulty roll. If you are playing historical drop em, but a case can be made that the spell represents some trick or shared hallucination. Witchdoctors had a real affect on those that believed in them, magic or not.
• We call the Gold Crowns from Mordheim Pounds and groups start with 500£.
• We are working on a special equipment chart and do not use the Mordheim one as is.

Who has been playing this?

The Monday Night Adventurers a gaming group that has been gaming together for seventeen years in the Washington DC area. The MNA regularly run games at Historicon, and Cold Wars and play a wide variety of games and periods. The group is remarkably argument free and thus may well be blind to abusable rules in this set, feel free to let me know what holes you spot. We make adjustments on the fly and are the bane of rules lawyers but we like the foundations to be good.

This isn't extremely Historical is it?

In 'realistic' games I dislike national or racial modifiers. These are used to simulate things that are frequently due to factors like fatigue or whether or not the armies have eaten lately yet get passed off as American marksmanship or French elan. In the real world the British could be shaken, the Americans could not shoot any better than anyone else, and the Zulus ran the same speed as anyone else. This is not meant to be a 'realistic' game, it is a fun adventure type game to give a good flavor of African colonial skirmish combats. It can be played with a very historical feel, but we normally approach it like a jungle adventure movie. I like the Mordheim experience system and campaign mode because it changes the way players approach the skirmish and makes them treat their figures with more concern than a one up skirmish usually does. Ironically this can make the player play more 'realistically' than they do with a more 'realistic' set of rules.

But what about

Machine Guns, Gun Boats, Airplanes, Tauregs, Lost Civilizations, Pure Big Game Hunts, Pirates, Mahdists, Italians, and all the other cool stuff. We are playing with ways to put these into the game, send me your ideas. This is a rough first cut on the rules. They will evolve as played and changes will be posted. I will put these up on a web page and let you all know where it lives as I welcome your suggestions and feedback. Be sure to check the variants page as several folks on the Colonial Mailing list have sent in ideas!