Video Game / Mordheim: City of the Damned

"Who among you shall die today?"

Mordheim was once the jewel of the Empire; an island of peace and prosperity in a nation wracked by civil war. However, the people of the city grew arrogant and hedonistic, and it is said that the gods punished them by casting a great, twin-tailed comet to destroy the city and render it uninhabitable.

Years later, Mordheim is the center of a figurative gold rush. The comet that destroyed the city was composed entirely of a magical substance known as wyrdstone, and tiny shards can be found everywhere in the city streets; spreading the taint of Chaos and transforming Mordheim into an Eldritch Location populated by mutants, monsters and worse. Drawn by the mineral's value as an arcane resource, many factions and races now stalk the streets in search of wyrdstone, competing savagely and braving the unknown dangers in search of fortune and glory.

Created by Rogue Factor and published by Focus Home Interactive, Mordheim: City of the Damned is a video game adaptation of Mordheim that places the player in control of a variety of factions delving into the eponymous ruined city and competing for its hidden riches. Players manage their warband and scavenge for wyrdstone and other resources to appease their sponsors and grow in strength, battling other warbands along the way. Fallen warriors can have their equipment stolen, or suffer injuries that will impact their performance in later missions - assuming they even survive them.

Mordheim was initially released for PC on November 19th, 2015; it was then ported to PlayStation 4 and Xbox One on October 18th, 2016. The core game boasts four playable factions: The Human Mercenaries, the Sisters of Sigmar, the Cult of the Possessed and the Skaven. Two more factions - the Witch Hunters and the Undead - are available as paid DLC.

Tropes of Mordheim: City of the Damned:

• Achilles' Heel:
  • Large creatures (including most of the Impressive units) get an armor reduction bonus and increased resistance to critical, stun and poison, so it's difficult to cripple or hurt them in a straight fight. On the flip side, they get a resistance penalty for missile attacks due to being such big targets. Having a warband unload all their bows, shurikens and guns on an Impressive can bring it down surprisingly quick.
  • Some of the toughest characters in the game are "parry tanks" — Mighty Glaciers that enshew dodging in favor of parrying/countering melee attacks and wearing heavy armor. However, attacks with the "overwhelm" property cannot be parried at all, and the most common sources of this trait are the melee-weapon mutations wielded by the Cult of the Possessed, particularly the Chaos Spawn and Possessed units, who start with claws.
• Acrofatic: The Executioner is a very big, squarishly-built guy with a rather prominent gut. However he has a superhuman Agility maximum of 20! Only the inhuman Crypt Horror and Chaos Spawn match that.
• Arbitrary Gun Power: Firearms are an alternative to bows. They're slower, but deal more damage per shot; however, it will still take at least 3-4 shots to down most enemy units.
• An Arm and a Leg: Both are possible injuries. If a warrior is missing an arm, he'll never again wield an offhand weapon, a shield or a two-hander. A warrior with a missing foreleg becomes slower-moving and less capable of landing safely from a leap or jump. In both cases, the character completely loses the ability to climb. A small mercy is that your troops can still be Handicapped Badasses, and CPU enemies will have these too according to the state of your own troops.
• Annoying Arrows: Played semi-straight. Arrows still hurt, but far less than an equivalent melee attack. Archers are good at whittling away enemies, but arrows alone will rarely kill an enemy unless you have multiple archers focusing on the same target.
• Antidote Effect: This game gets hit hard with it, the most amount of items that a unit can carry is 6 (and only very strong units can do so) with much of that space dedicated to carrying treasure and wyrdstone. This makes highly situational items like anti-venom hard to justify, especially in a game where these items are unreliable while poison effects are uncommon and wear off in a short duration.
• Anti-Frustration Features: To keep clumsy units from dying of failed climbs, the makers patched the game where each failed attempt improves the chance of making a climb. Additionally to help experienced players shorten the time of starting a new warband, the game has Veteran Points which gives valuable contacts, increased starting cash and reduced shop costs. As well the first time a warband reaches Level 5, an option appears where you can start any new warband at Level 5 (this opens all unit types and slots. It also allows shops to sell Master quality goods).
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: The number of units you can deploy, and the number of units you can keep on reserve between missions, increases based on the rank of your warband. The maximum possible number of units you can have in a mission is one Leader, five Henchmen, and four Heroes/two Heroes and one Impressive unit.
• Armor-Piercing Attack: Certain weapons such as flails, axes and crossbows will go through armour better than other weapons (the degree of effectiveness depends on the weapon) as do weapons that have been enchanted with a rune specifically for going through armour. Magic attacks will completely ignore armor.
• Armor Is Useless: Mostly Averted. Unlike the tabletop game, armor reduces damage rather than offer a chance of taking no damage or full damage. The armor reduction when stacked on certain abilities, could make a character almost immune to certain attacks. Additionally there are fewer armor-piercing weapons in the video game. The only drawbacks are that light and heavy armour will reduce agility and initiative, while heavy armour also has significant movement penalty. However the agility penalties get reduced, as better quality armour is found or bought. Fine or Master-crafted cloth armour offers damage reduction without any penalty.
  • More played straight early on: given your troops' lack of skills, how tight money will be and your opponents' henchmen only being able to attack once per turn, the value of an increased chance to avoid damage completely with extra mobility to help with exploration and looting vs. a certainty of taking reduced damage against all attacks is skewed quite heavily in favour of the former. As your opponents start gaining skills and multiple attacks later on, dodging becomes much less useful and your cloth-clad warriors will start sporting more advanced protection.
• Artificial Brilliance: The AI tends to focus their attacks in on badly injured or under-powered troops in your warband. This can make training low-ranked new recruits on a high level warband quite hazardous. It also means it's vital to get badly wounded soldiers away from the enemy as fast as possible, which can be difficult on open ground, particularly if the enemy has a lot of ranged units.
• Artificial Stupidity:
  • The computer can have great difficulties with large units (and sometimes regular units too). Don't be surprised to find an enemy Ogre stuck helplessly in a doorway, while 5 metres away from him your forces gun him down. Also the Executioner has an odd habit of throwing his brazier in front of him and getting trapped on it.
  • The enemy Warband will sometimes field units that make absolutely no sense, like one-armed Marksmen equipped with daggers. As the game goes on, it becomes easier because it is much harder for the randomly-built AI troops to compete with optimized troops fielded by an experienced player.
  • The AI will never raid your cart, meaning you don't have to defend it to prevent the theft of your icon and any items or Wyrdstone you store on your cart is completely safe from the enemy.
  • AI pathfinding is limited to straight lines, and enemy units will opt for the quickest possible route to their target. This leads to many tactical blunders:
    • It's quite common for enemies to advance on your formation, only to run out of movement and stop just short of charge range. Particularly amusing if you have a lot of ranged units or casters who haven't had their turn yet.
    • AI pathfinding never takes potential traps into consideration. Expect to see more than one charge attack negated thanks to an obvious trap marker sprung by the related movement (which stops the unit in its tracks and wastes the offense points).
    • While the AI is downright nasty about performing charge attacks from just beyond your own units' ambush ranges, enemy units will happily blunder into ambush attacks set around corners due to their singleminded focus on reaching charge/melee range.
• Asteroids Monster: When a Pink Horror is slain, it splits into two Blue Horrors.
• Authority Equals Ass Kicking: The leader units for each warband are excellent warriors who can soak up and dish out a lot of damage. The one exception is the Cultist leader, who is a Squishy Wizard who can't handle the front lines of combat anywhere nearly as well as the others.
• Awesome, but Impractical:
  • Two-handed weapons hurt, but they're slow and tiring (resulting in attacks becoming weaker and more costly with successive strikes) and just carrying one hurts your dodge and initiative ratings. Attacks performed with two-handed weapons also increase the opponent's chance to dodge them by 10%, meaning that you're more likely to end up dealing no damage at all.
    • The exception to this being Halberds, which don't give the enemy a +10% dodge chance and are the only two handed weapons that allow you to parry.
  • Dual-wield will total the damage from both weapons into a single powerful hit and there is no damage drop per attack, but dual wielding tacks on a heavy -25% damage penalty to the attack and it still causes tiring. Two-handed weapons tend to perform much better than dual-wielding for units with 1 or 2 attacks. Non-Impressive units with many attacks can attack with a single weapon more often.
  • Mainly one that concerns the Mercenaries: Firearms. They do more damage per-shot than bows or crossbows, but they take many more Strategy and Offence points to fire and reload. They're maybe better in the early game when your Marksmen can only shoot once a turn anyway, but when they level up, bows replace them because they can do multiple attacks a turn.
  • Played with in the case of heavy armour. While heavy armour offers a substantial damage reduction, it comes with a LOT of drawbacks: it slows your unit to a crawl and reduces their ability to dodge an attack, a worthy consideration seeing as quite a few weapons like halberds, flails and two-handed axes will cleave through the resistance offered (and these are all slower weapons that lightly-armoured troops with good dodging skills will laugh at - though if they are hit they'll take a lot of damage). That said, a unit isn't exactly guaranteed to succeed at their dodge either and they can only successfully dodge one attack a turn unless you invest in expensive skills like Sidestep, while heavy armour at least offers a guaranteed reduction on every attack that hits. You can also get the Armour Proficient skill to reduce (and eventually negate entirely) the painful movement penalty. Probably which is best depends on your plan for the character and the stage of the game; unarmoured or light armour is better early on, but heavy armour eventually justifies itself.
  • The Last Stand perk is a double-edged sword: it can allow your tank to keep multiple enemies engaged without having to test for All Alone... or it can keep one of your units stuck in a bad position because it prevents you from fleeing or disengaging.
  • The Norse Marauder and the Possessed have impressive stats and can deal tons of damage (attacks from the Possessed also cannot be parried)... but they both have mediocre defenses and cannot wear heavy armor. Chances are they'll go down before the enemy.
  • Having two arm mutations means two different types of stat-draining poison attacks, however for anyone other than the Chaos Spawn this can be very impractical. With two mutated arms, a hero cannot pick things off the ground (which can be awful as heroes capable of mutating have high strength and can make great pack mules). You try picking something up when both your hands are axes.
  • The Rat Ogre has the potential to become just as strong and tough as an Ogre, its attacks cannot be parried - unlike those of an Ogre - and it's only slightly slower than your average Skaven warrior (not to mention that it can also achieve a decent Dodge rating and has a pretty high Initiative). The problem? It's Stupid and its maximum Intelligence - the stat on which Stupidity rolls are based - is ten (for reference, that's nearly as low as it gets). This drawback can be compensated by having another warrior use the Guidance skill on the Rat Ogre, skipping the Stupidity test entirely... but that means someone else in your warband has to invest skill points on Guidance, that you have to spend the money to train it, that said warrior will have to spend 3 Strategy Points per turn just to keep the Rat Ogre operational, and that you'll have to keep the Guidance unit away from any melee, since the skill cannot be used if said unit is engaged. Oh, and this unit better have a high enough Initiative to act before the Rat Ogre, otherwise everything will go to waste. Considering that the Rat Ogre might be the poster boy for hidden costs awareness campaigns, it's no surprise that many players refuse to field one. Though the tide is turning on this, as people find out the Rat Ogre can use enchanted amulets/pendants with anti-stupidity features and they get fantastic synergy with Black Hunger and Swarm skills.
• Anyone Can Die: And many of your warriors will.
• Bad Boss: The player, almost unavoidably. "You lost an arm fighting for my profit. I commend your bravery. Treatment? Sorry, no budget for that. If you could just keep quiet while you're in the corner dying, that'd be great."
• Badass Normal: Somewhat the point of the Human Mercenaries faction. Taking on psychotic mutants and demon-worshippers, murderous rat-men, all-female religious fanatics who can deflect bullets and heal wounds with their faith, the slavering hordes of the undead, and living manifestations of humanity's darker side, are a ragtag bunch of Reiklander sellswords who have nothing but sharpened steel, firearms and their wits. And sometimes they win.
  • The new Witch Hunters faction's 'Impressive Unit', the Executioner. Unlike the Impressives of other factions, the Executioner isn't a monster or empowered by the supernatural - He's just an extremely big and strong man who likes to carry a large weapon. This gets reflected in his stats, where his maximum strength is 16 compared to other Impressives who can reach 20 Strength.
• Badass Preacher: The Witch Hunters have a warrior priest hero unit, who serves as the team healer and can even be an effective damage dealer with the right build.
  • There's also the DLC Priest of Ulric, just as good at dishing out pain as his Sigmarite counterpart.
• Bad Luck Mitigation Mechanic: Failing a climb check provides a bonus to successive climb checks, allowing even the most graceless characters to eventually haul themselves up.
• Balance, Power, Skill, Gimmick: Of the 4 base game factions: Human Mercenaries are balanced, Skaven are highly mobile but lightly armored, Sisters of Sigmar are heavily armored but rather slow and lack ranged options, and the Cult of the Possessed distinguish themselves by giving their heroes random mutations.
• Battle Trophy: The 'Marked For Death' secondary objective requires you to defeat certain members of the opposing warband and claim special trinkets they're carrying.
• Blade Below the Shoulder: A possible mutation that replaces a random arm with a weapon covered in a debuff-inducing poison, and it comes in multiple flavors:
  • The Executioner is an axe blade that weakens armor. It also has a variation called the Destroyer, which reduces how much damage a target can do in melee combat.
  • The Ripper is a crab-like claw that makes its victims more vulnerable to critical strikes.
  • The Smasher is a huge fleshy club that lowers a target's stun resistance. It also has a variation called the Crusher, which reduces poison resistance.
  • The Slicer is a literal Blade Below the Shoulder that makes a target more vulnerable to subsequent melee attacks. It also has a variation called the Piercer, which instead makes a target vulnerable to ranged attacks.
• Black-and-Grey Morality: The "Order" factions include a pack of amoral mercenaries and two groups of religious zealots, while the "Destruction" factions are a daemon cult, a race of evil rat-men, and vampires gearing up for a war on humanity.
• Blessed with Suck: Your warband can hire experienced units, known as Hired Swords. These will start off with abilities and stat increases that you can assign. They may also come with some nice equipment, too. However, a good number of these may have already taken various crippling injuries that can make them almost useless, despite their skills. So buyer beware!
  • The Mutant is the best ranged attacker for the Cult of the Possessed. But if he gets a random arm mutation, that effectively ends his archer career and just makes him a somewhat decent warrior, who can hit and run unlike the Marauder and Possessed. If later on he gets a torso mutation, he slides further down in effectiveness as a melee fighter.
    • If you have a Cult unit with both arms mutated into weapons, they can be pretty good in a fight. Unfortunately they can no longer scavenge or loot, use shields or have an empty hand. This of course is a non-issue for the Chaos Spawn who can't pick up items anyways, can't use shields and isn't affected by fatigue.
• Boring, but Practical:
  • Using only a single one-handed weapon adds a 10% boost to a warrior's dodge chance, thanks to the empty hand being used for balance. Wearing no armor also adds 10% to dodge chances. Combined, a warrior can have a 20% higher chance to dodge attacks, which can be a godsend for low-level warriors that naturally have sub-par dodge chances on their own.
    • Note that both of these options have drawbacks, just to reinforce how tough things are: single one-handed weapons have mediocre damage, and lacking armor means that the attacks that DO hit you will hurt much more. Between the two, you won't win blow-for-blow, so you'd better pray to the Random Number God that the enemy misses as much as possible.
  • Using a single one-handed weapon with a shield. Not only does the shield improve your parrying chances, but it also increases the likelihood of an enemy missing you with a ranged or melee attack and this improves with better quality shields. Having a single weapon means that your unit does not get the tiring penalty nor the dual-wield reduced damage penalty, for a unit that can do many attacks this could mean they do more damage than with dual-wielding or using a 2-H weapon.
  • True to form, the humble spear and mace are both the most useful one-handed weapons for low-level troops. Not only do they offer a bonus to Initiative, but the chance to bypass dodge and parry and the increased hit chance (respectively) will help get those crucial killing hits in when they need to.
  • Impressive units are huge, powerful, deal obscene damage and can take it just as hard... but if you pass on one, you can take two Hero units in their place. These two units, depending on specifics, can hit just as hard and tank just as well, and have the added perk of being able to split up and work two different locations as needed. The Impressive units for the Chaos, Skaven, and Mercenaries warbands are also gigantic, and can't go through some doors or leap/jump/climb.
    • This idea has a huge drawback!! The more heroes you have, means the enemy has an equal number of heroes. The computer is notoriously bad at using Impressive units effectively, so taking an Impressive unit usually weighs heavily in your favour especially if the objective is killing the other side. But when the enemy has more heroes, it greatly increases their likelihood of harming your party in some fashion especially on maps that divide your forces.
  • Consumables are easily forgotten next to weapons and armor, but poultices will help keep your warband from losing time and money as they succumb to light wounds (a unit will get the light wounds injury and open wounds status if they get hit with a critical hit). Meanwhile healing draughts are one of the few ways to recover health.
• Capture the Flag: The 'Break Their Will' secondary objective involves raiding the enemy wagon to steal their idol and bring it back to your wagon chest, while protecting your own.
• Career-Ending Injury: It's generally a good idea to dismiss gravely injured troops and replace them with healthy raw recruits unless they're really experienced or you're just really attached to them. Your grizzled old Sister Superior with her peg-leg, gouged eye, mutilated hand and permanently crazed look on her face will certainly look like a badass even if her actual performance isn't so great. Skull fractures and severed arms and legs are what will most likely end your warriors' careers.
• The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard: Oh so blatant. It occurs less with lower-level warbands, but the skill checks will almost always favor the AI, and accuracy ratings will sometimes outright lie; it's more common than not to see players consistently miss attacks of 80% or higher accuracy, while enemies who should feasibly have 50% or less accuracy will land their hits nearly every time. The AI appears far more likely to get critical hits as well; multiple consecutive criticals is a common sight for the AI, whereas such occurrences are exceedingly-rare for human players.
• Continuing is Painful: Losing a battle can have disastrous results. You can lose your best equipment and have your elite troops suffer permanent injuries or death, forcing you to replace them or wait days for them to finish healing.
• Counter-Attack: If a warrior has the appropriate amount of offense points when attacked by an enemy, they can immediately counter-attack. Successfully parrying an attack makes the following counter-swing one point cheaper to perform.
• Crapsack World: Within a Crapsack World. Mordheim is considered one of the most dangerous and terrifying places in the Warhammer world, and this is a world where cannibalistic goat men roam the woods and demon-worshipping vikings constantly raid the coast. The city is littered with signs of madness: carriages where the horses have been skinned and placed on the cab while kneeling corpses of men are hitched to the front, random limbs and gore strewn about like macabre decorations to some insane festival, bodies hanged from windows and roofs and scattered in varying states of decomposition. The streets and buildings are covered in Meat Moss or rigged with traps — both liable to spew some horrible toxin on unwary passerby — and all manner of strange creatures and apparitions can be found. Hardly anybody still lives here, and the ones who do are scarred in mind, body and soul; most are in league with daemons or vampires, and they're killed on sight by everyone else because of it. The hunt for wyrdstone adds roaming packs of heavily-armed warriors to the mix: Opportunistic mercenary looters and thieving rat-men collect wyrdstone to be shipped to parts unknown, religious zealots murder anyone who covets the tainted mineral, and mutant cultists gather it to offer as tribute to an Eldritch Abomination lurking in the comet's impact crater. Even daemons from beyond the skein of reality can be found prowling the streets, granted form by the raw, ambient magic of the wyrdstone. Not for nothing is Mordheim called the City of the Damned.
• Crippling Over Specialization: Nothing can dish out a beating or take one like an Impressive Unit. But of the six varieties, only three can use armor other than cloth, and only the Maiden of Sigmar can use a shield or pick up items.
• Critical Failure: Of a sort. No matter how many modifiers you stack in your favour, attacks will always have a five percent chance of failure (the only exception is trying to hit a Stunned unit with a melee attack, which will always be a guaranteed hit).
• Critical Hit:
  • Any ranged and melee attack has a chance to deal one. They take the form of inflicting the maximum amount of damage possible (and ignoring damage resistances) and a roll to see if the target is Stunned. Notably, the chance to inflict one can depends on what weapon is used and what skills the attacker or the defender possess. It is entirely possible to have a critical hit chance of 0. It is also possible to have a high chance to hit but a low chance to crit, or the reverse.
  • Conversly, no matter how many modifiers you stack, it is impossible to have 0 percent chance to land an attack (easily verifiable by trying to hit the Sisters of Sigmar's Impressive unit with a ranged attack. Depite her minus 200% to be hit from range, there will still be 1 percent chance to hit her).
• Crutch Character: The Sisters can be seen as an entire crutch faction. They can all wear heavy armor, have proficiency with hard-hitting melee weapons, and have easy access to healing and support spells; the final strategy for most Sisters warbands involves advancing your wall of nigh-unkillable, magic-flinging, hammer-swinging pain slowly up the map until everything is dead. However, their lack of range, poor mobility, and awful climbing skills means that even fairly standard movement tactics such as ambushing, overwatch, and flanking are far less reliable for them. They're powerful, but overusing them can encourage tactics that will get other factions killed in a hurry.
• Cursed with Awesome:
  • Losing an arm renders a warrior unable to duel-wield, carry a shield or use a two-handed weapon, which is crippling for dedicated ranged fighters... On the other hand, the warrior also gains a permanent 20% boost to their dodge chance, which will definitely help a unit geared for melee combat.
    • Note that, in this case, "help" means "keep useful until the player can replace them with a non-mutilated warrior". A one-armed warrior won't be able to dual-wield or use two-handed weapons, nor to use a shield, which will make them pretty mediocre at both damage dealing and tanking.
  • Several of the Chaos mutations are pants-soiling levels of Body Horror, but no one can deny the significant bonuses they grant.
  • Injuries that would normally be crippling on some characters can end up not changing anything for others, leading only to lower combat rating (which affects enemies' Level Scaling and wages). The Amok brain injury (unit can never run away) on a character that already has Last Stand (unit is immune to leadership checks but can not run away or back off from melee) or Megalomania (unit cannot use ranged weapons and spellcasting costs are greatly increased) on a physical fighter are two such examples.
• Difficult, but Awesome:
  • The Cult of the Possessed has a horrible early game (see below), but if they manage to survive it in decent condition, they have the potential to become pretty powerful. A full-tank Darksoul can keep multiple enemy warriors occupied for round after round, since Darksouls never take All Alone tests and can become pretty sturdy, a Magister with advanced Chaos Chains can make enemy Heroes nearly powerless, and a Possessed or Spawn with the right mutations can destroy them like there's no tomorrow.
  • Similarly, the Undead from the DLC. Neither of their henchmen can wear armour or use ranged weapons nor consumables, Ghouls can't disengage, Zombies can't even use two-handed weapons and both have fairly mediocre stats. However being mindless undead they have one crucial advantage; immunity to psychological checks (and in the case of Zombies, poison immunity to boot). The Vampire leader unit on the other hand is a combat monster: ludicrously high stats, psychology and poison immunity plus Terror from the start and the ability to equip nearly any gear loadout... but if he does go down then the whole warband is in deep trouble. When the Undead hit Warband Level 4, they get the Necromancer, who can cast a load of useful support spells; Call of Vanhel helps gets those slow Zombies into the melee quickly and survive a bit longer once they're in, and Idol of Death helps with ensuring that enemies fail those crucial psychology checks. In the hands of an unaccustomed player, the Undead may be outmanuevered and sorely beaten; in the hands of an experienced player, they're extremely dangerous.
  • Human Warlocks: At the start of the game they are complete garbage. Their starting spell, Blinding Light, causes no damage and has a significant curse risk at low ranks. As a typical Squishy Wizard, they cannot handle much damage on the front lines, and their physical attacks, while not terrible, are far below that of dedicated melee characters. Due to their physical weaknesses, the enemy AI will often try to gang up on them. They can equip bows, which allows the player keep them back from the front lines while still inflicting some damage with them, but it's still far below the damage output of even your Marksmen, making early-game Warlocks a liability as bringing them will cause the enemy warband to get a hero unit likely far more effective in battle. But if you can keep your Warlock alive till late ranks (7 or above), they eventually become quite formidable, with a massive array of devastating spells, as well as skills to increase casting chances, reduce curse chance, and survive in melee combat. Late-game equipment can also help with this as well.
• Disability Superpower:
  • Having a severed arm gives a warrior a +20% to their dodge rating. That's an even higher bonus then warriors who have two arms get for fighting in ordinary clothes with a one-handed weapon and nothing in their off-hand. It also makes sense for an appropriately-morbid reason - they have less body mass for their opponent to hit.
    • For the Possessed hero, losing an arm is even more beneficial (especially if it's his left arm - his right arm is the only one capable of getting the extra-arm mutation). Normally the Possessed keeps getting tired and does reduced damage as he MUST use both his hands to attack, but losing his arm means that he can attack without these penalties and the extra dodge bonus is great for a hero that can only wear cloth.
  • Similarly, a warrior with a missing eye will find it a bit harder to hit at both range and melee, but they do at least get a bonus to Perception checks.
  • The "Featureless Face" mutation completely erases a character's eyes, nose and mouth, in exchange for making Perception checks completely free to perform, and with a +20% bonus.
  • The Sisters of Sigmar Augur unit is blind, but is blessed with the sight of Sigmar, which basically gives her normal vision. On top of that, she's immune to eye injuries.
• The Dreaded: Any unit with the Fear or Terror trait is this trope in-universe. Fear just makes troops lose their nerve and less likely to hit in melee, but Terror causes the affected unit to freeze in horror, unable to act (a state represented by a loss of Offence and Mobility pips). The Cult and especially the Undead are a big source of this.
• Dynamic Difficulty: The computer on Normal Difficulty will match the build and rating of your warband, taking into account their experience, stats and equipment (including the one-shot consumables). Higher difficulties will give the computer a bonus to damage and health on top of that. The rating comparison isn't an exact one and if you have a party with low-level heroes and Level 10 henchmen, you could end up fighting a lopsided battle against a warband with Level 10 heroes and inexperienced thugs.
• Early Game Hell: At the beginning of a campaign your warriors are fragile, money is tight and you don't have access to powerful skills yet. Also, if it's your first campaign ever, chances are that you won't know how to build your characters, resulting in suboptimal builds the game will be all too happy to smash. Prepare to fire your entire warband and start a new one many, many times.
  • If early game is hard for everyone, the Cult of the Possessed has it even worse. Their Commander is a Squishy Wizard who cannot hold his ground in a melee (he's the only leader unable to do so in the early game) and their henchmens' defensive stats are sub-par, making them particularly vulnerable. In a game where being knocked out of action can lead to permanent injuries, the Cult of the Possessed's inherent frailty means that one or two bad games can force you to start the campaign all over.
• Elite Mooks: Hero units. They have better offence, defence and mobility stats than henchmen, and access to master-level skills. Some like the Human's Warlock, the Skaven's Eshin Sorcerer and the Undead's Necromancer can even cast magic. Later on you can take two of them, or up to four if you're willing to go without an Impressive unit. Any henchman can be graduated up to a Hero unit by the "Lad's Got Talent" passive.
• Eldritch Location: The Grand Library of Mordheim is host to a chaotic layout of rooms connected by portals, is absolutely covered in the Meat Moss seen in the rest of the city, and is occupied by a pack of daemons summoned by the Library's deranged curator.
• Endless Game: While there are story missions in a campaign, completing them doesn't really lead to an ending, and you can continue playing and accruing the day as much as you want beyond that.
• Enemy Exchange Program: If you're willing to send some wyrdstone shipments to the secondary customers, you can eventually unlock recruitment of one henchmen type and one hero type belonging to other factions of the same alignment — Human Mercenaries, Sisters of Sigmar and Witch Hunters are grouped together as "Order", while the Cult of the Possessed, Skaven and Undead are "Destruction". This can be used to shore up on your warband's weaknesses, like recruiting Mercenary Marksmen and Youngbloods to provide ranged support to the Sisters of Sigmar.
• Everything Trying to Kill You: Every other warband in the game is hostile and will attack you on sight, even others of the same race, and the city itself is also riddled with traps, hazards and the occasional daemonic invader to contend with. Even the wrydstone you're gathering is Toxic Phlebotinum, and can saddle your warriors with nasty debuffs at the worst possible time.
• Expy: The Sisters of Sigmar in the board game were very basic, they didn't even have a Purifier let alone something like the Maiden of Sigmar. So it appears that they took cues from the Sisters of Battle to flesh them out more.
• Eyeless Face: The Featureless Face mutation, which somehow makes Perception tests free of charge and increases their success rate by 20%.
• Eyes Do Not Belong There: Two mutations cause this: The Eye, which creates a giant eyeball in the chest, and Thousand Eyes, which results in dozens of little eyeballs all over the upper body - both of which renders the bearer unable to wear any form of armor.
• Fake Difficulty: No matter how careful you are in choosing your missions, deploying your warriors and navigating the ruins of Mordheim: if the Random Number God decides to screw you over, you will miss a string of 90%-chance-to-hit attacks, while your opponents will hit with all their attacks and critstun you half the time.
• Fantasy Metals: Averted. Unlike the board game which had gromril and ithilmar weapons that could be found, the computer game does away with the fantasy metals and instead has equipment that's of superior design compared to the usual item of the same type.
• Flaming Sword: The Executioner lights up his weapons to do lingering damage over time.
• Fighter, Mage, Thief: Every warband has three Hero unit choices, who fight the roles of a light combat hero, a heavy combat hero and a spellcaster. For example, the Mercenaries have the Champion, the Youngblood and the Warlock, while the Skaven have the Black Skaven, the Night Runner and the Eshin Sorcerer. Averted in the case of the Cult of the Possessed, who have the Marauder (frontline fighter), the Possessed (frontline fighter) and the Mutant (frontline fighter, can be a decent archer too)
• Fragile Speedster: Thanks to the Arbitrary Headcount Limit described above, the Skaven have been redesigned as this. Plenty of strategy points and high dodge chances all around, but low defense means they die quickly if you can hit them, and low morale means they can only take a few casualties before they rout.
• Game-Over Man: Losing a battle results in your warband's Supporting Leader admonishing you for your failure during the loading screen.
  Merga: "Disappointing the Shadowlord leads to death, and things worse than death. Do not fail him again."
• Giant Mook: Impressive warriors are huge, lumbering, and capable of dishing out and receiving ridiculous amounts of damage. At higher ranks, the only units besides other impressives who can stand against them are heroes or leaders who have been fine-tuned to receive/avoid damage. Too bad that for all their power in combat, their sheer size means they can't climb and they can't fit through doors (with the exceptions of the human-sized Maiden of Sigmar, Crypt Horror and Executioner).
• Glass Cannon: The Cult of the Possessed (and to a lesser extent the Skaven) are this. The Cult units have various combinations of great offense, above-average mobility, spellcasting, and the ability to get powerful Chaos mutations that can grant them unique and powerful benefits...but their defense is subpar (especially the entry-level units) and their morale is below-average as well.
  • The Possessed hits with incredible strength and ferocity in close combat, even without any arm mutations, and they can bypass an enemy's parry chance to ensure a hit, but they wear nothing more than a ragged pair of pants and their agility is poor (with a correspondingly bad dodge chance). Unfortunately for them their fragility overshadows their damage output.
  • Most Charge-based builds result in warriors who can devastate any enemy they come into contact with... but if their Charge attack misses, or if the enemy is still alive after they were hit, the charge warrior is left in a very tough spot, since they tend to have mediocre to low defenses and usually don't fare well in prolonged melees.
  • The Witch Hunters, who play like the Mercenaries with less access to ranged weapons and armour, but they hit like freight trains in close combat. Flagellants can't equip any armour, but give 'em a two-handed flail and they'll crump your average henchman in only two hits.
• Glowing Eyes of Doom: The Daemon Soul mutation, which allows a unit to automatically pass All Alone tests and grants a 25% boost to magic resistance.
• Greater-Scope Villain: The Shadowlord and Murderlord Snikkit are the main sponsors of the Cult of the Possessed and Skaven factions, respectively, but they never appear in person; instead relaying orders through your warband's commander and demanding shipments of wyrdstone in exchange for continued funding.
  • The sponsor for the Undead is Vlad Von Carstein. Since the game's start year is 2000 IC, this means that your wyrdstone hunting is helping Vlad build up power for his attempt to conquer the Empire a decade later; kicking off over a century of conflict that will be known as the Vampire Wars.
• Green Rocks: Wyrdstone, literally. Sickly Green Glow included.
• Guns Akimbo: Characters equipped with pistols will always dual-wield them.
• Healing Magic Is the Hardest: Only the Witch Hunters and Sisters of Sigmar have healing spells. The Sisters of Sigmar have a somewhat weak healing spell that affects an area, while the Witch Hunters's spell affects only one person but recovers a lot of health. Both these spells take the maximum amount of time and money to learn. Other than those two, healing becomes limited to finding healing draughts (they recover small to medium amounts of health depending on the quality) or buying DLC characters, Poison Wind Globadier and Doomweaver and learning their respective skills Infused Globe and Idol of Blood (the first can cause side-effects, while the second requires units to attack an enemy before they recover health). Also no healing method will remove injuries or lessen the recovery time.
• Hero Unit: During the faction missions, your warband will be accompanied by a unique Leader character called a Dramatis Personae. This character is max level and very powerful, but if they are defeated you immediately lose the mission.
  • There are actually a class of units available for your warband CALLED Hero Units, but they fit the role of Elite Mook more.
• Hero with Bad Publicity: Even before the Hammer hit, the Sisters of Sigmar were widely regarded with scorn and suspicion by the predominantly male clergy of Sigmar. The fact that their main base, the Rock, was "conveniently" the only part of the city to be spared the Hammer's wrath has only inflamed hostilities.
• Horned Humanoid: The Crown of Bones and Wrydstone Horns mutations cause this. Merga also has an impressive pair of horns, but they're purely aesthetic.
• Immune to Bullets: The Maiden of Sigmar has the passive "Sigmar's Chosen". This gives her a +200% bonus to her missile resistance, so trying to shoot her means a 1% chance to hit even for expert gunners and archers. So use bombs, melee or magic to fight her.
• Item Crafting: In a move away from the low-magic tabletop game, magic items are almost plentiful. That's because you can make your own magic armour and weapons if their quality is good enough to hold an enchantment.
• Jack of All Stats: The main appeal of the Human Mercenaries faction. Their units are diverse and specialized, meaning the team can field an effective mix of dedicated tanks, damage dealers, archers, and spellcasters. However it's worth noting that they generally edge out the other factions in terms of ranged capability, and despite their modest stats they have the most varied equipment list.
• King Mook: The Dramatis Personae for each faction is essentially a max-level Leader with a unique character model. Merga is a bit of an odd example, because despite being a Magister her model and animations are that of a Sister of Sigmar wielding a great-weapon.
• Knight Templar: The Sisters of Sigmar are hellbent on gathering and stockpiling all of Mordheim's Wyrdstone so it can be locked away and not hurt anyone else. This does put them at odds with the human warbands from the Empire who want to claim the wyrdstone as well as Mordheim's treasures, but really, what are the lives of a few sellswords next to the threat wyrdstone poses?
  • The Witch Hunters even moreso. Convinced that literally everyone in the city has become corrupted and mutated beyond redemption, they are obsessed with razing the entire city and everyone in it to the ground. Not even the Sisters are safe from their wrath, as their sect was already distrusted by puritains, and the fact that the Rock was the only area of the city completely spared by the comet is considered highly suspicious. In their minds, it's better to be safe than sorry.
• Law of Chromatic Superiority: Item quality is indicated by their colour. The basic items are grey, fine quality items are blue (this is the minimal quality of item that can be enchanted), and master-crafted items are purple (and are also the only items that can take master-level enchantments).
• Level Scaling: Your warband comes with a "rating", tallied from the ratings of individual members. In standard missions, enemy warbands field randomized compositions roughly on par with your rating. This makes relying on an overleveled Crutch Character a bad move, as your party's rating will inflate and result in the enemy fielding troops who are stronger on average than yours.
• Luck-Based Mission: So, so many:
  • Dodge and parry work as a secondary chance for an attack to miss, and the up-front statistics displayed to the player don't always factor it in. This means it may not be obvious that the 80% hit chance the player sees is actually closer to 40%.
  • Criticals. There are almost no displays of these in battle, and they have a SIGNIFICANT impact. A crit means both extra damage AND a turn-wasting stun, which in many cases can instantly turn the tide of a fight.
  • Scavenge and Wyrdstone placement. While there are algorithms for it, it's heavily randomized, and entirely possible for all the stones to be clustered just a short jog from the player's spawn... or scattered wildly on the far side of the map, beyond the opposing warband.
  • "Pre-Engagement" deployment conditions. Both warbands are deployed at random across the map, with units of both sides being deployed within combat range of one another. This can result in such fun as your Youngblood archer starting within swinging distance of the enemy's Possessed.
  • Equipment loss and permanent injury after falling. What items you lose, and what (if any) permanent penalty your unit suffers is entirely random, ranging from nothing to death.
    • To an extended point, what can be looted from yours or the enemy's corpse. Just because the enemy is carrying a big, shiny battleaxe doesn't necessarily mean you can snatch it off his remains.
  • Missions themselves, including deployment, objective, what warband you'll face (and their difficulty) and any optional objectives. It's entirely likely to face a row of nothing but Deadly missions, with maybe one Brutal.
    • With randomized enemy warbands, your current opponent may have all his henchmen slots taken by archers counter-intuitively armed with melee weapons, who will rout as soon as you look at them sharply... or you could be staring down a wall of high-level characters with more health than your own toughest warriors.
  • Mandatory Wyrdstone shipments. While the dates are calculable and the deadline is always the same duration, the quantity varies and has no relation to your performance thus far. You can easily end up owing 300 units while your faction is battered, broke, and forced to sit out for several days recuperating.
    • You have SOME leeway with these, in that there are no immediate penalties for failing, but four failures total over your warband's career and that's it; Game Over, no second chances.
• MacGuffin: Wyrdstone, a byproduct of the meteor that hammered Mordheim. These little chunks of glowing crystal are the main reason everyone is fighting over the town. Magically powerful, useful in both alchemy and equipment-forging, and dangerously unstable; the Human Mercenaries want it simply because of its great monetary value, the Skaven want it because it's the lifeblood of their civilization, the Cult of the Possessed want it because it creates mutations and empowers their eldritch god, the Witch Hunters want it because they think only the Church of Sigmar can be trusted to use it and the Undead want it to fuel their planned war with the Empire. The only ones collecting it for largely altruistic reasons are the Sisters of Sigmar, who consider the stones blasphemous and simply want to lock them away.
  • In gameplay terms, Wyrdstone is one of your primary objectives; you'll have a set amount you have to periodically gather, failing which has dire consequences and can even lead to a Nonstandard Game Over. Beyond that, excess Wyrdstone beyond your quota is your primary source of income, AND nets you some nice bonuses from various buyers. It's also Toxic Phlebotinum; Wyrdstone is unstable and units picking them up risk suffering (short-term) mutations, ranging from small positive bonuses to crippling penalties. This is one of the main reasons Chaos wants it, and why the religious factions want to lock it away where it can't affect anyone.
• Macrogame: Present in the form of the Veteran System, and helps alleviate some of the Nintendo Hard nature of the game. Every individual warband you create has their own set of achievements to meet, which all feed into a universal xp meter; when it hits thresholds, the player earns points that can be spent on quality-of-life upgrades, such as reduce unit upkeep, better shop prices, chances at free equipment, and more. Once earned these bonuses apply to all current and future warbands, so even failed warbands ultimately contribute to progress.
• Magikarp Power:
  • The Cult of the Possessed start with an unpredictable Glass Cannon roster - the Magister is the only leader in the game who is a Squishy Wizard, Darksoul henchmen and Marauder heroes are incapable of disengaging from bad fights, Mutant archers can end up ruined by random mutations, and few of their units can wear more than light armor. As the warband grows in size and gains more abilities, however, the Cult becomes quite skilled at hammer-and-anvil tactics. Darksouls tough enough to survive their inability to retreat serve as excellent tarpits for tying up enemy warriors in prolonged melee engagements. Magisters become potent support casters armed with useful buffs and debuffs, able to simply shut down enemy units' offensive capabilities. Possessed and Chaos Spawn, once unlocked, serve as Lightning Bruisers that spread fear and terror effects, and will happily rip parry-tank characters to shreds.
  • The Human Mercenaries Warlock begins the game with a weak debuff spell and has a hard time earning XP, since he's fragile and can't do much on his own. However, after leveling up a bit and earning a few spell points, he can turn into a powerful crowd control wizard with some neat offensive spells as well. Giving him a bow and keeping him out of harm's way can help him survive long enough to get his spells.
• Magic Knight: Possible, though not terribly effective; spellcasters clad in armor or carrying heavy weapons can still cast spells, but have both lower success rates and a higher chance of backfire. This is the Sisters of Sigmar's hat, they don't have any anyone who can use a missile weapon. But they have a Leader, a Hero and an Impressive unit that cast spells, compared to a single spellcaster type for everyone else. The epitome of the magic knight ideal, is the Maiden of Sigmar. Sure she can cast spells as well as the other magic users, but she shines something fierce when it comes to melee. Only a few units can avoid getting curbstomped when they go one on one with her, and on top of that, she's Immune to Bullets so you can't even hose her down with ranged attacks.
• Major Injury Underreaction: When a unit is hit with an arrow or a crossbow bolt, the game animation often shows them proceeding on with the arrow or bolt sticking out of them. This can have some ridiculous results, showing units with arrows/bolts sticking out of their arms, legs, chests, or even heads and carrying on their business as if it's not effecting them at all.
• Meat Moss: Patches of Chaotic growth are all over the city, and any one of them has the potential to spray an unsuspecting warrior with a surprise buff or debuff if he walks too close. Some of the more harmless growths are large enough to completely block off streets or crack apart buildings, and the Great Library map is host to a sprawling mass of living flesh so gargantuan that it almost qualifies as an Eldritch Abomination in itself.
• Metal Slime: Bloodletters, Daemonettes, Pink Horrors, Plaguebearers and Chaos Ogres have a chance to appear on Brutal difficulty missions and above, if at least one of your warriors is Rank 6 or higher. These special enemies are hostile to everyone on the map, and will grant a whopping five Experience Points to the warrior who lands the killing blow on them.
• Mighty Glacier: The Sisters of Sigmar's gimmick; universally slow as molasses, with lousy climbing abilities and a complete lack of ranged weaponry... but they're all tough, hit like a ton of bricks, have high morale, and most of them can cast spells to boot. When fighting them, you're encouraged to use ambushes, hit them at range and generally fight dirty.
  • Exemplifying this, Bertha Bestraufrung's melee damage is obscene: she can pulverize anything short of Impressive units with just one or two attacks. However, her Dodge chance is only 20% and she can only attempt to dodge a single attack per turn. Sure, she's heavily armored, but even her armor can't protect her from Death of a Thousand Cuts if you leave her unsupported for too long.
• Minmaxer's Delight:
  • The Web of Steel skill allows for characters to parry multiple times per round, to a max of three times when upgraded fully. Taking it is a no-brainer for the Mercenary Captain, whose unique skill Swift Reaction boosts parry chance and allows him to counterattack after a successful parry for one less offence point than normal.
• Mook Commander: Warband Leader units. They are typically the most formidable warrior on the team except for the Impressive; though there are exceptions like the Cult Magister, who is more of a Squishy Wizard.
• Mook Chivalry: Averted painfully for actual gameplay, but a quirk of the Campaign means that enemy warbands will only ever field as many units as the player does. This means that, especially later on, players can game the system by only taking four or so of their eight-strong warband, and the enemy will match. Having fewer numbers of units makes managing battles FAR easier, and gives enemies fewer chances to gang up on the player's units.
• Mook Promotion: The "Lad's Got Talent" passive skill — It promotes a Henchman to count as a Hero unit, granting them extra offence and strategy points and allowing them to purchase the second level of skills. Heroes can in turn acquire the "Born Leader" skill, which promotes them to a Leader unit and allows them to train Leader class skills.
• Morale Mechanic: A crucial element of gameplay; each warband has a morale meter that drops when they lose units. After it falls below a certain threshold, the warband has a chance of routing when they suffer further losses, resulting in victory for the opposing side. Every member of the warband has a morale stat that contributes to the warband's total morale pool, as well as a fixed value of morale that is deducted when that unit falls in battle.
  • This is what makes story missions so Nintendo Hard; usually morale is an Instant-Win Condition and hitting it in a close battle can net you the win. The enemy is exempt from morale in story missions, but you are not. You must complete the assigned objectives to win, and if you lose too many units in the process, you can still rout and fail immediately.
  • If a warrior is caught in a melee engagement with more than one opponent, and at least one of those opponents isn't threatened by an ally, they will suffer an "All Alone" leadership test on their next turn. If they fail, the isolated warrior will automatically flee if possible (giving all of their opponents a free attack and retreating in a random direction) and loses all offense points for the turn.
• Multiple Head Case: A partial example, unfortunately: The Extra Face mutation gives a warrior a second face that overlaps with the original, resulting in a face with three eyes, two noses and two pairs of lips over an enormous mouth. The effect is almost akin to a visual glitch.
• Multi-Armed and Dangerous: The Extra Arm mutation gives your unit a weaponized third arm. This is easily one of the better mutations to get; your unit gets a +10% bonus to all melee damage and gains all the benefits of that type of weapon-arm, with no drawbacks whatsoever. However, only the Possessed and Chaos Spawn are capable of developing it.
• The Needless: One of the biggest advantages of the Impressive units is that they never get tired, so they never suffer any penalty for using two-handed weapons or dual wielding. This makes them even harder hitting than they normally are.
• Never Split the Party: Probably the #1 rule for random battles, the easiest way to die is to have your troops isolated and vulnerable to unfavorable matchups. Your easiest way to victory is to have your forces covering each other and able to quickly gang up on enemies. This means if you have a choice of battles, avoid picking those where your forces are randomly scattered with enemies nearby or where your forces have encircled the enemy (on paper this looks advantageous, but in reality your troops are too scattered to be effective and the enemy are often in a highly defensive box formation). If you can't avoid it, then you're often better off running to safety and regrouping than fighting it out, even if it's just a weak foe that's nearby.
• Nintendo Hard: Make no mistake, Mordheim wants you dead. Your units are weak starting off, and thanks to the Morale Mechanic, it's entirely possible to fail a mission simply from having a couple of your initial five-man warband fall. Any unit that falls in battle can have some their equipment pilfered mid-battle (which can include rare and valuable gear) and has a chance of suffering permanent injuries afterword, possibly rendering them nigh-on useless. On top of everything else, you still have to pay wages daily, as well as earn enough Wyrdstone to pay off your Supporting Leader and avoid a Nonstandard Game Over. Your first few warbands WILL fail, simply due to a lack of understanding of game mechanics and optimal builds for each faction.
  • Story missions are a whole new breed of Nintendo Hard. Infinitely-respawning enemies who aren't any weaker (and are in some cases stronger) than normal, and IMMUNE to the Morale Mechanic while you, the player, are not. Worst though is that these missions are designed to play to your faction's most-glaring weaknesses; if you don't have a plan going in, expect heavy losses, if not utter failure.
    • Story missions do provide one small mercy though; unlike on normal battles the enemies on story missions do not match your warband's level but rather have set levels. As such if you ignore the story missions for a while (there are no negative consequences for doing so) then when you do jump into them you may still be outnumbered by the enemy's reinforcements and suffer from morale loss but on a one to one basis your higher levelled warriors will make mincemeat of their weaker foes.
  • The Random Number God helps reinforce this trope as well, due to just how unforgiving it can be. A several-days winning streak can be broken by an unlucky loss that costs you over half your most valuable equipment and results in your best units suffering crippling injuries (or even death), possibly plunging what was otherwise a perfect game into Unwinnable territory.
    • Notably the inverse is true as well; it's possible to survive a defeat with no permanent injuries, minimal equipment loss, and a decent stash of Wyrdstone. On top of that your units still earn XP even if they fell, so it's entirely possible to come out of a crushing loss stronger than you went in.
• One-Armed Warrior: Warband members can lose an arm and keep fighting, though with some significant drawbacks.
• One Stat to Rule Them All:
  • The character's Dodge or Parry chance will be this in the early game. Even being able to possibly avoid an attack once per round is very helpful for keeping your guys alive and uninjured long enough for them to be actually useful. The value of dodge/parry tapers off for most characters towards the late game, as the number of combatants increases and every warrior has more action points to spend on attacks per turn.
  • In terms of mental stats, Leadership is prized for increasing the warband's shared morale pool, giving the whole team more staying power during fights that incur losses. It also makes characters more resistant to fear, terror and "all alone" checks, important in the later game where it's easy for fighters to be outnumbered and frightening Impressives start showing up.
• Only in It for the Money: The Human Mercenaries faction is gathering wyrdstone purely because they have clients who pay handsomely for it.
• Our Manticores Are Spinier: A manticore roosts in a broken tower in the city's marketplace, serving as a unique boss encounter in the second act of every campaign — for the Human Mercenaries and Skaven, the manticore is the Final Boss altogether. The beast is massive enough to dwarf even the biggest Impressive units, can re-position itself by taking flight, can spew acid on melee targets, and possesses a magical Breath Weapon capable of inflicting warp effects (the random buffs/debuffs normally acquired by gathering wyrdstone).
• Our Ogres Are Hungrier: The Human Mercenaries 'Impressive' unit is an ogre, while Chaos Ogres clad in heavy armor can appear later in the game as a Metal Slime in high-difficulty missions.
• Permadeath: Units that fall in battle have a chance of dying for good when they roll for their injuries. On a meta level, failing four Wyrdstone shipments to your Supporting Leader has them forcibly disband your Warband, ending your campaign.
• Poisoned Weapons: This is what makes the Skaven so dangerous. All of them can get skills that put debilitating toxins on their missile and melee weapons, as well as skills that weaken poison resistance. The Skaven can soften up their foes with shurikens and warplock shots that make enemy units incapable of attacking or greatly slow them down, while greatly increasing the chance of getting poisoned by stacked weeping blade and poison wind toxins. Only chaos spawn, zombies and vampires/vampire thralls are immune to poison effects.
  • This is exemplified in the Weeping Blades, a Skaven-only weapon that takes the form of a pair of swords coated in wyrdstone poison. Any unit struck by Weeping Blades will take immediate damage from the poison at the start of their next turn, and the effect can stack from multiple attacks.
• Power Creep, Power Seep: For the game itself compared to the tabletop version. Some units like the Dredge really got a power boost while others like the Possessed got neutered. In the tabletop game, the Dredge was a lowly skulker but here he's got the strength of a Vampire Count! Meanwhile the Possessed used to be as powerful as the Vampire Count, but his mutations have become randomized instead of player picked, important tabletop mutations like spines are gone and he has poor starting agility (though potentially quite high if you sacrifice strength or toughness).
• Power-Up Letdown:
  • When attempting harder missions you will sometimes be presented with an "Ambush" mission, where you ostensibly get the drop on the enemy warband and take them by surprise. What the game describes as a great opportunity to swiftly win is anything but, because the game forces you to place your entire warband very close to the enemy units, putting your squishier characters even more at risk than they usually are and the enemy units keep their bonus to Action Initiative, meaning that, on most occasions, their units will act before yours, even on the very first turn where you supposedly ambushed them. And the penalty they get for being ambushed doesn't prevent them from attacking your troops right after deployment. And finally, because the two warbands spawn so close to each other, the battle will quickly devolve into an all-out brawl against the entire enemy warband, when normal missions normally allow you to take enemies out in smaller groups.
  • Some skills and mutations are fairly useless and end up taking up a warrior's limited skill capacity. One example is the mutation Wyrdstone Horns. Prior to an update that also increased melee and missile resistance as the warrior takes damage, all it did was provide a resistance to getting sick from picking up wyrdstone when most warriors that could get a mutation weren't capable of carrying items anyway.
• Puzzle Boss: Merga, in her boss battle, is surrounded by a shield that negates all physical damage. You need to perform a lengthy process of freeing a pair of Sigmarite Sisters, finding and purifying shards of the pylons powering her ritual, and then taking the shards to each of the eight pylons to disable them and finally drop the shield.
• Pyrrhic Victory: This can very easily happen. If you take heavy casualties while winning a battle, the loss of equipment and troops can easily offset the rewards you get from winning. Victory doesn't taste so sweet when your best warrior dies or suffers a permanent injury that effectively renders him useless.
• Ragtag Bunch of Misfits: Every Warband except the Sisters of Sigmar and Skaven. The Mercenaries are self-interested lowlifes taking insane risks because some lord offered them fast cash for wyrdstone, the Cultists are all deranged mutated psychos gathering wyrdstone for the thing that lives in the pit where the meteorite hit, and the Witch Hunters are all religious crazies who want to kill everyone for being "tainted". The Undead downplay this as their officers are aristocratic vampires, but their subordinates include the outcast Dreg who no-one else will be kind to, the conniving Necromancer attracted by the chance of more power in their service, the degenerate Ghouls here for the meat, and random corpses reanimated as zombie Cannon Fodder.
• Required Secondary Powers: Units with the Last Stand ability (or Amok disability) usually have the Unwavering ability with it. Last Stand/Amok means the character must fight to the death in a melee and can't flee or withdraw. Unwavering means the unit is immune to fear, terror and "all alone" tests. Averted with Sigmar's Purifier and the Marauder; these units only have Last Stand, this makes it extra dangerous to involve them in melee.
• Shoot the Medic First: The Sisters of Sigmar can learn to cast healing spells. Since spells are generally cheap to cast as long as you don't spam them within a single turn, you will want to focus down these spellcasters quickly; however, this being the Sisters of Sigmar, those spellcasters will still most likely be either very hard to hit, or have a ton of armor and health, and will also be swinging oversized hammers at you the entire time, so this isn't as easy as it is elsewhere.
• Shows Damage: Certain injuries your warriors suffer are represented on the unit model afterwords, such as missing limbs and blinded eyes.
• Skill Gate Characters: The Sisters of Sigmar are great in close combat, resilient with their HP and heavy armour, have good morale and a wealth of nifty magical abilities. However their mobility is pretty limited, and they have absolutely no shooting skills apart from the DLC-only Smuggler, or Marksmen they can borrow from the Mercenaries at high trust level with Brigand's Burg. They're powerful, but very straightforward tactically.
• Spiteful A.I.:
  • The computer in single player will do anything it can to make you lose, even if it would counteract what one would expect in the fights. They will loot their own dead to deny you their Bounty items if that's the sub-objective, devote multiple units to loot your dead so that you lose valuable equipment, swarm your leader to make you lose the morale checks... it can go on and on.
    • It gets much worse than that. The objective of the AI in every mission isn't to win, it's to screw the player as hard as possible. They even tailor this to your situation; Warband hanging by a thread, but your overleveled Hero Unit with high-quality equipment is carrying you? The AI will suicide-rush as many of its units as it can at the hero, hoping to kill and loot them before you can end the mission, swiping the loot and likely inflicting the hero with a debilitating injury in the process. On the last couple days of your Wyrdstone shipment and just a few stones short? They'll focus almost entirely on scavenging all the stones they can, and will gang-rush any of YOUR units that are carrying any. Trying to level up newbie units after a bad loss? They'll focus those units exclusively, crippling them before they can become useful to you.
    • This is primarily because enemy warbands are not persistent, instead being generated from scratch for every match. They don't need to worry about equipment losses and permanent injuries, and will simply focus on doing whatever will most immediately disrupt your campaign.
  • Played dead straight with the storyline missions, which are a painful inversion of Character Select Forcing; each warband has specific weaknesses they need to deal with, for instance the Sisters of Sigmar's lack of ranged combat and poor mobility. Story missions are specifically designed to play to your warband's particular weaknesses; continuing the above example, the first story mission for the Sisters has you break through extra-powerful melee units holding tight chokepoints (which means no flanking; you WILL have to sacrifice Cannon Fodder, or otherwise use your Hero Unit and risk the Random Number God screwing them over,) all the while ranged units hide on balconies and overhead ledges taking potshots at you. To top it all off, once you've finally cleared through, it then becomes a race to the top of the tower; multiple Climbs are needed (which your units will have at least a 40% chance of failing) while endless waves of enemy units pour in and continue to beat down your exhausted Warband.
• Strong, but Unskilled: The Undead. Nearly all their units boast incredible physical stats and very good mental stats too, plus ready access to Fear and Terror and a plethora of status effect resistances and immunities. Vampires have a physical and mental statline on par with many other factions' Impressives, but their weapon skill, ballistic skill and accuracy are all below average. Even Zombies have a surprisingly high strength and toughness skill, and they don't suffer from many injuries except for dismembered limbs. However Zombies also have abysmal agility and mental stats, no ability to use armour^note though they can use shields and helmets or consumables, and poor dodge and parry skills.
• Supporting Leader: You get two - your warband's commander, who gives the orders directly and participates in special missions, and your faction's distant sponsor, who demands tithes of wrydstone and gives you those faction-unique missions.
  • Notably, for the Sisters of Sigmar, these two are one and the same.
• Too Dumb to Live:
  • The Stupid mental condition, which forces a unit to take an intelligence test if it starts the turn outside of a melee engagement. If it fails, it wastes its turn standing around doing nothing, possibly while enemies take shots at them.
  • The Amok mental condition prevents the unit from fleeing or disengaging from combat, which can be problematic when an Amok unit gets trapped in a fight they can't possibly win. Note that this condition becomes redundant for units that already have Last Stand.
• Squishy Wizard: Mostly Averted. All spellcasters are heroic units and while they tend to be not quite as tough as their melee specialist team members, the spellcasters are still tougher than most henchmen and almost all of them can wear heavy armour. The Maiden of Sigmar takes the aversion to a next level: she can cast spells, she's Immune to Bullets, and practically everyone will be curbstomped by her in melee.
• Tactical Superweapon Unit: Differing from the tabletop game, each warband has their very own Impressive unit: the Ogre for the Mercenaries, the Maiden of Sigmar for the Sisters, the Chaos Spawn for the Cultists, the Rat Ogre for the Skaven, the Executioner for the Witch Hunters and the Crypt Horror for the Undead. They have their own slight quirks, but all of them are basically big, beefy linebreakers able to engage multiple lowly henchmen and carve through all of them with little trouble; the only thing that can bring down an Impressive is either another, better Impressive or Heroes and Leaders working together. Impressives do have their downsides, however: half of them are too large to enter buildings and doorways, they can't gather loot or wyrdstone (the exception being the Maiden) and they can't equip ranged weaponry.
• Took a Level in Badass: Henchmen are significantly more powerful in City of the Damned, and are able to level up and learn skills just like Heroes, though they can only purchase the first tier of a skill.
  • Henchmen can also take a skill called "Lad's Got Talent" which turns them into a Hero unit and improves their stats and abilities, and it lets them get the master tier of their skills. The final Heroes you get, before Impressive units are available, in turn can get a skill called "Born Leader". This gives them a Field Promotion to become a Leader unit with corresponding stat increases and they can now take restricted Leadership skills. As before, mastering "Born Leader" will give more increases.
  • To a lesser extent, the Cult of the Possessed has benefited greatly from their fragile Leader unit being replaceable, and mutations being a random upgrade gained for free at level thresholds.
  • Daemons. In Warhammer, basic daemons like these would be rank-and-file and easily killed by even basic troops getting lucky with their hits. In this game, daemons are scary combat monsters who can go toe-to-toe with your warband leader and even your Impressives.
• Touched by Vorlons: The Maiden of Sigmar used to be a regular Sister. But she got magically imbued by her god and now is strong enough to wrestle down Ogres and Chaos Spawn, while also casting spells.
• Turn Coat: Baroness Katherina von Dernsbach used to be an acolyte of Queen Nefarata, now she's a noble of the Von Carstein court.
• Unusable Enemy Equipment: Chances are you'll find a lot of weapons that can only be used by certain units from other factions, like flails or warplock pistols. If you send enough wyrdstone to the secondary factions, you might eventually unlock some those units, but until then foreign weapons are useless.
• Verbal Tic: The Skaven retain theirs, as always.
• Virtual Paper Doll: The colors and appearances of your warband members can be customized to a limited extent. Equipment, injuries, and mutations also visibly change units; fresh warbands will almost look like an army of clones, but one of the quickest way to identify high-level warbands is to note how strongly they avert Only Six Faces.
• You Have Failed Me: Fail to meet your Supporting Leader's Wyrdstone deadline four times in total, and they'll shut your warband down for good.
• Wake-Up Call Boss: If your warband becomes strong enough (about Level 6), Mordheim will throw a curveball by introducing Daemons of the various gods (and a Chaos Ogre for variety). Normally only showing up in story missions, a single Daemon may randomly appear and it will devastate warbands that aren't ready for them. On the plus side, sometimes they'll go after your enemies and they give a phenomenal 5 experience if you kill one.
• Weak, but Skilled: The Skaven and Sisters have lower strength than the other factions (additionally the Skaven have low health). The Skaven make up for it with a high agility that enables them to dodge and parry better and their heroes tend to be above average in weapon skill, meanwhile the Sisters of Sigmar heroes have significantly better weapon skill than the other factions so the Sisters will hit more often, plus they get more access to magic.
• We Have Reserves: Basically what the AI does to you in the campaign. The random warbands it generates are often filled with lacklustre troops which are no match for the powerful optimized troops an experienced player can build, but since the AI creates new warbands each time, it doesn't have to be concerned about casualties or risks; they just need to be able to fuck you over in the long run. Hence why they'll Zerg Rush a warband full of injured soldiers held together by a powerful hero, or nick your equipment.
• Willfully Weak: Most of the playable factions represent the interests of politicians, religious authorities and even a few Evil Overlords that can normally field far more manpower and military might than they do in Mordheim. But each faction seeks to control the city in order to gather wyrdstone, not to blow it up, so cloak and dagger tactics are preferred. That's why you won't see the setting's usual powerhouses like Chaos Warriors, warpstone warmachines, etc. The average Blood Bowl team has more hitting power than a high-end Mordheim warband.
  • A form of this can be done by the player, as an over-leveled character in an otherwise weak party will inflate the warband's overall rating, which determines the strength of randomized AI warbands. It's not unheard of players firing units that are too powerful but don't add much to the team chemistry.
• World of Badass: True to the source material. Mordheim is hell on earth, it's a Crapsack World within a Crapsack World, and you need to be seriously badass just to survive a single day. And not even that is a guarantee.

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It's over for this one.