Joseph A. McCullough isn't one to rest when it comes to expansions for his games and March sees another book added to the Frostgrave library. Mortal Enemies will be available 28th March 2024 from Osprey Games and will offer a new way for you to throw dastardly villains into your games in the Frozen City of Felstad.

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Get Your Copy Of Frostgrave: Mortal Enemies

In Mortal Enemies, McCullough has created a series of interesting ways for you to include a dastardly foe in your campaigns, be that as part of a solo adventure into the Felstad or in your regular campaigns of two or more people. If you're looking to introduce a cackling villain or cool recurring threat to your games then this might be fun to help spice up campaigns.

Creating Your Mortal Enemy

At the core of this new supplement is a series of tables which help you determine what kind of Mortal Enemy you have for your campaign. You could generate a Mortal Enemy right at the start of your campaign if you prefer or you could wait until a moment reveals itself where a recurring character would be fun to add into the mix. If you're playing Frostgrave solo then I think this is great for creating more interesting campaigns. You can build up the rivalry that you'd normally get in a campaign with other people and see where the story takes you.

As with anything that you need to roll for, McCullough has created the Mortal Enemies generation tables so that you can take and leave as much of it as you like. You could make it so that your foe is a Vampire or a Werewolf, perhaps even a monstrous Fire Giant. Or, you can let fate decide and simply roll on the table and see where the book takes you.

From there, a Mortal Enemy will gain certain bonuses as well as an array of spells that they can use against you. They will also get a special ability which could be fun for you to work out how to combat and a small gang of minions which they'll use to try and ruin your day.

The creation method for a Mortal Enemy is pretty easy to get your head around and you should have someone fun and interesting noted down in no time at all. What's nice about this is that it also allows you to dive into the hobby side of things and either kitbash yourself a villain using one of the numerous plastic sets from North Star or dive into various metal and resin ranges out there to find the perfect villain.

McCullough explains that a Mortal Enemy should be a challenge for your Wizards up until level fifteen. As they grow and develop between games much like your own Wizard, they should keep pace with you and prove to be a thorn in your side throughout your campaigns. Additionally, you can use the levelling up section in the supplement to make them even more challenging if you see fit to do so!

As a Mortal Enemy can grow and develop over time, gaining new skills and adding to their gang of minions, they can also be wounded if you're lucky enough to land a good blow during a scenario. But, as any good villainous character in a decent story will tell you, there is always some strange way that they escape their doom and end up returning in following chapters. It will be very fun seeing how players tell the tales of these villains and what hooks and plot points they work out as to why they hate your Wizard so much!

Mortal Enemies In Your Games

Mortal Enemies follow more or less the same AI rules as other opposing characters would in your games. They will always have a motivation which could be to take out your Wizard or perhaps make sure one of your Apprentices has a very bad day. This then works with their updated priority list to determine who they will target and what they will do.

Additionally, a Mortal Enemy won't turn up in every game. You will roll off to see if they ambush you each time you set up a scenario and once they do, they effectively reset and a countdown timer begins behind the scenes to see if they come back to have a pop at you again. This is quite fun as it means that you're not going to have to constantly deal with the threat but it's an ever-present one, waiting in the background to pounce when you think you're safe!

I particularly like that even with your Mortal Enemy showing up, there is a chance that some of their minions might end up telling a story of their own worthy of being elevated later on in the narrative. Maybe if your villainous foe dies, you could end up making that thief or treasure hunter your next challenge, looking to get their own back on you for slaying their master or ruining their payday.

Whilst gameplay ideas like this aren't something that Frostgrave players couldn't have come up with themselves, I like the push that McCullough is giving with this supplement to get you thinking outside the box, coming up with cool and innovative creative ways for you to use miniatures in your collection and engage with the storytelling part of Frostgrave. Frostgrave has always been a game of storytelling and campaigns packed with interesting tales and this just helps to reinforce that.

All Your Bases Are Belong To Us

Another fun aspect of this supplement that McCullough has explored is the development of your Wizard's base and scenarios based around assaulting said stronghold. Rules have been crafted for you to set up fun base assaults between players in two-player campaigns or as part of a solo campaign where you're going up against your Mortal Enemy.

Much like with the creation of your Mortal Enemy, McCullough is offering up this as a chance to stretch your hobby muscles. A base must be made up of three or four rooms joined together to a certain set of dimensions. You're encouraged to have fun with this and maybe make use of dungeon tiles, odd pieces of terrain you have lying around and everything else to make a base that suits your particular Wizard.

Bases can be upgraded and added to with traps and more throughout your campaigns, lending a character to the terrain itself which I think is nice to see. You can also use these base assault scenarios as a great opportunity to ruin best-laid plans and perhaps pilfer some treasures from your opponent's vault in the meantime. Thankfully, you can't constantly assault another Wizard's base and you'll have to make use of out-of-game spells to reveal the path to your enemy's base where you will then promptly need to prepare yourself for a tough fight.

I genuinely love the "colour" this adds to your Frostgrave campaigns. We've had some good books in the past full of additional adventures but Mortal Enemies feels like it would be a great fit for any group. The base building and base assault rules are a perfect example of this. It helps you build that additional "character" for your campaigns, engages you more in the hobby and fits really well for groups playing the game or individuals attacking the game solo. It's an incredibly evocative bonus for Frostgrave that might help drag your campaigns back on track.

New Scenarios & Bestiary

As well as the new base assault rules, there are also your customary scenarios that McCullough has come up with to suit the supplement. The five scenarios in Mortal Enemies have been designed to pit a single warband against their Mortal Enemy in solo scenarios but some of them have been designed with two-player options as well if you'd prefer to go down that route.

I won't spoil the scenarios for you but in typical McCullough style, they have been designed to challenge you and come up with innovative ways to build your tabletops. They can be easily slotted into an existing campaign that you might be running and should give you a themed challenge, a boss fight perhaps, to work on if you've not seen your Mortal Enemy in a while because they just haven't been bothered to ambush you!

A bonus Bestiary at the back of the book also throws four new enemies into the mix based on the above scenarios which can be slotted into ongoing campaigns as well. Why wouldn't you want to come up against the deadly Praklicore?

A Great New Supplement?

As you've probably guessed by now, I think Mortal Enemies is going to be a solid addition to a Frostgrave player's library. If you're a solo player, this is almost invaluable as it helps to add the rivalries and such that you'd get from campaigns with two or more players.

I also think that Mortal Enemies continues to help engage the hobby side of your wargaming. Not only do you have the fun of coming up with miniatures for your villainous foe and their band of minions but also the development of a base, new scenario terrain and more. If you're working with another player on this then you could even come up with some fun and elaborate ways in which the threads of your various stories are linked together!

It's another creative addition to a game that I thought would have had its well tapped good and proper by now. McCullough keeps coming up with fun ideas and Mortal Enemies is certainly one that I think will work for a lot of Frosthaven fans.

Will you be picking up Mortal Enemies?