I thought long and hard about where to go with my next Retro Recall. My mind went back over countless board games, wargames, and RPGs, but none felt like a natural place to go to after my last look at Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Then I remembered something. A long forgotten story played out across the tabletop. The legend of two skinks adventuring in a ruined city far from home. Their names: Coca & Cola.

After that, I knew I had to talk about Mordheim.

Adventure In The City Of The Damned

For those unfamiliar, Mordheim was a fantasy skirmish game first published by Games Workshop in 1999. Set in the world of Warhammer Fantasy Battles, though five hundred years before the events of the main game, Mordheim saw you take control of a party of adventurers and set out into the ruined remains of Mordheim, the titular city of the damned. Struck by a comet of pure wyrdstone, the city became a place of darkness, monsters, and mutation. This was Warhammer meets post-apocalypse.

Initially, the game had a limited roster of factions to choose from, focusing on those you might meet in the borders of the Empire. Witch Hunters fought Skaven, Undead tussled with the Sisters of Sigmar, while Empire forces from Reikland, Middenheim, and Marienburg faced the horrors of the Cult of the Possessed. Later expansions, both official and unofficial, saw the game taken to new settings and brought in new factions.

One of the best things about Mordheim was it gave us a chance to see small groups not given a chance to shine in the massed battle game, so while armies like my beloved Lizardmen got rules, we also had bands of Kislevites, Shadow Warrior High Elves, a Nurglified circus troupe, and Dwarf Treasure Hunters (let the Slayer go first).

This combined with the game’s excellent campaign system, created a game world that lived and breathed, with so much more character to it than the broader scope of Warhammer Fantasy Battles allowed.

The Adventures Of Coca & Cola

I have talked before about how my love of Mordheim started with seeing it played at my first gaming club. Little ten-year-old Sam wanted to play so badly that the club’s owner (and the guy who gave me my first Lizardmen models. Hi Derek!) wrote up a list of Lizardmen for me.

We didn’t realise official rules supplements existed, so he made the warband up himself, even letting me take my favourite character Oxyotl into the city. So began the adventures of my mighty warband, featuring the Saurus D’ur, the skink archers Coca and Cola, the chameleon skink Oxyotl, and their fearless leader, the Skink priest Urehgellar!

Unfortunately, I never got to do more than play the one game as I came in at the end of the campaign they were running. However, I was allowed to borrow the rulebook. I went home and read it cover to cover, delving into the fiction of this cursed city. It’s a setting I absolutely love and one I would like to return to in the context of an RPG some day.

The Legacy Of Mordheim

I don’t think it is too much to say that a lot of the current trend towards skirmish level, narrative games, especially for those like myself who came to the hobby during Mordheim’s ascendancy, can be seen to draw influence from this game. Mordheim mixed an exciting setting, ripe for adventure, with mechanics that allowed you to shape your warbands and watch them develop into characters you had a genuine attachment to.

The game maintains a cult following even now, meriting the creation of a video game a few years back, long after the game itself had ceased being printed.

I hope that one day, Games Workshop might return to Mordheim, but if they do I hope that they do it in the setting of The World That Was, rather in Age of Sigmar’s Mortal Realms. Mordheim was all about dark, oppressive shadows moving in to surround the normal folk of the Old World, in a way that would not work if a Stormcast Eternal strode into it.

As such, I doubt we will ever see its return. But in the meantime, I will continue to return to it every once in a while. Maybe one day I’ll discover just what happened to Coca and Cola in those blasted ruins.

If you want to see more adventures in the city of the damned, check out Ben's Mordheim Journals series from way back in the far off days of 2014.

What memories do you have of Mordheim?