House Rules

HOUSE rules

Before You Add Any House Rules

Mordheim is intentionally unbalanced, lethal, and unfair at times. That is not a flaw, it is part of the campaign arc.

Before adopting any house rules, your group should:

• Play at least 4–6 games with the core rules only
• Use proper terrain density (see below)
• Apply all rules correctly, especially:
  • Movement, cover, and line of sight
  • Hiding rules
  • Climbing, falling, and vertical play
  • Scenario objectives (not all games are deathmatches)

Many commonly used house rules are reactions to environmental problems, not rule problems.

Ranged Weapons Feel too strong

In some groups, ranged warbands (or shooting-heavy builds) can feel dominant, frustrating, or uninteractive. This often manifests as:

• Melee warbands being shot to pieces before engaging
• Games devolving into static firing lines
• New players feeling punished for non-shooting choices

A large number of house rules target ranged weapons. Before limiting ranged weapons, ask:

• Do at least 30–40% of the buildings in the centre block line of sight?
• Are there vertical elements and multiple approach paths?
• Does every street, alley and open area have some form of cover, and are players using Hiding properly?

If the answer is “no”, fix the table, not the rules.

Common Tools

If your table is filled with tall buildings, barricades to hide behinds and rubble granting cover every step you take, yet after a dozen games your group is still getting decimated by that one ranged player, you can opt to implement some of the tweaks below:

• Limiting warriors with a ranged weapons to a percentage of the warband. Note that you might not want to include all weapons in this limitation. Items such as Javelins, or pistols have a very short range and are not likely to be the overpowering factor leading to this decision.
• Reducing effectiveness of specific weapons:
  • Slings reduced in range, strength or increased in cost.
  • Crossbows cannot use Quick Shot

Risks

• Masks poor terrain design instead of fixing it
• Punishes warbands whose identity relies on ranged combat
• Can flatten warband diversity if applied universally

Before changing ranged rules, fix the table. A dense Mordheim board should force movement, risk, and positional play.

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Defensive options feel too weak

Defensive mechanics in Mordheim, armour, parry, and survivability, are sometimes perceived as underpowered or overcosted. This has led many groups to introduce house rules aimed at increasing durability or reducing cost.

However, as with many such changes, it is important to distinguish between intentional design, campaign pacing, and actual mechanical problems.

Armour Feels Too Expensive

Armour in Mordheim is expensive, rare, and easily negated by Strength modifiers. As a result:

• Players often skip armour entirely
• Early campaign gold is better spent on additional bodies, weapons, or hired swords
• Armour can feel like a trap choice rather than a meaningful upgrade

This is most noticeable in the early campaign, where warbands start small and are under immediate pressure to grow in numbers in order to avoid rout tests, contest objectives, and absorb casualties. In that context, spending a large amount of gold on a single model’s protection is usually an inefficient economic choice.

Starting a campaign without armour is not strange, nor is it accidental.

A Mordheim warband represents a rag-tag group of fortune seekers, cultists, mercenaries, and outcasts who have come to the ruined city chasing rumours of wealth. They are not elite troops marching to war in full kit, they are desperate opportunists, scavenging and fighting with whatever they can afford.

From a campaign design perspective, this serves several purposes:

• Early games are meant to be lethal and fragile
• Losses hurt, encouraging cautious play and hard decisions
• Wealth and equipment are earned through survival, not front-loaded
• Armour is positioned as a symbol of success, not a starting entitlement

In this light, armour appearing later in a campaign is not a failure of balance, but a sign that the warband has survived long enough to afford it.

Common Tools

When a group feels armour remains unattractive even in the mid to late campaign, the following tools are sometimes used:

• Reducing armour costs (often by around 50%)
• Allowing armour stacking e.g. purchasing light armour first and later upgrading it to heavy armour rather than replacing it
• Expanding access to materials such as Ithilmar and Gromril by lowering rarity or increasing availability
• Shields give +2 to armour save (instead of +1) when in hand-to-hand combat (when wielded with a one-handed weapon).
• Bucklers give a +1 to armour save when in hand-to-hand combat (when wielded with a one-handed weapon).

Risks

• Overcorrecting can make armour mandatory rather than optional
• Heavily favours elite warbands with better income or access to rare equipment
• Reduces lethality, potentially slowing games and dulling tension
• Alters campaign pacing by shifting survivability forward instead of letting it emerge naturally

Armour works best when it feels like a late-campaign luxury, not an early necessity.

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Parry Scales Poorly with Weapon Skill

The parry mechanic unintentionally benefits low Weapon Skill models more than skilled fighters:

• A low WS model has a higher chance to roll above an opponent
• High WS models gain little relative advantage
• This feels counterintuitive in a game about experience and martial skill

As campaigns progress, parry can feel increasingly disconnected from fighter quality.

Common Tools

• Adding WS to parry rolls
• Reworking parry into a flat modifier or reroll-based mechanic

Risks

• Adds complexity to an already granular combat system
• Can heavily favour elite fighters and heroes
• Makes defensive play disproportionately strong when stacked with other "extra" save mechanics such as lucky charm, step aside, etc.

Parry should reward skill, not randomness, but too much correction can remove uncertainty entirely.

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Critical Hits Feel Overly Punishing

Critical hits bypass many defensive mechanics entirely and can:

• Instantly remove expensive or experienced models
• Undermine armour investments
• Create large swings from a single die roll

This can make defensive upgrades feel irrelevant when critical hits occur frequently. Do keep in mind that you can only score one critical hit in melee from a fighter, and you cannot crit when you needed a natural 6 to wound to begin with! Two rules often forgotten.

Common Tools

• Removing automatic critical hits on a natural 6 to wound
  • Requiring a second roll to confirm a critical hit
  • Retaining faction- or skill-based exceptions, e.g. Skaven with Art of Silent Death triggering on 5–6

Risks

• Reduces the brutality and unpredictability Mordheim is known for
• Weakens high-risk, high-reward builds
• Can make combat feel more procedural and less dangerous

Critical hits are meant to be frightening. Softening them too much risks sanding off the game’s sharp edges.

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Emotional Attachment to Models

As campaigns progress, players naturally become attached to individual heroes. A warrior who survives multiple battles, gains skills, and develops a story can start to feel irreplaceable. Losing such a model to a single unlucky roll can feel:

• Disproportionately punishing
• Emotionally demoralising
• Like a setback from which a warband cannot recover

These reactions are understandable, but they are not purely mechanical issues. Mordheim is set in a damned city filled with monsters, mercenaries, cultists, and worse. Warriors are not legendary heroes protected by fate; they are desperate individuals risking their lives for wealth, power, or survival.

From both a narrative and campaign design perspective:

• Death is expected, not exceptional
• Warbands evolve through loss as much as success
• Characters are defined by risk, not safety
• Replacement and recovery are part of long-term progression

Importantly, Mordheim is a game about warbands, not individual heroes. No model is meant to be indispensable. The loss of a character creates space for new recruits, new stories, and new directions for the warband to grow.

Campaigns where nobody dies often feel flatter, safer, and less thematic than those marked by sacrifice and turnover.

Common Tools

Despite this, some groups choose to soften the consequences of character loss to preserve player enjoyment or campaign longevity. Common approaches include:

• Campaign catch-up mechanics, e.g. warbands falling below starting value receive gold to recover
• Post-game protection tied to equipment: Light, Heavy, Ithilmar, and Gromril armour granting a save to avoid rolling on the Serious Injury chart
• Recovery-focused exploration options: Sending heroes to retrieve the body of a fallen comrade instead of exploring

These tools are not about balance, they are about player comfort and narrative continuity.

Risks

• Undermines one of Mordheim’s core themes: nothing is safe
• Encourages reckless play if death loses its sting
• Reduces the impact of victories and defeats alike
• Shifts focus from warband management to hero preservation

These rules protect players, not warbands, and should be used sparingly and deliberately.

Dual Wielding Cheap Weapons Dominates

Wielding two one-handed weapons is often strictly superior to:

• Two-handed weapons
• Weapon + shield or buckler
• Defensive or utility-focused builds

Extra attacks scale extremely well with skills, experience, and critical hits. As campaigns progress, this scaling frequently outpaces alternative weapon choices with little meaningful drawback.

This is not primarily an external balance issue between different warbands. Almost every warband can dual wield, and almost every warband has access to cheap one-handed weapons.

Instead, this is an internal balance problem: a warband may have access to a wide variety of weapons, but if the optimal choice is always the same, meaningful variety disappears.

Clubs are a key example. Aside from daggers, they are the cheapest close combat weapons available, yet they come with one of the strongest and most widely applicable special rules:

• Concussion improves results on the Injury table (Stunned on 2–4 instead of 3–4)

When combined with dual wielding, this makes the humble “double club” henchman an extremely efficient baseline choice, often outperforming more expensive or flavourful alternatives.

Common Tools

Groups seeking to restore internal variety often experiment with one or more of the following:

• Applying to-hit penalties to the offhand weapon, or to both weapons
• Preventing offhand weapons from scoring critical hits
  • Introducing skills (e.g. Ambidextrous) that negate dual-wield penalties
• Adjusting weapon costs:
  • Increasing the cost of Hammers / Maces / Clubs
  • Introducing a new simple club without the Concussion rule, keeping concussion for maces and hammers

These approaches aim to ensure that dual wielding remains a strong option, but not an automatic one.

Risks

• Over-penalising dual wielding can make it unattractive entirely
• Adds bookkeeping and conditional rules
• Can disproportionately affect henchmen compared to heroes
• Can indirectly strengthen creatures with built-in multiple attacks (e.g. ghouls, beasts, or daemonic entities that do not rely on weapons)

Dual wielding should be powerful, but not the default best choice in all circumstances.

Reroll Mechanics Reduce Mordheim’s Chaos

Items and abilities that grant rerolls such as:

• Lucky Rabbit’s Foot
• Lucky Charm (not strictly a reroll but frequently included)
• Holy / Unholy Relics
• Familiars

can significantly smooth out randomness.

Individually, these effects are small and often feel harmless. Over the course of a campaign, however, multiple sources of rerolls can stack in ways that subtly but meaningfully alter how the game feels.

When rerolls become common:

• Key moments lose tension because failure can be “fixed”
• High-risk decisions become safer than intended
• Outcomes start to feel managed, rather than earned or suffered

This runs counter to one of Mordheim’s defining traits: uncertainty. The game is built around bad calls, worse luck, and living with the consequences—often long after the dice have stopped rolling.

Rerolls do not just change probabilities; they change player behaviour.

When failure is softened or reversible:

• Players take risks they otherwise wouldn’t
• Magic becomes more reliable than intended
• Catastrophic results (miscasts, injuries, rout tests) lose narrative weight

The danger is not that rerolls are powerful, but that they quietly erode the sense that anything can go wrong.

Common Tools

Groups seeking to preserve uncertainty sometimes adopt one or more of the following:

• Limiting reroll-granting items to one per warband
• Preventing rerolls of specific results e.g. miscasts, serious injuries, or Out of Action rolls
• Making reroll items single-use, consumed permanently when triggered
• Banning specific reroll items entirely

These tools aim to keep rerolls rare, costly, or narratively significant rather than routine.

Risks

• Makes early campaigns harsher and less forgiving
• Can disproportionately affect fragile or magic-heavy warbands
• Reduces player agency in clutch moments
• Risks shifting the game toward pure dice brutality rather than informed risk-taking

Mordheim thrives on bad decisions, worse luck, and living with the consequences.

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Blackpowder Weapons Feel Overcosted

With a few exceptions, blackpowder weapons often struggle to justify their cost when compared to crossbows or bows.

Typically, blackpowder weapons:

• Cost more than crossbows
• Suffer from the Reload restriction
• Are less reliable over multiple turns

While powerful on paper, this combination frequently makes them feel inefficient rather than specialised. In practice, players often avoid them entirely unless a specific warband or skill set strongly supports their use.

Blackpowder weapons are meant to represent crude, dangerous, and devastating technology. They are not designed for sustained fire, but for decisive, high-impact moments.

The problem arises when:

• Their downsides outweigh their moments of impact
• Crossbows offer similar damage with greater consistency
• The intended “big shot” fantasy rarely materialises

When this happens, blackpowder stops being dramatic and becomes merely suboptimal.

Common Tools

Groups attempting to reinforce the intended role of blackpowder weapons may experiment with:

• Reducing weapon costs
• Improving injury or damage outcomes
• Differentiating blackpowder weapons more clearly from crossbows e.g. stronger injury rolls, situational bonuses, or unique effects

These changes aim to emphasise impact and danger, rather than efficiency.

Risks

• Risk turning blackpowder into the new dominant ranged option
• Compresses ranged weapon diversity if one option becomes clearly superior
• Undermines the intended “one big shot” flavour
• Affects balance unevenly across warbands with differing access

Blackpowder should feel dangerous and dramatic, not optimal and repeatable.

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External Effects Permanently Hinder a Warband

Some mechanics in Mordheim go beyond killing individual warriors and instead apply long-term, often unavoidable damage to an entire warband. These effects do not merely punish bad decisions or bad luck in a single game—they can permanently cripple a warband with limited or no meaningful counterplay.

Certain rules introduce consequences that are:

• Persistent across games
• Largely unavoidable once triggered
• Disproportionately punishing over time

Rather than letting Mordheim’s chaotic nature decide the fate of individual warriors, these mechanics can make that fate feel predetermined.

Common examples include:

• Nurgle’s Rot A spreading disease that slowly kills off infected warriors, with no reliable way to stop it other than voluntarily removing them from the roster. Over time, this can hollow out a warband regardless of player decisions.
• Black Dwarf capture mechanics Weapons or rules that bypass the normal Serious Injury process entirely, effectively guaranteeing the permanent loss of any model taken Out of Action.
• Swordbreaker Less severe, but still notable: a single lucky roll can permanently destroy a rare and expensive weapon, with no opportunity for mitigation or recovery.

Mordheim is a brutal game. Warriors die, limbs are lost, and bad rolls can end careers. That brutality is part of the appeal. The difference here is agency.

• A critical hit might kill a hero, but it happens in the moment
• A failed Rout test may cost you the game, but you chose to risk it
• A Serious Injury roll is random, but not inevitable

By contrast, effects like Nurgle’s Rot do not meaningfully ask “what do you do next?” They ask “how long until this warband collapses?”

This is why these mechanics are frequently cited as the most demoralising in the game.

Common Tools

Many groups choose to intervene directly with these mechanics:

• Banning Nurgle’s Rot entirely
• Allowing infected warriors to:
  • Seek out a cure through exploration, or trading (Tears of Shallaya and/or Blessed water)
  • Attempt risky treatments with consequences on failure
• Reworking capture mechanics to:
  • Feed back into the standard Serious Injury system
  • Allow rescue, ransom, or recovery opportunities
• Limiting or softening permanent equipment destruction *e.g. Swordbreaker destroying only cheap weapons,

These changes aim to restore player agency, not reduce danger.

Risks

• Weakens the oppressive, grim tone of the setting
• Reduces the uniqueness of certain warbands or items
• Can shift the game away from long-term consequences entirely if overcorrected
• Risks turning existential threats into minor inconveniences

Mordheim is cruel—but it should still ask players to make choices.

Magic Feels Too Safe or Too Strong

In some groups, magic can feel overly reliable or oppressive, especially as casters gain experience and access to additional tools. This can lead to the perception that magic offers powerful effects with relatively low risk compared to martial options.

Common complaints include:

• Spells being cast successfully too often
• Magic providing strong board control or damage with limited downside
• Wizards feeling safer than frontline fighters despite their impact

Magic in Mordheim is deliberately volatile and uneven. Its power is balanced not only by casting difficulty, but also by:

• Fragile casters
• Limited spell access
• The opportunity cost of protecting and advancing a wizard
• The inherent randomness of spell selection

Magic most often starts to feel too safe when additional layers are added on top of the core system, such as:

• Academic skills from the 2002 Annual that increase casting reliability or flexibility
• Reroll mechanics affecting spellcasting, such as familiars or lucky items
• House rules that reduce the impact of failed casts or miscasts

In these cases, the issue is rarely magic itself, but how many optional supports are being stacked around it.

Common Tools

Groups that still feel magic lacks sufficient danger sometimes introduce:

• Miscast tables, triggered on specific casting failures e.g. double 1s, failed casts by a margin, or natural 1s
• Restrictions on rerolls affecting spellcasting such as familiars
• Limiting access to specific Academic skills

Arabyan Nights miscast table

This table was created for the Arabyan Nights event (thanks @ntdars).

2D6	Result
2	Cursed by Nagash: The wizard taps into ancient, deadly, necrotic magic as their flesh withers and their soul is sucked from their body to serve the ancient necromancer Nagash. The wizard is killed instantly with no saves allowed.
3	Bleeeeuurgh! The wizard is turned into a toad and is now stupid. Roll a D6 after the battle, on a score of 2+ the effect ends, otherwise it is permanent and they must leave the warband.
4	Power Drain: The winds of magic abandon the wizard. They cannot cast spells for the rest of the game.
5-6	Shifting Sands: The winds shift at the wrong moment, and the spell is cast successfully upon the wizard themselves! Any additional decisions about the spell are made by the opponent of the wizard’s controller.
7	Explosion! All models, including the wizard, are blown backwards d6” from directly in front of the wizard. This may cause models to take falling damage.
8-9	Necrotic Blessing: The spell is successfully cast, but the necrotic energies of the desert inflict one S4 hit on the wizard with no armour saves allowed.
10	What were the words? The wizard hears ancient whispers as they mumble an incompressible phrase. The attempted spell fails, but instead roll a D6 on the Necromancy spell list and cast that spell automatically.
11	Genie’s Wish: A friendly genie looks kindly upon the wizard. The spell fails, but the wizard learns one new spell at random from their spell list until the end of the game. Roll a D6 after the battle, on a score of 2+ the spell is permanent. Otherwise, it is forgotten as the wisdom of the genie fades from the wizard’s memory.
12	Mummy’s Blessing: The wizards makes magical contact with a Tomb King of Old, learning the secrets of Undeath. As the power flows through them, the spell succeeds and they may also choose one Undead spell (see Tomb Guardians).

Hull UK miscast table

This table is used by the Hull bi-annual event.

2D6	Result
2	The fibre of reality itself is torn apart as a pass to the Realm of Chaos opens. A gigantic taloned hand emerges from the gate, seizes the screaming wizard and drags him through the rift, disappearing with a chuckle in a flare of multi-coloured light. The Wizard is gone and immediately removes as a casualty, and taken off the roster! Models in base contact, friend or foe, suffer one strength 10 hit.
3-6	The Wizard's body is wracked by a discharge of pure magical energy, warping and burning everything in his close proximity. The Wizard and all models within 2" of him suffer a strength 6 hit, with no armour saves allowed.
7	The Wizard struggles to keep the magical energies in check. The caster suffers one Strength 2 hit (no armour saves allowed).
8-9	The caster's mind is ravaged by the attention of a hideous Daemon. The caster suffers one Strength 8 hit (no armour saves allowed) and will flee a random 2d6". He will continue to flee at the start of each recovery phase unless he passes a Ld test.
10-11	The caster mispronounces one of the secret words of power binding the power of the spell, triggering an anomaly. The spell he attempted to cast is not successful and the caster forgets how to cast the spell and will not be able to cast it again this battle.
12	A massive vortex of power drains away the sorcerous energy. The caster suffers one Strength 4 hit (no armour saves allowed). In addition all spells currently in play on the battlefield are automatically dispelled and no magic can be cast for the rest of the game. Any demons in play must pass a Ld test at the start of their recovery phase or are removed as a casualty.

These tools aim to reinforce the idea that magic is powerful—but dangerous.

Risks

• Disproportionately punishes magic-heavy warbands
• Can make spellcasting feel unreliable rather than risky
• Slows the game with additional tables and bookkeeping
• Interacts strongly with other house rules, amplifying randomness

Magic should feel tempting, powerful, and frightening—not safe, but not unusable either.

Final Thoughts

Most house rules exist because something felt wrong. That feeling is valid, but the cause is not always the rules.

Before adding fixes:

• Play several games
• Vary scenarios
• Improve terrain
• Enforce all core rules consistently

Only then should you reach for certain house rules, and only as many as you truly need.

Beware of Stacking Effects

House rules rarely exist in isolation. When multiple changes are applied at once, they can reinforce or amplify each other in unintended ways.

For example:

• Increasing armour effectiveness
• While simultaneously reducing the effectiveness or availability of ranged weapons

…may seem reasonable when viewed separately. Combined, however, these changes can dramatically skew balance:

• Lightly armoured warbands relying on simple bows suddenly become underpowered
• Heavily armoured elites or knightly warbands become extremely difficult to stop
• Entire archetypes disappear, not because they are weak, but because the environment no longer supports them

This kind of imbalance is often far more severe than the original problem the house rules were meant to solve.