Forbidden Psalm Game! Plus Skull & Crown Skeletons!

WARNING: POST CONTAINS DEPICTIONS OF SELF-HARM, HORROR, DEATH, GORE, COARSE LANGUAGE, NUDITY, SOME OF THE OLD ULTRA-VIOLENCE, AND SMOKING. 

So on Thursday Conscript Mike F. and some of the lads came over for our first crack at Forbidden Psalm, the super-grim tabletop game inspired by the Swedish RPG Mork Borg. Mike's been painting like a madman and I was really looking forward to getting a game on the table. We played the first scenario from the book - "Corpse Scavenging." Six corpses were laid out on the table and the two opposing warbands had to search them for treasure and "black fungus", a particular goodie that the Mad Wizard Vriprix would pay handsomely for. Above is Humfrid about to search a corpse. Mike had painted them and they were... horrifying.

Here's two members of Mike's warband trying to search another corpse. This one resisted all attempts to search it - seearchers had to make a Treasure Roll to successfully search, and these guys failed A LOT. Worse still, a model takes 1hp damage when they fail a search roll!

On turn 2 the Disembowelled Ghouls start to appear - these are pretty tough monsters and did for two of my warband. In the background you can see my erstwhile leader, Ulfnar, and great axe-man Karl (RIP).

Ulfnar and Mike's leader put each other out of action - we each used the Omen card that allowed maximum damage from one attack. Wow!

Karl here about to get put out of action by a skeleton summoned by Mike's scroll-user. He'd summoned him to menace my scroll-user, Astrid, but she used her own scroll to immunize herself from attacks by monsters.

This combat went on awhile - my rogue, Nils (second from right) snuck into Mike's deployment zone to mess things up. Unfortunately a Disembowelled Ghoul followed. (They are controlled by an AI formula).

Games run for six turns at most and at the end, I had three men down (one was killed) and I think Mike lost one. I got more fungus so a few more gold pieces from the Wizard. It was a fun game but took longer to play through than I'd anticipated - I felt bad that Frederick, Hugh, John and Dave didn't get to play also, but I think they had a good time kibbitzing. In any case maybe we'll play the four-player variant next time.

I'd painted this horror for Forbidden Psalm - it's the cover model for the game book - the Corpse Collector. Absolutely repulsive.

This model is a 3D print I got on Etsy, I think it came from Greece (!). This was before Mike tipped me to the guy in Quebec that's printing this stuff.

This'll give you an idea of the size of the model. In retrospect I probably should have gotten the next bigger one!

These bony dudes came in a recent order from Skull & Crown. They're super-cool obviously.

Dude carrying a brazier, he'll be the standard bearer if I ever build a unit of these guys.

The unit champion here, of course.

Skelly blowing a trumpet. Not sure how this works exactly but meh, fantasy.

I love this dude toting a huge basket of skulls and bones! Skull & Crown make some superb models and you'll see some more on the blog soon.

Well that's it for now, I hope you weren't too scarred by the Forbidden Psalm stuff :-)