Today at the CMON Expo, the development team behind the skirmish miniatures game Dark Age held a panel discussing the present and future of the game. Earlier this year, Dark Age: Outcasts hit shelves, bringing a new twice-yearly book release schedule and introducing a new subfaction. CMON also revamped several models to give the faction a more modern aesthetic. During the panel, Michael Shinall (Dark Age Senior Designer) and Eric Kelley (Writer and Editor) looked at how Outcasts affected the state of the game and gave us a peek at the upcoming book Dark Age: Forsaken.
To set the stage for Forsaken, Eric Kelley broke down just what’s going on in the word of Samaria. The new book sees the rise of Saints Joan and Issac as they are called to action to defend New Ashkelon, the largest human populated city in Simaria. Besieged on all sides by a possessed Archangel Gabriel and the CORE. To do so, Saint Joan, who has begun calling herself the Divine Inquisitor, leads an army of fanatics stopping at nothing to root out the evil. Meanwhile, Saint Isaac has put together an army of manmade and operated machines for the battlefield, in hopes of mitigating the loss of human life.
The machines Saint Issac controls are all thanks to his discovery of a 2,000 year old cache of NorTec technology. Yes, that NorTec from CMON’s Xenoshyft card game. In fact, at the panel it was revealed NorTec’s excessive mining of resources actually led to Samaria’s current state. Luckily, their tech is good for something, letting Issac equip himself and his troops with modified Ajax armor and more that will be familiar to those who played the card game.
As the name suggests, the new book will have everything Forsaken related. Most Forsaken models are ten years old, making them one of the oldest factions in the line, so about 90% of the models are getting an update to fall in line with the current releases from Outcasts, utilizing the new artists and sculptors that have been brought on to the Dark Age line in the past couple of years. The goal for the new sculpts is to make them more dynamic and more badass feeling. The resculpts will have smaller heads and hands, making them more anatomically correct.
Each Forsaken subfactions’ play style is also getting a big overhaul, making them different from one another. Players fielding Saint Mark will have a very different experience than those playing Saint Mary and so on. Hopefully, this will lead to people finding their favorite character and building unique armies and play styles around them. A few other gameplay changes (among many) are the re-balancing of range weapons to make them more risk/reward, leader models don’t have increased points or power but will buff other models in their unit, and several split characters, like Judah, have been fleshed out to be their own unique characters.
All of these changes, be them rules or visual, all speak to a more streamline experience. With that in mind, point costs have been modified across the Forsaken line to make army building very easy and intuitive. Gone are odd numbered costs in favor of break downs like 150 points, 50 points, 25 points, etc. Again, it is CMON’s hope that this will allow people a little more control of their builds, letting them play what they want more readily, rather than ending up with a unit that just happened to fit the odd point cost that was left over.
If you’re looking to get your hands on the new Dark Age: Forsaken book, you won’t have to wait long. CMON plans on having the book available at GenCon 2015 along with the new sculpts for the faction.
Dark Age: Forsaken Revealed At CMON Expo 2015
