A Possible Future for Monsterpocalypse?
By Marcus U.– January 11, 2013
With the recent snubbing of Team Covenant by Privateer Press, I want to change my stance on a long-held position. I had always accepted that fan-created material would exist, but I felt it should have been kept separate from the official game. I went though the effort of removing the Covenant Maps from my own Monsterpocalypse VASSAL module.
Now, however, I think it’s finally time that we the players take the lead to “fix” and accept our position of sole support of Monsterpocalypse.
I believe we should work to create our own VASSAL module, starting with the figures we know and love, fixing or even radically changing the figures and rules if we want. Let us create our own Set 6. Let us get Project V into the project. Beyond that, who knows? I think we don’t even need to worry about keeping to Privateer Press’s “official” abilities and can start to make our own. I don’t think we should call it an official Monsterpocalypse module by any means, but until PP supports BOTH Team Covenant and Monsterpocalypse again, I have no qualms about using fan-created material anymore. Perhaps even exclusively.
I’ve been mentally calling this idea “Monsterpocalypse: Covenant”, or maybe “Monstercovenant”… I may not be very good at naming things.
Does anyone else think that now is the time to take the game to the community? If so, who’d be willing to help out in what would be a ridiculous large undertaking of effectively re-imagining the whole game from the ground level?
Sounds like a good idea to me!
I’m into this idea, but think we way want to do this in small incremental changes rather then big sweeping changes. We want the fixes that we put in place to fix the right things and not break others.
True, I probably went a bit overboard with the idea that the entire game could be rebuilt from scratch with an entirely new vision on everything.
Too soon. I want this snafu to play out first so that I can more accurately judge what’s going on with MonPoc (and Privateer in general). For all I know, this is a hardball approach to shutting MonPoc down by shutting TC down prior to a MonPoc 2.0 reboot they plan with a movie. It’s a long-shot but it’s a plausible reality.
Agreed. There is still a lot we don’t know. Some part of me still hopes that Series 6 is going to come out…. And yes, I still believe in Santa and the Easter bunny
If that’s the case, and PP does indeed both renew their support of Team Covenant and gives new Monsterpocalypse releases, then I would gladly abandon this project for the official MonPoc… Until then, I don’t want to just sit on my hands and wait–and that’s really all I could do in this whole situation.
I think that’s the way to go Marcus. After Heroscape was discontinued in 2010, us fans over at the fan site were waiting to see if a new company would pick the game up. But after a year of nothing, we finally decided to make our own “official unofficial” customs (called the C3V and SoV) to keep the game going. It’s very cool, I must say. We were pretty much keeping the game alive ourselves anyways ever since ’08.
An “unofficial official” Series 6 would be awesome.
* “official unofficial” Series 6
If anything I’d take the word “Covenant” out of it – just in case there is some extra legal clout/infringement from their name being involved & hosted on their site.
But agree to the errata bit. I think that’s the “easiest” to do – tweak some abilities and rebalance some things. After that go with the
“new” series which could have varied oppinions. On that I’d also maybe avoid any references to the pics PP have shown as concepts for S6.
But way on board with this. Just take my oppinions with a pinch of salt – I’m not fully synched with all the factions yet, so I don’t fully understand all the nuances yet.
I support this, particularly if I can help with figure design. The name will need work, however.
I’ve mentioned this before under different posts, but the Star Wars Miniature community moved forward with the game after WoTC stopped producing it. They have created several virtual sets, printing out the cards, and pairing them with existing miniatures from previous sets. They also took the lead and run regionals, and the World Championship events at Gen Con each year. So it is possible as a community to grab the reigns so to speak, and move forward.
I’m willing to help, but like a few people mentioned, not quite ready to jump the gun. Maybe my glass is still a little half full, but I was really hoping we’d eventually see S6. With this current news I’m not as optimistic. So count me in to help, and I’m sure I can get the Chicago Crew to lend a hand play-testing, etc. as needed.
Likewise, the Blood Bowl community has not only kept the game alive, but developed it into what it is today. It is definitely possible!
Didn’t people try making a fan set before? Its hard work to build a consensus. Although little danger of random people picking up the game and not know about the changes since random people will never pick up the game anymore
Crazy thought. If this is going beyond merely patching abilities – if one actually wanted all the monsters to stand a chance in a competitive environment, it would be impossible in vanilla rules. If a monster doesn’t have >1 damage per turn, or lotsa healing, it’s unlikely to keep up with the competition in a timed environment.
Without fancy trickery, the only way to bridge this for monsters who win in fully played out games, while keeping time constraints, is to create alternate win conditions. Either something like Warmachine/40k 6th ed where you randomly determine win condition/scenario or just some other objective other than damage-per-second.
Thinking out loud here. Haven’t fleshed out the idea or it’s feasibility any further. No sure if it’s possible/going against everything monpoc stands for.
That really was my original idea, but then I decided why stop at simply fixing things? Why not imagine things anew? Idea was really because Zorog and Xaxor are quite similar, so one or the other could be taken in a whole new direction.
But that may be too ambitious.
I don’t know Zorog is melee and Xaxor is very blasty. If you want to make them different just buff Climb with custom rules. As it is Climb is limited in number of figures it’s on and it’s not very good.
QZorog though is pretty bad ass.
If we’re talking alternate win conditions, I’d love to see some faction-specific stuff here. For instance, Radicals win if they knock down some # of buildings. Just a thought and likely a very difficult one to implement fairly across all factions.
Fac-flavoured win conditions sound fun.
I think balancing them will be as much a function of rebalancing some abilities as it will some individual monsters and playtesting the win conditions.
One thing I’d like to see from such alternate win conditions, is promoting/rewarding monsters who cross/go over to the middle, rather than stalling the game and moping around the HQ for the first 4 turns (like I do
)
I just got another friend into the game. Yeah let’s see it keep going all on its own if the parent company has abandoned it.
I also like the idea of faction specific win goals.