What is Blight?

In Blight you control a small warband, living from the dirty work of those who have the money to pay for what they themselves have not the spine nor stomach to do. For someone of your cunning and skill, it is a world ripe with opportunity. While kings and queens wage their wars, local lords, churchmen and other unscrupulous criminals are left unchecked, free to fight and scheme amongst themselves. You and your followers are here to profit, and in so doing, claw your way to riches and power.

In design terms Blight is a campaign and narrative focused, miniature agnostic, tabletop skirmish game. During play each player gets to create and control their own warband of miniatures, and lead them through a dynamic campaign where the world and narrative evolves and change based on the results and choices of the players.

What is a Skirmish Game

A Skirmish game is a tabletop game where both players controll a small group of miniatures. The Skirmish game is the nimble sibling of the wargame. But where wargames tend to look at the big picture, of squads and regiments fight wars, skirmish games are focused on small groups of individuals and specialists.

Strong Campaign Elements

Blight is set in a fictional low fantasy dark age world, rife with suffering, sickness and death. It is a world on the brink of plague, a sickness that most believe is no more than tales and superstition, at least for now. It is a world of violence and war, that you are right in the very center of.

As the campaign progresses, so does the world and story. This happens through a reactive event system, that both drives narrative, but also ensures that no two campaign are ever the same. Whether the world will be ravaged by plague, if the church and their superstitis ways will win, if the rebellion will take hold, or the queen will strike down hard on all that opose her, noone knows. And what roll will you and your band play?

A large part of a Blight campaign happens between games. During a campaign, players can work for different factions, get to control territories, improve their warbands through skills, abilities and items, and last, but not least, upgrade their sanctuaries into an actual base of power. Most importantly though, is that players get to decide. If you imagine a band of hard-boiled criminals, raiding and operating from a secret mountain hideout, you can create that. If you would rather have a band of mercenaries making camp anywhere they like, fighting for those who pay the most, you can do so. Want to create a mysterious cultist leader, in pursuit of forbidden knowledge, you could do that too.

What makes Blight different

When playing campaign, the majority of games you play will be the so called Contract missions. Instead of being all-out fights or arbitrary hold-x-objectives, Blight gives the players a set of contracts to choose from (24 different contracts). Contracts are special missions that the warband will have to complete to get paid. All contracts have a narrative focus. As an example you could be asked to find an interrogate the village mayor, rescue someone who is about to get hanged, assassinate a defector befrore he spills his secrets to the wrong people and much more.

On top of that the game provides 8 special scenarios, known as vengence missions (focusing on one player wanting to teach the other band a lesson), and 5 solo challenge missions.

How many Players?

Blight is designed around two player campaign play, but can be played solo, co-op, or by multiple players as well. Blight can also be played as one-off games (although you will miss out on a lot of the fun!).

Fantasy or Historical

Blight does not have magic directly, but does have elements of the occult. There are no fireballs, but there are witches and seers. If their magic is real, or simply superstition, no one really knows.

If you want a more "realistic" medieval experience, you can easily remove the occult from the game. The Variant Rules chapter has a description to help you do it easily.

On the other hand, if you want more fantasy, the rule book also has guidance on how to use fantasy races like orcs, ratment and dwarfs (and even adding your own races). The game also has variant rules for black powder weapons, for those who want a little extra bang for the buck.