Arcane Reservoir: Relic Knights: An Introduction

Darkspace Calamity

Relic Knights: Darkspace Calamity may be a game you would have heard myself or others on the internet banging on about.

The game itself was funded via Kickstarter back in 2012 and for most of those who didn't back it you may've heard complaints about delays and not much else.

Well the game is finally here, it's been in everyone's hands for a month or two now (maybe more in the US) and it is a game I dived in big time with.

Two years to wait has been a long time, but I was excited about the game back then and I am again now and seeing I am buzzing about it, I thought I might as well blog about it a little.

It was probably worth the wait.

What is Relic Knights?

Relic Knights is a 30mm scale miniatures game at what I would still describe as a Skirmish level.

The scale of game is somewhere between Malifaux and Warmachine, to elaborate it has four recommended point levels; these change some things other than how much you can field.

At 35 and 50 (the smaller levels), the game is played on a 3*3 and for me I feel 50 will be the standard.

This however could be wrong.

At 50, you can field one Knight, your leader (more about them later).

My first game was 35 points and we had five units each.

I say units because what makes the game lean a little bit more towards Warmachine scale is that there are some squads, some of which are up to five models.

The other factor that makes it closer to Warmachine in scale is larger models on 80mm bases.

Thematically Relic Knights is running hard with an Anime/Manga gimmick.

All the things you may expect from Japanese animation, giant robots, well-endowed women, cute animals and just over the top mayhem.

The theme is not just aesthetic but also runs throughout the game mechanics and the feel of play.

Factions

There are six distinct groups in Relic Knights for which you make your cadre (the equivalent to crew) from, these groups play into the story and the core mechanics of the game.

Each faction has a Relic Knight, some number of Questing Knights, Uniques, Minions and Squads.

A Knight in this universe is one who is a strong wielder of Esper (essentially magic an energy which binds the universe) they are united with a Cypher a being of pure Esper which in Malifaux terms is something akin to a Totem, representing the Knight and their desires.

The difference between Relic and Questing Knights is that the latter is searching for a Relic, where as the former has found it.

A Relic though is not a dusty cup or rusty sword, but a big bloody mech.

The main factions are:

Cerci Speed Circuit, these mostly ladies are from a planet which is entirely a race track, the leader Princess Malya rides a giant robot with a body similar to a jet bike or just a jet ski. The choices you can pick for Cerci range from Pit Crew and robotic things that would help, to the Hell's Belles a gang of ladies jetting about.
Shattered Sword, are essentially a Knightly order. These tend to be armoured people in a variety of sizes, very clean and ornate. If you have played or watched the anime Tales of Vesperia, they remind me a lot of the knights in that.
Black Diamond are next, these soldiers are a military style mercenary force, for Mass Effect fans think Cerberus and you are not far off. One Shot their Relic Knight has very real war looking mech with a cannon, the troops range from soldiers, miniature tanks to battle suit men and a giant robot, oh and some ninja assassins.
Noh Empire are huge Oni like red Ogre type dudes who like to enslave people and are generally quite nasty. The males are hulking Red beasts occasionally bringing beasts into battle whilst the females are serpent themed purple Amazonian sized killers. Big and in your face.
Star Nebula Corsairs, these are space Pirates, with everything from a ship themed Relic to even cannons, they also include some people who have left their respected factions and taken the life of a pirate.
The Doctrine round off the factions at six, these are a wizardry based group, Harry Potter types along with a few different things such as a Little Red Riding Hood look-a-like with giant wolf or Librarians who are bulky statuesque looking guys. Oh and the Relic, is a giant robot tiger thing!

Flynn from Tales of Vesperia

What I instantly thought of when seeing Shattered Sword.

The stories are far larger and more interesting than I have described but hopefully they give you a feel of what the groups are like.

The colour of each faction ties into the Esper mechanics and themes which I will delve into more later, but to round off there are also 2 more Relic Knights (and Uniques too) that are Radiant and Void.

The poster girl of Sodapop Candy and her Cypher Cola are Radiant, this represents the lighter side of the battle and can lead a group from either Doctrine, Shattered Sword or Cerci.

Cola in Miniature and Plush form.

Harbonath the Void Reaper is the Void knight and can lead the other three groups, Noh, Black Diamond or the Corsairs. As you may tell, he is not a nice bloke.

Rules and Concepts

To start I will list what breaks Relic Knights away from most other miniatures games and then go into a bit more detail later;

Relic Knights uses no dice
Relic Knights has no traditional rounds
Relic Knights has no ranges for weapons, only movement and AOE
Relic Knights has no deployment zones

Crazy right? Now we all know about diceless games (Malifaux, Infamy) but to me those other bullet points are quite different to anything I have ever played.

No Dice

Relic Knights uses a deck of cards, unlike Malifaux or Infamy this is not based off a playing card deck but one specific to the game called the Esper Deck.

The Esper Deck is the main resource of the game, it is 42 cards consisting of different coloured pairs and 3 Void and 3 Wild cards.

Each standard card has one large Esper icon and one small esper icon, the wild has all six shown and the void has a black hole, it's worthless.

As I mentioned before each faction has Esper affiliation, Blue is Law, Orange for Chaos, Purple Corruption, Yellow Essence, Red as Entropy and Green for Creation.

Each game starts with five cards in your hand, more are drawn when you take or are targeted by actions and the coloured symbols are used to power them.

The above examples are some actions from a Paragon of the Shattered Sword.

That first "type" symbol is a fist and represents melee, to initiate the Lance Charge the Paragon needs to pay the Esper cost.

Looking at your hand you can see whether or not you can pay, the standard cards allow you to have 1 esper of the small logo or 2 esper of the large type, the player discards any cards needing to pay for the action, if extra Esper is used (for example a large blue and large green) it is lost.

Typically, if you are playing one faction you will need more of your colour but it isn't always the case.

If we finish looking at the Lance Charge, you can see what to the Malifaux players out there look quite like Triggers.

Relic Knights has what it calls "presses".

Once the target is determined and the attack paid for each player draws cards equal to their skill level or defence level against that skill.

The attacker can then pay for any number of Presses they would like with the cards they now have.

The Paragon for example has a Melee attack of 3, we paid 2 cards, drew 3 so now have 6 to look at and see what we can do.

If we can make 2 more blue our Damage will be more, more Green allows us to charge further (understandably lance wielding knights do this a lot), if we can do both and it feels worth it we can.

Then, if the target has any Block or Deflect actions, they may for them.

Blocks can out right cancel the opponents attack and deflect well can deflect the attack on to something else (what this will be is described in the action).

If you are getting smacked about and have no Blocks/Deflects the card draw is still handy as next turn you will be more prepared to hit back or do whatever you like.

Combat is very fast paced in this game and you constantly are thinking either what you need your hand to do or what you hope to draw.

The one final element with Esper is Held Esper.

There are a few ways of gaining held Esper, the Knights and Cyphers tend to play with this a lot more but the typical way a unit, minion or unique will do this is "refocusing"

Rather than attacking the gain a Held Esper and draw five extra cards.

Held Epser gets noted on the card next to where you track wounds, a typical minion can hold about 2 where as a Knight usually holds around 6.

What the Held Esper does is it can be used to count as 2 of any colour to pay for any action.

This gives the image of the Dragon Ball Z style powering up a move before releasing it's full strength or a burst of power allowing them to deflect a huge attack.

Where as the Lance Charge may've seen cheap to pay for, Sebastian Cross the Shattered Sword's Relic Knight would have to pay 5 Blue and 3 Green for his largest attack and 8 blue and 6 green if he wanted to unleash it's full effect with all the presses.

Bearing in mind he will have 8 cards (3 of which are drawn later) to do this. Without Held Esper you would need to be extremely lucky.

That is 10 Damage that cannot be prevented and ignores 2 points of armour though!

Again, the combat is fast and simple, quite intuitive, and a lot of fun.

No Rounds

A turn in Relic Knights consists of you activating a model/squad, it moving, doing an action and then doing a follow up move (or forgoing all that to Refocus).

A clean up step, then on to your opponent to do the same.

Back and forth, over and over again until the game is concluded.

I feel though, this may be mind boggling to some, it was a little to me so I shall elaborate.

The above diagram shows the Dashboard.

The right is your Esper deck and discard pile, to the bottom left of that is your dead models stat cards and a space to keep tokens.

The bit we are concentrating on is the Active Slot, Linked Slot, Ready Queue and Idle Section.

At the beginning of the game you take the tracker cards of your cadre and place them into the Ready Queue slots, the rest will be Idle.

The Ready Queue is just that, a queue with the left most card being the first unit to get their turn.

In your turn the entire queue shifts left, the Active Slot is the unit you are using, either as I said before moving, taking an action and doing a follow up (yes two moves, lots of bouncing about) or refocusing.

Once they are done, they go into the Idle pile and a new card fills the gap in the Queue.

Two things to note here, first is that the queue size is different according to game size, 3 slots is for the standard 50.

The second more interesting thing is that because the model you just used falls into Idle first it can jump straight back into the queue.

In the above example it means Betty (the person in the Active Slot) could go to the back of the queue and Rollo (the dog in Idle) could just chill for longer.

This information is open though, so your opponent and you will always be planning knowing that "oh that's going next" and "I can activate this before that gets it's go".

The Linked Slot is filled if the card going into Active has a thing it is Linked to.

In this example, Betty the mechanic has her big robot Lug.

Lug. Apologies about the super glue mess.

This is dragged straight out of Idle and get to take it's turn straight after Betty before the opponent.

In Malifaux terms, this is companion or accomplice.

The clean up step as well as sorting the Ready Queue out allow the player to mulligan or at minimum drawing or discarding down to five cards and also to check victory points.

To a degree the game is a race, objectives score big VPs, Primary five and Secondary three, as well as killing too.

It benefits the player who has planned well and also the player who can be flexible and change things on the fly if needed.

I will chat about objectives later.

No Ranges

This bit is fairly simple to explain, Relic Knights does not have ranges on weapons.
Shooting or Psychic attacks can hit what they can see and base to base is combat. It is that simple.

Overall this saves time checking melee ranges, how far people shoot and trying to move safe, you are either seen or not, your are either in combat or not.
Thematically shooting having no maximum is fitting, laser guns, people firing off energy bolts, these things would be able to go "far enough".

Melee ranges arguably make less sense but it stops a lot of confusions or odd situations like models walking in-between people's engagements. That and having some attacks have "Charge" which moves them in a straight line, adds a lot of flavour when needed.

As I said AOE (area of effect) are 30mm tokens that have a 3-inch aura/bubble around them, but unless otherwise stated are placed where the model can see.

The only major need for the tape measure is your movement and deployment.

Movement in Relic Knights is fairly fast and has models bouncing about the table like an in flight fight from an anime.
Each model gets two move values, one before and after their action.
You can move shoot hide.
You can move fight move on.
You can move back grab something, head back on.
It gives a lot of tactical flexibility and is refreshingly different in such a simple way.

Zineda employs Psychic attacks across the battlefield.

No Deployment Zones

As I said, keep your tape measures by.

Deployment is very similar to "blind deployment" in other skirmish games; your models will be spread about the table if you like.

Simply players take turns placing 3 objective markers, the restriction being they can't be within 9" of each other. They can be close, far apart, as near to opponents, this in itself is strategic as different placements will be good depending on your objectives, your force, your opponents and terrain.

After objectives an additional thing called Boost Markers are then placed taking turns, these have no restriction on where they go, but to explain Boosts simply, they are power ups or like Mysterious Objectives in 40k. Some are things like ammo dumps and med kits while others are traps and mines.

Lastly, the models get placed also taking turns, 9" is the restriction again but this time the nearest thing to a Deployment zone is made.

Not 9" within your objectives but at least 9" away from an enemy objective or marker.

The deployment is strategic. I can see it becoming manic too as a lot of things will be able to attack in the first turn if deployed right.

This could be argued as good, because unlike many tabletop wargames Relic Knights does not suffer from the first turn of getting into position and not much else.

In the first few games, deployment will catch people out for sure, but soon they will learn, not only how to not get caught out but how their list should want to deploy, how the other factions like to do their thing and so on.

The Models

Relic Knights is a 30mm scale game, as I said before this does go from soldiers up to giant robots who need 80mm base.

Photos do not do the size justice.

Kasaro To doesn't even fit into the 80mm base.

Originally, when Relic Knights were just some cool miniatures that Sodapop made and not a full game, they were made from both Restic and metal pieces.

Excluding some limited edition pieces all the Relic Knights models are made from Restic, a few which had minor re-sculpts to make them safer.

I'll cut to the chase, Restic is not my preferred material to work with and I know mostly everyone agrees.

Plastics are very costly for companies to do and tend to be avoided due to great investment the moulds cost.

Resin in the "Forgeworld style" is also usually held back for special pieces or boutique miniature ranges, mostly for cash reasons but occasionally time.

Metal is a thing of the past for most. Some companies stick to it as the detailing is great, but weight and cost is restrictive.

Restic is an obvious choice for Relic Knights and though I might not be that happy with it, it does mostly pay off.

The larger models such as the Relic Knights themselves or from my experience the entire Noh Empire it works very well, mold lines are everywhere and restic always takes a little longer to clean, but bar that the bigger kits are actually fantastic.

A joy to build as most the large kits have very obvious different shaped pegs and matching holes, allowing models to be dry fit really easily before hand.

The issues become a little more apparent with smaller models, I have heard the poses and variation some of the "human sized" squads isn't quite there, for me it has been fine but cleaning is that much more difficult.

The other large issue is detailing quite soft, some faces look almost blank.

Aww, Mr Tomn is so cute.

This issue was one that early plastic Malifaux sculpts seemed to have when they kicked off with their Ten Thunders, these are still great to paint but just involve a little more skill and imagination to take full advantage of. I am quite sure it will be the same for Relic Knights.

The only other small issue is sausage finger syndrome and that some pieces attached to sprues are so by their pegs, with the shape and hole format this is kind of moronic.

Overall though, as far as Restic goes it is far from a lot of the nightmares that are out there and is quite possibly top of it's class.

Mamaro To. One of my favourite miniatures.

Intro Outro

I hope that this fairly hefty introduction has been enlightening.

I will leave this with a few pictures of the models and a note that, don't worry I've not quit Malifaux for Relic Knights but that I hope people will enjoy the occasional post about it here in the future.

I may do some more for Guildball and Infamy once they hit our tabletops.

Lastly, expect a quick round up of my very first game coming soon.