Fight in a world where death isn’t the end, it’s just the intermission in our skirmish wargame, Dead Reckoning
The Cybernetic Coven is here to announce Dead Reckoning, a skirmish wargame of the quick and the undead.
In the stone heart of a corpse the size of a mountain, the dead walk. They also fight, feud, squabble, and scramble for whatever advantage they can have in a necropolis where the living fear to tread, and don’t stay down for long. Whether it’s fighting in cathedrals made from fossilized ribs the size of skyscrapers to plunging through the lightning-strewn caverns of the spinal column, to even heading back above to the cities that have built themselves around a corpse of incomprehensible size and unimaginable power, there’s never a moment where there isn’t some kind of fight breaking out.
Or, to put it simply, Dead Reckoning is a game about the roiling conflict within the corpse of a god, and what your personal little band of misfit undead can do.
Using a straightforward roll-under system and a whole bevy of units, abilities, and fancy faction-specific mechanics, Dead Reckoning is an attempt to make a skirmish wargame with a heavy emphasis on small selections of customizable units, quick and flexible gameplay, and fun and flavorful design. Its core theme, if there is one, is that no one stays down for long: Every faction has some form of life after death, making your small squads a lot more than they seem, and far more likely to turn shutdowns into comebacks. After all, you can’t keep a good undead abomination down.
Grave Tidings
So what’s waiting for you, in this fine attempt to be the afterlife of the party?
Right now Dead Reckoning is an alpha playtest, covering only the most basic scenario and with only a small selection of two factions available. However, this is more than enough to cover all the basic rules, general gameplay, and unit and army customization. There’s more than enough for people to sink their teeth into, with premade army lists to give people ideas, and instruction on how to make your own and what to look out for. It’s relatively simple, all things considered, but is a nice and straightforward introduction to what we’re planning to do with Dead Reckoning later on.
Included in this are two factions: The skeletal warriors of the Amethyst Order of the Cenotaph, who rise and rise again as the magical smoke that animates them coalesces around their corpses, and the serfs and lieges of the Court Dolorous, whose phantom nobles sacrifice themselves to bestow glory and power upon their living servants. These should offer a good taste of the game, but rest assured, there’s a lot more coming. We plan to have five full factions at launch, and more surprises still.
Additionally, this release comes with a fully functional Tabletop Simulator version! If you’ve got it, it’s a great way to play without having to be in person, and even has its own placeholder miniatures.
Check it out on our Patreon.
The Future
Development on Dead Reckoning is something that’s been in the works for a while now, and while we’re putting out this alpha now, it’s by no means the only thing we have planned for it.
Future versions of Dead Reckoning aim to include the three other core factions, a greater variety and scope of units including the unrepresented Boss and Summon unit types, larger scale lists and testing, and a further exploration of some of Dead Reckoning’s stranger ideas, like it’s Incursion system— Where you reshape the board to your faction’s advantage, laying new terrain on top of old. Of course, given this version of the game is lacking terrain at all, we’re still getting there.
In the much further future, we have plans for significantly more than just that however. Our goal for Dead Reckoning is for it to be a recurrent thing, a game where new units and factions and ideas can add and grow as it gains a community that plays it. In the ideal world, we’d like to eventually even get physical miniatures or STL files for it, if we can.
Until then however, the purpose of this alpha playtest is clear— see if the game works, and fix where it doesn’t.
About the Cybernetic Coven
The Cybernetic Coven, or CyCo, is a participatory cooperative and artist collective. CyCo focuses on sustainable and healthy work practices, protecting individual members from the risks of the attention economy, supporting the creation of meaningful art that would not be profitable, and rewarding labor according to effort or solidarity. You can learn more on the CyCo website.
