Have you ever wanted to kick Herakles’ ass? NOW YOU CAN.

Welcome to the “The Trials of Herakles”.

So what is “The Trials Of Herakles”?

Put simply, “The Trials Of Herakles” is a twelve-scenario mission pack that reimagines each of Herakles’ twelve labors through the lens of encounters in DEMIGOD. You can slay the Nemean Lion, try your best to clean out King Augeus’s stables, pit your wits against Hippolyte of the Amazons and more. The book is designed with solo play in mind (as is the DEMIGOD core rulebook), but I am playtesting a set of profiles to allow a second player step into the sandals of Herakles himself and really see if they can get the labors done before your adventuring party does.

What else is in the book?

Besides the twelve labors, you’ll have three different boons from Hera, allowing her to be your demigod’s patron if you so choose. You’ll also have access to the bestiary at the back of the book, meaning you can add the monsters you encounter in “Trials of Herakles” to your monster hunts in normal games of DEMIGOD.

What do I need to play?

Besides a copy of the “Trials of Herakles” beta rules (available here), you’ll also need a copy of the DEMIGOD core rulebook (available here from my own site, or here as a PDF from Wargame Vault), as well as some miniatures to represent both your own adventuring party and the monsters you’ll encounter throughout “The Trials of Herakles”. For a general primer on what miniatures match the “vibe” of DEMIGOD, check out this post I made a couple weeks ago on the subject.

If you’re looking for miniatures specific to “Trials Of Herakles”, so far I recommend this lion by Epic Miniatures. I’ll keep this post updated as I work through the other 11 scenarios, so if you’re looking for inspiration for tackling the quests from “Trials of Herakles”, don’t forget to check back!

So I wanted to apologize for the second hiatus. To be honest, I didn’t feel like writing blog posts. Or games, if I’m honest. You know that saying of “Find a job you love and you’ll never work a day in your life”? Well, writing games was starting to feel a lot like work.

Now that I’ve taken a bit of a break, I’m back in business. Expect new blog posts, plus new game content. I’m about 40% done with “The Trials Of Herakles”, and I’m hoping to get that out to playtesters by the end of this year (2024). I’ve also had a new game in the works. Well, for a given sense of “new” - it’s a rewrite of a game I finished years ago and never released. That game was called “Humanity In Flames”. It started life as a what-if scenario: I’d just finished Dan Abnett’s “Embedded” and the way he’d written combat really stuck with me. I wanted to write a game that evoked the combat in that book - something frenetic and fast-paced.

What I ended up coming up with could best be described as “Force On Force without all the charts.” It combined basic versions of the unit profiles from Warhammer 40,000 4th edition with Force on Force’s troop quality dice, and played much more like Warhammer 40,000 than it did Force on Force. Throw in Chain of Command’s army list system, and you have the first version of Humanity In Flames. I eventually re-scaled the game into a 15mm company-level wargame, but that still didn’t get me exactly where I wanted.

Enter Covering Fire

From there, I went back to the drawing board. I re-examined what I wanted out of my game: fast-paced, frenetic combat that didn’t worry about bean-counting. So I started poking around. I already knew Chain of Command, but I wasn’t a huge fan of its Chain of Command points. Eventually, I stumbled upon Covering Fire, a little two-page ruleset from the folks behind One Page Rules (OPR). While it doesn’t appear to still be available on their website, Covering Fire was OPR’s take-off of Crossfire, a company-level WWII wargame written by Artie Conliffe in 1996. Covering Fire (and Crossfire before it) is designed to be a fast-paced game, for all that it’s company-level. There are no turns. There is no measuring. Units move from terrain feature to terrain feature. Units accrue “pin markers” that are a representation of how combat effective they are - the more pin markers a unit has, the less effective they are, until they’re killed.

Making It My Own

I kept most of these features, excepting that units have to move from terrain feature to terrain feature - this makes for terrain-heavy boards, and not everyone has enough terrain to saturate a 6’x4’ board. I added vehicle rules that are vaguely similar to Chain of Command’s, but vastly simplified. I still have to flesh out those vehicle rules I mentioned above, plus make some changes to how infantry work (namely as individual models vs stands). I hope to document those rules for y’all in some upcoming blog posts, so stay tuned!

In the meanwhile, you can read those rules (tentatively titled “Eleven Bravo”) here.

As of last week, DEMIGOD is officially out of Kickstarter. Unfortunately, it didn’t meet its crowdfunding goal. While it always sucks when this happens, never fear: I have a cunning plan.

If you take a look at the DEMIGOD Itch page, you’ll notice that DEMIGOD is now set up to slowfund. I talked about this a little in the post from two weeks ago. So what’s changed from then to now?

Well, I’ll no longer be slowfunding via Cardboard Monster. I didn’t know that Itch allowed you to offer physical goods when it came to setting up their reward tiers. Now that I know that that’s the case, I no longer need Cardboard Monster - everything will be handled by Itch.

That being the case, the reward tiers for Itch will mostly be carry-overs of the ones from Kickstarter. The “Mortal Acolyte” tier will go away, as will the larger tiers with the 3D printing files. Instead, the Itch tiers will be broken down like this:

• Digital Demigod: Gets you a full-color PDF copy of the DEMIGOD rulebook. $15.
• Seasoned Campaigner: Gets you a full-color PDF copy of the DEMIGOD rulebook, plus The Suitors For Lady Penelope add-on scenario. $18.
• Scion Of Olympus: Gets you full color print and PDF copies of the DEMIGOD rulebook, plus The Suitors For Lady Penelope add-on scenario. $50 + shipping.
• Patroned by Hermes: For merchants, retailers and others patroned by Hermes. Gets you four print copies of the DEMIGOD rulebook, as well as PDF support for any physical book sales you make going forward. $100 + shipping.

Each slowfund I set up will cap at $500 - enough for me to do a print run of the DEMIGOD core book to fulfill the orders placed during the slowfund. Once I reach that cap, the print order gets placed and the next slowfund begins.

If you have any questions about the slowfund tiers or the process as a whole, feel free to reach out to chris@no-name-games.com with your Qs.

So The Blog With No Name (and No Name Games as a whole) have been on a bit of a hiatus for a couple reasons. First was that I started a Kickstarter for DEMIGOD, No Name Games’s first solo-published game. When it looked like that Kickstarter wasn’t going to fund, I turned to setting up other ways for getting the game funded and “paying myself back”. So far, I’ve arrived at three solutions:

1. Slowfunding via Itch.
2. Slowfunding via Cardboard Monster.
3. Some combination of the above.

As it stands, I’m looking mostly at #3. Itch would handle the distribution of PDF/digital versions of my games and their associated 3D printing files, while Cardboard Monster would handle physical distribution. So here’s how things will break down:

• If you want a PDF copy of DEMIGOD and/or the 3D print files, those will be available from Itch for $15 (PDF) or $10 apiece for the 3D printing files.
• If you want a print copy, you’ll have two options: order straight from me for $30; or order from Cardboard Monster for $30.

Speaking of physical copies, that leads to my second point: as of the end of next month, I’ll have physical copies of DEMIGOD in Nowhere’s Store of Forgotten Lore in Springfield, MO. So if you’re in the Springfield area, definitely check it out!

The third thing doesn’t really have to do with the first two, but I also redesigned the No Name Games website! I got rid of the big central logo in place of something a little more understated. The click effect is also gone on the logo. Makes the site a little longer, but now everything should load faster - especially because the site and blog are now rolled into one.

I’ll be back next week with our regularly scheduled programming - a post on how to price your TTRPGs.