On Tuesday, Spanish miniature maker Corvus Belli revealed the full line up for the Red Caps, a rabble of “mischievous, impulsive, eternally hyperactive” goblins for its fantasy wargame Warcrow, immortal sprites spawned from the magical dreams of the long-suffering elven general Nuada. I spoke to Corvus Belli’s own mischievous, impulsive, eternally hyperactive goblin Laura “Hoopoe” Royo about the new faction, and how that chaos comes across in their bespoke narrative campaign.
The Red Caps range launches with a ready-to-play warband-in-a-box ‘action pack’ containing Nuada and his goblin lackies. “That action pack is going to include a narrative campaign, and that narrative campaign is bonkers”, Hoopoe says, “the most stupid, the most ridiculous, and the most insulting to the players that we’ve ever had”. “I’ve had a blast creating that”, she adds.
“The Red Caps, with all the lore and the miniatures, the way they conduct themselves, they’re asking for this”, she explains. It just didn’t seem right “to write a super serious campaign about a tall elf who goes looking for a lost city followed by a train of goblins like ducklings following their mom”. “There’s nothing behind the Red Caps eyes”, she adds, “it’s just smooth”.
Hoopoe – one of the game’s designers – has channelled her inner goblin while writing the rules. “There’s parts in which I directly address the player”, she says. “[At the end of scenarios] where it says ‘But what if we tie?’, immediately after that it says ‘BuT wHaT iF wE tIe?’ or ‘Go read the rules, you had one job!’ stuff like that”. It is, she says, “incoherent”.
“Its not going to be everyone’s cuppa, I’ve accepted that”, Hoopoe says. “This is me taking revenge on [the players for] all the questions in the FAQ. ‘What if I do that? Can I do this?’ No!”, she jokes. “There’s something that all my campaigns have in common. In every single campaign, there is a giant creature that wants to kill you. She’s basically me. It’s like me taking revenge on all the players and their questions”. I make a mental note never to get on her bad side, for fear of being written into a scenario as some manner of lumpen troll.
This explicitly silly framing for the campaign, “means we could do stuff that we would normally not consider doing”, Hoopoe says. “There’s a massive gap between creating scenarios for narrative campaigns and competitive scenarios, entirely different world, but this one is even more different to the usual”. She gives an example: “I think it’s in the last scenario, there’s a rule that says that no one dies, because death is a lie”.
Warcrow’s narrative campaigns live up to the “narrative” description, with interstitial scenes between missions and sometimes choose-your-own-adventure style choices and tests in the middle of battles. It’s something that the goblins, naturally, make very silly.
“There’s only one Redcap that can speak properly, Plav, the female”, Hoopoe says, “[for] the others, their names – Rag, Plum, and so on – are the sound they make”. So when “you interact with Plum in the campaign, all the options are ‘Plum, Plum, Plum, Plum, Plum, Plum'”. She adds that Plum “will be protected forever, and no harm will come across him in any capacity”.
In Warcrow’s lore, the Red Caps have only recently emerged from under the earth. While some factions like the dwarves of Mounthaven have known and been fighting them for decades, others don’t have a clue. “The Northern Tribes approach the Red Caps as if they were animals in the wild, they don’t comprehend why they could be organized”, Hoopoe says. After a moment’s reflection, she adds, “They cannot. No one other than Nuada is trying, and Nuada is the representation of delusion”.
The connection between Nuada and the Red Caps that follow him – his literal brainchildren – has been worked into their rules. “They mimic whatever emotion Nuada’s feeling – you can choose an emotion, and the goblins behave differently”.
The juxtaposition of these scrappy lunatics and a refined, but emotionally volatile, elf, puts me in mind of David Bowie’s Goblin King from the movie Labyrinth. I predict a few Nuada conversions with big hair and prominent crotch bulges in the future.
Hoopoe thinks that “people are going to either enjoy or hate” the campaign, “but play it nonetheless because the scenarios are very, very fun”. The Red Cap action pack and first unit box will be open for pre-orders on October 22, with early collection available at Essen Spiel. If you pick them up, make sure to share pictures in the Wargamer Discord community. Any goblin pictures, really. We love the malicious, idiotic little guys.
I’ve interviewed Hoopoe a few times in the past, and she’s always a hoot – check out our discussion about Warcrow’s recent global participation campaign ‘The Witch’, and about the body-morphing elves of the Scions of Yaldabaoth.
Source: Wargamer
