to DOWNLOAD THE Warhamster! Open BETA - 9th Level Games

Getting Skulls in the
monster bowl
The most common triggers for players to have to put skulls in the bowl are
rolling 1s, breaking rules, taking multiple actions, using dangerous toys and
gaining story tokens. I’m sure that enterprising diceMasters will come up
with more ways over time, but for now, let’s focus on these.
ROLLING SKULLS - The truly math nerd-tastic of you may have noticed
that it should be really easy for an Adventurer with some good gear and a
high Stat Die to accomplish most tasks. A 5 th Level Adventurer will NEVER
fail a roll against a DEFENSE of 4…so, why should I even roll the dice? Well,
in Warhamster you must always roll, because you may “Roll A Skull”.
Whenever you roll a die and you roll a “1”, you don’t automatically fail (like
in most games). Instead, you just “rolled a skull” and have to donate a
SKULL to the MONSTER BOWL. This makes lower Stat Dice (especially
d4s) dangerous to roll. SPECIAL NOTE: Damage rolls and movement rolls
don’t generate Skulls…
GAINING STORIES - When the Party is in a TOWN phase, an Adventurer
can take a skull to gain additional STORIES to use while in Town. More
information on that is explained in the TOWN PHASE section (xxxxx).
TAKING ADDITIONAL ACTIONS - Adventurers can take an additional (or
actions) on their turn, by adding a Skull to the Monster Bowl.
diceMasters can take advantage of this as well, by removing (spending) a
Skull from the Bowl to give an additional action to one of the monsters
during the dM turn.
BREAKING A TIE - Adventurers can choose to cough up a skull to the
Monster Bowl to break a tie in their favor (watch out, the dM can “spend
a skull to do the same).
The DANGEROUS Edge - Some POWERS and GEAR may have the keyword
DANGEROUS attached to them. Whenever a player uses a +DANGEROUS
power or item, they must donate a SKULL to the bowl.
RULE BREAKING - While it is true that we all like to play chaotic
characters*, Gamers as a rule crave order! Rules systems are filled with (bet
you can’t guess it…) rules! And while rules were meant to be broken, there
should always be a penalty for doing so (otherwise you wouldn’t need rules
and game designers like us would be forced to write pathetic Battlestar
Galactica fanfic and blog about Star Wars themed undergarments).
Whenever an Adventurer breaks a rule – give them a SKULL! The most
common rules violations will be players forgetting to “role-play” their bogies,
or failure to remember house rules.**
*Especially high level Chaotic Neutral Assassin Barbarian Sorcerers that can
explain away their wholesale slaughter of innocents and enemies as “I was
just playing my alignment dude”.
** Bar Gamers Note: For instance, a play group that really likes to imbibe
libations and has a penchant for crafting rules systems to encourage such
imbibation (imbibatude???) could create a HOUSE RULE that says,
“Whenever an Adventurer takes a SKULL, they have to immediately say
“Thank You Sir, May I have Another.” So, when they forget that, they are
breaking a rule….