The Naked & The Dread

‘It was the lockdown, the first lockdown in the UK in 2020. It was my birthday and somebody had sent me a gift card and I thought, you know what, I’m stuck in this house, I need an indoor hobby. I’m going to buy myself two different miniature kits and bash them together, buy a few paints to paint them with and just do it for a bit of fun, not get in too deep,’ Chris McDowall laughs.

‘And then it was, I'm just gonna buy a little bit of terrain so that I can pose them on it for a nice photo. And then I thought, well maybe I'll try making a little ruleset that I could use with them. And well, here we are three years later.’

Where we are exactly is late summer 2023 and Chris McDowall has just released The Doomed. A miniature agnostic wargame set on a dying, dystopian world, The Doomed sees rival warbands exploring this ruined planet, fighting battles both amongst themselves and against the monstrous techno abominations that call this awful planet home.

Whilst McDowall is best known for games like Into The Odd, one of the more influential rules-lite RPGs to have emerged from the OSR movement, The Doomed is something of a return to his roots and the wargames, like Warhammer and Necromunda, that first caught his imagination as a ten year old child setting him on the path to game design.

McDowall may have, temporarily at least, swapped RPGs’ theatre of the mind for the more physical world of miniatures butThe Doomed still shares much of the same design philosophy that underpinned Into The Odd and its follow-up Electric Bastionland. Much like they took those early editions of Dungeons & Dragons B/X and stripped them to the bone, The Doomed is a similar exercise in mechanical minimalism. 

Warbands come from one of four different factions, each with their own theme and from which you pick eight models, a leader and their attendant retinue. Each model gets to operate independently of each other and can make three actions on their turn, actions that are normally limited to moving, fighting hand to hand, shooting or recovering if they’re currently prone. Tape measures are out, with models able to move and shoot as far as they can in a straight line and to further simplify things units have just the one stat, Quality, which they must equal or roll over on a d6 when they want to do anything bar make their first move. 

‘With The Doomed, what we ended up with was an attempt to create as simple a rule set as possible, something that is very fast and easy to learn,’ McDowall explains. ‘Now I appreciate that's something that every wargame system says about itself, but I've tried to push it even further here and take it to the extreme. I’d been playing Kill Team a little bit and I thought, well, this is okay, I like this, but I wonder how much more you can strip back. Another big inspiration for that was the One Page Rules games. But even with those I thought, well, can you go even further than that? Can you strip out things like ongoing conditions, stacking modifiers and measuring. Reduce units down to a single single number essentially, without losing flavor or the differentiation between units?’

Reducing the rules to a skeletal frame wasn’t just an intellectual exercise though. By making the core structure of the game as simple as possible McDowall was able to then add complex features back into the game where they could create the kind of narrative drama that he wanted, a key example of this being the Shock Table that units must roll on every time they’re wounded.  

‘I wanted the game to have that sense of chaos, a little bit like in Warhammer Fantasy Role-Play when you get these critical hit results that cause all sorts of spiraling effects that can change the face of the battle,’ he says. ‘So every time a unit gets wounded, you roll on a shock table. That covers things like getting a chance to crawl to cover before you go down or the unit that's been hit just panics and shoots at the nearest model.

‘That can create all sorts of domino moments where an attack hits somebody and they go down but they get an attack so they shoot another person who then crawls and moves and that activates something else. In a game where the core system was a little bit complicated that, for me, would be overwhelming. I wanted the system to be super simple so you could have those exciting dramatic moments, and have this chaos unfolding on the battlefield.’