Why Conqueror exists

Conqueror is a labor of love. It grew out of a personal passion for wargaming, for painting, and for the 10mm scale specifically — a scale that rewards ambition on the table (real ranks, real formations, real armies) without demanding a lifetime to paint or a mortgage to collect.

I wanted a game built around that scale from the ground up, not adapted to it after the fact. Everything here: the rules, the factions, the world they fight in, is being built by one person who just wants this game to exist, and who'd like other people at the table to enjoy it too.

The world

Conqueror is set on a peninsula of a fantasy world — for centuries dismissed by the wider world as worthless, home to nothing but recluse lizards and old, buried dangers. That changed the day a shipwrecked crew stumbled out of its jungles with their pockets full of gold.

They'd found temples. Ancient ones, and full of treasure. What they didn't know was that plundering them woke something that had been resting a very long time. Deep in the Peninsula's heart, a cursed civilization of god-kings and soldiers — dead, and yet not permitted to die — began to stir. Centuries had turned their flesh to bone without ever letting them rest. Now the Gilded Host rises from its obsidian temples to reclaim what was once theirs.

Yet they are not the oldest thing here. Long before their empire ever stood, the Ssarthan Concord had already endured for ages beyond memory. Cold-blooded, cruel and patient, carrying their history not in books but in ritual and a shared inheritance they call the World-Memory. They watched the Gilded Host's empire rise and saw it fall. They see its return not as the reawakening of an old rival, but as just another stubborn kind of warm-blood, refusing to stay dead.

Meanwhile the Meridian Confederation, the continent-spanning power that once couldn't be bothered with this place has followed the gold back to its source, the same way it follows gold everywhere: with roads, contracts, and armies raised as much from paid loyalty as from shared banners.

And from the desert's edge come the Dreamsworn, servants of something they call the Sleeper. An entity that feeds on dreams, hope, and the substance of thought itself. They believe the Peninsula's heart is a seam in reality, one thin enough for their master to finally cross through whole. Where they walk, the air gets heavier and people wake up changed.

Beneath and around all of it is the land itself, older than any empire built on top of it.
A primal force that answers when the balance is broken: poisoned rivers, undead blight, overreach by the living or the dead alike. Outsiders spoke of it as one thing, the Verdant Wild. It's since revealed itself as two: the beastkin warbands that strike through hidden Beastpaths, and the druidic circles of the Deep Root, who turn the forces of nature into a weapon.

Six powers, one contested strip of land, and nobody who was there first is willing to leave.

The rulebook currently carries the mechanics of this conflict in full — the deeper narrative material (artwork, history, geography, more voices from each faction) is ongoing work, and it's one of the things future support would go toward expanding.

What is Conqueror?

Conqueror is a rank-and-flank tabletop wargame for two or more players, designed to move fast at the table — command, act, resolve — favoring clean, decisive turns over long fiddly ones. Starting games are played at 100 points, using 4-base entries that can be stacked into ranks up to 4 deep, though the system scales up or down for different scenarios and game sizes.

Six tenets sit behind every design decision
in the book:

- Engaging rules - Both players should stay engaged at all times, with play moving quickly between them. Nobody should be sitting idle through someone else's turn.

- Command friction - No warlord has omnipotent control over their army or the battlefield. Command is a real, spendable resource, and concentrating it is powerful precisely because it's fragile. 

- Flexible army building - Mustering a force should be streamlined enough for a quick pick-up game, but deep enough to reward serious list-building and strategy.

- Variable game size - 100 points is the starting standard, but the system is built to scale up or down for different scenarios and game modes.

- Miniature agnosticism - Conqueror isn't tied to any single miniatures range or manufacturer. Basing is kept adjustable by design, so armies from adjacent systems can be ported over rather than requiring a dedicated line of models.

- A nod to the past - Built in the spirit of the tabletop wargames of the 90s and 2000s; the games I grew up on, taken forward the way I always wished they would be, into a modern age of wargaming

Six factions, six ways to fight

- Meridian Confederation - not so much a human nation as a method: trade, contract, and controlled war. More chartered company and banking order than kingdom, conquering through commerce as much as the sword — absorbing everything it touches, roads, goods, and loyalty alike.

- Gilded Host - an ancient empire native to the peninsula, dead and unwilling to stay that way. Endless undead ranks, raised from the fallen mid-battle, marching under obsidian and gold.

- Ssarthan Concord - cold-blooded lizards backed by signature battle-spells and a patience no warm-blooded army can match.

- Dreamsworn - the many servants of the Sleeper, running on Lucidity, a shared resource spent to bend the battlefield rather than break it by force.

- Beastkin tribes - savage, mobile warbands that strike from Beastpaths no conventional army can follow.

 Deep Root Druids - druidic circles who call on the raw forces of nature, turning beast, storm, root, and stone into a weapon. 

This is an alpha. Read that as an invitation, not a disclaimer.

Conqueror is currently at **v0.17** and has been through multiple internal QA passes and some initial local playtesting. Every rule checked for contradictions, abilities cross-referenced against its glossary entry, every scenario worked through end to end. What it hasn't had yet is a wide table of players putting it under real pressure. That's the whole reason this page exists.

Right now, expect:

- A complete, playable rule set: core actions, combat, magic, six full factions, and six scenarios.

- No real art yet: The rulebook mostly text and stat blocks for now. Full illustrations, narrative material, and photography are all in progress. The illustrations I used are placeholder leftovers from a project me and Damijan worked on.

- A few open balance questions I'm tracking myself and would love outside eyes on:
- does whoever charges first just win? does a horde of cheap troops beat a command-focused list? does being short on Command ever really cost you anything substantial? 

- The Army Builder

Alongside the rulebook, there's a free companion app for building and printing legal army lists — pick a faction, add units and characters, watch your point total update live, and export a clean list to bring to the table. No install, runs in your browser.

https://conquerorarmybuilder.netlify.app

What I need from you

If you download this and play even one game, I want to hear about it — good, bad, or "this rule made no sense at the table." Specifically useful feedback:

- Anything that felt unclear or contradictory when you tried to actually resolve it.

- Whether one strategy (charging first, massing cheap troops, stacking Command) felt  like it dominated the game

- Anything that took too long to resolve or broke the pace of the game

- Typos, broken cross-references, or anything in the document that just doesn't track

You can leave a comment on this page, or drop into the Discord below — that's where I'll be hanging out day to day. I read everything and would love for you to get involved.

Join the community

The best place to talk shop, report bugs, share army lists, or just see what's being worked on next is the Discord:

https://discord.gg/GVMjYfxAW

If you'd rather just keep tabs on the project without joining anything, hitting

Follow on this itch page will let you know whenever there's a new build, a devlog post, or new art to see.

Pricing

Conqueror is pay what you want, including $0, for the full alpha rulebook and the army builder. This is a hobby project I want in as many hands as possible right now.

Support is genuinely appreciated but never expected. If you'd rather pay it forward by sending detailed feedback after a game instead of money, that's worth just as much to me if not more.

If you do want to throw a few dollars at it, thank you — support goes toward the things that actually move this from "alpha text doc" to a finished game: illustration and narrative work, getting physical copies printed, and expanding the roster with more factions, units, and supplements. Further down the road, and depending on interest, I'd also like to collaborate with 3D artists who specialize in 10mm-scale miniatures.

nothing promised yet, but it's the direction I'd like this to grow toward.

Status

- Rulebook: v0.19, text-complete, placeholder-art, no real layout.

- Army builder: live, functional, screenshots above

- Playtesting: just getting started — this release is the start of it