The Mortem et Gloriam Strategic Plan

I am now resurfacing a little after 18 months in which I nearly died twice after the electrocution, have had to protect two traumatised ASD children on my own and am just finishing going through the divorce from hell. 

So my apologies for having been more distant than in the past but despite the above quite a lot has been going on in the background.

So herewith is the context and the plan …

When PSC were given the licence to publish and market Mortem et Gloriam I thought we had a good answer but alas it proved not to be. There was very little promotion of the game.  I therefore took it back earlier this year.  But unfortunately, they were in breach of a far more serious issue of not even having any dice in stock.  70 sets in total from the 4500 sets I gave them … so sadly I couldn’t promote it either as no dice no Mortem et Gloriam really.

We have a very fine community already.  In the UK there is an event every two weeks and we are starting to see beginners’ events and historical events rather than just normal comps!! We have excellent groups of players in Australia, Greece, Poland, France, Belgium, Ireland and certain parts of the USA.  A smaller group I know of in Spain, Italy, Brazil, Germany etc. One can only admire the enthusiasm of the many organisers of events everywhere and I thank you all. I wish I could get to more of them.

We have a lot of social players.  In total, we are well over 2000 players. Our FB groups are larger than most other rulesets with almost 3000 followers now. We need to spread our wings grow the community, and encourage social players to come to ‘events’ (and we need to make them less competitiony to do such as boot camps, reenactment of battles, themed fun events etc). That is the priority now so after 2024 list changes we agreed to lock everything down.  So there will be no rule or list changes until a vs 2 appears which is probably a 2028 product.  All that will happen is we will fix anything that is pointed out as badly broken – but there doesn’t seem to be anything – and Richard is going to adapt the dates of lists based on all the amazing work he has done adding all their battles to the document (an amazing resource). 

So our sole priority now should be to grow the game and community over the coming years, recovering from the PSC and electrocuted-Simon era.  Doing so has always depended on the words and actions of the community most of all but now I can get back to backing it and marketing it centrally…

So here is the plan:

1. I have had an emergency dice run recreated in China and air freighted over for $750, so now we have a lot of dice.  We have all the items in stock now at the Lurkio store.  So we can now market the game and grow it. 

2. For rules we will be staying with PDF and Lulu but will do short runs of books so they can be purchased directly from the site as a shared copy.  We have tested this for both Mortem et Gloriam and Renatie et Gloriam and the books sold fast at events.

3. History shows that the primary growth comes from getting new players in from non-ancient gaming.  28mm Pacto is the single best to remote as it attracts SAGA players and 40k players who like big figures to paint and also old WRG players. Clearly, the plan is to move them up to Magna and then to 15mm Maximus as well. Please don’t stop trying to pull people from other big battle systems but it is not the main source of growth. 28mm Magna will do some of that as a lot of older players are now going back to 28mm.

4. I have now agreed on a plan with WoFun where we have in stock starter sets which have two complete armies for 5 different matchups. They have just arrived and will go on sale next week. While those with massive collections of metal may only use them as travel sets, they are amazing for people starting out.  The artwork is stunning and better than most painting. The cost is about half unpainted metal and if you count time or getting anything painted maybe 1/5th of the entry cost into the hobby.

5. At the same time, WoFun are going to stock the rules and accessories so that people can buy it all in one place from either. For those of you in the EU you will therefore soon have a source of local Mortem et Gloriam items within the EU.  The box is packed and will be shipped next week.

6. The potential game changer is Total War Rome – not just the game but the logistics.  It has taken a mammoth effort to recover the project but the main game and the BattlePlay expansion (which is one notch away from Mortem et Gloriam Pacto) are in production right now.  They will be delivered end Q3 and through Q4 to 4000 backers. There will be an online pre-sale in September. There are 50,000+ historical board gamers there already to try to get into Mortem et Gloriam…

7. But it then gets a lot better. To deliver TWR I have 5 fulfilment centres around the globe and these will stock the dice and CCC items as well. So once they kick into action in Q4 everything is available at local P&P within AsiaPac, USA, Canada, EU and UK. So once we have all that up and running then I can market Mortem et Gloriam properly again myself as CCC games and we have the follow-up infrastructure to support it.

8. In the meantime I am sending stock to certain individuals so they can send them out locally or sell them at shows to reduce the need to pay excessive shipping.  For instance, some stock and prizes will be going off for Historicon later this week.

So that is the short-term plan.

Longer term.

1. We already have a rule team of myself, RJC, Nik, and Lance who work closely together on rule ideas. We have a list of possible improvements to the game but we must tread carefully as it is easy to break something that is always so. They are very effective at working on rules with me from long-established time together.  But the final say always is with me.

2. It will be a gradual process. We plan to have a brainstorming session on ideas around the end of the year.  Apparently, they have about 15 and I have about 10. And then we will have another around Xmas 2026.

3. Committees make for very bad designers – so the final design will still be mine and come from me.  But I listen and always have taken great input from the team. I will add a US, Australian, Far East and EU person to a group for rule discussion in late 2026.

4. We will then be publishing ideas for you all to playtest on comments about in 2027.

5. A year of playtesting will get us to Mortem et Gloriam 2 in late 2028 – if we find enough to change.

6. It may well be we find tweaks and improvements only and it is more a vs 1.1 update. Time will tell but rest assured no surprises and lots of time to input.

7. Any material army list changes would be timed to go with the new rules and rest assured we will not be making changes that take out armies people have spent a lot of time collecting and painting.  Army viability will remain a top priority (at present I can make at least 80% of the armies work – which is amazing out of 660 armies).

Communication processes

There has been some confusion (to say the least) recently so let me remind everyone of the following:
1. OFFICIAL ultimately means me.  I will either announce something or I all post saying RJC is announcing something.  That always happens here. I will often cross post something to my Mortem et Gloriam FB page which is the official one.  But the forum is ALWAYS the place for anything proposed for deep discussion with any intent to it.  And always has been.  My enforced absence has perhaps allowed some confusion to emerge.  I am sorry for that.  But some things are more important …

2. The FB groups are for community sharing, banter and fun.  But nothing there is official.

3. The WA groups are one stage, lighter still being a great deal of banter that at times is hard to keep up with there. Lots of joking and challenges for the fun of it. Anything on there is way further from official and all sorts of ideas are floated there – some good and some quite bonkers frankly.  But it is part of the community fun.

So please everyone do not ever overreact to anything on WA or FG groups. Only ever the official channels. And if you are concerned about something said please just come back to me so I can fix any mix-ups painlessly. 

Our target market is outside the walls of the Mortem et Gloriam castle and we do not need to be wasting energy infighting – especially if that infighting is based on false information and rumours anyway.

I hope that is very clear to all. The next steps you will see are:

• JUNE WoFun 28mm going up.
• JUNE WoFun stocking Mortem et Gloriam for Europe.
• JULY Individuals receiving stock in countries.
• SEP Total War Presale.
• NOV Fulfilment of RTW.
• DEC Mortem et Gloriam marketing on the back of all the above to a few 100k people.

Keep enjoying the game.  It makes it all worthwhile.  But please let us have less inner stress and focus our energies outwards and grow more as a result.  I know all fans of the game want that and in truth, the PSC journey took away our infrastructure on which to do it for 18 months. 

That returns far stronger by the end of the year as above.

Onwards and upwards.

Simon – MEG-Meister