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Introduction

(Rule)

Description: Welcome to the tabletop wargame known as The 9th Age: Fantasy Battles, or T9A for short. This is a community crafted miniatures wargame, where grand armies collide in monumental conflicts for supremacy and survival. The game is played on a tabletop with terrain features and miniatures to represent the battlefield and the clashing armies, and it uses six-sided dice and measuring devices to move miniatures and resolve actions such as charging into battle, letting arrows loose, and casting spells.

For all the rules, feedback, and suggestions, please visit our webpage: the-ninth-age.com. The rules presented in this book are considered the Core Rules of T9A and are used in all T9A games.

Licence: Copyright Creative Commons

Rules representation

In order to keep rules clear and tidy, the following text formatting is used:

Text in a grey box denotes designer notes. In these are the designers giving some insights into intent behind rules, alternate ways to play the game, or shortcuts to speed things up.

  • Capitalization is used for words/phrases that are defined in this book, such as Round of Combat, unless they are common words with no elaborate game definition like model or unit, but Combat is since it is not used like the common British term.

  • Bold font or text is used to highlight specific words. It is also used in Army Books to emphasise Model Rules specified in the same unit entry.

  • Italic font marks reminders, examples, clarifications, and other content that are not direct rules.

  • Grey-coloured text is used for figure and table captions, item restrictions, repetitive content, and Properties, which is a special type of keyword that doesn’t transfer any direct rules.

  • Hyperlinks can be found in the electronic version of this document, and the page footer includes hyperlinks to key sections.

  • Pink text is unique to the Reference Handbook . This Handbook covers corner-cases and specific circumstances that are not expected to be relevant in the majority of games. The Handbook is a copy of the Illustrated Rulebook with additional sections added to cover these corner-cases.

Rules Documents

Illustrated Rulebook

The Illustrated Rulebook contains a streamlined version of the main rules needed for playing the game, alongside art, miniature images and lore.

Appendices

Appendices are an integral component of the core rules, and are generally used in most games. There are two appendices to the Illustrated Rulebook:

  • Illustrated Rulebook - Appendix I: Model Rules -- Additional and unique rules that specific models possess.

  • Illustrated Rulebook - Appendix II: Arcane Compendium -- The compendium contains spells from the ten different paths of magic, along with the common Magic Items.

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Season Packs

These documents comprise additional deployment types, maps, and secondary objectives, catering towards more advanced games.

Reference Handbook

This handbook includes all rules from the Illustrated Rulebook, plus Appendix I: Model Rules and Appendix II: Arcane Compendium documents. Additionally, it includes extended rules text to cover for intricate and complex battlefield situations. We recommend that players who prefer to understand complex situations in advance and fully grasp the nuances of all rule interactions, to turn directly to this document.

For new players and those who prefer to deal with intricate scenarios as they arise, we suggest starting with the Illustrated Rulebook and only referring to the Reference Handbook when specific situations occur that are not fully covered in the Illustrated Rulebook.

This document is the Illustrated Rulebook, containing a streamlined version of the main rules needed for playing the game alongside art, miniature images and lore. In addition to this, you will need a few more documents to play a full game of T9A.

Army Books

The rules for the different armies are found in Army Books. Within these, you will find army composition rules, unit and model rules, characteristics, and so on.

Supplements

Supplements are optional add-ons to the game that require an agreement with the opponent before using.