The Reckoning is a mod for the videogame Mount And Blade: Warband. Set in a post-apocalyptical version of 2019's USA after an epidemic which ravaged the world, the mod is about a conflict between a dozen of factions in the middle of devastated American towns and American countryside.
The available factions
- Major factions (have longer unit trees and usually control larger territories):
- The United States Army: Remnants of the US Army,
- The New Confederacy: Confederacy nostalgists aiming to recreate the CSA,
- The Aryan Brotherhood: Neo-Nazi gang,
- The Bennet Clan: Stereotypical redneck clan,
- The Church of Our Saviour: An army of religious armed men wearing armours.
- Woodbury : A much smaller faction, around the eponymous town.
- Minor factions (raiders or isolated settlements; their unit trees usually consists in two different units):
- Cannibals
- Crater Miners
- Gearhead Raiders
- Hagar Settlement
- Orion Raiders
- The Dead Men
- The Ghost Clan
- The Great Khans
- The Jackal Clan
- Wasteland Marauders
Other new features are the use of vehicles in battle and the AI unit taking cover on the battlefield.
Note that the mod official development has been officially stopped despite its Beta state, due to the mod's creator being eventually more and more disinterested in it. Because of this, some parts of the mods (companions' dialogs, some scenes, some features) are native ressources used as placeholders. Fortunately, its creator allowed the mod to be used as OSPnote .
Some additional informations and a download link are available here
. However, it's recommended that you play the superior Third Stage version rather than the original one.
Unrelated with Hunter: The Reckoning or the 2023 miniseries.
For tropes related to the gameplay which are unchanged from the unmodded game, refer to the Mount & Blade page.
The Reckoning Provides Examples Of:
- Action Dad/Action Mom/Badass Family: The character creation quiz allows to start with either your child or your (adult) brother as a free companion spawning in your starting partynote . The child companion is able to fight with guns.
- Aerith and Bob: The companions have names like Alan, Glen, Linda, Rick, Billy... and Bunduk.
- After the End: The world has been ravaged by a zombie plague.
- Apocalypse Cult: The Dead Men have small parties of cultists who wander the map, claiming that they are "the hand of death". When asked what they want, they request you to give them one of your men to perform a Human Sacrifice, though the option to accept hasn't been added.
- Armor Is Useless: Thanks to the modern setting, armours are much less protective than in the unmodded game and bullets can very easily kill.
- Artistic License – Geography: The worldmap looks nothing like the USA (it uses the Calradian continent).
- Bad Boss: Instead of doing it yourself, you can force your own men to scavenge points of interest, resulting in loss of honor (paying them to do the job has no consequence).
- Batter Up!: A baseball bat is available as a blunt one-handed weapon.
- Break Out the Museum Piece: The available weaponry includes World War Two guns (parts of the Aryan Brotherhood weapons are nazi-era guns), World War Two and Vietnam War-era bayonets, and a World War One-era British tank.
- Cannibal Tribe: A whole faction of them, appropriatly named "Cannibals". There also are groups of independent cannibal bandits, who are hostile to every other faction.
- Captured by Cannibals: The "save a merchant's brother from the local brigands who held him prisoner" early quest from the original Mount & Blade: Warband has been rewritten as "save a traveler's daughter from a tribe of cannibals who held her prisoner".
- Combat Stilettos: Skirts and some of the "female bottom body with panties" partsnote are worn with high heel shoes. Wearing them to wander in the wilderness and to fight outside doesn't have any effect on the mobility or fighting ability.
- Cool Shades: One of the available "hats". Oddly, they provide a (limited) protection for the head.
- Church Militant: The Church of Our Saviour is a whole army of guys wearing monk-like clothes (except some of their higher tier units, who wear medievalish armours), with units having religious theme-naming ("novice", "member of the clergy", etc.) and led by commanders with christian titles ("pastor", "preacher", "clergyman", etc.).
- Dead Guy on Display: Some settlements have hanged corpses exposed outside.
- Desert Punk: The south-east corner of the worldmap is a desert inhabited with gangs of raiders dressed as villains straight out of the Mad Max / Fallout franchises.
- Disaster Scavengers: Small parties of low level units named "Scavengers" travel endlessly back and forth between points of interests and castles / towns (they're basically the mod's version of native's villagers). It's also used as a gameplay point: exploring said points of interest allows to gather supplies, which can then be sold or exchanged for troops.
- Divided States of America: The US Army is just one of many factions involved in the conflict, and one of its main antagonists is the New Confederacy.
- Easy Logistics: Averted further than in the original game. Gun ammunitions aren't replenished when a battle is over, and each shot is a bullet defintively lost, thus forcing the player to regularly buy ammunitions; it only affects the player character, though.
- Eyepatch of Power: Technically identical to the sunglasses, it exists in several flavours: plain black, pirate symbol, and sporting a glass eye.
- Fanservice: Available female clothing include mini-skirts, tank tops or long dresses with sideboobs, or bras and panties (though there's also much more modest clothes, like long skirts, more covering shirts, and male pants which can be worn by female too). Oh, and characters wearing them suddenly gain several cup sizes.
- Hard-Coded Hostility: Parties like criminals, savages, mental patients, and infected belong two a special faction that is hostile to everyone and cant be allied with.
- Horse Archer: Raider bandits (especially those wandering in the eastern desert) feature large numbers of riders wielding bows or firearms.
- Improvised Armour: One of the helmets is a mask looking like a purple alien.
- Improvised Weapon: The available weaponry not only includes guns and army knives, but also kitchen knives, an electric guitar, brooms, briefcases, etc. Thrown weapons include dollar bills, plastic cutlery, coffee cups, spanners, etc.
- In the Hood: Hoods of different colours are available as hats. Some of the Aryan Brotherhood units wear them with gasmasks.
- Improbable Infant Survival: Played straight if the companion chosen at character's creation is your child, averted during the fights (there are children among the infected, and you'll have to gun them down like any other infected).
- Insane Equals Violent: Some of wandering always hostile parties have wonderful names like "criminally insane", "escape mental patients", "psychos"...
- Katanas Are Just Better: The katana is more powerful and has a longer reach than most of the other mêlée weapons.
- Kukris Are Kool: The machete is a kukri-shaped one-handed bladed weapon.
- My Horse Is a Motorbike: Cars and tanks are technically vehicle-shaped horses.
- Nemean Skinning: Units of the Jackal Clan wear a cougar head as headgear. Some wandering bandit parties ("savages") wear them as well.
- Non-Human Undead: The infected parties who wander on the map includes parties of infected animals (dogs, elephants, goats, etc.).
- Post-Apocalyptic Dog:
- One answer in the character creation quiz grants a Canine Companion in your starting party.
- There are packs of hostile infected dogs roaming the worldmap.
- Post Apocalyptic Gasmask: Worn by some US soldiers and some Aryan Brotherhood mooks.
- The Remnant: The US Army is still active and maintains control over a portion of the country, replenishing their ranks with recruits from the wasteland. Even years after the apocalypse, they hope to regain control over the rest of the country.
- Sawed-Off Shotgun: A double-barreled sawed-off shotgun is available as a ranged weapon. It is mostly used by raiders (and Bunduk the Crazy).
- Shout-Out:
- The Hagar Settlement, Ghost Clan, and Gearhead Clan factions.
- The Great Khans and Jackal Clan factions.
- Bunduk the Crazy is a man which nickname relates to madness, who wears a post-apocalyptic armour, and which starting weapon is a sawed-off shotgun.
- There's a companion named "Lara Croft", whose haircut is a single brown braid, who wields a pistol, and who wears shorts with a small top.
- The Shawshank Penitentiary.
- The town of Woodbury famously featured in another famous zombie story.
- Technically-Living Zombie: Some of the wandering low-level mooks are zombie-like men named "infected".
- The Titling
- Those Wacky Nazis: The Aryan Brotherhood is a whole faction of neo-Nazis, wearing coats with swastikas, swastika tattoos, and wielding World War Two-era German guns.
- Undead Child: You'll occasionally have to fight infected children in the infected parties.
- Zombie Apocalypse: The mod is set in the aftermath of one. Details are unclear, but it seems to have been caused by a plague. According to a loading screen, it happened between 2014 and 2019, affected the whole world, and in 2019 the number of survivors in the whole world is 100,000 persons. In the proper game, infected are mostly here to provide early opposition to a low-level player character, since most of the action is about the war between the human factions.
