Status 20 August 2009

Presently designing outline lists and first pass through special abilities.
Once a critical mass of 8 or so lists are outlined, move on to review and more detail/balance in each.

Introduction and Ethos

The idea of the Fantasy Imp project is to design special rules and army lists suitable for fantasy tabletop wargaming using the Impetus rules.   Impetus is by an Italian company called Dadi & Piombo and their website is here Impetus are an excellent set of historical tabletop wargame rules aimed at the Ancient through early renaissance.

Why do the project at all?

I wanted a set of fantasy wargames rules which I could use my 10 and 28mil collections with and wasn't particularly happy with any rulesets aimed at fantasy. Writing a set of wargames rules from scratch is a lot of work so the project went on the shelf for some years. I played Impetus and realised it could easily be used as the basis for Fantasy games with very little work. "Very little" is the sort of time I have available.   Result!
Lists are intended to have the minimum additional rules that can give what I think is the right sort of fantasy feel. Effects from special rules will be significant but not overwhelming. In turn, it will be easier to balance lists.
The game uses units which are the width of two dbx elements.
If you have individual based figures then you can use movement trays of the appropriate width to group these into units. If you have HoTT based figures then they can be used as is. If you don't have any figures then you can decide on the scale and basing you prefer.
I recommend you probably best start by downloading and reading Basic Impetus. Read them and decide if the style of rules are potentially interesting. If they're not to your taste then move on and you've not spent anything. At the tme of writing, Impetus is available in the UK for £25. That's quite pricey but the rules are spiral bound and each page thinly laminated in a protective plastic coating.

The points values of units are intended to balance against the existing historical lists. the idea being that if you have a Roman army you can potentially play it against your friend's orcs
Quite how practical this can be remains to be seen.