Kroot completed

Here they are: dark skinned bird creatures that stand as tall as a horse and are armed with light cannon.

Thanks to Paul for swapping them to me. I enjoyed painting these guys.

Lizards!

These fellows have been in my painting box for at least ten years, probably more.

I distinctly remember lodging a request with my mate, Pete, when he went to work in the UK to bring me back a box of GW Skinks. As a non-gamer, I’m sure he found the experience confronting. Still, if the most confronting thing you ever have to do is walk into a hobby shop and ask for toys then you have lived a very sheltered life, my friend. Pete has since redeemed himself by living such a harrowing life that I feel positively confronted reading his dispatches from the front.

Anyway, so I bought these skinks because I have a soft spot for the lizardmen (and rats). But how to paint them? The default seemed to be green? Why? Hard to say, really. Any skink I have seen is brown, and when you look at other lizards in the wild they have an amazing and beautiful range. This was in part why it took me so long to get around to painting them. I could never decide on a scheme, and I felt inadequate to the task.

Recently I have decided to paint things because they are no good unpainted when I am dead. Better to be painted shithouse than not at all.

A little research came up with the poison frog of South America. This test paint is an attempt to capture that scheme. White undercoat, black eyes, space marine blue hands and feet, blood red dorsal surfaces (that’s back, to you), yellow ventral surfaces (front), orange crest gills, brown for the bow and quiver, silver for jewellery. Wattyl Stain & Varnish. Tamiya Matt Clear varnish.

I’m pretty happy with this guy and now I just have to discipline myself to do the rest.

Just completed – Ratmen

Here are the Ratmen (Skaven, Hosbecites from Slipstream) completed. The technique was extremely simple:

• assemble and glue to base
• spray white
• divide into two groups, painting the fur on one group red-brown and on the other black brown, leaving white gaps where I want the flesh to be
• paint flesh (Formula P3, Midland Flesh) on hands and feet, in ears, along snout, on tail and between legs
• divide again into groups and paint the clothing on each group in straight red, blue, green and yellow, making sure to leave any straps or belts exposed in white
• paint all metal
• paint any leather such as pouches or arm guards
• paint wood
• when dry, paint with Wattle Satin Stain and Varnish, Walnut shade
• paint base burnt umbar (only a simple base here as they are so small)
• splat a bit of PVA on each base, making sure to connect to at least one foot  and to work in angles not parallel with the edges, then dip in a bag of flock
• Paint the base edge green
• spray coat with Tamiya Clear Flat varnish.

The only delay in the process was in waiting 24 hours for the Wattlyl Stain and Varnish to dry. Otherwise these steps could have rolled one after the other and the job could have been done in half a day… for someone who did not have a thousand other jobs to do including being interrupted by demanding children.

Savage Dwellers of the Forbidden City

Few things are more boring than reading a blow by blow account of some one else’s role playing experience. Wargame reports can be marginally more interesting because you have photos of the little toy men on the table. But RPGs. Unless the writer really has the talent for writing, are just dull. You had to ‘be’ there.

So it that vein I will not give a blow-by-blow description of the session that Greg and I played recently: Savage Worlds game where we actively attempted to meld RPG and skirmish miniatures gaming.

This probably comes as no great innovation to the vast majority of players who have been brought up on, particularly the modern version of, D&D. It’s all just skirmish gaming, right? Well, no. We have come from a world where the two forms of game have been poles apart. So this use of Savage Worlds to swap between the two modes of play is new – to me, anyway.

The attached image shows the tools we had. The action was set in the 1930′s – an Indianna Jones antiquities hunting adventure – the treasure being found in the classic AD&D module ‘Dwellers of the Forbidden City’. The Call of Cthulhu and Realms of Cthulhu were there to give us more info on the period. I also have Thrilling Tales (not pictured as Greg has made off with it to study), but for all the wealth of period detail it gives very little equipment information. RoC, similarly, has a nice list of guns. But what we really needed for the first session was info on other pieces of equipment that would be available to an adventuring party in 1930. Such as torches. For this we referred to the master of all source books, CoC (4th ed, in this case).

Slipstream sat ready as well just in case any super-science artefacts should turn up. But in the end none were, so it will stay on the shelf next time.

So to cut a long story short, the initial role-playing session went as expected. A little banter with a local chief, some scene setting. Some hints of the coming story. Characters were explored to find out who they are. Greg and I are of the school that start off with minimal stats for characters and allow them to find their abilities in play. For example, Bud, a college undergraduate and assistant to the professor, had only a d6 for shoot and was armed with a conventional .38 revolver. But where he fired he Aced and then Raised, knocking the pygmy beastman on his arse. We knew immediately that Bud had the Marksman Edge, and we developed a background around him being on the school pistol shooting team.

But when we came to the scene that was a skirmish war-game with miniatures, the action just fell to… fighting. Penny the journalist could do nothing but find a .32 in her garter and blaze away, and this was not how we had imagined her at the start. A war-game implies fighting, and diminishes – or at least taxes the imagination – to find a role-playing activity.

Or so it seemed last night. With a little more practice we may be able to see more.

This was the first session in what I hope will be a mini-campaign to move through this classic module.

Mini character sheet for Savage Worlds

Just built this little tool for recording character information, particularly for miniatures games. I plan to print these off on cardboard, cut along the dotted lines, and get that index card look which will sit nicely along the table edge.

Each card is for a single figure or squad, and lists the main attributes that we have used. I may find through use that there are some other standards that can be included, but this will do for a v1. Click here for a copy:  SW Mini char sheet

Savage Worlds – Palace raid

In a pick up and play session, we pitted a squad of square jawed colonial British against the palace guards, and a couple of special off-worlder body guards. The rules were basic Showdown, with the humans using standard bolt action rifles and the men from Mongo using standard stats but interpreted as ‘rayguns’ and ‘flame lances’.

The British and Frigians (Inuit) were Eureka. The guardsmen were converted Crusader 100YW with rayguns added. For terrain we used some of the D&D tiles, made into a palace. Around and in it we used blocks from the game, Cathedral to represent various bits of furniture and random items of machinery or sculpture outside.

To design the troops we used the random character generator for Deadlands, drawing cards and then assigning the result to each stat in sequece. This made for some interesting combinations as we had Mong guards with very high Tough (must be that armour they wear), and heroes with low Shoot. But making the heroes Wild Cards gave us another lever to pull and so balance, more or less, was preserved.

Despite the determined efforts of the British, most notably Private Higgs who fought off no less than 5 guards single handed before being brought down, the mission to penetrate the building failed. My hand picked body-guards, dressed in their traditional winter gear as they hailed from planet Frigia, were my Wild Card characters. They lasted to the end, fighting off determined attacks, and finally nailing the last determined Brits.

A good game; a simple game. Yet again we came to the conclusion that it is the scenario that makes a skirmish game. If you have a story then the rules flow and support it. With no story every game is pretty much the same.

Flash Gordon, the original is still the best

Flash Gordon. King of the Cliffhanger

Alex Raymond, in 1934, with his creation Flash Gordon, conceived and rendered a spacefaring future so intriguing and exciting that it has persisted in the visual imagery of Science Fiction ever since.

In 1936, Universal Studios would produce the most expensive serial production to date bringing Flash Gordon to the big screen starring Buster Crabbe and Jean Arden. A reported $350,000 budget was set, about double the normal serial budget.

So successful, Flash Gordon has become synonymous with Cliffhanger Serial. After three serials and film adaptations of those serials, Flash Gordon would find a home on television during its early years in the 1950s.

Flash Gordon reappeared on the big screen in 1980 with Sam Jones playing Flash and Max von Sydow playing Ming the Merciless. Timothy Dalton of James Bond fame plays Prince Barin.

Flash Gordon Serials

“Flash Gordon: Spaceship to the Unknown” The planet Mongo is on a collision course with Earth! Flash Gordon and Dale Arden join Dr. Zarkov and blast off in his rocket ship to Mongo, trying to avert worldwide destruction.

“Flash Gordon’s Trip to Mars” (1938, 299 min., 15 episodes) – A mysterious beam of light emanating from Mars is sucking the nitrogen from the Earth’s atmosphere, and only Flash Gordon can stop it, battling Queen Azura, the Clay People of Mars, and his mortal enemy Ming the Merciless!

“Flash Gordon Conquers the Universe” (1940, 234 min., 12 episodes) – A rocket is dropping purple dust into the Earth’s atmosphere, causing instant death! Can Flash Gordon stop the madman from Mongo while retrieving the antidote to the death dust from the frozen planet of Frigia?

Rescue June Mayweather – Act 2

Last time, you will recall, the Rocket Brigade had tracked baron Aristodemos to his palace on a remote planet. He had kidnapped plucky reporter, June Mayweather, and certainly had no-good in mind. During the battle with the baron’s mechanical servants, dashing captain Stagg Wallop was killed, and the team were unable to prevent the baron from having his wicked way with June and then escaping in his personal rocket.

Now, read on.

A reformed Rocket Brigade with a new leader in captain Cody ‘Uppercut’ Kirby had traced the baron to an inhospitable jungle planet. He was now reinforced by a squad of picked goons, armed to the teeth and protected from the environment. With June in tow, the baron needed to recover a necklace that (we discovered by using Mythic) would chain June in mind and body, and kill her within 40 days unless a hefty ransom was paid.

For this game we had a first test of the Raygun Gothic rules, using the d6 countback dice resolution system. In addition, we incorporated our favourite elements from other games, including randomly occurring monsters, and natives with changing allegiances. Figures were a mix of Eureka, Renegade, Pulp Figures, and some D&D pre-painted as well. The main terrain piece was a Paizo flip map of a swamp, supplemented with some walls to lift some of the ruins into relief. GW trees were dotted around as well, and I ringed the uncompleted tree armatures at the edges to give the impression of dead and rotten swamp vegetation. And just to further help tie the map into the underlying board, I dotted some Miniature World Maker rubber swamps to break up the hard edges of the card.

The baron and crew trekked along the path, pretty much ignored by the natives who lurked in the thick greenery. Every turn, we randomly discovered who’s side the natives were on, and for every group in the jungle we rolled to see if a crocodilic monster or giant snake appeared and attacked. Once engaged with a monster, we rolled to see if a feeding frenzy started and another appeared. The natives spent most of the game fighting off these beasts, though a couple managed to shoot their poisoned arrows at one unfortunate goon, who went down.

The rocketeers bounced over the undergrowth, and found themselves in the middle of the path, directly in front of the baron’s picked squad, who gunned a couple down. Bypassing the main group in one direction, and bouncing over them in another (while firing his Colt .45 as he zoomed over their heads), the rocketeers cornered the baron in the ruined building. A goon had been trying to retrieve the necklace (requiring 3 successes in difficult checks), but he dropped his shovel as Cody lived up to his nickname and sent him reeling.

But it was to no avail, the baron’s man defended admirably, recovered and then knocked out Cody, and the baron calmly pulled his raygun and vaporised another rocketeer entering by the other doorway. Then, June still in tow and presumably still enamoured of the villain, the baron fled.

Again he slipped the net, but he failed to retrieve the necklace. The rocketeers were almost wiped out, and the final act will need to be prosecuted by a different unit of the galactic law enforcement agencies.

Samurai Flashing Steel

Flashing Steel works for the setting it was designed for: the Late Renaissance European swashbuckler. It has also been tested for a Star Wars theming (thanks, Paul). But the little realised fact is that the period of the Samurai also occurs in this time signature. Despite the not-uncommon belief that the Japanese were the only people who ever worked out how to fight with a sword, that Western fencing consisted of a ‘fight of attrition’, and that basically everyone in the West were untrained thugs that bashed ignorantly at each other, there is more in common between the two hemispheres than the time.

Perhaps it is another example of that historical synchronicity. On both sides of the world schools of fencing proliferated, notions of honour and the need to fight to the death to maintain face, and experiments with professionalism were occuring. The West no longer has access to these schools. No one thought it important to keep the teachings alive. Those that are taught now come from books, recreated using interpretation and common sense. But modern common sense, divorced from the reality of actually swinging a sword in battle to stay alive may be deceiving. We in the West have forgotten the techniques and so it appears we never had them. The Japanese kept the schools alive. That’s all.

But how does this affect wargaming? What is the best way to reflect Samurai warfare? Too many rules emphasise the technical detail and ignore the flair and dash of the real thing. And this is the connection, because I think the exact same thing is true of Western sword play in rules. Except for Three Musketeers, which is considered a Hollywood invention, no one considers that there is anything worth elaborating from the West.

To cut an already too-long story short, I believe that the approach of Flashing Steel, with the langauge and art theming changed appropriately, would work perfectly for Samurai. And by perfectly I mean that it will ‘feel’ right.

To test this we have set up a mini-campaign using the standard builder. We have changed the names to suit, and built a story that sounds suitable to the Samurai period. Actual playtest to follow, where we treat the rules as if they hold together.

Campaign details:

Game 1.

Where: (trenches) Among the lines of a friendly army in the process of besieging an enemy city/castle.

What: (Deliver) A message must be handed to a particular general.

Why: (Necessity) The message contains news that allied clan army cannot attend siege because Daimyo’s son has been taken hostage. This is vital news for the General who will delay his assault or be slaughtered for want of support.

Who (opposes): (Professional swordsmen) Samurai of equal standing have been sent to stop the message being delivered.

Game 2.

Where: (Ruins) The outlying remains of a neglected Buddhist temple.

What: (Rescue) A child, the son of the Daimyo of an allied clan that has been kept out of the current battle because of this hostage situation.

Why: (Revenge) This is not only a rescue mission, but an extermination raid against the monks – additional points awarded for monk casualties.

Who: (Civilians) Warrior monks.

Game 3.

Where: (Smuggler’s Cove) At a secluded sea shore village, the son is reunited with the father, who has come in secret to the contested battle region. If father and son are reunited and can safely exit back to the ship the protagonists have broken the back of the conspiracy to keep their allies out of the contest.

What: (Meet)

Why: (Justice)

Who: (Hired killers) Ronin, who are of lesser skill/value than protagonists.

Flaming Plasma – scenario generation questions

Flaming Plasma is the name of the rules set I am building to enable me to play skirmish games in my Ornithopter setting. It is based on Song of Blades and Heroes, and has inspiration from several older rules sets. Importantly, I hope for it to be generic enough to be thrown into the ring with the plethora of other generic sets. Oh… the dream.

Anyway, I consider my greatest contribution to the world of rules to be in the tools for designing sessions – mini-campaigns. The format for Flashing Steel seems sound: asking Where, What, Why and Who questions and then fleshing out the details. The trick is to remain generic but still give sufficient flavour. Science fiction is just fantasy, of course, and  whatever you say can only eliminate some possibilities, and alienate some readers who saw it differently.

I read a set of rules once that claimed to be generic, allowing you to play with whatever miniatures you had. It then went on to describe the politics and economics of a notional world of the author’s construction. He described the factions and force construction principles. In short, he enabled you to play not anything that you had models for, but anything that HE had models for.

So this is what must be avoided. The goal is to be specific enough for the players to design their forces and decorate the table from the random items, but to be generic enough so that they do not have to share the same art sensibilities as the author.

StarBlazer Adventures may come to the rescue again, as it has already when I was attempting to overcome the problem of shooting at armoured vehicles. There are some great random tables in there. And these are the basic design principles I had in mind: http://shichitenhakki.wordpress.com/rpgs-using-mythic/ornithopter/ Is this too restrictive already? The stuff about no aliens? Should that be relaxed? Probably, or at least the language needs to be modified so the existance of creatures that are not-like-man is definitely possible.