The AT-43 figures are attractive, in a scale the mix’s well with many conventional ranges, and the paint jobs are perfectly adequate. Easily as good as you’d want for the table and well above the abilities of the starting painter. They are good value, if you also are used to paying to have your figures painted for you.
So: here is the first platoon of generic marines, using UNA Steel Troopers and the first platoon-equivalent sized group of Golems.
Here are the HorrorClix Aliens:
Now a few of these in a nice spacecraft interior would make a great game. Very creepy. Something from Worldworks Games would be good. Check out the links to their impressive stuff.
Having worked with small game companies over the years, I know how hard it is to produce anything that might be in the public consciousness (that is: from films) unless you have the license to do it. Try making miniatures or games that are based on an existing idea without having the rights and you can end up in a lot of deep legal fertiliser.
However, if you have the cash and the ability to distribute in bulk (because that’s what it’s all about at the end of the day), you really can get some traction. See, for instance, these new figures from WizKids, part or the new HorrorClix range. There is a full range of Aliens (from the movies) as well. And if this doesn’t inspire me to build up a force for StarGrunt then there is something wrong.
All these figures need is to be stripped off the clicking base and resettled on something a little more standard to make them consistent witrh my other figures. Perhaps a touch up with the paint, too: a wash to get at the shadows, a little edge highlighting, and maybe a matt coat.
Of course, I could just use the HeroClix rules and play it as they intended. But that does take all the effort out of it. And since they come prepainted that seems a little too passive. You know? No work at all makes them of no value at all. But maybe that’s just me.
Updates now made to the StarGrunt II page under the Beyond the Singularity heading.
This addition breaks into classes the types of Golems (Terminators) that can be encountered on the battlefield.
Much of my recent thinking has been influenced by Simon’s upcoming novel. What I have been doing is describing one of the potential pre-histories for his far-future idea. But where he is developing these ideas as a serious philosophical argument – a book, I am just trying to string enough together to get a few games going.
From our discussions a few important concepts can be used for the game.
The first is that the mind-state is not some virtual-reality substrate in which individual minds live out their lives, unlike The Matrix. The mind-state is a totality: a new consciousness in and of itself that has absorbed and continues to absorb human minds, but has become far more than the sum of its parts.
When the mind-state constructs remote entities (machines that operate independantly) and then animates them with intelligence of varying degrees, it is not ‘downloading’ formerly human minds into them. It is, instead, ‘nipping off’ or copying tiny portions of its overall mind. The thinking ability of each of these animated machines varies with the task that it is employed to do, ranging from insect drone-like dedication, right through to human and super-human intelligence complete with appropriate communication powers. Rather than think of these constructions as machines or robots with downloaded intelligence, we are closer to the mark in comparing them to a biolgical body’s component organs. A white blood cell, or phagocite (‘a cell that eats’), is a good way to think of the military constructions of the mind-state. They do not experience individuality as we understand it, and they intuititively understand that they are organs within a greater body, despite their disconection from the mind-state.
An important question is raised by this model. That is: at what point, if at all, does a specific construction (or instantiation as Simon might say) gain sufficient self-awareness to question its own purpose and connection to the mind-state. Does it ever experience existential angst? Without exploring it philosophically, we might ask whether the game behaviour of these constructions will be coloured by ideas of self-preservation over dedication to achiving objectives. Or, put more simply, do these things have morale issues?
I have been driven. Driven, I say, to formulate settings in which i can play my wargames. Campaign settings might be a better word, but only if I ever play more than one game.
This first one is a science fiction world, inspired by Star Trek (specifically the Borg), Terminator and the Matrix. See my earlier post for my views on these films. This setting massages out the faults I perceive in them, and builds up a roughly plausible – or at least consistent – world view. I call it Beyond the Singularity. It proposes an Earth in the not too distant future where artificial intelligence and transhumanism have created a new species benevolently antagonistic to biological humanity.
I intend to use the swell AT-43 figures now available. In fact it was these figures – so reminiscent of Terminator in the first place – that got me thinking. StarGrunt II is the set of rules that I will use to develop force composition. Actual modeifications specific to the setting will come soon.
The background matterial to the setting is in the StarGrunt II page.
Posted in Campaign, History, Science Fiction, Wargaming
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