Change of Plans; Rolling with the Punches

If you've been following this blog for any length of time, you may have realized I tend to flit from unrealized project to unrealized project, doing lots of planning but very little actual doing on many of them.  Sometimes it's a matter of time/money, sometimes it's recognizing that a project is going to require a big expenditure on my part with very little return, sometimes it's just plain short attention span.  Sometimes it's about other projects muscling in to claim my attention.

It looks like Kings of War is going to be a big focus for my painting and modeling time and energy in the foreseeable future; my friend Tom bought the 2-player starter box, and I'm just waiting to pick up the undead from him next time we meet.

*childish grabby motions*

I'll also be doing a second army, a Kingdoms of Men force using Perry Miniatures' War of the Roses line.  This began as a means to give my mother a list of miniatures I would like for Christmas that aren't all skeletons and ghouls, but I've honestly become really excited about the tactical flexibility that the Kingdoms of Men list allows for.  I've been spending a good amount of time toying with different combinations of lists - how much artillery do I want to bring to the table, what role do I want cavalry to play, how many units of armor-piercing "can openers" can I get away with, et cetera, et cetera.  Gina bought me a Reaper Griffon yesterday to help me recuperate from a particularly stressful day, which will become the mount of my General on Winged Beast in higher point games.  Truth be told, I'm so excited for this army that I may put the undead on the back-burner and focus on the Kingdoms of Men list.

I might be able to buy myself a regiment at the end of this month, even with taking care of Christmas shopping and putting money into savings, which would be exciting, but I may still hold off even if the money's there - we're firming up plans to do a little bit of holiday traveling and are also hosting Gina's brother for Thanksgiving, so I may not actually have the money handy to spend on foot knights and archers.  Which is fine, I should probably wait and see what sets my mother finds for me in London before I buy anything anyways.

This doesn't mean that I'm putting away Frostgrave - I may shift towards a focus on playing, rather than painting, when it comes to the Frozen City, but I will finish the warbands I have started.

What I think I would ultimately like to do is position myself to run demo games of both Frostgrave and Kings of War at Just Games, my FLGS - Matt, the owner, has mentioned that he'd love to stock Mantic products but he needs evidence that the demand is there before he pulls the trigger on investing money and store space in Kings of War.  I'm hoping running demo games would inspire people to want to play; this is a bit of an iffy proposition, as when a Frostgrave store league was attempted a while back, it quickly fell apart as people decided they'd rather play at home than at the store, and I think the Warhammer grognards in the area have either gone Oldhammer or switched to Age of Sigmar, and at any rate I'm fairly certain most of them hang out at one of the other game stores in the area.

All in all, I think I need to adopt a bit of a "wait and see" attitude while trying my best to get all this off the ground.  And, of course, doing lots and lots of painting wherever I can.

What's Next?

I'm vastly behind on my painting.  I have a couple miniature projects in various stages of completion, and I've completed my entry for the "L'amour" bonus round of the Painting Challenge.  I'm particularly pleased with my entry for the "Defensive Terrain" round - I interpreted the name literally, and had the terrain be on the defensive, as an Earth Elemental struggled to fight off a team of undead miners directed by a witch.  Here are some pics:

The reason I haven't been painting too much is that I've been writing a whole lot - I've had two story proposals accepted for inclusion in upcoming anthologies.  One of my stories is complete and has been submitted, the second is in the works.  I'm also working on a third piece, my first try at fantasy fiction, to submit to a new magazine.

In other gaming news...

My two Call of Cthulhu games at Running GAGG this year have me feeling pretty good about that, and I'm looking ahead to other cons to run Cthulhu at, plus the possibility of arranging a monthly store game at a gaming store in Buffalo.

I've been invited to take part in a Savage Worlds game in the Deadlands weird west/horror setting, which should be fun, though I'm a little wary - I sometimes think I'm under a curse, that any RPG I join as anything but the Game Master is fated to die after the session I join.  Every game I've joined since I graduated college in 2009 has died after the session I participated in.  It's eerie.

I'm also considering the possibility of another home game - probably some form of Swords & Wizardry again, as I really like that system, though I'd use Ascending Armor Class this time - it really is just a more sensible system than the attack matrices.  I would do either "regular" D&D, without any science fiction elements of the sort I had last time - though I'd operate under the same sort of campaign framework, with the player characters free to wander and find their own adventures rather than adhering to a pre-planned story - or use the Swords & Wizardry rules in conjunction with the Warriors of the Red Planet book to run a full-on Barsoom-style game.

A lot is going to depend on my time and attention - right now writing fiction is holding on to my attention very tightly, to the point where I don't want to divert attention from that to preparing game material.

What to Buy Next?

Gina and I have been on hobby no-buy for the month of December - I can't buy toy soldier stuff (not even based or flock) and she can't buy knitting supplies. Well, one of her favorite indie yarn dyers put out an update last week and Gina would have been unable to purchase any of the one-of-a-kind skeins if she'd been forced to wait until January 1st - they would have been completely sold out.

So we came to an agreement; I would turn a blind eye to her buying a few skeins of unique yarn, and she would turn a blind eye to me making a toy soldiers purchase AFTER Christmas - she's buying me some toy soldiers for Christmas so doesn't want me buying anything she might have picked out for me.

Now, I know what I showed her in terms of miniatures I was interested in, so I have a pretty good idea of things I won't find under the tree. So I'm considering what my "post-Christmas" present to myself would be. I've narrowed it down thusly:

photo courtesy Warlord Games

1.) Terrain for Frostgrave. I have two warbands and might be able to put together a third or more after Christmas, so I ought to get some terrain going for games. I'm eyeing a couple of Warlord Games' bombed out farmhouses from their Bolt Action line and maybe the snap-together gothic buildings that I think Pegasus Hobbies currently puts out. I'm curious to hear from readers who've built these structures about how the construction process went.

2.) Colonial/Victorian/Steampunk-appropriate figures from Wargames Foundry. I've been rereading Chris Palmer and Buck Surdu's Victorian Science Fiction skirmish game GASLIGHT lately, and I'm more impressed with them than ever. I haven't run GASLIGHT in years and don't have the figures from those long-ago days any more. I think I'd like to be able to run demo games of both GASLIGHT and Frostgrave at conventions by autumn 2016, and that means new armies need to be painted. Colonial-era games are tricky things in our current hyper-sensitive climate; it's too easy to get accused of ethnocentrism by putting on a game set in this era.

I'm thinking a couple packs of Foundry figs would take advantage of their end of year 20% off sale, and build a force of Belgians (who were dastardly in their dealings in the Congo, no doubt) and some stalwart Brits to oppose them. I've got a pretty nice mental image of a demo game in which rival European expeditions racing to the entrance of King Solomon's Mines - which happens to be located in a "Lost World" valley populated by dinosaurs who don't care about the national origin of their next meal.

photo courtesy Wargames Foundry

The thing is, I'm not sure if I'm spreading myself too thin by dividing my time and money between two games; would it be better, I wonder, to focus solely on Frostgrave for now, get my warbands painted, and start playing the game, learning it as best I can before I start building armies for another game? Or would being able to go back and forth between working on the two games make me less likely to experience burn-out because I'd be painting a greater variety of figures? This is the first time I've ever really had the income to where I could work on two games at once. I'd love to hear others' experience, ideas and advice.

A.R.M.Y.M.E.N.

I've been looking for a wargaming club in my area, and there just don't seem to be any; everything I've found reference to either went defunct five years ago or more, is Warhammer/40K exclusive, or has broadened its gaming scope to be all-inclusive and thus there's one wargamer sitting amidst dozens of people playing Magic: The Gathering or trading Pokemon on their vintage Gameboys.

There are actually a large number of gaming clubs in my area; we've got a plethora of colleges, including my alma mater, and they all have gaming clubs and all put on their own annual conventions.  I was a member of the Geneseo Area Gaming Group, the organization for State University of New York at Geneseo, all four years of my college experience and an officer of some stripe or another for three of them, rising as high as the rank of treasurer, though primarily holding ceremonial posts such as "Minister of Wargames and Board Games."

But the thought occurs to me that now, as then, if I want wargaming to happen in my area I need to be the one to make it happen.  Running GAGG, the convention put on by the Geneseo Area Gaming Group, is rapidly approaching; I'm actually scheduled to run a couple sessions of the Call of Cthulhu RPG, 7th Edition during the course of it.  I feel like I've booked myself heavily enough for this year's convention; I need to have time to do the ordinary grown-up stuff of the weekend as well, like grocery shopping and spending quality time with Gina.

For the future though, it might be worthwhile to try and draw some people into wargaming with a big, flashy table display and bring a co-GM to help demo the game.  But how do I do that on my current shoestring budget?

Army Men.  Green and Tan Plastic Army Men.  They're cheap and plentiful to be had, they're big enough to where they and scenery would be eye-catching from halfway across the room, especially once you add in tanks and halftracks and helicopters and the like.

So I, assuming that there's nothing new under the sun, went looking to see what rules people had written to accommodate Green Plastic Army Men (when not melting them with a magnifying glass or, as my dad used to do in his youth, heating up a nail and pushing it into the poor blighters to create "battle damage").  I found a couple and did some reading, and none of them really spoke to me.

So I decided to write my own.

Tentatively entitled "A.R.M.Y.M.E.N. - Accessory Rules Making Your Military Escapades Nerdy," I'm trying to keep the rules as simple and straight-forward as possible to accommodate the player new to wargames altogether, while allowing for complex and creative tactics and strategies.  I'm not attempting to model any actual military with any sort of accuracy or realism; as I'm not and have never been a soldier, I think that trying to do so would be an exercise in futility on my part and would leave me feeling like I was being disrespectful to the brave men and women who actually serve their countries.

The warfare of A.R.M.Y.M.E.N. is the warfare of movies like THE DIRTY DOZEN.  It's meant to be dramatic and over the top, and above all provide a degree of spectacle.

The core mechanic is simple; individual figures and vehicles have various abilities such as Melee Combat, Ranged Combat, Morale, each with a numerical rating between 2 and 6.  To succeed at using an ability (for example, if a squad of Infantrymen wants to Shoot an enemy squad), roll under the rating on a six-sided die; a result of 1 is always a success, a result of 6 is always a failure.  Infantry figures have, effectively, one "hit-point" - on a successful hit, they're removed as casualties.  Vehicles can take more hits before breaking down and becoming part of the scenery.

I've got some rules for some additional stuff as well; while the default Infantryman is assumed to be carrying a rifle, figures cast with mortars, minesweepers, bazookas or flamethrowers can be upgraded to carry such weapons in game, for example.  Gray plastic army men are assumed to be mercenaries, and can be used by either side as cheap allies (though with poor morale compared to the Greens and Tans - the Grays would rather live to get paid another day!), and blue, red and black army men likewise represent special troop types.

One bit I'm particularly pleased with is that either side can be upgraded with the ability to, once per game, call in a long-range strike.  When this ability is activated, the player using it takes a step or two back from the table and uses a dart gun, such as those manufactured by Nerf, to try and take out enemy soldiers.  They get one shot and if they miss, too bad.

I've still got some writing to do but once the first draft is finished I'll post it here and include After Action Reports of playtest sessions.

Steam Tank Follies

The first of my packages have arrived - one, containing my shiny new self-healing cutting mat, my sculpting tools and my Green Stuff; the other, my 1/72 scaled Mk A Whippet tank.  Opening the second, I carefully took the sprues out of the box to inspect what I'd be working with.

Hilarity has already ensued.

I couldn't find specifics regarding how big the completed kit would be online, but knew that since it was a 1/72 scale kit, it'd be, well, 1/72nd the size of a real one.  Looking up the measurements of an actual Mk A Whippet, I did some rough calculations and came out with some numbers suggesting the assembled kit would be between 4 and 5 inches long.

I miscalculated.

The assembled kit will be closer to three inches long.

Here's some shots of the sprues (one of the big chassis pieces broke off the sprue in transit), including a shot with a nickel for scale.

So now I need to recalculate a little regarding converting this into a "Land Ironclad" for Steampunk/VSF wargaming.  It's still getting converted (into a one- or two-man Ironclad), don't get me wrong, but I need to do some rethinking about how I go about it.

I think I'm going to assemble the chassis, minus things like the Hotchkiss machine guns and the exhaust pipes, and use that as a frame-work to build a Land Ironclad over; a couple pieces of plasticard cut to the appropriate size and shape glued over the Mk A will create a bulkier vehicle, and then I can put a turret on top - Brigade Games has a couple nice ones, and if I fatten this bad boy up a little I can put the 1" turret on top of where the fixed turret of the Mk A is.  Speaking of, I think I want to turn the tank around; on the Mk A, the turret is above the back end of the tank, with the engines encased in the lower area in front.  If I turn it around it'll resemble a more "modern" tank in general outline and I can put a boiler and smoke stack on the "back" behind the turret.  Then I'll just glue the Mk A tank treads back on over the plasticard body.  Prime, paint, seal, get it on the table.

Now, this is not a priority project for me by any means; Cthulhu needs to be done first (I'll be doing some good work on him this weekend), and by the time that's done I should have all the figures I ordered from Wargames Factory in hand and can plan my next project.

Speaking of, I noticed that they've got a Persian Infantry sprue bundle deal, where you get just the figure sprues from the Persian Infantry boxed set minus some accessories, for $2.49 per set of six.  That's $2.49 for twelve figures, six each of archers and spearmen.  I ordered ten bundles, which brings the total number of Persian Infantry I've got coming in the mail to 144 infantrymen.

2015 might be the Year of the Achaemenids.

The Tentacle Beckons

I was talking with a coworker and fellow RPG enthusiast recently - I'd introduced both her and her boyfriend to Call of Cthulhu not too long ago, and they had a blast with the game, and that's impressive given that they both come from a background of hack 'n' slash dungeon crawling Pathfinder.  They showed up to the one-shot I ran with characters prepared and ready to go - a war correspondent and a big game hunter, complete with backgrounds and personalities.  She was telling me about how, after that session, her boyfriend (who is a longtime DM and player of D&D himself) couldn't shut up about how blown away he was by Call of Cthulhu.

Call of Cthulhu is really where I've always shined as a GM.  My first real experience behind the screen was running a heavily-modified Shadows of Yog-Sothoth, with several additional scenarios interspersed between each chapter and the Scotland chapter completely replaced with material I wrote set in a Silent Hill-style town.  The campaign ended up lasting something like 16 or 18 4-6 hour sessions, and featured the development of what we termed the "Shotgun Mythos" -- more Investigators died due to being shot with shotguns or having shotguns malfunction catastrophically in their hands then due to Mythos horrors.

After that a ran a short campaign set in Roman-occupied Alexandria, in which the PCs were manipulated by Nyarlathotep into exterminating a cult of Shub-Niggurath worshipers to further his own bid for cosmic supremacy, culiminating in the PCs calling up Shub-Niggurath to smack Nyarlathotep down.

Next campaign, again a fairly short one, only about eight sessions, used modern day Flying Saucer mythology and the Shaver Mystery in place of the Cthulhu Mythos, I think to excellent effect.  The high point of this campaign was the final scene, in which I revealed that everything past the first session was a hallucination shared by the PCs in a sanitarium following a toxic overdose of experimental dream-suppressant medication.

After that, I converted Nigel Kneale's teleplay for "Quatermass and the Pit" into a short campaign, with Nyarlathotep again manipulating the PCs into opening and activating the Martian cylinder, sending out psychic waves activating latent Martian genes in the people of London.  Under this psychic influence, Nyarlathotep revealed, the people of London would mutate into locust-like creatures, which he termed "the Megiddo Swarm," and wipe humanity from the globe at his direction.  The PCs managed to avert this fate using a Gate spell and, through a great deal of psychic effort, sending the cylinder off-planet.

After this, I took a break, as one of my players commented on my tendency to lean on Nyarlathotep as a villain, and I wanted to refresh myself creatively.  Since then I've run some Pathfinder, a couple assorted sessions of various OSR games, and a short (five session) campaign using the BRP mechanics set in the Caribbean at the time of Elizabeth's reign (which I originally started this blog to use as a campaign journal for, which just didn't work out).

Now maybe it's time to pick up the percentile dice and roll for SAN loss again.  Maybe that's why I'm so flighty and indecisive towards fantasy games lately; maybe I need to sink myself back into horror.  I recently got a copy of Dan O'Bannon's excellent adaptation of The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, THE RESURRECTED, on DVD -- most published Call of Cthulhu campaigns tend to be very sprawling geographically, on the model of The Shadow Out of Time...maybe I should try to do something that sprawls chronologically instead.

Maybe set each player up with three Investigators, one for each of three different eras, with each character being somehow descended from their character in a prior era.  Have the main arc of the campaign take place in the 1920s, say, and one of the Investigators stumbles across an old diary belonging to an ancestor...and when they start to read it, I play a "flashback" sound effect, collect the 1920s character sheets and hand out the players' 1750s (or whatever) character sheets, and have them play out the events of what the character in "the present" is reading.  And later they get access to older documents (such as a ledger maintained by a cult, decade after decade, for hundreds of years) and read about the exploits of their ancestors further back (flashback sound effect again), and I had out character sheets for 1028 AD or whatever, and it's only be piecing together the information they've found in the present with the incomplete information their Colonial ancestors and Dark Age ancestors had that they manage to tie together all the clues and defeat the cult once and for all.

It's a thought!