The Lost and the Damned: Starting my Chaos Rampant Project

My big project for this summer/year is going to be building myself a fresh warband for Osprey's Dragon Rampant, and I've set myself some limitations to keep things extra interesting:

• All figures must be metal, and either be pre-2000 Games Workshop or by new manufacturers working in the "Oldhammer" aesthetic.  
• No two copies of the same sculpt can be used unless I do significant conversion work on one of them.  
• All shields must have freehand designs painted on them, with an emphasis on John Blanche-inspired monstrous faces.  Realm of Chaos 80s' shield tutorial is my guide here.  
• Every unit must have a standard bearer, which will be outfitted with a banner I've hand-painted.  Every unit can optionally have a Champion attached, which counts for two Strength Points instead of the usual one.  Champions will be mounted on a 40mm base instead of a 25mm one to show their status.  
• I have to be able to field a viable 30-point warband before I can call the project complete.  

The army will be one of traditional WHFB Chaos; big angry guys in heavy plate armor, vicious thugs, raiders and marauders in a motley of lighter armor and miscellaneous weaponry, mutant beastmen and horrifying demons.  Because I'm selecting figures based on the "Oldhammer" vibe, color schemes will be likewise based on the examples Games Workshop's 'Eavy Metal team painted for the pages of White Dwarf back in the 1980s and early 1990s.  

Last night I got a start on two classic figures I managed to score of the Oldhammer Trading Group on Facebook, who will be part of a unit of various Thugs and Marauders; these guys are technically both.  Originally released in 1985 as part of the F5 Chaos Marauders line (or at least, intended for it), these two later showed up again in 1988 rebranded as Chaos Thugs, though their slotta tabs both still say "Marauder" on them.  

The axe-wielding Marauder with the big exposed beard was base-coated in Reaper's "Viper Green," and given a wash of GW "Biel-Tan Greenshade." Highlighting was done back up to Viper Green, and then the armor plates given an edge highlight of Vallejo "Escorpena Green." The raised portion of his left pauldron and his poleyns were then picked out in Reaper "Marigold Yellow," washed with GW "Casandora Yellow" and highlighted with Reaper "Sun Yellow." His beard was basecoated in "Ultramarine Shadow," and highlighted with drybrushings of "Ultramarine Blue" and "Ultramarine Highlight."

His shield used mostly the same greens as his armor, though I took the highlighting a step further with a little bit of Vallejo "Livery Green" over the "Escorpena Green." The face was also glazed with GW "Wayfarer Green" before the eyes and teeth were detailed.  

His buddy with the odd chain weapon had his armor basecoated with Vallejo "Squid Pink," and given a light wash of GW "Druchii Violet" before being built back up to Squid Pink.  The final highlight was Squid Pink with a few drops of Pure White mixed in.  Helmet, poleyns and elbow pieces were painted using the same Ultramarine triad I used on the first guy's beard.  Weapons were basecoated with Reaper "Tarnished Steel" and highlighted with "Pure Silver."

Bases were given a coating of Vallejo Sandy Paste prior to priming, and painted with Vallejo "Goblin Green." I'll probably go back and give them tops of them a drybrush of "Escorpena Green" to pick out the texture a little bit.  

I Believe in Venger Satanis

Venger Satanis of Kort'thalis Publishing, a heavy metal madman if there ever was one, is one of my all time favorite game writers and RPG personalities that I've encountered on this here Internet.  Lewd, crude, unafraid to jab a grimy finger in the face of banality, he's also one of the most generous, supportive and all-around good people I've met in the RPG community.  You may remember him from my reviews of How to Game Master Like a Fucking Boss, Liberation of the Demon Slayer and Islands of the Purple-Haunted Putrescence.  I really ought to write up my thoughts on Revelry in Torth and Alpha Blue at some point, especially since I'm going to be running a one-shot of the latter in the near future as a palate-cleanser after running nothing but Cthulhu for almost a year.

His wife let him into bed with her and now they've got twins on the way, so Venger is squeezing out every last little bit of gaming material his brain can produce before the larvae arrive on the scene, hence his latest Kickstarter, the Trinity of Awesome.  Three short adventures, designed for systems of his own design but easily convertible, can be yours for the low, low price of $3.  At that price, even though I'm currently, technically on "hobby diet" and trying not to spend money on my hobbies for a few weeks (a few paychecks, more accurately), you bet your buns I backed this one.

10 days left if you want in on this as well!

Recent Acquisitions

I got some new - and not so new - gaming goods recently, thought I'd take a post to show off a little and talk about what I got.

First off, I bought three out of the four new Carcosa modules written by Geoffrey McKinney.  These aren't so much adventures as open sandbox hex crawls - each booklet details a quadrant of a larger map that player characters are free to roam as they please.  Each quadrant is dominated by a single terrain type - Swamps, Barrens and Jungles.

Unlike the 2008 Carcosa release, which was done as a supplement to 1974 OD&D, or the 2011 re-release which was geared towards Lamentations of the Flame Princess, these modules are written with AD&D rules in mind, and as such reference spells and classes that don't previously appear in Carcosa, such as Clerics and Magic-Users (as opposed to Carcosa Sorcerers) as well as monsters not previously seen, such as traditional Lizard-Men.

The books are printed by Lulu, and are well put together, and for what it's worth, this is the first order I've gotten from Lulu that wasn't damaged or otherwise contained an "oops." One time I got somebody else's order combined into mine - so I got my Swords & Wizardry books *and* someone else's apocalyptic new translations of the Old Testament which described God as an extraterrestrial!

Other than the covers, the books are devoid of art, which is a bit of a shame; likewise, page numbers are missing which makes it a bit harder to track down information.  The maps on the back cover are nice, but the hex-numbers are often hard to read.

Of the three, I think I enjoyed my read-through of The Yuthlugathap Swamps the most and felt like it was the most immediately useable, with its assortment of Lizardman strongholds and the internecine warfare that marks their relationship with each other.

Overall, I'm kind of so-so on these books, and I don't really feel like they got me fired up and excited for running a Carcosa game, which is something I have been considering lately.  I don't regret the purchase, and I'm sure I'll pull some useful material out of them for use in future games, but I'm just not excited to run them for people.

On the flip side...

My FLGS, Just Games Rochester, has two collections of old Dragon magazines; on the wall rack, above the endless plethora of Pathfinder releases, are the "new" issues - copies that are still in great condition, nothing's been cut or torn out, while in a compartment under a display table is a stack of "used" issues.  I grabbed two from the "new" rack; issue #137 because I've always liked that Larry Elmore snow lizard painting, and #138 because it was the next one consecutively and it had a bunch of undead in it.

I gave both issues a read-through today while waiting for some paint to dry on a row of figures, I was really impressed by the sheer quantity of content here, with #137 being especially full of material I would absolutely 100% use in a game - the ecology of carnivorous plants, the weather system, the Pleistocene mammals, and the article on animal skins, tusks, etc., as treasure are all good, with three of the four being deep in my wheelhouse.

#138 was useful on two fronts - a great article detailing a new grimoire for Call of Cthulhu and a related monster I've never seen referenced before, and a listing of new and fun undead for AD&D.  Both of these seem like things I'll get some use out of in the future.

Planning Ahead; a D&D Campaign for the Future

I've been running Call of Cthulhu exclusively for months now, and love it.  I really feel good about the campaign I'm running and the additional single-shot games I'm running both at the store and at conventions.  But I also know that sooner or later I'm going to want a palate-cleanser from the unspeakable cosmic horror I'm hip-deep in.  And to tell the truth, because right now I'm not writing scenarios but running published ones, I'm not exercising my creativity *that* much on the gaming front right now.  So I've begun thinking about a D&D campaign for once "A Time to Harvest" wraps, probably mid-autumn.

Here's what I know I want:

• More "traditional" D&D than my last campaign; fewer rayguns, more Western European fantasy tropes and Arthuriana.  I'm likely to replace some of the D&D humanoids with critters like Sciapods, Blemmyes and the like from medieval manuscripts.  How is it Blemmyes never made it into any of the Monster Manuals?
• Sandbox adventuring.  "A Time to Harvest" is very plot-centric, and I'd like a break from leading the players from clue to clue and let them decide where they want to go and what they're going to break when they get there.  
• Rules-lighter mechanics.  Swords & Wizardry, B/X retroclones, and 5e are all possibilities here.  3.x/Pathfinder are not.  
• A sense that the world does not exist for the PCs, that there are constantly things going on in the setting that they aren't interacting with.  

Here's what I'm pretty sure I want:

• Early Modern tech levels; gunpowder and early firearms exist, though will not always be easy to get, with a matchlock musket being as "high tech" in this campaign as the X-Ray Pulse Rifle was in Devil's Canyon.  This has me somewhat leaning towards using the Lamentations of the Flame Princess rules.  Longbows, crossbows, and armored warriors will be much more common.  
• Strongly humanocentric setting.
• A solid mix of exploration/dungeoneering adventures and castle intrigue/stuff going on in town adventures.  A number of castles within the sandbox controlled by various wizards and warriors who feel very different from one another, so visiting Castle B isn't a cookie-cutter of having visited Castle A.  Likewise, different towns have different problems.  
• No reusing monsters; if there are orcs besieging Castle Blackstone, those are the only orcs in the sandbox.  There may be Chaotic-aligned, 1HD humanoids elsewhere in the sandbox, but they'll be, as mentioned above, Sciapods or something like that.  Mixed in with the Ogres, Harpies and Dragons will be the occasional weirder critter drawn from the Random Esoteric Creature Generator.
• A tracker akin to Chris Kutalik's Chaos Index tracking the ebb and flow and Magic and Mundanity in the sandbox.  

And here are some of the resources I intend to be using:

• 1E Oriental Adventures yearly/monthly/daily events charts to determine the regional events that the PCs can choose to ignore or involve themselves in.  
• Medieval Demographics Made Easy, by S. John Ross.
• Hexographer.
• OD&D Castle Occupancy Chart, combined with Jeff Rients' Random Castle Shenanigans chart.
• Justin Alexander's take on building a Hexcrawl.