Frostgrave Warband: The Choosers of the Slain

I've had these ladies primed and ready to go for almost a year now, and I'm very glad to have finally settled on a color scheme and gotten them painted.  I picked up the two packs of Valkyries from Wargames Foundry at their Christmas sale last year.  I was a little disappointed to find a couple of the figures miscast, but I had enough to build a warband, using Reaper's Ice Queen as a Wizard, and if I need to I can pin new swords to the hands of a couple of the miscast ones - it looks like in all cases not enough metal made it into the mold, and so I've got two holding just hilts, and the figure I've chosen for my Apprentice was originally holding a spear, which in this case has become a staff.

Left to Right: Brunhilda (Apprentice), the Ice Queen, Sigrun (either Knight or Templar)

Hildr and Gunnr, a pair of Infantrymen

Hlokk, Olrun and Herja, three Thugs

Geidriful and Goll, two Thieves

I normally don't do eyes, but I think I want to go back and try to do a couple of them, and I definitely want to give Brunhilda and Sigrun's lips a touch up.  Same with Geidriful and Goll's nipples, I suppose.

I should probably do another layer of snow on the bases as well.

Cthuesday: Consumption

It occurred to me that I haven't posted the write-up of last week's game.  We ended up having a few last minute withdrawals, and so we ran with only two players.  Which was a new situation for me - I don't remember the last time I ran for a table smaller than three players.  Possibly never.  The scenario did not exactly go as I, or author Brian Sammons, intended, but everyone had fun nonetheless so that's what matters.

Dramatis Personae:

• Roxanne Bennett (played by Kai), an African-American stage magician
• Janet Whitley-Rose (played by Julie), a widowed woman using her money to hunt ghosts

While driving on the Aylesbury Pike, sometime after their investigation of the Corbitt House, Janet hit a woman who stumbled out of the fog with her car.  Investigating, they found the woman dead - of blood loss; one of her legs had been sawn off, with a belt in place as a tourniquet, which had loosened during her flight.  The woman had been using a broken broom handle as a crutch.  Her tongue had been removed, the stump cauterized.  

They decided to wrap the woman's body in a blanket and stash it in the backseat of the car for now.  

Following the woman's bloody trail through the melting snow and mud, they found the burned out shell of an old two-story house, and behind it, a shack built of reclaimed wood.  Inside the shack, a horror show; a pyramid of ten skulls, their eye-sockets stuffed with mementos of the corpses they'd been taken from.  A bloody bed, ropes hanging from the bedposts.  A grisly hacksaw on the ground, a flayed torso hanging on the wall.  Finding some bloodstained luggage, tattered but once-nice, Roxanne piled the skulls inside, along with the hacksaw.  Checking outside, they found a still-wet bloody knife in the snow and a man's booted footprints, which they followed in the direction of Arkham before losing the trail in drier ground.

Returning to the car, Janet and Roxanne decided the best course of action would be to drop the body and the bag of evidence at the police station as discreetly possible and leave.  

This is where things began to go wrong.  

Pulling up the curb in front of the police station, Roxanne tried to kick the three bags and the corpse out of the car without attracting any attention - and failed, bringing the police running.  She tried to casually throw her registered handgun into the gutter discreetly, and failed, the gun discharging and shooting out one of the tires on the car.  

I've never seen players roll so many 95s and up in such quick succession in Call of Cthulhu before.  

The two women were brought into the station and questioned separately about how they came to be in possession of a woman's corpse, minus one leg, and a bag of human skulls, by detective Michael Cooper.  He assured them that he believed their story, and was calling in a local doctor to give them a once over before they were released to go home.  

Dr. James Bell, a black-bearded gentleman, gave Roxanne a once-over and suggested giving her a mild sedative to help calm her nerves.  Roxanne recognized this as a line of BS and the "sedative" he mentioned as a paralytic.  She jumped him, trying to strangle him with his own stethoscope.  Bell threw her off and made for the door, but was caught blind-sided when Roxanne threw a chair at him.  Bell stunned, Roxanne picked up the syringe of paralytic, shook it up real good to ensure the presence of plenty of air bubbles, and emptied the syringe into Bell's thigh.  

Cooper and Janet burst into the room almost simultaneously.  Roxanne explained that Bell must have had a stroke, quietly kicking the empty syringe into a corner of the room.  Cooper tersely asked the two women to wait in a cell while another medical examiner was called.  

Janet and Roxanne eventually dozed off in the cell, at which time Cooper entered the cell quietly (both players failing their Listen rolls by drastic amounts once more) and casually murdered both of them, caving their skulls with a nightstick wielded with superhuman strength.  He quietly moved the bodies to a waiting hearse, where the local undertaker delivered the two bodies back to the shack for rendering by the cannibal secret society's sociopathic chef.  

Alpha Blue: A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Death Star

Saturday afternoon I ran a short session of Alpha Blue, Venger Satanis' silly, sexy sci-fi RPG, for a group of three players at my local game store - I'd been expecting more but had an exodus of players within the last 24 hours before game.  It happens.  As it stands, our dramatis personae was as follows:

• Alkar Mull, medic-turned-bounty hunter
• Zorgo Bonesnapper, 4' tall lizardman and pimp
• Astroduke-in-Exile Nedra IV, interstellar conman and swindler

Given that Zorgo was played by my sister, Nedra by her boyfriend, and Mull by a 14 year old, I jettisoned the sexual elements of Alpha Blue and just went for silly.  

The adventurers were in the process of passing through customs to get into Alpha Blue when a ship came careening in, bouncing off the deckplates of the landing pad skidding to a stop just feet from the wall.  The hatch blew off but no one emerged, so the three decided to check it out for themselves.  They found the pilot, Blake Rogers (according to his Spacer License; Zorgo helped himself to the 300 credits in Rogers' wallet) still strapped in, stoned out of his gourd on plutonium nyborg, surrounded by empty gallon-size ziplock bags.  "You know your perspective's fucked so you just gotta let your hands fly like you're sober," he mumbled to Zorgo.  

Checking the rest of the ship, they discover he was carrying a cargo of O-Rings destined for the robotics plants on Astrotech V.  Deciding these had no value to them, they called Med Bay to have Rogers sobered up and go on their merry way.  

A few hours later, they get called to the captain's deck; the captain, a fat, shirtless guy with a nose ring and a three-foot blue mohawk surrounded by empty bottles of Old Space Granddad, absent-mindedly picked at his belly-button as he laid out the situation.  

"So, like, you guys remember that guy that came in stoned, right? Rogers or whatever? Like, there's some unfriendly dudes outside looking for him, and nobody knows where he went - he checked himself out of Sick Bay an hour ago."

Flipping on the view-screen, he shows the adventurers an enormous alien battle-cruiser outside; a

picture-in-picture screen showed the captain of that ship to be a Brain Bug - a hippo-sized mass of pulsating grey-matter, with a wet, sphincter-like mouth surrounded by eye-stalks.  Dozens of mind-controlled humanoid slaves surrounded the Bug, operating the ship and massaging the folds of its oversized cerebellum.  

Speaking through one of its slaves, the Bug demanded that Rogers and "the information he carries" be turned over at once - if he is not delivered within one Standard Galactic Day, the Bug will drop a polynuclear warhead on Alpha Blue.  

"It'd be cool if you guys could find Rogers," the captain said, "and I could like, give you a reward or whatever."

Checking the Med Bay, they learned that Rogers was heading for the bar level, and Zorgo pulled up a listing of all the nyborg bars in Alpha Blue, turning up three.  They split up, each checking one of the bars.  Alkar Mull found Rogers up to his eyebrows in snortable powder, running up a tab longer than he was tall.  

Sobering him up, they learned that the Brain Bug had been chasing Rogers for some time, demanding the location of something called "the Loc-Nar." Zorgo recalled that this was a fabulous, legendary jewel that had passed from tyrant to tyrant, conqueror to conqueror.  While Rogers had never heard of this thing, he did vaguely recall clipping a derelict space-yacht; maybe that's what the Brain Bug is after?

To find the yacht, they'd need to check Rogers' ship's black box.  Unfortunately, the ship had already been dismantled and taking down to Reclamation.  The Reclamation Supervisor, a 3' tall carroty alien, was very susceptible to bullying, however, and gave the adventurers free reign to search for the black box in the scrap-heaps.  

Just as Nedra laid hands on the black box, the Brain Bug fired a "warning shot" that disabled the station's gravity well - with the gravity turned off, the adventurers (and all the scrap) began to float around the room.  "Swimming" through the air and pushing off against pieces of scrap, they manage to make their way through the halls to the docking bay.  

Plugging the black box into Zorgo's shag-carpeted space ship "The Shaggin' Wagon," they figure out where the space yacht was and which direction it would have likely drifted in.  Transmitting the wrong coordinates to the Brain Bug, the adventurers hired a slightly larger ship than the Shaggin' Wagon and took off the salvage the yacht themselves.  Before leaving, they turned over Blake Rogers to the captain - the new captain, a man with a cat for a head (a full cat, not just a cat head), who explained that the old captain had choked on vomit and died.  

[Aside: I was really disappointed that no one got the Spinal Tap reference and questioned whose vomit it was that the captain had choked on.]

They found the yacht, "The Temptress," with little difficulty, entering it through a hole in its side; Zorgo immediately began dreaming about converting the yacht into a new base of operations for himself.  Inside, they found a half-dozen freeze-dried rich jerks, and began helping themselves to the jewelry still worn by the corpses.  In the hands of one, Zorgo found a green glowing gem the size of a Space Grapefruit. He grabbed it.

Immediately, the gem woke up, identifying itself as "the Source of all Evil in the Universe, Eternal and Imperishable." Mull replied sarcastically, and got zapped with a bolt of electricity from the sphere.  The sphere mused that the gathered adventurers were too weak to serve it as anything but bearers, demanding to be taken to a greater power - the Brain Bugs, the Krylon Protectorate, or the Knights in Black Satin, all would do.  When the adventurers continued to dicker, the Loc-Nar decided to give them another demonstration of its power, reanimating the six freeze-dried rich jerks as Space Zombies and ordering them to attack.  

The adventurers made quick work of the zombies, at which point the Loc-Nar declared that a greater power had come for it, and began to float out the hole in the side of the ship.  The Brain Bug battle-cruiser had arrived, and the Loc-Nar was making a beeline for it.  

Nedra jumped to the controls of the yacht, managing to pull enough juice out of its old batteries to charge the thrusters.  Maneuvering the ship around, he set it on autopilot aimed directly for the bridge of the Brain Bug cruiser.  Setting the thrusters to fire, the adventurers escaped back to their own ship, where Zorgo immediately failed to make the jump to Hyperspace.  The yacht impacted the cruiser, setting off a chain reaction of explosions.  Trying again, the adventurers managed to escape to light-speed just ahead of the expanding explosion, heading back to Alpha Blue for some much needed R&R.  

I never know how to gauge the length of a session in a new RPG, and this was no exeption; I'd anticipated two and a half hours of play and we were done with the adventure in an hour.  Everyone had a good time though, and it gave me a palate cleanser before the very dark session of Call of Cthulhu I'm running tomorrow, so it's all good.  

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!

A Time to Harvest Session 11: The Doom that Came to Cobb's Corners

Here we are, at what is probably the penultimate session of this campaign.  Here we wrapped up Chapter 5, and Chapter 6, the final chapter of the campaign, is a fairly short one, and I doubt it will require more than a single session to complete, which means the next session, taking place on October 4th, will be the last session of "A Time to Harvest" with my group.  It's been a long strange journey, hasn't it?

Dramatis Personae:

• Perry Webster, journalism student (played by Dan)
• Randall McNally, geography student (played by Sean; formerly Randall Vhloche, but Sean decided on a name change)
• Roni, visiting Finn, history student (played by Katie)
• Horace Hoadley, local laborer (played by Kai)
• Levi Hoadley, local laborer (played by Mike)

When we last left our heroes, Perry and Roni had just laid down on alien operating tables, along with soldier Mack Hairpin, to await brain surgery at the claws of the Outer Ones.  Operating leisurely, the two Outer Ones deftly removed the top of Mack's skull and scooped his brain into a jar.  As they made ready to repeat the process on Perry, a third alien, buzzing and changing colors, entered the room.  Flashing and buzzing in response, one of the Old Ones ordered Perry and Roni to "remain where you are - there is no escape.  We will return momentarily."

As the three aliens left the room, Perry and Roni lifted the grate and jumped down into the same underground river that Randall had escaped into.  

***

Making their way up to the isolated farmhouse they worked at, the Hoadley brothers spotted a trio of bodies floating in the river.  Fishing them out, they quickly discovered them to be alive - Randall, Roni and Perry.  Agreeing to work together to deal with the threat of homicidal children in town, and to rescue the Hoadleys' mother, who lives in town, the five headed up to the farmhouse to "requisition" a steam-tractor and supplies.  Arming up and hitching a wagon to the tractor, they head to town.  

Cobb's Corners is, despite the rain, on fire, with people and tree-monsters silhouetted against the flames as they move back and forth.  Our heroes head first to the sheriff's office, which they find deserted, helping themselves to shotguns and a keg of black powder intended for the town's civil war-era cannon, fired every Fourth of July.  

Heading then to the town square, they find the town deputy, naked, sacrificing people atop an altar made from previous sacrifices, flanked by a pair of tree-monsters, hooting in unison.  A third stands guard over a collection of prisoners, including the sheriff, the school-teacher, and the Hoadleys' mother.  Overhead, darker-than-black clouds swirl ominously.  

Perry, Randall and Roni fired at the deputy, managing to pepper him with shot but not kill him immediately; Horace lept off the tractor, axe at the ready, to rescue his "momma" from the tree-monster; and as one of the hooting sentinels turned and lumbered towards them, Levi threw the tractor into gear and tried to build up enough steam to reach "ramming speed."

Horace sheared through the tree-monster's ankle (one of three, at any rate) and slid under the collapsing beast on his knees, coming out cleanly on the other side as it toppled, sending the prisoners scattering.  The steam-tractor rammed into the second tree-monster, and in its flailings it caught Perry with a tentacle and sent him flying twenty feet through the air.  

Unfortunately, the deputy lived long enough to complete the summoning ritual; the sky dilated open and hundreds of thousands of tons of black, alien flesh, studded with pus-rimmed eyes, salivating, sphincter-like maws and uncountable tentacles, began pouring into our reality, vaster than any dinosaur or whale that had ever lived.  Three enormous legs, each hundreds of feet long, stretched down, planting cloven hooves ten feet deep into the earth, crushing buildings, trees, concrete, anything in its way.  

Perry went violently mad at the sight of the thing, charging at Horace and blasting him away with a shotgun in his insanity; Levi responded by shooting Perry in the chest.  Randall took off running for the river.  Roni got crushed by a tentacle the size of a tanker truck.  Levi rigged the boiler on the tractor to explode and took off running for the river.  

All in all, a good session.  

Paint Table Saturday

Nothing much going on here on the painting front; I've been slowly applying base coats to my Foundry Valkyries; I'm trying out basecoating everything on each figure before applying any highlights to anything.  The overall color scheme for this warband is going to be ultramarine blue and white.

The plan is the basecoat everything, do all the touch ups needed, then start highlighting.  I'm spending this weekend alternating between this and a writing project so we'll see what gets done.

I Want War Elephants

You know what doesn't seem to exist in my neck of the woods? Historical wargaming, of the "paint some minis and push them around the table" model.  There are groups who meet to play board games recreating historical conflicts, sure, but I like the pageantry of a table with terrain and collections of painted figures.  28mm fantasy and science fiction skirmish gaming seems to rule the wargaming roost around here, and while I'm certainly not against that (seeing as how I have four Frostgrave warbands), there's an itch that can only be scratched with units, ranked deep, that have a story behind them, a layer of reality behind the painted metal and plastic.

So I got to thinking, and I came up with a plan.  I have no idea yet how well it will go, or if it will prove to be a colossal sink of time and money with no return.  Time will tell.  I want to put on a big demonstration game at a convention, with two big painted armies, recreating a famous historical battle.  I want there to be an element of spectacle, something that draws in passerby - and then I hook them, offering them command of a regiment or two for however many turns they feel like playing, giving them a taste of historical wargaming, that playing with toy soldiers can be fun without pretending to cast spells or fielding mythological monsters.

First step then, is to pick a battle.  I decided to focus on two key elements in selecting a battle to refight: Spectacle and Familiarity.  Spectacle, something about the battle should be eye-catching and lure people in as they walk by.  Familiarity, something about the battle should ring a bell, even to non-historians.  Some ideas I tossed around:

• Kadesh 1274 BCE: The massed chariots of Ramses II and the Hittite King Muwatallish would be very eye-catching, and Ancient Egypt is a perennially popular subject.
• "The Trojan War": Mycenean Greeks versus Trojans, perhaps with a big wall ("Troy") along one table edge.  Wooden horse is optional; sieges, I think, are boring to play.  
• Thermopylae, 480 BCE: Has some cultural cachet still lingering from the Frank Miller graphic novel and its associated film, but I don't know if "OK, you're the Spartans, let's see how many turns you survive" would be fun for anybody.  
• Plataea, 479 BCE: Almost all the perks of Thermopylae, without the guarantee of "Spartans, you're going to lose, it's just a matter of how long you last."
• Gaugamela, 331 BCE: Alexander the Great has name recognition value for sure, and I think most people who would be at a gaming convention would be at least vaguely aware of "the Persian Empire," even if they don't know why there aren't war-rhinos and guys throwing bombs on the table.  Refighting the battle that was, historically, the death-knell of an empire and having the opportunity to change history might be a good hook.  
• Hydaspes, 326 BCE: Alexander the Great again, this time trying to invade India and running into a crapload of brightly-caparisoned war elephants under the command of King Porus, giving a great balance of name recognition and spectacle.  

I think I'm leaning most strongly towards the Battle of Hydaspes; Alexander the Great is well-known enough to be a hook, a line of elephants advancing across the table is a visual hook, plus this was the last big battle of Alexander's career; not long thereafter his men forced him to turn back rather than continue on into India, and the battle was, from what I've read, a very close one.

As apprehensive as I feel about painting the brightly-dressed Achaemenid Persians, if Hydaspes goes well I may refight Gaugamela at a subsequent convention.  Darius fielded not just war elephants, but scythed chariots at that battle, which would be a draw I think.  

Next step is deciding on a ruleset.  I knew I wanted something that's easy to learn and to teach, with minimal granularity and plenty of dice rolling.  This was actually the easy part - Neil Thomas' Ancient & Medieval Wargaming is simple and straight-forward, without too many frills or complexities to remember, while allowing for tactics and maneuvering.  Plus, rolling handfuls of six-sided dice!

Because I'm likely insane to be taking on this project in the first place, why not go all in and have custom six-siders printed for the demonstration game? Do a big bag of "Alexander" dice with a Vergina Sun in place of the 6, and then a bag of "Porus" dice with...well, not a swastika, since that's taken on some unsavory connotations in the last century, but maybe a silhouette of an elephant? Big bag of each and then participants can keep one when they leave, because gamers love getting souvenirs from games they play in at conventions.  

Step three is going to be selecting figures, and I think I'm already there.  There's no way I can do this in 28mm and not empty my bank account in the process, plus the difficulties of storing large figures like that.  And 15mm-scale, I'm concerned, will be too small on the tabletop to be properly eye-catching.  Enter the 20mm, or 1/72 scale, plastics.  I've been combing through the Plastic Soldier Review site, and think I'm pretty well settled on HaT Industries' figures - you get 48+ figures per infantry box, the sculpts are good if not wildly exciting, and they have extensive lines of both Macedonians and Indians.  I'll likely be supplementing the Macedonians with figures from Zvezda's line of 1/72 scale figures.  

I've been discussing this with a few people over on the AMW Yahoo! Group, most notably Trebian from Wargaming for Grown-ups, who has done very similar things with the Ancient & Medieval Wargaming rules and 20mm plastic figures.  Because HaT does not supply spears for many of their figures (as it would be difficult to mold things like the 20-foot long Macedonian sarissa and have them come out well), I had been dreading slightly the prospect of carefully trimming florist wire or plastic broom bristles to length, but Trebian has suggested using pins with the heads trimmed off, and as best I can reckon it, a 3" pin would be just about the right length in scale for a sarissa.  

I'm looking at doing the purchasing and painting of figures in two stages; first, getting enough of each to field legal 8-unit armies, the standard for AMW, and use these to strengthen my familiarity with the rules.  Once I'm confident with that, then I can begin expanding; I think I want to run the demonstration game as a double-strength game, with 16 or more units on each side, and a few tweaks to the Indian list - Neil Thomas only allows for bow-armed infantry, while the HaT Indian Infantry box also comes with javelinists, hill tribesmen and a female bodyguard, so I'll be figuring out stats for each of them.

So where am I planning to put this game on? Initially I was thinking next year's Queen City Conquest, but have been worrying about this ending poorly for me - I can imagine putting in the time and effort and ending up sitting alone in a room with the figures I put in ages of work on.  So we shall see.