Category: Wargaming

Over the long weekend for Martin Luther King’s birthday I had a chance to work on some hobby stuff.  We had to take my daughter for an interview for high school admission and cheer leading, church, errands, etc., I had a couple of hours on Sunday and quite a bit of Monday (after running 12.5 miles around BWI airport) to paint.  Most of Saturday and Sunday I was preparing projects for painting.  Monday I did the painting.

People who know me, know that my favorite Dr. Who is Jon Pertwee.  My favorite story arc is the Silurians, a race of hyper intelligent lizard type people who had put themselves into suspended animation when the big meteor hit the earth.  The timer woke them up late, around the 1960s in England.  They were slowly waking each other up from deep sleep.  The Dr. gets involved, and excitement commences.  (This arc also has Elizabeth Shaw, my favorite companion.)

This weekend I painted a ten-man Silurian unit for use in Dr. Who GASLIGHT games.

These are Black Tree Dr. Who figures.  I have ordered a unit of Sea Devils, the Silurian’s aquatic cousins.

I also finished working on the quick-start guide for GASLIGHT.  When we combined the four GASLIGHT books (and added additional material) to create The GASLIGHT Compendium, we organized the new book in a Chinese menu format.  We found that our players were mixing and matching activation from one book with shooting from another, for example, so we organized to facilitate this.  We were then criticized that we made it too hard for newcomers to the game to get started.  The quick-start guide was designed to address this criticism.  You can download the quick-start guide for free from www.gaslightrules.com (here is the direct link: http://www.bucksurdu.com/Personal/documents/GASLIGHTQuickStart.pdf).

In a previous post, I showed some of the FASA Hangar 18 Flash Gordon cities.  My parents got me two more of them for Christmas.  Above is a mountain with a death ray.  Below is an asteroid with a city on it.

I spent some time on Saturday cleaning up some of the clutter in “the war room.”  During that activity I found an old Marx cave/mine entrance.  I had two and already painted one for brown terrain.  This was was earmarked for gray terrain.  While these were intended for 54mm plastic Marx figures, I think they look pretty good with 28mm Silurians coming out.

The Hangar 18 Flash Gordon cities also come with little resin space ships.  I painted those too, but I haven’t photographed them.  I ordered 40 flight stands from Hydra Miniatures.  When they arrive, I’ll photography them and post them here.  Stay tuned.

I filed, primed and mounted on sticks a couple dozen Copplestone 10mm orcs riding wargs.  I painted the wolves, but I didn’t get a chance to paint the riders.

One more picture of Elizabeth Shaw and the Third Doctor for the road.

I am very excited about a new project on Kickstarter.  See press release below.

TUNNELS & TROLLS — ONE OF THE EARLIEST RPGS WILL GET A DELUXE REBOOT, WITH LOVE

The original team who created the classic role-playing game Tunnels & Trolls has come together again
to make the finest edition yet.

With the help of Kickstarter and a legion of enthusiastic supporters, the original design and development team, being affectionately called the “Fellowship of the Troll,” now has the funds to reboot the classic game into an updated and first rate Deluxe edition. It has been a long time in the making.

The longevity of Tunnels & Trolls is remarkable. As the second role-playing game to reach market (1975), the game opened the door of possibilities: the possibility of diversity in RPGs; the possibility of humor with your heroism; and the possibility of excellent art to ignite the imagination and bring the game alive. Adventures for solitaire play followed modules for group adventures, making it possible to explore a fantasy gaming narrative at any time, whether one’s companions were available at the gaming table or not.

The fans have remained loyal to the game for 37 years, through multiple editions and translations, weathering criticism of the game for being too light-hearted, or shy in world development, and the ups and downs of fortune in a multiform hobby that offers countless alternative opportunities, both tabletop and electronic. When the Kickstarter for Deluxe Tunnels & Trolls (dT&T) was announced, fans from around the world stepped up: the new game reached its funding goal in just over 36 hours. In less than a week, funding is over 200%, and there are another 25 days to go.

WHO’S WHO ON THE NEW EDITION
Ken St Andre, the designer of T&T, envisions a new edition that remains true to his original concepts, empowering players with strong, simple core rules and optional elaborations, while adding the best ideas from later editions. The Trollhalla.com website has kept him in touch with the fans over the last 12 years, so changes to be made receive due consideration before implementation.

One significant addition to the rulebook will be description of, and chronology for, Ken’s Trollworld, the world environment played “back in the day” and further developed by Ken in the years since. Working with Ken will be designer Bear Peters, drawing on Bear’s collection of maps, stories, and lore that have been tucked away for decades. Whole continents previously unknown are being fleshed out with their unique Kindreds and histories.

Liz Danforth, illustrator and editor/developer of the well-loved classic Fifth Edition is on board to reprise all those jobs. In addition to artwork created for the recent French edition (<http://tunnels-et-trolls.eu/>http://tunnels-et-trolls.eu/), Liz will create an entirely new cover painting and new interior art to add to the old favorites. Her editorial and game development skills will help ensure the Deluxe gem gets the best possible cut, hone, and polish to make it shine.

Although not part of the original team from the 70s, Steve Crompton brings years of experience as an illustrator, publisher, and graphics designer to the project. His hand and eye are responsible for the outstanding appearance of the recent French edition that inspired the Fellowship to reunite with the game’s original publisher, Rick Loomis of Flying Buffalo Inc.

CATCHING THE BUZZ
The fans of the game have showed up with bells on to share their memories of growing up with T&T, and they continue to express their warm approval of the prospective new edition in blogs and forums. Below are just a few examples:
<http://whartsonhall.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/tales-of-the-staggering-zombie/>http://whartsonhall.wordpress.com/2013/01/06/tales-of-the-staggering-zombie/
http://www.thesecretdm.com/2013/01/new-on-kickstarter-deluxe-tunnels-trolls.html
<http://thegaminggang.com/2013/01/deluxe-tunnels-trolls-now-on-kickstarter/>http://thegaminggang.com/2013/01/deluxe-tunnels-trolls-now-on-kickstarter/
http://futileposition.com/2013/01/deluxe-tunnels-and-trolls.html

In the Comments section of the Kickstarter, many amazing stories of how the game touched people’s lives are being shared. The sense of community is strong, and has profoundly affected the fans and the design team alike. Liz Danforth spoke of the inspiration and impact of the fans’ words in her own blog (<http://www.lizdanforth.com/>http://www.lizdanforth.com).

Perhaps Big Jack Brass (the Whartsonhall blogger, above) encapsulates it best of all:

“The Kickstarter does two … important things: the surge of giddy support lets the people behind it know that there are hundreds of gamers out there who absolutely love and cherish the work they did and are doing now; and the new edition is something younger gamers can engage with more easily than something from 1979. It’s time to share the wonder and let others build their own magical memories.”

CONTACT US
If you can help us spread the word, we would be grateful. If you have a blog or podcast and would like an interview, or if you know someone who does, we would be happy to oblige. With new stretch goals (milestones) posted, we are hoping to reach out to many old school RPG fans who share the community’s fond memories of Tunnels & Trolls, and newer players who might welcome the possibilities to be found in this fresh Deluxe edition.

<http://www.deluxetunnelsandtrolls.com/>www.deluxetunnelsandtrolls.com
Kickstarter: <http://kck.st/W8rkq7>http://kck.st/W8rkq7

Twitter: @DeluxeTnT

Trollhala, Ken St Andre’s online T&T community: <http://www.trollhalla.com/>www.Trollhalla.com

Ken St. Andre: <mailto:kenstandre@yahoo.com>kenstandre@yahoo.com (Twitter: @Trollgodfather)
Rick Loomis (Flying Buffalo Inc): <mailto:rick@flyingbuffalo.com>rick@flyingbuffalo.com (Twitter: @buffalorick)
Liz Danforth: <mailto:liz@lizdanforth.com>liz@lizdanforth.com (Twitter: @LizDanforth)
Steve Crompton: <mailto:sscrompton@cox.net>sscrompton@cox.net
Bear Peters: <mailto:themancalledbear@gmail.com>themancalledbear@gmail.com

Flying Buffalo Inc  www.flyingbuffalo.com
PO Box 8467, Scottsdale, AZ 85252
480-945-6917

We needed suitably fantasy-looking buildings for your LSNC: Fantasy, Ancients, and Mediaeval games.  For Christmas, Chris made the building in the picture (above) with the blue roof and gave me a bunch of the plaster hexagonal columns to make more.  I haven’t had a lot of time for hobby this week, but bit-by-bit I assembled and painted a number of these small buildings.

I painted them with different roofs.  I thought each town might have different colors, so I could tell the goblins to seize the green town or the maroon town.

I made the doors and windows in PowerPoint and printed them on card stock.  While it’s hard to see in the pictures, the trim color around the doors and windows matches the color of the roofs.

The bag of hexagonal column bits had flat pieces that were too short for levels or floors.  I decided to make them into porch overhangs.

This was a fun little project that I could manage while watching “Murder, She Wrote” on Netflix in the evenings with my daughter.

In this post, I am including pictures of the last figures I finished in 2012 and the first figures I finished in 2013.  The idol above is meant to look like the cover of the original Dungeon’s and Dragons Player’s Handbook.  I love this model; although, I’m not sure when I’ll get to use it in a game.

The last figures I finished were the two sets of “Sergeants Three” from Pulp Figures.  These were meant to look like the characters from the movie Gunga Din.

I also completed 15 Pulp Figures Highlanders.  I’ll be using these in my Duke Morrison versus the Thugees game at Cold Wars.

In what has become a time-honored tradition, the HAWKs got together at my place to ring in the New Year by gaming until the ball drops.  This began several years ago before I deployed to Iraq.  I wanted to have one last gaming event with the guys before heading to the desert.  The first couple of years everyone stayed until midnight.  As evidence of greying of the hobby, we had 20+ gamers with a few vivandières (spouses).  About half the folks left after the first couple of games.  It may be that death and mayhem in the Indian jungle wasn’t enough excitement for everyone on New Year’s Eve, but several folks wanted to be with family for the ball drop or just pooped out.

It is hard to develop a game for 20+ players, so instead, I ran two GASLIGHT games simultaneously.  I was able to get away with this because GASLIGHT is very simple and also because almost all the players were very familiar with the rules.  I ran play tests of both of my Cold Wars GASLIGHT games.

I didn’t realize until half way through the evening that I had turned off the flash on my camera, so in the low light, many of my pictures turned out blurry.  This shot depicts the layout of Duke Morrison vs. the Thugees.  The good guys are trying to get to the temple in the center to rescue Ginanna Naninnia from the clutches of “Toad Face” and his minions.  I used a modification of the Zombies by GASLIGHT zombie generation system to generate thugees and minions.  Thugees were better in melee, but the minions had muskets (requiring reloads).  We actually had to reset this game after 45 minutes, because we were generating too many minions.  (That’s the value of play testing before a convention!)

Any figures who entered the temple moved to another table where I had placed one section of Noah’s dungeon craw terrain.  Gianna was in the temple awaiting her fate.  Though Duke Morrison was gunned down in the jungle and had to be carried along, eventually the good guys reached the girl, but were unable to fight their way back out of the temple — even with Sergeants Cutter, MacChesney, and Balantine arrived as reinforcements.

Due to the unpredictable nature of GASLIGHT and the ability of players to spoil a well-planned and play-tested scenario, I usually keep one or two “balance” forces in my hip pocket.  For the Thugee game, I had the Pulp Sergeants Three (the characters from Gunga Din) for the good guys and a giant beetle for the bad guys.

This is the setup for Duke Morrison and the Mounties.  In this scenario, assisted by Sergeant Preston of the RCMP and Yukon King, Duke Morrison’s posse must rescue Gianna Naninni from being sawn in two by the gangsters and also must blow up the lab equipment that Professor Serafini Naninni had been forced to build for the Venusians.  Gianna was in the second floor of the mill in the foreground of this picture.  In 12 turns, she would be killed.

This picture shows some of the carnage in the upper floor of the mill where Naninni was taking her ride.  Duke Morrison and “Boats” Morgan defeated a number of Venusians and gangsters and rescued the girl.  The good guys then turned their attention on the other objective.

(A note on the naming:  Since being stationed in Italy int he late 80’s, I’ve thought the name Gianna Naninni just rolls off your tongue.  One of her songs, Bello e Impossibile, Beautiful and Impossible, is a favorite of mine.  While the singer is not particularly attractive, I’ve attached her name to this character in my series of Duke Morrison games, because I like the way it sounds.)

Duke Morrison lead the charge into the cave / laboratory (build from a Dwarven Forge cavern set).  He ran headlong into a gangster who he dispatched quickly in hand-to-gland combat.  Every time he tried to move toward the lab equipment, however, another gangster, trapper, or Venusian set on him from behind.  He eventually overcame all opposition and successfully destroyed the lab equipment.  For Cold Wars, I will “put a clock” on the time to destroy the equipment and add a couple of guards to the interior.  Without a time limit to destroy the equipment the good guys were able to mass on the mill and then turn to the second objective.  I wanted the good guys to have to split their forces.

(By the way, both Yukon King and Sergeant Preston met their demise in this scenario.)

After we cleaned up this game and had a meal of lasagna, Noah set up his popular dungeon crawl game.

This game could only handle 10 players, but about half our guests left after dinner, so this worked out okay.  The game took us until a few minutes before midnight.  We toasted the New Year with sparkling grape juice and finished cleaning up.  As is typical of the HAWKS New Years Eve gaming spectacular, everyone had left by about 1230.

We had planned three big games, beginning at 1500.  At the last minute we dropped one game from the event list.  If everyone had stayed, we would have needed to run both the Dungeon Crawl and Santa Claus vs. the Nazis in parallel.  As it worked out, we had just enough game for the number of players.  I think everyone enjoyed themselves.  I have really  never understood all the hoopla associated with New Years Eve, so these gaming nights are a nice way to mark the occasion without putting up with drunks.

 

 

Last Friday, a few of the HAWKs came over to play Look, Sarge, No Charts: Fantasy, Ancients, and Mediaeval.  This was actually the first time I had played it with historical figures; all my previous play test have been with fantasy figures.

The game involved three legions of Romans versus three “warbands” of Carthaginians.  Both sides had some skirmishers and a little cavalry on the flanks.

The game played very well, I thought.  Because of changes we’ve made it has a decidedly different feel from the previous three versions of the Look, Sarge rules.  I am thinking about adding a charge bonus for melee, however.  We haven’t done this in other versions of the rules.  (In the Napoleonic version, charging cavalry gets to roll first against non-charging units that are not in square.)  As ancients are mostly melee games, with perhaps some thrown spears or pila right before contact, I’m worried that the game will discourage people from charging at each other and could degenerate into folks staring at each other across the table.

Being mostly naked, it was difficult as Carthaginians to defeat the heavily armored Romans unless you could mass several units on one.  In this picture you can see that I was deployed in two lines.  My first line was in an odd, “refuse the flank” configuration, as I was anticipating an imminent charge by a bunch of Romans.  In this version of the rules, units can turn at the beginning of the move and then must move in a straight line.  This makes maneuver decidedly more difficult in this period than the other periods covered in this family of rules.  Placement of units and keeping a second line of troops becomes very important.

In general, I think these rules are coming along nicely.

My last post showed the Pulp Figures “dismounts.”  This week I completed the trappers and adventurers packs from Pulp as well as the two canoes that I’ve had in my to-do box for a long time.

These were great fun to paint.  Each figure has real character.

These will soon see action in “Duke Morrison and the Mounties.”  I’ll be running that scenario on New Year’s Eve for the HAWKs as well as at Cold Wars.

For the snow, I’ve tried something different.  I applied fine, gray ballast to the bases using Elmer’s glue.  After a couple coats of matte varnish, I then dry brushed white over them.  I think they turned out just about right.  Next time, I may try painting the ballast light blue before dry brushing with white.

I am working on a pulp scenario, entitled Duke Morrison and the Mounties for our New Years Eve gaming event and for the Cold Wars convention.  I bought two of the new sets of Pulp Figures mounties to support the game.  This weekend was the first time I had picked up a brush in several weeks.

Pulp only makes the one pack (so far) of dismounted Mounties (what I call “dismounties”).  I bought two sets to make a ten-man GASLIGHT squad.  The scenario will also involve the older Sergeant Preston figure.

There was some recent “conversation” on TMP about Bob Murch’s faces.  Since TMP message boards are often inhabited by haters and critics, several folks jumped on the bandwagon.  I like his figures, however,  and I think they have real character.  The detail is deep enough to be easily painted.

Stay tuned after the first of the year for an update on Duke Morrison and the Mounties.

I finally got around to modifying two Make Knight tanks that I bought recently.  These used to sell for $35 each, but I found two at $5 each at different conventions.

This is what the tank looks like before I modified it.  I’ve never thought the spikey wheel on the front made much sense.  I could only imagine this tank burrying its front end into the dirft after a few yards and becoming immobile.  I ordered resin wheels from Brigade games, cut off the spikey wheels, repainted the whole thing, and glued on the new wheels.  I also mounted a commander’s machinegun (also from Brigade Games) on top.  I’m pretty happy with the way the two tanks turned out.

I’m not sure when these tanks will see action for the first time, but at least they are off the project table.  So, now I have to devise a scenario that uses them in time for Historicon!

Last night we played a really fun zombies game using straight GASLIGHT with the free Zombies by GASLIGHT download from RPGNow.  The basic scenario was a rescue situation.  Several groups of survivors were trying to get to the compound, rescue the people, load all the supplied into their truck, and get back off the table.  When the game began, the “compound” was defended by just three figures, and there were over 20 zombies on the table.  In the center, you can see the overturned truck.  These began the game overturned with four “teamsters” trying to get them working again.  The teamsters were unarmed except for one figure with a baseball back.  All the rest of the figures began the game at the far end of the table, loaded into the truck.

Whenever anyone makes noise, such as running the truck engine or firing a weapon, some number of “noise markers” are placed on the table.  When the “zombie spawn” card is drawn, the zombie player rolls to determine how many, what kind, and where the zombies appear.  This picture is early in the game.  At the top right you can see the rescue truck approaching.  In the top(ish) center you can see Grandma Schlegel, one of the compound’s defenders, becoming surrounded by zombies.  Though she was an Extra, Grandma Schlegel survived to the end of the game.  The use of noise markers reduces the amount of shooting that the players do, because while shooting can kill zombies, it often attracts more than it kills.

Zombies come on one of three types: creepers (that move slowly and fight poorly), runners (who fight well and move quickly), and bloaters.  When a bloater dies, they burst open and spread spores.  Anyone within three inches of the bloater must pass a Save or risk infection.  In addition, when a figure takes a hit from a zombie, the figure rolls 1d10.  Each turn or each subsequent hit, the die is decremented.  When it reaches 2, the figure makes a second Save.  Failing this Save means the figure becomes a zombie in two turns.  By the end of the game, the humans had lost five figures by becoming zombies, forcing the players to kill their own men.

I thought the man armed with a bow would be very effective.  It was the only ranged weapon that made no noise.  Unfortunately on his second shot, Palmer Tell snapped his bow string.  Before fixing it, he leapt from the truck, where he was quickly surrounded by hungry zombies.  He fought valiantly for many turns, but he eventually succumbed and became a zombie himself.

The game was a nail biter until the end.  All of the players had at least one figure finish the game.  The players received one victory point for each “piece” of supplies.  Each pile of supplies scattered around the compound contained four “pieces.”  The humans lost four victory points for each figure killed or turned into a zombie.  The humans were trying to have a positive number of points.  There were 32 points in the compound.  Since the humans lost 5 figures, the needed 20 points of supplies just to break even.  In the end, they had collected 25 points and got away.

The game was loud, funny, and boisterous.

In this picture you can see a nun who had been hit by a zombie.  You can see the ten-sided die used to count down the number of turns before she was going to have to Save or become a zombie.  Several bloaters blocked the path between the supplies and the truck.  The truck couldn’t pull over, because the two figures in the truck, including another nun, were  busy fighting their own zombies.