Author: Buck

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.

As a sucker for Flash Gordon (the comics, the serials, and even that lousy 1970’s movie), I had been admiring Flash Gordon kingdoms available from FASA Hangar 18 (see http://www.hangar18fasa.com/flash_gordon_42.html#) for quite a while.  Last Summer, my parents got me many of them for my birthday.  I finally got around to painting them up.  These were extremely fun to assemble and paint.

They are all-resin kits.  Some of them require no assembly, but others require a bit of assembly.  The parts fit together well, so assembly was easy.

Each kingdom also comes with two to four space ships.  These were a bit fiddly to assemble.  It was only after I have figured out how to assemble them from the illustrations on the Web page that I found the link to some assembly pictures.  I haven’t finished painting the space ships, so I’ll share pictures of them in a future post.

I think I may add a piece of orange or yellow wire between the two gold posts to look like lighting or electricity,

This one might be my favorite of the bunch.  Note how the rock formations are carved to look like lion heads.

The roofs on these buildings are painted gold, but with the flash, they look orange in this picture.

I will likely use the ships with Fleet Battles by GASLIGHT, from the GASLIGHT Compendium.  I may also mix the ships that come with these kingdoms with my War Rocket ships to game with them.

One of the guys in our gaming group had once been part owner of a company that made interesting plaster terrain pieces.  While painting these kingdoms, I finished a piece that I will use in our 10mm fantasy games.  These are apparently long out of production.  Doug just showed up one day with several boxes of excess bits that remained after the company closed up shop.

While I was busy running games, I did manage to take a small handful of pictures.  I thought Fall In ran well.  Despite Hurricane Sandy, which seemed to have prevented some folks from attending, I thought attendance seemed good.  The convention staff, all volunteers, were helpful as usual.  Thanks to all who helped make Fall In a great three days of gaming and shopping.

One of the HAWKs, Noah, and his son, with some help from Greg, fashioned this tunnel system using a table-saw like foam cutter and a lot of Hirst Arts plaster molds.  It was the darling of the convention, attracting lots of gamers and lots of attention.  It looked terrific, but more importantly, ALL the players had a great time.  This game earned Noah a GM award for his first ever convention game.

Greg ran two GASLIGHT gamers.  One was Paul Revere vs. the Werewolves, a game pitting British, Americans, and Werewolves against each other during the American Revolution.  While I was busy running another game at the time, from all the whooping and hollering at his table, I gather it went well.

Fall In marked the formal release of Fate of Battle: Look, Sarge, No Charts: Napoleonic Wars.  The games went really well.  We had several people come back for a second or third try.  I was supposed to have run four games, but only three made it into the PEL and the program.  I officially added the fourth game back into the event listing at the convention.  Friday night we had so many people on the standby list that Dave Wood threw down an additional impromptu game for eight more players.  We had a father bring his son to our Saturday night game and actually explain the rules to him before I began the formal rules explanation myself.  We had another gamer, who is also a fellow game designer, who came back for a second run.

At one point I was worried about a couple of folks who had epically cold dice going away with a bad impression of the rules.  Afterwards, they made a point of saying how much they enjoyed the games.

Because I was so tardy in finishing the book, we could only put up posters with pointers to RPGNow (where you can download a .pdf) and the Web site.  I suspect we lost quite a few sales by not having books on hand, but I just couldn’t get the book done any sooner. In fact, I’m happy that I got the .pdf done in time.  As Hurricane Sandy was rolling into town I was going to do my final edit for typos, etc.  That’s when I discovered that the current version of the file had gotten corrupted.  The good news is that I use off-site backup.  The bad news is that I had pushed the corrupted version around to all my backup sites!  We were sent home early on Monday, so I spent 11 straight hours merging four sets of changes back into the previous version of the file.  I think it was a blessing in disguise, because the current version is much better for those 11 hours of intense scrutiny.

Sorry I didn’t take more photos.  I was busy running or helping to run five games in two days.  I’m bushed!

Dave, Chris, and I are just about done with the final editing of Fate of Battle:  Look, Sarge, No Charts:  Napoleonic Wars.  The initial release will come as .pdf on RPGNow.  This will be in time for Fall In.  We will release the paper version of the book in a couple of weeks, certainly before Christmas.

The supertitle comes from a quote from Napoleon (of course):

“Battle should only be offered when there is no other turn of fortune to be hoped for, as from its nature the fate of battle is always dubious.”

Last weekend I got tired of painting green faces on a horde of 10mm goblins, so I decided to put a dent in my growing collection of unpainted Pulp figures.  I painted these South Pacific natives in preparation for another Duke Morrison scenario.

Inspired by Dr. Mithias on The Miniatures Page (http://www.lead-adventure.de/index.php?topic=33379.0), I went looking for wedding favor coaches to convert into armored cars for the Hinterland female hussars.

I cut the tongue and horses off the coaches and began adding bits.  My 13-year-old daughter helped me along the way.  The choice of maroon for the wagons was hers.

I made the front sponson from an old fill canister.  The Gatling gun was made from bits of balsa.  I found the turrets in my bit box.  They rotate.  The guns were made from two different sized straws.

These will make a nice addition to the firepower of my Female hussar legion.  All three of you who follow this blog will find previous posts about the Death Jaws, sailors, cavalry, etc.  All that’s missing now is artillery.  I keep hoping Hinterland will release artillerists who I can match with a nice mountain gun.

Jason Moses of Hinterland Miniatures posed a picture recently of my Death Jaw-riding female hussars.  See the customer gallery at http://hinterlandminiatures.weebly.com/customer-gallery.html for some nice pictures of his figures in action.

The Harford Area Weekly Kreigspeilers present our annual gaming day yesterday, 15 September in the Havre de Grace Community Center.  It was a huge success, with a number of firsts:

• A new, larger, better-lit venue
• A Flames of War tournament (with 18 of 24 available slots filled)
• Expanded food service for lunch (hot dogs, drinks, chips, candy, and other snacks at a reasonable price)
• Record attendance (which was exciting, given a new venue and the threat that folks from Northern Virginia wouldn’t drive to Northern Harford County.
• Record number of dealer tables (Age of Glory, On Military Matters, Lost Battalion Games, and The War Store (Havre de Grace)).  All dealers reported a successful weekend and said they would return next year.
• Record number of games for kids, including a table dedicated to kids all day
• Record number of kids (6 or more youngsters who stayed all day and played in a wide variety of games)

This year’s attendance was 104, which does not include the HAWKs.  In HAWKs tradition, we pushed as many players as we could into games run by non-HAWKs who supported our convention by offering to run games.  I do not think that any GM who came to run a game didn’t have enough players to run it.  We cancelled two HAWKs-run games to ensure this was true.  There were no players turned away from games; everyone who came to Barrage was gainfully employed all day.

We think that the number, breadth, and quality of games were about right this year.  We need about 20 more gamers next year to fill all games.  If everyone brings one more friend next year, we’ll achieve that goal.

As is HAWKs tradition, we try to encourage younger gamers.  While previous Barrage game days have always features a large number of games for kids, this year we dedicated a table to kids games.  These included:  my War Rocket spaceship game, Rob Dean’s Hannibal game, Eric Schlegel’s ACW game, and Geoff Graff’s Lego pirate game.  In addition, Ken Frost ran the Lego pyramid game for which he won an award at Historicon 2012.

People often think the HAWKs are a much larger group than we are.  There are really about 12-15 regulars.  What makes us appear bigger than we are is the large percentage of folks who run games.  Just about all the HAWKs are active GMs in HAWKs meetings, in local gaming events, and in large HMGS East conventions.  What makes the HAWKs work is a dearth of hierarchy and bureaucracy.  Barrage is not an event run by a “convention team.”  It is a group effort in which everyone contributes to they extend they are able and comfortable.  Whether its organizing the event schedule (me), organizing the dealer area (Duncan), handling the back end logistics (Geoff), running games, setting up, tearing down, making sure non-HAWKs games are filled, donating food and supplies, working the registration desk, or whatever needs to be done, HAWKs manage Barrage in a decentralized manner with a minimum of fuss, angst, control, or organization.

As a new feature, we think we’ll offer a small number of Friday night games next year as well.

We are checking with the Recreation Center now to see when it is available for next year, but we’d like to do it a week later in September to avoid potential conflicts with Antietem and Defenders’ Day.  We’ll publish next year’s date as soon as we confirm it.  We hope to see each of you next year.

Two nights before Barrage, I still had people signing up to run games.  In fact, I was worried about not having enough tables.  This GASLIGHT War of the Worlds game was one of those last-minute additions.  I think this was the first time these guys had run GASLIGHT at a convention, but by all accounts it was hugely successful.

This was a really interesting game.  When the game began, the players’s force were on these big tiles.  Because of the fog, the players didn’t know who was on their left or right.  As the game progressed, tiles were moved, and the table was finally filled in with additional tiles.  It’s a very interesting concept from some of the nicest people in the hobby.

Aerodrome is popular with both kids and adults.  My kids go to conventions largely just to play this game.

Tank debuted this game at Historicon 2012.  He built a representation of a cowboy train that is large enough to move figures around inside it.  The game is a cowboy Blood and Swash game.  People can run along the roof of the train, fight inside, and even gamble.  This has become a crowd favorite.

We want to maintain the friendly, low-stress feel of Barrage, but the new venue provides room for growth.  In this picture you get a feel for the size of the main room.  There is a second room about half this size.  With enough growth we have flexibility to move tournament play into that room or put large, mega games in there.   We will grow slowly so as not to sacrifice the local nature of Barrage.  We need to add about 20 more games next year.

From left to right:  Geoff, Eric, Steve, Duncan, me (seated), Dave, Kurt (Charlie Brown shirt), Don, Chris (seated), Mike, Greg, and Tank (kneeling).  Missing from the picture are Rob, Ken, Norman, William, Don S., Bruce, and Jennifer.  My wife, who worked the food service with Jennifer most of the day, took the picture.  You’ll be hard pressed to find a more active, friendly, or productive gaming group anywhere in the world.

You didn’t go to Barrage?  Get up so I can shoot you again!

See http://www.bucksurdu.com/Buck_Surdu/Barrage.html for more information about the best gaming day in the area.  Don’t miss this tremendous day of gaming fun.

The Barrage gaming day run by the Harford Area Weekly Kreigspeilers is just three days away.  It will be held on 15 September in Havre de Grace Maryland, just off I-95.

See http://www.bucksurdu.com/Buck_Surdu/Barrage.html for detailed information, including a list of vendors and  a complete listing of games.  We have a nice selection of games from a variety of historical periods.  This year we even added a Flames of War tournament.  Barrage is typically an enjoyable, low-stress day of gaming.  Food will be available on premises, and there are a number of places to eat within short driving distance.

We’ve moved Barrage to a new venue with twice as much space and room to grow.  Don’t miss this event.  Bring a buddy or two!