Buck's Blog

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.

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.