Ch't Station

Ch't Ch't Station
For the Sunday game.

Copernicus deck plans take III

Continuing to add to the deck plans. 1-6 now done. 7 has medical facilities and some other things that need defined, 8 will need the shuttle designs to be nailed down first.

Decks 3 and 5

Yet another deck done for the Copernicus.

Copernicus deck plans

After a fall that saw little time for getting on top of my gaming projects, I have been able to do some catch up lately. High on the priority list was deck plans for the players' ship in my new firefly inspired Sunday night game.

First up is the second deck, the crew quarters. Unlike most sci fi games this ship is following physics with gravity along the axis of travel and thus is oriented more like a sky scraper than a cruise ship.

Painted in June

Fairly poor showing and an obviously mixed bag where I was unable to focus on anything. This doesn't include a couple of dozen more figures partially done that I haven't worked up the umpph to finish.

Left to right Brigade (?) plastic toy, Warlord P&S sniper, Warlord Count Tilly, Foundry extra, Musketeer IWI.

I swapped Count Tilly's bible for a plastic sword hand from the Warlord cavalry.

The plastic cow is from the old wagon full of toys at Finnegans with horns made from brass rod and green stuff.

OK, these two don't go together but they are emblematic of my just trying to finish something - they were done because they were simple and easy.

Cactus Field

For the summer old west games seem natural so I have been repairing some of the buildings and even found time to add some new terrain. Here is my test piece for some cactus fields.

CD base covered in a sandstone grout, drybrushed, and then tufts and some burrs added. Simple and fast!

Of course the lowly prickly pear lacks the majesty of some other cacti, but a dense field (and I need to make the next couple of bases with much denser cacti) will definetly slow a person down.

Archiving my games played - Spring '11

In looking back at what I have played I notice a lot of boardgames and only a few minis games. This is mainly because of time - the board games can be played with no notice and JM and I are playing a couple of times a week.


May '11

Dominion
Ticket to Ride (7)
Starcraft Boardgame (2)
Memoir '44 (2)
TYW with Sharp Practice
Strange Aeons
Pathfinder (4)
Swashbuckling Adventures
Zombies Ate My Baby/Tribes

April '11
Memoir '44 (3)
Pathfinder Campaign (2)
Swashbuckling Campaign (3)
Ticket To Ride (2)
ACW2 with home rules(1)
TYW with Sharp Practice (1)

My version of Chase Cards

For quite some time, as in 20+ years, I have been disappointed with how chases were handled in RPGs. When Pathfinder came out I was excited because they gave some chase rules that seemed to work and were close to ideas I had derived after using the Hot Chase rules.

Unfortunately I found the Pathfinder chase rules too linear. 10 cards, most with obstacles summed up into make one of 2 checks. There is no room for tactical thinking, no room for options, just pick which you are better at. This was the burr in my saddle with 4th ed D&D skill checks as well so I have finally sat down and tried to design my own cards to  work with the Pathfinder rules.

They aren't that different than the normal Pathfinder rules, rather I have tried to add a little bit of choice. Each card has obstacles broken into 3 categories by level - brown for street level, green for 2nd story, balconies, etc. and red for the roofs.


There will be two decks - street cards and alley cards. These cards are fairly preliminary - a few of you will see them in this week's playtest, but essentially the alley cards allow for more twists and turns as well as a better chance of ditching the opponent.

















Broadly speaking the cards will be divided into

Obstacles - a skill check or decision must be made to pass to the next card
Options - a choice is available - intersections, alleys, courtyards, etc. If pursuers are out of sight these cards may end the pursuit if the followers fail a track or random guess.
Encounters - People who may react to the chase or present the opportunity to recruit help.
Dead Ends - These block movement on one or more levels.
Corners - may have an obstacle as well, but they block line of sight. More common in alleys, they can shut down the long range snipers.

Essentially the deck then becomes a map that may either be preplotted by the GM or random. Each card will also be numbered to make pre planning easier.

Miscon follow up

While I had intended on running several miniature games this year, I ended up running just one, a Strange Aeons game. It went over well with the three players I had. Unfortunately I took no pics, but I will when I run it again at the August game day here in Missoula. I may even take it on the road for Spokane's upcoming game day as it is not too terrain heavy.

What did go over well was my Zombies Ate My Baby!  adaptation of Steve Jackson's Tribes (formerly Darwinopoly) game with eleven players. The play was relatively nonchalant until zombies broke through the defenses and ate half of the tribes children. Yep, half. Talk of annarcho syndicates and fundamentally capitalist systems went out the window as players turned to scavenging in hopes of finding better weapons which in turn led to a collapse of the food system and eventually a life on the edge.

The scavenge rules worked well, a couple of tweaks to the existing rules were made to streamline things, and the notes for next game are;

• The scavenge deck needs to be balanced. The MRE cards were too plentiful, though they saved the tribe. Make most of them smaller in size and perishable (Food Cache?).
• a better food counter needs to be made. Tokens slow down the play, but do keep people honest.
• Removing the breakage die roll worked. To balance it out double 3,4,5, or 6s break an item for a proficient user ( hunter with spear, gatherer with basket) 2-6 for a non proficient user.
• Pregnancy can be hard to remember - use a two sided token to mark the time.
• Starvation rule - adults may pay 3 food instead of four but move from strong/average to average or weak.

Cossack Cav

As I get started on painting the next 17 I thought I'd post up the first seven of the Cossack cavalry. They've been painted for months and have even seen a couple of games, but bases have finally been done.

They are from Foundry's SYW line except for the leader, a random Das Aus Schwarz (or something) figure I had lying around. One thing about these is the size of the horses - they are tiny! Truly these fellows are riding steppe ponies. These I was easily able to mount on 3/4' washers, though I've gone to 1" with the next batch  and will probably have to retro these.

Not exactly Cleopatra Jones, but after painting the dozen cavalry and some Scots with claymores I wanted to do something different. I have plans to use her in an upcoming zombie game, but in all honesty this was like the elephant man - something to change up what I had been doing.

Reaper Elephant

I finally finished and based this guy. It's a Reaper figure that I picked up on a whim several years ago but have never really had a use for.

Someday he'll probably show up in my D&D campaign as a Rakshasa lord or something.

Of course I also picked up a cheap 1" brass elephant headed Hindu god from Import Market, so maybe I'll just start an elephant headed Indian themed fantasy army.

Spring Painting I'll celebrate with crappy photos

Tercio Sacristanes and the Maltese

Not really rooted in any historical unit, I used a throw away mention of a Spanish Tercio in a history of the Spanish Road, called the sacristanes for their dark attire, to put together one of the two musketeer wings of my Thirty Years War mercenaries.

They are all Renegade miniatures as is the leader who I added a cloak to simply so I could paint a Maltese Cross on the shoulder.

Building a Big Man

Sharp's Practice focuses on leaders to inspire and control troops. It also goes beyond to make these leaders heroes in their own rights, worthy of their own novels.

As I finish the first ten figures in my Tercio Sacristanes inspired unit I am looking at a leader worthy of them. The black uniform has got my thinking of the Knights of St John aka the Knights Hospitaller and the Knights of Malta.

The color matches the all black I used for my Sacristanes as shown in this Caravagio painting from the early 17th century. The problem is that the uniform of the order's soldiers is mentioned in  several books as red with a white stripe. 

Oh well, I'm shooting for a Hollywood level history anyway so now to find the right figure.

Cossacks

A rare event - I not only finished painting two units of cossacks, but for once I got the bases dones as well.
As the guns are flintlock not matchlocks these TAG figures are meant for a few decades after the Thirty Years War, but for my purposes they are close enough.

These are the first TAG figures I have gotten my hands on and while they are a bit smaller in height and bulk than the Redoubts I started the period with, they work on the tabletop together. 

Left to right: Warlord plastic, The Assault Group, Redoubt, Foundry pirate

Pine Trees

I have finally gotten around to putting together some standing pines. Great for any temperate clime, can be used for the Rockies or the Carpathians.

The trunks are bamboo skewers. The upper ends were drilled out with a pin vise to take the bottle brush tops.

I glued six random length skewers to each CD, then reinforced each one with a bit of two part plumbers putty. Once dried I primed everything grey. The trunks were then streaked with a little bit of brown and highlighted with greys and even a bit of white.

The base is covered in a sandstone colored premix tile grout and any areas of the CD where the primer shows through painted with Americana Mississipi Mud.

To tie the base together I then drybrush both the unpainted grout and painted areas with a whitened highlight of Americana Fawn.


The tree tops are some old Heiki brand bottle brush style pines. I simply undid the first coil of wire and stuck a single strand of wire into the hole drilled in each skewer.

I left the bases fairly clear of litter or foliage and later I'll probably go back and put down some flock, but for now I wanted to facilitate moving figures.

This is my first time using the grout for large scale basing and I gotta say I really like it. The color matches the Americana fawn perfectly and I forsee using quite a bit of it.

First Post

In the past I have usually considered most blogs to be a showcase for the blogger, but today I ran into a fellow moving out of town who complained about not finding any FoW gamers in the two years he lived here in the garden city. 

Montanagamers.org was started to adress this problem, but I realized a blog might help as well. Hopefully, it will also help keep my nose to the grindstone and prod some fellow gamers into keeping up as well.