Space ruffians part 2

OK, so I have already posted the first part of my entry in the sci-fi week challenge issued by Chico of Oldhammer on a Budget. I painted up a squad of Reaper Bones IMEF Marines. Since I had a couple of days left, I thought I would add a few more models. I painted up the remaining IMEF model, the sniper, and also added a transport for the squad.

The sniper is done in the same way as the rest of the squad -- highlighting up from VMC Chocolate Brown and then colouring with various inks. I am not happy with how the face turned out, but she looks OK on the tabletop. 

The transport is inspired by a series of posts on the Chaos Arts blog. The transport is a cheap plastic toy armoured car from Little Green Men Toys. I picked up three of them for US $3.75 (about £2.25) each plus shipping on one of my trips to the USA. I chopped off the plastic gun from the turret, added a twin autocannon from a huge set of Robogear toys I got on eBay and stuck on a spare dozer blade from a 40K vehicle kit. I painted it up in a crude camo scheme that uses the main colours from the models, then weathered it kind of random and added a few decals from old tank and aircraft model kits. 

So now the squad has a bus to drive around in and someone to pick off HVTs. I think that's not bad for less than a week. 

Space ruffians

So, this week's painting challenge over at Oldhammer on a Budget is sci-fi. Now, I paint a lot of sci-fi minis already, but nothing on my painting table was really calling to me, so I had a rummage through the unpainted bins and found these Reaper Bones marines. According to the Reaper website, their names are Nick Stone, Torch McHugh, Reggie Van Zandt, Jazz Jenkins and Erik Proudfoot. I also have the sniper, Sarah Blitzer, but she needs to be straightened in hot water so I haven't painted her yet. These models were part of a very generous gift from a good friend, and they're among the only ones from that gift that I haven't painted.

I have a bad habit of picking up a squad's worth of sci-fi infantry guys from all different manufacturers: I have teams from Metal Magic/em-4, Copplestone, GW, Reaper again, Alternative Armies, Grenadier/em-4 and probably more that I'm not thinking of. They can look a little bitty -- and also I paint a hell of a lot of tan, browny-green and grey. I decided that I wasn't going to do that this time; I would make them a little more colourful.

I started these models on Tuesday morning, and decided to do them as fast as I could in between work projects. After removing the mould lines and washing them in dish soap (removing mould lines on Bones models is a giant pain in the ass, and I always miss some), I gave them an all-over coat of VMC Chocolate Brown, then drybrushed with a mixture of that and VMC US Field Drab, then straight US Field Drab. I then went over the armour plates with a mixture of US Field Drab and Ivory. I did the weapons and equipment with VMC German Grey, then a highlight of German Grey mixed with London Grey. I then blocked in the faces.

Time for washes! Face and hands got a flesh wash appropriate to the skin tone, then a couple of brown washes (Army Painter Strong for the cloth, followed by a re-highlight and a layer of Army Painter Soft), black washes (for the under-layer of armour and the boots as well as the weapons and kit).

In my mind I had decided that these guys were going be sort of Chaos-y characters in the Warhammer 40,000 setting, I guess because the Gears of War knockoff symbol on their chest armour made me think of the Chaos star. I wanted their armour plate to be reddish, but I didn't have a good red wash, so I picked up a pot of GW Carroburg Crimson while out yesterday. It turns out to be quite purply, but I think it actually looks OK. (I added a second layer of 50/50 that and a brown wash to tone it down a wee bit, although I don't know how noticeable it is.)

I think they look not bad; there are some things I would do differently the second time around, and there are some areas where I could add more detail but just couldn't be bothered (the hero's headgear is somewhat underdefined) and of course there are %@$*! mould lines everywhere, but hey! I painted five of 'em in two days while doing other things, and I think they look not too bad. If I get time I will add the sniper, just to make poor Jazz Jenkins, the only ordinary rifleman of the bunch, feel like even more of a chump.

The boys all together.

The sergeant, with look of grim determination and big ugly mould lines.

Jazz, the only private in all of GI Joe.

Marcus who? Never heard of 'im.

The heavy. Actually, I quite like this guy.

Review: Forgive Us

So another thing I picked up while at UK Games Expo was Forgive Us by Kelvin Green, a supplement for the Lamentations of the Flame Princess RPG -- although like pretty much everything for LotFP, it should work super-easily with anything based on old D&D, and pretty easily with more or less any similar RPG system. There's not a whole lot of mechanics.

It is both written and illustrated by Green, and it looks superb. It's in a little A5 paperback, and the layout is just so clean and smooth. Observe: 

The really clever thing is that the main scenario (there are three in total, one big one and two little ones) has its "dungeon" in the form of a complex of connected buildings -- so it's effectively broken up into modular chunks, each of which has just enough map and text to fit a two-page spread. It's really readable. Check out the little indented sections on the right-hand page up there: the top one is the stat block of a character encountered in the building, and the bottom two are specific descriptions of the numbered locations on the map. So easy to look up! 

OK, so the book looks terrific. What about the scenarios themselves? I'm not going to go into too much detail, because I intend to use these in my game and I expect that at least one of my players periodically reads my blog. I will say that it's nominally set in Norwich(!) in 1625, and that it deals with scoundrels, theft, secretive cults and grotesquerie. 

Yes, Norwich. Why not?

"Hmmm," you say. "Scoundrels, thefts and grotesquerie in a 30 Years' War setting? I wonder where I've heard that before." And it's true -- this scenario is very WHFRP-ish. In fact, you could run it in WHFRP with about 15 minutes' prep (figuring out spell lists for spell-casting NPCs would be about it). Green even says in his intro that he was inspired by White Dwarf scenarios from the golden age, and the influence is very clear. Which is a good thing. 

My own campaign is scumbag-heavy and magic-light, so Forgive Us is perfect for me. I think I will probably invest about half an hour in changing the scenario to be more consistent with my own game (oh, and I will probably half to come up with some D20 stats for the monsters, so maybe make it 45 minutes). Even if your campaign doesn't dovetail so well with the way this one is presented, there's a lot of good material in here that you'll be able to use. 

I paid £10 for this book, which seems like a lot (by my standards anyway) for such a small book, but when I consider that I'll probably get 3 sessions out of the main scenario and one each out of the remaining two, that's pretty good value for money. You can also (if you like) buy the PDF on RPGnow for under £5. As a side note, the A5 format of this book would probably display really well on a typical computer monitor with two pages side-by-side, considering that most game book PDFs are a pain to read on a laptop. And a single page should display cleanly on a tablet, although you'll lose the cool side-by-side presentation, I should think.

So, yeah, it is good quality. 

Honestly, the only thing I didn't like about it was when he talked about the White Dwarfs of that era and that made me feel a stab of regret at selling off all of mine at a flea market about 11 years ago. I did really need the money, though. I bet the good scenarios are all on the internet somewhere, though. 

Trip report: UK Games Expo!

Today a crony and I went to UK Games Expo in Birmingham. It was very good; I bought all kinds of stuff. But the most historically-relevant thing I bought was a deck of replica 16th-century German playing cards from The Historic Games Shop. These things are pretty cool: they are replicas of a deck from 1588, and they have four German suits: cups, vases, ink stamps and books. 

Note that the four of vases is an illustrated card: even the number cards are illustrated in this deck, like in a Tarot deck. 

The cards are a little bit flimsier than your modern deck, which apparently is more or less how they would be. I really like these and I need to incorporate them into a game in some way. I even spent an hour or so trying to figure out how they should be used in my history class, but nothing comes to mind just yet. 

The guy I spoke to at the company's stall was a cool dude, very friendly. I'm going to have to get some more of their stuff at some point. 

Scenario concept: over time

OK, so I have been thinking about the idea of a scenario that reuses the same topography with a linked narrative over time. Let me give you an example of what I'm talking about, on a three-scenario model. I've decided that this is a miniatures game scenario, using one of my current favourite games, the Cthulhu skirmish system Strange Aeons.

For many and good reasons, my campaign is set in the UK, but it's just an example; and you could easily do something similar in another setting.

Scenario 1: It's the 890s AD, and a group of Vikings are raiding an English village, only to find out they've bitten off more than they can chew. The natives turn out to be allied with sinister fish-folk, and the Vikings have to fight their way out. (I have an appropriate collection of models for this scenario.)

Scenario 2: It's the 17th century, and a local witch is making a last stand against a witch-hunting mob. She summons up the skeletons of the dead Vikings to defend her witchity hovel.

Scenario 3: It's the 1920s, and a team of archaeologists are excavating the site of the village church (or the burial mound of the Vikings, or something; I haven't got this one sorted out yet). They awaken some kind of horrible evil, the usual.

The question is: how do you make each scenario affect the subsequent ones. Like, the witch might get more bennies if she has the skeletons of particularly tough Vikings to use -- that's a good one. But for the rest, I am unsure.

Encore le swipe file

• A kingdom with a disputed succession is ruled by a council consisting of the rival claimants. 
• The way to complete a magical thingamabob is to walk a labyrinth. 
• A shapeshifter has no identity without a form to shift into. 
• A band of soldiers are led by a young child who is technically a prince. 
• A charismatic leader inspires fanatical loyalty, but his subordinates detest each other. 
• A window into another dimension only works when placed at the corresponding location.

Actual content soon, I promise!

The swipe file again

• Hovels or nests are made from the fine silks and other luxury goods of a wealthy city. 
• A dungeon's map is based on a building's floorplan, but turned to an incorrect orientation.
• An occupying army has gone batshit crazy native trying to "maintain order."
• A new weapon or fighting style appears to the natives as some weird monster.
• Several different NPCs turn out to be the same person in disguise. 
• An empire's royal family are a completely different species. 
• Half-elvenness is contagious.