Valiant Swords of Greyhawk - Session 7: Ghouls, Guards, and a Giant Crayfish

 

Back at the remote camp near the Moathouse our heroes prepare for another expedition into the dungeon beneath ...

Braeden (Human Ranger)played by Battletech Terry

Sir Kentor (Human Paladin) played by Paladin Steve

Sir Lantor (Human Fighter) played by Boom Gun Brandon

Xyzzifax (Human* Wizard) played by Blaster

Samson (Halfling Mechanist) played by Shootist Will

Jaric (Human Cleric) played by Variable David

 All are level 2 or 3 at this point. Grognard Mike is out this week so Malice is back in Hommlet and Inigo the Rogue is also absent - as he often is)

The much more entertaining players account, written in-character "As told by the Illustrious and Mighty Xyzzifax" is here.

The goal this time is to explore the passage downward hidden in a column that they had discovered previously. The portcullis is still down so they work around that and make their way to the prison area where they had fought the zombies and start inspecting the passage. 

DM aside: Once again we have the totally engaging exercise of the wizard's familiar scoping out the various rooms and tunnels like a recon drone. I have been a fan of wizards having familiars since I started playing way back but this version is pretty ridiculous and has become an annoying thorn in my side with it's unlimited range-flying-stealthy-darkvisioned self. Yes the owl is the power choice here and of course my son jumped on that right away and has been abusing it ever since. I am seriously considering locking it back down to the earlier 5E limit of 100' or whatever it was. The running joke is that Bubo's nemesis is the closed door which is the only thing that stops his out-of-control scouting. Coincidentally just about every door in the dungeon is closed and some new doors might have been added recently ...

Once they determine it is safe to proceed the group climbs down the hidden rungs and figures out they are in a crypt area as demonstrated by the large number of burial niches and the smaller but still concerning number of ghouls. The Cleric turns most of them and they run a pretty good distance away while the party handles the one that sticks around. As the turn wears off, the other ghouls come back but the party is ready and has a chance to hit them at range on the way in, thinning the numbers and in the end only the Fighter gets bit and paralyzed.* The area is searched, minor loot is found, and the party continues on ...

Next, to quote from the players log ...

Xyzzifax and his minions venture forth after some scouting by the faithful minion Bubo, and advance down a set of stairs into a square room with a pool of water in its center. To investigate the pool, minion Samson creates a 10 foot pole, and gives it to the only one in the party stupid enough to do it, Minion Lantor, who sticks it into the pool. Before he can react, minion Lantor is seized by a giant claw which locks onto his torso and clamps down, locking him in place!**

...and the battle against the giant crayfish is on!

For one (1) round!

Even at only (only?) six members, this group is hell on single large targets. Everyone in the room opens up on the thing and the Fighter (even grappled) and Paladin just tear it up using their special abilities. I thought it would be tough enough to go a few rounds with them - nope! So the pool is searched and looted of some scrolls and jewelry and the party continues onward.

Coming down the long diagonal passage they encounter locked doors - which they unlock - and then armed guards - who proceed to feather the party with crossbow bolts! The fight starts with just 3 guards and then escalates as 3 more plus a leader type charge around the corner  to join the battle. This proves to be a bigger challenge than the crustacean as at the end we have the Paladin, the Fighter, and the Ranger all in melee with the guard captain who finally succumbs but not before dealing out some punishment of his own as his minions fall around him. 

The team quickly checks the fallen then heads out and back to Hommlet to recover and recount their adventures.

They are still not completely sure what's going on with the Moathouse but they are almost done with it. signs of Bandits up top then Bugbears, Gnolls, and organized humans in the dungeon have them discussing who or what is running this place which is a good thing to have. Mechanically it's working well with PC's feeling like they are in danger but not dropping dead like some of our older edition attempts at this one. My group works together at this point like a machine most of the time and there is a ton of banter along with teasing Lantor's player about dropping every fight. They are having a lot of fun so now I have to maintain it.

For a better fight with the Crayfish from back in 4E here's a link to one of the old session reports.  Where we had a different mix of players and characters.

*This will be a recurring theme as Lantor (the Fighter) is constantly in melee, uses a greatsword, and so has a lower AC than some and is in a position to get multi-attacked almost every fight.

** See?

Valiant Swords of Greyhawk - Session 6: Bugbear Battle

 

Time to start catching up!

This is the DM's Summary and Notes - for more details and the players' take on things take a look here.

We begin in Hommlet after a night's rest. The prisoners have been escorted to safety and various abilities have been recovered. After some light shopping the party returns to the Moathouse area and sets up a camp some distance away. Our protagonists are:

Malice (Human Bard) played by Grognard Mike

Braeden (Human Ranger)played by Battletech Terry

Sir Kentor (Human Paladin) played by Paladin Steve

Sir Lantor (Human Fighter) played by Boom Gun Brandon

Xyzzifax (Human* Wizard) played by Blaster
     (He's not an Apprentice anymore, and really past Journeyman, but I just will not call him the obvious)

Samson (Halfling Mechanist) played by Shootist Will

Jaric (Human Cleric) played by Variable David

All are level 2 or 3 at this point

Heading down into the dungeon beneath the moathouse they start poking around some empty rooms and manage to trip a falling portcullis. The sound draws the attention of some Gnolls which starts a fairly vicious fight where Malice the Bard starts to look a lot like a 4E Warlord and the Flaming Sphere spell plays a big part. As the fight winds down the magical owl familiar spots a new set of creatures creeping down a corridor towards them.

As the party reforms to face the new threat Braedon the Ranger starts taking shots at anyone he can see and the flaming sphere rolls over to intervene as well. The beasts manage to drop Lantor the Fighter with concentrated javelin fire but their follow-up charge is thwarted by the traps laid down on the way in by the ranger. Kentor the Paladin is bearing the brunt of the melee attention now and he too drops. The bugbear leader is a tough customer as he stays on his feet despite multiple melee attacks, missile attacks, and being partially petrified! 

More of the bugbears drop but Lantor and Kentor  are healed and then fall again. The wizard uncloaks, revealing some insectile wings and starts throwing thunderwaves to drive the creatures back which actually works. The enemy leader is beaten and battered when he finally shakes off the petrification and staggers back with his one remaining warrior ... "next time, humans ..." is the last exchange as they slink off into the darkness. 

The familiar monitors their retreat as the party pulls itself together and heals up to the point of mobility. Our heroes find the way back out blocked by the fallen portcullis and Sir Kentor has to strain and break it to open the way.

Back at the camp Xyzzifax shares his origin story as a once-normal man warped by his former master into an insect-man on a quest for power.

DM Commentary

This session started with some banter and exploration but turned into one long, running fight through a small complex of rooms as the noise from the initial trap drew the attention of the gnolls and then that noise drew the attention of the bugbears. It's all fun and games until the Fighter and the Paladin both go down and the Cleric and the Ranger become the new frontline with the halfling Mechanist trying to help out. The Bard usually fights from the second line when needed - with a glaive so she has reach - but she's much happier doing that with the two tanks in front. 

Having realized that a group this large was going to be tougher to challenge and knowing how this level was set up I started making notes on who would react to the alarms and also to the sounds of fighting in different parts of the dungeon. The familiar being both recon drone and security system continues to be a bit annoying and I'm having to get picky with the wizard about when he is seeing via the owl vs. seeing out of his own eyes at times.

The Gnolls were Tome of Beasts Gnolls and they're fine - the "taunting bark" ability forces an opponent to move towards the Gnoll and attack it on its turn - shades of 4th edition! The Bugbears were led by a Bugbear Champion from that book and he is a little bit nastier and made the whole thing better. He is tougher, has more attacks, and has a Recharge reaction ability to change one miss to hit so he can really put out the hurt. He ended up becoming a bit of a nemesis as he spoke, survived their best efforts, and threatened to come after them again. They would hunt for him in the next few sessions but he did not return - though he will later. 

The wizard has become one of the stars of the campaign as Blaster uses a distinct voice when he speaks and tends to refer to everyone as minions. Getting his backstory out there for the group was a good moment and made everything that much more personal for everyone. Also his in-character writeups are pretty funny if you get the chance to check those out.

Overall I really like the system. There are some potential concerns with a few things and with the size of my group but we are going to finish the Moathouse mostly as-is and then see how things stand.

40K Friday: Grab Bag for May

 

Time to shout at some clouds ...

• It's been going on a long time and it's not exclusive to 40k sites or groups but when did people start feeling that posting a picture of a pile of boxes of stuff was worthwhile in some way? You see it when someone starts a new army, when a new set of units for an army is released, when someone gets their kickstarter shipment ... why? What possible value does it have? What does it contribute to a group? It's meaningless - "hey I bought some stuff ... and it arrived ... and ... I took a picture of it."? Yay. Congratulations. How about doing something with it and THEN posting about it?
  
  Build it and show us. Paint it and show us something. Play it and share a battle report or first impressions or a comparison to your other army or to another game.
  
  Acquisition is easy - it's a simple monetary transaction. The rest of it is what makes the difference. I say this as someone with several armies still in boxes, boardgames unopened on a shelf, and RPG's unread. You won't see them on the blog until I've built or painted or played or at least read the things.

• One thing that seems to be fading finally - the need to mix in what kind of alcohol one is consuming while painting or playing a game. This seems to be on the downswing now but for a few years there was some weird need to add some kind of extra ... credibility? ... to a post or a video for say a 40K battle report by talking about beer or wine or whiskey before (or during) the playing of the game. I don't know if this was some leftover trauma from the "nerds aren't cool" days or something but two guys playing 40K on YouTube is not a place I am going for craft beer recommendations. Just talk about the game - no one cares what, or if, you are drinking. Many of us have been able to drink or smoke or whatever for a very long time. It's not anything that's impressive or particularly interesting. Focus!

• The constant proclamations of doom or "Beyond Clickbait" takes in articles or on YouTube - things like "6 Reasons D&D is Doomed in 2025", "Is 40K dying?", "Games Workshop/WOTC/Hasbro about to go Bankrupt" etc. I know it's BS, you know it's BS, they know it's BS but they have to keep upping the hype to get attention. D&D has been the biggest RPG since the beginning, it's the biggest right now, and it will be the biggest a year from now and for a long time after that. Now that doesn't have to mean anything to you - I'm not sure why anyone not trying to sell RPG material would be too concerned about which game is more popular right now - but if you care there it is. Correspondingly 40K is the biggest miniature game, has been the biggest miniature, and will continue to be that until something wild happens. 
  
  Yes I am aware of the several quarters circa 2010 where ICV2 reported that Pathfinder was outselling D&D 4E. I was there when it was published amidst much crowing by certain parties but keep in mind that's a very limited sample of stores and included neither Amazon nor Paizo's direct sales. Hey, it may have been true, but there's the one time you can -maybe- point to a time when D&D wasn't number one. How has it been doing for the past decade?
  
  These days I see it even from sources I otherwise respect - bringing up things like Shadowdark having a million dollar kickstarter for the rules and then another one a year later for a setting and pronouncing that it is more popular than D&D. Sure. It's doing well and that's great. It's this year's retroclone flavor of the month. Remember OSE? Remember Labyrinth Lord and OSRIC and Shadow of the Demon Lord and Black Hack and 13th Age and a bunch of other tweaked D&D rulesets that everyone talked about for a year or two that have been pretty quiet for a while? It's one of those and it's not going to replace D&D even if the 2024 edition ends up less popular than 2014. 
  
  
  

  

  It has long been a dream of mine to find a reason to include a picture from "Wicked" on the blog and that day has finally arrived. The wife will be pleased.

  
  
• Regarding miniatures yes I saw the report a month or two back that said Battletech was the #2 game at a very small set of hobby stores. Cool. It was clearly a very distant #2. On Dakka I saw a discussion about Zeo Genesis, a new mecha skirmish game designed by Andy Chambers and Gav Thorpe (two former GW big names):
  
  "This seems to be the popular genre right now with BLKOUT, Gamma Wolves, this, and the name of the third one is escaping me at the moment...... "
  
  "Arsenal, from Blaster magazine issue 7, or maybe Steel Rift. It's a pretty saturated genre."
  
  Apparently it's a saturated genre with 4-5 games you've probably never seen or heard of and certainly never seen played.
  
  And don't get me started on "popular" here - will there be a dozen games of any of these played over the weekend world wide? The "popular genre right now" is 40K - just like it has been for the past 30+ years. Age of Sigmar, Old World, Flames of War, Bolt Action, and of course Battletech are also in the mix for "what's popular".  

Yeah that's Grand Moff Tarkin playing miniature battles. Your welcome.

• A final point for the day: The constant anxiety around the state of the various gaming hobbies is overblown and unnecessary. If GW went out of business tomorrow we would still play the games. If WOTC went under we would still play the games. If your FLGS disappears we will still play the games. Resist the lure of the clickbait and the anxiousness. Let the older cloud-yeller assure you that some of us were playing before "games at the store" was a thing, before the FLGS existed really. We survived the Satanic Panic. We played before GW was anything important. We played before WOTC and Hasbro made RPGs full-on corporate assets. We played before the internet existed. If all of it disappeared tomorrow we could still play.
  
  H.G. Wells published a set of miniature rules 100 years ago that you can still find today in book or online form. We have the books. We have the figures. We have the dice. Best of all, we can make more - ourselves, without needing sizable corporate entities to be a part of the process. 
  
  None of this is going anywhere. We're going to be OK.

Outgunned: A Short Review

 

I had high expectations for this one. It's not bad. It's just ... not clicking with me for some reason.

I picked up Outgunned as part of a modern-to-sci-fi binge last year looking for a possible Mechwarrior alternative after running MW3E for a few months. I started in on it, realized it would not really work for that, and set it aside. This year I wanted to give it another look for a potential campaign after the Temple campaign wraps up. So I started back in from page 1.

It's 200 pages long with a nice modern look and layout. From the book's introduction:

Outgunned is a cinematic action rpg inspired by the classics of the genre, from Die Hard to True Lies, passing through James Bond, Atomic Blonde, Kingsman, Ocean’s Eleven, Hot Fuzz, and John Wick.

In outgunned, Players take on the role of action Heroes facing terrible odds. They will be constantly surrounded by enemies while trying to carry out their mission, be it robbing a casino or saving the day.

That's a very specific take and the game does live up to that. There is a constant emphasis on movies as a guide to how the game should feel. Players will take on one of ten roles, each with suitable movie character examples:

• Commando
• Fighter
• Ace
• Agent
• Face
• Nobody
• Brain
• Sleuth
• Criminal
• Spy

A sample:

You have Attributes (5), Skills (there is a list of 20), Feats, and a Trope.

• Attributes are Brawn, Nerves, Smooth, Focus, and Crime and are rated 1-3
• There are 4 skills tied to each of the attributes which are also rated 1-3
• There are 18 tropes and each character picks one. These are sort of templates/archetypes/personality types/alignment that grant some stat & skill bonuses and also tie in to how one wants to play their character. Examples are Bad to the Bone, Cheater, Good Samaritan, Jerk with a Heart of Gold, Leader, and more. 
• Feats let you break the rules in various ways - mainly through re-rolls or avoiding an in-game cost of some kind. They are heavily tied to the mechanics of the game.

Mechanics: It's a dice pool system. It's not an add-em-up for a high total kind of system (like Star Wars d6) but it's not a look-for- individual-dice-over-a-target-number system (like Shadowrun/White Wolf/etc.) system either. You are looking for sets, or matches - like Yahtzee or King of Tokyo or the One Roll Engine (Godlike etc.). 

Difficulty is set by number of matches needed, starting with 2 as a Basic Success ranging on up to 5 for an Impossible though you can get more. There are examples of each difficulty level, a discussion of 'Double Difficulty" for more challenging or complex tasks where one success at level X might not be enough. There is also an option to convert multiple lower success levels into a single higher success level so if you needed a Critical Success (3 of a kind) but rolled 3 pairs instead you can bump that up. There are also some options on how to spend any extra successes by taking extra actions.

There is a handy odds chart in the middle of this section showing the likelihood of success with varying numbers of dice at each difficulty level. 

I can't help but think of these while I'm reading this game

There is a metacurrency called Adrenaline that can be used along the way for things like +1 dice on a on a roll. 

There is a bigger metacurrency called Spotlight that lets you just flat-out accomplish some things - no roll required like an automatic extreme success, removing a condition, or "do whatever you want" - discuss it with the GM. Sure.

There are various ways to acquire each of these during an adventure and I suspect the reason there are two of them is to avoid the "I'm saving them" problem you sometimes see in games with a mechanic like this. Here, Adrenaline is meant to be acquired and spent all through the session while Spotlight is meant to be saved for those big moments, finales with multiple explosions and the like. I get it, I'm just still not sure if we really need two of them running in parallel.

Also much like King of Tokyo (and Yahtzee) there is an option to re-roll: If you don't like your results you can re-roll, and if you don't like that roll you can go "All-In" and re-roll again. There is a downside if you had any success as you can lose those if you roll badly but there are things like Feats that give you "free" re-rolls in certain situations that do not have these negative consequences

There are additional sections on how to adjudicate failure, conditions, combat and damage and death, equipment and vehicles, chases, enemies, and how to run an Outgunned campaign. A few notes from these:

• Enemies are very abstracted and feel kind of generic as they are dice pools with a few modifiers. The GM is going to have to work hard to make enemy mook group #1 feel different from enemy mook group #2. 
• There is a dramatic clock mechanic in "Heat" which makes things more dangerous for the party as the scenario escalates. It's fairly basic but it's a good starting point.
• Plan B is a great idea for changing up a bad situation. It's described as a sort of group spotlight. There are 3 options described in the rules and each can only be used once in the course of a campaign. An example would be "Backup" where in desperate no-win circumstances an outside force shows up to help the PC's out. It's a neat idea on how to salvage a potential campaign-wrecking moment.
• Time-Outs are another campaign type mechanic that's somewhere between a planning session and a pre-finale montage where they bandage each other up, modify the cars, "make some calls", or pick up some guns. There is a list of things the PCs can do - of which they can each do two - and then we move on to the next scene. It's a cool idea and completely fitting to the genre.

 The book ends with a sample adventure and it's probably fine. I have not dug too deeply into it.

Backup!

So there is some really good action movie stuff here buuuuut ... it's just not grabbing me. 

I think a lot of it is the dice pool. Pretty much all of the mechanics revolve around adding or adjusting or manipulating the dice pool for whatever it is you're trying to do and I've seen that in other games but compared to say, Marvel Heroic, where a lot of the fun is in justifying the inclusion of a particular power or trait or quirk there really is not a lot of that here. It reads as just being a mechanical exercise. I realize that might change with some actual play but it's a problem for me right now.

This feeds into a dissociated mechanics issue that I'm feeling as well. The basic system is stat + skill = the number of dice in the pool which can then be modified and I believe the GM (or NPC capabilities) is just setting the target numbers - the players make all of the rolls. Gear is typically a modifier to a die pool, Conditions are a modifier to dice pool, and even Adrenaline is likely to be used for that as well. Between that and all of the abstract approaches to things (like opponents) built into the game I'm not sure it's going to feel particularly visceral. I think my players are going to be busy focusing on the dice and not on the "fiction" of the scene. 

Remember - it started over a car

So yes, I should probably run it but I don't especially want to burn a session for my group to try it. It's not a bad game at all - I suspect for the right group it will hit all the right notes and it covers a lot of the expectations of the genre. That said I think there is a need in this kind of game for some specifics, particularly when it comes to gear. Players (my players at least) might be OK with a "car" with a speed enhancement but they would get a lot more excited and have a more specific mental image if they had say a 1987 Firebird Formula 350 with a supercharger. They'd be a lot more interested in a ".44 Magnum" than a "Revolver". Things like that. Even a feat to have a "signature" weapon or vehicle that does something special would be better. Right now an Ace is good at doing things with vehicles and a particular type of vehicle especially but their personal chosen & modified vehicle is just a generic thing with possibly extra weapons or armor added on. It's the same with some of the other Roles and guns. It's ... bland. Mechanically effective and quick in play - but bland, and that's the last thing I want in an action movie RPG. Give us a few specifics to hang some things on in this sea of abstraction and it might help.

So, final verdict - it's a well done game for a very specific genre but it's probably just outside my target zone for what I personally would want in a game like that. If you're interested though it is definitely worth a look. If I end up running a test game I will post about it here as well.

Pew Pew! Bounty Hunters in Space

 

It occurred to me after mentioning it in last week's post that I ought to talk about PewPew as a game because it's a great little effort from one of my favorite small publishers Fainting Goat Games.  They've made a lot of interesting things over the years, particularly superhero adventures for games like ICONS.  This game was a new direction for them and I really like it.

First up it is very rules light - if you're looking for crunch and "builds" this is probably not going to work well for you. The whole thing is less than 40 pages and includes the rules, pregen characters, and an adventure. Around half of the page count is spent on opposition and NPC's and a map for the adventure. This is a full-color production as well and it looks good. I give bonus points for the "action figure" marketing on the back - this is another Fainting Goat signature item like the snack cake ads in their superhero adventures and it tells you where they are coming from.

As for the rules themselves they are simple but interesting. They are borrowed from Havoc Brigade, a game I do not know beyond what I can see on DTRPG, but I may have to look into it. In a larger sense they are borrowed from Marvel Heroic, or Cortex+. When a character needs to do something they roll a d6 looking for a 4+. Beyond that basic d6 though you are looking to build a dice pool  - one from your skills, some from your equipment, (one for each relevant piece of gear), two from each relevant drive ... you get the picture. While it is only d6's, unlike Cortex+, you can build up a pool fair quickly and each 4+ is a success and this is how the whole thing works whether you are shooting someone, flying a ship, schmoozing your way past a guard, or repairing a ground vehicle. There is not a ton of structure here beyond the building of that pool. Some things have limited uses - like the armor on the sheet up above, or medpacks and some other items noted in their descriptions. 

Your character can have a spaceship and there are some equipment you could add to it and some basic rules for space combat and ship repair. There are no points or tech levels or speed ratings here - it's more about the flavor than the technical details.

Also much like MHR there is no character creation system. There are 6+ pre-gens and the suggestion is to tweak one of them if you don't like it. This is a game meant for drop-in type use, not an extended campaign so I am OK with this.

There is metacurrency in the form of "Embrace the Chaos" (steal the GM's dice), "You Owe Me One" (re-roll your pool dice) , and "Carefully Crafted Plan" (add 2 dice to a pool)which players can use a limited number of times per adventure to really push things over the top. These are entirely genre-appropriate and look like a lot of fun.

The GM uses NPC stats when opposing the players directly and the "Chaos Pool" for general difficulty levels not tied to an active opponent or as bonuses to add to a particularly capable opponent. This is very much the Doom Pool from MHR and begins with X dice based on the situation or location and grows when the PC's screw up. The players can, once per game per character, use the chaos pool themselves for some ridiculous stunt they want to pull off. Let me use their own description and example here:

Chaos can also be used to the bounty hunters’ favor. Once per game, every character can use the chaos to their advantage. Grab all the dice in the Chaos Factor Pool (whether the GM's rolled them this turn or not) and describe some awesome but unlikely thing that happens that benefits your character or describe an amazing action your character is doing. (For example: it turns out the infant that is your bounty secretly has telekinetic powers and uses them to oppose the attack of the monster who was about to kill you.) The GM rolls against you at the base suspicion value for the area.

After the PC has used the Chaos Factor Pool, it refreshes to the default level for the area.

I think that communicates the spirit of this game pretty well.

Some of this will be an exercise in justification - again like MHR - but is likely to be less strict about it since it is an even looser style of game.  There is no grid or range incrementation or variable difficulty levels - a lot of this is eyeballed by the GM and defaults to "roll more 4-ups's than the other guy" which should work just fine for this. 

The whole idea here is a one-off adventure for a team of bounty hunters in a vaguely Star-Warsian-Outer-Rim type setting. There are at least 3 other add-ons in this line and each one pretty much contains the rules and basic info plus an adventure and some other odds and ends - a random character generator, a random adventure generator, etc. As a fill-in game I think it's set up with just enough "system" to be fun without requiring a bunch of rules-reading and explanation and going through character generation. It's much more "pick something you like and get going".  I have not tried it out yet but it is on the short list for the next opportunity.

For those who want more structure there is a Savage Worlds version of these same books which runs off of that system and converts everything to those stats. The adventure is converted to a Savage Worlds One-Sheet format and is a little more structured. I can see a lot of groups preferring that so it's great that that version is out there and it would nicely supplement an ongoing Star Wars style campaign with some drop-in NPCs and an adventure complete with map. Given some of the crossover potential in Savage Worlds campaigns - like Rifts - having a one-shot like this with a limited scope and a set scenario can be a godsend and a heck of a lot of fun. 

When I get a chance to actually try it out I will post about it here.

40K-ish Friday - Battletech Gothic

 

I'm so glad to see the return of one of my favorite out of print GW ... wait it's what? From who? Well, alright ...

I waited a week to let this thing percolate before I posted on it but my thoughts on it haven't changed and they come down to 3 main questions: 

• Who is this for? 
• Who is excited about this? 
• Is this the best way to spend your resources on building the BT game?

Prologue:

I've been playing Battletech for a long time. I've had ebbs and flows as far as my time and interest level but it's never gone completely away and I still have the first miniatures and books and things I bought back around 1986. I've been playing 40K since it came out in 1987 and I've been playing Warhammer Fantasy since the second edition came out in 1985. Yeah the 80's were a busy time. 

I've never heard anyone say, while playing Battletech, "I wish this game was more like 40K". Not once. Ever. 

When BT came out there were some surface similarities. The 3025 universe was post-apocalyptic in that much technology had been lost, very few places could make new mechs and even making parts for them was rare. Most mechs were repaired and rebuilt from salvaged machines and components. It made even a lance of four mechs a considerable force in the lore. Scenario books recreating "historical" confrontations would mention which mechs were present and what kinds of damage should be applied to them pre-battle to represent that bad leg actuator or missing laser. They got away from that aspect of the setting pretty quickly though and eventually that lost tech thing and damaged mechs being a standard expectation disappeared. Nowadays we have thousands of new mechs being constructed every year, not to mention the whole Clan situation.

Today it's much more of a "future Tom Clancy" type setting with new technology and specific weapons platforms taking the lead alongside political machinations between the houses and clans and whatever version of ComStar exists at the time. This makes for decent novels  and provides plenty of hooks for a campaign whether purely BT or going full RPG. It's "clean" in comparison to something like 40K - not a lot of tentacles, if you know what I mean.

But now we have this latest effort. Yes, I assumed it was an April Fool's joke. It's not. Alright so ...

Who is supposed to be excited here? 

Is this to try and draw in 40K players? I would think a lot of them would already be aware of Battletech as a game between the Battletech PC game from ten years ago or so,  the more recent Mechwarrior 5, and the resurgence of tabletop BT driven by Catalyst's Kickstarters  and boxed sets and new miniatures over say the last 5 years. I'd say Battletech has a much higher profile in the last 5 years than it had before - since the 90's at least. So I don't think awareness is a problem.

A part of this may be the thinking that if you make it look like 40K it will get more attention from that crowd. Well, maybe, but I don't think so. It appears to be mostly the same game underneath and that's a very different animal than any version of 40K. The look is only a part of the appeal of 40K.

• Both games have been building up their lore for roughly 40 years. BT is a combination of Historical Novel and Techno-Thriller. 40K is Epic Myth and Action Movie. The feel, the "vibe" is completely different between the games and the universes. People like the "grimdark" and 40K originated the grimdark - taking on the original when it's as strong and popular as it has ever been seems like a mistake. Battletech has strong lore but it is completely different than Warhammer 40,000 (no aliens, no psychic powers, no AI) and making a new offshoot of that is putting your new lore, unsupported by any prior products, up against the massive juggernaut that is the Warhammer Universe. 
  
  
  

  

  You know what quote goes here don't you?

  
  
•  There is also the scale and scope of the game. BT tends to focus on mech action with a side dish of tanks, infantry, and aircraft for some players. I'd say 20 models per side is a big game in BT. In 40K the focus is driven per-army and could be a 100+ infantry on one side against fewer than 10  Knights or superheavies on the other - typically it is a mix of both. The look of a "typical" game of each looks wildly different as far as terrain, unit type, unit count. A lot of BT games happen on a hexmap, even with the miniatures, while a 40K game is always a pure measuring tape on an un-gridded table kind of game. 
  
  Most people could play both without much effort but most people also have a preference for on or the other and despite BT's standard approach being easier to set up I'd say 40K's approach  has more popularity and that's not likely to change by putting gribby monsters into the robot game. 
• Speaking of monsters let's talk about that. They're putting some kind of monsters/kaiju into the Gothic game. That's a huge change for Battletech. That's breaking at least one of the main rules of the universe and hey it might broaden the appeal. I've thought for a long time that a "mechs vs. kaiju" type option for BT would get some attention but I was envisioning something more like Pacific Rim than chaos beasts and daemon engines from Warhammer. So I like them working this angle in somehow, but then they go and leave them out of the boxed set! It's all mechs, and I believe it's alternate sculpts of mechs that already have new miniatures! This is effectively the starter box for a new setting and you can't include the very thing that makes it different from the old setting? That seems like a terrible decision. Even including paper stand-ups of the monsters is a fail - that may work for Battletech players but that hasn't been acceptable for 40K players since 1993 ... and it's still a meme today.

Who is this for? 

Effectively there are 3 groups at play here: Existing Battletech players, Existing 40K/Other miniature game players, and people who are not actively involved in any of these games at this time. 

• Existing (and lapsed) Battletech players: Existing players seem to be somewhat split on this one. I see a few people saying give it a chance. I see a lot of people not liking it at all - for various reasons. I can sum up my own take as a BT fan like this:
• If I want Gothic 40K exists and does it better than anyone has done or is doing
• As an existing player and fan of the only setting they've had up until now splitting this off into an "Elseworlds" side story means I can just sit this one out. It has no impact on the story I like and know and I have no history with it so unless I just really want to have my Thunderbolt punch a Great Uncelan One in the face I can skip this. It's the first boxed set in years that the core Battletech fan can ignore. And if I want to have a big robot punch a big demon in the face ... again, 40K exists. 
• Also a new setting and a new style of mech and the introduction of monsters means I would need to consider building up one or two new armies just for this game. Or I could just keep adding mechs and other forces to the stuff I use in the main game. 
  
  The one real opportunity here might be with people who stopped playing Battletech at some point because it was boring or the universe seemed stagnant or they were just burned out. This does give a new type of combatant and a new look to the old combatants and that might be enough to convince some people to check it out.
  
  
• Existing 40K/GW players: They mostly don't care about Battletech - or any other miniatures game either. 
• This is the main factor they are up against: the general arrogance of Games Workshop players. A large number of 40K players only play 40K and if they do play another tabletop game it's another GW game like Age of Sigmar or Kill Team. GW markets it as "the Games Workshop Hobby" and a lot of people buy into that - they won't even look at another miniatures game. This is something that all other miniature games face and it hurts Kings of War, it hurts Flames of War, it hurts Bolt Action, it hurts Crisis Protocol, and even the Star Wars games. Many of the companies publishing miniatures games today were founded by ex-GW employees and they often view the GW customer as their customer but the Fortress of Arrogance is not just for Comissar Yarrick. Non-GW games are looked down upon and dismissed as inferior by many of the people playing 40K and the other GW games. One element of this is popularity - as in, if Game X is good then why isn't it more popular? Battletech is reasonably popular but I don't think it measures anywhere near the numbers 40K hits in sales, convention & tournament attendance, and online presence. This new take might help but I don't think it's going to make a big dent in the state of things.
• Lapsed 40K players might be a different story as there is a fairly high turnover in those games and they often come out of it looking for something new. For them BT's rules barely changing in 40 years will be a feature when compared to GW's 3-year cycle and constant FAQs and points updates. A more 40K-like version of Battletech might gain some followers here.
  
  
• People who don't play miniature combat type games at all right now: I don't think this is likely to pull in much at all as these people also don't care. If they did, they'd be playing 40K or BT already and if they're new they will probably pick one of those "pure" options instead. A new RPG that's more like 5E D&D would likely pull in more new players to the BT universe than a new flavor of tabletop Succession Wars.

Finally, resources: 

Assuming you can only support one boxed set for Battletech per year - and they've needed Kickstarters to do that - then is this a good move for the game, the players, and the brand in general? Players are already talking about this taking resources from the main game. 

• Some miniature sets have already been delayed. Players don't like it when announced projects are held up for a surprise side-project
• There are major areas of the game that could use a refresh -like fighter combat. Wouldn't a cool boxed set of new spacefighter miniatures featuring a streamlined air/space combat system make more sense? It would give a new (refreshed at least) angle on things and still tie into the main universe. Your goal should be something like X-Wing which was really popular for a few years until the company screwed it up: A game based on small numbers of units playable in a relatively short amount of time by more casual fans. This would also provide an avenue to draw new players in to the rest of the game, allow an option to upscale things by making a Dropship expansion, and potentially tie in to a capital ship combat game (which they have said is in the works) by introducing ships and characters to new players and re-introducing them to the old players who may not have cared about space combat for years. Note that this is not "reprint Aerotech with new art" - this should be a new system that makes it simpler than and distinct from classic Battletech but can still interact with it in some way. That's just one example.
• They've talked about supporting the new line with additional miniatures - many of which would not fit in with or be usable with at all in regular Battletech games. Yet another resource draw.
• There is also talk of this being the first of an ongoing series of parallel universe games. This from a company that's had trouble keeping elements of their main game in stock. Now you're going to have a bunch of "stub" universes with limited support alongside the main game? They mentioned a more anime-flavored universe, a 50's style retro-tech universe (aiming for the Fallout crowd?), maybe a steampunk universe ... but what does that do for me as a player? That mostly sounds like alternate mech designs but how does the game change? If it's just republishing the same mechs over and over  - as we see with Gothic - who cares? That is seriously catering to existing fans, not attempting to expand the game or bring in new ones. Support is a real question - in 5 years how much support will there be for Gothic? For whichever other universes get the greenlight?  Will there be Technical Readouts? Timeline updates? Novels? What's the realistic lifespan of these things?

So yes, I'm pretty negative on Battletech Gothic. I totally understand wanting to expand the product line but this just seems like a misstep and a sidetrack.  Additionally this year's hot new 40K challenger is Trench Crusade which is also grimdark and violent and has all of the usual make-your-parents-mad imagery. I suspect the bulk of the "wanting something like 40K that isn't actually 40K" crowd is being pulled in that direction, further limiting the opportunities here. 

PostScript: 

If you're willing to compete with GW head to head and want to make something new why not make a 28mm skirmish game set in the Nth Succession War and have your basic units be infantry squads and individual vehicles with an occasional appearance by battlemechs? You could make basic infantry squads for each house (and merc unit and periphery bandit group) and also for each major time period (fewer bullets, more lasers as time goes on) and then make some vehicle kits as those are universal across houses. You have some interesting unit variety in the universe already with rifle infantry, laser infantry, and jump infantry and the basic trilogy of wheeled/tracked/hover vehicles plus the VTOL option. We have light medium and heavy tanks, transports, artillery, scout units, recovery vehicles, and even coolant trucks already. We have special elite units in many houses like Liao Death Commandos and the inevitable ninjas from House Kurita. Later in the timeline you get powered armor units. Battlemechs could be a limited use option like knights in 40K and would make for awesome centerpiece models in 28mm scale. 

It just seems like both a new and an obvious way to go to please existing fans while getting some attention from people playing other games that might be looking for something. Yet instead of this we get Mechs vs. Squiggoths ... 

 

Kickstarters These Days - The 2023 Report

 

In 2023 I backed 20 Kickstarters/BackerKit efforts by game companies. Some were bigger, some were smaller, but all of them were things I was interested in enough to lay some money down in advance. Most of the time it works out. In fact it almost always works out ... eventually. There are hazards however and some red flags that can inform decisions in advance. I've been doing Kickstarters since 2013 so I've seen some ups and some downs. Since it doesn't seem to be going away anytime soon I thought I would walk through these last two years and present my thoughts on how my tabletop game crowdfunding experience has gone lately. 

For 2023 here's what I backed in rough chronological order:

• Cities Without Number - Sine Nomine cyberpunk (Hardcover Book)
• Battletech Mercenaries - Their third big boxed set (Boxed Set)
• Pew Pew No Disintigrations - Fainting Goat's light RPG of space bounty hunters (Softcover Book)
• Stickman Battlegrounds - a card game of fighting stick figures (Card Game)
• Tome of Essential Horrors - OSE monster book from Necromancer Games (Hardcover Book)
• Comic Crawl Classics - superhero game based on DCC (Softcover Book)
• Tales of the Valiant - alternate 5E rules (Hardcover Book x2)
• Dolmenwood - OSR game and setting from the OSE people (Boxed Set)
• Dragonslayer - OSR game from Greg Gillespie of Barrowmaze, etc. (Hardcover Book)
• Worlds Without Number (Reprint) - Sine Nomine fantasy (Hardcover Book)
• Deadlands Night Train - An update of a classic Deadlands adventure (Boxed Set)
• MicroDungeons Halloween - a set of small 5E adventures (PDF only)
• Necessary Evil - an update to the classic campaign run through Pinnacle's "Game Changer" (Boxed Set)
• Old School Tactical Vol IV Italian Theater - An expansion for one of my favorite wargames
• Fever Swamp - An OSR big adventure (Boxed Set)
• Scientific Barbarian Magazine #6 - An ongoing supplement series for MCC (Softcover Book)
• Adventurer Conqueror King 2E - An update of an OSR game I liked a lot (Hardcover Books)
• Reaper Dungeon Dwellers - Reaper Miniatures' OSR RPG rules (Boxed Set)
• How to Make a Fantasy Sandbox - A supplement on D&D style fantasy campaign building (Softcover Book)
• Dungeon Domains Riven Catacombs - another set of small adventures (PDF only)

I included some non-RPG games in there to show how some other options have gone in comparison. Bold means I have it in hand. Italics means I do not have it yet. More on that in a minute.

First up a few things about me we can draw from this:

1. I have 7 of these that are directly related to some kind of D&D style game. Sure. That's a lot of what we play here.
2. I do tend to be more interested in new things from people I already know. Two of them are Sine Nomine, 1 Necromancer, 1 Greg Gillespie, ACKS 2E, OST v4, 2 Pinnacle, 1 from Fainting Goat, 1 from Jim Wampler for MCC - these are all things I have some version of already or companies/people I have done business with before and I am confident they will deliver. There is a risk in any crowdfunding endeavor and track record matters.
3. Some of these were fairly pricey as far as gaming items. ACKS, Dolmenwood, and OST v4 were all up there in the $200 range with 3 others in the $100 and while I get the "it's not a preorder" clause I am expecting to get something for my money - these aren't charities and I am not making a donation.

A couple of kudos:

• Kevin Crawford's Sine Nomine campaigns are the gold standard for RPG Kickstarters. he delivers on-time-every-time and the books are great games and tool kits for running a campaign in a given genre even if you use a different set of rules.  One of the ways he does this is by limiting stretch goals. His runs are typically one nice hardcover book with maybe a supplement of some kind - one supplement. No miniatures, no bags or t-shirts or mousepads, no multitude of adventures that need to be written by freelancers ... he is a one-man operation who runs focused consistently successful crowdfunding campaigns and more people running their own should look to his as an example. He is in the "I will back anything he starts up" club and that's a pretty small group for me.
• Pinnacle - the Savage Worlds people - continue to knock them out like clockwork. I admit I am not really a fan of crowdfunding almost every book they release but they do get them out consistently and without drama so they are doing a good job. I don't back everything they do because they do some licenses or genres I don't care about but if it looks interesting I am in.
• If you're interested in board wargames the Old School Tactical team (Flying Pig Games) gets these out as promised and pretty much on-time and also drama free. They make big, nice games and have several lines going from WW2 to Vietnam to ACW to an occasional foray into SF or alternate history. 

The less happy stories:

• Dolmenwood: Estimated delivery date Sept 2024. Considering it funded in Sept 2023 that was a year to get this one out. Exalted Funeral, the creator, had been doing Kickstarters for 4 years and had at least ten prior projects under their belts including Old School Essentials which is one of the big dogs of the OSR scene. So this is not a case of someone new to the process being overwhelmed by success. No, this is a case of too many add-ons. Extra books. Maps.  Dice. Miniatures. A record album. Some of the main books were described as 99.9% complete in March of 2024. They didn't even start printing the books until November of 2024. 
  
  Now sure, the PDFs have been available in draft from since early on and final - as much as an RPG PDF gets to be final - since late last year. But I didn't pay what I paid for PDFs - I paid for books and those are still not here 6 months after the projected date. 
  
  The good news is that according to the latest update they are shipping the things to the U.S. now - the containers are on their way at least. So maybe by June we will have this stuff in hand. So yes, many of those "estimated dates" are simply anchors of potential disappointment. People have to keep waiting, updates become less frequent, people get frustrated, companies start to get defensive - it's a fairly common story. This team has done a good job of keeping their cool but it has still dragged out a long time.
  
  
  

• Adventurer Conqueror King 2E: Estimated Delivery November 2024. I am not as upset with this one as shipping has begun on it and so it will not be as late as Dolmenwood. There were not a lot of add-ons here though the one obvious indulgence - a wooden slipcase at the higher pledge levels - did hit a snag late when it was cut to the wrong size. Extras that add nothing to the actual game are just a hazard waiting to be tripped. This one still took too long.
  
  
  
  
  
  
• Reaper Dungeon Dwellers: Funded November 2023. Estimated delivery July 2024. That was probably way too ambitious but a) it was implied that the rules were already written in some form as they were showing beta playtest videos and b) IT'S REAPER! They do huge miniatures kick starters every year! Well even if they've gone well in the past these things can fail. Let's play Kickstarter Bingo:
• Illnesses? Check.
• Death in the family? Check.
• Facilities change? (Warehouse or factory or something)Check.
• Other obligations? (ReaperCon) Check.
• Prior Kickstarter Entanglements? (Had to finish shipping Bones 6) Check.
• Had too much material so the books got bigger? Check.
  
  The only thing missing there is "Depression" which comes up on a remarkably high number of Kickstarters. Thank goodness for that at least. 

 The March 21st, 2025 update declares the Players Book "done". That's good. Considering that July 2024 original date it really should be. 

Then it mentions work to be done on the adventure(s), the GM Book, the Monster Book, some other text they want to include ... and then they mention hoping to get it all out the door by the end of the month. March, presumably. 

At some point you need to stop digging. Stop writing new material, stop expanding the adventure, stop the proofreading cycle and ship it! 

Anyway that's probably enough for today. We can take a look at 2024 in another post. Please feel free to share your KS war stories if you're so inclined.

One of the winners!

 

 

40K Friday - The Practical Side of 3D Printing

 

He's upset about being resized

I know the dream of 3D printing is "I can print all the miniatures I want for almost free" with a side order of "any time I want them" and to a point this is true. It's more true with a resin printer than a filament printer in many ways but I am happy starting out with the melted plastic option. One of the reasons I feel that way is because I already have too damn many miniatures - what I need is more time to play them. Barring a terrible physics accident that alters the flow of time (and hopefully grants some cool superpowers) one of the areas a 3D printer can help with is the supplementary stuff that you will use -with- all of those miniatures that you already have.

One of the big ones is Terrain with a capital T. I have a lot of plastic ruined buildings - because that's kind of a 40K thing. I do not have as much Fantasy/Medieval type terrain - because those fights tend to happen more in open fields like the historical fights of the medieval era did. I don't have a lot of building type terrain that isn't "blasted Imperial gothic architecture" because that's what GW sells and what GW used to show in White Dwarf and what 3rd party makers think everyone wants based on what's in all the GW photos and artwork.  I don't have a lot of WW2-appropriate terrain. As it turns out a lot of terrain is perfectly amenable to FDM printers as the occasional layer line doesn't really get in the way or ruin the look compared to how it would impact an elf face for example. 

I have some spaceship corridors. I bought two sets of the stuff GW put out a couple of years ago for that whole Boarding Action thing they did with Kill Team and for 40K. It's cool. I can see using it for all kinds of things. I'd like more but I'm not buying another one of those sets. As it turns out there are a lot of people making those kinds of things and putting the STLs out online at very reasonable prices. 

People and companies run kickstarters for big sets of terrain and the costs there are pretty affordable with those as well. You can acquire models for an entire table's worth of whatever you like and make extras of the parts you really like at almost no additional cost once you own the files. It's great. It can work for RPGs too - if you thought the Dwarven Forge stuff was cool, well, you should see what's out there now that you can print yourself.

MiniWargaming did a Kickstarter recently for this set of interesting stuff.
"The Ruins of Drakenfell"

The other side of supplementary materials here include my personal nemesis: Base Expanders. These have been a pain for a very long time. The main culprit here is once again Games Workshop. The triggering incident is when they decide that a certain army, most of whom have been on 25mm round bases for decades, really look better on 32mm round bases. So all of the new units now come on 32's, the sure-to-be-coming-upscaled-new-versions-of-old-units will come on 32's, and random strangers whether at a store or at a con assume that all of your fully painted armies should be on 32mm bases the day after this is noticed - because they don't actually announce something like this. They just start putting new bases in all of the boxes and let people discover it on their own. 

Yeah, it's a sore spot.

You could say "but if you play with friends they probably won't care. Sure. But if I go outside the friend circle it's tricky and I also do not like to see one marine army on 25s and then my other marine army on 32s. Or mixing in Ork boyz on various differently-sized bases - that's not a good look.

Guess the main two armies this has happened to? Guess which are two armies I have tons of? Bonus if you can guess which are two of my oldest armies and thus more likely to be on 25mm bases?

Somewhere around 2017 GW started shipping new marine boxes with 32s in them. I noticed it with the new Blood Angel sets first but I don't know for sure they were the first offenders overall. Then in 2018 we got the new Primaris Marines and we all saw why they really went to 32mm bases - bigger figures need bigger bases!

Somewhat later -  it might have been earlier but I noticed it later - they decided to do this with Orks as well. Now I have a lot of marines across multiple armies but I have 120 2nd edition Goff Ork boyz in just one Ork force - so you can imagine I was not pleased to see this change. People also get a lot twitchier about orks being on smaller bases than they do marines as it means you can pack more of them into melee where they are a lot more dangerous than a tac marine.

So what does one do when one's old classic 40K figures are deemed to be on too small of a base? Well I did write a post about this a few years ago that has pictures of the base expander options I had found at that time. I have used all of those at some point but some of those were very unsatisfying as I dug into them more. The silver half-ring things gave me a lot of trouble trying to line them up straight and level. The wooden rings were definitely the cheapest and I was planning to use them on my Orks but ... I hate the way they look once they are on. The cup-style are the best looking and the least trouble in my experience but were also the most expensive. Not stupidly expensive, but when you're buying them 100 at a time you start to think about how much you are spending on stuff for your miniatures that is not actually a miniature. I had a bunch of orks, a bunch of loyalist marines, and a bunch of chaos marines that all needed this treatment. In my head, at least.

I've been trying to finish up the Goff boy updates this year and then I acquired a 3D printer ... and one night while putting the new shoes on the boyz it occurred to me that I had bought 3D printed versions on eBay - maybe I could just print them myself! As it turns out I could! You can too! I poked around various sites and found several styles of the things including some that looked pretty much like the ones I had been using. 

The tan-ish ones are the expanders I purchased a year or two back (sprayed with Zandri Dust). The black ones (and the white one) I printed myself this week. I stuck one of my Evil Sunz boyz in one to do a test fit and then printed the rest. This will save me some money, even more time, and just makes things a lot easier going forward as I don't have to worry about  buying more of them, shipping them here, or keeping some on hand for future acquisitions of old miniatures - if I need some I can print some. Case closed.

There are other practical benefits. You can print custom bases too, not just expanders! You can print objective markers and banners and nifty score-keeping things and a bunch of other stuff that you might have a use for in a particular game. Spell or area effect templates and other measuring devices seem to be a popular option. 

A lot of rank-n-flank games like Warhammer Fantasy and Kings of War use blocks of figures moving around the table. Movement trays are a way to facilitate this and have been in use for many years but before you had to make them out of plastic sheet or wood or something that took at least a little effort. Now you can just print them - do search, pick the correct size, and off you go.

The crowning jewel of this is the "Movement Tray Adapter" which combines the powers of a movement try AND a base expander into one handy option. Behold:

GW brought back old school fantasy in the form of The Old World (yay) but decided to bump all of the bases up a notch (boo) so all the old humans and elves that were on 20mm squares are now on 25s and the orcs and chaos warriors that were on 25s are now on 30s  <sigh> because that's just what they do. But, by using one of these beauties you can keep your figures on their old bases but still have them take up the correct amount of space on the table. It's a triumph of human ingenuity.

Anyway much like base expanders vs. actual miniatures, here's a 40K Friday post that's not really about 40K very much. Sometimes it's not a hobby - it's a lifestyle choice.