40 Friday: Fixing Some Grey Knights

 

 I had mentioned before that some of my GK Interceptors had lost their teleport vanes. This is one of the main things that marks them as "Interceptors" instead of just regular Strike Squads so I need to fix them. Also, all of these were intact a few years ago and they've been pretty lightly used these last few years. I suspect it happened in the move to this house a few years back but who knows? Damage like this and the general crappiness of how the bases looked - even though I redid them a few years ago - were the impetus for this whole re-work effort for this army. 

One of the upsides of the current Grey Knight models is that two kits make all of the infantry options in the army - one for the power armored guys and one for the terminator armored guys. They are remarkably flexible and one of my long-term concerns is that whatever updates come for them it will not be anywhere near this good. Right now the one sprue makes five Strikes, Interceptors, Purgators, or Purifiers, plus you can use it to build some characters as well if you want.  The terminator kit is the same - it makes Terminators, Paladins, and any other characters you might want, plus both kits come with all of the weapon options you might want for a typical squad. It's just great!

What this means though - and if you've worked with this army before you already know - is that you have a lot of spares and leftover parts from each sprue after you build a squad. Some people use this as an opportunity to magnetize everything to ensure maximum flexibility  - melee weapons, heavy weapons, backpacks so your Strikes can switch to Interceptors as needed - and it's probably a smart way to go but I bought a lot of these things already built and I am very selective in my magnetization anyway so I have not done much of that here. I'm more of a "commit and figure out how best to use a particular setup" kind of guy. Coming out of it though means I have a lot of spare parts for Grey Knights of all types. 

So when it came time to deal with the damaged interceptors here's what ran through my mind:

• I could just try to combine the two squads in question to salvage an intact 5-man squad ... but there were not 5 without damage. I had already done this when I picked out 5 good ones and finished them a while back. So what was left was not enough to make another squad.
• I could just clip off the remaining vanes and call them Strike Squads now. This just felt like a give-up and it meant I would have to make 2 new Interceptor Squads from scratch. I mean I have the bodies to do it but it seemed like a lot of work when  I kind of already have them ... well 90% of them anyway.
• I could just take off the backpacks they have now and paint up some replacements either for the whole squads (ensures they match) or just for the damaged troopers (less work but it could be tricky to match the paint. 

So instead I went for the final option: I have a bunch of leftover Interceptor backpacks so why not clip the vanes off of some of those and use them to replace the missing ones? It keeps everything that is already there "there" and is less work in some ways. Plus the clipped backpacks are now just regular Strike packs - not that I lack those really but I like the idea of preserving them as a usable part instead of trashing them.

The downside of only replacing the vanes is a) trying to keep them straight(ish) while gluing little fiddly bits onto an existing painted model and b) I'll still have to match the paint. It turned out getting the vanes on straight while not building up a ring of glue around the base was not that tough so that worked out well. Matching the paint could be trickier but the vanes are often depicted with a blue glow around them so worst case I'll go back and drybrush some blue-white onto them and make it look intentional instead of like a screw-up. It's certainly easier (and less noticeable) than matching a whole backpack.

So what you see there is the white parts are what I replaced. I grabbed 5 packs (and a hammer - see below) and sprayed them white and then clipped them off and glued them into place. Now you might have noticed there are enough there that are not white I could have made an intact squad - but they were not intact when I started. I found two of the painted vanes broken off in a box with other GK stuff so I started by re-attaching those first. Then I worked on the replacement parts. The top of the Librarian's force staff broke off at some point and it's just gone, apparently, so I decided he would now have a hammer. In the current edition they are all "Nemesis Force Weapons"  so they can be anything and in older editions they usually carry "force staves" as opposed to swords or axes so he should be fine there too. Also, I had to reattach his gun- hand as it came off too and fortunately that went without any drama.

This is after applying some paint. I was convinced these guys were originally painted with GW Leadbelcher, not Grey Knights Steel as one might expect, but if they were there was a light wash of either Nuln Oil or maybe an Army Painter shade as it's a tiny bit shinier than the rest of the silvery part of the miniature. Most people looking at them, especially during a game, probably wouldn't notice but ti was nagging at me a little bit. There's an easy solution here though - I just drybrushed some Leadbelcher onto the other vanes to even it out and now all the vanes are a little bit shinier than they were, which is fine by me considering what they do. It looks a little more intentional, at least, if anyone does notice.

Still some other work to be done here - that guy on the left's staff-hand is way too shiny!

The Librarian got his force hammer painted with a simple speedpaint job and some leadbelcher touch up on the shaft. I think it needs a few more touches of gold here and there but I'll look at that later when I work on the bases. I also covered up the weird white spot on his forehead. Not sure where it came from and I don't remember seeing it before but it's handled now. Yes, as I approach the end of the work the perfectionist creeps out and starts getting in they way - "...enemy of the done", etc. I'm working on it.

So now I just need to go back and do/re-do/touch-up the bases and get them flocked and finished and this batch is ready for the display case - or maybe the tabletop ... maybe this weekend even ...

More to come!

 

1987 - A Huge Year for Tabletop Games

 

You may remember 1987 from such films as ...

It was a big year for this hobby of ours but I'm going to focus in on 3 things. To set the scene properly remember a few things true about the time ...

• No internet. We got our niche news via magazines mainly, which of course were delivered on horseback, via steam locomotive, and by hot-air balloons. We also found out about new stuff quite often by walking into the local game store.
• Technology was just far less of a player when it came to this stuff. Sure, we all wrote a D&D character roller in BASIC programing class or something and we were playing computer RPGs but the most advanced thing for actual play was probably one of those electronic dice rollers with the LEDs. The biggest communication innovation at the time was probably still cordless phones. Character and campaign information was stored on paper. 
  
  

  

  The "Dragonbone"

• The dominant RPG at the time was AD&D - no bloody 2E, 3E, 3.5, 4, Next ... Much like today there were a ton of other games but there was no real competition for top dog.
• The other big fantasy RPGs were Runequest, Chivalry and Sorcery, Tunnels & Trolls, Warhammer FRP, Pendragon, Maybe even Fantasy Hero at this point. 
• Sci-Fi wise it was Traveller with maybe a little Space Opera. FASA's Star Trek was still rolling along although it was about to come to an abrupt end. Star Frontiers was fading but still around as well. Heck Mechwarrior might have been up there too.
• Post-Apocalyptic was still a real genre at this time with Gamma World, Twilight 2000,  and The Morrow Project all active.
• Horror was mainly Call of Cthulu with a helping of Chill and possibly a little Ghostbusters and Paranoia depending on how far you want to stretch the definition.
• Superheroes were strong with Champions, Marvel Super Heroes, DC Heroes, Villains & Vigilantes all on shelves.
• Westerns were ... not really a player. If you wanted to go Cowboy you were probably playing Boot Hill or homebrewing something. 

RPGs were flourishing and it was easily a "golden age" if you want to use that term. So what was new for 1987?

It was a good boxed set

First, this year saw the release of MegaTraveller. Now Traveller is not the force today that it was in the 80's but it was more dominant back then than any one SF RPG is right now. That's not to say everyone loved it, but if you wanted to play with spaceships, robots, and lasers, you were probably playing Traveller. It was the D&D of space games. After ten years and various printings and versions and presentations and a ton of expansions we got MegaTraveller - effectively a second edition of the game. It revised both the mechanics and the setting. 

Mechanics-wise MT unified and organized the whole task resolution system with a more formal approach to how it worked and to how things were presented in rulebooks and adventures. Skills were more tightly defined. Vehicle and ship construction was way more defined. A rough analogy might be original Traveller had a more loose approach to things, figuring out things as they published more like Original D&D did. MegaTraveller was the big new revised version like AD&D. At the time I thought the skill system was genius and the level of detail in the construction system lit my rivet-counting gearhead heart on fire. Other people though thought the whole thing was over-codified when it came to the rules and the approach in general. It didn't help that it turned out to have a massive amount of mistakes, typos, and errata but we didn't know that right away. 

This is not even from MT - this is from original set Book 2 I think. Traveller was always kinda like this.

Setting-wise MT made a lot of bold choices and many people hated them. The largely static Imperium in the background, existing mainly to justify common language, standardization, and interstellar trade - and as the hammer lurking in the background if your players got too stupid - suddenly had a rebellion and split into regional factions and had active war zones and such. Now I didn't hate the idea at the time but it took the setting from being a somewhat generic background where it was easy to focus on your players and tweak whatever you wanted to having an early metaplot situation with a moving timeline where other stuff is changing the map. I think it some ways trying to get by in the middle of an active civil war is a more interesting setting but it is also far more specific than it had been and people really did not like that. I also thought it was easy enough to ignore but when they keep mentioning it in the published products it's hard to forget. 

Looking back I would say MT was the beginning of the end of Traveller's big run. It had a lot of great support from GDW and from another group, DGP, and they would be publishing stuff for it for another 5-6 years but it fractured the community in a big way. Presumably that led to a faster wind-down than Classic Traveller and got us to The New Era and the collapse of both the Imperium in the game and GDW in reality. 

I know it's not as big a player as it was - I'd say Traveller today is "a" sci-fi game, not "the" sci-fi game but this was a pretty big thing at the time if you were active in RPGs. 

Second, 1987 saw the release of the first Star Wars RPG. yes, the West End Games d6 system version we all know and love and revere today. We got the Rulebook, the Sourcebook, and a bunch of adventures and some supporting boardgames and it was glorious. Besides the obvious - it's Star Wars! - the tone on this game was the complete opposite of Traveller and most of the SF RPGs at the time who tended to aim at realistic physics-based assumptions and this game did not care about that at all - at least not any more than the movies did. Instead of a detailed breakdown of modifiers and parameters for each task including how long it would take and how hard was it to try again if you failed Star Wars gave you a fistful of d6's  - roll 'em and get a total! Detailed charts for determining planetary characteristics? Tatooine! Hoth! Dagobah! The game was a revelation and a juggernaut both for what it actually was and for the possibilities it revealed. The system was easy to grasp and teach, and a blast to play. We all knew the setting and it was also great and focused on the Rebellion era and with no prequel or sequel trilogies at the time no one was ruining the thing by trying to be full-on Jedi - just some dabblers and wanna-be's here and there. 

The production values were another standout. Those first two books were not full color but they were two- color - lots of blue accents. They also had some full-color inserts which we really didn't see at the time and it helped that they were funny. They were also hardback books which outside of D&D was not really a thing yet either. The adventures had extra cardboard inserts, paper sections intended to be cut out, and started with a script your players could read out loud to set the tone of the typical "en media res" style they used. 

Lots of cool stuff in those old folders. Not quite the same in PDF.

In the end it was fun and popular and well-done and probably put the final nail in the coffin for Star Frontiers (last supplement published 1985), greatly damaged MegaTravller (Why play in that rebellion when you could play in the real Rebellion?), and may have helped finish off FASA Star Trek as well (license ended in 1989 as they tried to move into that new "Next Generation" thing). I know the FFG/Edge game line has gotten pretty quiet and Star Wars now is not Star Wars then but that D&D announcement got a lot of attention so I'd say it's still a factor even 40 years later.

To me this is still the defining image of 40K

Finally, going in the complete opposite direction of the Star Wars universe, 1987 also gave us the darkest, grimmest future setting of all with the release of Warhammer 40,000 - Rogue Trader. Not strictly an RPG but definitely aimed at campaign play where you accumulated stuff and troops and improved stats over time like the older wargames that inspired D&D. It was simply amazing, utterly unlike anything else we had back then. It out-post-apoc'd the post-apoc games because the apocalypse had happened long ago and never stopped - it just kept getting worse. 

System-wise it was an adaption of Warhammer (fantasy) 3rd edition's rules which were widely played at the time and had quickly become the most popular set of fantasy rules. I know I was seeing it played at conventions around DFW almost as much as Battletech by 1986 and that's saying something. It was easy to understand, detailed enough to make difference between units feel meaningful, and included characters in the same way most fantasy games did which is a big part of the appeal. It wasn't just a space marine army it was -your- space marine force with gear you had picked up, wounds and weirdness you had taken, and you had probably named your characters after a few fights. 

The art was also a huge factor here. Games Workshop had been tapping into a lot of wild and awesome fantasy art for years with Warhammer fantasy and this game gave them the chance to push out in all kinds of new directions. It's hard to emphasize to people who weren't there how NOTHING LOOKED LIKE THIS when it was released. They did a big multi-page ad in Dragon that put me over the top as far as committing to it and, well, it's been a few years and I still remember that ad and I'm still going at it. 

The concept also was so genius that you have to ask why no one else had tried it before. Someone had to be the first one to make it work, right? They just took all of your standard fantasy races and put them in a a sci-fi setting with guns and spaceships and a strong dislike of each other, with magic rebranded as "psychic" to keep wizards and weirdness in the game. GDW's Striker rules - Traveller miniature combat rules-  might have been the most popular single set of SF rules out there prior to this, depending on how you count Battletech and it's hexgrid map-based play. I'm guessing within a year or two that was no longer the case as 40K quickly surpassed other SF miniature games and within an edition or two even surpassed it's older sibling Warhammer Fantasy as far as sales and popularity. 

It became apparent quickly that while Warhammer had been popular before this was a whole new animal. I don't know that we quite realized the revolution it would be but we knew it was new and cool. It's far less new now but it still has some level of cool as they keep coming up with new interpretations of it with videogames, animations, and now maybe a live action show. There are even multiple RPGs for it in print right now! Clearly it strikes a chord with a lot of people. 

That's enough for now for 1987. This idea just hit me one day and spurred this post. I can think of other years that had some pretty big releases so I might go back and pick out a few of those for a similar write-up. Until next time ...

Bringing an Old Green Friend Home

 

I haven't talked about it a ton on here but I have been working on Warhammer fantasy stuff for The Old World - and just because I like it. That older aesthetic from the 80's/90's/early 2000's still means something to me because that's when I got into it and played it quite a bit. I've always loved the "Orcs & Goblins" army and I've worked on one quite a bit over the years but never quite finished much of it. When we started playing Kings of War I played them quite a bit but that eventually faded and everything went back into boxes and on the shelf. 

I started out with 2nd edition and we played some of that and 3rd but we didn't have a lot of miniatures so we played with D&D minis, plastic dinosaurs and knights (sometimes sprayed in different colors), and the large pile of cardboard counters from TSR's Battlesystem 1st edition boxed set got more playing time as Warhammer units than they did in their own rules. 

This one is before I converted to Orc & Goblinism but I do remember it being around back then

By the time 4th edition rolled around the game exploded and the figures became much more widely available and my friends and I started building actual miniature armies, alongside out existing 40K armies and our Epic armies and our Battletech armies ...

It may have some out in 3rd but I found it in 4th and I still have at least two of them. 

The 5th edition was pretty similar rules-wise and we kept right on playing our ridiculous hero-hammer games with over-tooled heroes and monsters.

AZHAG! This guy was my general in most of the battles I fought with the green guys back when and I loved him. Mean in combat, mounted on a mean beast, and able to cast spells because of his magical crown - expensive, but worth it!
Think I still have two copies of him too.

For me Warhammer 6th edition was probably the peak and it toned down the overpowering of individual models quite a bit and felt better to us overall as a wargame. Around the time it came out the greenskins got a new "flagship" in the form of a new Warboss on a Wyvern.

No more sinuous, serpentine wyvern - this guy is a thicker, more brutish take with an underbite - more orcish for sure.

For whatever reason I never managed to get one of these. I mean, some might ask "well how many orcs on wyverns do you need?" to which I would respond "one of each at least, right?" - and now I finally have him. They are not exactly rare but I never ran across one that was a)the old metal version and b) not either badly painted, missing parts, or priced like an art object and not a gaming miniature.

But I finally did find one like that and since I'm working on the orcs in between the 40k stuff I realized it was time. It had become a bit of a Holy Grail thing for me as I wasn't sure I'd ever find one clean and complete. But now he's here and I'm very happy about it. I'm going to try and get him built and primed pretty quickly and then agonize over how to actually paint him for an undetermined period of time but I do have some ideas so it may not take that long.  More to come.

40K Friday: Knights & Angels & Wolves Again

 

I have managed to make steady progress on finishing up the Grey Knights unit by unit these last few weeks. This week it was the last of the 3 regular Dreadknights going into the display case and it did feel good. 

I also did some serious figuring on what unbuilt parts I had left and how I wanted to allocate them. Some serious reassessment of the options led me to believe I can fix my broken Interceptor vanes on my mostly painted squads so that's 10 bodies no longer needed for that. If I can that gets me to 3 squads of 5-men each. I have one mostly painted strike squad that I believe I can salvage as well which puts me to 6 squads of 5 which is as much as anyone probably really needs. This should leave me enough strike squad type bodies to build out Purifiers and indulge myself in some extra Purgation squads.

I was in pretty good shape with Terminator bodies having finished two 4-man squads and a 5-man with all the extras. But they are also core troops for a GK army and I only had 15 more to build AND I want 10 Paladins AND there might be a character or two I want to build so when I found a nicely painted squad of 5 Paladins online I went ahead and got them and a matching GK Termie Librarian too. This should let me build the remaining squads I want and fill in the others to their full complement as well. I would say the end of "acquisitions" for the Knights is in sight! Finally!

This is not mine but it's a damn good looking model

For the Dark Angels I did get the winged helmets I mentioned in the last post though I have not attached them yet. I will start with the characters and the Bladeguard squad and then maybe the Vanguard Vets. This army is already in decent shape build-wise. I just need to get moving on the paint. This is not a new story for me.

Then there is the deliberate retro army with the Space Wolves. It sarted out mainly as a way to use up the rest of my non-primaris marine bodies and gear ... well it didn't stay that way. There was a lot of "acquisition" activity this week as scope creep exploded and it became an effort to see if I could get a squad or unit of most of the things in the 5th/6th/7th edition codexes. This is not a completed effort by any means but it's a bigger force now than it was a week ago. Another decision: They're all going on 32mm bases for the regular infantry. It's retro but it's not that retro.

The core (planned anyway) is:

• 3x 10-man Grey Hunter Squads (prob 2 with plasma, 1 with melta guns)
• 1x 10-man Blood Claw Squad (sized for Rhinos or Drop Pods more than a Land Raider)
• 3x 5-man Long Fang Squads (prob 2 distant shooters, one stupid one with 4 multi-meltas to jump out of a Rhino or Drop Pod or something because that's possible)
• 3x 5-man Terminator squads (could turn into 2 squads with all the weapon options and a Lone Wolf or three)

Then some dreadnoughts, some Rhinos, some tanks, characters - the usual things one would expect to find in a classic Wolf force. The problem is the add-ons. I want some jump pack guys so ... Skyclaws? Jumping Wolf Guard? Both? Swiftclaw bikers? Thunderwolves? Lot of Fast Attack choices on the menu right now. Some I could already build - some I could not. Some will be joining the force regardless. Lotta wolf claws in the mix here now. Now to make this into a coherent army ...

Savage Worlds vs. Mutants & Masterminds and the Importance of Dice

 

I know, but we'll get to it I promise ...

Let's talk about two systems for a minute. I'm prepping to run a Savage Worlds game and I just finished running a short M&M campaign in May. At one point I figured I would still be running M&M for most of this year but given a break point and an off-ramp my players chose to change to a different system. Why might that be?

In general, M&M is a more abstract system than many but Savage Worlds uses a lot of similar concepts so it may be the most similar game to M&M mechanics-wise on the market. Comparison points:

• M&M stats are a bonus to a d20 roll, SW stats are the type of die you roll
• M&M skills are a bonus to a d20 roll, SW skills are the type of die you roll
• M&M has Advantages and Complications that help customize your character. SW has Edges & Hindrances that do the same thing.
• M&M Powers are abstract effects-based abilities personalized by Descriptors - it's not just "ranged damage" it's a "fire blast". Savage Worlds has Powers as well and they are generic effects-based abilities personalized by "Trappings" in the same way.
• In both games Powers can be modified by various bonus effects or reduced effects that can increase or decrease the points cost (talking super powers here for Savage Worlds).
• In M&M points are spent to purchase stats, skills, advantages, and powers. SW has separate pools for each but points are spent on stats, skills, and powers and taking hindrances allow one to add edges. 

As you can see they work in very similar ways. M&M in general can be more complicated and more detailed - SW is more broad strokes - but they are not that far apart in approach. 

Then we get to combat. With M&M one rolls a d20 +/- relevant modifiers to equal or beat a target's defenses. In SW one rolls the relevant skill die (typically Shooting or Fighting). In melee the roll has to equal or beat a target's Parry defense. For ranged attacks one has to beat a fixed number (4) modified by range, speed, light conditions, size, and other possible modifiers or abilities. They are similar but SW treats ranged combat differently from melee to a degree though it ends up being a roughly similar process.

The effects of that hit though ... that's where our paths diverge.

• M&M hits mean the target rolls to resist the incoming damage. That damage is a static number based on the power or weapon used - this is the target number for the defender. The defender rolls a d20 modified by the relevant defense and the degree of success or failure determines how hard they were hit. It is possible, though unlikely, to take out another powerful opponent in one shot if they roll badly enough  and they are hit hard enough. 
• Savage Worlds hits have the attacker roll dice based on the power or weapon used. The total of those dice is then compared to the target's Toughness (plus any armor) and meeting or exceeding that Toughness will impose a Shaken or Wounded status on the target. It is possible, though not likely, to take out a powerful opponent in one shot with any attack or weapon in the game because damage uses exploding dice. Your pistol does 2d6? Roll a "6" and keep on rolling a "6" and you can inflict 5/10/20 wounds in a system where most things will not exceed a 3 wound capacity.

I think this is a basic, visceral difference and one that is not readily apparent just reading the games. Having run and played a lot of RPG sessions over the last 40+ years I can tell you players like rolling big numbers!  Having run a long Deadlands campaign in Savage Worlds in the last few years I can tell you players get very excited when that one damage die just keeps exploding. It's a triumphal moment that everyone can see and it's hard to replicate when your damage system depends on someone rolling low to fail rather than rolling high to succeed and I think that's where M&M loses some people. 

 It's not just in comparison to Savage Worlds. Most RPGs these days have some kind of stat & skill system and have players roll to hit in combat and then roll for damage - and higher is better. This is from D&D (going all the way back) to related offshoots from Runequest to Pathfinder to other approaches like Traveller, Champions/Hero System, GURPS, and various Star Wars games. Even Powered by the Apocalypse games tend to use a fixed damage system where a bigger Harm number hurts more. There are RPG's where both attack and defender roll - one to hit and one to dodge or deflect a hit - with opposed rolls, but the attacker, if successful, tends to be the one rolling for damage. 

M&M is one of the few RPGs where damage is a) the result of a defense roll and b) directly determined by the result of that defense roll and with experience in both approaches over the last few decades I would say it is just less satisfying to most players. With M&M you know that your possible results are 1-20 plus your Power level. A critical hit can make it worse for the target, and of course you can build up that effect level in as many ways as possible before you strike, but it's still the other guy rolling vs. a target number. It's a big deviation from the way RPGs in general work and I think it mutes the excitement people have in M&M combat scenes.

A more specific example:

• Strong Guy in M&M has a +8 Fighting and a +12 Strength. Enemy Robot has Toughness 10 so if hit it rolls a d20 + 10 to beat a 27 target number in M&M 3E. Most likely he will take a bruise and maybe a stun. Maybe some Knockback too. A 27+ means it takes nothing but a 7 or less means it is out of the fight, with various damage conditions popping up in between.
  
  Odds here are not too hard to figure if it matters to you. A critical hit will shift things up a bit but the basics there are a 35% chance to knock out the robot and about a 20% chance to do nothing. 

• In Savage Worlds Enemy Robot might have Toughness 15 while Strong Guy punches for 3d10. a 14 or less total means Guy does nothing, a 15 shakes the 'Bot, a 19 = shaken + a wound, 23 ups it to 2 wounds, and a 27 ups it to 3 wounds and most likely out. 
  
  Odds are trickier to figure in Savage Worlds as a few 6's in there can jump the damage up a lot and a raise on the to-hit roll adds another d6 into the pool for damage so it can snowball quickly. That said multiple dice also makes it a bell curve so it tends to stay in the middle range
  
  
• Then just for fun let's do it in Champions: Strong Guy has a 60 Strength so punches for 12d6 damage - that means you get to roll a fistful of dice and add them up looking for the total (for Stun Damage) and for specific numbers (for Body Damage) figure out some knockback (and see if that did any more damage) then compare those numbers to Robot's Physical Defense and start marking off Stun and Body if you exceeded it. Then you also compare it to it's Con score and see if you Stunned them. It's great! With tons of dice flying around the table and multiple calculations on each roll it feels like every swing that connects is impactful to say the least. Is it faster? No. But sometimes speed is overrated.  
  
  

  

  See?!

Now I love M&M and this is in no way a call for a hit point system to be added to M&M. Savage Worlds , though, does show that a non-hit point system can still embrace a "roll your damage dice" approach . I suspect that if there were ever a radical shake-up with M&M that this would be a good area to consider for a change. I don't know exactly how it would work* and it would take a big rethinking of how defenses work in the game. With 2nd - 3rd - 4th editions really being refinements of a solid framework I would not expect to see anything like this soon - but it's something to think about. 

*First rough idea: Attacker rolls to hit like now and if they do hit then we flip the Toughness roll around from how it works today: attacker rolls Effect level + d20 vs. a target of the opponent's Toughness + something. Yeah, it looks a lot like Savage Worlds, I know - but I know that works and it keeps things fairly similar to the current M&M approach. The main problem is that it means everyone is "rolling a d20 for damage" all the time and I'm not sure that changes it up enough to get people excited. The real jump would be rolling a fistful of dice based on power level of the attack but that's a whole other level of change. 

40k Friday: Dark Angels, Grey Knights, and the Focus Thing Again

 

Despite the sidetrack into Oldhammer this week which did take up some time and some budget I did manage to progress on the Dark Angels for 11th. One of the problems though is when you are part of the way into a project and find a piece that brings things to a screeching halt and forces you to reconsider how you want to proceed - and by "you" I mean "me". In this case I was working on a unit of Bladeguard Vets to give the army some melee punch and also to give the captain a unit to lead. My BGV were originally allocated to the Templars but all I had done was build them and spray them black so it was not a big deal to reassign them to the new (old) chapter. Then I ran across a picture online where someone had put winged helmets on their BGVs and it looked really good ...

Winged helmets are a thing with Dark Angels especially on their leaders but I figured the veterans might have them too. Poking around a bit I found these:

That's just too good of a look to not do it so a batch of these is making its way here. My Armageddon captain and standard bearer's heads both popped back off so I can make the change there easy enough but the BGVs I have now ... there's no way. I tried. So the first set will likely be reallocated back to the Templars and a new squad  - with nifty helmets - joins the Unforgiven. I don't really need a second unit and I'd want them to match the others so it's better to put them back in the non-winged-helmet-army. If I need more elite melee Dark Angels there are always the hooded and robed inner circle vets.

With that many wing-heads available that also means my jump pack vanguard vets will likely have them too, and maybe some sternguard vets if I pull together a unit of them as well. For this army it could just be a standard for the leaders and veterans to have them - we will have to see if I can sustain that over time. Now should I take it down to the veteran sergeant level? Have to ponder that - might be too much of a good thing.

I did manage to finish building and basecoating the hellblasters - all heads and backpacks accounted for, sprayed, and attached. So there's a unit ready for the rest of the paint. I picked up an apothecary for the unit as that's an important add-on for a unit that can blow themselves up regularly. They will also have some version of Azrael the chapter master as he is way too useful to not put him in there. I might give in and buy the new one but I'm still leaning towards using one of the versions I have already. 

There is still plenty of work to do but I  feel like I'm figuring it out. 

Also: Obligatory Grey Knights Update:

Special reflection appearance by Nelson Doggo

That's two Dreadknights added since the last update so the finishing continues. It's at least a useable force now with 5 strike squads (probably more than I need honestly). an interceptor squad (need more), 3 terminator/paladin squads, a dreadnought, the 2 dreadknights, and some characters over on the right. Still more to do but I'm happy with the amount of progress I am making.

40K Thursday: Retrograde or "7th Edition?"

 

So after the game last weekend Blaster mentions that he's been looking into 40K again recently - he hasn't played a game since 9th - and while he despises 10th/11th edition (too many cards, too many changes for no good reason) he is interested in trying an old edition again. We discussed that option for a bit and settled on 7th, last of the 3rd edition inheritor generations. Now I won't try to tell you that 7th is the best or my favorite but I am always open to playing a prior edition of the game and if it gets my kid* interested in playing again I'm all for it. His run with the game was 5th thru 8th - and we played a lot when he lived at home and we had Red and Who as well - so somewhere in that range made the most sense. As a throwback here's my take on 7th at the time.

So, interest declared it was time for dad to dust off the stacks and see what I had from 7th. I still had all of my books from then but exactly which book did I have? This was 10 years ago and I have added armies since then so I had some figuring to do. Besides the codexes 7th also had a set of cards for each army - most of them anyway - so I had to take a look at those too.

Objectives & Psychic Powers - useful but not necessary. With four of us in the house playing back then it was an easy call to pick them up. Plus they were handy stocking stuffers.

As it turns out I had a pretty good swath of them and we still have all of those armies so that's good. But ... I added Grey Knights with 8th, Necrons & Imperial Knights with 9th, and Tyranids with 10th. Imperial Guard has been a factor since 6th but I did sell that army off at one point and I must have let the codex go too because it's not here. Plus Harlequins became a separate army with this edition too but I never picked up the book. I was also missing the cards for some of these so ...I mean you can't expect a man to play without the rules for all of his toys ... off to eBay I went!

It is surprisingly cheaper to get into 40K - when it comes to the rulebooks anyway - as they hit the ten year old mark. I suspect the 10-15 year mark is when they bottom out before becoming nostalgia items for some people and the prices begin to climb a bit. Almost everything is still findable online at a pretty reasonable price. I make no guarantees on the miniatures though - that's a whole different animal and might best be acquired at the "army" level. 

The fun part is that nearing the finish line of "completing" my Grey Knights force it is almost completely useable in 7th as-is. The line was redone for 5th edition and has had just a few additions here and there over the intervening years. It's a good feeling knowing a lot of it is likely to be revamped in 11th but what I have is still perfect for any version from 5th to "index" 11th - plus OPR of course. 

As the poster boys for 6th and 7th the Unforgiven actually got a new codex for each one 

It's a little less perfect with the Dark Angels I've also been working on as all of that primaris stuff is out but all of my older firstborn units now have a potential use beyond OPR and memories. Rediscovering those units with an actual chance to get them on the table has been a lift this week.

So anyway there's the unexpected turn for this week. Tomorrow I'll get back to the new stuff.

*At some point I should probably stop calling him a kid since he's now in the upper half of his 20's now with a college degree, a full time job/career, a wife, and a baby. It's a hard habit to break though. I did stop calling him "Apprentice" here on the blog a while back so I have made some progress. 

Necessary Evil Session Zero Coming Up

 

This weekend we will wrap up or expedition to deal with The Emerald Enchanter in Variable Dave's Dungeon Crawl Classics campaign. It's been a lot of fun and since the 0-level funnel we've only lost one character. It happened to be the guy with the possessed sword so that initiated an immediate debate on who was going to pick it up to be the new unpredictable combat monster - right as we head in to the final confrontation (we think) with the Enchanter himself. Hopefully it all goes well.

Once we finish that we will put DCC on the shelf for a while and have our Session Zero conversation for Necessary Evil. I don't worry about this kind of thing before every campaign kicks off but I do like to have an official one with a supers campaign to a) work out technical power details and make sure everyone understands how their characters work and what some of the limits might be and b) to work out everyone's connections to the setting. For example, here are the ten questions I am hitting my players with for this one:

Questions about your character:

1. Origin Story – how did you get your powers?

2. Why did you become a villain?

3. What did you do before the invasion? What kind of villain were you? What kind of jobs did you do or what kind of schemes did you plan?

4. Were you part of a team or mostly solo?

5. Who did you work with? 

6. Did you have any villainous rivals?

7. Did you have a nemesis or archenemy hero?

8. Were you ever caught and imprisoned?

9. What did you do during the invasion?

10. What have you been doing since the invasion?

I don't expect everyone to have ready answers to all of these. Some may not want to commit to everything and others will just not have thought about it all but I want to get the wheels turning and start making some connections between the PCs, other villains in the setting, and the heroes who may or may not have survived. Also, with the game starting after a lot of big events I want them to think about how their character reacted to them and how it changed their life.

I don't think we will be rolling dice on Saturday but I'll be ready just in case. There has been some chatter in the group this week as people start figuring out their character but there is some work yet to be done and that's my priority. 

Longer-term  It looks like I have 7 players lined up and we have 20 weekends left (after this one) so I think we should get 12-15 sessions done in what's left of 2026. Being a supers campaign I won't be cancelling if even half the group is out - you're supers, deal with it - but the holidays will interfere down the road so we will see how far we get. Once I get a feel for how quickly the various plot points move with this group I'll be able to figure it more accurately but the main thing is let's get rolling and see where it goes!

I also need a good name for the campaign that isn't "Necessary Evil" again. Still working on that. Open to ideas if anyone has any.

It's a cool adventure

Dungeons and Dragons and Warcraft

 

I admit I was not expecting to see this. Similar things have existed before but it's been awhile ...

The first edition from 2003

The second edition from 2005

It's an interesting concept. Notice the title on the first edition and the lack of "World of" - this was from 2003 and so pre-dates the whole WoW tidal wave of 2004. We had already had 3 games + expansions and there was clearly a lot of lore in and behind these games, then WoW came along and blew things wide open, and that plus the 3.5 D&D update got us to a second edition and a new title for the game. The wiki has much more information on it so I won't bog down here.

If you were there you might remember that this was not the first MMORPG to make the jump to tabletop:

circa 2002

And yes they did an update for it titled Everquest II which had launched in 2004 as well. There were multiple books here and it's probably pretty interesting if you're heavily into EQ lore. There is a wiki for this as well.

I don't own any books for Warcraft (or Everquest). I wasn't into either game when they came out (though I had played a lot of Warcraft and WarCraft II in prior years) and I was busy running and playing third edition Realms, Greyhawk, Kalamar, Scarred Lands, and homebrew stuff so I did not feel like I needed another setting. If someone else had wanted to run it I'm sure I would have given it a whirl but it never came up. 

Since those days I have had some pretty lengthy runs in WoW (and in EQ2 for that matter). As popular as the game got I am a little surprised it took another 20 years to get a tabletop RPG version of it. Even if they hadn't piggybacked on D&D and made their own version or licensed it to some other system - honestly some version of Pathfinder seems like a great candidate for that - I thought years ago that there was enough of a potential player base in the dedicated WoW fandom that it could be viable. Now in 2026 or 2027 here it comes. 

Being a leaked book it's hard to tell what it's going to encompass just yet but I'll speculate a bit. 

• Azeroth has a ridiculous amount of lore built up at this point including various world-ending threats which honestly makes it a pretty good fit for the over the top power levels of modern D&D at even low-medium levels. I don't think we have a system-fit/setting-fit problem here.
• I think there is enough information and enough space in the setting that you could publish a series of books, say one on each of the major continents of the world, and really crank out some great setting detail. A lot of your D&D players would love it, and a lot of WoW fans would love to have a nice big full-color hardback detailing places in the game after 20 years of build-up. 
• There are enough WoW/MMO system quirks you could also put out a supplement of some kind talking through some common MMO concepts for PC's as well as discussing how to do Boss Fights in a tabletop game the way WoW does them. Then you could close it out with a big section of well-known classic WoW bosses and examples of how they would work on the tabletop using those mechanics described earlier. 
• Rather than the geographical approach you could take a timeline approach and after getting a basic Azeroth book out there you could publish a book on say, the Legion Invasion: Timing, impacts on the world, new monsters, and then something like a plot point campaign (from Savage Worlds) to let players deal with the invasion, push back, and then finally defeat it. This would also let you work in some regional details as each expansion like this tends to focus on a specific area of the world. This would be more like the approach MWP was taking with Marvel Heroic doing things like the Civil War and Annihilation events, which I still think would have been a great plan. 

Anyway - there's a lot of what they might or could do. What do I think they will actually do? Probably not much of any of those. Every other campaign setting for D&D during the 5.0 & 5.5 lifespan has gotten 1 or 2 books, period. I don't know that WOTC wants to open up to a multi-book ongoing product line for a licensed setting, even for WoW. A smaller company might see this as a good base to build an entire game line around. I think WOTC will see it as a nice one-time add-on and then get back to the main focus and the next one-off supplement. I don't like it but that seems to be how they operate these days. I'd love to see them do more but I don't think it will get that level of attention or effort. I suspect that it will be one or two books, maybe a slipcase deal like Planescape or Spelljammer, and it will mainly focus on tweaking D&D classes and PC abilities to WoW, mainly through subclasses, plus some lore, plus some monsters. It won't be bad, it will just be way less than what a lot of people would like. That said I would be happy to be completely wrong here.  

So how interested would I be? 

Would I play it? Sure. If one of my crew said they wanted to start up a new D&D WoW campaign I'd be up for that.

Would I run it? Well, I'm not sure I'm the right guy for that, but if my crew all thought it sounded cool and asked me to, well, yes. If you can get most of your players to ask you to run a game that you are even moderately interested in then you have to grab that opportunity.

So I'll be watching this one with some interest. Hopefully it's a solid effort and makes some people happy and adds some interesting things to the game.

Miniatures, Bases, Beastmen, and Hassles

 

One of the challenges of being involved with miniature wargames is basing. It's been a question for a long time, sometimes tied to questions of scale. Do you build your Pictish army in 15mm or 25mm? Then once you decide that are you going to base it for DBA/DBM, WRG Ancients, or some other game. if you're lucky your favorite game, or one of the popular ones, will be on smaller bases and some other game of interest will be on bigger bases meaning you can use sabot bases which is a fancy term for putting a larger base underneath the smaller base to increase the footprint to the proper size. In many games you can actually mix scales if the basing is correct, which can look pretty weird when someone's 6mm Gauls go up against someone else's 15mm Early Imperial Romans but I get it. Do you want to play a game right now? Even if it is Romans vs. blue-painted hobbits? Sometimes you just have to roll with it.

With the Warhammer family of games - and a lot of modern miniature games really - this attitude is less present. I blame it on the competitive-first mindset that's become so prevalent over the last decade or so. A lot of us play these same games far more casually, more "narratively", but so much of the focus online is on tournament stuff and efficiency and point costs that people forget that's not the only way to play the game and one of the sticking points is basing.

So space marines and orks originally came on 25mm bases. Ten years or so ago the went to 32mm round bases. Now leader characters for marines are mostly on 40mm bases, even if they are not in terminator armor, and some leaders have gone to 50mm rounds. My beloved Captain Banderas of the Crimson Fists started on a 25mm and got moved to a 32mm and now ... will probably stay there as I have bigger Primaris versions with a similar look that would fit on those much larger bases without looking lost in that space. 

Old Azrael

In casual play it doesn't really matter - and realistically game-play-wise it doesn't really matter - but people can get snippy about it. It doesn't really matter because smaller bases let you pack more figures into a smaller space - this can be important in a big melee fight - while bigger bases block some figures out. In contrast if your unit has aura abilities, with a radius effect, a larger base will let them cover more area on the table. So yes a marine character on a larger base can do leader effects over a bigger area but gets blocked out of some combats if they are part of a squad. There is actually some balance there but there is still some community pressure to put your models on whatever the current official base size happens to be. My metal Chapter Master Azrael of the Dark Angels came on a 25mm. Later I put him on a 32mm to modernize, as I did with the 6th edition starter set Captain that looked an awful lot like Azrael but was plastic and slightly bigger. Then somewhere in 9th or 10th they put out a new Azrael and he's on a 50mm base. (insert furrowed brow here) As much as I would be fine continuing to use one of my older models it just looks silly putting Old Az on a base of that size. So at some point I will probably break down and buy the new one - I'll grumble about it, but I will probably do it.

New Azrael

The other challenge is when they just change up the whole damn thing. I built a lot of armies for original Warhammer Fantasy Battles. Those were on square bases, typically 20mm and 25mm for infantry. In 2015 they killed off WHFB and launched Age of Sigmar with round bases. Now it's been long enough this doesn't make me angry today on its own but the aftershocks still rumble through. 

Around 2023 we had been playing around with some AOS and I decided I might as well unify my Beastman army that had been in various stages of development since the old WHFB days. So I pulled a bunch of Gors - the main Beastman troop type - off of their square bases and put them on rounds. This was some 40+ of them so it took some time. I picked up some other units too, building them all on the current round or oval bases for Sigmar. 

Then in early 2024 the rumors started up and were eventually confirmed that spring: The "Beasts of Chaos" were being dropped from Age of Sigmar. They were being added to The Old World, which was sort of good news as I was interested in the new version of the old game, but it also meant I would need to look at rebasing a bunch of stuff less than a year after rebasing them the first time. 

No, I was not happy. 

No, I still haven't rebased them ... but I'm looking at it because a bunch of them are painted and playable and would be good to get on the table again.

One of the main expediters of this is the creation of movement tray expanders. I've talked about these before when discussing using my old armies as Old World bumped up base sizes too, of course: all the old 20mm based figs are now on 25's, and the 25's mostly went to 30mm bases. Well, they also make them to convert round bases to fit in the footprint that a square-based unit would take. I already had them so I printed one out for my 50mm based Bullgors (minotaurs) and yes! - they fit perfectly! Now I've printed out some that adapt 32mm bases so my Bestigors are viable. No rebasing needed!

The only real dilemna here is with the Gors - of course the most numerous unit in the force would be the problematic one. Gors, years ago, were on 25mm square. Sigmar moved them to 32mm round. With Old World, for various reasons, they left them on 25s instead of bumping them to 30s like every other larger infantry unit. You can fit 32s into the space for 30s, but you can't fit 32s into the space for 25s. Looking at how almost everything else in the army needs minimal work I am leaning heavily towards bending the official rules and just leaving them on their round 32s. It saves me a ton of work, potential damage to painted figures, and the only reason I can see that they left the 25s in was to allow one specialty army to combine Gors and Ungors (a lighter, weaker type of beatman) in a single unit. I don't really care about doing that so I'm not hurting my options. I also don't trust GW not to put them on 30mm bases anyway in a year or two so that decision is probably made. 

I have to admit this is giving me some ideas now ...

So yes, when not working on the 40K stuff I do dip into the fantasy side and try to make some progress. Movement trays and adapters and similar utility aids are a great reason to have a 3D printer around but even if you don't they are widely available online and it's a great feeling when you realize you can just put some new shoes on an old army and go.