Time of Crisis Completed!

 

Well we wrapped up our jump into Mutants and Masterminds last weekend and it went pretty well. I had one last minute miss (Providence's player) but Heavy Metal finally made it back after missing an entire arc.  To recap the structure of Time of Crisis:

• There is a kickoff involving a robbery by a team of villains at a casino. It's well done but I replaced it with a bank robbery involving fewer villains and more mooks since some of my players were new to the system and the rest of us were shaking off some rust. 
• Then most of the omniverse is destroyed but the characters are pulled into a surviving fragment by a powerful entity and given the task of saving it all by hunting down and disabling a set of cosmic bombs created by Omega, Lord of the Terminus. This involves traveling to various parallel earths and dealing with the inhabitants while searching for this larger goal. 
• One setting is the classic scenario where America lost WW2 and is now occupied. It's a chance to punch Nazis and fight various villains, robot tanks, and help the Resistance, and possibly set up a brighter future. Special guest star: Dr. Tomorrow. 
• Another setting is Earth-Ape which ... you knowwhat's coming, right? Another comic book trope where the world is inhabited by intelligent apes instead of humans and yes you do eventually get to save the world here. Special guest star: The Primate Patrol
• The third setting is pretty much a Mirror Universe where the good guys are all bad guys and run things for their own personal benefit. It's "The Tyranny Syndicate" in place of the Freedom League and one man, a villain in the normal Freedom-verse, is the lone superhero. You have a chance to change some things up here too. Special guest star: Mind-Master.
• The final chapter is back at home on Earth Prime, home of Freedom City and the League and the other heroes and villains of the Freedomverse. This is also a showdown with Omega himself, coming to make sure his final bomb completes its mission. Being a Power Level 19 character facing a bunch of Power Level 10 characters it could be pretty one-sided but their prior experiences give the team some tools that give them a fighting chance.

  It was a lot of fun and all of my players liked it. We spent 10 sessions working through it and after having tried to run it multiple times over many years we actually managed to finish it this time, and with an appropriately climactic battle against Omega. People were battered, bad guys were beaten, and in the end the Lord of the Terminus went down to concentrated efforts and smart thinking by my players. Some high points:

• Our first parallel world was Earth-Ape and everyone got a kick out of the inhabitants, the heroes, and the terrible, terrible puns scattered throughout this adventure. Boom Gun Brandon was back in town for this and got to play a Glitter Boy from Rifts which made him happy even if the "boom" effect that happened to everyone around him every time he fired made everyone else less happy. Definitely a feature to be worked on in the future. After the main villain went down an attack by an Omega drone - part of how the GB ended up here - gave everyone one more chance to show off their combat skills and to team up with the recovering Primate Patrol. This is also where our two tech-genius heroes figured out how to defuse the bomb for the first time.

• We went to Occupied America next and this part gave U.S. Patriot a chance to make a -lot- of speeches about America ... to everyone within earshot, accompanied by various renditions of the Star-Spangled Banner courtesy of Heavy Metal. It was cracking all of us up so it was a fun run.

• Next-to-last was Evil Earth which opened with a fight against their own evil selves. Heavy Metal was not present for this one - but his evil doppelganger was! Taking down the team's toughest member was an interesting exercise and White-Out was very on-board with razzing him for a) not being at this fight and b) letting him know who it was that finally took him out (it was White-Out). While fighting the evil Freedom League Thunderbolt (evil Captain Thunder) was tanking almost the entire team and frustrating them more than a little bit. Later, the team made a really good effort to reform Mind-Master who was ready to blow his own world away regardless of whether Omega was the source of it or not. This was probably the most interesting run of all.

• In the finale they tracked down the bomb fairly quickly so we spent most of the session's game-time working through the fight. The whole thing happens in a park where there is a giant statue of Centurion and with Patriot having a personal connection with Centurion it was a great location for drama. Once they figured out Omega's weakness ... well the fight did not last long. He hurt some of them in the process but they had multiple rods (IYKYK) and were not afraid to use them. Soon enough the city, the world, and the omniverse were saved, thanks were exchanged, missing heroes reappeared, and the movie was over. 

Since we had some time left, I started the discussion on how they felt about the system and if they wanted to continue the game as a more traditional superhero game. We went around the table and while they liked it, I would phrase it as they didn't love it. One comment was that it dragged a fair amount in combat. As we talked through things it became apparent that there were some other options that interested them more than "more" M&M. 

I had pretty much expected this as I felt like I was probably the most excited person at the table for most of this campaign. There were bursts of excitement here and there as the game went on but I never felt that next level of interest coming from my crew. That tipping point where they are consistently talking about the system amongst themselves away from the table just never quite ignited. It's interesting because I was feeling overwhelmed when we started but by the last few sessions I was finally feeling it and seeing the possibilities for a real, ongoing campaign. Not this time though.

As for me I was happy to make some kind of run with this game again as it has been a long time. M&M is a hugely important game to me and to anyone who loves supers campaigns - even if they don't play it or like it - as it has become "the standard" IMO for most players - especially if they've never played Champions. It's been a consistent long-term presence with a lot of stability as far as rules and availability. I know that I could have done a better job in several ways - mainly rules mastery and keeping things flowing during the game. It would have had more impact if we had spent more time getting to know Freedom City before blowing up the multiverse but I wasn't going to risk not getting to do it. That said I'm not kicking myself over anything in particular. I do really like the game and I especially like the level of support it has for actually running the game. From NPCs to creatures to equipment to locations there is a large set of pre-built things to throw into your game and with a supers game that is especially important.

That said I'm probably not quite as in love with it myself as I was ten years ago. I think it's a great game but one does have to guard against some "sameyness" leaking in when you have a bunch of characters at the same power level. The trappings and descriptors matter. The combat can drag a bit as the team stacks bruises on a villain and hopes for failed saves on other effects. Some of the powers, particularly Afflictions, can be tricky to decipher and distill into "what does this look like when it's fired off?" I think with more in the system this would be less of a problem but there is a definite curve to get through to where the mechanics take less processing power and more can be devoted to "style." I doubt I have run my last game of M&M, probably not even my last game of 3rd edition, but I'm OK setting it aside for now. 

So what did we decide to do? Well the siren's call of D&D did not take hold but the siren's call of Savage Worlds and the prospect of a complete run of Necessary Evil did make it through. I'm happy with it as it's a)more supers-action and b) a chance to complete yet another thing we have started before but never finished! With some schedule choppiness ahead Variable Dave is going to run some Dungeon Crawl Classics for a session or 3 - so I actually get to play something - and then in June we will head back to Star City and kick off Necessary Evil: The Third Attempt!

Yep, right over there ...

40K Friday: The Imperial Fists Update

 

 Well I talked about it briefly in this post and as it turns out an update was entirely achievable by adding a pair of Redemptor Dreadnoughts ... so I did! It ends up with 3 characters, 3x shooty Terminator squads, 3x Assault Terminator squads, a Land Raider, and the two dreads. There is room to add an enhancement or two, or I could change Darnath to a regular Terminator Captain and take either another Chaplain or Librarian for exactly 2000 points. The army list is down below.

Is this a balanced force? No. Once they hit the ground the Terminators will be slow. Deep striking does give them some initial mobility, and the Land Raider could get them up the board on turn 1 a bit, but there is no speed here. The main anti-tank are the dreads and the tank - beyond that it gets a little thin. 

There is room to change things up even further by dropping the Land Raider or changing out some of the Dreadnoughts for a Balistus or a Brutalis which are cheaper and more specialized. Right now this is almost everything I have unless we went Legends. I could also expand it beyond just Terminators using the more modern definition of the Deathwing or First Company to include Primaris units like Bladeguard and other veterans, plus a Repulsor or two. Also the detachment structure in 11th edition might make it smart to move some bikes back in - we will see. But this is what I have painted now so this is what the army will look like for some time.  

I need to do some work on the bases and with some decals to make it look more cohesive but at least i have all of the parts and all of it is painted!

Background: I bought most of this force as a painted army around 13-14 years ago and I played it quite a bit when I first got it - how did I never post about it? Wait ... I did! Tags updated! I added to it over the years here and there and just never worried about it too much. I loved the idea of an all-terminator army so I kept with that theme. It was built under the 4th/5th edition Dark Angel Deathwing army rules so it did have a pair of bike units (Ravenwing you know) - which I have used many times as they add some mobility to it but the core has always been 30+ Terminators dropping or driving into the fight. Sure, the newer termies are bigger, but they still all look like termies and that's what matters to me. This was the first time I bought a complete army already painted and I have never regretted it. It makes me very happy to be able to continue using it pretty much as-is with the same theme all these years later. 

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

+ FACTION KEYWORD: Imperium - Adeptus Astartes - Imperial Fists

+ DETACHMENT: 1st Company Task Force (Extremis-level Threat)

+ TOTAL ARMY POINTS: 1930pts

+ WARLORD:  Darnath Lysander

+ NUMBER OF UNITS: 12

+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++

1x Chaplain in Terminator Armour (75 pts): Crozius arcanum, Storm bolter

1x Darnath Lysander (100 pts): Warlord, Fist of Dorn

1x Librarian in Terminator Armour (75 pts): Force weapon, Smite

1x Land Raider (220 pts): Armoured Tracks, 2x Godhammer Lascannon, Hunter-killer missile, Multi-melta, Storm bolter, Twin heavy bolter

1x Redemptor Dreadnought (205 pts): Icarus Rocket Pod, Redemptor Fist, Macro Plasma Incinerator, Heavy Flamer, Twin Storm Bolter

1x Redemptor Dreadnought (205 pts): Icarus Rocket Pod, Redemptor Fist, Macro Plasma Incinerator, Heavy Flamer, Twin Storm Bolter

5x Terminator Assault Squad (180 pts)

• 1x Assault Terminator Sergeant: Storm Shield, Thunder Hammer

• 4x Assault Terminator: 4 with Storm Shield, Thunder Hammer

5x Terminator Assault Squad (180 pts)

• 1x Assault Terminator Sergeant: Storm Shield, Thunder Hammer

• 4x Assault Terminator: 4 with Storm Shield, Thunder Hammer

5x Terminator Assault Squad (180 pts)

• 1x Assault Terminator Sergeant: Storm Shield, Thunder Hammer

• 4x Assault Terminator: 4 with Storm Shield, Thunder Hammer

5x Terminator Squad (170 pts)

• 4x Terminator

    1 with Chainfist, Cyclone missile launcher, Storm bolter

    3 with Power fist, Storm bolter

• 1x Terminator Sergeant: Storm bolter, Power fist

5x Terminator Squad (170 pts)

• 4x Terminator

    1 with Chainfist, Cyclone missile launcher, Storm bolter

    3 with Power fist, Storm bolter

• 1x Terminator Sergeant: Storm bolter, Power fist

5x Terminator Squad (170 pts)

• 4x Terminator

    1 with Chainfist, Assault Cannon

    3 with Power fist, Storm bolter

• 1x Terminator Sergeant: Storm bolter, Power fist

Campaign Pondering: The Rest of the Year

 

As the Time of Crisis proceeds - I know I haven't kept up with it here, I'll get around to it at some point - I've really started to think where we might go after it ends. One of the advantages of starting off a new system with a sort of mini-campaign like this adventure is that it does end - and that gives us a chance to think about what we want to do next. Warning: blatant thinking-out-loud post ahead ...

My original plan was to use this run to get everyone up to speed on the setting and the mechanics and then roll into a more traditional supers campaign for the rest of the year. We've had 8 sessions and will probably end up with around 12 total by the end and while I think everyone is enjoying it I'm not sure there is enough energy there to keep everyone excited and interested for another 6+ months. I have asked them to think about it as we play through the last chapters of the adventure so we will see.

In case they want to do something different then I've been working through a list of other options. I figure these will still be useful down the road when we start talking about next year so they are not a complete waste of time even if we stick with M&M.

• Some kind of D&D type fantasy - it's always a popular choice and knowing this I've been contemplating all kinds of things. 
• System-wise it could be another round of Tales of the Valiant, D&D 2024, 13th Age 2E, Pathfinder 2E. Might be a side-step into DCC, Dragonbane, or WFRP. I might even run some older edition if enough people want it. An AD&D 2E Realms game sounds like fun to me lately, though that's with zero details worked out.
• Setting-wise I've been thinking a lot about an old-school Dalelands campaign set in the Realms, which we have never played in this group. Zhents, Myth Drannor, Drow poking into surface business ... it's almost a cliche at this point but if you've never played it, just heard about it, well then it's not truly a cliche is it? I'd also love to do something with the Scarred Lands. I've been looking at the MTG books for D&D - Ravnica and Theros - and considering what those might look like. Heck, I might even consider running an Eberron game and that's just not a thing I've ever really considered before.
• We all love Savage Worlds here and it does just run. I might turn 2026 into a year of supers and a year of finishing old business by running Necessary Evil to completion. I've started it twice and never finished, much like Time of Crisis,  so it would be a solid victory to finally see that happen.  Beyond that Savage Rifts is always high on my people's lists and some kind of fantasy campaign using these rules has come up before as well. 
• Games I have never run for this group: There are 3 ...
• Shadowrun - Blaster was just talking about magic systems other than D&D and this one would certainly open up his mind to other possibilities
• Gamma World - Wild post-apoc. Might use 2nd, might use 4th, have to nail that down later.
• Twilight 2000 - Brutal post-apoc. Probably use the latest rules to see how they work.
• Wild Cards: Stars Without Number, Cyberpunk, the 40K RPG, the Trinity Continuum games ... there are a few that pop up now and again but never seem to have enough interest to draw in the whole group.

Nopes: No one talks about Star Wars or Star Trek these days here so I'm not going to push them. Same with Traveller. I could happily run any of them but the home team just is not crazy about these for some reason.

Part of the challenge is that unless I frame it as a limited run campaign or a tryout everyone knows that we are committing to at least six months of a particular game, typically more like a year or two to get to  a finishing point. I think this causes them to weigh things out from a different perspective than a limited run. Mine also tends to be the only game that's running on a regular schedule so you have to think about whether you want, say.  "Lancer" to be the only regular RPG in your life through 2027 versus D&D or Savage Worlds.

The first thing to do is get a read on continuing M&M and then see how we all feel about going in different directions. Whatever the preferred mechanics, I probably have a setting, and whatever the preferred setting I probably have a system that will work for it. It's a good problem to have regardless.

The Monday Post

 

New arrivals and now this is my new band name: "KRAVEK MORNE AND THE MUTILATORS"!

RPG Numbers: What 's the Third Biggest RPG?

There was a decent discussion on EN World over the past week about indie RPGs - and it seems anything outside of WOTC or Paizo qualifies as "indie" to some - and the conversation turned to numbers, as in "what are the biggest games out there?" This got some wheels turning and turned into this post. 

First up I will say that if you're running a tabletop game with your friends none of this probably matters. If I am running say Mongoose Traveller or FFG Star Wars or 2d20 Star Trek then sales figures or popularity numbers of those games or any others really don't matter and they aren't going to affect what I do each week. People seem to be very interested in scoring or ranking these kinds of things but it really has very little impact on playing and running games*. 

When people get to discussing this aspect of the hobby I think it is very important to distinguish two things:

• There is the biggest selling game at any given time.
• There is the most played game at any given time.

It is completely possible, and I would say likely, that there are two different answers to those. Well, aside from "D&D" which tends to dominate both regardless, followed by "Pathfinder". The other part of the question is "how do we measure either of those?" How do we come up with numbers on what people are playing and how do we truly know what's selling?

People in the business side of the hobby are probably more concerned with the sales question but the problem is that no one really knows. Individual game companies know what they are selling. Individual game stores know what is selling for them. Amazon knows what's selling. There is no industry-wide reporting with any real data. 

I know about ICV2 and their quarterly reports. They've been around for decades and they've been cited as some kind of industry standard for a long time but their data is so flawed and incomplete that I feel it's incredibly misleading to draw major conclusions from it. The two biggest players in the RPG market are WOTC and Paizo and both of them have significant direct sales to consumers - heck Paizo built their core business model on it. None of that data is included in those reports. Amazon sales are not a part of those reports. I believe DTRPG is also not included in their data. Their miniature game reporting has a similar flaw in that Games Workshop does significant direct sales and maintains their own chain of retail stores around the world yet none of that data is included in ICV2 reporting. When a major chunk of sales for the biggest players in the industry are not covered that's a major flaw. That's just the start of my problems with that data and that reporting.

So we don't have a real big picture view of RPG industry sales. We have a lot of anecdotal stuff and we have companies mentioning that, as a fictional example, 2025 was the best year ever for Deadlands! Great! What does that mean? It tells us nothing in comparison to other games. 

Then you get into the how we would differentiate the games even if we had more data. Do we track everything for Savage Worlds and rank that? Do we break it into the various game lines like Deadlands, Savage Pathfinder, Savage Rifts? What about 3rd party products - do they add on to the  total for the whole game or do they count separately? Do all of the Free League's games count together? Are the Year Zero engine games grouped up separately from say Dragonbane? It's tricky. You might get a significant number of people playing Year Zero, or Savage Worlds, or 2d20 as systems but the individual games might be too small rank very high. There's a lot to consider, even if you had complete information, when it comes to "what is the number 3 best selling RPG right now?".

And again, how relevant or important this really is to anyone other than those trying to sell them is debatable.

Then we get to the question of what people are playing right now - which I think is regularly very different than what people are buying right now. A fair number of RPG players tend to be wrapped up in ongoing campaigns of varying lengths which means a book that you buy today may not hit the table for weeks or months or even years. 

A personal example: I added the Tales of the Valiant Player's Guide 2 to my shelf recently. I ran Tales for a year and a half but it ended in November. I'm not sure when I will run it again. I'm happy about the purchase but I'm not playing that game right now. Conversely I am running Mutants and Masterminds right now and will be for at least a little while longer, maybe the rest of the year. I haven't bought a book for it in quite a while ... looks like since the Kickstarter for the Reprint Extravaganza which was summer 2023. Astonihsing Adventures Assembled was that same summer so either way that was my last pick-up. I did back the 4th Edition Kickstarter so maybe that should count - we're back to "how do we count these?" with various editions of a game now entering the mix. 

This also touches on Kickstarters - there's a potential built-in delay there too as it often takes time for the rules to come out, even PDFs with some games. Even once it funds it might be weeks or months before anyone can even try to play it and not everyone will do that. 

People do try to look at online play platforms to see what's popular but many of those cater to certain games more than others and there are still a whole lot of people who do not play online so at best you're getting another limited snapshot of what's being played. 

I've seen others bring up convention numbers - what games are being offered? What games are filling up?  It's another limited data point. For example if I went to a convention this weekend I suppose I might sign up for an M&M game, but if I signed up for 3 games over the course of a weekend I am 100% sure that the other two would be something else, and at least one might well be something new that I have not played before. Does a one-off count as "playing"? It should count for something as that means interest and engagement but it's not exactly the same as a game being used in a running campaign.

So I have far more questions than answers here and a lot more obstacles than solutions. For a relatively small industry it is very challenging to draw any useful conclusions from the available information. 

*I do wonder if some of this is driven by people who don't have a current game but want to sound informed about the scene so they need to be able to say "Hey did you know XYZ is the 3rd biggest RPG right now"? Maybe it's something else but my preferred response there is "And ...? What do you play?". 

40K Friday - Iron Warriors vs. Ultramarines

 

In addition to building some updated units for my chaos marines I managed to get a game in with them over the past weekend. This time was against Boom-Gun Brandon's Ultramarines.

The kid has been remarkably consistent with both his army and its composition - possibly because he only has the one army - but he has started building Tau and he's always free to borrow units from my marine forces so he has some options now and will have more in the future.

This was a 2000 point dawn of war deployment (start on the long sides of the table) with a "hold some objectives" type primary and the normal "draw some cards" secondary. I did not take as many pictures as I usually so I won't try to turn it into a battle report here but it was fun. 

The Ultras had Guilliman, Captain Titus, a squad of shooty terminators, a squad of assault terminators, some assault intercessors, two aggressor squads each led by a gravis captain, some bladeguard, then his heavy hitters: A Redemptor dread, a Balistus dread, and a Repulsor executioner.

My IWs went tank-heavy. The main reason was that I wanted this to be an all-painted force, up to date, etc, and all of my old infantry are still on 25s. So it was pretty ridiculous: 3 Predators, 3 Helbrutes, 2 Vindicators, a leviathan dread, a daemon prince, a Heldrake (I know, right?), and then a squad of chaos terminators led by a terminator chaos lord. So I was definitely outnumbered but certainly not outgunned.

HELLOOOO BAAAAYBY!
(BANG!)

I actually won the first turn and started working on his anti-tank units. The predators blew up the balistus and both the redemptor and the executioner were at half wounds or less when I was done. 

The Ultras moved around quite a bit including running the executioner right up near one of the vindicators and dumping out his intercessors + Titus. he didn't manage to kill anything - my vindicator just barely survived the assault after being blasted by the executioner's big laser  - but he was sitting on his home objective plus the center so he was in scoring position early. 

Hello there!

My second turn I rearranged a bit myself and then blew up the executioner and the redemptor. I managed to shoot down the primarch as well but he did stand back up - of course! During my rearrangement I managed to move out of range of my home objective so my scoring fell off of a cliff here.  

Ultras second turn saw the Heldrake chosen as his Oath of Moment target and thus saw most of his army shooting at it and it managed to survive this with a few wounds left. Granted he was missing most of his real anti-vehicle weapons but he had a lot of lesser guns left. He still scored more points though. He also dropped in his terminators this turn.

Third turn and onward we mostly shot up each others remaining infantry. I blew away both aggressor squads and one of the gravis captains. His assault termies failed to kill a predator that was all by its lonesome on an objective and my killing one of them on the way in meant that we were tied for OC so neither of us got credit for it. He did finally manage to kill the damaged vindicator and he was pretty happy about that. 

One wound left - I can still nail the dread!

He ended up winning on points but I had done a lot more damage to his force so I still felt alright about it. It was pretty low scoring as we both mismanaged our secondaries in a big way. 

In the end I was pretty happy with the game. I got to dust off an army I haven't played in years and finally play them in 10th edition. A few more notes:

• I did forget to Dark Pact a lot - the perils of not playing very often - which probably lowered my offensive output. It's a cool ability when you remember to us eit.
• I took the iron warriors detachment (Fellhammer Siege Host) and its signature ability is a -1 to wound when you get shot by a gun with a strength higher than your toughness. Well, with a mostly tank army it was useful for the first two turns then ... not so much a I had eliminated his big guns and was mostly getting hit by various types of bolter and punched in melee. I still like it though.
• The Leviathan Dreadnought ... man I love these things. It's been a long time since I took one and the double-stormcannon setup is basically 4 twin-linked versions of the Predator's turret autocannon. It is really nasty and I am hoping now it's Legends status at least makes the jump to 11th so I can continue. I have 6 or more of the things spread across a few armies so ... yeah ... it's in the list as long as I can take it.

This has also encouraged me to continue with the modernizing as all of the vehicles are up to date, terminators are still on 40mm bases, and so painting up some legionaries, chosen, possessed, and some havocs will give me an up-to-date infantry force to go with them. It's maybe 35 models total, so I should be able to knock it out fairly quickly.

More to come ... 

Primarchs - still need to look both ways before crossing the street ...

40K Friday Off-Schedule Edition: Modernizing the Iron Warriors

 

The title pretty much says it - as I discussed here earlier I have quite a few chaos space marines painted up as Iron Warriors and a surprisingly large percentage of it is still the current production model. This is mostly the vehicles though - the infantry is all older and smaller.

The Helbrutes, Rhinos, Predators, and Vindicators (and the Heldrake!) are all still good. 

All of my actual marines though are the older style, aside from a few characters. 

Now I don't care that much about this state of affairs in general but unit options have changed too and the new hotness is building Chaos Marines for melee and almost all of mine are built for shooting so maybe it is actually ... finally ... time to look at upgrading things around here. At least I only need to consider the infantry, which is a plus. I do have some newer current stuff sitting in the IW box in a closet. I should probably start there. What I have is:

• Abaddon (we will get to him in a minute)
• The Hammer Lord on foot  (technically not the latest and greatest but still fairly recent)
• An unbuilt recently built Terminator Lord/Sorcerer kit (still technically current but likely to be replaced soon)
• A normal sorcerer (the current plastic kit)
• Fabius Bile
• A Master of Possession
• A Lord Discordant (how did I not build this guy already?)
• Some Daemon Princes ranging from the older metal kit to the now-older plastic kit (I loved that kit) to the newer plastic kit.
• Six of the newer monopose plastic Obliterators. I never got around to actually painting these. 
• A box of the newer Possessed
• 3 Venomcrawlers
• More Helbrutes
• A Defiler (now technically the Old Defiler since there's a new one coming out)

There's more - it's a bunch of stuff. There is however, precious little infantry in there. The MoP and the Possessed make a nice combo element but they aren't allowed in Rhinos anymore so what am I going to haul in those? Looks like I'm going to have to start with some legionaries!

That's cool - I like having "core troops" in my armies. I am not one of those "only the chrome" type army builders. If I build a box then I could make it into two 5-man squads with one going melee + chaos Lord and one going ranged + Sorcerer. There's a start. Of course I'm probably going to end up with at least 3 boxes but I'll try not to go for the crazy backlog right out of the gate. 

Then of course we have the other major modern infantry box - the Chosen. These are 5 to a box but have lots of equipment options and 3 wounds per trooper. I'm thinking this is where Fabius Bile comes in and leads a squad of these boys. This is a unit heavily slanted towards melee anyway so why not give them a buff character and put them in a Rhino too?

The other new kit I lack is the Havoc box. My existing Havocs are 3 or 4 squads of the old style marines like everything else and are all autocannons, missile launchers, or heavy bolters. Right now I would just blu-tac them to some 40mm bases but I think a box or two of these new-style troops are worthwhile down the road. Between all the tanks and helbrutes etc. I don't lack for heavy weapons but I think a Devastator squad equivalent has a place here somewhere. 

Mine are all from this era

I do also have 10 Terminators already. I think we are currently on the 3rd generation of plastic chaos terminators and mine are from the prior gen but they still look like Terminators so good enough.

So I believe this will be the core of my updated Iron Warriors. It is a lot of new kits but I'm not going to do it all in a week:

• 10-30 Legionaries (Picked up 10 this week)
• 5-10 Chosen 
• 5-10 Havocs
• 10 Terminators (Have 10 now)
• 5-10 Possessed (Have 5 now)
• 2-6 Obliterators (Have 6 now)
• Chaos Spawn (Have 5 now)
• A bunch of tanks and daemon engines (Have a bunch of these now)
• Add characters to taste (Have a bunch of these now too)

I have to figure out what to do with my Raptors and Bikes as they are technically current (though the Raptors just got a new kit in Kill Team) to add in some Fast Attack options (dating myself there). I like the idea of keeping a lot of my old stuff on their 25mm bases to use in old school games but the Raptors may have to join the modernized army for now. 

I think I have 4 of the old ones and I'm sure I will be adding at least one of the new ones down the road.

A side unit making occasional guest appearances would be Abaddon and a 5-man Terminator squad. I already have the termies and they are painted up as Black Legion so part of the work is already done. Could be a fun unit to add on for certain fights.

The other interesting part of Chaos Marine armies now is the whole sub-codex of cultists, weirder cultists, beastmen, traitor guardsmen and just a bunch of mortal infantry that feel like an entirely separate army. I have a couple of units of cultists left from the old 6th edition boxed set which I might add in at some point but I've just never been excited about adding in a bunch of weaker, unarmored troops to my glorious power armor & tanks force. It has gotten interesting now with all of the units they've added in (a traitor Comissar and his Ogryn Bodyguard? Really?) but I would lean towards it being a separate force most of the time. At least that's how I feel right now.  We will see once I get the IW's tuned up and finished out. 

Enough rambling for now - more chaos later.

40K Friday: In Which the Writer Loses All Focus

 

It's Spring and the miniature ADHD goes into full bloom! Oh Lord what have I done? Several factors at work here:

• Boom-Gun Brandon wants to play every time he comes into town now
• Some of the rest of the crew has started building 40K armies 
• 10th edition is in the wind-down phase now so what you have is what you're going to have as far as rules and datasheets and FAQs
• 11th edition is coming this summer which tends to ramp the energy levels up - and also increases anxiety over which units will be replaced or removed in the new edition

So this recent energy burst started up by looking at all my chaos armies and shifted into me mostly working on Grey Knights about a month ago and that continued for a couple of weeks. Then I started feeling some Firstborn Anxiety - the feeling and wondering mentioned above that I expect the next edition to pretty much finish off the older styled marines as they exist now, outside of Rhinos and Land Raiders. 

The smaller-guys replacement is just about complete with Chaos Marines as all of the major groups of units have been upscaled over the last 5-ish years. They won't get rid of the Rhino here - they may make a new kit but the Rhino as primary Chaos transport will live on and I expect the Land Raider to continue on as well. 

For loyalists, as much as a certain segment of players wants to see the marines go all grav-vehicle I think the Rhino and the Land Raider are just too iconic and too much a part of the game and the lore to drop. New models? Sure, maybe even "likely" at this point as these are 20+ year old kits. I wouldn't be upset if they just rolled the Horus Heresy kits into mainline 40K as those look great but I doubt they will do that for a variety of reasons. The bikes and speeders have been replaced already and they did not go retro with those. Anyway I am not as concerned about the vehicles here - it's mainly the infantry.

I have a lot of firstborn stuff. Some of it makes up a big chunk of my marine armies but I have a lot of unfinished projects, half-built units, squads on the sprue, stuff still in boxes ... it all was part of a plan at some point but right now it looks like kind of a mess. I should be focused on updating armies with some of the newer units but I'd really like to get some of the old stuff finished up too. 

So...

I spent over a week with all of my firstborn stuff pulled out on to the big game table and started going through it and figuring out what I actually had and who could use what parts. For example my Crimson Fists are pretty close to one old version of a Space Marine Battle Company so they need some more assault marines and some devastator marines and I can check that little box that's been in the back of my mind for a while. Predators and Vindicators are still totally useful and allowed (non-legended) in current 40K so let me count up how many parts and sprues and hulls I have and see if I can get those built and field-able. 

I am at well over 50 Rhino hulls of various types and marks at this point. Most of them are even painted. This is not something I set out to do.

Then it gets a little more complicated. Some of the infantry I have needs to be rebased if I'm going to stay current, mainly 25mm to 32mm. I've done it on several armies and it's not terribly enjoyable. While the rules could change down the road Rhinos and Razorbacks are not seeing a ton of use right now as Primaris marines can't ride in them - one of the few remaining separation type rules in the codexes. So I should probably keep them in my older armies but how many Rhinos do I need for one army? This is also true of something like a tactical squad - I have at least six of them (various editions and styles) sitting around unfinished but I don't really need all of those added to one army.  

This whole process ended up leading to a few conclusions:

• A lot of the old-school infantry  and vehicles are going to finish out whatever thoughts/plans/dreams I have for my Crimson Fists and Blood Angels. A few things are going to the Black Templars but I never really  prioritized them as a firstborn army so they get a smaller share. 
• My Dark Angels are definitely one of my retro armies - way too much old stuff there - but I am also bringing them out of mothballs and into active service, mainly via the Ravenwing/Deathwing options. I've picked up a few missing pieces, I will spray those this weekend, and suddenly I have a 2000 point Ravenwing army with options for Deathwing drop-in support. This should be fun.
• This still leaves me with a lot of uncommitted stuff so I am indulging in an old dream and building a Space Wolf Army! Specifically a 3rd to 6th edition type Space Wolf army - no primaris. I always wanted a Wolf army and I had collected some pieces way back but when Blaster got into 40K he immediately focused on the Wolves so I gave him what I had and sensibly stopped adding more space marine armies to focus on what I already had immediately started modernizing and expanding my Blood Angels. Well, he's been out of the house for a few years now so I wouldn't be stepping on his toes anymore. I'll talk more about Project Wolf in another post but I'm pretty happy to have a place to put my strays and orphans. Of course I did need some wolf components so I immediately went out and hunted down some of the now out of print 5th edition era space wolf kits ... some things never change. At least I know what my problem is. "It's like a free army because it's stuff I already had that I wasn't using" ... well, except for the new (old) stuff I went out and bought to really fill it out. 

Project initiated ...

I do feel good about getting all of it organized. Much like building my Tyranids, it's good to realize it's finite and to be able to see the boundaries of the firstborn stuff. It will be finished at some point. 

An unexpected side note to this as I looked through my stuff started when I realized Terminators new and old still pretty much look the same and that I could add a Redemptor or two to my Imperial Fists Deathwing army. Since dreads are considered Deathwing too they are a legitimate part of it lore-wise and it would give me some extra oomph in that force. So yeah, reversing the point of the entire effort there is one currently all-firstborn army that's jumping to effectively primaris. Miracles happen every day!  

More to come as I sort this out ...

Mutants & Masterminds Campaign Catch-Up

 

The M&M campaign is still going, I have just been slow to post about it here. We have six sessions in the books and are about halfway through the Time of Crisis. I will say the system familiarity does start to come back faster as we play more so I'm feeling way less rusty in sessions 5 & 6 than I was in the first few. I am really enjoying it and I think my players are too.

I am also feeling way more proficient with Hero Lab. This has been helpful with both running the game and with helping my players tune up their characters and spend their power points. This is the only game where I use Hero Lab since the demise of our Pathfinder campaigns years ago so if we are not playing M&M the rust accumulates. Coming at it with fresher eyes I do see where some of the complaints about it come from as it is not a modern "app" - the way powers are listed is not really intuitive in-play and sussing out what a power actually does can be a little tricky if you have no descriptive text. I will also say the tool tips help in some circumstances yet add very little in others. A lot of these issues come from them presenting generic, standard game information not a customized description based on the powers and modifiers particular to this character, but I suspect that kind of dynamic information would have been tough to do when this version of Hero Lab was created. Regardless, I can work with it and it does help me run the game better than if I did not have it.

We have had to miss a few weekends so beyond a massive 40K effort (I'll discuss it in a separate post) I have been trying to catch up on other RPG books that have piled up over the last six months or so. It's a weird habit but I do tend to pick up multiple large rulebooks at once and then let them sit on the shelf for months while I read other things. Then I look at the shelf full of unread rules for different systems and decide I need to read them all at once. Sometimes I do, and sometimes I do not as the drive to dive into a game I am not running, especially a dedicated rulebook and not an adventure, dwindles. I've added the Tales of the Valiant Player Core 2, some of the D&D 5.5 books, a couple of Pathfinder 2E books, some stuff from Savage Worlds, and then various Kickstarter tomes. What I need to be doing is going back through some of my M&M 3E books to brush up on those - since that's what we are actually playing - and I have been ... some. At times I do feel pulled in so many directions that it's tough to focus in on something long enough to knock it out but I am working on them. 

On a final note the M&M 4th Edition Kickstarter did wrap up with over $300,000 taken in. I'd say that's an encouraging number. It is a reminder of how niche the whole superhero RPG market is - the million dollar kickstarters are big D&D-related projects or have a well-known author behind them. The Deadlands kickstarter running at the same time took in a similar amount so I suppose I like the niche games. M&M had twice as many backers for a very similar amount of money which is interesting. Maybe I can take a look at that in a future post. I'm happy these both funded. The downside is that I don't want to look at any more 4th edition M&M rules stuff as it causes edition bleed for me as I try to "expert up" on 3rd edition. When the physical books come out months from now and we are well into our campaign then it might be time to look again. 

Campaign reports will resume soon ...

40K Friday - Continuing Distractions with Grey Knights

 

Not a lot of progress on the Tyranids or Praetorians these past two weeks as I've really been pulled towards finishing/updating some already substantial and mostly finished armies.

For the Grey Knights I've moved 20-odd figures into the "done" cabinet with more coming close behind - hopefully this weekend. All of these are already painted to some level. It's mainly sorting them back into squads, fixing any broken parts, a final clear coat and then re-doing the bases. This includes a few more marine squads and the dreadnoughts and dread knights . I also have to finish up my Rhinos/Razorbacks that I started a few years ago and a Stormraven & Land Raider  as well. This may all happen in stages as I jump around to different projects. The pull here is that this army is this close to being done-done, which is a good - if rare -  place for me to be on an army. 

Please ignore the Chaos Knights lurking below ...

Once I am  through these I will have some "from scratch" work to do as I need a big squad of Purifiers which I lack right now. I do have the newer Crowe model to go with them so that will be one effort. Then I also want to do a big squad of Paladins with all of the bling. 

The only new acquisition recently was the new upgrade sprue for one of the Dreadknights. I do want to finish up building and painting what I have but the only thing I might want more of would be the full-kit Dreadknights as everything else I've mentioned I already have. I think I'm OK with 1 grand master and the 3 regular DKs as I do have the Land Raider and Stormraven to bring big guns and take up a lot of points if I want to go that direction. 

I also expect much of this army, the infantry at least and probably the dreadnoughts, to be replaced in the next 3 years so I am not really feeling a need to spend more money on expanding it right now. One more new Dreadknight (to be able to field all of the cool new stuff) is about the only temptation and despite the new upgrade sprue those could get replaced as well so who knows? It's already more points than I could ever really field outside of an apocalypse game so it's not like I need more of anything.

So yes, the goal is to finish up the easily-finished stuff, take a look at the rest and maybe advance one chunk of that and then switch to one of this year's other efforts.