40K Friday: Ponies

There was a Hello Kitty necron army a few years back but this is the most unusual one I've heard of recently. Not sure the world needed it but here's a link to an article with more pics and details.

Original Ebay Auction is here.

I'd love to see something like this at Adepticon or the Bay Area Open. We need more crazy in this hobby.

M&M: The Big Game

So I started what I hope will be the "ultimate game" the day after Thanksgiving. I ended up with 5 players - two of my regulars, two of my Apprentices, and a friend of Apprentice Red's. We ran for about 8 hours which is a good long session for us. It was not quite as productive as I had hoped so we came nowhere close to finishing the adventure but it was a good start. People ran late, people had to finish making characters, we had to make some introductions of those characters, and we had to have a quick run-through of the rules but I didn't mind - those are all part of kicking off a new campaign.

So what did we play? Time of Crisis! Originally written for 1E M&M, updated for 2E in the GM screen for that edition, and updated to 3E by ... me. There are almost zero published adventures for superhero games that I think are worth running (except for ICONS!) but ToC is one of them. It's very much an "event" type adventure and I have wanted to run it for a group that would appreciate it for years. Being somewhat heavily structured, it's good for a new group too as they can focus on accomplishing a series of tasks to SAVE THE UNIVERSE under circumstances that mean even heroes who might not get along normally have a reason to work together.

I'm not going to get into all of the details as we only got through part of the adventure. The short version is that after Omega finally manages to shatter the cosmos a random group of heroes is rescued by a powerful entity and sent on a series of "missions" to undo the damage and save reality. Each of these takes place on an alternate universe and the first one is one where Nazi's won WW2. Right away the heroes are getting to punch Nazis and throw tanks at airplanes in a much-worse-off version of Freedom City. There is more fun to be had in subsequent parts but that's as far as we made it this time. The players were all pretty excited during the game and liked what they saw so things are looking really positive.

Our Heroes:

• US Patriot - super-strong, super-tough, flying symbol of patriotism
  (known hero in Freedom City)
• The Descendant - heir to an ancient legacy tied to artifacts of elemental power
  (new hero)
• Dark Justice - lurking, menacing, bringing justice to the streets - dark justice
  (known hero is Freedom City)
• Heavy Metal - builder and wearer of a hi-tech armored battlesuit to defend the defenseless and make a difference in the world
  (new hero)
• Barry Allen, the fastest man alive, aka The Flash - yep, that guy. This whole flashpoint thing is way out of control
  (errr...)

(Red's friend really likes Flash, especially the show, and wanted to play him. With the DC Adventures books as a reference how could I say no? It's not like Barry isn't getting into this kind of thing all the time anyway. We down-powered him to PL10 and went with it.)

The only downer was that schedules were not compatible for December, smashing my hopes of wrapping it up this month. January 2nd we gather again to hopefully resolve the Crisis. It's a big gap but I'm going to try and work in an M&M game during the holiday break with a different set of heroes to keep it somewhat fresh for most of the players.

So, the game is started. For 2017 I have decided to run an ongoing M&M game monthly. That will be the Freedom City game taking off from this kickoff adventure. I have 12 adventure ideas sketched out and will run one of them each month for whoever can make it. Other sessions will use FC or work in Emerald City or Atomic City depending on who's playing and what makes sense. I'll talk about how its going and what is or isn't working here.

New Ideas for 2017: More Tower of Zenopus from The Tower of Zenopus

I named the blog after the adventure in the back of the Holmes Basic edition of D&D because that's where I started with RPG's. It was the first adventure I read and the first adventure I ran. It occurs to me that I haven't referred to it on the blog in years - about five years. As discussed in that post I am considering working up versions of that old dungeon for other games. I could work it up as the lair of a mystical supervillain easily enough for my M&M game. I could work it into Deadlands fairly easily as well. It's perfect as the old hideout of some dark side mystic in a Star Wars game. A Pathfinder conversion is trivial. Why haven't I done this before?

I'll let you know how it turns out.

Meme-tastic Monday

40K Friday on Sunday: Other Miniatures Options for 2017

Anthony posted a comment on Friday's post that mentioned getting Bolt Action mini's ready as well as 40K. Yeah, similar problems here. I tend to focus on 40K because that's what we play the most but we go beyond that when we can. For 2016 I even made some deliberate efforts in that direction:

• I was determined to get in some games of Bolt Action so I went back to work on the 1/72 plastics I had from a while back. I also took a turn and got interested in playing more Pacific battles so I started looking into 28mm Marines and Japanese options. Then I saw a second edition was on the way and put the whole thing on hold. 2017 might be the time to get serious about my WW2 interests again and make this a real option. I was focused on 20mm or 1/72 plastics because they are cheap and a ton of stuff is available but so much of our terrain is 28mm and sometimes looks out of place for them. not so much hills/rocks/trees but the buildings are a real problem.

• I did, finally, get the two-player starter set for Dropzone Commander. It is a lot like epic, I really like the rules and the design overall, but I got bogged down while building the armies and it sits in a half-finished state, unplayed thus far. I really need to fix that.

• Frostgrave: It's a cool game, love the rules, but we just haven't found the time. Anything that uses the D&D mini's we already have and plays fairly fast has a chance here though.

• Flames of War: Bought an older rulebook cheap, read those rules, remembered why I lost interest the first time. Plus it's even more out of scale at 15mm. everything I have is built for either 6mm or 28mm. I'm not likely to buy or build a 3rd set of terrain for one game. 

• Kings of War: We repurposed my old Warhammer High Elves and Orcs for this game, wokred up some temp bases to stick them on and played 3 or 4 games of it. It's a lot of fun and plays quick without getting bogged down in umpteen special rules for each unit/leader/magic item. I like it a lot. I'm considering whether to rebase the old Chaos Warriors for it and I'm eyeballing the leftover Lizardmen I have so clearly it's found a home.

• X-Wing! Hey at least you don't have to paint the damn ships! We play this intermittently and I suspect it will resurface during the holiday break. It tends to spring up in conversations like this: Well I could go buy a new tank or a codex for 40K and spend the next few days reading it or building and painting up that unit -or- I could buy 4-5 new X-Wing ships for that same amount and be playing with them as soon as we get home. It's an easy decision sometimes.

Anyway I will probably pick one or two of those to bump up to "real, playable game" status alongside occasional Star Wars space skirmishes. If we do anything serious we will put some pictures here,