40K Friday: Gathering the Dark Angels

 

So I've spent most of the mini-time over the past week building the Armageddon set minis that I want to use for the new (ish) Dark Angels force. I built the Captain, the Ancient, and half of the Intercessor squad. I also started digging through what I have floating around various marine armies in an unfinished state - which is, fortunately or unfortunately, quite a bit. I added a Lieutenant from Dark Imperium, and the solo-Rambo-dual-blades Lieutenant from Leviathan as a start on a command group. I wanted a foot chaplain for this army too so I grabbed the hooded and robed one from Dark Imperium too (I think) which was still on the sprue. I also pulled in a Primaris Librarian, the existing one with the sword, as I'm going with a theme here. 

Theme-wise I've come up with some rules for the army so far:

• No bare heads or faces - only helmets! This is both practical - as it means I wont get bogged down detailing up eyes and beards and mohawks etc. - and thematic as the Unforgiven are supposed to be mysterious - so let's leave some mystery there as to what they look like. I may have to check some of my existing figures but it shouldn't be difficult to make some updates if I need to.
• Swords! Particularly power swords! They have a knightly theme and a sword is part of their chapter so for melee options I want swords - not fists, not axes, not staves.
• Well there is also the usual "Dark Angels = Plasma" thing too but I'm not going to go plasma exclusive on the specials and heavy weapons. Just enough to keep the theme.

Digging around some more I found the Hellblaster squad I knew I had somewhere -let's see, 10 bodies with guns, 10 backpacks, and ... 8 heads. Well I do have more primaris helmets but I'll have to spray them.  Such are the dangers of leaving units unfinished for years.

I also decided to put my heretofore untouched Reivers into this army as well, along with a Reiver Lieutenant. The Unforgiven have been a somewhat Unloved army here over the years so why not make them a home for wayward-children-type units as well. Reivers are still not thought of as great but there are tricks in some of the DA detachments - mainly with chaplains I believe - that might work well with them. Plus it gives them an infiltration type unit which can be handy even if the squad itself isn't super-powered.

Going back to the intercessors for a minute it is the Armageddon set of ten which would be better as 2 sets of five. There's one possible candidate for a second sergeant, a guy holding an auspex scanner. Then I reviewed the weapon options for a (regular) intercessor sergeant and, well, they can have a power sword. Luckily I do have a spare unbuilt intercessor and some spare power sword arms so ... decision made. 

So the army is shaping up like this at the moment:

• Armageddon Captain
• Armageddon Ancient
• Dark Imperium Chaplain
• Primaris Librarian
• Primaris Apothecary (another unfinished mini) 
• Lieutenant
• Another Lieutenant
• That Other Lieutenant
• 5-man Intercessors
• 5-man Intercessors
• 10-man Hellblasters
• 10-man Reivers (have to think about this one)
• 5-man Armageddon Vanguard Vets (I mean, they all have power swords so ...)
• Armageddon Land Speeder (probably?)

That's pushing around 1000 points so not a bad core. 

I have completely forgotten the armored part of this force. I'm leaning towards a Redemptor, 2 Ballistus Dreads, a Gladiator tank, and I might commit one of my Repulsor hulls to this one - it would give me a way to transport the Hellblasters at least.

I also might add in a jump captain to run with the VVs. Not sure there yet either.

Anyway there's a very loose rambling rundown of how one of these takes shape - for me anyway. Not completely focused in yet, but getting there.

Laying Some Groundwork for Necessary Evil

 

As much as I am enjoying the DCC campaign - and being a player for a change - I did commit to running NE as the next big game so it's time to start digging into it. I have tried to run it twice before - my notes say 2010 and 2014 - though we did not finish it either time. 

The first one we made it maybe halfway through. It was a lot of fun with an interesting mix of characters and encounters. The concept is glorious and everyone was enthusiastically on board with it with the brutes going around bashing objects and aliens and the vampire charming everything in sight. Most of them went into City of Heroes and made character portraits . This was one of our earlier runs with Savage Worlds for a longer term campaign and it worked really well. We eventually had too many schedule interruptions and had to put it on hold.

The second run was shorter and I was distracted trying to adapt it to Paragon City, the City of Heroes MMORPG setting, as we had all played it and had a ton of screenshots and would give us a reason to revisit something we all loved after its shutdown in 2012. Most of the players were the same and we carried over a few of the same characters but generally treated it as a reboot of the campaign. Looking back through my notes had me tempted to try the same thing for this new run but I'm going to hold off, run this one in its original setting, and see how it goes. If I get a chance to run this another time with a different mix of players then I might give that option a try. Plus with the game back online screenshots would be easy to work in as needed.

For this run though I am going to focus mainly on the adventure in the book and in the setting as it is written. Now the core of the campaign is the set of 11 Plot Point adventures that form the links that connect the whole thing together. You need to work them in as they are the spine of the game. Beyond that there are 25 other "Savage Tales" that can be worked in during the campaign to really flesh it out. Then of course there are whatever side adventures or shenanigans you cook up for your players or that they cook up for themselves. I don't feel the need to use all of them so I will pick out 10-12 that I like and start figuring out how to work them in - some might fit better in a certain sequence, others might be useful as a reaction to something else in the campaign. Assuming we're looking at each of these taking around one session then I'd like to start with around 25 sessions worth of material reviewed and ready - a rough outline for how the game might go. If the players are really into it then I can always work in more and if it starts to drag I can drop some side chapters and focus in on the main event. 

Action-wise the PCs start off being "recruited" to join a resistance movement against alien invaders in Star City, an island city with some unusual qualities off the east coast of the U.S. As things progress they get more deeply involved, make some friends and some enemies, and become more and more of a concern to the local alien warlord. There is a lot of freedom in that middle part of the campaign. They are super-villains so things can get pretty ridiculous but trying not to pull down the entire alien invasion force gives an incentive to keep some of it quiet at least. Eventually things come together and a confrontation is inevitable. 

I'm going to be running low on "generic superhero art" before I even start this campaign ...

Now I will say here that I do not like the official finale of the campaign. I never have and part of what I will be noodling on is coming up with some other options for it that I like better - we will just have to see how that goes.

So as I finish up reading back through the material I need to put together an initial outline, get the bad guy stats printed out, look at my cheat-sheet options, review my properly themed Savage Worlds assets*, get the players minds rolling on their characters, and think about how I want to kick things off. Also have to think about doing an online recap or not like Obsidian Poral. 

Anyway, more to come here. 

*I'm not a big "props" guy with my RPGs but Savage Worlds does draw me in a bit with the trappings built into the game system itself just begging to be themed for a campaign. Plus cards and bennie-type trinkets are cheap and widely available. 

The DEATHBRINGER RPG Kickstarter, err, Backerkit is up and running

 

Can't rally argue with that art ...

Sure, I'll hype it because it looks interesting, I've been hearing about it for years, and I like what I see of the guy running it. It feels a little like Spaceballs - it's Deathbringer: The Crowdfunding!

I like a lot of what Professor DM puts out there. He's a YouTube guy but don't hold that against him. He's of a similar vintage as some of us who have been doing this for a while and he's not just there to hype the latest thing for D&D - he may be big on hyping his own thing now, and he's definitely a D&D type game guy, but he's not a big WOTC guy, and he also doesn't push everything OSR as the one true way. 

I know guys who used to draw stuff like this in high school

I was already interested in this one but I will say that playing Dungeon Crawl Classics for a while now has me even more interested. Taking the old school basics and customizing them in some significant ways is far more interesting to me (and rewarding to play) than just re-editing the same damn rules we were all playing 40+ years ago. I have that already - do something new with it! I think we have a great example here.

His whole approach is less rule-mongering and more doing things in the game. I appreciate that. There is a lot of stuff that has built up over the years in D&D type games  - and others too - that is mostly there because it's been there in prior editions and more rules and clutter are hung off of these parts with every update. One great example of clearing a section is the combat zone/"Ultimate Dungeon Terrain" thing he uses:

He typically shows this on a lazy susan in the middle of a table so it can be rotated by players as needed. Notice the change here from modern D&D - we're not counting squares. It's a simple question of "how close are they?" with three possible answers. Now this is not the first game to use abstract distances, range bands, etc. but it's presented here as a concrete physical representation that facilitates play in a big way. To me that's useful. For some games I like counting my squares or hexes and drawing my maps but sometimes this approach would save a lot of time. Mutants & Masterminds, to get away from the dungeon for a minute, uses a similar concept when it comes to ranges and I could definitely see using a diagram or layout like this the next time I run that game. Would I use it for a 4th Edition D&D game? No. Traveller? Maybe. Champions? Not sure. It's a useful concept that's easily ported to other games.

Some other points I liked:

• You get three "death dice" to use during a session to add to rolls. They're d6's, they refresh every session and there's no carrying them over. This is clearly very bennie-like ala Savage Worlds but I like bennies so  I like this.
• Initiative: Straight from the KS page - whoever started the fight goes first, then their side; players declare actions clockwise, then everyone rolls at once. Simultaneous fights resolve as chaotic mass rolls. We've been playing around with ideas on initiative here so I like seeing a set of rules - especially a D&D type game - that doesn't get hung up on individual initiative. It's become a very "set" element in games these days and I'm convinced there is a lot of room to experiment. 
• Death: it can happen a lot in a combat-heavy D&D type game so why not do something fun with it? Here he spells out 3 stages:
• First time dying gets you a scar and something called a Prestige Talent which buffs your character
• Second time means you're "maimed" and get another talent
• Third time, well, you're about to be dead but you get one final action that's an automatic crit success. 
  
  Awesome! I like these a lot!

So I see a lot to like here with multiple concepts that distinguish it from Yet Another B/X Game. I also see a few things some people may not like:

• It's a class and level, armor class and hit point system, d20 based. It's fine by me but I know that's not attractive to some. I see that it goes to level 20 and my feeling is that 10 would probably be enough but the ridiculous over-the-top vibe here probably demands 20 levels.
• The contributing writers for the adventures at least are all YouTubers. Some of them have a track record of published material but some of them ... I don't know.
• The rewards are ... also ridiculously over the top. Shirts, jackets, posters, dice (multiple sets), pins of the class archetypes (?) ... yeah that's a red flag for "Crowdfunding Success" as it's a bunch of crap no one actually needs to play the game but pads out the KS $$$ figures. I get it, I won't begrudge someone making money but these are the kinds of items that tend to get delayed or screwed up in some way that tarnishes the whole effort and to have that many of them ... it's not great. 

Finally there's the timeline: They state Spring 2027 to deliver final PDFs and Summer 2027 to ship the printed material. Well, I'd love that to pan out - but I wouldn't count on it. PDM has been running Deathbringer for people for years but now they're going to be putting it out for playtesting to backers and I suppose we will see how that goes. 

Now I don't want to seem all down on this - one of the things I do like about it that I haven't mentioned is that there is a definite point of view here. From the tone - which you can detect from the art alone I would say - to the philosophy of make it faster and make it more exciting and action-oriented - I like it when a game designer has a well-defined concept of what they want a game to do. I am excited to see this coming out and I will probably back it at some level and I will try running it for my crew with whatever version of the rules I can get ahold of. It looks like a lot of fun and I hope the whole thing goes well and in a year I can say "wow what a great effort  and a great game.