Necessary Evil: Third Time's the Charm - Session 1

 

Our story begins in Star City, U.S.A. in the year 2004. The world has been conquered by alien occupiers for a couple of years now and hope is dwindling. The superheroes were blown away in the surprise attack that announced the V'sori's turn from savior to conqueror. They didn't have much trouble after that. As the bootheel grinds down though, other forces on the planet begin to reach their limit - they can only tolerate so much. So the villains find they have a new nemesis now - not the old ones in capes but the new ones who think they are the rightful rulers of the world, who didn't account for the egos, the megalomania, contrariness, greed, and immense capacity for violence that had been laying dormant for the past two years. Deals were made, old grudges put aside - for now (mostly) - and a new resistance began to rise.

Our Villains:

• MEGASTRIKE - He's big! He's strong! He's ... radioactive! The nuclear-powered enforcer for the Russian Mob has been stuck in Star City since the invasion when he was sent here to teach a lesson to a rival criminal organization. Played by Paladin Steve. A returning character from the prior attempts at this campaign.
• LEGION - She's hot! She's smart! She's well-connected ... she's the deal-making demon! On assignment from Hell and busy tending to her rising criminal organization based in Star City and trying to work things out with rival criminal organizations when the invasion hit she was inconvenienced more than anything else. Played by Grognard Mike.
• NIGHT BLADE - He's from the East! He has a magical spirit-infused sword! He's an "independent contractor"  and while he may not have a heart of gold he does have a code of honor! He's newly arrived in Star City as he was escorting an important shipment into the city that needed to be kept quiet and not interfered with. As it turned out it was not kept quiet and it was interfered with and that led to some personal complications ... Played by Shootist Will and another returning character.
• NIGHT TERROR - He's stealthy! He walks through walls! He's ex-CIA now gone independent contractor as a paid assassin! He moved to Star City after the invasion to get away from the heat he had generated in Europe and because the aliens seemed to take a lighter hand there - starting with not flattening the city. He's looking forward to new opportunities. Played by Variable Dave and yet another returning character.
• Y2K BUG - It's artificial! It's intelligent! It's stole a military grade humanoid combat chassis and downloaded itself into it! Only recently awakened it has some technological abilities and is very tough but is frankly terrible at actually doing most things. I'm sure the hardened criminals around it will totally not take advantage of its lack of experience... Played by Battletech Terry.
• A MYSTERIOUS ROBED, BOUND, AND GAGGED FIGURE UNKNKOWN TO ALL- at least that's how it begins. Played by Blaster.

The session opens with the aforementioned troublemakers restrained and drained on an alien craft. They are being transferred between secure facilities and they know the journey likely ends with a trip off world and death at the hands of alien scientists. Those who are not gagged begin to talk about what got them into this situation. Some of them know each other but do not necessarily like each other and shots are taken as often as possible. With the nullifiers on there's little else they can do ... until ... 

Suddenly the M’buna flies into the air! It flips end over end, sending you tumbling into the other captives. The world is a jumble of color and cursing before you finally come to rest. The M’buna is ripped wide open and you see blood and smoke everywhere. A massive explosion rocks the wreck, killing the Fin guards as they stagger forth. You’re

stunned, trying to gather your senses, but the nullifiers keep you weak and useless.

Then a familiar figure strides through the smoke holding a massive gun. There can be no mistaking the famous form of Earth’s most powerful supervillain — Dr.

Destruction!

“You want to live?” Destruction asks

Everyone says yes to this except the Mysterious Figure who can only nod. They are lifted out of the wreckage of the craft and into a new flying carrier . Dr. D begins to explain his plan. In short he doesn't really care about them but he needs a new Omega cell in the city and their job application for this is to break another villain out of a V'Sori prison nearby. As he shoves them out the rear ramp of the craft our team agrees to the deal and so he detonates their nullifiers and their powers return on the way to the ground - or in this case the roof of the main building. 

Yeah we all know what it is but I'm going with this for a visual on the M'Buna for now

Freed and looking extremely angry the mysterious figure blows a large hole in the roof with a flaming blast and much of the rest of the party drops inside, getting the lay of the land. As the guards rush to the opening, firing along the way - to no effect - the stranger screams "IMBECILES! YOU FACE THE WRATH OF THE MIGHTY XYZZIFAX!" and begins blasting every potentially hostile thing in sight. 

A bit more mission-focused, MegaStrike and Night Terror begin looking for Mindjack, the prisoner they are supposed to rescue. Legion searches for her sidekick Kasha, a particularly violent cat-person from another world. Night Blade and Y2K Bug start dealing with any guards still standing amid Xyzzifax's fiery rampage.

In short order the guards are down, various cell doors are melted, ripped open, or phased through, and both Mindjack and Kasha are found and freed. Another wave of guards, this time in the form of war-spheres, is dispatched as the team prepares to leave. While doing that Night Terror, always with an eye for the ladies, frees a woman named Valerie who seems to be more together than the rest of the prisoners, and Xyz recruits a trio of minions in a fairly similar way to how this team was just recruited. 

Emerging into the courtyard another squad of war spheres goes down and then Dr. Destruction's craft appears overhead and takes the party & their picked-up strays up and away, leaving the other freed prisoners to fend for themselves. The Arch-Villain drops them off in a not-great neighborhood in Southpoint, points to a nearby warehouse, tells them they did better than he was expecting and that he will be in touch, and zooms off into the night sky. 

She's more "business suit" than "tank top" but I just recently played this so she's going to be appearing as Legion a lot.

Still ruffled, the group begins to debate their next move. The Russian and the Demon are not sure about working together (well he's not anyway), others are not keen on taking orders, and many are concerned about the consequences of having been arrested. 

Valerie thanks Night Terror and heads out on her own  - she seems to have a plan. Half the group thinks she's a spy for the aliens and will rat them out but they end up letting her go. Xyzzifax's three newly acquired minions agree to work for him - for now - and stick around

In the end MegaStrike decides to stay in the warehouse while the rest of the crew head off to one of Legion's safe houses. Once there, she goes to another room and brings a nice gun back which she hands to Y2K Bug - "I saw you fight back there - please take it. You'll need it."

GM Notes

Yeah this was fun. Old characters returning was already going to be fun and then Blaster decided to bring in his wizard character from the Temple of Elemental Evil and it just went nuts. He is using the regular superpower, not any kind of amped-up "normal" arcane background option, but the superpowers are probably more on-target for a high level wizard from modern D&D.  The campaign premise is still good, my players were enthused, and we already have intra-group rivalries taking shape. We do have a 7th player but he couldn't make it to the first session. Not super-excited about having this many players in a superhero campaign but he will probably be an intermittent player - we will see. Even six is probably too many but I'm just going to roll with it - there are six of you, you all have superpowers, and you've all played RPG's for years - there will be no whining at this table.  

Next session is later today and I expect it to be a ton of fun too. 

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.