RPG Stuff: Our 50 Fathoms Campaign Log

So I'm actually playing in two ... that's TWO (!) ongoing campaigns now - and have been for a few months! I could not tell you the last time that happened. I've been playing in one for about 5 years now - more on that in another post - and I've had a few one or two-shot games in that time but it's been longer than that since I played in two sustained games at the same time. I'm also still running a campaign or two myself so it's a really cool situation I find myself in game-wise right now.

I'm playing a kraken water-mage who is also an expert swordsman and it's been a lot of fun. The setting is roughly 1700's tech plus magic and some non-traditional fantasy races (like mine!). There is some one-way crossover with Earth of the same time period so we have the East India Company running around among other familiar landmarks. In the group we have the gun-nut, the trade specialist, the recon/sniper character, and out fearless monkey-cursed captain. So far it's been a little reminiscent of some old Traveller campaigns - lots of trading between different ports while following up on local problems/quests/missions and connecting some larger threads, all while trying to make some money so we can tackle larger issues.

Anyway here's a link to the session logs so far if anyone wants to see how a campaign like this can go: The Caribdus Cruise

BatRep of the Week: Armada!

Something a little different this week as Blaster and I dig back into Armada for a change:

First, a very casual intro by the guys at Shut Up and Sit Down:

Then another "how-to" with a European Champion:

Then the first of a series covering a normal game of Armada with the same two players:

BatRep of the Week: Imperial Knights Vs Khorne Battle Report Warhammer 40K

A fun battle with lots of heavy hitters knocking each other around.

Sentinel Comics RPG Kickstarter

A lot of you probably already know about this but just in case the RPG based on the Sentinels of the Multiverse card game has a kickstarter that wraps up in a little more than a week. The campaign is here and it looks pretty good to me.

There are a couple of things I really liked about the original card game:

• Each hero has a set deck and expansions add new heroes and villains, not new cards for existing ones. So it's expandable but it's not collectible. This keeps it a "game" and not a "hobby" - or an "investment".
• It's based on a fictional comic book universe including a fictional history of the comic book company and it ups and downs over the years.
• It's a cooperative game. You team up with the other players to defeat a villain who runs off of his own deck. So everybody can win but it doesn't feel like a "gimmie" game - everybody can lose too.

The thing I like about the RPG (having played the starter kit last year) is that it's an evolution of the Marvel Heroic / Cortex+ system with more tightly defined mechanics. I've played multiple sessions of the Marvel game and had one try-out session with the starter kit and it went well as the players got familiar with the mechanics.

Here's a pretty thorough review of the Starter Kit that explains some of the mechanics.

Anyway it looks like fun and I thought I would help get the word out.

BatRep of the Week: Grey Knights vs. Tyranids

A new one from Miniwargaming that's fun and shows off some of the new Urban Conquest Rules

40K Tuesday: Chaos Daemons Update

I spent a fair amount of time in 2018 building up this army alongside the Grey Knights and while it's still a work in progress I did at least make some progress.  I have all of the pieces I want, for now, and I managed to get the Nurgle half just about finished a while back.

As far as that Nurgle half Chapter Approved 2018 dropped the cost significantly. Now, 3 Soul Grinders and a Daemon Prince add up to 729 points where they were over 900 before. I'm not really looking to add any Plague Bearers or Nurglings or Beasts right now so that frees up some room for more Khorne.

The Khorne "half" looks like this right now:

• Daemon prince
• Blood Throne
• 30 Bloodletters
• 10 Bloodletters
• 10 Bloodletters
• Karanak
• 3 units of 5 Flesh hounds each
• Option A:
• A Jugger Herald
• 5 Bloodcrushers
•  Option B:
• 3 Skull Cannons

So yes it's a Bloodletter bomb with some smaller units plus a speedy swarm of hounds. With the Grinders providing a solid fire base my Khorne units are free to rush over and engage the enemy force up close. My main plan is to take the Jugger squad as a fairly tough mobile unit (upgraded to 4 wounds each in Chapter Approved) but the cannons could be a nice "extra-shooty" option as well. The hounds, cannons, and juggernauts each run 250-300 points so I can arrange as needed. All of those are Acquired, all but the throne are Built, and I'd call Painting about halfway done on this bunch. They should get finished up the first part of this year and then I'll put up some pictures.

Future plans: At some point I need to get one (or three) of the big plastic Bloodthirsters but right now all I have are 3 of the older metal ones. I may have to test those out and see how they do after their big point drop in Chapter Approved as well. One of them could swap out with any of those modules mentioned above ... or ... they could swap out with the Nurgle force and let me go full Khorne. It's good to have options! 

BatRep of the Week: Imperium vs. Khorne

This one is from Tabletop Tactics and it looks like they are having a ton of fun in this one. Also: comically bad dice rolls!

40K Weekday: Grey Knights Update

I really really like the Grey Knights lore in 40K I remember them being an interesting unit in Rogue trader and then in Epic where they were a single unit you might take if fighting Chaos but not an army on their own. Then came 5th edition when they received a separate Codex and suddenly they were a whole separate force with some really nice miniatures all their own. It's a great look, a great theme, and a great concept for an elite strike force in the game.

In 5th they were a top-tier army.

In 8th ... they are widely regarded as the bottom tier army of the game.

This is sad on one level but it also opens up some possibilities as there have been Grey Knights all over eBay for the last year. It occurred to me that since they are an elite army and there are a lot of them showing up for sale online it might not be too hard to acquire them in nicely painted form at a reasonable price.  I've been interested in adding them to the house armies for a while so this seemed like a great opportunity to do that.

So ... the goal: Build a fully painted Grey Knights army without ever lifting a brush to paint them myself and without paying a premium for having it done. This was to be a total refugee army.

I started looking last January, and this first month of 2019 has seen the final acquisition needed to make my Grey Knights army really playable in 8th edition 40K: A third strike squad! This opens up the Battalion option and a decent number of Command Points when fielding them. It's a nice milestone to have achieved.

The force now:

• Grandmaster Voldus
• 2x Terminator Librarians
• 2x Grand Master Dreadknights
• 3x Strike Squads
• 3x Interceptor squads
• 1x Paladin squad
• 1 Venerable Dreadnought
• 3x Razorbacks*

Now I like the silver look for these guys, not the literal grey look, and that seems to be the default color scheme along with red and white heraldry. It's been fairly easy to acquire and there are still a lot of options out there. I don't have any air units, I don't have a land raider, and I could always use another Dreadknight and some more Paladins. 

*I'm cheating a little bit on the Razorbacks. They are not painted. I brought them over from another army and I will probably end up painting them myself.

It's around 2300 points right now so I can play pretty much any normal scenario and have some options on what to bring. The core of the force is 3 strike squads in the razorbacks who sport lascannons to give some usable heavy firepower. Pretty much anything in the force can deep strike either from the unit rules, a psychic power, or a stratagem so the rest of it is pretty flexible. The dread is also carrying a double lascannon as well. The recent buff to bolters makes everyone in the army a little better too.

I've been collecting them for a year but I have yet to play a game with them so I cannot tell you how they play - but that should change this week! I'll put up a report when it happens and hopefully it will be the first in a new series.

The RPG Catch-Up post

Despite the silence this month I have managed to get in some games - here's what's been going on at the beginning of the new year:

• I'm actually playing in two games! At the same time! Not literally!
• Paladin Steve's Pathfinder campaign is about to make it's 5th anniversary. We're 10th level now and even playing once a month, roughly, it does feel like a nice long continuous campaign. It's clearly going to outlive the system that spawned it ... and I don't care at all.  
• Variable Dave has been running his 50 Fathoms campaign weekly for around 10 sessions now and it's going really well. I have not played in an extended Savage Worlds game in a very long time - actually never this long - and it's cool to see the intended progression at work. Playing a squid-faced water mage and ace swordsman has been a ton of fun. People always know when I'm speaking in character because I put my hand in front of my face and wiggle my fingers like tentacles and it cracks us up every time.
• In general it's really nice to be playing in some games regularly for a change. I've been a constant DM for so long it's good to have that perspective from the other side of the table and it helps remind me of the way the fun works on that side of things too.
• The main campaign which has run mostly consistently every two weeks is the "Classic Cormyr" 5th Edition D&D game. 
• I really liked running Storm King's Thunder but I felt like I needed to focus on just running one D&D game for a while -not the 3 I was attempting- to keep on some kind of regular schedule. The players liked playing through Keep on the Borderlands and when I explained my thinking on what other old classic modules we could play through as this campaign the immediately voted to make it "the game". Most of them have not played through these old adventures because they are too young or if they did it was back in 1st or 2nd edition and it's pretty fuzzy. 
• It's fun for me because it gives me a framework to build around but the process of updating to 5th gives me some space to flex my creative muscles in tweaking the encounters and working up some hopefully memorable characters to encounter, both good and bad.
• They are now finished with the Keep and next on the agenda is The Isle of Dread which starts later this week! Down the road we will probably encounter some Giants and then likely Descend into the Depths of the Earth.
• As a holiday one-off I ran Day of the Swarm for ICONS - yes, a Supers game again! It went pretty well so I expect ICONS will show up again as an ad-hoc game.
• I also managed to run another session of our extremely intermittent Marvel Heroic game! I will write it up in the future but the start of a new Event saw the return of Hercules, new writers for Colossus and Iron Man, and the first appearance of Wolverine. It took some time to shake off the rust but we had fun and this may turn into a once-a-month game to try and keep the rust off.

For the rest of the year I would like to keep these things stable and work in more as much as I can. Hopefully SKT will drop back into the rotation at some point, Savage Rifts is still being asked for regularly, and I'd love to run another fixed-run Star Wars game. We will see but it all looks pretty promising at this point. 

Beginning Year 10 of the Tower

I started writing here in 2009 as an outlet for my game related-thoughts and that's continued every year since. Last year was a terrible year and posting fell way down, but as I climb out of the hole I intend to keep the blog here as a part of my online life. I'm still running games, I'm still playing games,  so I should have some things worth sharing. I figure 2-3 posts a week will put me back where I'd like this to be so that's the goal for this year.

Currently I'm mainly running 5th Edition on a regular basis finishing up a retro-run of Keep on the Borderlands. We could have gone in several directions but this is what my players wanted to play! It actually started in 2017 then had a long dry spell and picked up again this year and has become the main game - we've even managed something approaching a regular every-two-weeks schedule! As we wrap this up we do have plans to move into the next chapter of the 5E retro tour ...

Besides D&D, in the last six months I've run sessions of ICONS (first run in years - yes!), the Sentinels of the Multiverse RPG (Starter kit - looking forward to the full game), and Labyrinth Lord (Barrowmaze - lots of fun).

For the future I'm hoping to keep the D&D game going and work in a once a month Supers game somehow too. We will see. I'm sure the plans will change - they always do!

I'm still playing in Paladin Steve's Kingmaker campaign. After 4 years we are 10th level with only one character death! It's still fun and all of the original players are still playing.

I'm also playing Variable Dave's new 50 Fathoms campaign! I say new - it started in November and has run consistently since then. I have to say it is a lot of fun finally playing Savage Worlds - not just running it.

Miniatures-wise I've pretty much let Age of Sigmar, Kings of War, Frostgrave, Bolt Action, X-Wing, Attack Wing, and Armada fall by the wayside. The focus is on 40K, both playing it and getting some of those armies perpetually "under construction" finished - at least to the point of having a painted, playable, 2000 point army. I'll post more about that on Friday. I do hope to work some of those other games back in to some kind of rotation throughout the year but for now it's all about the GrimDark Far Future.

Boardgames-wise I've played more Smash-Up this past year than anything else. It's a good game, especially with kids.

Online I take occasional dips into Star Trek Online but I'm mostly playing World of Warships. It scratches a historical itch and is a lot of fun to play, especially when I have a group of friends playing it too.

Anyway there's the state of things as the year begins. I'm looking forward to getting back into the blog and everything else that goes with it.