Something Funny Saturday

 

Something Funny Saturday

 

40K Friday - Necrons Necrons Necrons

 

So this is the swore-I-wasn't-going-to-do-that army I mentioned in an earlier post. Since I went ahead and did it I thought I would try and get it built, painted, and up as a playable army this year, with Halloween as a sort of target date to play a first game ... being creepy undead robots and all. 

My biggest problem with starting a new army is sticking with it long enough to achieve that result because typically I start buying units and they end up in a partly finished state as new codexes come out and I get distracted finishing up "closer to completion" units for other armies. This year I did not want to do that.

The main considerations to achieve that goal are to get everything built, keep the paint scheme fairly simple, and keep the basing fairly simple too. So far ...

• Everything is built except for 20 out of the 60 warriors that will be the core of the force, a triarch stalker, and a canoptek doomstalker.
• Everything built is base coated with a silver spray that I like. 
• Basing materials have been acquired and await usage. 

This is all of the Indomitus stuff plus a few fun extras like a Command Barge and a Doomsday Ark. No old "rod" models here. 

I'm leaning towards a terminator type theme with these guys - shiny silver bodies (maybe with a blue tint), red eyes, sandy desert base with at least one skull on each base and maybe some tufts too. I'd like to put some ruined building bits on them too but they may just be for the bigger models as I don't want to complicate the scheme too much. 

I am not doing the traditional "green glow" thing with this army. It's cool and all but I want them to look different. Of course this means I can't really use any painted mini's I might come across so everything in this army will be done by me, for good or ill. 

Anyway that's the update so far. Once I get a chance to play with the eyes and figure out what I want to do with the guns I'll start cranking them out and sharing the progress in another update.

Babylon 5 Reboot with JMS

 

Well this is not something I expected to see. Details are here. 

• Positive: It looks like JMS is charge
• Neutral: It looks like they are aiming to re-tell the original story. Is that something we really need? Could we not get a "Next Generation" type new chapter building on the old?
• Red Flag: It's on the CW.  

So ... wow. Unexpected news I would say is generally good, could be terrible, but also could be spectacular. I rate the original as a top 3 Science Fiction series, maybe the best ever. I hate to see someone messing with it but if that someone is the original creator, well, I have to give it a chance. 

Plenty more to come here I am sure.

Next Year's Campaign - Temple of Elemental Evil 5E

 

So yes - next year (after Deadlands at least) I expect to dive back into 5th Edition with something big. To me the biggest advantage of 5th is the ease with which a lot of old school stuff translates into it without a lot of recalculating and Goodman Games has been doing it right with this series. In an interview I saw one of the writers on this project mention that if the original version had 17 goblins in a cave the new version has 17 goblins in the same cave. Sure, they will have 5th edition stats but they didn't go through and try to reconfigure it to fit 5E's encounter standards and to me that's a feature - heck that's the right way -  not a bug.

It is a straight-up linear presentation. Starting with the introduction, essays, and interviews - including one by Jon Petersen going through the saga of Gygax and TSR and the temple -and then moves right on into a reprint of T1, then a reprint of T1-4 ... so yes you get Hommlett twice, effectively. This takes up 220+ pages in the first volume and if you do not own a copy of the originals this is as good a version as you could ask for. 

The 5E version starts in Book 1 and then continues into Book 2 with the monster and magic item conversions at the end. 

I have only skimmed it at this point but I know this adventure fairly well and it looks solid. Fleshing out the elemental nodes alone is a big improvement.  I played parts of it in 1st and 2nd, ran some of it in 2nd, ran "Return to" in 3rd, converted it myself and ran a chunk of it in 4th ... it's been a part of every edition in some way for me. 

Now I am not one of those people who will claim this is the best adventure ever made. It does have flaws. It can turn into a grind with 4+ dungeon levels in the main temple. That said the beginning (Village + Moathouse)is a great start to a campaign and the temple itself gives you an epic quest to attempt and a helluva story to tell if you pull it off. Treating the temple itself as more of a death star infiltration at first rather than a frontal assault can be a lot of fun for the players and the DM both. There is the whole mess of the Zuggtmoy/Iuz/Elder Elemental God thing the DM needs to think through as well if you want it to make sense in your head but it's been run many times without that breaking it so maybe that only matters to me. 

I do have a Deadlands campaign to run - more on that later - but I am looking forward to sharing this monster with my current group.

40K Friday - Checking in on Warhammer+

 

This new service? Product? "Thing" started in late August and I gave my initial impressions here. Now it's been a few weeks  - how is it going?

I admit - I am a little disappointed. New material comes out on Wednesday so we've had the launch plus three release windows and it has been s-l-o-w - much slower than I expected. 

The high point: Angels of Death. This black and white and red CGI series is exactly the kind of thing I want from a Warhammer Animation Studio. It looks right, it sounds right - the voice acting is solid and the music is good too - and the developing story is interesting. The service released with the initial episode and a new chapter has dropped every Wednesday so far. 

Hammer and Bolter is the more traditional animated series with one-off stories from around the 40K universe. It released with 3 episodes and now has ... 3 episodes. Yes, the same 3. It makes no sense but that's where it stands. 

Battlereport is their channel for ... battle reports. There was one 40k battle and one Age of Sigmar battle at release and now we have three 40k batreps and one AoS batrep - yes, the same one.

They have added a new show "Loremasters" which talks about stories and backgrounds in the Warhammer universes. So far we've had one episode discussing Abaddon the Despoiler. 

They've added at least one painting guide. The 40k app has been updated regularly. They've released a beta of the AoS app which I have not tried yet. The vault has had some new material added like extra issues of White Dwarf.

So far it feels slow and underwhelming. Angels of Death is amazing but the rest of it is just ... intermittent. What was the plan here? Was there not enough in the can to sustain a steady release cycle for these other shows?

Where is the rest of Hammer and Bolter? I wasn't overwhelmed with the first 3 but I was hoping it would get better. So far we have almost a month of nothing. Great job!

It's GAMES F'ING WORKSHOP - How on earth can you not produce a battle report for at least one of your games every week? It's what you do! What a tremendous dropping of the ball.

What is the point of "Loremasters"? A game design type explanation from "outside" the universe might be cool, or hey, maybe this kind of stuff would make for a good animated series topic? More show, less tell? Nope! We get 18 minutes of a guy basically reading the Abaddon info from pretty much any of the Chaos Marine Codexes over the years. The first half of it is more about Horus anyway so we get to hear that story again. They intersperse a bunch of art that you've already seen if you're a chaos player but a lot of it is literally showing a man's face as he reads a bunch of well-known lore. It's like an incredibly dull audiobook which should not be something we have with the 40k universe. "Abaddon did this. Then he did this. There was a battle. He won. Then he went somewhere else. Then he destroyed Cadia." - it is incredible to me that they landed on the least interesting way to convey information about some of the biggest events in 40K . It drains all of the life and energy from them. 

I'm not giving up on it but I do feel like they are letting the opportunity get away form them. A steady, solid stream of content would make this thing look a lot better. The battle report thing especially seems like a missed opportunity. It's not that expensive to make, you have people on staff already, you have the models and the terrain, and it shows people what they are supposed to do with your game! I don't understand why they don't have one for every single game they currently produce  on there already!

Anyway check back in a month or so when I touch on this again - hopefully with more positive things to report.

The New Deadlands Campaign

 

So I started a new campaign a week or two back. RPG time has been pretty spotty around here since early 2020 for all the typical reasons but this is my effort to get things back on some kind of regular schedule. I rana lot of D&D 5E and some Pathfinder 2 prior to the pandemic so I wanted to do something different. After some debate I settled on Deadlands - with a shiny new batch of stuff released recently it feels like a good time. 

We managed to figure out a day and a time that worked for almost everyone and I ended up with 5 players! My goal for the first session was to get characters made and get into some initial trouble with them - and we achieved that! Names and details will show up in future posts but we ended up with a shootist, a huckster, a mad scientist, an Indian shaman, and a Chinese martial artist.  So yeah ... covering a whole lot of the Deadlands character spectrum. 

For various reasons this collection of unconnected souls finds themselves on a train station platform in Andover Kansas in 1879. It's a dusty, tiny outpost in the middle of nowhere with a small general store, a blacksmith, and a hotel that seems much larger than needed - probably due to a burst of hopeful optimism on the owners part.

As our heroes and some others mill about on the platform a kid rushes down the one real street in the town, raising a cloud of dust, waving his arms, and shouting. "The Clampett gang! The Clampett gang is coming!"

Yes, they are back again. A good opening is a good opening.

As the rest of the waiting passengers look for a place to hide the five strangers step forward to assess the danger. A gunshot rings out and a bullet slams into the unfortunate huckster obvious professional gambler which helps speed the assessment right along. The shootist, gambler, and mad scientist inventor stay on the platform, readying weapons and aided by a wall of flame that conceals their position. The martial artist moves up onto the roof while the medicine man moves around to one side of the station - both are thinking "ambush".

As the gang approaches shots continue to ring out along with curses and exclamations like "they done shot granny!" and "Uncle Jed - noooo!" and soon only Big Jethro and Dirty Jane Hathaway the well-known knife-fighter are left. No one among the station defenders is hit in the ongoing exchange and Jethro is the last to go down before any further harm is done. 

The defiant ones exchange nods and discuss the fight and the other waiting passengers come out of hiding and thank them. Checking the bodies it is clear the Clampetts have been dead for some time so it's clear evidence of the rumored "walking dead" right here in Andover Station. The station agent mentions no one has seen them for months and word was that they had met their maker in a dust-up with the Rogers gang. "Maybe they did - but it looks like it didn't take."

Soon enough the train pulls into the station and everyone boards, eager to get to their next stop.

This was only the first part of the first session but I think it's long enough for one post. The goal here was to get everyone together, try out abilities and to shake off any rules-rust and it did exactly that. 

How it Started versus How it's Going

 

Barking Alien had a great post about those games we started with and which ones we still play. It's been awhile since I've gone down this road but let's see ...

I started with Holmes Basic D&D. Still have my copy though it is in rough shape from major use. This was 1979-1980. It was pretty much just D&D for the next few years though I did start writing up my own game with Jedi and Cylons and things in there too. Lots of graph paper was consumed as I dove into AD&D and the new Basic Set and then the new Expert Set and Dragon magazine. 

By the summer of 1982 I added Traveller. That was the second game I really dove into. So many cool things - character generation, ship construction, star system generation - so much in those 3 little books.  

I had been aware of the other TSR games for some time but had not acquired any of them. Later that year I had picked up Star Frontiers and it was not all that much like Traveller but it had its own attractions - the maps! The counters! An interesting take on actions and combat and races and gear - I really liked playing it. 

During 1983 things really exploded as I added Gamma World, Star Trek (FASA), Top Secret, Boot Hill, and Champions. 

The 80's were a great time for RPG's as by the end of the decade I had jumped into Marvel and DC supers games, Twilight 2000, Star Wars, Warhammer Fantasy, Ninja Turtles, Runequest, GURPS, Mechwarrior, and Shadowrun. There were new editions of various games in there as well plus starting up a miniatures hobby with Warhammer, 40K, and Battletech.

Out of those first few let's see ... I do still play and run D&D. Not that same version but I have run Labyrinth Lord (briefly) in the last 3 years. I'd like to do more as it does feel different than "normal" D&D now but schedules are such a constraint we are lucky to keep one game going steadily these days. 

Traveller is one I have taken off the shelf and considered but I haven't run it in at least ten years. Another one I would love to run but it just gets squeezed out every time.

I haven't run Star Frontiers since the 80's but I do still have everything and I do still love a lot of things about that system and setting. Nowadays it mainly serves as a source of inspiration for a potential Star Wars campaign - the adventures in particular. 

As far as the batch from 1983 ... 

• Gamma World is another of the want-to's but I haven't run it in ... 20 years at least? I really should put together a short run at least.
• Star Trek - I haven't run FASA Trek since maybe the 90's but I still have all of that material ... and the LUG Trek stuff ... and Decipher Trek ... and I just picked up the Klingon book for Modiphius Trek. So the systems have rotated over the decades but the setting is definitely still a player. Just have to convince at least two of my players to give it a shot. 
• Top Secret - another box unused since the 80's. I did do the kickstarter a few years ago for a new version from the original creator but it is not a good game. These days when I get the itch for a spy game I'd say Spycraft comes to mind the most but it's just not a genre my guys care a whole lot about. Odds are this will keep gathering dust on the shelf. 
• Boot Hill was a lot of fun back when but has since been rendered obsolete by Deadlands. Considering we had the most fun with Boot Hill crossing it over with D&D anyway this was not really a surprise. I usually hate "tech" analogies when it comes to RPGs but this is the best case for one that I can think of - everything we wanted to do in Boot Hill can be done easier, faster, and better in Deadlands ... any version of Deadlands. 
• Then there is Champions ... so good and yet so long since I've actually run a game with it. I still love the system even if it's been bumped aside by M&M a lot over the last 20 years when a superhero game is discussed among the crew. I would still like to run it again so I picked up the lean and mean version and then earlier this year I grabbed the full double-textbook version. It may take a little while but it's on my radar and it will happen eventually.

So most of those early games are not major players for me these days. The oldest thing I've run aside from a D&D game with some regularity these last few years is probably d6 Star Wars and that will continue - it almost became the new game I'm running now. 

BA asks a good question about how people play only one game and for so long and I admit I have no idea. I love the bubbling concoction that is RPG design where new and innovative things emerge and change the way we look at things. D&D is a nice constant in some ways but there are so many other things to do out there that I cannot imagine sticking to one game only and ignoring everything else.  

The Deadlands Companion

 

The Deadlands Weird West Companion is a ... slim ... hardcover that's largely extra stuff for Deadlands Adventure Edition. Short take: This is a -very- optional book.

We open with a two-page spread that covers the publication history of the Deadlands game. I like this and I think more long-lived RPG's should include this kind of thing. 

Then we get to player stuff - more powers for harrowed, U.S. Marshals, metal mages (mad scientists who have become aware that their devices are working because of magic), voodooists (new arcane background),  and witches. It's all nice to have and brings some character types from earlier editions up to date but honestly I've never had anyone play any of those last 3 so this is probably the kind of book they belong in.

Next up is a chapter on Relics and this, surprisingly, is almost the longest chapter in the book! Deadlands doesn't do magic items the way D&D does but they do exist in the setting. They tend to be one-off, unique items tied to a person or event. So-and-so's pistols ... famous outlaw's boots ... somebody's coup stick - this is the kind of magic item in this section. There is typically a paragraph or two of background, a note on what power it holds, and a note on any taint it holds - yes, some of them have downsides. I've never thought of this as an item-focused game but if your players have some interest it could be fun and it does let a GM tie things in to some of the legends of the setting in a direct way. 

One thing I was surprised to see is an entire chapter that breaks down what happened in each of the four servitor campaigns. Now this was covered in a big-picture way in the main rulebook but here they have decided to give a summary of what happened and then they go into a rather lengthy breakdown of every core plot point in each of the four campaign books. I was really scratching my head at this as I don't know why anyone would need this level of detail if they are not running those campaigns! They are still available on DTRPG so one could certainly acquire and run them without much difficulty. It's sort of a timeline of the last 5 years of the setting but we already get a broader timeline and breakdown in the main book so this adds ... what? It's not wrong it's just a weird duplication of effort that has me wondering what the benefit is supposed to be.

There is a nice chapter on the hunting grounds which could be *extremely* useful depending on where your campaign takes you. It's similar to notes on planar travel in a D&D game: you may not need it early in your game and you may only need it once in a campaign but it's really handy to have if your game goes there. This section covers what it looks like, what lives there, how things work, and even includes some ideas on adventures that involve the hunting grounds. 

The next-to-last chapter has stats for NPCs both historical (Wyatt Earp, Seth Bullock) and Deadlands - specific (Ronan Lynch, Lacy O'Malley). This is handy stuff when you're running a game as if you want a more personalized statblock for your town marshal then maybe you clone Bat Masterson instead of using the generic law dog stats. This is all specific people - no generic stats or monsters here. 

Damn straight my Notice is a d12 ...

The last section is an old adventure from Shadis magazine (KODT! Joe Genero!) that hasn't been republished since then and it reads decently enough. It has some nice ties to other parts of the setting so I'd say it's worth working in.

Overall for me this book is director's cut material. There's nothing here you need to run a Deadlands campaign but if you're digging in and having a good time there are things in here that could be useful. I'd say the NPC's, the relics, and the hunting grounds chapters are all good examples of "expansion" type material. I would still say you want the main book first, some dice and cards and bennies, a GM screen if you like them, maybe an adventure ... then consider getting this book. 

Something Funny Saturday