40K Friday - A Complete Lack of Focus

 Besides the Orks that I mentioned last time a few other armies have crept on the painting table. Fortunately I have two! One of them is covered with Orks (still) while the other is a bit of a grab bag right now with Blood Angels, Tyranids, Crimson Fists, and World Eaters piling up in various stages of "painted" as I try to get a unit here and a unit there done regardless of army. 

The whole 'Nid army is still a work in progress. It's supposed to be my Official New Army for 10th Edition and I've made decent progress but it is not complete. Most of it is Leviathan set stuff + some big monsters + genestealers and I have spent most of my efforts on building and basecoating the big monsters part but the 'stealers are pretty much there as well. Playable, certainly, but not "finished" at all. Work will continue for a while but "finished in 2024" is still possible.

The Crimson Fists are a perpetual project and as long as new marine stuff is being made they will never be completed. I realized I never actually built intercessors for them so getting more Primaris units into the mix for my core marine army has been another effort this year. This is very much a unit here, unit there, kind of effort not a mass upgrade or rebuild.

The Blood Angels ... it's not that I deliberately start a big upgrade program with them but sometimes I run across a painted unit that would fit my army well so i kind of have to get it. Then it goes into the rebasing queue to make it match the rest of the force and, well, it does add to the backlog somewhat. I have been holding to a new standard though - avoid the "almost done" state. If something comes in and all it needs is for me to touch it up, redo the base, and clearcoat it, then it moves to the front of the line. So after the bikes earlier this year there are now some assault squads and a redemptor making their way through the process. These will be off the painting table and in the cabinet soon - and hopefully on the game table sometime soon after that.

The World Eaters have been a work in progress for some time now. I have managed to paint a lot of them - talking about berzerkers here - but they are not quite finished so they are still lingering around the table. I need to take a weekend and focus in on them to push them over the finish line but it hasn't happened yet. Soon!

So that's where things stand for now. In addition to these the Custodes codex came out but I managed to resist adding anything new. The Tau codex came out as well and ... I did not. More on that later.

Figuring Out the Next game - the Not-Fantasy Options

 

Despite it's length yesterday's post did not cover all of the possible games I might run. Indecision is a harsh mistress. The other leading contenders:

• TORG Eternity - I finally picked this one up and I see a lot of potential. I'll post some kind of review soon but I think my crew could have fun with it. Doing a tryout in July before a big run afterwards makes a lot of sense with a new and different system - it uses even more cards now - so it does fit into the available windows. I need to read more of the supporting material and figure out what kind of campaign I want to run but something in the Nile Empire has always been attractive and some kind of Land of the Lost weirdness in North America looks pretty good too.

• Savage Worlds Rifts - this one is always on the list but I think we're still letting Savage Worlds settle a bit before we dive back into it. Ideas are not a problem it's just committing to what I know will be a long campaign that brings a bit of reluctance. I know my players want to play it but they've also said let's wait a bit on another Savage Worlds game. And no, I'm not dusting off original flavor Rifts. 

• Wrath & Glory the 40K RPG - There is potential but it is a very specific universe and needs a certain mindset to enjoy and I'm not sure my players really want to dive into that. With the new Xenos book in my hands the possibilities are certainly bubbling and I think I would lean towards "Inquisitor's Helpers" as far as structure and just use the published setting of the Gilead system to send them all over it on some kind of Rod of Seven parts type quest to give them a reason to explore and encounter different factions and locations. I have some vague ideas on an RPG campaign set on Armageddon in the aftermath of the first ork invasion but I'd like to get to know the system first.

• Shadowrun - I want to run this for these guys one day but I'm not sure I'm feeling it right now. I spent some time reading through SR4th edition and that is one dense book. I still love the setting and usually like the rules but I would need to make sure my guys are interested as much as I am in working through all that. My comfort zone would be to start back with 2nd or 3rd edition - and probably in 2050 - but that's something I don't need to decide when it's a "maybe". I'd still start it as a pretty typical shadowrunning campaign set in Seattle to get the proper atmosphere established since most of them have never played it but there would be plenty of room to go off track after that. 

• Post-Apocalyptic - There are some games here that I want to run someday but I'm not sure I want to run them now. The most recent Twilight 2000, some version of Gamma World, Crawling Under a Broken Moon's Umerican Survival Guide, Hell on Earth, Mutant Crawl Classics ... I know all of these would be fun but I'm thinking of them as more short term games rather than the big one and I'm probably not going to run them right now.

• The "Without Number" games - I  have all 3 and even though they all cover a different genre they all have a similar approach to those genres as a wide-open sandbox kind of game. I've been sitting on some of them for a long time and this might be a good opportunity to run them. 

So ... yeah ... I have some homework to do and decisions to make. I'll narrow it down to some tryout candidates for July and then settle on something for the rest of the summer & fall. I will do my thinking out loud here though. 

 

Figuring Out the Next Game - Fantasy Options

 

So I have two problems to solve: 

• What do I run for my reduced group of four in July while the Con Crew is busy?
• What do I run for the full group as the new Main Game after July?
• Is the bigger game a "next few months" kind of thing or an "into next year" kind of thing?

July might be a good time to test out a new system or refresh on an old one, especially if it's a candidate for the bigger game. The main issue there is that with only 4 players available it's fragile - one person cancelling means it starts getting tricky to run things in most systems. Not impossible but tricky. I pretty much consider 3 the minimum to run outside of some very specific games - usually superheroes of some sort. July might just turn into a month of board and card game nights if it leans this way. With July having holiday and vacation options built in attendance just may not be terribly reliable.

Beyond all that though I'm thinking it's time for some fantasy RPG options. Outside of one special D&D session in 2022 and a session of WFRP last year I haven't run or played anything fantasy since at least mid 2021 and that's a long break for our group. 

Considering the fantasy options I need to figure out system and setting. One easy option would be 5th Edition D&D. The top of the options list for 5E is this:

• The Temple of Elemental Evil - I have the Goodman Games double hardback edition (brief run through here) and I think it's a great adventure and a great way to jump back into Greyhawk which has been another itch of mine lately. Plus it might eventually lead into the G-Series and then the D-Series and eventually Q1 - a classic run of adventure modules that would certainly put a capstone on 5th edition for us.
  
  
• Dungeons of Drakkenheim - I need to do a writeup of this one here at some point but the short version is that it's a D&D-ification of the Mordheim game by Games Workshop from about 20 years ago. We have a fantasy city hit by a comet which is a pretty big disaster on its own but this comet also happens to be made of warpstone which is sort of solidified chaos and thus both very dangerous and very useful in casting and crafting magic. This draws all sorts to the smashed ruins of the city and exploring it for warpstone to become rich and powerful becomes the hot new thing.
  
  This was a great concept for a skirmishing miniatures campaign game - it was effectively a fantasy version of Necromunda if you know that one - and allowed for all kinds of weird factions and monsters and things. It should only work better for a D&D campaign and the thing seems to be fairly well-regarded online. I'm still working my way through it but I am very interested in seeing where it could go. There are some mechanics to the fog poisoning the ruins that mean the party cannot sleep "in the dungeon" and has to get out of the dangerous stuff which is very conducive to varying party configurations. There is a lot of potential here
  
  
• Published 5E Campaigns: I have most of them and have run very few of them. High on the list here would be finishing Storm King's Thunder, the Undermountain one, maybe Tomb of Annihilation (dinosaurs, ya know?). Baldur's Gate Goes to Hell might be fun but looks like it needs a lot of work. I also have the 3rd party Odyssey of the Dragonlords where we got about a third of the way through and there might be some interest in finishing that. Honestly the first two items in this list (above) interest me more but I might need to look a few of these over again to be sure. 
  
  
• As a kind of wild card here I've been struck lately by an interest in running the old Age of Worms campaign from Dungeon Magazine most of 20 years ago. It ends up traveling all across Greyhawk visting some iconic locations with some interesting opponents and an unusual major villain behind it all. It was written for 3.5 but I could fairly easily convert it to 5th and I know none of them have come anywhere close to it before. This one has a ton of potential too.

The biggest obstacle with 5th is that a lot of my players are tired of and bored with 5E D&D. They've played a bunch of it between me and other venues in the earlier years of the game and 5th alone is not going to get anyone too excited. There are other options though.

Besides 5th edition pure there are some variants. Kobold Press' Tales of the Valiant is out now and I did the Kickstarter so I have those rules. I also decided to look over ENP's Level Up Advanced 5th edition. More to come on those. There is also a Drakkenheim supplement that adds a lot of adventure-related character options that might liven up 5th for my players as well. I need to look some over and maybe try them out in July to make this work.

Beyond current D&D there are more options and this comes back to figuring out what kind of campaign I want to run and then figuring out which system I want to run.

Pathfinder 2nd Edition is one I'd like to spend more time with and it just got re-revised so why not? The goal a few years back was to run it set in Ptolus for a big fantasy city campaign (a non-comet-smacked city this time) and that's still a decent idea. I think that Age of Worms could be easily converted to this as well. I'm not terribly concerned with running PF2 published adventures with it but more using it to do my own thing.

I also might finally run some 13th Age both to try something different and as a warm up for the second edition and a possible campaign there. This would probably also be my own thing rather than published stuff.

There are some fantasy options for Savage Worlds as well but I don't think we are quite ready to jump back into that one just yet. 

There is of course a ton of OSR material out there and while it's fun for short runs I'm not sure I want to sign on for 6 months to a year of Labyrinth Lord or OSE or Dragonslayer etc. We could go megadungeon here but I think I'm more interested in one of the other options for now. 

As you can see I still have a lot of thinking to do but this is the start. More to come!

40K Friday - Ork Horde Gathering

 

Not much playing around here lately but plenty of building. Even before the release of the Ork codex for 10th I was feeling like I needed to spruce up my horde. For one, I felt like it was finally time to upgrade the green tide to 32mm bases on the boyz so that's a project that really got rolling in May. Some of the units were in a playable-but-never-really-finished-to-my-regular-standards state so there is painting going on as well.

And yes ... my Goff army core is 120 2nd edition Goff boyz. What plays into the "faceless horde" more than 100+ identical miniatures? Each 20-man mob has a slightly different paint job and markings to make unit identification possible and then the nob for each squad is an old metal nob because they just fit together. 

Building this out for 10th I am also making sure I have 3 warbosses and 3 weirdboyz - all old metal units also - because that seems to ba the way to run a green tide army right now. Most of this I've had for years anyway so some of it is just reorganizing and touching up paint jobs. For example some of these were organized in 30-ork mobs for earlier editions and need to be touched up to make some new 20-ork groups. 

Rebasing also means trying to ensure that what I do now matches up with the basing I did back in the 90's. This actually hasn't been terrible as I used a lot of "Woodland Scenics" train flock back then and they are still around as are many of those same products. Adding a few modern touches like tufts here and there livens up the bases while being easily retrofittable to the stuff where the bases are already good.

Beyond this I am touching up my Battlewagons as that's how these will mostly be run and finally finishing up my Ghazghkul model so his current ridiculously huge version can lead the force while his old 2E models take over as Warbosses for individual mobs. Part of this will be building and painting the Meganobz that will serve as his bodyguard too. If I can maintain focus the old ork army will be looking pretty good.

The Hard Realities of the Mechwarrior Campaign

I'm approaching a confluence of variable factors when it comes to our ongoing RPG time and I'm going to have to make some decisions.

First, Con Season approaches. Four of my eight regular players are involved with putting on a convention  - and have been for years so this is not really a new problem - and it nukes their availability for part of the summer. The variables here are "when does this interference start?" and "how long does it last?" and now I know these details so I know July is going to be thinner and best case is that for about 5 weeks I will have 4 players at most. We non-cons will keep playing but it will probably not be "the main game".

Second, We are nearing the end of the opening situation for the Mechwarrior campaign so I need to decide how to proceed long-term: Are we going to keep on with the Battletech thing or are we going to do something else? For July we will need to do something else anyway so can I lay the groundwork for a new thing there or is it just an interlude until the full crew re-gathers in August? More details below but I will probably start a new campaign with another system & setting and think about coming back to Mechwarrior down the road. 

Here it comes ...

Third, I really am not enjoying the MW 3rd edition as a system and my players are not terribly attached to it either. The first part of the campaign was intentionally mech-heavy and we used the Battletech rules directly for most of that. This past weekend was a zero as far as mech content but involved meeting some other members of the unit, exploring the local city where they are stationed, and getting into a bar fight. They had a good time but the rules kept getting in the way and I am ready to replace them. More on that below.

So I have these factors all coming together at around the same time.

In addition I have realized that I am not quite as much of a Battletech Universe fan as I was. All of the later metaplot stuff after 3060-something means nothing to me. I have a ton of material for the earlier era and I still know it well enough that it's the era that makes the most sense for me to run but when it comes to fictional gaming universes there are others I enjoy more. This doesn't mean that I don't like it enough to run something in it - just that running it for a year or more straight might not be the way I want to go. BT also suffers from something I have seen in way too many game settings: namely the "lore" tends to be page after page of dryly written history and dates and names and none of it really means anything nor does it add anything to the campaign I am running right here and now! 
(More on that in another post)

Catalyst, while I have a problem with some of what they do, has at least gotten the game back into circulation with decent support and a new line of miniatures that might actually be better then the metal line we've had for decades. The boxed sets are nice, the art is decent, there is an alternate set of rules for tabletop Battletech -Alpha Strike - and two sets of RPG rules as well. So the support is actually pretty good after a long gap. 

The problem may just be that my tastes have changed a lot since I played and ran these games years ago.

  Wow, how insightful, your interests as a teen to twenty-something may not be the same ones you have at 50+, yeah, applause all around for this discovery. 

I know, I know, but a lot of my tastes have not changed that much - keeping it to hobby topics I still like RPG's, and miniatures, and board and card games. In fact, I like a lot of the same ones I did back then. Despite that Battletech feels decidedly old-school rules-wise even with a modern wrapper on it. Alpha Strike is no help as it loses almost everything that makes BT unique, like hit locations and all of the details on the various weapons. Sure it plays faster but it plays nothing like Battletech to me so why bother? 

Star Fleet Battles has this issue too but they came out with Federation Commander years ago which somehow manages to keep 90% of the look and feel of classic SFB while streamlining it and modernizing it in important ways. I think that was a goal with Alpha Strike but it just does not work for me.

The Battletech RPGs have a similar problem. Mechwarrior 3rd edition is from 1999 but it feels like a much older game. The basic core mechanic is a lot like Traveller with d10's: 2d10 + skill level vs. a target number of 10, roll high. Typical skill level for most people is 1-2 with some getting to a 3-4 and not many going over 5. It is possible to have a "0" skill level in something representing training with no real experience. Just reading through the initial system mechanics I thought it was decently playable. The issue is that they then go and add the old-school-list-of-comprehensive-modifiers that makes every roll a checklist scan prior to the actual roll. For example for combat the base target number is not ten but it's not a set stat or skill or anything else either - there are 4 different "base target numbers" for each of melee and ranged ... here, take a look at it yourself.

Also the damage system  -after you jump through the hoops with all those modifiers then damage is another chart where you compare the damage rolled to a set of numbers to find out what you actually did to the target. Imagine if you were playing Mutants and Masterminds but still rolled damage based on each attack but then still had to consult a chart to find out the actual effect:

I'm sure it would play faster if we spent more time on it but the problem is that after taking up much of a session just trying out personal combat I am not terribly excited about doing it again and neither are my players. I'm going to run the campaign in this system to it's planned end point but if we pick it up again I'm probably going to run it in another system. Right now I'm actually looking at GURPS as a strong candidate for this and I haven't run GURPS in 20 years. However, if you want mostly normal humans in a setting where they are terribly vulnerable to modern weaponry it's a solid candidate. It would take some customization to things like the skill list and some of the equipment but it might just be worth it. Savage Worlds is on the list as well as we know it pretty well and it would be another easy adaptation. Heck, I have half a mind to tweak up a version of Star Wars d6 system just to see how well that would work.

"But if you're willing to mod GURPS or Savage Worlds why not just mod this game?" - well, because having run it again now I just don't find this game all that appealing. Somehow it worked for us 20+ years ago but it just falls flat for me now. It's not just the skill system - character generation was lengthy and involved and I thought having all of those house books with specific background tables (it has a kind of lifepath system) would really immerse my players in the setting. It sort of did that but it mostly just took forever and drained everyone at the table's life force away right when they should have been getting excited. Then there is a convoluted system to convert the point system used during character generation to the different point system used during play and for XP.  Then the XP system turns out to be terrible too so it just fails to shine for me. The novels tend to be fairly cinematic yet the RPG mechanics do almost nothing to reinforce that feel and so there's nothing about the game that really "feels" Battletech the way Star Wars d6 feels like Star Wars or the Warhammer Fantasy RPG feels like the gritty universe of old school Warhammer. There's just nothing special about it. 

Pretty much every subsystem of this game feels like it has extra - and unnecessary -  steps and I'm ready to try something else for our out-of-mech action. 

This probably came out a little harsher than originally intended and this is by no means an "unplayable" game - I've been running it for months now. It is totally playable but I don't like playing it as much as some other systems I know and there are probably other rules that will do this in a way I like better. So that's the plan now. More to come on this journey ...

The Promise of the Long Term Mechwarrior Campaign

 

So why did I choose to run a Mechwarrior campaign? Regardless of rules, the setting has a ton of potential. Let me focus in on 3 things that put it over the top for me:

1) The particulars of the setting:    

• It's science fiction but there are no aliens and no psionics. This does limit things somewhat in comparison to say, Star Trek or Warhammer 40,00 but it is nice sometimes to dive into a straight-up-human-centric universe with no supernatural weirdness.
  (Was this a reaction to running Deadlands for the last few years? Why no, certainly not!)
• It is set in the future of the real world. Granted it's 1000 years in the future and there are things like FTL travel and giant robots with directed energy weapons but there are recognizable cultures and languages still present. It's usually easier to explain House Kurita as being heavily influenced by Japanese culture than say to explain Klingon culture if someone is unfamiliar with Trek. Earth is still a place you could go and English is still a language people speak - among many others.
• The aforementioned giant robots! This is the major part of Battletech's appeal, right? Tons of designs, tons of art, the ability to modify them or just make up your own with a heavily battle-tested set of rules - this is the main draw!

2) The support: There is almost 40 years of material tied to this setting from boardgames to RPG's to videogames to novels to comic books to at least one mediocre animated series. If you want to do your own thing you certainly can but if you want to dig into the place and see where you could hang your ideas on to the setting there is  likely to be a time period or planet or faction that works for what you have in mind. From toppling interplanetary governments to locating where that one particular battlemech model was produced before the early Succession Wars blew up the factory to fighting in mech-based gladiatorial arenas there are a ton of campaign options out there. Finally, if you want to run a war story from infantry to tanks to mechs to aircraft to space battles there may be more supporting material here than for any other RPG.

3) The timeline: This is a very strong point to me. There is a bunch of history sketched out for a GM but the most interesting part is where the game started: a post-apocalyptic era of damaged and limited mechs that are nowhere near what they once were ... mostly operated by noble families where much technology has been lost and resources are scarce. Then we begin a slow climb upward where technology is slowly rediscovered, factories reopen, and life gets better - just in time for the leaders to start a major war. technology continues to progress as planets change hands and mechs come into play and then just as things settle down the Inner Sphere gets hit with the clan invasion which upsets the whole apple cart and then some odd stuff with ComStar getting too big for their britches. 

This roughly 50 year stretch gives us a big, global backdrop to run whatever kind of game we want with some major events to hang things on and it's pretty easy to see the campaign as being about much more than one group of PC's. As the back of the 20-Year-Update said "don't think of your character as being 20 years older  - think of his son as being ready for battle". This sets up an interesting potential mix of ongoing war story across several generations. You don't have to use any of it if you don't want to but it's all there if you do. Once you pick a  starting point your mission is to let you players mess up the timeline as much as they want to! Sure, if you want to the Clan Invasion still happens - or maybe it doesn't! maybe there is a different Davion on the throne when it does ... or a different Steiner!  Maybe your players lead an expedition Beyond the Sphere and run into the Clans first!

The cool thing is that you have a timeline laid out to follow or ignore as you choose and if your players have some familiarity with the setting it only gets better as they recognize things and then eventually figure out you've left "canon" behind and it's a whole new world out there.

This was part of my vision when I started this operation: Play a group from 3025 on up through the next succession war and eventually into the Clan Invasion and beyond, likely through at least two generations of PC's and possibly a 3rd.

There's the big upside of a Mechwarrior campaign. 

Tomorrow the not-so-up parts ...

Mechwarrior 3rd Edition- Our Campaign in 2024

 

This has been the main RPG for this year so far - even if I haven't been posting much about it here - so I thought I would pause and talk about it a little bit. 

We started in February with a character generation session after playing several one-off Battletech fights over the last few months. Since then we've had 7 playing sessions. I've had from 4-8 players each time. I implemented a "5 or more players = Mechwarrior" rule (4 or less means we play Marvel Heroic) though I broke that for the last session because the cancellations were last minute and I knew we would have a break this week anyway. 

Most of sessions so far have been in-mech combat and I can say that 8 players each running their own mech vs. 1 GM running all of the opposition is a challenge though there are several things that help. 

• Using various markers including those fancy modifier dice to show mods for both the attacker and defender are a big help
• Writing down things on each mech sheet - other weird modifiers, planned target or course of action, etc. - help keep things from getting lost in the table-wide back and forth discussion.
• Colors - putting a sticker or something on the mech and the mech sheet stands out more than small print.
• Having a player who is more up on Battletech's rules and current background than I am means I have a mechanics sub-processor to help expedite the turns for everyone so I can focus more on what the bad guys are doing.
• Use one or at most two kinds of opponents - either all mechs, mechs + tanks, or tanks + infantry. Don't try to work in a massive combined arms force with artillery and air support dug into some fortifications - at least not early on. That way lies madness ...

The campaign is set in 3025 and the premise is that a group of experienced characters (MW3 has a very thorough lifepath system for chargen) is joining a medium-sized merc unit. They get to know each other on the dropship but as they approach their destination they are forced into an unplanned combat drop before they even meet the rest of their unit. 

At this point we are past the initial combat and the PCs have made an important discovery on their way to finally link up with the rest of the Battalion. We have spent way more time with the BT rules than we have the MW rules thus far but that started changing last session and should continue next session. 

The MW3 rules still feel fairly clunky to me but we will give them a good run-through for now. My concept to start this campaign off is from notes I made 20 years ago in preparation for a game I never actually started. I found them in the ol' binder, looked through them, still liked the idea, and decided to go with it so HANG ON TO THOSE NOTES! Sometimes it does pay off!

Once we've covered the initial scenario we may have a forced interruption due to half my players being part of a convention crew and afterwards we will have to decide if we want to continue this campaign or switch to something else. There is a lot of interest in making this a long term game and seeing our party face the Clan invasion and all of those future upheavals. If we do continue I will seriously consider changing to another set of rules based on what I have seen so far. That could be Savage Worlds, Traveller, or it might be a good reason to dust off GURPS and see if that works for us. Shaking off the rust has been more of an effort than I expected.  There is a chance further MW3 experience might shift my opinion but right now I'm not in love with the system. 

Eventually I will post up some session reports here or link to it on Obsidian Portal as one of my players is taking in-universe session notes which should be pretty entertaining.

New Month, New Games

 

I see a few new Kickstarters of interest popping up so I thought I would share them here.

13th Age Second Edition

I thought 13th Age had some interesting ideas but I admit I've never run it or played it because it was always squeezed out by something else. I like it but I couldn't get a consensus to run it at the table. Now it's been a while since we've had a fantasy game as our main thing and with a shiny new edition coming along it might be time to finally give it a chance. 

Some of my earlier takes on the system are here and here. How has it been over a decade since I wrote those?

The most significant line from the publisher link above is that "The Kickstarter campaign begins on May 7th and runs until June 6th." if you are interested.

D6 System Second Edition

The article on ENWorld mentions a coming Kickstarter campaign and discusses the plans for the game in some detail. It sounds like a good approach and it is good to see someone making an effort to get this wonderful system back in print and in the public eye. It's a legendary system that's been left by the side of the road for years in my opinion. 

I'll say the same thing I've said for a while now - a generic system needs a compelling setting to really make it stick, both as a draw to new players and as an example of what can be done with the game. Savage Worlds has this with Deadlands and a fistful of additional options from Pathfinder to Rifts to Necessary Evil to 50 Fathoms and has been thriving for the last decade. I feel that d6 as a system should be doing at least as well but its two best settings were licensed and when the license ran out the game just died. I know they tried to make it generic in the early 2000's but it felt directionless and just never took off. Honestly it was probably too soon because most people knew it as the Star Wars system as that's what it had been for more than a decade. Now maybe they have a chance to make a fresh start with a newer audience and establish as its own thing.

Heroic The Roleplaying Game

This is a superhero RPG that takes the old FASERIP system and adds some interesting things to it - namely things from the MWP Marvel Heroic system of a decade ago, in particular the Milestone system. This was originally done in Astonishing Super Heroes and has been carried over here - with the blessing of that author - where it is the "Calling" system. You pick a "calling" at character generation which is a set of conditions or action that can grant Karma - an example:

Beast Within – Your hero has a savage side that must be kept in check. He or she must struggle to control these feelings or give in and lose control.

• +5 Karma when you first declare a character as your emotional ally, and when you assist or gain assistance from them.

• +5 Karma when you power creates unforeseen consequences.

• +5 Karma when you first describe losing control in a scene.

• +10 Karma when you start trouble by punching a bad guy in the face or inflict Stress on a hero who is over-thinking his problems to convince them to get over it.

• +10 Karma when you do something in the presence of your emotional ally that you already know they do not approve of.

• +15 Karma when you decide that your emotional ally has helped you all that they can, or you believe they have rejected you in terror, and either way you move on from this stage of the relationship.

I like the potential for this mix. 

Another important change is that Karma is strictly the Bennie/Fate Chip/Force Point mechanic. Advancement is handled via a separate system which on first glance looks workable. 

The rest of the system is very much the system you remember with percentile dice rolled against a particular column looking at color-coded results with column shifts as modifiers and specific outcomes often tied to achieving a specific color result. It works.

It's interesting that all of the games catching my eye at the moment are updates of older systems - but not all of them. D&D 5.5 (or whatever we're going to end up calling it) doesn't really excite me yet and Star Trek Adventures v2.0 doesn't either. Regardless, I'll keep an eye out for The Coming Thing and probably talk about it here. 

40K Friday - Blood Angel Additions

 

With the Crimson Fists progressing nicely I side-tracked for a bit into my Blood Angels. I picked up a semi-painted outrider bike force including a chaplain and then realized I had several units in a very-close-to-done state that wouldn't take all that much effort to move into the display case. So I spent a week touching up paint, redoing bases, adding decals, and gluing lost bits back on.

There's a nice 6-bike unit of outriders almost done now, along with a 3-bike squad I've had waiting on a finish for a while now, plus the chaplain on bike - that's a very cool model. I've had one in the box for some time that is destined for my Black Templars one day but it's very cool to have one put together and just about finished. I've wanted to add some of the new bikes to my BA force for a while now and this makes me very happy.

I also have a painted leviathan dreadnought sitting around waiting to be put back together and based properly and that will be this weekend's project. Paint-wise he just needs a little touch up and then he needs some decals applied and he should be good to go. I don't care that they're legends now - we don't let that keep the cool stuff off of the table.

There is a 90% painted jump pack thunderhammer captain - just needs his weapons painted - that's been loitering on the shelf for a while and he could be another "easy finish" if I focus on him for an evening or two.

I had a squad of terminators that had been waiting for a while to have their bases done so  I started with them. They're finished and in the case now so it has been a productive week.

Down the road I need to finish the 15+ sanguinary guard sitting in a half-finished state on a shelf. This feels more important now as I assume they will be replaced by a new kit later this year so it would be nice to have them out of the backlog before I have to tackle the new ones.

Beyond that there are various intercessors, assault intercessors, assault terminators, and the always-more-in-progress death company to tackle.

More to come.

Battletech: The Technical Readouts

 

The TRO's are the "fun" books of the line. They give you game stats for a bunch of mechs for a given time period but they also give you a big illustration and then they also give the history of that design, where it was produced, how it was used, variants, and some sample mechwarriors who use it. The original 3025 TRO up there was where the BT universe really started to take off as a "real" place. It set a certain tone and a certain look that has never been exceeded in my opinion. Part of this was having a single artist do all of the work for this book - that consistency really welded the whole thing together. 

Time marches on though and later there was a 3026 TRO covering more vehicles and personal gear, 2750 stepping back to Star League mechs, then 3050 bringing in the clans and updating the Inner Sphere mechs to higher tech, and 3055 adding even more and then on and on for a few of decades. There were tweaks to the content as the whole "Unseen" kerfluffle erupted resulting in the need to remove the images of some of those classic anime-sourced designs. Then there was their eventual replacement using new looks for the same stats - a mixed bag there. Then the eventual reinstatement of the originals after some legal victories.  The basic mix of TRO's was the same though - new ones tended to add-on rather than replace old books.

Recently though Catalyst has revamped the whole thing and tied them in to their more formal "Era" approach. Now instead of "3025" and "3050" TRO's we have  "Succession Wars" and a "Clan Invasion" TRO. 

I will say they do look good and the design and branding and all that ties them in to the rest of the line nicely so you can easily tell these are the current thing and not an older edition. With as much Battletech stuff as is floating around out there I think it does matter.

There are others besides these two - one for Jihad and Dark Age and probably ilClan too but I haven't delved too far into those eras yet as my existing familiarity peters out around the Jihad timeframe. These do use a lot of the old artwork which is nice but there are some quirks. Despite the legal issues being resolved some of the iconic unseen mechs do not appear in these which is disappointing. You have to go to the "Recognition Guide Vol. 1" to get those. 

This one covers all of the old IS mechs plus all of those clan second-line mechs that were based on them - the "IIC" versions some of you may recall. 

Like this one ...

Also a lot of the old Star League mechs have been retconned into having a 3025-era declining tech version, presumably to fill in the gaps left by the missing classic mechs. It's weird to see a Black Knight and a Flashman mixed in with 3025 staples like an Archer or an Orion. But it does make them useable with an official version in that time period so it's not really a problem - just a wrinkle in time for some of us old-timers that skipped out for a bit.

So where do these books fall? Well, once you've played the base game you could pick up the Succession Wars TRO and use most of the mechs in it in your games.  The Battlemech Manual discussed in the prior post will give you all of the rules you might need for the rest of them, plus it would cover the mechs in the other volumes like the Clan Invasion book. 

On another level these effectively serve as a catalog for picking up mech miniatures - here's what it does in-game and here's how it looks ... see anything you like?  I know that just showing people that original 3025 TRO pulled in a lot of new players back when so they are powerful tools when done right. 

Today there are effectively four elements to the Battletech tabletop game: The Boxed Sets, the Rulebooks, the TRO's, and the miniatures. You can certainly start with just one of the boxes but if you enjoy the game you will likely be picking up some of the other pieces as well. 

Let's talk about the miniatures next.