Meme-ish Monday

 

The New Year's Eve Post for 2022

 

Well the end of '22 finds me in a very different place then the end of '21 ... literally. Somewhere along the way I decided to see how much change I could pack into one year and the answer is "a whole lot".

• All of the Apprentices are now out on their own. It's a massive change for all of us but it's part of the deal and how things are supposed to go. 
• I changed jobs, leaving a place I had been for more than a decade for something new. It was time and it has certainly been worth it so far. 
• As that was developing I also ended up moving from a house I had been in for ten years to a new (old) house with more room more land and more interesting terrain. There was the whole looking part, the getting-ready-to-move part, then the actual-moving part, then the unpacking-after-the-move part and trying to get the new routine figured out. It's been challenging but so far so good. One of the reasons for the move was ...
• I made things official and permanent with The Relationship and getting back into the groove of "couple" rather than "individual" has been a big part of this year too. She's amazing and it's very cool to have a smart, capable, person right *there* as we go through life.

So, yeah, had a lot going on this year - mostly positive and mostly self-chosen (or self-inflicted) but still a lot. Next year should be a lot quieter and should involve a lot of building on what we did this year. 

Fred the Yard Panther on patrol

Looking back at this time last year I can safely say I was not planning all of this. I figured it was probably the last "everyone at home" holiday season but beyond that ... no. 

RPG-wise I mostly ran Deadlands. I ran one session of D&D as a sendoff to the game room at the old house and then one session of d6 Star Wars here after other plans fell through. I usually have a more diverse array of games over the course of a year but with everything else going on it just did not happen in 2022. 

In saying farewell to the old place I thought about the number of hours spent in that room with friends and family and it is eye-opening. If you figure two 4-hour sessions a week. 50 weeks a year for ten years (that's a rough guess between RPGs, miniatures, and boardgames)  it means I spent 4000 hours in that room around a table. That's probably on the light side and it doesn't count the time spent building and painting miniatures in an adjoining room which would add at least a couple thousand more hours on to that. It's one way I spend time both with friends and family and also in solo concentration attempting to accomplish various goals. It's a significant chunk of my time and that's probably why I spend time pondering things here. 

I also mentioned 40K last year and while I have yet to play a game in the new place I have started building and painting again. I clear-coated some of those Necrons earlier today and will do some more tomorrow. I also decided to dive back into Age of Sigmar as I unpacked things and I'll talk about that more here next year. 

As far as the next historical game, well, the rules for Victory at Sea arrived today and I'll start reading them a bit later and over the rest of the holiday weekend. No I did nothing really with Flames of War this year. or Kings of War, or Bolt Action, or Armada, but with the new place and a more regular schedule I have hopes of touching at least some of these next year.

Blaster and I did manage to play another round of C&C Ancients this year and we are just about to wrap up the first campaign of Rome vs. Carthage which we started, um, as described in this post. Yeah it's been awhile. To celebrate I picked up the Revolutionary War version of the game to go along with the other 5 or 6 expansions for the Ancient version. Hopefully we can finish it before he starts bringing me grandkids.

One other thing that did hold over from last year is Battletech - yes Battletech! We played multiple games earlier in the year at the old house and we have played multiple sessions at the new place as well. It's been fun dragging old friends into playing it with many comments along the lines of "I haven't played this in 20 years". I expect this will continue at its intermittent pace next year as well as several of them have now bought the current boxed set and started painting mini's. I'm still calling that a win.

So for now my gaming year wraps up with a session of d6 Star Wars that kicked off a campaign, the next-to-last scenario in the C&C Ancients book, and building & painting my Necrons, Chaos Warriors, and Fyreslayers with a pile of rulebooks and settings waiting to be read into the new year. Moving means going through your stuff and for me it reminded me about some things I had let go dormant and rekindled interest in some old options while inspiring some looks at some new ones.

It's been another good year. More to come.

40K Friday - Monday Edition - Necrons!

 

Remember those Necrons I was working on last year but didn't quite finish? Well, they are finally getting to a "finished" status now. Hey, it's only a year later than I was thinking ...

Of course now I am up against the same barriers I was last year - mainly the weather. It warmed up well enough here over the past week but it also rained much of the time so while I've been able to finish basing everything that I clear-coated earlier in the year I still have a chunk of the army making progress and then being set aside to wait for a warm-enough and dry-enough day to finally complete the process.

The idea here was to keep things simple - find a paint scheme I liked with a minimal number of steps so that I could get it done fairly quickly. I also did not want to go with the traditional "necron green" scheme which invalidated the easiest scheme of all: the one someone else has already put on some minis. I wanted to go with a Terminator-inspired look but I didn't really like the way that 80's glowy purple-blue you see from their guns looked when painted so I decided to focus on red - like their eyes. This ended up with a rule of red (Blood Angels Contrast Red to be exact) on the eyes and on the weapons and occasionally on sensors or some other markings. I've stuck this pretty closely.

The bodies needed to be silver of course and while I started with a chrome-ish look it just felt too shiny so I went with a more traditional silver, hit it with the red in the right spots, and then gave it all a heavy dose of Nuln Oil. Then I put a glossy spray clearcoat over the whole thing. This kept the silver look and added some shine but kept them from looking like they just rolled off of the lot. It also really brings out the details on these things. There are a ton of lines, panels, inscriptions, grooves, and nuance to these models and limiting the palette helps to emphasize them in my opinion.

I kept the basing fairly simple too. Desert sand color on the base, spreading some glue around over that, adding a tuft or two, and then dipping it in some fine-grained hobby sand ... and that's it! I had a vision early on of putting down a carpet of skulls like you see in some of the future shots in the Terminator movies but I could not get it to look the way I wanted so I stayed with a simpler desert scheme. I may put some skulls on some of the character and bigger model bases but I'm not doing it on the whole army. I also went back and forth on adding the somewhat traditional crystals to their bases. I have some on order now and I may dip a toe in it on the characters and such but I'm not sure every warrior and scarab needs a personal crystal on the base. 

Work in progress this week

It's about 3000 points now so I have some choices when setting up for a typical battle. I'm still considering expansion options - Lychguard? Immortals? Wraiths? More Destroyers? Flyers?  Not sure yet. Once I get this set finished I know the urge to expand will hit and there will be a "phase 2" expansion. 

The New Backup Game

 

We just recently restarted the Deadlands campaign that I've been running for the past year. Everyone is excited and the new place adds something to it too. So we mapped out a schedule that worked for everyone - tricky heading into the holidays - and then sure enough someone couldn't make it to the next session. With some advance warning we decided to do something else on purpose as we are really trying to ensure 100% attendance as the campaign heats up. 

So then of course the debate begins - what shall we play? Originally I was thinking boardgames ...  or maybe start a Frostgrave campaign to make things easy for whoever could make it. RPG-wise I tosdsed out the usual suspects for one-off type sessions: ICONS, Marvel Heroic, or DCC. I also threw out Stars Without Number as I wanted to try it out. I have ready-to-go-material for most of those but with no consensus as Saturday arrived it was going to be a challenge to run anything coherent so I decided to just see how things felt once we actually got together. Normally I really really prefer to know what I'm going to run at least a few days in advance but I decided to embrace the chaos and just wing it.  Having experience and a decent library of games this should not be all that difficult ... right?

As it turns out it was not, really. We debated for roughly an hour and somehow ended up on Star Wars, specifically d6 Star Wars. No, it had not been discussed in advance, no I had nothing specific prepared, and no I haven't run it in about 5 years. Great! It is easy enough to jump in and make characters and one of my players has extensive experience with it so he could help with character creation while I scrambled around gathering materials. It's tricky when you have a lot of good ideas but they are scattered across three different systems and the associated binders and computer folders. 

I did not want to just run Tatooine Manhunt again though that would have been an easy answer. I didn't want to run Starfall again either though that's another solid campaign starter. So I ended up falling back on an old idea I've discussed before using an old adventure published for another game which I originally converted to Saga edition but which I later converted to FFG's rules about two years ago. Had I converted it to d6? Of course not! So naturally that's what I chose! This was mostly a feel thing as I feel it works really well for Star Wars and figured it was worth the hassle of not having any mechanical details prepped.

These days I don't need a ton to run most games - a starting situation, opposition stats, and an idea of where things could go - even though I prefer some prep time this is really enough to run a fun game. FFG has printed several nice decks of NPC/monster cards that have all the stats on one side and then some notes on traits and gear on the other and it makes winging things really easy. I have some examples of similar things for d6 but not nearly as comprehensive so adaptations were made. One of the strengths of the system is that it's pretty easy to wing it given the difficulty chart, the standardization of weapons in the Star Wars universe, and the way stats and skills work. 

Despite the rust and the lack of planning we pulled something coherent together and ran for a few hours and everyone was happy with it. We started on a ship under attack and the characters fought their way through the ship to the bridge and then to the escape pods, saving crew people and dispatching space pirates along the way. We ended with them gathering their supplies as a new day dawns on an unfamiliar planet. So now this is officially The Backup Game. If anyone misses then the game switches to Star Wars. Considering a whole swarm of escape pods just ejected it will be easy enough to add new players - they can literally fall out of the sky for a while!  

It was a ton of fun and I am looking forward to how good it will be when I have some time to actually prepare!

The 10th Anniversary

 

Golden Griffon goes to work

Well today marks ten years since the shutdown of City of Heroes. Yes, we have the game back now and have for a few years but it's not quite the same as when it was a going concern. My post last year covers most of my thoughts on this but in the year since I have spent more time on the current version with Homecoming and it is better - they've made a lot of enhancements this year and I've had a ton of fun playing it with my friends. Halloween, especially, was a blast this year. 

A league gangs up on Jack-In-Irons

I'd say the only downside now is going to happen with anything that you do with friends and family over a long period of time: remembering what all was going on back when and occasionally being reminded how much has changed over the years. It's not a negative, just a side effect of sticking around for a long time. It's easy enough, relatively speaking, to keep a video game going, but it's impossible to return to a particular place and time in one's life ... we've had some moments though. 

I'm just glad it's back and still going strong.

Phurious Pharoah takes one for the team here. Witches...

40K Friday - Catching Up

 

So much new stuff this year and I was out of action for a big chunk of it - I am finally getting back on track. The new workspace is finally usable and the playing space has been ready for a bit. We did get in a round of Battletech last weekend but I have not given it a 40K baptism yet. Still, it feels good to be operational again.

Codexes: Imperial Knights, Chaos Knights, Chaos Marines, Chaos Daemons ... now Imperial Guard ... I skipped Votann as it just isn't doing much for me and the last thing I need right now is to start a brand new 40k army. I thought squats were cool back when, especially in Epic, but it's not like those old models are really compatible with the new incarnation. So for now it's a "no" here on the neo-squats.

Areas of focus for the rest of the year ... well that's the real trick isn't it? After a long break and especially after going through all of my stuff packing and unpacking it and refreshing myself on what I have and what state it is in ... well, I want to work on all of it! From past experience I know that's not a particularly productive approach so I'm going to have to narrow it down a bit. I'm thinking about picking one squad or vehicle at a time and working it into shape and not trying to finish whole armies. This would let me make progress on several fronts and see where I want to go next. Part of my interest in this approach is because of another decision I made.

I decided to dive into Kill Team. The new edition seems quite a bit better than the old one and the concept for the newest sets really appeals to me. Into the Dark is basically sending your troops into a derelict spaceship -so it's a lot like space hulk and I love that game. This is also going to be the new concept in the next set of 40k campaign books with a new way to play that involves smaller armies and boarding actions that will use this same terrain. I figured I might as well jump on in. Plus with it being squad-level actions adding a new force means I only have around 10 models to paint. Many of them tie into armies I already have like Kasrkin for the Guard and Kommandos for the Orks but it also means I can branch out a bit into something different like Kroot without committing to a 2000+ point 40k army. It's a nice combination of something new that still ties in to something familiar.

I will talk into more on specific armies as I dig into them in the future but there's a "where things stand" here and now.

Age of Sigmar: Return of the Chaos Warriors

 

After the move comes the unpacking and as a part of that process I got to spend time with things I had not really  touched in a long time. One of those was my old school Chaos Warrior army that I built from about 3rd edition WHFB through 7th edition. It was one of the few armies that I could say was "finished" back then - though they're never really finished, right - in that I had a decent sized force that was fully painted and didn't really lack anything. 

Since the end of WHFB it's been sitting in a wall-mounted display case in the game room providing occasional armored guards for D&D games and not much else. Putting it back up in the new hobby room gave me a chance to look back through it and beyond realizing how many arms and horse tails I need to re-glue it reminded me how much I liked the whole Chaos Warrior thing and that I've missed not having an active force of big armored elite soldiers to stomp things with on demand.

So ... let's see where things are in Age of Sigmar ... oh look there's a big new army set coming out for Slaves to Darkness - the more dramatic name we have now for the old Chaos Warriors army. I had picked up some of the newer style knights and warriors a few years back but never did anything with them. With the prospect of some new releases, at least one possible player, and an interest in building something completely new, well, it all came together.

So now there is a pile of plastic in one corner of the hobby room and I have built my first unit in the new place. It's just one ten-man unit of chaos warriors but a) I am finally back in business after months of zero building or painting and b) it's an elite army so it will only take a few units to make it playable. Heck, there may only 20-30 of these guys in the army anyway, along with some knights and characters. So it's technically a new army but it's very manageable in terms of avoiding a big backlog.

Meanwhile, the old veterans await the return of The Old World ...

Andor - A Longer Take

 

I know it's not been doing well in the ratings but I decided I was hearting enough good things about Andor to take a look and I'm glad I did. There's a proven principle in box office analysis that a sequel movie's opening weekend is heavily impacted by the quality of the prior entry. A good movie can have a bad opening if the previous film was bad, and a bad movie can open well if the prior entry was strong. Word of mouth will have some mitigating effect over future weeks - particularly on a bad entry, which is why you see some movies open strong and then fall off of a cliff thereafter.

I say this because I think this is what is happening to Andor: it's a good show but it follows two series with a mixed reception at best - Book of Boba Fett and Kenobi. Plus it faces the basic question of "who asked for this?" which is something I was asking myself when they first announced this one. Who was out there saying "wow I wish I knew more about this Cassian Andor guy" after watching Rogue One? I love Rogue One but even I never thought we needed a follow prequel series for anything in that movie. I also think that Star Wars fatigue is a real thing and having a near-constant flow of Star Wars shows runs a real risk of making them less special, especially when some of them are just not that good. 

So why is Andor an exception to this? Or, why should it be? Why was I pleasantly surprised?

First up, it is a story about the formation of the Rebellion. Now maybe not everyone cares about that but it's a pretty significant event in  the overall story of Star Wars and 40+ years in it feels like that's something we could spend some time exploring - surely there are some good stories to be told there and some interesting characters to meet along the way. Andor himself gets involved at the lowest level but we also see one of the main agents (who recruits him) and high level subterfuge as Mon Mothma tries to get support from various entities. We also see the lack of cohesion among the various sub-factions such as Saw Gerrera's band and some others that are mentioned. So it's a more complex situation than just "hey we're the rebels" and that could keep things interesting down the road.

Second it's a good look at the Empire taking power. The gradual imposition of restrictions on imperial society. The growing fear and unease among normal citizens. The unfairness of it all shows up in trials and sentencing and the revision of those sentences after the fact. This might be our first good on-screen look at the ISB which was a pretty regular opponent in a lot of early Star Wars RPG campaigns. People are uncertain at best about the Empire as the show begins and it only gets worse as it goes on.

Third it's an interesting look at normal life and normal people in the Star Wars universe. We see corporate security in action and some of what their life is like. We see criminal activity. We see a guy looking for a job. We see a guy dealing with his mother's expectations and concern for his career. We see relationships pushed in different directions both through individual actions and because of Imperial crackdowns. We see some prison life. There's a fair amount of people trying to go about their normal daily business as events unfold around them. It's just an interesting element that has not come up a lot in prior Star Wars media.

The downside is that it does move a little slow for a Star Wars show. There is a lot of setup and while the payoffs are solid there is not a ton of action - early on it's a heist, not a space assault. There are no Skywalkers and no lightsabers and no mention of the force at all. It's much more of a thriller than an action movie. 

I loved Rogue One and it had some similarities so if you hated that movie I suspect you will have a hard time liking this show, but if you liked it then you should give this one a look - it's worth your time. 

My Mutants and Masterminds Kickstarter Conundrum

 

So Green Ronin is running a kickstarter to get a bunch of M&M 3E books back into print. That's a good thing, happy to see it. One complication is that I already own all of the books, including multiple copies of the main rulebook. Well maybe they're putting out something new too as part of this ... (looks through campaign description and stretch goals) ... nope. Wait - they are publishing two new novels -set in the M&M setting I guess? This creates a bit of a conflict for me.

I really want to support this - the game, the company, and the creators have all done a great job and have been doing it for 20 years now. I like the rules, I like the setting, and I like the presentation. I think it's the best all-around supers RPG you can buy.  I figured I was contributing by picking up a copy of everything they cranked out as it was released. I've even bought a few extra copies over the years and handed them out to friends when I was getting ready to run a game. 

Not kidding here- that's the M&M shelf

This kickstarter though ... I was in on the 10th anniversary book ten years ago and it was excellent. It was also something new and significant. It's still one of my favorite RPG books ever. Unfortunately there is nothing like that in this effort. It is all reprints of existing material. Well, except the novels -let's talk about the novels.

They've put out a couple of novels previously. I don't own them. I am truly not that interested in superhero novels. If you were going to take that approach how about a novelization of, say, Centurion's story? Maybe the Terminus Invasion? The birth of the Freedom League? These are all background events of significance in the Freedomverse's history and would probably make for a decent story. Instead we get characters we don't know and it sounds like, at least partially, settings we don't know ... so why are these the only new effort in an M&M kickstarter? What do they have to do with the setting and the game? 

Continuing the questioning, why are we doing novels at all? For a superhero game why are we not doing some comic books? A graphic novel? Champions had a limited series  30+ years ago! City of Heroes had several comic book runs! It's the preferred medium for the genre, the dominant one, and a successful one for over 80 years - doesn't that seem like something worth exploring? Maybe even one worth its own KS initiative!

Tier pricing is a little iffy to me too. At 15$ you get one of the novels and for 25$ you get both. The game books start at 40$ for one and but at 100$ you get the three main ones they want to renew which is the core book, power profiles, and the gadget guide. That's not a terrible deal and that may be where I end up if I jump in. There's no PDF-only option - all the game books are for print and PDF both.

So I'm a little torn here. I know superhero RPGs are a niche of a niche and there are a ton of challenges in making them. I want to help but I'd really like something new to spend money on as the incentive. 

Anyway they're getting close to hitting their goal and if you're at all interested the Deluxe Hero's Handbook is definitely worth picking up if you don't have it. I'll probably post here again when it's over and share what I end up doing.

Andor Short Take