Big 40K Friday: Our first video battle report!

Well, it finally came together, so here it is, all 12 minutes of it:

Blacksteel & Sons

(Their idea, by the way)

All the Apprentices will be back the week of July 4th so I anticipate a second and maybe third batrep that week. Production values and camera technique will improve.

Side Quests: June

23rd century (actually maybe even 22nd?)

The good: The Marvel heroes Anniversary Event continues and is a lot of fun. Lots of free stuff, some crazy event overlaps, and it continues for another week! Also, a playable Ultron is coming, probably next week as well. yes, they call it "Marvel Heroes" but it has playable villains as well. Doctor Doom, Loki, Magneto, Juggernaut, and a few others, soon to be joined by the evil robot himself.

The less good: Star Trek Online is going in an odd direction. The upcoming expansion is full-on retro, allowing players to start a new character as a TOS federation character with uniforms, ships, gear, etc. It still bugs me a little bit but it is the 50th anniversary and it's not like time travel isn't a huge part of Trek anyway so I can deal with it. Now, in addition to that direction, we have this:

26th century - the "Nautilus" class

Spock, the legendary Starfleet officer, scientist and diplomat, accepted a mission to make a daring attempt to save the dying star Hobus. His mission was not successful, however, and the effects of the Hobus supernova have echoed though time and space. This series of events is now referred to as the “Kelvin Incident” by temporal agents and multi-spatial researchers. 

The sheer destruction from that moment in time has weakened the barrier between our reality and one strangely similar to our own, leaving a strange temporal anomaly in its wake. While most are content to allow alternate realities to be, others have looked on them as unique opportunities to exploit, the consequences to the natives be damned.

“Terminal Expanse” will take players not only back in time, but to this strange, alternate “Kelvin Timeline”. This mission will be available to all players at level 40 and above once Agents of Yesterday launches.

Look for future updates on new missions as the launch day approaches, and we’ll see you in-game for the release of Agents of Yesterday!

This is where it's starting to get messy. The game has a really good concept of the future of the original trek universe, covering the 20-50 years after TNG/DS9/VOY. That's where the focus has been barring the occasional time-travel scenario or mirror universe incursion. The trunk of the tree has very much been The Federation/Klingons/Romulans in the decades following the TNG era with branches for various other races, the Dyson sphere, the Iconians, etc.

The first big expansion added playable Romulans and covered their story in the wake of the destruction of their homeworld - it was great!

The second expansion covered the Delta Quadrant - not my favorite, but it added a whole new region with new races and a new missions so it was solid plus it  continued the story of the setting.

This new expansion goes backwards to the TOS, jumps to the 26th century somehow, and adds in the JJ Abrams movie universe in what I assume is the first of a series of missions at the very least! That seems like an awful lot to cover, even if it is an expansion and not just a smaller patch type update. I'm a little concerned that they're going to lose focus on the "now" of the game and get tangled up in all of these side areas. Players have been asking for stuff like playable Cardassians and now they get TOS Feds. In the wake of that quite a few Klingons have asked for playable TOS Klingons and so far that does not seem to be in the cards.

I can see making some tie-ins to TOS and to the movies with all of the attention they will be getting but it still feels like wheel-spinning to me on some level. There were already retro-ships, retro-uniforms, and some retro-missions in the game. heck, one of my characters and his crew wears the Wrath of Khan uniforms exclusively, because I like them! Making it the focus of the whole expansion, though? I don't know, that doesn't seem like a great choice for the long term. I'll give it a try when it comes out and share my thoughts then.

Almost a Loknar ...

26th century version

Something Old and Something New

The RQ2 Reprint Kickstarter payoff arrived last week and over the weekend I actually had enough quiet time to read the whole thing. I like it. There's a practicality to it,  a very definite sense that this developed in play and was not sent out with zero playtesting. One example: You improve stats and skills by paying for training, in addition to experience. That's something we never used much in my prior RQ playing experiences, but it makes a ton of sense as far as a playable solution to character improvement. It also implies a ton about the world, way beyond Glorantha-this and Lunar Empire-that - there are fighting guilds, temples, and other organizations that provide this training, even going  so far as to do it on credit to new adventurers! Yes, "adventurer" is a known and widely accepted occupation. In a world full of ruins and monsters that seems eminently reasonable - and practical.

It's also very clear the influence of the SCA experience of the primary author, Steve Perrin. Combat is all about weapon types, weapon length, the order an attacker might be able to strike vs. different weapons, how much one might reasonably carry and still be effective in a fight. Including Size as a stat is another sign of this as it plays a role in a bunch of combat elements. With Apprentice Red in a similar organization at school I'm picking up on a lot of the influences here - moreso than i did before, anyway.

The whole book is written in a conversational tone that  I found incredibly appealing. It's something you just do not see in modern RPG writing. Comments like how an referee certainly could track a bunch of different elements if they wanted to overburden themselves, but in the writer's opinion it's simpler to just do X. It's very different than the contemporary (circa 1980) Gygaxian I was immersed in at the time, and it's very different form what I see in books today too It's personal without being ego-driven, which can be a tricky balance to strike. It's much more like how I think   I would want to write a RPG supplement if I ever got around to doing that - that's intended as a compliment!

We've already agreed within out group to run a session of RQ and see how my mix of veterans, experienced non-RQ'ers, and millennials take to it. I'll let you know how that goes.

On a different note, while I was re-reading some of my Savage Worlds stuff last week I got to thinking about how it would make for a really strong Star Wars ruleset. I started looking up conversions online, dug out some of my d6, Saga, and even Star Frontiers stuff with an eye towards outlining how I might use it. I also came across my AoR book and reviewed our playtest of the Beginner Box and how much fun we had with it, and started thinking I should really give this set another chance. So after I finished reading RQ I sat down and read AoR.

This is the serendipitous path we all tread at times. Honestly I was really happy to find the time to read two RPG books in detail in one day.

Maybe reading RQ helped open up my mind a bit, but I think I get the FFG system's appeal now. There are some touches with Marvel Heroic in the whole "building a dice pool" thing and we love that game. I know it's a giant rulebook, much like the Pathfinder ruelbooks, but it is a very different approach from PF mechanically and I think we could have a lot of fun with it. I'll have more on it next week but I am furiously thinking up campaign options in between the rest of life and at some point it will click and we will set up a one-shot to try it out. Also, there are a lot of cool things being done for this game by players - for example:

I still think Savage Worlds would handle Star Wars really well, and I may try it too. One nice touch is that both games, SW and AoR/EotE/F&D are mechanically light enough that you can put NPC's on cards. My take on the SW ones is here, an example of FFG's is here. I really like that these exist. Going back to my RQ take, they are very practical, an approach and an item that's intended to help you actually run games and not just sit on a shelf! That's becoming more and more of a factor for me in games: Is it a good game, is it fun, will my players have any interest in playing it, and is the "work factor" in running it high or low?

More to come!

Savage Worlds Super Powers Companion 2E

Savage Worlds has had a steady progression when covering super hero games. We started with Necessary Evil all of 12 years ago (!), and that was it until 2010 when Pinnacle released the Super Powers Companion alongside a slightly revised Explorer's Edition of NE. In 2014 they released a second edition of the Super Powers Companion. I finally picked it up and since I own all 4 of the books in question I thought I would talk about Savage Supers in general and the new book in particular.

NE in general is a very limited scope campaign - it all happens in a single city over the course of a few months, maybe a year at most. Certain powers were included - or not - based on the campaign conceit. There are some definite balance issues as we discovered when my wife's character went around happily mind-controlling everything in sight. Now we were all having fun so it was not a huge issue - "Why bash down the door when you can have the guards let you in?" - was the general approach. Balance is tricky in a supers campaign anyway and not really at the top of the list. The Savage Worlds system worked well as a framework for comic book action and we really felt like we were exploring the city, discovering a plot, and taking action to throw out the invaders. Both times I have run multiple sessions but both were eventually interrupted before we could finish the campaign. That said it's something we talk about starting up again whenever a new game is discussed.

NE was the only official source for super powers for a long time but after many requests the company did release a super powers companion. This was better, but it was still largely a collection of material taken from NE and very lightly revised. Some new material was added like super-bases, but it still felt like less than a full effort - limited, in some way.

The latest version is much, much better and finally feels like a full, standalone, superhero campaign supplement for Savage Worlds. If the prior versions were like the early versions of Champions, this book feels like the SW version of the Champions 4th edition Big Blue Book. It brings together everything they've learned previously, makes it right, and presents it well. So...

• If you are interested in Savage Worlds and super heroes, do not have any of these books yet, and are wondering where to start this is the one to get.
• If you have NE and would like to broaden your horizons beyond that book then this is the one to get.
• If you have the prior edition of the companion there is a free PDF containing all of the changes here. Note that it is 54 pages long so it was much more of an update than a few pages of errata and clarifications. 

I don't see myself running a pure Savage Supers game just yet, but that's not because of this book. It's mainly because Savage Rifts is coming later this year. I figure a superhero might show up in that game at some point and who knows - I might dust off Atomic City for a one-shot using these rules to help get us warmed up for that.

Meme-tastic Monday

Meme-tastic Monday

(OK, they're not all memes but I think I covered all of the major food groups here)

The Problem With Imperial Assault

We've had Imperial Assault for about a year now and we've played it ... once. I was discussing it with Apprentice Blaster last night and he came to the same conclusion I had without any prompting. It starts with this:

Contents
Learn to Play Guide, Rules Reference Guide, Campaign Guide, Skirmish Guide
Rules - gotta have the rules!

34 plastic figures
6 Heroes
9 Stormtroopers
4 Trandoshan Hunters
3 Probe Droids
2 Nexu
1 AT-ST
3 Imperial Officers
4 Royal Guards
2 E-Web Engineers
Mini's - welcome enough!

6 Hero Sheets
Sorta like character sheets ...


59 double-sided map tiles
Map tiles are cool and might have uses in other games

11 custom dice
Kind of a thing with FFG now

Large Cards (FFG Green Sleeves)
39 Deployment Cards (3 decks)
2 Skirmish Mission Cards
10 Story Missions
14 Side Missions
18 Agenda Cards
5 Reference Cards

Small Cards (FFG Yellow Sleeves)
54 Hero Class Cards (6 decks, 9 cards each)
27 Imperial Class Cards (3 decks, 12 cards each)
36 Item Cards (3 decks, 12 cards each)
12 Supply Cards
18 Reward Cards
12 Condition Cards (3 decks, 4 cards each)
42 Command Cards
This is where the trouble starts - there are typically 5 or more decks of cards involved in play all in very similar sizes, plus the one-off cards for the  mission and each character . It's tricky to keep up with which deck means what, especially with new players.

Tokens
1 Initiative Token
1 Entrance Token
4 Activation Tokens
20 Mission Tokens (8 Rebel/Imperial, 12 Neutral)
8 Terminal Tokens
8 Crate Tokens
15 Condition Tokens (3 types, 5 of each)
12 Ally and Villain Token
45 Damage Tokens (35 1's, 10 5's)
35 Strain Tokens
20 ID Tokens and 60 ID Stickers
There are a lot of tokens in play too. This does not help with the visual complexity.

Luke Skywalker Ally Pack
Darth Vader Villain Pack
A nice little bonus for getting in early.

By the time you get it all set up, the playing area is littered with cards, tokens, tiles, and miniatures.

That is not a real example of play as even our first play-through involved more than what is shown there.

The problem we both see is that if I am going to go to the trouble of picking up a $60-100$ boardgame I'd like it to be something different, yet this has all of the complexity, style, time-to-play requirement, and expense, of this:

So if I am going to have individual characters running around with individual actions,abilities, equipment, and damage tracking, and where one player runs all of the bad guys and events while the other players run individual characters, why not just play the RPG? The boardgame even comes with a campaign of linked missions where the characters are awarded XP and credits! If I'm going to do all of that and put up with all of the cards and tokens and funky dice why not run my own adventures with a party of characters that the players made themselves?

This is our dilemma.

Also, there are expansions - just like an RPG. They're boxes instead of books, but you get the idea.

Not everything is negative. The game also has a set of skirmish rules of pointing up your own small rebel or imperial force and duking it out like a traditional miniatures battle game. This of course leads people to do things like this:

Now I already have a big box of pre-painted plastic star wars minis from the WOTC stuff a few years back, so the last thing I am looking for is a set of star wars mini's to paint, but the rules for this part of the game are a nice bonus.

In the end, we are going to try one more game and see how it goes but I suspect I already know the answer. If it takes the time an RPG session would take, has a similar learning curve, and feels a lot like an RPG but with less freedom, is that a better option for us than just playing the RPG?

Meme-tastic Monday

40K Friday - Dark Eldar Progress

It's been a little slow around here as far as 40K goes because it's been the opposite of slow for everything else. If you have kids in school then May is a busy busy month and having multiples, including one graduating high school, makes it even more so. This week marks the end of all that though so hopefully we will have some time to get back to building, painting, and playing.

In the last couple of months all I have added to my eldar forces is a big group of dark eldar warriors. This gives me enough to field 40-50 of them altogether and that should be plenty. These are the older style plastic troops as I intend to use the newer (current) style sets as trueborn.

So the entire dark-kin force consists of:

• Archon
• Haemonculus
• Raider
• 30 warriors (usable right now anyway)

That's not a great standalone force but it's a decent start for some allies (which is all they have been thus far) and it covers the core of a real army so it's not a bad start. I'd like to add another pair of raiders, then some scourges, and probably a ravager. That would end up being around 1000 points and enough to do some small battles on their own if I felt the need. It's not a super high priority but it's on the agenda for the rest of the year.

My biggest dilemma at this point is the paint scheme. I originally thought I would do something that looked good and fit the background but was simple to paint as this is a secondary force - something like the black and silver or black and purple that was sort of their signature look from 3rd and 4th edition. Now though I kind of want something a little more exotic. I've seen some really nice gloss red paint schemes on dark eldar that look really good and a part of that is that it's so unexpected. 

I have a Blood Angels army on the shelf so I do have a fair amount of red already but ti does look nice. 

I've also seen some really sharp all-white paint schemes for them and that's a color I have not used as a base for an army. 

I always liked the look of white Tau (the whole mecha thing probably) but I don't have a Tau army (and some would say I don't need a Tau army) and I do have a developing army of these guys so maybe that's the way to go?

I kind of like that purple and white combination - maybe a darker purplish color ...

Anyway that's the next chapter of the 2016 eldar story. More to come!

Starting Concepts for a Rifts Campaign

With Savage Worlds Rifts a real thing now I thought I would share the three ways I have started and run a Rifts campaign. It's a post-apocalyptic game, but one where there is some organized technological /magical society and industry (unlike Twilight 2000 and most Gamma World campaigns) and most of the world has been covered at some point so I know it can be tricky trying to decide how to start a game in a way that makes sense.

Option 1: The North America opening - This is how my last campaign started. The idea is to limit the character types and the setting to the core rulebook and let things expand from there. The starting line from my email to the group that last time: Welcome to Horseshoe Bend, Arkansas, 2400 A.D. No flying cars, and not much indoor plumbing either.  It was a backwater town with some local problems where the PC's were drawn in and things gradually expanded from there. It's a classic "bullseye" type campaign where you have a fairly high level of detail for the town, some detail on the surrounding area (say a day or two of travel for normal folks), and a general idea of what's outside of that. The main premise here is that it's easier to add things to the game than it is to take things away from the game. It's easier on the GM and it's easier on the players too. Plus it makes no assumptions about where the campaign is going - it's just a starting point and once the party finds their feet it could go anywhere. Maybe they end up headed for Tolkeen. Maybe they become heavily invested in the town and the local NPCs and become local champions and defenders. Maybe they take it over and rule. It's wide open once things get rolling and it's largely player-driven at that point.

Specifics: I liked Arkansas as it was near parts of the Coalition, Texas (and so vampires), the Federation of Magic, and it's not all that far from Florida and Dinosaur Swamp. I prefer an area that's not in the middle of some heavily detailed region or plotline but is close enough that the party could dive into those if they wanted to. Parts of Texas, Iowa, and Pennsylvania would work well here too.

Option 2: The Epic Quest - I used this for my longest-running campaign. The concept goes back to everything from  Jason and the Argonauts to Sinbad to Lord of the Rings. Heroes from all over gather when a call goes out to join an expedition into mysterious territory.  In my case a wealthy patron wanted to travel across half of North America from Arkansas to the ruins of Detroit to retrieve some legendary artifacts. You can read more about it here.  The thing to keep in mind is that just because the Rifts allow instant travel to other places you don't always know where they go or how long they will last. People are still going to travel the hard way and the epic quest is based on doing just that.

This opens things up for the players to bring in almost any character type as a "wandering adventurer" with any motivation from a worthy goal to revenge to a simple payday. It keeps the GM sane though as you're not required to explain why all of these disparate characters are working together - it's built into the concept and it's up to the players to explain why they are joining up! So if you end up with a juicer from Texas, a Triax full conversion borg, a Japanese cyber-samurai, and a Venezuelan anti-monster, that's perfectly fine. Maybe they traveled by ship, maybe they came through a Rift, maybe they want to get home, or maybe they don't remember how they got here - it all works! It gives all of you time to discover the backstory of each character if you want to without having to know everything up front.

For the GM it puts the "why" on the players and let's you focus on developing the "where". You have a major quest goal that is the long term focus of the campaign but while everyone is traveling there you can have impromptu side adventures. It also puts a definite end point to the campaign when the quest is achieved. After that you can reset the campaign with a new situation and some or all new characters as desired. If you think of your game as having "seasons" like a TV show then this would be a great way to start and finish a coherent storyline or season. It's also a good way to explore another area of the world if you have veteran Rifts players. Maybe North America is something you've all played before and you want to go somewhere different - the quest for the heart of Africa (meet the Egyptian gods? Take on the Four Horsemen?) is a definite change up. The team could outfit in NA in relative peace, then board a ship (or a fleet) which would utilize Rifts Undersea/Coalition Navy for some adventures along the way/ once they land in Africa there's a whole support book plus material online and something besides Coalition Troopers to bash.

Specifics:

• "Expedition to Africa" as described above
• "To the End of the World" - NA expedition to Antarctica via South America. Could take a ship down the coast, could take a giant robot over land - either one could be interesting.
• "Transcontinental Transport" - it doesn't always have to be a one-way  traveling quest. What if someone gets an idea to rebuild a transport network across the continent? Part of the campaign would be talking to locals and working out deals along the way to extend the line, and part of it would be defending what you've already built. This could be a crazy back and forth campaign and could easily accommodate multiple groups of players and characters if you're fortunate enough to have multiple groups. It gives them a chance to change the landscape of the world in a notable way and gives them plenty of diplomacy and combat as well. Keep in mind it doesn't have to go east-west either - maybe Northern Gun wants to ship products to Mexico - or Chile!
• "Moonshot!" - Mutants in Orbit gave us details about what's going on up on Luna. It's kind of a wasted book if no one goes there, right? Maybe someone on Rifts Earth is convinced that pre-Rifts civilization survives on the moon and thinks humanity's last hope is to establish contact with them and get some help.  This could be a 3-stage quest: First, getting to Florida to what was North America's major spaceport. Second, taking control of the facility and figuring out how to get to space. Third, launching for the moon, landing, and finding out what's there. If all goes well then you might have set up your next campaign: "Red Planet". 

Option 3: Slave Ship - All of the characters begin the game on an Atlantean slaver. First session it comes under attack, the players break out, get to land, and begin exploring the area. There are some similarities to both of the previous options.

1. Player character choices are wide open. The Splugorth trade and raid across the multiverse, so if it's in a Rifts book (or any Palladium book really) you can justify it showing up here. Bring on your Robotech characters and Ninja Turtles! Characters from prior campaigns could even appear in this one with nothing more than "I passed out in a bar and then I woke up here".
2. The GM gets to pick the setting - I used this kickoff to explore those shiny new South America books back when they were shiny and new. Want to run around Russia or Australia or Japan for a while? Here's a great way to do it. You can assume your players will be spending a fair amount of time at the beginning just figuring out where they are and what they want to do so you can dive into that area of Rifts earth that interests you but has never made sense to include in your previous games. 
3.  ...but the players drive the campaign forward - once they have their bearings what do they want to do? Take over? Help the locals against those oppressive jerks from the kingdom next door? Find their way home? Pay back Atlantis for what they have done?  It's totally wide open at this point and it's mainly up to them. Sure, the GM can plant interesting rumors about a pre-Rifts city that's intact up in the mountains, or a powerful magic item hidden in a tomb in the desert, or a really nasty monster that dominates a local region, but the direction of the campaign is all about what the players want to do.  

Specifics: Pick a book! Any non-North America book, or any book that doesn't cover a region you've already played through. Talk to your players in advance about what areas of Rifts Earth they are interested in - veteran players will probably have some ideas. I don't know that I would open this way with a group of players totally new to Rifts but for vets it should be a blast.

So there are 3 ideas to help get a Rifts campaign organized and off the ground. They all worked for me when I tried them out so I believe they can work for other people too. It's hard to predict where a campaign will go most of the time so these are mainly focused on "how do I get started?" After that, hopefully, you won't need much help. If you do try some version of them out, let me know how it goes!