Rise of the Dead

Here's a new set of tokens for use in your fantasy games, and since Halloween's coming up, they're of various lesser undead. I suspect we might find use for them in our Carrion Crown game.

Lesser Undead (970kb pdf)

You can find my other tokens at this post. Enjoy!

Three Sheet Firefight

There's a new version of Small But Vicious Dog out, and it's even better than the last. I spent the morning reading it, and it's clear that something in it inspired me, as I then went off to write a very quick and dirty skirmish wargame.

It's very basic, and it has a fair bit of Nottinghamshire DNA in it, albeit more from Blood Bowl and Epic than either of the Warhammers. It's intended for quick games with whatever figures are available, and it's more than likely full of all sorts of holes and problems; since I haven't yet played it, I can't predict what they'll be, but the turn order might be a bit wobbly. Still, if you fancy it you can download it here, and if you do, please let me know how you get on.

Return to Orc's Drift

Stuart was home alone over the weekend, so a couple of us went over to his place to play the second scenario in the Orc's Drift campaign. Ric had observed the last few rounds of the first battle and is a veteran Warhammer 40,000 player -- discussion turned to that after the game, and if we can scrape together some armies, we might have a battle, perhaps using the Killzone skirmish rules -- whereas I'd played the orcs last time, and Stuart once again took the role of referee. Ric gave me the choice of armies, and since the first scenario was weighted towards the orcs, I decided to play as the defenders this time, a small group of dwarven gold miners.

You'd be forgiven for not spotting the dwarves in this picture, as there are only about eleven of them, whereas the orcs brought this lot along:

Maniac Mansion

The Jolly Butchers didn't venture out onto the mean streets of Marienburg last night, as Steiner Eriksen was laid low by some Nordic ailment, so instead we broke out the newish Mansions of Madness board game from Fantasy Flight.

It's in a similar vein to Wizards of the Coast's Castle Ravenloft and Wrath of Ashardalon in that it's a tile-based exploration game intended to emulate, at least partially, a tabletop rpg. In this case, the emulated game is Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu; Fantasy Flight already produce Arkham Horror, which is in the same milieu -- and indeed Mansions is part of the same line, although the games seem to be incompatible - but Arkham Horror is at the summer blockbuster special effects end of the scale, while the newer game is more of a low-key horror movie type affair.

In the game, players are sent into one of the titular buildings to track down some MacGuffin, along the way encountering various gribbly beasties -- axe-wielding maniacs seemed to be popular in our game -- and sanity-shredding shocks. While the D&D games mentioned above feel like stripped down and simplified versions of the parent system, Mansions is very much its own thing, emulating a Call of Cthulhu investigation but not attempting to replace Chaosium's original game; for one thing, mysteries seem to be quite linear, which isn't an issue in the board game, but would kill the rpg equivalent stone dead.

There are some neat mechanics -- there were some grumblings about the card-based combat system, but I quite liked it, and am already thinking about ways to import it into an rpg -- and there's an interesting balance of play between the investigators and the Keeper -- the player who runs the Mansion's monsters and effects -- with a larger party giving the Keeper more options for mischief, but also enabling the group to search more thoroughly, for example. There's also a fun time limit mechanic, which came into play in our game last night, as we rushed to the finale with one turn left and had to kill an undead creature; the gangster fired two bursts from his Tommy gun -- missing with the second -- and the detective did the same, leaving the hobo to wrestle with the thing -- having dropped his axe in an earlier fight with no time to recover it -- and needing to roll a 7 or less on a d10. It would all come down -- literally -- to the last throw of the die.

The die came up as a 9.

A tense ending then, but still good fun, and I'd be very keen to play again. The system enables the same mystery to be explored up to three times, with differing paths through the plot, and I'm interested to see how that works out in play. All in all, it's a good fun game, and in many ways I prefer it to Arkham Horror, not least because it's much faster in play.

I'm not sure I would ever buy it though, as I don't think it offers good value in its current form. It's an expensive game, but I wonder how much of the cost comes from the thirty included plastic miniatures. The designs are rather uninspiring, and the miniatures themselves are completely superfluous; each has a slot in the base into which is inserted a little token, much like the ones from Arkham Horror, on which is a picture of the monster -- or rather a picture of the grey, unpainted miniature, which strikes me as a bit cheap -- as well as all its game statistics. As such, all the miniatures seem to add to the game is price; I'd have much preferred to see the game use the tokens alone, and the extra cost either dropped or used to provide more monster or layout options. After all, Arkham Horror does just fine without plastic figures.

That is my only criticism of the game -- admittedly based on only one evening of play -- but it's a significant one, and one that prevents me from recommending the game to others, let alone buying it for myself. That said, now that the group has it, I'm keen to play again, and I'm quite interested in taking a turn as the Keeper.

Based on gameplay alone, I'd give Mansions of Madness four out of five, but the pointless miniatures bump it down to .

It Is Better to Give Than to Whine, Moan and Fall Out With Your Friends

Everyone needs to calm down and stop getting so uptight about something which is supposed to be fun.

Here are some more monster tokens to print and cut out. These are all from my most recent Savage Eberron game, and include a dullahan, some dwarves on snowboards, a dwarf warrior, a dwarf wizard, some ogres, some city guards -- from Sharn, although they can fit in anywhere, as only their shield emblem is specific to the locale -- and of course the AVALANCHE ELEMENTAL. Also included are the alert tokens I mentioned in the session report; these can be used as action points or condition markers.

Savage Eberron III Cast of Characters (1.6mb pdf)

Also still available for download are various types and sizes of elementals:

Elementals (3.5mb pdf)

And some minor undead:

Lesser Undead (970kb pdf)

If you have any suggestions for improvements, or a wishlist of creatures to include in future releases, please do leave a comment.

Half-Term Blood Bath

Stuart at The Great Game likes to run a gaming day every so often during the half-term holidays; it's a canny way of keeping his kids entertained without him having to do all the heavy lifting, and he gets to get in some quality gaming at the same time. I tend to miss these days, as although I work in education I don't get the half-term break, but it happened to match up with a day off I already had booked, so the Stars Were Right.

The day began with a scenario from the Warhammer campaign Blood Bath at Orc's Drift, from back in the day when Warhammer had narrative campaigns, although we played it using the more modern The Lord of the Rings rules. I had no experience of these rules, as they were introduced long after I left the Games Workshop Hobby for more inexpensive pursuits, like polonium-210 trading, but the game was very easy to pick up and play and seemed to me to be a more streamlined and elegant version of the Warhammer ruleset, so I'm keen to play another episode of the campaign.

My side won the battle, slaughtering the elven garrison to a man, er, elf, aside from one pointy-eared coward who fled into the forests where my orcs could not follow. In fairness, Stuart's young son handled the opposing forces on his own, while I had both a larger force and a co-general -- although Ben surprised us all with the revelation that he'd never played a tabletop wargame in all his many years of gaming! -- and the scenario was weighted in our favour.

Oh, and we also had a giant.

After a lunch break, Stuart's son ran a bonkers freeform sandbox type of thing which -- despite using the Pathfinder rules -- felt much more old-school. We had a great deal of freedom, and the game seemed heavy on random tables and on-the-spot adjudications, all of which was a great deal of fun and felt very liberating. We did wonder later on whether it was worth using Pathfinder at all if we were going to ignore most of the rules, a subject with which I've struggled before, but the GM didn't seem to have any problem with it and ran a very fine game, so that's probably our answer.

While I enjoyed the Pathfinder game, the highlight for me was the Lord of the Warhammerings battle, which reminded me of how much I enjoyed playing tabletop wargames before I was priced out of the hobby. I'm half-tempted to buy a box of orcs, you know, just for old time's sake.

Token Effort

My gaming group has been playing a lot of Pathfinder of late and it's become quite a miniature-heavy game, as we have lots of followers and summoned creatures stomping about, and there's only so much one can keep track of without some kind of visual aid. Generic pawns are okay up to a point, and there's always something a little demoralising about pointing at a miniature and saying "I know it looks like a squirrel, but this is an otyugh".

As such, I've been producing some cardboard tokens for use during these more confusing moments, and as soon as I have enough of a single theme, I'll be putting them out as pdfs. First up are some bog-standard elementals in a variety of sizes; these should cover medium to huge elementals in D&D3/Pathfinder, but I'm sure they can be of use in any fantasy-type game. Click on the link below to get the file:

Elementals (3.5mb pdf)

I'll be producing these for use in our weekly game, so the monsters included will reflect that. That said, I'm open to requests or any other bright ideas to improve them.

Absolutely Nothing!

Yesterday Stuart posted some musings about wargaming, and it got me thinking about the fine art of pushing little tin lead white metal soldiers about a table.

As a teenager I did a fair bit of wargaming, although it was all of the Games Workshop variety, aside from one afternoon playing The War Machine mass combat rules from the D&D Rules Cyclopedia. I have a poor head for tactics, one that borders on the comedic -- some of my opponents might say moronic -- so I was never much good at these games; I won my first game of Warhammer Fantasy Battle with a bold undead cavalry charge and thrashed a GW staff member at a display game of the then-new Epic 40,000, but aside from a long unbeaten run at Warhammer 40,000 -- because Genestealers were very, very broken in the first two editions -- that was the extent of my success as a general. Even so I still had great fun playing, before rising costs and rules changes -- in the case of 40K a combination of both, with the increase in the basic army size in the third edition -- pushed me out of the hobby.

Also, if I'm honest, I'm rubbish at the painting. I have a smidegeon of artistic talent, but I can't transfer that to the painting of figures to save my life. My neon pink Genestealer Cult is an embarrassment to this day.

So that's why I don't play these games any more, despite there being a sizeable community of tabletop wargamers here in Brighton. I'd love to play, but I can't afford an army and even if I could, it would look like a four-year-old painted it. A blind four-year-old. With no hands.

Even so, Stuart's post woke my long-dormant love of wargames, and so I did some poking around. Even after being out of the hobby for over a decade, I knew enough to know that Warmachine is a popular alternative to the Nottingham hegemony, and I've seen some of the models in use in our various role-playing game campaigns, so I know that they're well designed bits of kit. The game is based around small warbands -- just like the Warhammers back in the day -- which might make the painting a bit less painful for me, and the game's emphasis on the mechanised warjacks with infantry as support reminded me of the Workshop's Space Marine, my favourite of all their wargames, despite being no more successful at it than anything else.

Then I saw the cost of the models, comparable to GW's pricing but for even less stuff, and that killed my interest in Warmachine. Maybe if I win the lottery. In the meantime, the world is spared my neon pink Cygnar warjacks.

So that was that, but then for some reason the Dreaded and Unmentionable D&D4 popped into my head, perhaps because it's often criticised as a wargame masquerading as an rpg. I don't think that's entirely fair, as it's more that the strong emphasis on the combat system makes it very easy to ignore everything else, but it did get me wondering about what could happen if one embraced that criticism and played D&D4 as a wargame.

The first step would be to create an interesting battlefield, with lots of environmental features to add some tactical flexibility to the game. Pits, areas of difficult terrain, things to climb on, and so on, nothing too unfamiliar to the average wargamer. After that's done, there seem to be two options:

• Classic Mode in which one -- or more -- player creates a party of heroes and pits them against a monstrous force. This would be D&D4 as written, more or less, only there'd be no plot or role-playing, as the emphasis would be on the battle, which has the handy side-effect of heading off the problem of the fight taking up the entire session, as so often used to happen.
• Total War in which the players decide on an XP budget as described in the DMG, then buy monsters -- which need not be actual bug-eyed beasties -- and set them against each other. This version would feel much more like a traditional wargame.
  

I don't know how exciting it would be, or if D&D4's mechanics are too involved and complex for a wargame, but based on my experience of it, I don't see why it shouldn't work. This is more or less what the Dungeon Delves book does, after all, it's just less honest about it.

Super Dungeon Explore

I'm sorry. I know I shouldn't approve of such things, as role-playing games are a Serious Business, and things like this make our hobby look silly and immature, but I don't care. I ran a D&D4 cleric using a Lego Indiana Jones as my miniature -- both characters had hats, which was enough for me -- so that should tell you where I stand on such matters.

On a more serious note, the Japanese console rpg is a big part of gaming culture now, and is likely more influential than the tabletop hobby, so it's only fitting that the visual style of the former should cross over into the latter. I'm only surprised that it's taken so long. The miniatures come from Sodapop, and are part of their upcoming Super Dungeon Explore board-role-playing-hybrid game, but will be available separately.