Wet paint

I've been messing about A bit with a wet pallet and trying some wet blending.  Early results are promising on larger areas, although some of the finer parts of the models are still a bit lacking.    I'll keep bashing away at it and see how I get on.  Nice quick technique though!

Below are a couple of malifaux never born as they are good to practice on being simple models.

And below is Einstein. I have had my eye on him for a while to paint but only recently plucked up the courage to have a go. I am pretty happy with the results and was going to take him up to Targe for the painting competition but as it turns out there is not a category that he can enter.  Ho hum.

Apologies for the terrible photos as usual.

Otherworld Miniatures Game

I haven’t tried to do a review before so thought I would give it a bash.

 

I got my advance order copy of the Otherworld Skirmish Rules through the post this week.  I ordered the full bundle, including the rulebook, roster pad, tokens and deck of cards. There were also 6 D6 and a couple of pencils as well.

I have not actually had a chance to play the game yet but have had a good look through the rules and will give my first impressions.

The rules are written by the wonderful people from Crooked Dice, who wrote the 7TV rules and their expansions and this game follows the same mechanics.  I have been a fan of 7TV since I bought the rules a few years ago but have never had the time to collect and paint the models that would be required to do the game justice.

As far as the appearance of the book goes it is very pretty. There are lovely full page shots of various models from the Otherworld range of miniatures set in some lovely terrain scattered throughout the book, along with a generous amount of smaller photos.  It makes the book a great showcase for Otherworld’s Miniatures if nothing else.  On top of this there are a lot of line drawings, all of which look a lot like miniatures from the range.

The book itself can be broken down into three sections. The rules, the profiles and stats for all the heroes and monsters and how to play the game including generic scenarios and some specific ones as well, using pre generated bands of monsters/adventurers.

The rules are pretty straight forward, using the action:engine from crooked dice.  The main feature about these rules is the activation system. At the start of the turn you receive a number of action tokens equal to half of the number of models in your force and you have to assign them to models before you do any activations. Certain models have abilities that can increase this, like Leader but basically you are unlikely to get to activate every model in your force every turn.

The game uses a fairly standard profile to represent your models, with Spd for how fast you can move, Defence for how hard you are to hurt, Hits for how many times you can be hurt before that model is out of the game etc etc.  The average stat appears to be about 3 for most things, as having a stat of 3 requires a die roll of 4 or greater to succeed at any tests.

The actions available to a model once activated are fairly straight forward, with each model getting two activations to spend on things such as moving, spell casting, fighting, shooting climbing etc.  Actions are resolved on a test system, with the value of a stat affecting the number required on a D6 to succeed. All pretty simple so far.   On top of the basic profile each miniature can have some special rules, and there are a lot of them, broadly split into several categories such as Equipment (10 foot pole!), Traits (move silently, Pickpocket) or Combat (Dodge, Great Strength).  It is these abilities that set the individual characters apart and they have a very old school D&D feel to them (ten foot pole, thieves’ tools).

The second part of the book covers all the profiles to use in the game, and needless to say they cover the range of miniatures from Otherworld pretty comprehensively, with each model having a cost in Gold Pieces, which is basically point’s value.  These profiles are broken down into Legends (mighty heroes or villains), Companion (2^nd tier heroes). These two types come in Good and Evil flavours. In addition to this there is the Minion Manual which covers everything else (hirelings, Humanoids, Monsters, undead Etc.).  

Whenever you play a game you pick forces from this section of the book to an agreed value of Gold Pieces and a lot of these can be modified to suit whatever theme are aiming for in your game.

The third section of the ruled book gives details on how to play and details victory conditions and provides a number of basic scenarios to play. This allows you to play pickup game quite easily by picking a couple of forces and rolling a scenario, but I don’t think that is where the strength of this game lies.  There are three very nice linked scenarios in this section, with each one using a variety of forces to tell a story. It is these three scenarios that show what could be done with this game with a little bit of effort and just sitting reading the book gets me thinking of how I could create a small narrative campaign to use at the club. There are certainly lots of possibilities.

Overall the book is great and I am looking forward to giving it a go.  I think that it will be great for playing themed games and adventures with an old AD&D feel.  The only thing that I think is a weakness is the generic feel to the book, which means that you need to put in a bit of work for your games. However I also think that this is a strength as there is probably less tendency to treat the game as a competition and more of a co-operative affair to tell a good story. In that sense the game feels very much like a RPG rather than a wargame.

It is bit of a shame that Frostgrave came out when it did, as both games are excellent in their own ways, but Frostgrave seems to have garnered the lion’s share of the attention on the various war gaming forums and I have seen very little mention of this game on t’interweb.

I like Frostgrave as well and it benefits from having a basic premise to the game that is easy to get into and can be done with very little work which is great, but as always some elements are straight into working out what are the optimal choices to squeeze the maximum efficiency out of their warband, which I feel is a wasted opportunity. The way these rules are written and presented makes it difficult to do that and naturally steers you towards a more collaborative affair, which is a good thing.

So to sum up, lovely book, nice system that lends itself to RPG style gaming but will probably require some work to get the best out of. 

Photos used in this blog have been borrowed from the Otherworld website as they have better photography skills than I do!

Frostgrave Bits

Some more prices to use for Frostgrave ( or any other fantasy skirmish really).

Some nice scatter terrains from Thormarillion.   I'm  going more for a damp and mossy look for my ruins, so that they can be used in more settings.  

More Forestgrave than Frostgrave, if you like as that way we can make use of the existing terrain and trees that we have at the club, rather than making a whole bunmch of specific terrain that can only be used for one setting..  I may purchase some of the GW trees as they have a nice twisted fantasy feel to them.  

Chilly Wizards

We gave Frostgrave a try tonight.  No campaign, just a game to try out the rules to see how they play.   We had four players, so opted for a 4x4 board, covered with as many buildings as we could muster. 

The wizards were from the following schools:

John brought a Necromancer

Rory brought an Enchanter

Douglas brought a Soothsayer

I opted for a Sigilist.

We played a basic treasure grab, with each player putting 3 tokens down on the board, so there was lots of treasure to grab.

Early game saw everyone running for the easy tokens, and a few potshots from archers and ranged spells.  I tried to cast a few spells to enhance my warband but was not very successful, mostly failing to cast them. In Frostgrave if you fail to cast a spell you can also take damage, with how much depending on how badly you fumble the spell. There were a few people who started doing some serious self-harm from bad spellcasting. 

The Necromancer and Enchanter got stuck in fairly quickly, with the Enchanter throwing some grenades at John’s band, and John throwing some nasty spells back in his direction.  Douglas and I were on the other side of the table and had a slightly more cautious approach, trying to get as much treasure as possible without exposing our bands to any unnecessary conflict.

John eventually managed to kill Rory’s wizard with a Bone Dart, while suffering some casualties in return.  Douglas and I started to come to blows, with Douglas generally getting the better of me, thanks to some lousy die rolls. I had sent my Wizard into the standing stones in the middle of the table, as there was a treasure token there. As soon as she picked up she cast a teleport, moving to my table edge, ready to exit the board as soon as the rest of my band could get there.  Douglas in the meantime has taken control of my ranger, who was fighting my knight, while his warhound killed my warhound and there did not seem to be much I could do about it. Even my archer firing from his advantageous position kept missing his mark.

On the other side of the table Rory had managed to get away with a few tokens but paid a heavy price with most of his warband down.  John did quite well, taking out a large number of Rory’s band and making of with some treasure. 

Douglas was clear winner, taking out several members of my group, while getting a good haul of treasure and managing to stay largely intact thanks to my inability to roll above 10 on a D20.  I managed to get three treasure tokens, but lost my apprentice, ranger and warhound in the process.

Our first outing at Frostgrave went fairly smoothly, with everyone getting the hang of the rules quite quickly.  There is a lot of potential in the game, but a few points were raised as a result of last night’s game:

The terrain needs to be a bit more densely placed. We played with a fairly open table and everyone could pretty much see across the boards, which gave some wizard and absolute filed day (the ones with direct damage spells)

Direct damage spells are the most effective.  While the selection of spells are great, some of them are very situational, whereas a direct damage spell is always useful and will have an instant effect on the game.  This may change as people get a bit more practice and become smarter but at the moment, Elementalist for the win!

This is a game that is heavily biased towards narrative play.   Get together, come up with an interesting background for your band and play an interesting campaign with an end goal. I think just using the campaign rules and scenarios for an open ended campaign would end up unbalance pretty quickly (as would happen in pretty much any campaign).

Forward Base

My forward base pledge from Antenociti's Workshop arrived today.  Lovely looking stuff and will make a very nice detailed base for Sci-fi games.   

Looks a bit daunting when laid out on the table though!

 

Stepping Through the Breach

I finally managed to get me recently completed Pandora Crew for Malifaux on the table.  I finished them a few weeks ago but have been playing other things, but finally had a free Monday to try them out.  I only have the basic No Shelter Here box so Alistair and I sat down and worked out a game based around that. In the end the full box plus a couple of upgrades came to 40 soulstones so we settled for that.

My force consisted of:

Pandora with The Box Opens

Candy

Poltergeist

3 Sorrows

Baby Kade.

Alistair brought the Dreamer along with Teddy, a large number of Alps and Daydreams and Copelius.

For schemes and strategies I ended up with:

Flank Attack

Defend the territory

Reconnoitre

Alistair then realized that most of his crew were insignificant and peons, meaning that he only had three scoring units in his force.   The table was a collection of ruins, with lots of cover, not that it was really needed as there were very few shooting attacks in either force.

I deployed Pandora, the Poltergeist and a sorrow on my left, Baby Kade in the centre and Candy with one Sorrow on my right.  Alistair deployed most of his forces in the centre, with Copelius on my extreme right to do a scheme run into the corner for “The Ritual.”

We were off to a slow start with lots of running about, with both sides heading towards the centre of the board.    Candy and Kade ended up in combat with the Teddy fairly quickly, and I nearly managed to polish it off in turn two but didn’t quite manage it.  In return Teddy ate Candy in turn three, but baby Kade managed to polish it off in return. 

While this was going on Copelius had managed to get two scheme markers down in a couple of corners and I had managed to converge my sorrows on the bunched up Alps and Daydreams in the middle of the board.  I walked into the middle of the enemy crew and cast Inflict.  This managed to kill off most of the Dreamers smaller models, leaving Alistair with just the Dreamer himself and Copelius.  In return Alistair woke up the Dreamer and replaced him with “Lord Chompy Bits.” 

I spend turn four seeing to my strategies and schemes, and spread out to score points for reconnoitre while getting in position for the schemes, in the expectation that the game would end on turn 5.  IN addition to this I used the box opens and lots of soul stones to paralyze Lord Chompy, meaning Alistair could only activate Copelius.

Turn 5 saw the Dreamer wake up but it was too late in the game for him to achieve anything. I continued to move into scoring positions and the game thankfully ended at turn 5.

Not a bad start for Pandora, although Alistair was using a Master he had never used before and his crew was a bit lacking in non-peon models. As we were both using Neverborn masters there was a lot of Willpower debuffs floating about as well, which made for a lot of adding and subtracting all the various modifiers.

 I was starting to get the hang of what each model can do by the end of it as well. Malifaux is a game of micromanagement and special rules, neither of which I am particularly adept at so I don’t expect to be any good at it really, but the models are nice and it is very different from what I normally play as well.  Also there are a few people in the club also getting into it so I should not be short of players.  I also managed pick up Lilith at Claymore on Saturday so that should give me a few more options.

Next week, Frostgrave!