Signage for Modern and Sci-Fi

I thought I'd share my newest terrain piece...Billboards!

Chuck E Cheese in the far future? You bet!

This one I made in GIMP from an image I got off the net. The stand is from World Works Games set Mayhem Street Props. It did have a set of lights but the taller stuff wouldn't fit in there.

From my favorite movie Big Trouble in Little China!

This might be from Fallout. Not sure.

Well, there you have it. Hopefully I'll play something and I can feature my newest piece!

Talomir Tales: Snotz the Goblin

Once upon a time there was a goblin named Snotz. He was an eager little fellow and wanted to make a name for himself. He strolled into a run down tavern looking for work one day.

"Tender! You got any work, eh pig face?"

"Hmmm, wot?" The bartender peered down at the little goblin. "Oh, yer can look on dat board over yonder. Any ub dem jobs is on dere." He drooled as he munched a piece of mutton.

Swordplay 2015: No Good Deed Goes Unpaid

What follows is a recap of my latest foray into Swordplay 2015. Not a blow-by-blow report but pictures of the important events. I wanted this to be a blood bath so I resolved all three PEFs as contact. Each PEF is eliminated then the next follows until all PEFs are eliminated or my forces are destroyed outright.

Elf, Ranger, and Dwarf

Sellswords and Spellslingers: First Impressions

Last night for my "Friday Night Fights" I had a game of Sellswords and Spellslingers by Andrea Sfiligoi, the brilliance behind Song of Blades and Heroes. I had played it initially when I picked it up. It was still just called "Sellswords" at that point and there were some confusing explanations of the rules at that time. I tried a couple of games (my wife even played!) but just couldn't get the jest of it.

I finally got around to downloading the updated version and it's way more clear. So much so that I'd say it could be the first game I try with my son when he's old enough (counting the days!). Basically, you roll up to three D20 for activation, anything above eight is a successful action. Anything seven or below means you draw from the Event Deck. This usually means your going to activate monsters but there are other special cards that are actually a good thing.

Of course, your characters have traits that make them special. I like to build my characters in a role-playing fashion, i.e. if I have a thief, they're going to have thief-like traits. Probably why my thief died the second or so turn! I'll definitely have to practice at designing characters but this was just a test game anyway. You can gain experience and buy equipment with silver pieces that you accumulate along the way. You can get assorted useful items like potions and such.

With ten different scenarios, you can go on long campaigns and I'm sure it' easy enough to design your own with little trouble.

So far the game was super fun!

Below are some action shots during the game!

Okumarts Patreon Shout Out

If you've ever wanted to get into paper miniatures, David Okum's Patreon is definitely a good place to start. Lately he has expanded into other genres that aren't covered to well in the paper minis, such as his new sets pictured below. Perfect for your pulp gaming needs!

A T-rex...Now I can finally play "Lost Worlds" by THW!

Of course, he's got a full catalog of other fantasy, sci fi, modern day, zombie horror, and a whole lot more. If you want to check out his other stuff, you can go to his Drive Thru RPG page and have a look.

Customizing Paper Miniatures with GIMP (free)

Good day, ladies and gents. I'd like to do a brief tutorial on how to customize paper minis in GIMP, which is a free program that allows you to do this. It's really quite simple. Here's quick example of a Sanity Studios militia figure:

1. Load up GIMP.
2. Open your PDF file or picture file.
3. Press F to get the Free Hand Tool or "Lasso" as I like to call it.
4. Trace around the area you want colored. It will probably take several sections at a time and a little patience. Remember, there are two sides to each mini!

5. Next you go to colors and go to "colorize" (as seen in the above picture).

6. Now use the color slider bar to get your mini just how you want it. In this case, purple, my favorite color! My niece once said "but that's not a man's color!" Humph I say!

7. And Bob's your uncle! You're finished.

It will even save your colorization option, just select the date from the drop down bar and boom, no need to try and get your slider bar to perfectly match the color you want on another figure.

A note on gimp. I like to use GIMP to make sheets of figures I want multiples of. Instead of printing off multiple pages for just one or two figures, I'll just make a new page 8.5" x 11" then use the select tool, Ctrl C, and pop it onto the new page with Ctrl V. It does slightly shrink the image for some reason but it's not super noticeable.

Hope this helped out!

Chain Reaction 2015: A Classic Tale

This didn't actually happen...

Gladiator's Campaign Turn 3: Postponed due to blizzard!

 We are currently experiencing a major storm here in Washington so you'll have to wait for the next installment!

Five Parsecs From Home: Gladiator's Campaign Turn 2

The religious artifact the crew must liberate.

I had to use the special card "Have you met my mate?" in order to scare up some help. There are five one use cards you can use in a campaign. This one in particular lets you get a crew member whenever you need one, even during a battle. Pretty powerful so I'm a little reticent to use it on the second turn. The alternative is to only get one recruit so I opted to use it so that I can recruit two new members and go into battle with four characters.

Note: I did kick Hattie and took her shotgun. She was bad luck anyhow!

Anyway, the campaign turn consisted of Katsuda and Skeet recruiting one member each (total of 6 upkeep). No enemies tracked me down so I had to do an "opportunity mission." I decided on the statue since I wanted a cavern theme.

From left to right: Katsuda, Skeet, Grenda, and Gort.

My opponents: Four vigilantes armed with rifles and the leader with an auto rifle.

The scenario: Locals have hired Katsuda's crew to root out their place of worship, a statue deep within a cavern. Vigilantes have decided to make it their base of operations. The townsfolk have little in the way of weapons, being a peaceful people. Naturally, they have to hire some muscle to take care of their problems once in a while.

Strategy: Try and keep out of sight or at least in cover and close as everyone of my people have 12" range.

The set up

Turn 1:   Quick actions went to Gort who dashed into cover. Katsuda moved into range and opened fire! She hits her man and he's stunned but being a terrifying weapon (probably super loud, especially in the cave), he has to take a morale test at the end of the turn.

Gort makes his move but is out of range with his hand gun.

Katsuda opens fire!...Even if she wasn't supposed to!

The enemy take over and run for cover. The victim of Katsuda's cling fire pistol crawls to relative safety while the leader of the vigilante group and his lackey level their rifles at the blue beauty. Being in cover, the bullets bounce harmlessly off the stalagmites. A few yards over, Gort is fired upon by a vigilante behind the statue but the he's saved by poor marksmanship.

They never said anything about collateral damage to the statue!

Grenda joins the battle with a wild shot after she too moves behind a stalagmite. Skeet dashes up behind cover.

(At this point I realized you can't shoot after dashing. As Katsuda dashed and fired, I decided it wasn't such a terrifying shot and didn't make them test morale. Oops!)

Turn 2: No quick actions this time. Things go very wrong.

Fire erupts once again inside the cave, Katsuda is injured and goes down! Grenda is targeted but the bullets miss. Gort, unfortunately, isn't so lucky. He crumples to the ground!

Uh oh...

Alien down!

The good guy's turn sees Grenda fire again but miss. She's a hacker who lived on a space station after all! Skeet makes a wild charge to one of the bridges hoping for a quick action.

Skeet's last stand.

One morale failure for the good guys!

Turn 3: One quick action goes to Skeet who moves into firing position (1" of extra movement is pretty nice!). He fires his shotgun at the woman behind the statue. One vigilante down!

Skeet caps the lady behind the statue.

Enemy take aim at Grenda and she's not very lucky! She gets shot by the boss man's auto rifle and goes down...Game over! Skeet beats feet as he lost his morale roll. If it's worth anything, the vigilantes also lose their roll. *Sigh*

Post Game:  We got paid 1 credit from the locals. A "thanks for trying" gesture, I guess.

Injuries: Katsuda was just knocked out! Grenda minor injuries and would spend one turn in the tank. Gort suffered a leg wound dropping his speed from 5" to 4.5" and missing one campaign turn.

Experience: Katsuda leveled up! I put the +0.5 into combat. Gort and Grenda each gained 1 exp. Skeet also leveled up! Decided I'd also put 0.5 into his combat score. I think combat is a good stat to dump points in for now since you add your combat score to your shooting dice.

Shopping: I spent 2 creds and got a brutal weapon.

Campaign event: An admirer! I've gained one crew member if I choose but they're unarmed and have no skill advances. I'm guessing they can still get stats from their background rolls? I'll take them as I can always dump them, I suppose.

Character event: Gort got +0.5 reactions as he was taught to always be on the lookout. He may have lost a leg but he gained in wisdom!

Well, that was campaign turn 2! Next turn will see the return of Jibril and Tereg. I can finally do some activities other than recruiting. Until next time!

Song of Blades and Heroes: Chicken Chasers vs Humans

Saturday night I invited my cousin and his son over for a play date and our sons played together as well. I chose Song of Blades and Heroes as the set of rules that we would use. Last time we played a war game was back in the old days playing Warhammer Fantasy Battles! Been a long time. I suspect we were still in our teens back then. Now at 36 (me) and 38, we are old haggard veterans of gaming, though this was my cousin's first game since then.

First we played a straight stand up fight and, as I was busy explaining the rules, I did not take any pics. In short, the Chicken Chasers performed admirably taking little in the way of losses!

Charge! A goblin chicken rider goes down. Hardly chivalrous! You can clearly see he was fallen!

We were running short on time but decided to play another game. We did the scenario "Treasure Hunt." We would play up to 3:45 pm or until a victor was decided.

The humans close in on a possible treasure spot (which would turn out to be the magical sword).

A giant chicken blockade being formed. As animals they couldn't pick up the item but they could muck up the field! Alas, the treasure wasn't there and the brave chickens were slowly whittled down.

Chicken riders were diverted to where the treasure was found.

The battle is joined!

After the treasure was found, goblin archers and chicken riders raced to the location.

Most of the human war band had concentrated in the center, luckily for them, as the magic item was revealed in the center ruins. The Human leader was the barbarian looking guy and mine was the black chicken rider.

The battle raged more quickly this time after my cousin got a new set of dice (very superstitious this one!) and understood the activation system a bit more. We had to wrap up the game as time ran out. Just as I was about to administer a coup de grace (yeah right, I was pretty well blocked up at the end as you can see by this final picture)!

Next time I think we'll try the science fiction set of these rules, Mutants and Death Ray Guns.

Thanks for reading!

Five Parsecs From Home: Gladiator's Campaign Turn 1

The press gang...

This battle was played out on Friday night or what I like to call "Friday Night Fights." The wife works until 12:00 am and the kid is in bed by 7:30 pm so I have plenty of free time to set up and not have to worry about little hands grabbing at little figures and buildings. Anyhow, let's not drag on!

Hero deployment. I thought I'd have at least one random figure on guard duty, which happened to be Katsuda.

As I left off, the group was tracked down by a press gang. They are as follows:

Numbers: +0
Morale: 1  (These guys are not very well motivated...Hopefully I can get a quick victory!)
Movement: 4
Combat: 0
Toughness: 3
Fighting Style: Aggressive
Weapons: Handguns
Specialist: Shotgun
Leader: I decided to roll a D6 and on a 1 or 2 the specialist would be the leader, which they were not. So they are armed with a handgun and have the leader package: +1 Combat and Toughness is raised to 4.

Strategy: I want to get as many kills on the goons as I can to try and secure a morale victory. Pretty simple strategy, indeed. These guys seem like the weakest enemies to fight, which is fortunate as this is my first real battle.

Setup: Since neither gang has a weapon that has a range of 12", I started in close to avoid boring movement, which was a mistake!

Turn 1: With everyone set up, let the fighting begin! I rolled for initiative with Quick Actions going to no one.

Scanning the tree line, Katsuda thought she saw a face. No, she was sure now, it was somebody. The distinct sound of a shotgun being readied broke the silence. It was an ambush! "We're under attack! Everybody out!" Before anyone could get set, the press gang was upon them.

Caught out in the open, the crew was helpless. Shots rang out from the bushes and Hattie went down in a pile. More shots rang out, this time Jibril and Tereg dropped as well.

Doesn't look good for our "heroes!"

Herb kicked over the table and quickly took aim at the man with the shotgun. Squeezing the trigger of his blast pistol, Herb nailed him. He shouted something in his alien tongue (probably PWNT!).

Note to self, a strategically placed metal desk can save your life.

Katsuda stood atop the storage container horrified at the carnage below. She shook herself into reality, things were going bad, real fast. She steadied her aim and fired her cling fire pistol. She was almost knocked backwards by the two shots she fired. Peering over the ammunition box in front of her, she saw she blew the ganger's head clear off.

Not just a pretty face, she can also blow your head off!

Censored!

The press gang had had enough. They fled as fast as they came. After a few moments making sure the ambush was over, the sounds of the wounded could be heard. Katsuda tended to the wounded while Herb finished off the man he had shot with a garrote.

Man, that was brutal. All it took was one turn! I guess I shouldn't have set them up so close but it was an ambush so thought it might be appropriate. I expected it to be a short battle with just four scum. A lot of 6's were rolled both during the game and post-game so the dice gods definitely factored into my crews fate.

Post-Battle


Enemy Status: I rolled to see if the press gang remained an enemy. They had had enough leaving me with just three enemies on this planet...Including the dreaded assassins.

Get Paid and Loot Found: We looted 6 credits and a nano-booster off the bodies then, unceremoniously, pitched their bodies in the deeper woods.

Determine Injuries and Recovery:
Jibril suffered minor injuries. He will remain in sickbay for 1 campaign turn.
Hattie also suffered minor injuries and will be out for 1 turn.
Tereg suffered a leg wound. He now has -0.5" movement dropping him to 4". He also has to stay in bed for 1 turn.

Experience:
Kat gained 3 exp for surviving and holding the field.
Herb gained 3 exp for surviving and 1 for getting the first kill.
The rest of the gang got 1 exp each for going into sickbay. Could be worse!

Shopping: I spent 2 creds and got Jibril his hand gun. A nice get well gift!

Campaign Event: We sold off some cargo from our last job and earned 6 creds. Makes sense as we were all from an old mining ship, the Gladiator.

Character Event: Herb had some business to attend to and will be leaving for 2 turns! Nice, bro. Way to leave your leader hanging. When he returns, he'll 1D6 exp. and a roll on the loot table. Looks like I'll be recruiting since it's just down to Kat! Probably have to use the one time use "Have you met my mate?" ability too. I've decided I'll boot Hattie next upkeep as she is a liability with those damn assassins tracking her. I'll keep her shotgun though.

In hindsight, I think I should have recruited a couple of more members. It suggested 5 or 6 but I thought, "nah, I'm a tough guy, I'll just take 5!" Probably should have gone with my gut feeling to get at least 6. Live and learn!