Scrapjack, ever closer

Did some detailing, weathering, and touch-ups this weekend.

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How I spent my weekend

I wanted to show off where I’m at on Project Scrapjack. Edmund gave me the model for Privateer Press’s Zevanna Agha and Scrapjack for Christmas, and I’ve been working on it since. There’s lots of touch-ups, detailing, and weathering to do yet, but I feel it’s in decent shape. I just love the texture you get from using inks.

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Scrapjack is ready to paint

Base-coated, ready to dry-brush. That’s Zevanna Agha to the side, she’s on a temporary base to paint separately.

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Arts & Crafts: Scrapjack is based

Sooner or later, I will have to start painting.

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Gaming Because Global Warming

We’re having a record-breaking heatwave here. It’s really alarming for all the people who don’t have air conditioning, by the way, especially the poor and elderly.

We don’t have air conditioning either but we have a mother-in-law unit that was built in the back of the garage and faces north, never getting direct sunshine though it has a good deal of natural light. This is the coolest part of the house, by quite a bit—and it serves as our gaming lair as well as occasional guest room.

We were left no choice but to retreat there and play games. We huddled around the Chromebook and played The Watch (Anna Kreider and Andrew Medeiros) on Roll20, with GM Bryanna and players Fish, Dani, and us. We’re at the very beginning of our campaign but we’ve already cooked up some really nice links and potential; conflicts between our characters and clans. Lots of proper drama in the wings.

And last night and tonight, we once more took to adventuring in Gloomhaven, making our way through the sinister sewers (completed Scenarios #18 and #23).

 

Play Report and Review: Relicblade

On Thursday my husband Edmund, our friend S., and I got to try Relicblade, a miniatures game from local company Metal King Studio. This is a skirmish-level, 35mm-scale game pretty much conceived and executed by one person, Sean Sutter: he wrote the rules, drew the art, and sculpted the minis!

The rule & scenario book

Rules for setting up

Rules for jumping down

The Relicblade had been Edmund’s birthday present this spring, but we had not tried it yet because Edmund wanted to paint the minis first. The basic game set comes with two factions, the Heroes and the Pig Men. Edmund had immediately declared them to be social justice warriors and male chauvinist pigs, respectively. The colour scheme of the heroes was selected to reflect his official team name, the Rainbow Warriors. 

Game Review: Gloomhaven

Back in 2015, Edmund and I backed the Kickstarter funding campaign for Gloomhaven, a new legacy-style miniatures game. Legacy games are campaigns where actions in one scenario may affect game world conditions and future scenarios. Because they involve placing stickers or marking cards, maps, etc. to indicate persistent effects in the game world, it can be very hard for a dedicated gamer to accept.

Many gamers can’t bring themselves to permanently alter game components! Nevertheless, the scope of the game was ambitious and the price tag ($79 for the full version with miniatures for each player character class) was perhaps steep if it turned out to be a game we’d rarely play, but really cheap if it we worked our way through the 70 or so scenarios then expected to be included, even if we only played through the campaign once, so we decided to risk chipping in. 

Fate of the Mouse Guard: Here you go!

Mouse Guard RPG (1st ed.)

War of Ashes: Fate of Agaptus

That’s my mouse, running away from three giant spiders and dragging the bad guy with me.

The Mouse patrol defeats the weasel.

As requested by a fan of Evil Hat Productions, here is some information on running a Mouse Guard game using the Fate system. TL;DR: My thinking process, followed by lots of useful links at the bottom of the post.

When I was in the final stages of writing War of Ashes: Fate of Agaptus for Evil Hat Productions, I wanted to test the rules we had grafted onto Fate Accelerated to support the use of miniatures. I wanted to check whether they would play well when used in another setting and handled by a game-master who wasn’t part of the development team. My friend Kit was nice enough to run it for us using the setting from the Mouse Guard RPG (Archaia Studio/Burning Wheel Games) and the episode was a success. I later ran it a few times at conventions and it was great fun.

Recently someone (Tim R.) wrote to Evil Hat to ask how we made these adaptions. I never posted any notes before because in truth, this was not a full-fledged conversion. However, the Fate Accelerated engine is excellent for  conversions-on-the-fly! And I think the miniatures rules we came up with work very well with otther settings, especially fantasy settings. 

Fate of the Inquisitor

TL;DR: Play materials for a Fate hack of Dark Heresy. Enjoy.

A year ago, I was planning on running demo games at conventions featuring the Open Content from War of Ashes: Fate of Agaptus. The Advanced Conflict rules, which are now also available from Randy Oest’s awesome Fate SRD website, are intended to support miniatures as an integral part of of Fate. Since we have approximately 30,000 points’ worth of miniatures in the house — you think I’m kidding, but I’m not — it seemed like the grim, gothic future of the 41st millennium, as seen in the Warhammer 40,000 miniatures combat game and the Dark Heresy role-playing game, was a perfect match.

Of course, health issues soon forced me to cancel my convention plans, but now that I am recovering and convention season is upon us, I decided to go back to packaging the game for quick-start.

First, the pitch:

Fate of the Inquisitor

Inquisitor Lucanus has led you, his retinue, to the Hive World of Corundum IV amidst an ongoing Genestealer invasion to retrieve a priceless relic from the foul xenos. Now the Inquisitor has disappeared during a brutal firefight and the ensuing cave-in, and you are chased by a Genestealer cult. Will you find your master again? Complete his mission? Call for help? Or die bravely but pointlessly?

I made templates for nine types of player characters, using a playbook format like the one used in games Powered by the Apocalypse (PbtA). The rules are pure Fate SRD, but I hope the playbooks make character creation quick and easy for time-constrained one-off games.Each comes with a choice of names, looks, customizable aspects, and stunts. The playbooks include:

• Arbitrator
• Assassin
• Imperial guard
• Ogryn Bodyguard
• Ratling Scout
• Sanctioned Psyker
• Scum
• Sister of Battle
• Tech-Priest

I also modified the appearance of the blank character sheet from War of Ashes: Fate of Agaptus. Then I made a cheat sheet of the Advanced Conflict rules I am using, and a table sign. All of these are available on Google Drive.

• Character Playbooks (Google Doc)
• Blank Character Sheet (PDF)
• Special Rules (Google Doc)
• Table Sign (PDF)

I have not yet put any effort into creating well-formatted single-page folding sheets because I expect mistakes may be pointed out and it’s easiest to update text prior to layout. Also, not a big priority right now.

Your comments are welcomed!

 

War of Ashes: Fate of Agaptus is a 2016 ENnie Nominee!

The 2016 ENnie Awards nominees were just announced and War of Ashes: Fate of Agaptus has made the list in four categories:

• Best Art, Interior
• Best Family Game
• Best Rules
• Product of the Year

It’s up against high-quality, popular releases but it’s so nice to be on the list. (Now I know that at least four people read it!)  ^_^

I am so very fortunate that on my first professional writing gig in the role-playing world, Evil Hat Productions let me create a book the way I wanted to, with the support of their fantastic knowledge and staff resources. It doesn’t get any better!