April Recap

Not much to share pictures of this month.

I briefly picked up a paint brush and applied the base uniform color for eight WWII French. I could have sworn I had primed nine, but it seems he's AWOL.

That was the extent of my painting.

I did order ten used(and painted) old GW metal Black Orks. I can't wait until they get here - they'll go against my lizards, when I make time to game that is.

Gaming-wise, I didn't get a game in until this most recent Monday night when my Sisters of Battle and Tyranids met in a first pass at Space Weirdos in a small 75-point game.

At that level, that's just three Sisters and five Nids - a tiny number of figures, but well suited for a small space gamer.

I played without the command points or the optional rules, just to get a feel for the basics. One game is not enough to go by, but I enjoyed it far more than Grimdark Future: Firefight for a similarly sized game. I found the rules easy to pick up and I appreciate that they have a solo supplement included with the rules (though I haven't tested). It's dice-based, which is not my favorite, as I prefer cards, but it uses more than just the d6, so I actually enjoyed rolling. 

RPG dice need more love!

Oh and I took no pictures.

That said, this evening (Wednesday), I setup a similar set table but played with One Hour Skirmish Wargames. I don't know why I bother to play anything else honestly. Such a great game. Immersive. Cinematic. Strong narrative. Etc.

I need to buy more decks of cards though - I keep losing one or two cards from each deck. Maybe the missing French infantryman took them.

Oh and no pictures again - trying to get even further away from photographing games and just enjoying the playing.

Most of my gaming efforts in April were focused on prepping for an Episodic Old School D&D campaign  - we meet this weekend for our character creation session. 

I'll be running Basic Fantasy RPG (BFRPG) which is essentially a retro-clone of one of my favorite iterations of D&D (and the first one I played lo those many years ago), Moldvay\Cook Basic\Expert Dungeons & Dragons. Character creation should take at most 10-15 minutes for B/X but everyone will be creating three PCs (given the lethality of old school games). 

Not only that but BFRPG implements a 1e-style separate race and class system and they have a plethora of community tested and approved additional races and classes beyond the four core classes (Fighter, Cleric, Magic-User, Thief) and four core races (human, halfling, elf, dwarf). So, selection will probably take quite a while as most of our group won't read anything until we're at the table.

If you're unsure of what I mean by an episodic campaign, think A-team or Law & Order as examples. Basically, they will have adventures with no overarching plots tying them together, other than player character emergent plots. There isn't even a necessarily consistent world (how many times does the same actor appear on Law & Order as different people on different episodes?).

Adventurers, however, are not police nor are they a team of commandos who were imprisoned for a crime they didn't commit. Especially at 1st level, they aren't even top of the list when someone is in trouble. So, rather than waiting for adventures to come to them, I want them to find them, yet not a sandbox and not a hex crawl, because those are a hard sell for at least one of my players. 

To that end, and mostly because I love making maps, I created a map of sorts (there's no scale, it's not even relative distances, so is it really a map?) with some initial adventures indicated on it. My intent is that it provides them agency in what adventures they go on. 

It's not really for navigation within the game world, but for navigation within the list of curated adventures from my library that I could run for them in the first two gaming sessions we have scheduled - it's more of a graphical database interface perhaps?