A Little Update (Pun 100% Intended)

I am not feeling painting at all lately, but I continue to pick sections to read in Tony Bath's and Henry Hyde's campaign books. I am enjoying the process of coming up with campaign rules for North Pole '42 (they need to be absolutely simple as I cannot be bothered with extensive record keeping - I'm leaning towards something like wilderness travel in Basic/Expert D&D) and also thinking about how I want to approach the Italian invasion (attempted invasion?) of France in June, 1940. 

Oh and I'm having fun coming up with a map, city names, personality names, etc. for a simple campaign between my lizard folk and my medieval Deetail figures.

However, one glaring point came to the fore in all of this, and that was my lack of LMGs and HMGs for France and Italy. To the interwebz! Specifically BrickWarriors.com

The French are outfitted with outdated, yet distinctly French, Chauchat LMGs, The HMG is difficult to place (for me) but I'll assume it's also outdated.

Nobody seems to sell a minifigure Italian HMG/MMG, so this US one will have to do. The Italian LMGs look the part, but I don't know what model they represent.

 

You might notice I don't know a whole lot about the equipment of either army. That's intentional. The more I know about a period, the less I enjoy games played in it, unless the rules factor in the things I know. This way I can be happy with rules that just feel right, without my usual worrying obsessing about if they are accurate reflections of the material I've read/watched. 

Idiosyncratic? Probably.

Both sides had their first outing with the new kit last night (no pictures, sorry, part of my policy to play more games without thinking about blog posts). 

The Italians - a platoon of three 5-man squads, 1 mortar and an L3 - attacked a French village defended by two squads, a medium howitzer, and HMG. The French ultimately were overrun. Rules used were 1BC Toy Soldiers mostly as written.

Battle of the Alps Squared

June 1940, the Italian army, ordered by the outsized ego of Il Duce - who was desperate to have a piece of France before Hitler had captured it all for himself -  trundled across the northern alpine border into France.

The stalwart defenders of ennui and champagne had expected as much and were dug in and ready.

The Italians used the woods to cover the left wing of their advance.

The French infantry were well dug-in and extricating them proved more difficult than discretely hiding ten pounds of good salami into your rucksack.

Calling a meeting of L3s with the FT17s a "tank duel" or a "clash of armor" stretches credulity. Let us say, they fired shots at each other while snacking on loaves of bread and drinking bottles of wine, with the wine merchants being the real winners, judging by the ineffectiveness of both sides.

Eventually the French armor, despite damage incurred from the Italian battery - drove back their Italian opposites - can you blame those poor Italian pilots? They only learned to drive the L3 a few days ago. 

It was all for naught, as they were just in time to find the Italian infantry had successfully captured the village. A halfhearted attempted to dislodge the Italians met with no success.

The French had run out of time and would have to fall back. Here is the battlefield at the end:

The scenario was "Late Arrivals", a favorite of mine from One Hour Wargames. It works equally well for Austrians streaming into Italy as it does for Italians invading France. The game lasted the OHW standard 15 turns. 

The rules were improvised, based on my own squad-per-base rules - a mash of Crossfire, Advanced Squad Leader Starter Kit, and The Portable Wargame - but moved up a few levels of organization and no stacking allowed. I also used ideas borrowed from Ross Mac's Fast and Furious Fifties

Initially I thought of the units as companies of infantry, platoons of tanks, three or so guns, etc. 

However, while writing my narrative it didn't really seem to matter and I could just as easily think of them as battalions. I hear Memoir '44 is a bit like that - where the nominal scale changes based on the scenario? I don't know, I've never played it, but that's my understanding.

It seemed to work here at least.

Escape the Monster Apocalypse

Sunday was our annual Family Fall Festival - a holiday my son's mom invented when he was born. I don't recall the rationale, but here we are 12 years later and we still celebrate it with friends and family.

Three years ago, I suggested I could run a Halloween themed game for the party. And then again last year. Which meant I had inadvertently started a tradition. To the point that, a few weeks ago I was asked if I was going to run a game for the Festival. 

And so, somewhat last minute, I dug through my supplies and decided that, since the previous Festival games had featured Legos, so would this one. However, unlike previous years, I made use primarily of my existing collection and supplemented by raiding my son's massive tub of Legos to make the buildings for this game (and to provide player characters).

Rather than stop the zombie plague, the players would have to gather parts to repair an escape vehicle (represented by four Jack O' Lanterns around the board), while fending off zombies, skeletons, and boss monsters, and to do it all before the government nuked the town to end the monster apocalypse.

Fun, as they say, was had by all. Although my son was quite sleepy by the end.

For rules, I used One Page Rules Age of Fantasy: Skirmish, with army lists from both Fantasy and Grimdark (the players - because firearms are part of Grimdark). The players were all Hero types, which is unusual for OPR, and of course were essentially seven armies of 1, while the monsters were a much larger, but single, army. 

In play tests, the game lasted near two hours. In the event it was closer to four and as we had gotten a late start due to a delayed dinner, it was near 8pm when we started(so, a midnight finish!).

I had failed to account for the amount of discussion that would take place between the players around tactical choices - choices that I had purposely selected to add interest to the game!

Each player character had a trait that benefited them only, and another trait that benefited the party as a whole - under certain conditions (within 12", only if charging, in cover, that sort of thing). It was coordinating those for max effect that I believe had the greatest impact on total run time.

Next time, I aim for a one hour game.

And next time, will be the annual Christmas game (apparently another tradition I inadvertently started).

Italian Tankette Rolls Off Production Line

Thank you for everyone who commented on my injury post. Whether it was to well-wish, commiserate, offer levity or sympathy, it was all appreciated.

To further cheer me up, my plastic building brick (not Lego)  Italian L3/CV33 arrived.

It comes in around 180 pieces and looks pretty cute if I do say so myself.

Cute may not be how you want your armored fighting vehicle described, but well, I mean, it's cute!

Even the real ones aren't imposing. I suppose if one was coming towards me, guns blazing, I'd feel differently.

Then again, it'd probably break down and I'd be fine. They didn't have the best record in the war.

Back to the model.

The hatch works, so I can plop a mini-figure inside if desired (this model cost $13.99 USD. I can see buying two more eventually, for a platoon/company/battalion and putting a commander in one. That's still less than what it cost me to buy a single 1/50 resin T-34, and there's no painting required)

The treads are each assembled from 29 individual pieces. Assembly was made complicated by those pieces being 1) tiny and 2) lacking the use of my index finger on my left hand. The rest of the model went together with little difficulty.

Even with name brand Lego models, rough handling, say the kind anyone under 12 might do, will result in parts coming off. That said, despite being knock-off bricks, everything is fairly tight - almost too tight in some cases, and I had to really force the pieces together -  and so far nothing has come off, even when wrestling the hatch open and closed with my clumsy fingers. 

The treads did separate when I tried to roll it across the carpet. I just wanted to see if the gears "worked" or was all display. I won't do that again!

This kit finished off my initial Brick War 2 build-up. 

There's more to come in this arms race, but there's no rush. My bank account thanks me.

In the meantime, I've got three hastati in progress on the paint table, three Blitz Bowl Reavers in progress, and some French Foreign Legion ready for prep and priming. Plus, working on ideas for VSF Lost World/Antarctica campaigning and building/assembling a mega-dungeon of sorts because my son has asked me to create and run one for him!

Somewhere in France, 1940

 My Father's Day gift of five Italian minifigures arrived in time for me to stage a little skirmish in the first hour of the day.

The Italians had installed a howitzer on a hill close to the front lines in anticipation of a coordinated bombardment of the French reserves.  A French recon patrol spotted the position and two squads of a nearby platoon were dispatched to neutralize the enemy.

Defenders of the gun of dubious origin.

Not a fan of the grey helmet for the NCO, but it beats wearing a field cap on the lines with bullets whizzing around - even if he is in the relative guarded safety of a ruined French farmhouse.

French squads move up on the left and right - one for the gun, one for the farmhouse.

The squad creeps up to the edge of the woods undetected. They fire and immediately kill one of the guards outside the house!

After intense fighting squad on the left captured the gun, but lost their NCO and another rifelman in the process.

On the right the house was secured, but another dead NCO, and two riflemen were added to the toll. Perhaps some good came of it, as Italian maps indicating other artillery positions were recovered.

Rules used were One Brain Cell Toy Soldier Rules with the Overwatch and Wounds options. 

Playing time was maybe 30 minutes? I don't know, I was having too much fun to keep track!

Happy Father's Day!

The Black Gem

For the past two weeks, I've been head down scrambling to put together some kind of game for our family's annual Fall Festival. Last year, I ran a brick/Lego-based zombie scenario, which was a huge hit. The only specific request for this year's game was some kind of visual element (helps keep my son involved).

I had an itch to run some b/x (Moldvay Basic/Expert) Dungeons & Dragons again and decided to combine that with bricks.

After far too much time spent pouring over one-shot modules, I decided that The Black Gem  from Catthulhu over on DriveThruRPG had the makings of something fun. However, as written, it would not work for my players, so I reorganized it into a 5-Room dungeon format (I highly recommend subscribing at RoleplayingTips for the free guide). 

Spoilers ahead! If you are a player in a campaign and your DM plans to run this, STOP NOW!

*****

The party arrives in the area of the Crying Angel fountain.

While the PCs explore and investigate, some zombies and skeletons arrive.

Drawn by the smell of apples, the party finds themselves in the Spider's Grove. (This is something I added as a connecting point between the major encounters)

Ambushed by ghouls!

A tough fight but the party prevailed! The pumpkin headed figure resulted from that cleric trying to throw a pumpkin at the ghouls and rolling a 1.

The party happens upon two zombie grave robbers. They make quick work of them.

The final boss - the eerie glow of the black gem.

The Danse Macabre!

We had to turn the lights on so we could actually play.

Overhead shot of the battle field.

The thief fired an arrow at a skeleon, missed and the gem was alerted to the party's presence. It sent forth its guardian!

Ed the Head cast invisibility on itself, and rolled past the raging melee in front of the mausoleum. There it found the black gem. Which it debated eating or knocking off the pedestal. Given Ed's lack of a stomach, knocking it off was decided upon.

With the gem destroyed, the undead dropped in their places. The party was victorious.

I set up a map similar to a node-based wargames map based on the "rooms" and added some events to occur in between the main story nodes.

Here is my map for reference:

Grey boxes are from the module, blue circles are things i added. Solid lines are actual paths in the cemetery, whereas dotted lines are "overland" amongst tombstones and copses and take 2 -3 turns to traverse.

I purposely created multiple paths through the adventure - I don't like to rail-road my players and I've seen too many 5-Room dungeons setup or run just that way, with the rooms in order. The progression across the map, left to right, is basically the 5-Room structure, but they don't have to follow that.

In the event, my players went from the In Media Res start, to the Fountain, to the Spider Grove, to the Grave Diggers, to the Ghouls, to the Danse Macabre, skipping everything else.

To give players something to hook their directional choices on, I added simple sounds (or scents in one case), will-o-wisp "torches" were from a Halloween random encounter list i found on DriveThru, and the "gate signs" are part of the adventure as written. This made for quite lively discussion each time a decision was needed and that was the entire point, to allow the players to role-play and to feel their choices mattered.

I was pretty much able to run the whole game looking just at this. Including the time it took for players to decide on a minifigure and choice of armor, it took about 3 hours start to finish.

Cliche as it is, fun was had by all. It's hard not to have fun with Legos/bricks.

One player, a role-playing veteran, commented that he was impressed my ability to consistently run successful one-shots. Unfortunately, that's kind of where my ability ends! I find campaigns with through-lines difficult to run - perhaps because I cut my teeth in episodic module play? I don't know but thankfully our family gatherings are perfect opportunities to run one-shots.

Zombies! And Blocks!

After my son was born, his mother decided we needed a unique family holiday tradition outside of the usual and so she invented "Fall Festival". We play something as a family, make something,  and watch something - usually "Over the Garden Wall". 

Typically, the "play something" is a video game, but this year, after spying some zombie Lego-knock-off brick figures and sets in the Dollar Tree, I decided to put together a game that would use them. To be honest, my original plan wasn't for Fall Festival (which is always the first Saturday in October) but I was asked if I could have it ready and, upon rediscovering the zombies supplement for GASLIGHT on WargameVault, I figured it was feasible.

Almost everything for the game, including the wooden cubes for markers, was from Dollar Tree except for the flora, the lamp posts, and gate with fence. That was provided by Amazon - they are knock-off Legos as well, and inexpensive.

Dice and playing cards were things I had on hand but even then, some of them were from the Dollar Tree.

Overview. of the table. Players had to make their way from the park to the cemetery to destroy the bubbling glop that produced zombies.

The aforementioned glop. As luck would have it, DollarTree sells a zombie figure in black slime. It's like they knew I'd need this!

My zombie horde. Well, as much as 16 zombies is a horde.

In order to make the game more like a video game to appeal to my son, I added ammo tracking (via (wooden cubes) and loot crates (more wooden cubes) with med kits (still more wooden cubes), additional ammo and weapons, and possible "specials".

There were four players each controlling a single figure and an NPC dog that was controlled by the team (but it would run away if it failed a save and potentially leave the table). 

Their objective was to find and destroy the zombie spawn point in the cemetery.

Early turns, the player character figures are entering from the lower left behind the pine trees.

Bob (you know, The Builder) and Brewster (the dog) clearing out zombies in the road. On their right, Potter has fired his AR-15 (The plain cube is a noise marker). Officer Krupke and Hermione in the middle, back (also with a noise marker).

Same turn different angle.

Krupke found this book of esoteric lore in one of the crates.

It contained the secret to defeating the zombies. (And removed the "you must score less than half - quarter at long range - of your shoot score to kill a  zombie" restriction)

The heroes fought across the road into the cemetery. Just before they entered, Potter found a radio in another crate. He managed to reach the outside world. What would it mean?

A helicopter en route!

The chopper lands and a crew of an anti-zombie paramilitary deploy. Will they be able to help our heroes?

Like true heroes, they don't wait to find out.

Bob, Brewster, and Krupke made it to the goop! After fighting off the spawning undead, Krupke planted the bomb. Although caught in the explosion, they made their saves!

The game turned out to be more of a success than I could have hoped for. Everyone seemed to have a great time and my son, who doesn't like to play much of anything table top related save PanzerKids loved it

I have plenty of critiques of course. 

For one, I don't feel it was as intense a game as it could have been - their survival was rarely in question. To do that, I would lower the shoot, scuffle, and save numbers for the player characters if I were to run it again (I let them players assign the values as they chose from 17,15 and 9 depending on how they imagined the character. I would probably go with 15, 12, 9 next time). 

I'd also buy way more zombie figures! There were times when I couldn't spawn any in because there were not enough figures. Actually, I'll probably buy more whether I run this particular game again or not. Zombie games are fun solo too because the zombies don't require any tactical planning.

Finally, a good option would be a second spawn point coming in behind the players so they'd have to watch their backs. As it was, per my original conception, each board section was like a video game level and once complete you don't need to go back. It worked well that way, but I think a second spawn point would be even better.

There was talk about starting a spring celebration tradition as well - mostly because of the game. I don't think another brick game is necessarily in order, but perhaps? The WWII themed brick stuff is very tempting.

As in most zombie movies, the authorities arrived too late to do anything except congratulate the heroes for a job well done.