Purple People Eaters

A lot of people got their wargaming start with Games Workshop games/figures/etc and then discovered there's a whole wide-world of wargaming that goes beyond what GW dictates.

I seem to have gone the opposite direction.

Now, I'm not particularly interested playing 40K - the rule book costs too much for something that  I am not convinced is anything remotely close to worth it. One Page Rules are free, or if you want to shell out $5, you can buy the advanced rules PDFs on WargameVault and they get updated for free whenever OPR updates the files. Plus,  I have met several former GW gamers who say OPR is the fun they used to have before GW sucked the joy out of the room.

However, while yes, you can get 3D printed stuff or use models from any company to play OPR, I just happen to really love a lot of GW's sculpts. While aesthetically I prefer the more comical looking models of the 80s and 90s (Orks, I'm specifically looking at you), the current models are things of beauty, and panting them can be as complicated, or in my case, uncomplicated, as desired.

All that is to say, here's an update on my Tyranid termagants:

After priming, a wash with Magos Purple. Call it what you will GW, this is clearly Grape Juice.

Pallid Wych Flesh dry brush, Leviathan Purple applied, Ulthuan Grey dry brush on the purple, Reichland Flesh Shade on the gun bodies. Why can't their paints have normal names?

Presenting the first completed members of Hive Fleet Leviathan

The other side, so you can see the eyeball on the guns. Painted with craft paint! Let the clutching of pearls begin!

There are things  I see in close-up that make me annoyed and I'll go back and fix. Maybe. This is a horde army, individual models will blend into the mass. Even in Grimdark Future: Fire Fight (GD:FF), in a 300 point game I can field nine of them (if using the Force Org rules) or all of them (if I don't use Force Org rules).

And, this arrived Saturday:

Looking ahead (are wargamers ever not planning something more?) I am considering adding a canoness and three paragon warsuits but not until these are painted up. That would get me up to a 1000 point Grim Dark Future list (about 500 points in GW terms as I understand it) to bring to the Georgia OPR group (which, amusingly,  I am an admin on the FB group despite playing one game with the group).

Speaking of OPR, I got in a (solo) game of Plague Marines vs Blood Ravens on Father's Day night using GD:FF

Terrain provided by the neglected army men bin in my son's closet, which contains some things that used to be in my collection (CTS PZ IV, 21st Century terrain bits. The PlayMobil prison is his, but I have it earmarked for my collection :D ). Board provided by the Space Marine boardgame

The forces of Chaos demolished the forces of the Imperium - the one above is the sole survivor.

I used the kitchen table/small space rules for Grim Dark Future: Firefight, which halves all the ranges. However, I may have mistakenly set up the armies on the short sides which put a lot of distance between them (I couldn't be bothered to look at the rulebook PDF which on my laptop and not on my phone where it would be convenient).

 In Kill Team, the thing GD:FF approximates, Plague Marines have a base move of 4" compared to 6" for Assault Intercessors (all of my Blood Ravens are Assault Intercessors). But GD:FF does not give the Plague Marines the Slow trait - so they move the same. But about half of the Plague Marines had rifles vs the pistols of the Assault Intercessors, giving them a decided advantage with so much ground between the two forces.

Up next, more Tyranids! And an Ultramarine Infernus converted to Blood Raven Infernus (the three figures and paint sets come with the Ultramarine symbol molded into the left pauldrons instead of decals) to give the Blood Ravens a little bit more umph if not range (same range as a pistol).

In Space, No One Can Hear You Scream

To my surprise, I did have a little time over the weekend to do hobby things - or rather, I made time because I was doing a lot of "productive" things and thought "I need a break."

And so I broke out my copy of last year's bomb-of-a-game-but-great-minis-value Space Marine. I'm starting in on the Tyranid termagants. I love their Alien-meets-Jurassic Park look and I'm looking forward to getting them onto the table as opponents for my Blood Ravens or, as my son tells me this fits the lore, my Plague Marines, using Grimdark Future: Firefight or possibly even One Hour Skirmish Wargames. 

They're push-fit models in this box (I think it's meant as a gateway drug to Warhammer 40K and they don't want to scare anyone off) but they do have to be clipped from the sprues and a little minor scraping of lines and such, but the hard plastic makes it a breeze (mostly).

There are two of each pose in this set, so I'm going to work in 4s rather than my usual 3s. 

Here's the first batch undercoated:

Since I have so many to paint (for me, 20+ figures is a whole army,but I realize for may people, it's not even a battalion's worth of figures) , I'll be using a "speed" method and mostly following this video from Sonic Sledgehammer Studio.

One notable exception, I'll be using Leviathan Purple contrast paint for the carapace.

And speaking of, two of the paints were an early Father's Day gift!

These are my first contrast paints and I'm super excited to give them a try. With 20+ Tyranids, I'll get plenty of practice!

Week Off Recap

I was off this past week from my day job and as a result, I was able to squeeze in some gaming related activity. 

Most of the gaming was centered around a mega-dungeon campaign I've been running for my son, off and on, since July of 2023. His party is on their way to the regional capital to deliver a letter they discovered that hints of an invasion and at his request, he wants to see the villages and towns along the way.

As I had never intended for him to leave the tiny area I had mapped out around the dungeon originally, some time was spent generating a map (I make it sound tedious but it was fun - I used an old copy of Hexographer), identifying the villages and their names (most of them are based on towns from the Let's Game It Out YouTube channel that we used to watch religiously, but the capital is Capital City per The Simpsons), and then importantly what published modules, adventures, encounters, etc. I would put in or near each stop along the route.

His first side-quest was fighting a devil his party had accidentally freed when they were but level 3 or less (they are now level 6-7 - which might sound like a lot of gain for old school play, but we have had a *lot* of sessions, since it's just him and me it's easy to get the whole group together!). He appreciated the call back - and in the very brief fight where he sent the devil back to Hell, he learned that Geryon (arch-devil) is concerned about his party rising in power. It came out in role-play and was completely unscripted, but he's super excited about it, so now I have that thread/threat I can work in now and again.

As a point of interest, I used ChatGPT to generate a 5-room "dungeon" (really wilderness encounter areas) featuring said devil, set in a swamp. With a little tweaking it ended up being a great little 2+ hour session with a satisfying story arc and interesting puzzles. I'll probably do this for some other small area encounters along the route.

The party is currently in the Tower of the Stargazer (James Raggi's module for Lamentations of the Flame Princess). He will be there a bit - although he's already found and gotten the big treasure I think (the module is not written for characters of 6th level or higher, so he had some advantages and got a boon when he passed what would be a difficult saving throw for a 1st level character, which he cashed in for the key to the puzzle protecting the treasure - I'm OK with this. At his characters' levels, the treasure amounts to a pittance towards the XP for the next level - and he still hast to get it back to the village for it to count as XP anyway and it's more than they can carry). 

He's on summer break, so we'll play on weeknights as well as weekends until school starts again.

My big miniatures accomplishment was finishing the last three Novokh Dynasty Necrons. 

The gang's all here.

This puts me at twenty-five Warhammer 40K miniatures painted this year - not earth shattering, but on pace to get everything painted before the end of the year. Up next, when I get to it, I'll probably start assembling the first Tyranids. I think they are pretty great, so I'm looking forward to it, even though I have like 23 to paint or some ridiculous number.

I got in a second game of Fire Team - Necrons lost again, and in a big way. I definitely made some tactical errors when I was controlling them. I made some notes to apply next time.

The same can be said for my Nurgle Rotters who had their second game ever, and lost, in Blitz Bowl - this time against the Reichland Reavers (humans). They are just so slow. I think I need to goal tend with most of the team, most of the time.

Other than D&D, I'm not sure when I'll get to work on anything else gaming related - I'm putting together a bunch of YouTube content for guitar (song walk throughs for Sisters of Mercy, Black Flag, Dead Kennedys, and similar, as well as general guitar content, etc) and I 'll need time to shoot and edit it in between day job, D&D, Lone Warrior stuff, and teaching! (Overextended? Me?)

First Outing of Space Marines and Necrons

Friday night, I put paint to figures for the first time in ... awhile and by Saturday afternoon I finally finished the three Necrons and two Scarabs I had been working on for ages.

I still have three Necrons to paint, but I decided to get a game in as motivation for painting (the way Norm at Battlefields and Warriors does).

The game was Fire Team. 

The first time my Blood Ravens have been deployed in anger!

The Space Marines charge to their left to claim an objective. The Necrons mirrored them to do the same at their end of the board.

Further into the game (I think this is turn 2), several Necrons were dropped this turn but wounds are piling up on the Blood Ravens (indeed they lost one almost immediately after I took this)

End game.

If you look at the above picture, both sides control one objective - 1 Victory Point each. However, the Space Marines won the day due to achieving one of their Target of Opportunity card objectives:

Honestly, it felt like a bit of a cheat for them to win that way (I play solo, so I win regardless).  That said, the cards are the luck of the draw, so well within regulation.

I'm not going to do a full discussion of the game - for a detailed treatment check out a post from Alex on  Up the Blue!: More Space Marine Adventures: "Fire Team" (upthebluefow.blogspot.com) That's the post that convinced me to buy the game.

I will say a few things:

• The Target of Opportunity cards remind of the cards you use in Blitz Bowl to score points outside of a touch down - I find both equally difficult to achieve! I do like the added challenges though.
• As a learning game there was a bit of rulebook checking, but after the first tun, it was all pretty straightforward.
• There are a LOT of counters - not atypical in a board game, but difficult to manage with the miniatures (they don't balance on the stacks easily every time) and if you don't put them under the figure you have to be careful when multiple figures are in adjacent hexes, each with multiple counters.

It definitely has me excited to get painting on the last three Necrons!

Nutcracker Commando Raid

 Decided to put a non-canonical game on the table while I work out campaign rules for a first North Pole ‘42 campaign. In this case the scenario idea was taken from Sci-fi Skirmish Scenarios: Small-unit Missions For Use With Your Favourite Wargaming Rules by John Lambshead. Not coincidentally I used his One Hour Skirmish Wargames (OHSW) to play it.

The good guys are a crack commando unit - and so were given a Leader(3) (two actually - Clara and the Rat King), a Motivation of 4, and all had the Lucky trait (meaning they had a 75% chance of recovery if the were knocked down). Their goal was to silence the German 88 harassing a vital supply line for the main army.

The opposing force is supposed to be lower quality troops, so I gave the Germans a single Leader(2) and a Motivation of 2.  They don't want to be there - it's cold, it's the middle of nowhere, and their supplies are limited to what was on the ship they arrived on.

*****

Rat King took his Rattenkriegers to the right while Clara led a squad on loan from Frosty’s Fighters on the left (they are armed with bolt action rifles, I just haven't made them yet).

The forces arrayed at the start, with defenders as per the suggested scenario deployment.

It was a bit of a slog at first as our heroes struggled to make any dent in the the dug-in German front-line defenses.

Rattenkriegers

On the left, Clara and the snowfolk had difficulty getting much started, faced as they were by the German tripod MG and they were pinned down in the hill top woods

Eventually, on the right, the defenses were breached, giving the Rat King the opportunity he was waiting for. His rats gave a fine accounting of themselves.

A plucky rat spies the German rifleman in the second-floor window.

As the rats surged forward, the tide began to turn on their left. A snowfolk soldier sent a German defender into the snow, and Clara seized the opportunity to charge, brandishing her candy cane staff. She dispatched the German before he could stand. 

Clara set her sites on the machine gun and the German leader with them.

The German line begins to crumble.

The rat swarm continued their relentless push towards the German back-line positions, with Rat King, sword waving above his head, encouraging his soldiers to finish the job.

Rat-Attack!

Moments later, Clara engaged the German leader in close combat - he was no match for the peppermint princess. The rats begin firing on the 88's crew - armed only with pistols, returning fire wasn't an option. 

Before the gun crew could turn the 88 on the attackers, the German 2nd-in-command ordered his men to abandon the field.

Victory for the North Pole forces.

*****

The Germans actually broke when they failed a morale check after their leader had been knocked out of the fight and 2nd-in-command was down. This rarely happens when I play OHSW so it's definitely noteworthy.

The other observation I had was that the usual 5-turn limit of the scenarios included in OHSW would not fly here. With so much cover for both sides, the decks were chewed up fast and furious - meaning Jokers came up rather quickly. I didn't track turns but I think it was near 12 turns before the Germans broke.

The scenario however is not turn-based (unlike many of the scenarios in Sci-fi Skirmish Scenarios) but rather based on whether you concede the battle or not. I didn't have to as the Germans caved first.

I was so inspired by the game, I got out the remainder of my Christmas forces from the holiday bin and put them in a toy soldiers bin so they can be used in future encounters. In addition to the snowfolk needing rifles, some of the robot wooden soldiers need repair, as does King Moonracer. Storage was not kind to them.

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.

NP '42: Deciding on Tabeltop Rules

Over the weekend, I set up trying to settle on a set of rules for the North Pole games. There were quite a lot in contention, but the top contenders for this experiment were: One Brain-Cell Toy Soldiers (1BC) with card-based unit activation, G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T. with half-sized units, and One Hour Skirmish Wargames(OHSW).

For the scenario, a German platoon of three 5-man sections, one HMG, one light mortar and a platoon leader is advancing to capture some buildings on the outskirts of Christmas Village. An under-strength platoon of British paras, consisting of two 5-man sections, an HMG, and a platoon leader, move into the area to hold off the German advance. The Germans win if they capture both buildings, otherwise it's a win for the British.

You can tell this is non-canonical as I didn't break out my dozens of Christmas trees for the woods.

The fact that the pictures below tell a cohesive story is completely by accident. They are from multiple games.

British occupy the ruined building on their left.

 

"Knock! Knock!"

British assault the house.

The German right advances under cover of light mortar fire. The mortar was more devastating in some games than others. This must be from the GASLIGHT game where the max range was 24". In OHSW it's infinite (and can't move), and in 1BC, off hand, I believe it's at least 36".

The HMG covers the building in case the British capture it, while the English and Germans exchange fire from the relative safety of the trees. Either 1BC or GASLIGHT, because tripod HMGs can't move in OHSW.

The Germans hold the farm house, and the defenders of the other building are defeated in close assault.

Things take a turn for the worse on the British right.

Game over. This is most likely from the OHSW game, as contact with a downed figure is immediate figure removal.

I'm not sure I'm any further along in deciding.

I *can* say that, while it's no secret I love OHSW,, 18 units (the Germans, each figure or weapon team is a unit) on one side really felt like it was straining the system. 

The action felt less chaotic whirlwind and more disjointed than usual. At best you can take action with 13 units, and more often than not less than that. If you want to move and shoot with each figure even drawing a King, you're looking at 6 figures taking action.  To make it work, I'd have to drop one of the 5-man sections or support weapons or some similar combination (never mind that I have tanks, half-tracks, PAK-38s etc. for the Germans to use at the North Pole).

Both GASLIGHT and OHSW handle characters and vehicles easily - so a coin flip there.

GASLIGHT requires some adjustments for the under-sized units: morale and Shoot values primarily. Morale is somewhat silly in GASLIGHT, which I love, but maybe not for WWII troops (definitely would use for woodland creatures, elves, etc.).

1BC wins for simplicity and adding card activation made it more like GASLIGHT. There's no vehicle rules so they require improvising - nothing I haven't done before, and I could probably bolt on either of the others in some way, but still, it's extra work.

I really like the Force Motivation and Force-level Morale check in OHSW as opposed to individual unit morale checks in GASLIGHT or 1BC. Although, this was the first time I ever came close to a side failing their morale check - the paras lost their PL (a Leader(3) in OHSW terms) and only had their section leaders (Leader(1)  in OHSW terms). They came within 1 point of failing their morale check.

So, each set has things that work, and things that work sort-of. And I like them all. 

Maybe I'll just choose whichever one I'm feeling on the day? Or maybe, more play tests are in order? Oh darn.