Don’t think that your voice/pestering doesn’t matter. Contact your representatives. Talk to people at work. Pester people on the bus/internet/grocery store. It’s worth it and don’t assume that it’s taken care of by others.
Ugh. I felt like I painted a lot in December but I didn’t get much done in reality. I meant to get my Bestigor out the door but I only ended up completing three Gor, one Bestigor and my second Chariot (which has a bestigor on it). I couldn’t complete the riders in time for the new year but got close so finished those up last night. The bestigor is a bit messed up. He’s pinned to the floor of the chariot but his left foot is off the ground. Not really noticable but still not ideal. I had to put the driver quite a bit forward but I feel that worked out pretty well.
This January, now half way gone already, is all Bestigor– IF I can keep my dirty dirty paws off my old Epic 40K stuff. I started improving a couple of infantry stands here and there and it turned into fixing up 22 stands of infantry from their rather dismal 1992 paint jobs, and that took a lot of work.
I haven’t played D&D seriously for well over 20 years and have no interest in the ‘generic’ fantasy RPG genre whatsoever, but the drama around the editions has been quite a show the last few years with Pathfinder, 3.5 and 4th edition vying for dwindling post-Lord of the Rings film RPG dollars while the 40+ crowd all want to publish their own take on the old school revival (=meh) to keep it all so 1978 real as their mid-life crisis output (Labyrinth Lord, etc.). While 4th edition is not my cup of tea from a setting side nor system side (your character cannot die in the game), I appreciate what the designers tried to do with the DM XP points system and changes, however abortive sometimes, are progess. However, after playing Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition over the break I am now certain THAT was the way D&D should have gone. Granted every single iteration of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay has been better in setting, art, systems and tone than any of the generic fantasy stuff TSR, Paizo or Wizards has yet produced so what FF did with WFRP is to be expected as they had big shoulder pads with spikes to stand on.
Anyway– here is the announcement. Give me a three legged goblin, some nurgle sausages and chaos cultists ANY day of the week though…
First Mount and Blade and now this!
I can’t understand it but it appears to be about the siege of Constantinople (well that’s pretty obvious actually). It will be tough to get a hold of this badboy but it looks excellent and it will be cool to see a take on the conflict from the victims of the crusades side for once.
As a high school/college lad (and an embarrassingly long time afterward) I was far too languishing poor to buy a lot of gaming stuff; but oh boy did we used to play. We would make boats for Man o’ War out of balsa wood, we played with pieces of paper representing units in Warhammer, made terrain from toilet paper tubes and furniture rubbish, wrote our own adventures for WFRP and Paranoia and so on. What we had rather than cash then was time– and quite a lot of it compared to at least my current count (hell 1 hour free from other stuff is a long time these days) . Granted we could have been working during this time to buy more stuff for the games, but you know, it was in between classes or those idle weekends right at the beginning of a college semester when all your homework was long done so why not throw down a 15 hour game of Adeptus Titanicus or two? Or play Talisman every single day (sometimes twice)?
These days I cannot wholly complain as I’ve gotten in a good 50 hours of Warhammer Fantasy Battle in the last year as well as a much smaller amount at the boardgame table, but the long swaths of time like back in the day just cannot be spent without planning months in advance. I think it’s because of this lack of actual play that makes those of us with heaving masses of other real life responsibilities buy stuff– sometimes lots of stuff–for games we know we may never even get a few games in.
Case in point for me personally was an Epic 40K fever over the Holiday, where I dropped 100$ or so on miniatures and terrain. I have one buddy that played it back in the day but no group to get into it– an certainly the game is dead as dead can be from the publisher so it’s a game with no real future at all (that said all of the incarnations of the game are pretty great). Yet, I see buying stuff for a game sort of like buying a lottery ticket– if you have the lottery ticket you can DREAM about winning and pressing random people onto your personal yacht that goes to your small country in Africa where you can hunt the most dangerous gameof all and drive ATV’s all over manicured English Gardens: if you have the gaming stuff you can DREAM about playing and in this stage of life as it were, I think that’s all you can be sure about doing– the play sometimes is just too much work to get to.
This does not just apply to miniature games– Starcraft 2 was a complete bust for me as I just didn’t have time to get involved in the game online early on nor get a group of friends to play with– and if you get on it later all you will do is get your ass kicked constantly and no one cares about it because the next big thing is already out. As for board games– I played Advanced Squad Leader (Starter Kit 1) last night and while it is a cracking great game I realized after checking ebay for the second starter kit (ouch that’s $$$) that I had only played three times in two years. Now ASL is a SUPER heavy, and it takes awhile to get back into the swing of the rules (it does play extremely smoothly once you get going and I still heap praise on it as an incredible design) but is it worth it to buy and expansion when you haven’t even gotten your plays worth out of the initial set? It may be if I can sit and think OK, I have X game expansion in the bank– I can think about setting up a game whenever, and can read forum posts about it, etc. because I have all the tools I need to possibly play it, it makes thinking about playing it just that more fun. Twilight Imperium 3, a game I still am on the fence about whether it’s a pile of shite or not, tempts me whenever I see it to pick up the new expansion, even though we’ve only played 3 times and some of my play group abhor it. Just like a lottery ticket, it may be the fantasizing about playing is worth the price of buying it and by buying it we may be scratching an itch for actually playing that we no longer can have at our stage of life. As pathtic as that is, that may be the long and short of the reasons for a random splurge on something that logically won’t hit the table more than once or twice, if ever.
That said, anyone up for a Necromunda campaign!?
Reprint of Seven Masters vs the Underworld is available NOW. It’s an absolutely essential expansion if you want to use the Seven Masters (the best new faction IMO) and great for everyone else (Big Bruiser PAP!).
Also, online play will be available via LackeyCCG soon. Great news for everyone that moved from the nerd kingdoms to hipsterville or the sticks…
We made it. Great to see everyone that was in town for the week between Xmas and New Years and we had a bit of a gaming deluge, though it cost a shocking amount of sleep to pull off. I’m hoping someday in the future the fruit of my loins learn how nice it is for them to sleep in. When you’re thanking your lucky stars that you don’t have to get up until 6:30AM on a day you have off, that’s pretty sad.
Yesterday was our first annual Cosmic Encounter tournament on New Year’s day. We had 9 players and split into two tables, the winners of which moved on to a final at the champions table. The first two games had two shared wins so the final was a four person instead of five.
The final was Tripler, Fungus, Bully, and the Mercenary. The Fungus won the day with an attack on the Bully with four huge stacks of fungaloided ships. Appropriately, Fungus was played by the notorious JP Duvall. He shared a win in the preliminary and then convinced everyone in the final that they should only try to win it alone and only he was able to pull it off. Hopefully everyone had fun and had good eats and got to talk a lot of trash. I thought we should have a best of the worst game for the losers, but we ended up playing Dragon Lairds instead.
Today was Warhammer madness. I got in a 3 man game with my beastmen vs the Vampire Counts and Lizardmen at 3000 points per side which meant I had to put every model I owned on the table (so many still sadly unpainted). We rolled ‘Battle for the Pass’ so the board was cramped like craze with no real flanks to speak of. My beastmen ambush was useless, but I managed to pull out a win due to a very very stubborn and extremely pissed off Gor unit that started 50 in number and ended the game with a mere nine after trashing a unit of Blood Knights, a Skink/Kroxigor mixed unit and some grave guard that were ineffective on the flank. The highlights of the game include both of my ‘flanks’ evaporating as beastmen ran away at the sight of Chaos Hounds being spanked in combat, the Stegadon getting sucked down into a Pit of Shades (after the dispell dice came up one short!) and Skinks taking out a razorgor and my Giant in the same turn (gahhh!). Lord Lobo may post a battle report so I don’t want to go into too much detail but it was quite a butchers bill. After 10 games or so with the Beasts, my tactical advice is to–no matter what–get stuck in as fast as possible– don’t mill about at all, and don’t let a few units of zombies get in the way– if you hit tarpits– HIT them and move on. The beasts insane close combat prowess will likely carry the day if you can get them into touch. If your opponent feels like they were randomly punched in the face on the bus when playing your beastmen, you’re doing it right.
