Category: Warhammer

Necromunda – holy fk, the rules are a mess

I got in a casual CASUAL game of Necromunda last week and what in the flying fuck happened to the organization of these rules? Seriously, this couldn’t be worse.

First, these are not overly complex rules, but there are tons of situational rules that enrich the game and the system. What is a drop rig? What does it do? What does Toxin do? What if something is on fire? Anyone that has played all but the simplest RPG’s (most of which are SHYTTE) will be familiar with these types of questions and it usually takes just a few minutes to look up the rule (and if there is a GM, they may make a rule on the spot to save time which is usually spot on for the situation anyway). Necromunda being a competitive thing most of the time, these questions need solid answers and can’t be hand waved by a GM. While the rules are certainly all there, they are scattered FUCK ALL throughout a ton of different books with the added bonus of having the original 2018 rulebook split between Basic and Advance rules (no one plays with the basic rules).

So the answer to the multi-rulebook issue would be to download and print on LULU the massive community version of the rules that includes errata and all that one needs to play, right? CORRECT, with the exception of that book being as FUCK ALL organized as the original books; going from core rules part 1 to special cases on tiles on the board game version, and then back to core rules. Or going from core rules to stats for a bunch of gangs and creatures that will rarely see play BEFORE going into the weapons and skills sections. In addition, it doesn’t even have an INDEX. Absolutely fuck all.

The Warcry rules are CLEANLY organized. Killteam’s rules are CLEANLY organized. What happened? This is not to say that the new Necromunda is bad at all, quite the opposite as it deals with a lot of the issues with the original version, but why the fuck would the rulebooks be like this? I can only imagine that they didn’t know that the Necromunda line would be as successful as it has and everything grew organically like some indy game where the designer has a day job? It’s really inexcusable for GW.

Anyway the game was good, though slow. Melta traps went off, there was renderizing and web-gauntletting (both brutal close combat weapons), toxic attacks, back stabs and hallway collapsing. A great time. I should have taken a bunch of pictures of the carnage, but I had my nose up the crack of the books the whole damn time!

Solution for next time: print the damn consolidated rules by UNIVERSAL HEAD.

Gencon 2017 – that’s a wrap!

It’s Sunday night and I’m beat.  We were up until 3am playing a cracking game of A Study In Emerald wherein MOUTH failed to disclose via his actions in game which faction he was on due to rather erratic play.  I was in the lead after destroying a couple royals but the Loyalists could have pulled out a win if they crushed my partner in restoration who was down to a single agent on the board.   Mouth, shockingly, played a card to push the Loyalist War Track up to 10, ending the game, at which time he revealed himself to be a Loyalist. This after murdering another Loyalist player’s agents with the Vampire (Matt’s).  Madness.

ASIE is a fantastic game, every time I play I get better at it and it gets more fun!

I spent some cash at the con, needless to say. Notable stuff I picked up: Decision at Elst, a Squad Leader starter kit campaign, SECRETS by Eric Lang, Ethnos, 1914 Quartermaster General and I went ahead and spent the 30$ to get the board game geek exclusive Blood Rage miniature (Hili).

I got to see CMON’s Rising Sun played, and saw someone walking around with a copy (they won it in a charity auction) so I think Rising Sun may be closer to shipping than we have info on from Kickstarter.   I also got to see Massive Darkness played, which, while I kickstarted it, I’m not totally sold on the co-operative gameplay yet.  Nice minis though right?

One odd game we got to play was Mr. MeeSeeks (from Rick and Morty) which is pretty great if you can play with girls and are drunk.  It is not an all-guys game WHATSOEVER.  I saw, but did not get to play Anatomy Park, also from Rick and Morty.

RPG’s were fun but a bit scarce this year.  I played in an excellent game of Mythras based on the 80’s sci fi world Luther Arkwright.   I’m going to pick up that book and see if it will work well for a BPRD style game.  We played as Luther, Rose, another sex-addict character from the graphic novel, the Avengers (emma peel, johnathan steed) and Dr. Who (8th) in a sort of murder mystery, find the bomb game with dueling psychics and science!  It was great fun.

My Mythras game was set in 1648 during the battle of Roicroi and the characters were Walloon deserters from a defeated tercio who fled into the town only to find it very strange indeed.  Everything ended with a double hendersen and I feel I did a good job for only two hours of play.

The following day I ran Sailors on the Starless Sea, a DCC funnel adventure) for a big and rotating group of people who got exceedingly drunk during the affair.  It was a lot of fun for me to try to manage the chaos, but it became too loud with the yelling for anyone to hear, so we didn’t get the adventure done on account of gin and the like.   Someday I will finish running that all the way through: it is a pivotal module for DCC fans.

My favorite new game of the Con is probably Ethnos, but I really like Quartermaster General 1914 as well.  We played about half a game of that and it clicked for all the players (too late at night though!).  We’ll see which of those get more play.  Ethnos with 6 players is really difficult to manage as a euro.

My favorite non-gaming thing was the Museum.  I hope they do that every year.  We get a mini one every Gary Con, but this was gencon big and had a ton of really cool stuff.

One thing my brother said on the way home was that Gencon is an anomaly from normal life because everyone is NICE.  Packed in to a dealer hall, destroyed bathrooms and feeding areas you’d thing there would be dickheads and fights and yelling (remember, a LOT of people are drunk and high at gencon, like any other convention) but I never saw a single thing that wasn’t nice.  That is really saying something, especially sitting in the Trump era where people seem to be going out of their way sometimes to be total cunts.

Pics are forthcoming.  Now back to the grind.

 

Necromunda news

Been a long time since we’ve heard anything about Necromunda out of GW.   This was posted today to the Warhammer Community.  Not a lot of details on the game itself, but you can see the minis.  Much bigger, on bigger bases.   Sort of like going from 25mm to 28mm heroic to 32mm.  Most of the original Necromunda line was good, but not great with the exception of the Eschers which appear to have been sculpted by Jes Goodwin himself.   I’m looking forward to seeing the rules.  Hopefully they don’t oversimplify (AOS) the game and leave it close to the original.  Like I’ve mentioned many times, I think the W40k 2nd edition close combat system absolutely rules and should have been used for Mordheim as well instead of what they came up with.  Let’s hope enough of 2E lives on in the new version.  In any case, we will get new minis and terrain!

Updated rumors:  Will have eshers and goliaths in the box, will not be IGOYG (i go you go) but will have IMPULSE move/act like AT-43.  Will have skill trees, etc.  Again this is just announced today.

Check here for where I got this info.

Beefcake

 

First play, new 40K

Eight editions and I’m still rocking the 1986 beakies. Anyway, I’ve never been a serious player, but dan and I gave the new edition a spin last weekend.

8th ed. is very streamlined with very simple mechanics where once there was a lot of fiddly stuff. Gone are templates for flamers, explosions and the like and they are replaced with a flat or rolled number of hits to the unit in question.  You can premeasure ANYTHING which is one of the things that made 8th Edition Warhammer Fantasy better than all previous versions.  All this simplification was likely to improve speed of play and allow for very large battles.  At just over 1000 points for the game, it was plenty large for my tastes.

Command points are a new thing to 40K 8th edition, something borrowed from AT-43 and I believe they are now in Bolt Action as well. In the new 40K, they allow a reroll of a die when expended at certain points, pretty much like Blood Bowl.

One very interesting thing we used were the new “Open War” cards that lay out a scenario’s objectives, special rules, terrain and the like without rolling on various charts.  These were pretty neat and would work for any edition of the game.



So how did the game go?  It was a ‘grab the objective’ game except that the objective didn’t show up until turn 3.  While I was able to get some casualties on the Eldar, the main thing for me was holding off teleporting on my Terminators until after the objective dropped.  It’s unlikely anyone will get Terminators off an objective in a couple turns. Dan’s rolling was TERRIBLE so there wasn’t much he could do in the end.

Close combat, which is a big thing in 40K despite all the guns, is similar to the old games (chargers attack first, then defenders attack back) except that failing morale checks means removing more casualties as if everything was like the undead from WFB.  This is a pretty elegant solution to remove ALL instances of units running away, rallying and then coming back into the game.  That said we had two close combats that went on and on round after round for awhile, with no clear winner.

I do not like that small arms fire can damage heavy vehicles (i.e.: non open topped or light transport vehicles) so that’s really odd to have someone shooting a bolt pistol at a Land Raider and have it do damage, but that’s my only real beef with the game.

Overall while I like 2nd Edition 40K the best (which fuels Necromunda and Gorkamorka), 8th is very sweet in it’s simplicity without devolving into the Age of Sigmar level.

 

Weekend links and Gloomhaven impressions

This was a busy ass week, but I got a game in of Gloomhaven which is… interesting.   It’s definitely not a game I would want to own or try to get people to play (or read the rules) but it was pretty fun.  Gloomhaven is a mash up of Kingdom Death and Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay 3rd edition with all the cards-as-actions and tons of counters for everything;  except instead of an RPG, all adventures are pre-codefied in maps that unlock as you play.  Classes unlock as you play as well which is interesting.   While I don’t think it’s especially good after the first play, it’s still worth giving a good college try.

Comparing it to another similar, recent game: The Others, it’s the opposite in that the basic Gloomhaven gameplay is clunky and card driven, while the Others is very smooth and streamlined.  However, the Others has zero as a campaign mode and is replayable only in that you can play through different missions with different hero teams.  The lack of a Campaign mode in The Others really hurts the game, while the campaign mode in Gloomhaven makes a rather lackluster miniatures combat game much more exciting to play.

Anyway, here’s some other interesting stuff from the interweb tubes this week:

New 8th ed 40K FAQ.  I love some of the questions (and answers): basically people are asking if they are planning on AOS’ing 40k.  Seems not.

Freemium ios games are the worst of the worst trash mobile gaming has to offer, but there are exceptions.

An AWESOME rundown of the launch of the original Warhammer 40K.  I read this and then started re-reading it right away.

And another GW-based post about 1989.  That was when I was totally into the Warhammer stuff full bore (as full bore as a highschool kid could be) and it lasted until 1993 or so when we started playing too much Jyhad and MTG (and still a lot of talisman).

 

Necromunda – Cawdor vs Eschers

Got in a good shooting yesterday with the Scavengers scenario.   Matt had a brand new Eschers gang vs my dead-hard Cawdor (with 4 games under their belt) and it was a bit of a slaughter, though in the end, both gangs had to start taking bottle tests which was surprising.  The core issue was that the Eschers were full on close combat, and they had to move across some areas where they got shot up bad.   Also, I had some crazy lucky rolling throughout the whole game.

Matt had the idea to use the Talisman cones (which are USELESS in Talisman) for the status of Overwatch, Running, etc. in Necromunda.  I’m going to pull those things out and throw them in next game.

The new weapon from the community rules I hadn’t experienced before was the heavy flamer.  That thing is super beast.

Necro-1-17-1

Shotguns can work well on overwatch.

Shotguns can work well on overwatch.

 

Necro-1-17-3
Things are about to get real nasty…

Warhammer inception interview with Rick Priestley

This is an excellent interview with Rick Priestley on the inception of Warhammer and 40K and those two big beautiful books from the 80’s that I still pour over from time to time (3rd edition Warhammer and 1st edition 40K that is).

With the release of Gates of Antares, which does not have the amazing aesthetic that 40K does (what with Jes Goodwin and John Blanche), we have Priestley’s seminal rule set for sci-fi gaming.

Good Quotes:

“The fact that the Space Marines were lauded as heroes within Games Workshop always amused me, because they’re brutal, but they’re also completely self-deceiving. The whole idea of the Emperor is that you don’t know whether he’s alive or dead. The whole Imperium might be running on superstition. There’s no guarantee that the Emperor is anything other than a corpse with a residual mental ability to direct spacecraft.

“It’s got some parallels with religious beliefs and principles, and I think a lot of that got missed and overwritten.”

And this:

“When you’re doing something something as wacky as a huge toy soldier game with goblins, it can be a bit of a tough sell. But when people can see how glorious it is, see the beautifully painted armies and all these people hooting and hollering and rolling dice, it gives you an instant idea of how much fun it is.”

And finally:

“The studio, the creative part of Games Workshop, had always been kept apart from the sales part of it. One thing Bryan said was that if the sales people got to be in charge of the studio, it would destroy the studio, and that’s exactly what happened.”