The drawings are fine, but the comments on this reddit post are glorious:
Some bastard told on me. When my teacher said not to use that language, I asked her what language I was speaking. I only knew English.
Then I cried.”
Author: littlemute
Warhammer milestone (millstone?) 50 Gor!
Well the weather has turned to pure shite and so instead of going outside and getting fresh air and exercise, it’s the season for sitting in a dank basement doing stuff, and I have no more excuses for not working on the hairy beasts (well except for kids, work and Skyrim). Last night I completed my first unit for Warhammer Fantasy Battle ever by actually painting up my first unit base–and it was a big one– 50 gor with a hero, champion and standard bearer on 25mm bases. As you can see, I have a couple extra musicians in there so I have to paint up a few more rank and file to replace them, but it doesn’t change the fact that I can slap this giant unit of beastmen on the table complete with a painted and flocked unit base.
The base itself is from Gale Force 9 that I picked up this summer at Gencon. While solid in construction, it is slightly warped (nothing you can notice without looking really close, and I chalk that up to this being probably the biggest unit base they have, though Skaven players run slave units of 80-100 so this is not all that big of a unit). Hopefully having this weight of lead on it will flatten it out a bit because as you can see, this unit spans the history of GW’s beastmen with some of the mid 80’s models interspersed with the 5th edition “these guys look too small to have 2 wounds” to the excellent 6th edition kit. In the front rank is an old Minotaur from the 80’s. You can see how small he was compared to the new kit.
As much of a triumph as this is, it’s still just the beginning. Behind these lads is a unit of 30 bestigor (the big boys!) and I’ve got a spawn, a giant, 65 ungor, another Razorgor and a chariot to paint up in addition to building a herdstone to rape the Magic phase. As slow as I paint, it’s going to take years to get it all done…but at least I have this in the can!
Steve o Bot
Murder simulator for today: Saints Row 3
Baurice!Mastard and I got in on some co-op Saints Row 3 last night with ridiculous results. I laughed so hard from the basement region that I woke the kids and the wife was afraid I would stumble into the bedroom at midnight babbling about how great shooting people out of a cannon attached to a car was. After playing a bit of 2, I’m shocked at the overall quality of 3– great graphics, good sound, a much better driving/crashing/damage engine and it turns the entire gameworld into one big pro wrestling match with the fighting system. Forget the guns, the DDT’s and clotheslines are where it’s at! If you like the genre (which I’m hot and cold on in general), this is a must buy as it is completely over the top insanity. This is just a tiny taste of the mayhem of co-op.
and
FF’s Nexus Ops preview posted
If you already have the Avalon Hill version of the game, like the glow in the dark figures and don’t think the gameplay needs to change at all, other than hoping for a steep drop in price for the old version to pick up a copy, what would entice you to buy the new version? New variants and components to support those variants is a likely answer. In FF’s preview post, they detail the Vortex variant that moves around the map (a bit like the storm in Dune) and can pick up units and place them around the board, incinerate some and give energize cards to players who have stuff nearby where it lands that survive. Not a bad little random chaos thrown in– the key is if you can score VP’s somehow by using the vortex to your advantage.
Something is odd though– take a look at how the home mining areas are placed on the board with one hex hanging off– this is quite different from the old version that has them flipped the other way in a 4-player game.
FATE! first session
I got a chance to run a FATE-based game last night using the Dresden Files rules. Instead of going through the usual world-building session that would lead to an extensive campaign, we played a published one-off adventure so people could get the feel of the system. I chose “Night Fears” as it seemed the simplest both in the low power level of the characters and the fairly simple scenario of kids showing up to a purportedly haunted house to spend the night. Of course since there are Fae born characters and a ghost talking kid, the house IS haunted. My goals were to help the players to learn what the Fudge dice were for, how to use skills (the easy parts), and how to use fatepoints to invoke, tag, and asses Aspects. Also, since FATE has a pretty unique damage system, I wanted them to understand what Stress and consequences were. I’m a newb myself, so these were also things that I understood in the abstract, but didn’t know how they actually played out.
The characters, pregenerated high school students included a Faeborn trickster, a religious kid whose faith actually gives him some supernatural power, a kid who can see the past (a bit) by focusing in on an inanimate object and a normal girl who is just real sensitive to her surroundings. Nothing too powerful at all so there wasn’t going to be any running around with axes or gunplay. What’s cool about this scenario is that these characters start off incomplete without all their skills and aspects chosen and this really gave the players a chance to start to understand what aspects are and how they are derived. Night Fears has a section devoted to a series of questions to ask the group where the players themselves have a large hand in defining why exactly they are at the house and what they’re each doing there that night. After a half hour or so, turning the answers to these questions in to aspects became a breeze, and a lot of fun too. What the aspects actually DO was still a mystery at this point.
Because it was kids in a haunted house, I’d say 80% of the game play we got through was player on player interaction. Since they were trying to scare each other out of the house, they started doing attacks (social or mental) on each other via ghost stories or trying to freak the others out with tricks. This ended up causing consequences almost all around the table. Of course, the house itself slowly starts to do these things to the kids as well (of course!). Most of the characters took consequence aspects like ‘freaked out’ or ‘creeped out’ but one player took “huddled inside my sleeping bag” which forced him to walk around with his sleeping bag around him from that point on.
We didn’t get all that far, obviously the shit starts to go down the nearer it gets to midnight and I felt as a GM I wasn’t doing all that much (my NPC’s were not ‘active’ much during the session, but people had quite a bit of fun I think.
My main questions are: When does some sort of argument become an attack– there was a fight over a flashlight (verbal) and in Exalted, you can actually ‘win’ the fight via social combat and get the flashlight, but in FATE, it seemed like the players would be just laying on consequences/stress that didn’t specifically resolve the argument over the flashlight. Plus if you have social stress from the fight about the flashlight– should this carry over to a fight say– about going upstairs alone?
Environmental Aspects– these are aspects on the scene itself that can be invoked or tagged– but as a GM, if I invoke a scene aspect, who gets the Fate point? Who pays it? I’m still not totally clear on those bits.
All in all, a good time and not the usual Exalted 4-6 hour combat mega-bloodbaths I’m used to running (which are also good!).
SKYRIMMED!
It’s finally out! Only a few hours in and it’s showing it’s quality in the combat, systems and graphics. The metacritic score speaks for itself at ninety SIX. While I liked Oblivion a lot, especially the Shivering Isles expansion (that just had excellent writing throughout) I felt Morrowind was the stronger game– though certainly not technically nor graphically– heck modders were able to make far better PC/NPC heads than Bethesda did back then, and by far better I really mean it, so my hope with Skyrim is that it tops Morrowind by far.
Here is a tweak guide for PC users: http://www.shacknews.com/chatty?id=27073178#item_27073178. Big thing is to increase the Field of View if you are running in the FPS view (which is good for finding the small stuff).
My main love so far is that you can SWIM IN THE FUCKING CREEKS! And I don’t mean just on the surface! Like Morrowind, you can go under the water and look around and, of course, find stuff. Otherwise, like Fallout, for as big as the Skyrim world is, there is a shocking amount of detail to the environments– not RAGE level, which is wonderment incarnate, but close.
You still can’t make a pretty girlface via the custom creator. In that this is no different than oblivion or fallout. All the girls you can make for each race are fug ugs.
Hey! Penn State Students!
Does winning football games give people the right to place their penis inside a child’s butthole? Your riot says YES! Your football program should be dissolved. Your school should be closed, then demolished. You are a school of paederasts.
First Snow!
Yeah. Though it won’t stick to the ground, today is saying to all of us that the piss rain at 38 degrees horrible weather phase of the year is nearing it’s end and WINTER IS COMING. I picked up a black RED HI FI helmet because this year, at least once, I will go on a fun box and maybe off a small jump though here in Wisconsin with the hill’s (and I’m being very specific here saying HILL) proclivity for being covered by a little snow and a lot of ice, the latter may not happen. In any case, the shit season between mountain biking and snowboarding is almost over.
Post Funmatic Stress Disorder
I close my eyes and see Paris alleyways and cafes on fire with APV’s shattered in the middle of cobblestone streets with swarms of desert cammo’ed guys running around shooting AK-74M’s and throwing grenades, or goggled men in on their belly in a long snake crawling behind a low wall as mortar fire rains down and people complain and complain. Needless to say, a lot of battlefield 3 has been played by yours truly– about 12 hours of multiplayer so far, which is far less than many of the players, but quite a bit for me in less than a week.
The first days were just chaos, all the new maps and new players running into each other, having firefights with their own team mates, following people into dead ends or off the maps, crashing every type of vehicle off cliffs, into mountains either deliberately or accidentally but now, especially since the game came out in Europe, play is in earnest and has gotten much more focused and tactical without all the running around all over the place alone.
It’s a great game, and while I loved Battlefield Bad Company 2, BF3 is better, especially multiplayer. Even playing alone and not listening to your squad at all, it’s a thinking man’s FPS, as the rushing in doesn’t work very well in most situations (some, yes), especially if you get spotted, and in the open, you will get spotted. There are people that play that all they do is sit somewhere and spot people coming in for their teammates to clean up. The difference when going into an engagement spotted compared to not is absolutely huge and, of course, most n00bs have no idea even how to do this.
I’m finally got 350 shotgun kills today. After this I have no idea which weapon I’ll use– there are really too many guns and really all I want is my Baur from BF2142 (which I have heard is the G3A3 that can only be unlocked after (gulp) about ten hours of co-op match work). For any new players, the gun stuff is very confusing– especially since when you use a gun you unlock the optics for it ONLY and have to start over with the next gun unlock. For the Assault class, where every unlock is some random assault rifle, this can be pretty lame. I guess because I didn’t play BF2 much, and the gun list was a lot smaller in BFBC2, I’m a bit lost (hence the shotgun only). So as tired as the military shooter genre is, I have to give this game the highest possible rating. My only complaint is the client side prediction–especially since I rarely get off more than two shots with the shotgun when near someone else– it can be frustrating to get the rubberband effect when you know you had a bead on someone.
Of the maps that are out– I like Caspian Border the best. This was in the beta for a short time at the end, has a lot of open space and lots of wooded areas and is just a fluid, fun map with a lot of nervousness about the vehicles rolling around, though they are horribly vulnerable out in the open to the choppers. The central three objectives (Woods, Hilltop and Gas Station) are just terrific to fight over as they are quite a bit like a Devil’s Den area of nastiness. My least favorite is the Bazaar as it’s just too much about shooting down hallways with RPG’s for the entire map. Meatgrinder maps can be fun, but the chokepoints on that map just get tiresome.
My shotgun build out, if anyone cares, is the 870MCS with the HOLO sight and Slugs. This works at short range, but only does 91% damage without a head shot so you have to get two shots off for the kill, against someone with a submachine gun close up you are probably dead meat running and gunning. However, compared to buckshot, which is better close up, I chose slugs because you can tag people at medium range and it still does a lot of damage– a head shot will kill outright. So you can snipe with it (which is ridiculous but works) and you can shoot at people you are facing that are lying down and get a kill with one shot most of the time because there is the head right there. One of the later unlocks, which you’d think would be better, is the flak shell and this has not worked for me at all. It seems to throw a lot of crap around but doesn’t get a lot of kills. Flechette rounds– buckshot is better unless you are shooting through trees and stuff– not all that common. Most of the sight unlocks are total trash for the shotgun– you don’t want a big ass scope getting in your way when you are shooting off the hip– and it’s too difficult to judge where your shots are going from a scope anyway (you don’t have any tracer shells to track).
Anyway, 6 more days until Elder Scrolls: Skyrim is out, which will likely put my BF3 playing on hold until early next year so I’m going to go get in on some good shooting.
Here are some insane videos just showing the breadth and depth of the chaotic madness that is BF3: