Monday 22 October 2012

A Giving The Lad a Quick SKELP

The end of the week had the family up in the North East of Scotland (the picturesque seaside town of Stonehaven to be precise) for a few days. On the Saturday we decided to head down the road to Forfar and take in Angus Wargaming's SKELP show as part of the day. Road delays and scheduling meant that the wee lad and I didn't get through the doors until after 2pm, so the show was starting it's quiet, wind-down period. However it did mean that we got a good unrestricted wander. After the other large shows we'd been too this year (Carronade and Claymore) it was nice to go to a smaller, one hall show. The atmosphere felt more familiar. Possibly with fewer table numbers, the time of day and it being towards the end of the show season alot of folk from different clubs (and traders) seemed to know each other and be chatting when not busy. I also lead to some fun comments during the painting competition prizes.

An added bonus was that the Edinburgh League of Gamers (or at least one representative) had made the journey up the road with his Space Crusade participation game that we'd missed at Claymore. The game ( as ever for an ELG PP game) looked great, played simply and was great fun (it received the best PP game award I seem to remember).


The Space Marines make try to make progress, with
Chaos Marines having other ideas.

The final battle, androids and a Dreadnought stand
in the way of the Marines and their goal.

The tables on demo tables were all looking great. I only managed a few pictures I'm afraid. I had a interesting chat with members of "The Iron Brigade" about their Viking Raid table. They had been playing the raid earlier in the day using the SAGA ruleset, but had set it up afterwards as a visual piece. Great (SKELP prize winning) table with not only the main battle going on but loads of interesting side stories.






The other table I spend a good while looking round was the RAF Leuchars Normandy campaign table. I'd had a good chat at Carronade with these guys. They were touring the shows following the campaign trail of the US Airborne on (and following) D-Day.





More pictures of the other tables are available on via the Pendraken Forum (not my photo's I must say).

The Traders seemed to all be happy enough, but after unexpectedly buying some armour last week I wasn't there to buy much. Still picked up a handful of civilian looking Heroclix for modern gaming and managed to put myself in a fuzz as ever looking at the Crooked Dice and getting trapped between the old want/can't do yet gamer spin (after 2 visits and promises of returning later I had to remove myself from the hall with promises that I'd buy when I was nearer ready to look at the game).

A grand way to spend a couple of hours anyway, and I'll be giving it good thought about going next year.

5 comments:

  1. Sooo I just found this blog (as an RPG person, haven't dabbled much into wargames) and I think everything looks super cool but I have no idea what is going on. What games are you playing? What's a good starting point for some of these games? What rules do you use for your RPG sessions? etc etc. You should have a page with this info for wargame noobs like me : )

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  2. Phew, Ozreth, that's more than a quick answer. It's something I've been thinking more about recently as my son gets to the age where some of his friends may become interested, but as a Dad wouldn't want to encourage them to dive straight into the big spend. Definitely one for a post (or 2).

    If you already have figures for your RPGs get a generic wargame so you can use any figures you already have. The base set of Song Of Blades and Heroes is certainly the fantasy ruleset I'd recommend.

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  3. After some more perusing around this blog I've figured out that you use SoBaH a lot. And it looks like you use heroscape landscape with it sometimes?

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  4. Sometimes. Grand if you've got but it takes so long to set up that having some standard terrain to plonk down is a lot quicker. SoBH doesn't use hexes just to be clear, it uses a small/medium/large distances system, you can still use the Heroscape terrain though.

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  5. Gotcha. I looked at the starter rules and thought it said you could use hexes...but I prefer distances anyhoo.

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