40mm Pirates - Preview

With his collection sitting in the cupboards and shelves untouched for ages, Arabiansquire's Mega Bloks Pirate collection has been crying out for a ruleset for some "proper" playtime. 40mm from foot to eye level and with a collection of islands, hideouts and ships I suspect the assembled game will look irrisistable.

Then Ganesha released "Flashing Steel", their (standalone) Pirate/Musketeer Swashbuckling ruleset. To my credit, once the idea to apply it to the toy pirates came round, I managed to resist for as much as a few hours. Based on the "Songs of..." system I know it will be easy to play and fun. Looking through the book, the fgures are much more custonisable then "Songs of...", with weapon specific skills, quality checks are abstact tests to encourage players to just try things in character and a specific "Swashbuckle" test to get people swinging from rigging and throwing chickens during battle.

All I need to do to do for my own personal use, I feel, is draw up a Random Pirate Generator (surely one of the most excellent titles for a table ever!) for pulling together a diverse gang of "skilled" individuals and playing.

Watch this space...

Victorian Sci-Fi Adventure

Bainbridge didn't trust this savage. "Lord Graystoke, my eye, sir!"

This weekend, after much delay and excitement (on my part) I finally saw the movie John Carter. There are tonnes of blog column inches already on the topic of this movie, good and bad, so I'm not going to add to them other than to say that I was hoping for an non-taxing enjoyable epic adventure and I received it in spades. I can only hope that Disney see the flop status that so many critics seem to want to bestow on it as their own marketing fault and make a sequel - although I doubt it, unfortunately.

Anyway, it all had me thinking about the suppressed love I have for Victorian Sci-fi. A good few years ago now I was seduced by the world of the roleplaying game Space 1889, originally released by GDW in the 1980's and later reprinted by Heliograph. (the game world has also been coverted into a Savage Worlds sourcebook). "Science-Fiction Roleplaying in a More Civilised Time" the tag line read. All the politics of 19th Century Eath with a developed colonial map on Mars and Venus. I even managed to run a session in a pseudo "Lost World" type adventure. All the books were RPG books were bought, the war game rules, the boardgame, the aerial combat game and loads of Victoriana style figures (mainly from RAFM's licensed line or Wargames Foundry). Unfortunately after that one adventure was run there was scant opportunity to play again and my VSF interests and projects have been put on the back burner for more popular (but still fun) genres with more players.

So has this trip to the cinema rekindled the warm embers? Well, not until I can find room in my current project schedule. I'll just have to gaze wistfully at by painted and unpainted figures and imagine. Maybe one day I'll get round to painting those Martian forces (and scratchbuilding the flyers)

Urban War Viridian Strike Team

That 's my Urban War Viridian Starter strike team finished in a tabletop quick paint stylee. Their look seems a bit messy to me. Part of that, no doubt, is my painting, part of it, I feel is the colour of the webbing/packs. 
But once they're down on the ground dodging between cover I'm confident they'll look just grand.


The main thing is that both Urban War starter sets are painted and looking good for the coming games. I'll start to add more from my VASA collection as I play more.

SoBH2 - Battle #1

SoBH Battle #1 - New Enemies

Battlefield: Hilly
Weather: Heavy Rain
Scenario: Take The High Ground

Forces: As per Initial Warbands Post

Setup:

The Humans, Dwarves and Beastmen deploy roughly equi-distant from the objective hill. Initiatives are re-rolled at the end of each turn phase.

With extra victory points up for grabs for occupying the high ground the initial action was the dash for the hill. With any roll of a one making the model immobile (due to the heavy rain rules) left the field spread out. With a good set of activation rolls the dwarves nearly made it, but the beastmen managed to get a couple of bodies up during the same turn phase denying the dwarves the extra early points.

With a crowd gathering for battle on the hill top the humans arrive, the heavy rain taking toll on their progress towards the action. The dwarves come round the hill to meet the leader, but lose their blunderbus wielding shooter.

With the dwarf group slightly split, the beastmen gang up on a dwarven warrior to take advantage, but even though outnumbered he holds off three seperate attacks.

The humans charge up the hill to join in the melee, but their leader is knocked down in the attack, and is killed, causing some of them to flee the battle.

With humans blocking one of the beastmen sides the dwarves flank and move in. Their attacks knock down the beastmen leader and centaur leaving them prone targets for the few remaining opportunistic humans to come in and take them out.

Chaos reigns (or not in this case) in the beastmen ranks and they flee the battle, leaving the humans and dwarves on the hill as the skirmish ends.

Battle result:

• Beastmen: 177pts killed = 8VP
• Dwarves: 32pts killed = 1VP
• Humans: 224pts killed = 11VP

Humans Win  (1 CP)