29/6/2011: The Horus Heresy

Having played Brother against Brother a couple of times now, Dave and I decided to give the Heresy Unheralded mission ago. It's remarkably similar except that you deploy (largley) according to your own devices and use all 5 Traitor Primarchs rather than just 3. There was some confusion about this which I think cost me; because we didn't know that the Primarchs were supposed to be deployed with the entire Traitor force, I allowed Dave to bring them on via drop pod. I doubt it made much difference to the end result, but it's not an experience I'd like to repeat if I'm perfectly honest...

I was playing the Imperial side and set up the board largely how it is in Brother against Brother, to tell you the truth, except that I switched around Sanguinius and Rogal Dorn, and their appropriate Space Marines. Dave deployed a lot of Space Marines with his Primarchs at the expense of anything else apart from the obligatory Chaos Warband. I had a feeling that this would cost him in combat, as many of the card effects are conditional on having the corresponding unit involved with the combat. There's no point using a Daemon effect if you haven't got any Daemons, for example.

What happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object...

Well, Dave won once again by Spaceport victory. Largely due to the appearance of more Primarchs than I was expecting. I think a re-match is on the cards, but I do wonder, as we'll be swapping sides again, what approach to take and where to deploy the Primarchs. Thinking about it, Mortarion's ability is best suited to defence so it might be worth keeping him on the Vengeful Spirit. Fulgrim's effect is nice but as it basically gives you a free corruption draw, it will only really help you against Imperial Army or Tank unit. All well and good but better suited to mopping up the outer areas than attacking the palace itself, where very few such units exists. Magnus the Red may be a bit more powerful because hiseffect gives you a free orbital bombardment so that might soften up the enemy, but it is only really Mortarion that effects the enemy unit in such a way that they will find the battle itself more difficult than they may otherwise find it. Angron's ability is very good but can be countered with the right number of shields and cards, as he discovered when he tried to take on Rogal Dorn. Put simply, wherever Dorn is, write off his and a few surrounding areas.

Not got a good win/lose record with this yet, looking to improve on it next time...

New Orks and Goblins

Well today I've decided to be lazy and group these two painting blogs together. That should actually work out OK as they compliment each other in that I paint two sets of fundementally similar models very differently...



Bogrut's Blackspiders ready for war



First up we've got these ugly little beasts. They're goblins I've got from the Orc Battallion boxed set, and I named them Bogrut's Blackspiders. There's going to be 30 of them eventually, I think, but this will do for now. Two things I'd like to draw your attention to: First, the skin. How I did it was inspired by an article written by John Blanche in White Dwarf a few years ago, where he was talking about how he was painting some Orks he was working on. The idea is to give the skin a translucent quality to it, to suggest that there's something underneath the paint, and how he does it is that he paints Snakebite Leather (a swarthy sort of brown colour) mixed with a bit of white and a dash of Thraka Green over a white undercoat to begin with, then washes it with Devlan Mud, a wash that was sent by God himself. Then mix a little more white into the Snakebite Leather and paint that over the raised areas of the skin, and wash the whole thing down with Thraka Green. I know it works because I saw the Orks he'd painted in the feature, but I found myself thinking, 'if it works for 40K Orks, why won't it work for Warhammer Orcs and Goblins?' So I gave it a go. There's a few varieties of Orc and Goblin in any different army. The Orcs I'll probably keep as the article has written, but for the Goblins, I felt I had to add a little more white into the second mix of Snakebite Leather to bring out the lightness of the skin. I think it worked really really well.

The second thing is the colour scheme I ran with. This was partly inspired by John Blance, partly by Stevie T from Games Workshop Dudley, and the idea is to limit your colour pallette. For the non-artistically minded among us, that basically means don't use any more than a certain number of colours, in this case 12. That was Steve's contribution to it, as he tells us it's a real skill with painting to pick twelve colours and just use them for the whole model, or set of models. It's a bit of work, and as you'll need to do some mixing in order to get away with it you do need to have an awareness of what works and what doesn't when you're mixing colours, but the results are well worth it as you have a limited selection of colours tying the whole thing together. This is the idea that Blanche tries to get across by only using a very small number of colours, five or six. But if you look at the guy's painting, it tends to have a real gritty, dirty vibe to it; natural earthy tones made up largely of browns mixed in and out. I've used a few more colours than that but I think I've got the sort of muddy, flithy effect I was looking for, and one you'd happily associate with Goblins. The other thing about Blanche's painting is that when he does use colours that are any more vibrant than greens or browns, they tend to be for decorative purposes only. In this case I've only used one colour for this - Red Gore. Most of the eyes are red, and the tassle at the end of Bogrut's sword is red as well; there was one more but I can't remember what it was and I think it's hidden behind the standard bearer.

The whole '12 colour' thing seems to be working well for this. It's not necessarily going to be as easy to do this with every army - I wouldn't like to paint Brettonians in this way, for example, though I'm sure it's possible. But for now, it seems to be working as well as I need it to for the goblins.

So when you compare it to these:

I've spent a while painting these Orks. Basically when I worked for Games Workshop and I could afford to buy paints, I ended up with near enough every colour, and I'm using about half of them for these models. I've talked about these before so I'm not going to go in to too much detail about them, but the inspiration was from a couple of White Dwarf 'Eavy Metal articles, one on painting Ork Skin which I can now paint better than Human Skin funnily enough, and one for painting the Skulltaker. The elements from the latter ended up in the metal elements, and the black leather. You can't see it too well here - my camera was running out of battery when I took these so I couldn't use the flash - but by comparison to my goblins, these have a rather vibrant, 'cartoony' look to them. Steve was kind enough to tell me that my choice of colours worked really well for this; I have to admit it's something of a lucky reflex but it comes down to this: The bright colour of the skin works very well with the yellow clothes. It wouldn't necessarily have worked as well if I'd painted the skin the way I'd painted the goblins, or the clothes. The two styles wouldn't go all that well together. But because I've used all these vibrant, pastelly colours together, it makes the whole scheme work.

Just time to show you my conversion: when I put together these Orks I wanted to do something a little different to what I usually do, and that is to take some time to think about what I want on the model. Before, when I worked for Workshop, it was all about getting it together as quickly as I could so I left off a lot of accessories. Missed out a bit, though, and so now that I'm doing these Orks I'm putting all the accessories on them now (within reason, obviously,) and worring about how long it's going to take me to paint them later. For the most part, out of 32 models there's no so-called 'kit-bashing' going on in any but 2 of them, this being the second one where I used the power claw from the Ork Nob as a bayonet. Granted, in gaming terms it would be better employed as a power claw, but let me ask you this: Do YOUR Orks have bayonets?

The other conversion, by the way, was one of the Gretchin. I might tell you which one another time!

So, what's next for these armies? Well right now I'm working on an Orc Warboss and Goblin Spider Riders. I was actually painting the Warboss in parallel with the Goblins, but what happened was I stuck a little Snotling on the Warboss's shoulder and forgot to paint him, so I'm doing that with the Spider Riders. It's going to be interesting to see how those spiders turn out, because I've left our what might be considered to be a lot of the necessary detail; I think I'm going to have to get some reference material or at least some help in order to fill that in - and keep it with the colour scheme and the spirit of the army. For the Orks, er, that's going to be put on hold for a while. I meant to get some new ones the other day and I forgot. But the army list needs re-working, 70-something models in 500 points might seem impressive but I can't see it being any good if I'm honest. I might need to re-thing the theme of the army, though they will still all be in yellow.

I've actually got some other projects in the pipeline; I've never painted these models before so I'm quite excited about this! Looking forward to showing y'all.

See you next time!

23/6/2011: Leagues of Adventure: Plateau of the Ape Men

As you've probably gathered from my 'bunched' approach to blog writing, I tend to fall behind quite a lot. I end up writing about things literally weeks after they've happened by which time I've generally forgotten everything that went on. I've got a lot of things to talk about that's happened over the last few weeks and a limited amount of time to write it all in. For this reason, I'm going to leave you in the hands this week of Mike, AKA Gruffalo Crumble, who played the part of Evelyn Cross and did a bit of a write-up of this session that I ran. I'll give you a bit more in-depth information about what went on when I come to write next weeks session up:

"Gliding low over the expansive African savannah, daredevil aviatrix Evelyn Cross pilots her prototype dirigible (on loan from the Aeronautics Society in London) into a rolling cloud bank, which utterly obscures her view of the terrain. Also on board are eccentric German antiquarian Wilhelm von Bremer, gluttonous game hunter Big Allistair and brilliant detective Lewis Granville.

The dirigible is rocked as some unseen assailant shreds one of the airship's wings, severely hindering Evelyn's ability to control the vessel as it careens blindly through the fog. Big Al readies his rifle, as a dark shape circles back around towards the dirigible. A huge, winged monster swoops at the ship, but one deafening blast of the big game hunter's elephant rifle leads the hungry pterosaur to veer off in search of less formidable prey.

However, the damage to the dirigible has already been done, and while Evelyn (narrowly) avoids a catastrophic collision with the side of a mountain, she is unable to prevent the vessel crashing down along a densely forested, tropical plateau. The pilot and passengers all survive the impact, but even the least technically-able can see the dirigible has been damaged beyond hope of repair.

Stranded in the depths of some explored jungle, the heroes forge on through the trees towards a distant cave, leading north along the bottom of a long, narrow trench. It isn't long before the ground begins to tremble underfoot and a thunderous roar heralds a rockfall blocking the group's retreat. The only way is onward!

Emerging from the trench back into the jungle, the heroes are ambushed by a small group of savage Ape Men wielding primitive clubs. Big Al and Detective Granville quickly dispatch the hairy brutes. Searching the bodies, Evelyn finds a locket, inside of which is a photograph of one Cynthia Davenport, a female adventurer and anthropologist of some renown, who disappeared on some mad expedition several weeks previously.

Following the trail, the heroes reach the crumbling ruins of an ancient city, constructed in a style that Professor von Bremer recognises as being vaguely Egyptian. The missing anthropologist is spotted being dragged towards a sacrificial altar by a particularly impressive looking Ape Man adorned with feathers and baubles befitting his station as spiritual leader of the group. The heroes battle their way through a horde of savage tribesmen and confront the shaman, who throws Cynthia to the ground and draws his knife - only to be blown into red mist by the fiery discharge of Big Al's enormous gun the instant he relinquishes his human shield.

As the shaman dies, he implores his pagan god to punish the heroes for their trespasses - and the volcano towering above the ruins rumbles into life! As molten lava rushes through the streets of the forgotten city, the party race for Cynthia's hot air balloon - and their only means of escaping the plateau alive! Evelyn makes it first, with Big Al, Professor von Bremer and Cynthia all diving into the basket as it lifts off into the air. Nobody had noticed how Detective Granville had fallen behind, and they look away as the unfortunate man is overtaken by the river of liquid fire."
I think that more or less covers it. Cheers Mike!

16/6/2011: Pathfinder: Souls for Smuggler's Shiv

You have no idea how many times I've started this one and got nowhere, and it comes to something, I reckon, when you end up writing about things like this literally weeks after they've happened... This will be the last one on Smuggler's Shiv, as the adventure ended here and as Viggy, the Games Master, is committed to games for the rest of the year, it is unlikely we'll hear from Raziel and his friends before then, if at all.

So, we ended the last week having killed all the cannibals and learned that the Serpentine Demon we were supposed to be hunting had headed to the Red Mountain on the South East side of the island. We went there to discover a cleft in the rock that forms a way down through a succession of ladders to the ocean below. After not-so-easily dispatching a winged assailant (like a dimorphodon but a little bit bigger,) we examined and used the clearly magical collection of rocks (thanks to Gorman for verifying that for us.) This managed to drain the ocean to the point where it showed a couple of closed doors...

There was also a ship on there where we found a mad fungus-based critter who believed himself to be the captain of said ship. Through his incoherent mutterings we discovered that our quarry had indeed gone in through the doors, and we followed... we eventually ended up in a large room with a walkway running across it at an angle, on which were three skeletons firing arrows on to us. I had the idea of using my rope to climb the walkway and take the skeletons out from there. Bronn the Dwarf had the far better idea of using the grappling hook to pull the skeletons down to us; it worked almost every time and the skeletons took damage each time. We won the fight with out too much difficulty, and moved on...

Walking through a veritable maze of tunnels we ended up in a room which featured four pillars and a pool of blood, with a door at the other end. Before we had time to figure out what to do, the door slammed and a pendulum swung down, hitting Gorman and only just missing killing him. Raziel used his knowlege of dungeons to guess that the answer lies in the button on the four pillars; we each pressed one and stopped the swing of the pendulum. Gorman had time to heal himself...

We ended up in a cathederal where our serpentine quarry was there, inspecting the room. She was surrounded by three skeletons, and on seeing us told us she had found something beyond our imagination and attacked. She put up an impressive fight, but with Traugan turning one of her own skeletons on her and the rest of us beating the living daylights out of her, she never stood a chance. It transpired that she thinks she's found instructions on how to get to a lost city, an empire that's been missing for generations. Our party was well aware that the Pathfinder's society would pay large amounts of money for this information...

After this, there wasn't much to tell. We repaired the lighthouse, rounded up our survivors and finished up on the place we were bound for in the first place (Raziel neither knows nor cares what this place is; his only ambition through all of this was of getting out of the Shackles...)

So, how about that for my first adventure? Quite entertaining actually, I thoroughly enjoyed it. It was a bit of a shame that the format of the adventure doesn't necessarily sit well with a 'club' environment; the idea of a sandbox adventure is for the characters to explore, examine what they find, make use of it, scurry about the place and maybe come across some red herrings that are nonetheless fun to explore. Viggy tried to do it like this for the first couple of sessions, but after a while it became apparent that there wasn't going to be time, and he had to bend it slightly so that we got the main points of the adventure done by the time the 8-week rotation finished. That being said, it was a great adventure to be part of, and it got the best ending I could have foreseen...

What of my character? I evisioned Raziel as somebody who is handy in a fight but prefers not to; a con man with a conscience of robbing the rich and giving to the poor. His only motivation, really, was to avoid trouble, and yes, getting off that Hell-hole of an island was a good step in to doing that, but had the rest of the characters not volunteered to take out the Demon, he may not necessarily have gone all the way to do that. He would have done as much as was necessary to rebuild the lighthouse and escape Smuggler's Shiv, but he wouldn't necessarily have gone hunting for Demons. If they think there's something to be gained from this island let them get on with it! However, now that he has information that the Pathfinder's Society might be interested in, he may or may not choose to exploit it. For now, he's glad to be safely away.

There's a continuation in this. Whether or not Raziel will play a part in it I don't know, owing to the fact that there's a very real possibility that I'll be moving away from the area in the not-too-distant future, and if that proves to be the case then I won't be involved with the Role Play society anymore, which will be a shame. However, if I am...

14/6/2011: The Horus Heresy

Once again I was playing against Dave and this time we swapped sides, me taking the Traitors and Dave taking the Imperium to settle the score when Dave beat me at Brother Against Brother the other week...

I started out very well indeed, making enough corruption draws to hold all the spaceports after a bit of co-exisitence combat, and managing to blow several holes in the Titans Dave had brought to bear. However I also used a Port Landing order to drop several reinforcements onto Eternity Wall held by Mortarion. This was to set the tone for the game...

In his infinite wisdom Dave decided to use Jaghatai Kahn wrestle the Primus Spaceport from Angron. This might seem to be an impressive tactical move since if he succeeded that would mean I would no longer have any claim on the Spaceport, however I'm pretty sure it was only because he wanted to kill the Primarch. Whatever the reason, there was no way Angron could stand up to being outnumbered for so long and he eventually fell, with Kahn taking the spaceport.

I had shored up my forces at Eternity Wall and was attacking the Palace where Rogal Dorn was mounting a solid defence, despite Mortarion's ability essentaially cancelling Dorn's ability out. The battle ended the only way it can when it's two leaders absolutely refuse to die: A bloody stalemate. Realising I was getting nowhere, I drop-podded a force of Tzeentch warriors on to Lion's Gate to attempt to take the Palace from both sides. However, Dave had other ideas...

Sanguinius boarded the Vengeful Spirit in an attempt to take the ship and Horus. After a furious battle in the Catacombs, he then made a move on Horus himself. The ensuing fight caused wounds to both sides but Sanguinius lacked the manpower to take out many of Horus' guards and lost the fight. Help arrived in the form of Rogal Dorn...



Horus falls under the full fury of two Primarchs...



I was all too aware that there was no way Horus could survive a sustained attack from two primarchs for long, and I also knew there wasn't a blind thing I could do about it. My only chance was to use the Frenzied Assault combined with the Relentless assault with Mortarion in the hope of striking at the Emperor himself - I had enough initiative to get as far as the inner palace and would need Horus to hold out for one more change of initiative while I initiated the final assault. Mortarion's part of the plan worked absolutely fine. Unfortunately the combined assault of Sanguinius and Rogal Dorn was too much for Horus, and he fell, giving the game once again to Dave.

My mistake here was obvious: I should have reinforced Angron at Spaceport Primus. By the time Horus fell under attack, we'd just gone past the point where a spaceport victory is possible, and had Angron still got the port that is what would have happened. In hindsight, there's very little point in reinforcing Mortarion; as Rogal Dorn can only use his special abitity in defence and would be cancelled out by Mortarion anyway, he is as unlikely to attack as he is likely to give any ground. So I'll know next time to pile as much as I can onto Primus, take what spaceports I can with Corruption Draws and hope for the best. I think while the game does require you to react to what happens at the start, beyond that you have to make a battle plan and stick to it, otherwise the opposition will wipe their bottoms with your written admission of incompetence...

Seriously though, good game Dave! Looking forward to the next one...

9/6/2011: Pathfinder: Souls for Smuggler's Shiv

Once again I find myself behind with my blogs! However, with only 5 hours to go before my next gaming session, it's probably about time I updated you all on what went on last week. Warning: MAJOR spoilers here...

We finished last week outside the cannibal's camp, which was good because that's where the lighthouse is and also where our estranged captain and his girlfriend had apparently disappeared off to. Our party doesn't really have a fighter as such. We've found that our two monks, Garond and Bronn, are pretty handy in a fight, as is our ranger Rassdass. Traugan the half-orc mage has got it where it counts up close, as does my character Raziel, if only by being mobile enough to set up combat advantage. Gorman's never really much good up close but his cleric abilities more than make up for it in the aftermath. Nonetheless, we have thus far tried to avoid such tactics as marching directly into the enemy camp and expecting to win a fight. So we spent some time scouting out the area; finding out where the sentries are, using Gorman's detect alignment/chaos to find out where our enemies were likely to be. We came in from the East, where the lines were apparently thinnest, and attacked a small hut with a wizend old woman in there. It turns out that she's a mage and did some horrific things to our psyche by cackling and granting us all misfortune, however she couldn't stop the onslaught of several angry warriors and eventually fell.

Investigating the North we found our way blocked by a corral that apparently contained 4 skeletons. There was somthing about the general area in relation to the rest of the camp that made us feel it would be a bad idea to start any trouble at this time, so we scurried around to the South. We came upon a building that looked like it was a butchery of some description, where prisoners are kept and made to watch as their fellow captives are butchered and become dinner for the cannibals. We were heading ever onwards towards the area where the lighthouse was, killing a couple of cannibals along the way which, if I'm honest, didn't put up much of a fight. And then we happened upon the lighthouse itself...

This was a ferocious fight made all the more hard by our positioning. We were aware of a male and at least one female voice upstairs and Bronn, Garond and I snuck up the stairs to see what was going on. Unfortunately I fluffed my stealth roll and drew the attention to us, whereupon a man who looked like a stereotype Scottish Barbarian came charging down the stairs. A lot more tough and substantially more strong than the creatures we had encountered up to that point, the fact that we were fighting on the stairs of a lighthouse meant that only one of us at a time could effectively attack him. Raziel slunk back and covered the guy with his crossbow but the fact that there was always at least one person in front of him made this a very risky business indeed. Owing largely to the villian's penchant for smearing his opponent's blood all over himself, we eventually managed to wear him down and kill him without any losses to our own side. On going up the stairs, we found 4 young girls in a state of considerable distress. Calming them down, we learned that the two most prominent figures in the camp were the man we'd just killed, who was apparently the leader of the cannibals, and the witch we had killed earlier. We inferred that had we gone after the skeletons, we would have alerted the whole camp and had a much larger fight on our hands. And we also discovered that our captain and his lover had been here at some point, though they were not there now... We also found the room they had been staying in, and a shrine to some heathen God. We had the lighthouse, and as long as we can get it to work we have the means to escape the island. However, we had a feeling that this wasn't over just yet...

We assumed to kill all the cannibals, and on inspection of the camp found a hole in the ground we felt worthy of investigating. Underneath the camp we found a network of tunnels on which we discovered, amongst other things, a note, apparently from our captain. It turns out his lover, Ileana (I think) is a serpentine demon and he was under her ruse for most of the time since she boarded the ship. It was her influence that caused the captain to wreck the ship and cast us all off. Eventually, she betrayed the Captain, who in the note reckoned he was well on his way to becoming some sort of undead. And we learned that she was now headed west towards the Red Mountain to complete her work. The captain offered his apologies and beseeched us to kill her... We found a old and sinister serpetine cathederal, where we came upon the sort of spell that Ileana is trying to cast. We could let her do it... but with one more week to go, hunting her down and killing her just seems the right thing to do.

Incidently we found the captain in the not-entirely-surprising form of a ghoul. Killed him, obviously. It occurs to me now that the original plan was to kill us all and it was only by the intervention of the first mate that we and the NPCs survived. Even if we kill Ileana, the real hero of the story will be him...

7/6/2011: 8 ball Pool at Hare of the Dog, Birmingham

Yes, I'm documenting a game of pool. I take myself far too seriously! And all the Gods help me if I've got the name of the pub wrong...

Well, I'm not very good at pool, nor do I claim to be. I'm familiar with the concept of putting the balls into the right pockets, while at the same time arranging matters so that the cue ball is in the right place for a follow-up, or failing that at least in a place where I can make it difficult for my opponent. Putting all that in to practice, on the other hand, is tricky to say the least; it's not a set of motions I'm familiar with and knowing the theory won't help if you haven't done it for over 3 years!

I was quite pleased I won the blue balls, given my football team. My opponent was Chris Jeffries, and he was playing with a lot more power than I was. He would whack the cue ball in the direction of one of the yellow balls, I would gently tap the blue balls with what I hoped was enough power. In my case, I was rarely wrong, however I'm not too good with my aim and missed a lot more shots than I hit. Nonetheless, it came down in the end to a struggle for control over the 8-ball, and in those situations a lot of the time all you can do is whack it and hope for the best. It was when I did this that I put Jeff in a better position to get the ball in, which he promptly did. Well done Jeff.

Now I know what you're (possibly) thinking - is Pool a game I'm going to be playing a great many times? And the answer is probably not, but it's fun when I do play it however badly it goes. The aim isn't going to get sorted out unless I do a lot more practice to improve it, something I neither have the time nor the drive for. But hey - I'm always up for a game...