Like almost every wargamer out there I have the attention span of a gnat when it comes to periods of wargaming, projects, and sticking things out until completed. I'll buy a shed load of miniatures and paint about half before seeing another bright n' shiny and abandon the current miniatures and terrain in order to start on something else.
This leads to a cluttered workbench filled with something akin to a set up for a Heroes in Hell with Yardies facing off against undead Roman Centurions while a power armor clad Sister of Battle stares disapproving from her vantage point off a 15mm scale Sherman tank she has been set upon for four months...
When I abandon a period I totally lose interest in it apparently. You can ask any of my Flintloque figures and I'm sure they'll tell you they never expect to be primed much less base coated. Such is the fickle brush I wield.
Now enter a sudden passion for something new, again. The Tales of the Dragon King miniatures put out by Black Hat productions.
UK Manufacturer- http://blackhat.co.uk/catalog/index.php?cPath=121_147
USA carrier our own Rattlehead Games- http://www.rattleheadgames.com/catalog/TalesoftheDragonKingsProducts.html
I love Shaw Brothers martial arts films thanks to Kung Fu Theater. Particular attention was paid to The Five Deadly Venoms as well as Chinese Super Ninja as these moved at a faster pace than many of the films they also dealt with special powers or specialized weapons.
Later on I'd graduate to films like Kung Fu Colt Master (sic), Swordsman II, Chinese Ghost Story... Epic martial arts films are something I truly enjoy and why not transfer them to the table top?
Therein lies a two-fold problem.
1. I do not want to get stuck petering out so that a group of Chinese heroes are now staring at a group of 6mm Italian soldiers knowing full and well I'll never get around to painting them much less going through the work of building a 6' by 4' Chinese Wuxia/martial arts village to squab in.
2. No one has written rules for wargaming martial arts films that I'm aware of. There's Hong Kong Action Theater, Weapons of the Gods, Quinn but these are roleplaying games and not really built for a 2-3 hour game of master swordsmen facing off against hopping vampires while the bandits break cover of the bamboo grove to raid the town.
The solution to number 1 is simple... Sort of... Build the terrain table before buying the miniatures. After all, I'm a cheapskate and model everything out of foamcore, popsicle sticks, wooden coffee stirrers (they're thinner) liberated from Starbuck's (only reason I go there), and craft paint. Add to this finding out how to model bamboo cheaply
http://www.warfactory.co.uk/scenery/bamboo.php
and I've got a project that I can work on to completion before dropping the serious cash. Well $16.00 a pack is reasonable for miniatures but with the economy taking a nosedive my hobby dollars are near non-existent right now.
So it follows that I research the period (do the house have dirt floors? Wooden? Stone?), build functional terrain. Tea houses, temples, pagodas, homes, Buddha statues, whatever I can find and make out of the piles of foamcore in my closet. Make a few bamboo groves. Model some cherry blossom trees which I'm experimenting on an idea myself that may or may not work as I couldn't find anyone who has made an article on this. By the end there will hopefully be a nice table full of potential kung fu mayhem. I haven't even touched on the fact that I have no idea where to get 28mm Chinese styled furniture.
2. I could adapt some rules for martial arts but that's almost as much work as writing your own. I am still playing with this as I have seldom even house ruled games much less considered game design. A part of me thinks I should seek out the community for advice but I also see that the gaming community is so diverse that everyone will have a different opinion on mechanics, resolution, balance, morale. Some people like dice pools while others like opposed rolls.
Is it better to forge ahead blindly and develop a game to be fixed or canned based on playtesting or look for approval every step of the way?
Even my wargaming philosophy might differ from many as I put fun ahead of fiddly rules, point systems, explorative use of geometry with a tape measure to advantage, etc. Yes, this kind of game usually takes a game master to arbitrate but that's the kind of game I prefer over structured systems with rigid rules.
Basically I have to answer questions about how I want the genre emulated on the table. What sort of action do I want detailed. Should I go beyond whacking each other and move into simple mechanics covering the honrable aspects of a Wuxia swordsman and how far his heroic aspects might be brought down by a beautiful woman? Should stats ooze with the genre using a state like Grace or Poise over the usual Dexterity or Agility or will that just make things more confusing?
Lots to consider and I think I'm just trying to clear my head here as so far the undetaking is a collection of post-it notes with more question marks than firm ideas.
Tags: Game Design Wuxia Martial Arts Tales Of The Dragon King Miniatures Wargames
Well, Skirmish '08 is now come and gone. The stress of putting a game together, building the terrain, painting the figures, and trying to entertain some gamers is gone until next year. Skirmish is primarily a historicals convention and this is its third year and they have always been kind enough to allow my decidedly cracked games in and it's been commented that each year the game gets better and better. Well, practice does help as I never ran a game at a convention before I signed up for Skirmish in 2006.
The game was "Our Weapons are Useless Against Them!" which should have been entitled "Their Weapons are Useless Against US!" as the only truly frightening casualty during the game was 'Howling Mad' Murdoch of A-Team fame trying to leap on to an alien from the rooftop of a van and falling off onto his head a giving himself a concussion. I had truly horrible rolls the entire game which pretty much allowed the players to wholesale walk over the alien invaders. Who are the invader? Well, they were a mix of Warzone Dark Legionaires, Warzone Children of Ilian and twenty of these things which I built after being inspired by our own Cyborg Trucker.
I used Astounding Tales! 2nd edition to run the game. Sure, it's designed for 20-30's pulp but I figure a broom handle Mauser of old is probably about the same stats as an Uzi of modern day times. A couple tweaks to the rules and it was off and running.
The sad part is that while I remembered everything for the game itself, I forgot my camera and have been forced to beg the players at the convention that took pictures of the set up to send me some pics.
The organiser of the convention snapped a few pics and I immediately stole them of course.
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Tags: Wargaming Conventions Wargames
Well, reflecting on StupidSmurf's Dumb Name Syndrome blog entry I started thinking about a latter day scenario I encountered during my overly long tenure as a Dungeon Master. It goes something like this:
Me: So what's your character's name?
Player: Priest.
Me: But he's a...
Player: Fighter, yeah, but see his name ties in.
Me: I see...
Player: He's called Priest because he kills every priest he meets!
Me: Every priest?
Player: Yes, he champions atheism and is out to destroy the Gods' connections to the mortal realms by slaying all the priests on the planet.
Me: Okay... It's... interesting. I mean, in a world where a priest can call down a column of fire or literally mend wounds by laying on hands it's a bit unlikely. I'm just suggesting that a single figure will have some difficulty attaining a goal that err... lofty. Besides, if he acknowledges that priests have a divine link to a higher power doesn't that mean he acknowledges the existance of the Gods and kind of blow his atheism angle to pieces?
Player: Shut up, he kills all priests and that's that so no one better play a cleric in this game.
Me: Okay...
Player: What's the first module called anyway?
Me: Night of the Walking Dead... It's set in Ravenloft and I think you might well have a most interesting time of it to be certain.
Needless to say "Priest" came into the town where a burial procession is heading towards the graveyard in what is supposed to be a spooky moment as noises and thumps issue from inside the coffin and all that. Priest leaps ahead of the party but does not investigate the coffin. Instead he leaps upon the cleric leading the procession.
The cleric begins screaming, running, and calling for help. The Sheriff of the town comes running and begins a melee with the beserking fighter named Priest who is intent on slaying the cleric. A zombie busts out of the coffin to add to the chaos and finally after all the confusion the zombie is slain, Priest is knocked unconcious and jailed by the Sheriff before slaying the unarmed cleric, and the party is viewed under extreme suspicion by the already unfriendly townsfolk.
It went from bad to worse as the entire module sidetracked into breaking Priest out of jail ("Why???!!!??" I asked. "Because he's a member of the party!!!" they responded) and then getting worse as the murders happening in town were easily pinned on the party, after all Priest was a self-admitted murderer so it wasn't a stretch that he might prey on non-ecclesiastical victims as well.
It was an example of when I should have just given up rather than trying to bring a horribly derailed game back on the tracks. I'm DMing all this by the seat of my pants as the characters all become part of a plot to kill a poor low level Cleric rather than solve the mystery. What do you do with characters that are in between a dark lord and his horde of zombies and an entire town that wants to lynch them for murdering their priest in cold blood?
It's an example of players having free will but really... None of the players really look back on that particular game session as any of them being at their finest.
Must remember to keep serial killers confined to games of Kult.
Tags: Ravenloft DNS Character Creation
