Observations of the Fox

I always thought it would be cool to run a miniatures game where a team of grunt space marines faces off against an entrenched squad of traditional fantasy dwarves, or a platoon of roman legionnaires. Or maybe even a single master assassin from the pages of history confronts a rag-tag gang of post apocalyptic survivors. Yes, you can just substitute miniatures into other games...yes, you can probably ad-hoc some rules to make it work... yes, there are probably a few decent sets of rules that handle this (the Warhammer Historical Battle books come to mind, but they tend to deal with big armies rather than small missions or skirmish level stuff. You could also play out a game of Rifts using miniatures if you're a massive masochist, but that's also not quite what I'm after. So this idea has sat in the back of my head, and scattered across various notebooks, for decades. The aim is to have relatively balanced forces competing in exploration and scenario based missions, r...

I've long had an idea for a basic miniatures game, aiming back to the origins of roleplaying games. This would be a game where each player controls a single miniature, and maybe a couple of their henchmen. They collaboratively, or even competitively, explore an underground environment that is revealed through the course of play. I've been playing with some concept sketches along these lines today. The aim will be to get the character and team generation rules onto a single sheet of paper, all the basic rules for session play onto a single side of a sheet, and all the rules for trading with the merchant and upgrading the character on the other side of the page. The character sheet will take half a page, with the remainder filled out using 4 henchmen stat blocks each basically taking up an eighth of a page (where most character will have at most 2-3 henchmen). The basic idea behind the numbers derives from the Confrontation miniatures game, where damage rolls ...

Another EttinCon has come and gone. Every time it is run, it keeps getting bigger, but the rate of expansion seems to be slowing down a bit. I suspect it has now hit its peak size, it might grow or shrink a little next time. Unlike previous occasions, this event was not held in Katoomba, it was instead held further up the Blue Mountains in Blackheath. A bigger more open venue in the Community Centre up there, but whether this was a good thing, I'm undecided. It still felt like the organisers were trying to cram too much in with tightly packed tables, and the noisy echoes of the hall didn't make table-talk easy, especially when I'd normally walk around the table to more easily address players who were focal points of the game at any particular time. Three sessions across one day, I ran in the morning, with a scheduled game of Steve Dee's Relics in the evening, and a free afternoon where I hoped I could slot into an empty spot of whatever caught my eye....

The last debrief post started going longer than I expected, so I've decided to break the debrief into three parts for the three sessions of the day. Between Sessions 1 and 2 was lunch, looking at the stalls set up by the local game store " Afternoonified " and a few others who came in for the con...and generally stressing out because I thought I'd left almost everything for my evening session of "The Law" at home. Thankfully, that last bit turned out to be a false alarm. But stressing about that, filled yhe rest of the hour-and-a-half before session 2 began. Session Two: Honey, I shrunk the Heroes! This is the first time I've played +Sage LaTorra  and  +Adam Koebel 's Dungeon World, and the first time I've played rather than GM'd anything for a long time. I played with my wife, in a game run by  +Saul Alexander . Interesting premise that was basically what the title promised. Five stereotypical fantasy adventurers filling the standard ...

The convention I've been working toward for the past couple of weeks has now been and gone. Three sessions: two GMing, and one playing. Here's how it played out for me... Session One: The Ballad of Jericho Julip. This was a session GM'd by me. Running a twisted variant of Paul Tevis's "A Penny for my Thoughts". I actually wasn't sure about the best way to handle this session, I had a vague idea in mind, but couldn't work out the best way to address it.  The premise of this session was a two part story, where each act was formed by characters who had been attacked by "Nether Shadows" who had wiped their memories. It basically played out in two iterations of "Penny". First with the characters in the mountains explaining... What their life was like before the adventure began How they became entangled in the machinations of the mysterious Jericho Julip What strange event happened on the way up the mountafin pass The...

I guess tomorrow is the big day. The game is ready to go, even if the props aren't completely up to a standard I'm happy with. The books have come up pretty well, and hopefully they might generate a few orders for the first proper print run. I might even sell one of the three prototypes I've generated.  The thing that's got me bothered is the scemario map that I started working on a few months ago, but never got around to completing... and now Murphy's law has kicked in, and the 3D printer isn't working for me to make a stand.  So, I might end up making a stand from cardboard. Since I'll be busy all day tomorrow, expect a report on the convention outcome in a couple of days.

After working on the Ettin Con map fairly solidly for a week or more, it's nice to get back to my own project.  I've had feedback, I've made changes... and now I've generated a few proof copies of the game. Which mght hopefully sell on Saturday at EttinCon, so that I can pay to put some petrol in my car.  I'm pretty happy with the way these have printed, now it's just a case of using the guillotine to get them to the right size, and using the oversized stapler to assemble them (probably not in that order).

The map is almost ready for playing on. Just need to take a few photos of it, then digitally stitch them together in Photoshop... First attempt. Need to try again

More colouring today. I've tried to get more images, and even a couple more videos of the work procss, but my iPad hasn't been charging well, and there have been some glitches, so hopefully these images will suffice. My aim in colouring is to get cooler colours mixed with blues and more whites toward the south pole of the map, and warmer colours with more yellows toward the equatorial regions. There's lots of splotches and blending and varying techniques to give a range of terrain impressions. Darker areas indicating forests and jungles, lighter areas indicating grasslands and plains. K One of the last steps is giving some more definition to the mountain ranges which have started to get a bit lost among the other colours that have now been added.  Almost done.

Today was the start of painting the mega-map. The whole thing takes up the full table in the art studio, even when it's been extended to maximum size.  Before doing anything else, I need to add the latitude and longitude lines, but I certainly don't have any compass large enough to draw the arcs. So, it's time to measure things out and pull out the string. Next...colouring... I've decided that I'm going to use a watercolour technique for the map. If I used heavy acrylics, or even put a coating of primer on it, it would become more difficult to sew things onto the canvas...which is one of the long term goals of the project. Using watercolour will function more as a stain on the canvas, so it might take a couple of coats to get a good rich colour happening...but we'll see how it goes. First I'll tape some plastic sheeting down on the table, this will make sure the watercolour doesn't sink through the canvas and into the wooden table. ...

With the sketch and the canvas taped up to the window, I can trace the basic shape and maintain the generalities of the form. The specific details of the map sketch certainly don't match the intended scale, so thankfully I've got some leeway here. The first thing I'll do is break up the coastline a bit. Here and there I add islands, and provide hints toward river deltas opening out onto the sea.  The mountain ranges provide hints of where streams start, and the jagged coastlines provide ideas for where the riverways end. I've also been given a few rivers to work with, so it's now a case of using a rudimentary understanding of geography to piece these components together. I'm going to use a system where rivers are noted in two distinct types on the map. Wide waterways capable of being navigated by barges and ship-borne traders will be indicated with a double thickness, while smaller rivers and streams will be marked with a single thickness line....

This map is pretty loose, it's for a blank slate world that will be defined as we go. But it's nice to have some hooks for players to latch onto, and for GMs to base adventures around. I've been given a rough framework (as indicated in the last post), but pretty free reign with specifics. Here's the working sketch. Or, more accurately, here are the pages on which the rough sketch has been printed, scaled up to be more impressive.  Due to the printing on A4 pages, I need to guillotine the edges... Then tape the fragments together... ...gradually building the complete map. I've discussed fractal hexes before , in my geomorph series a few years ago. So it's nice to see a map given to me where this system is in place. Four of the smallest hexes across make one of the mid hexes, four of the mid hexes across make one of the large hexes, four of the large hexes make one of the largest hexes.  This works as a fairly convenient...