....I played Torch and Shield.

 Torch and Shield is the kind of game that intrigues me far more than it has a right to do so.While my background is mostly wargaming, I've only really truly enjoyed the excellent Battletech and Blood Bowl as far as gridded games go. While Underworlds was a decent title, I didn't see anything that wouldn't just work better without the hexes - for goodness sake there aren't even facing rules!

Ah, I'm ranting. Torch and Shield. No real major interest in dwarves, sour taste in my mouth because let's be frank, the Hobbit movies burned me, and I didn't really enjoy any of the newer "duardin" GW was putting out. I've since come around on the Fyreslayers (I like the newest Warcry band and nothing else, at all.) but alas, not much else. 

 

But, I do like Landsknects, and when I saw those on their website, I realized I should pay more attention. Let me be clear, I wasn't going to go for anything in the kickstarter but those goofy merc-looking dwarves, but then I watched some videos on the game, and realized that they basically took a lot of Games Workshop design ideas and put it into an honestly brilliant game. 

Combat is quick and easy to resolve, and features "buckets of dice" style resolution - you will be rolling around 3+ dice to make hits, you need successes for hits, those come on a 5-6, so throwing more dice is always important. 

There's no real structure to this post, so I'll just go with some observations:

While it's a "bring what minis you have" rule (which is a pointless descriptor, every minis game is a "bring what you have" game and there's exactly one company with the clout and power to enforce otherwise...) I found that going WYSIWYG was a massive, embarrassing mistake because one side of Vulkyn Flameseekers (mostly painted!!) was able to trounce a dwarf army of Kainan's reapers (not painted! mea culpa!!) very easily in every single game (we played three) except for one where we got some very unlucky pulls from the event decks and I was having to pull from my Warcry teams to be able to have enough. Now I've been assured that the main game will have a load-out system, so I'll mea culpa that for now, because otherwise having a "balanced" team with pure WYSIWYG is not possible.

Positioning is important and there's something of a "death spiral" in the games - your characters have 3 wounds, and it's possible to get one-shotted easy - but even taking a single wound means you become easier to be wounded. That's generally fine, because the resolution is pretty chunky and - roll a direct contest to hit, then to wound for each hit you get, a la' MESBG. There's knockback like in MESBG or Blood Bowl or Underworlds, and like MESBG and Underworlds if you don't have a place to be knocked back to(you choose where to go, unless the enemy is using a hammer. Hammer dwarves get to choose where to push) the enemy rolls an extra die to wound you. Like Blood Bowl, you can then do a "follow up" and come up to them. 

Taking a wound means you're knocked down. It uses a pool system, so if your MS(attack stat) is 4, you roll 4d6 and count the 5/6's for a hit, same with wounds, with armor and resilience reducing the amount of dice the "wounder" would get from its strength score. That resilience goes down by 1 each wound suffered, and all of the demo guys had 2 resilience, so if you took two hits and weren't dead, you were not going to survive another hit.

The card initiative system(each dwarf gets 1 card) was a bit slow going (our first two rounds of six was 50 minutes nearly) but once we had it down pat we were sheathing cards(you get +1 extra card if your leader is alive and can save it for the next turn) and slaughtering each other with ease, with each round lasting about 15 minutes. So for "pro" or "people that know the rules" type players I would say a normal game of T&S would last about 90 minutes. Depending on your life circumstances you could probably get two games in a session. Cards also do stuff like make you lose your light sources fuel or worse like spawning one or three monsters at the nearest entrance to you - meaning you can, at the end of the round, go from chuckling and confident to sweating bullets and having to realign plans. Or you set off a trap and have to resolve a hit against you. Nothing good happens to the player that draws this, and it's the player with priority that gets it. Which is interesting, there's some indication that being the Fated One has positive stuff going for it. As it stands you get to draw from the "fuck you" deck.

Being shrouded is the most "hold your breath" stuff I've seen in a game. Basically you become harder to shoot at but you also lose the protection of the light source, and the light source is a huge part of the game. You will tactically position yourself automatically without even thinking of it, and we started using home-made blood bowl scatter templates to show line of sight. If you're not careful re: light, you're going to have a bad time. Anyone without light becomes shrouded and that means every round you roll 2d6. On a 2, you die, no save (fuck you). You were eaten by a grue. On a 10-12 a monster spawns next to you. Monsters interrupt fights, as dwarves will fight, sure, but they won't stand a monster to live.

You are only guaranteed up to half a game of light. You get d3 rounds of light in the beginning, and after that you roll 1d6 for each light source and it goes out on a 1. Also, you lose 1 fuel if you, the fated one, draw a diamond card. For both teams, draw it again and the lights go out. Then monsters start showing up because you then are rolling for every single god-damned dwarf. Again these are QS rules so I'd recommend you hit up the discord for more questions by it, but this game is very tense and good. It's the diametric opposite of something like Warcry where the point is to just swarm each other like angry ants and beat the fuck out of each other (although there are special skills determined by your card drawn's suit for each guy, similar to Warcry's Yahtzee initiative). You really want to be careful - tactical positioning is extremely important - and objectives are very important. There's still the "cinematic" moments that Warcry offers, but it's more of an "oh shit" as the lights go out and then you suddenly have 12 monsters on around you and it's round two.

 So it's a great game. The Kickstarter is running right now and I recommend you get in on the ground floor because, not only is it good, it has Landsknecht dwarves. 

 

- Klang 

Kharmlund Session 2

In the time between the....oh hell, skip the cliche and let's begin it's time for Kharmlund! An open table OSE game I'm running here bi-weekly. For...ever? I have no idea. It's a sandbox campaign.

For this session, only two players sporting three characters and a pack of four dwarven henchmen went into Kharmlund (it's long weekend time in Canada, it was a fool's gambit to do this). 

That was:

Talsi - Drow illusionist

Ulf - Human Assassin

Grent - Elf

And of course, I will be simply naming any dwarves by the names of Thorin's company aside from other, neater sounding names I find on the spot. So Thorin, Dwalin, Balin and Floki joined the party into the depths of Kharmlund. There was no adventuring in the Dveghom about the underground, they took their eight hour (in-game) time limit and entered into...the long dark of Kharmlund. 

This session had the party dealing with their first combat encounters and uh, boy howdy did they have some combat encounters. First and foremost the party decided to go to the south-west from where they scored an easy win, gaining 400sp, which is like, 40gp in my lazy currency conversion. They scooped it into the pockets of their henchmen without a second thought. Money is kind of a trap unless it's literally gold, especially since I just make "coins" all weigh the same, but the party had four doughty dwarves with them. 

 

                                                                                  The Party's hand-drawn map(it is not correct but close enough)

 

From there, they entered into a few rooms (and made an absolute shitton of listening checks, holy hell, every door, multiple times, at least 60 minutes IGT(in game time) was spent listening at doors. They found the hasty camping site of some bandits belonging to one of the campaign's factions and then found one of the "easy early" treasures I usually put in there. It's a book of smut, with a GP value of 2500 gp. So think "lust argonian maid" and you're golden (also the book is studded with rubies). Sadly, the party was then surrounded, as there's a two-way mirror wall that allowed them to be seen. These bandits, with shoddy equipment and large red K's somewhere on their armor had placed the book there, see. Stolen from Kurgan's treasure, you see. They were just trying to figure out how to get past the wight that "guards" the entrance to the dungeon. One of the bandits also was able to clock a treasure sack full of coins and cut it open, causing silver, sweet silver to spill onto the dungeon floor, everywhere. This caused some distraction, enough for Turk, the assassin to use his ability.

Assassins in OSE have a neat trick. If they do a sneak attack on an unaware target(and I ruled he was unaware) the target needed to make a save or die roll. He did this to the leader - who did not make the save. The bandits also lost initiative, and most of them lost their morale rolls when their numbers were halved in a single combat round. Sadly, they did manage to kill Floki, so when all was said and done, the dwarves were down a number. Loyalty checks passed easily, but there was some soreness at losing someone so early on.

Onward! 

The party pushed northwards into a small, safe room. There was a pair of living eyes on the wall, and it called out, "Well Met! Have a drink!"  The party greeted them as the wall began vomiting water, cool, clear, water. There was a door to the north, so the party entered and stepped into a teeny tiny shelob's cave. Not willing to mess around with the webbing and the near silent rustle of something on the roof, the party decided to see if they could go around, noting at least two other doors. 

 So they went east. After much more listening at doors, hooray, they entered and moved north, stopping at a small Altar of some kind of wolf god, taking 2 damage from touching it(they were heathen nonbelievers) and debating knocking it over before moving into the "spider" room from a secret door. They were able to try and bushwack the spider and it worked...sort of. The Elf had to dodge what would have easily been a one-shot kill from the thing, but they were able to murder the awful thing. At this point, with the IRL timer running low and them already having a ton of money, they shrugged and decided to turn back.

No major encounters despite 3(!) rolls for them, and the party managed to return back to the land of the living, with a few thousand XP and many large piles of coins, they did good. 

The Dwarves will likely be asking for an up-front fee due to people dying. 1gp ain't worth your life, after all!

Kharmlund: Session 1

 So I've been dipping my toes into running OSR games and I'm beginning to find that these are basically the only kinds of RPGs I could play that aren't just strictly a wargame with RPG things bolted on, like Mechwarrior Destiny. I don't love rpgs, I never enjoyed the culture and I was more interested in the other things people talked about with them - character progression, but socially being more important than anything else and eventually rising up to stuff like being a noble, leading armies into battle.

In short, a really cool wargaming campaign. Most people don't really seem to like that, and I guess that is fine, but I've gotten a few people interested into the setting that they would like to play in it. So I'm calling the campaign after it's OSR-type megadungeon: Kharmlund, which is in-universe for Long Dark.

Before I list our PCs, please understand that Kharmlund is heavily inspired chiefly by the Black Company, The Elder Scrolls a little bit of Warhammer, I have no mouth and I must scream and so on, but the first floor is meant to be more like a "classic DnD". The Dungeon is massive, I'm at something insane like 440+ rooms, and for those of you that feel the need to say it, I am aware that this is overkill. I mostly just want to build two dungeons: Kharmlund for the megadungeon I can always run, and then I also want to do a blank one with a table of shit for populating the doors quickly for portable games. That's...for another time however, and I'd probably build the table out of heroquest pieces, probably use my tiles I printed out forever ago. Something I can fit into something the size of a small toolbox and have it be a portable fantasy RPG. 

Offtopicofftopic. Alright. So the purpose of Kharmlund is that it's effectively a Dwarven hold that on the surface seems like your typical Moria clone, but the deeper you go it's meant to convey that the Dwarves got up to some shit. Like the Dwemer, but several orders of magnitude worse. Anyway, enough lore, let's tell you how our first little session went. Keep in mind I'm somewhat new into this crap so I might not get all of the rules right, I'm more interested in things like Battletech, Blood Bowl, etc. 

Anyway, here's the players I have:

Elf and Human Assassin - A good friend of many campaigns. He'll just play anything. He's shrugged and tried out every RPG, miniatures game, or video game I have ever purchased.

- Husband and Wife wombo combo. The husband likes to keep things silly, and the wife likes to keep things S I L L Y but they're great players. Show up on time, give a shit, offer snacks. Love them. Husband is playing a human thief.

- College Room-mate. He's big into RPGs and such. He's very against letting the party turn into the Glanton gang.

- Wildcard lady. I don't know her well but I know she likes to role play. We'll see.

- OTHER husband and wife combo. Husband is playing a Half Elf. I don't know what the wife plays like just yet but I'm very excited to see. The husband will cheerfully turn the party into the Glanton gang (he's very nice irl) 

- British guy. He's British, and I don't know how much he'll be playing but we'll see.

- Sweetheart. Nice lady from my college days. Kind-hearted but you know the nerdy kind girl is also the one most likely to be part of a death cult, so we will see, my friends.

-Girlfriend's Dark Elf Illusionist - she usually plays the 5e stuff and is wholly un-used to murder stuff.

Begin....

The party began their journey on a cart to Kharmlund. The party consisted of the Human Thief, the Dark Elf Illusionist, the Half Elf Bard and the Assassin. They'd hired three dwarves as hirelings and after poking around in the city above Kharmlund, called Dveghom, they entered proper, and came face to face with a wight.

Obviously throwing a powerful undead at them in such short order is such a rude thing to do, the party was (pleasantly? I hope :D) surprised to find out it wanted to trade, offering them five pieces of mellinated(mummified in magical honey) person. The confections basically count the same as WFRP fate points: 500 a pop, they're hard to make and such but they allow a free pass on a save or die roll, even after failure. He offered them freely to anyone from a magical race (nonhuman exception is orc) with the promise that upon their death, they would place two coins on the eyes of their dead comrade so he could be used for the mellifcation process. 

Then the party set to adventuring, but in three hours they managed to get a whole...four rooms explored! I was really impressed at how slow they were going, to be honest with you. Lots of careful behavior here, nailing spikes in to the ground to keep doors from swinging shut. The main highlights of the session were, upon hearing a large party of...something was approaching them, they ducked quickly into a room where eight ratmen were fighting over treasure. The ratmen were neutral since, while jealous of their treasure, wanted to also live. Kharmlund's denizens understand a "shh". There's far nastier things than just other humanoids. After whatever passed them by, the party backed carefully out of the room, unwilling to fight 7v1 in a tight space with no room to maneuver. They were forgotten by the ratmen, who basically function the same as the Skaven from Warhammer Fantasy - all of them are seething, arrogant, hateful assholes, to outsiders only slightly more than each other. Every one of these not-skaven considers every other living being to be some kind of tool, object for their own advancement.

They found a room with a massive skull that opens for coins and slams shut when given them. Since nobody was dumb enough to try and steal from the large coin stash there, they simply threw a couple coins from their starting gold in and then left. 

Final major encounter was a massive contraption the next room over. Smashed ratmen bodies, a pair of statues, both beautiful statues of Vress, the dark goddess of poisoners, witches and any dishonorable killing. There's a huge chest in the room. What to do? After poking around, listening at doors and looking around but not up, they decide to test the room carefully - but seeing if the ratmen can be meme'd into coming in and opening the chest. The half-elf went alone, and took two dwarves with him (they were his hirelings) and returning the ratman room, they find a single survivor - bleeding and gashed, but smug and victorious. After some easy flattery the ratman decides to follow them - after all, he is smarter and better than them, he just killed seven of his fellows - and it's here the bard uses his mesmerizing (its an OSE bard thing) abilities (he played him a song about how much of a badass he was) to transfix and then charm the ratman into looking up to him. Then the ratman was told to go open the chest.

Ssssplat. The top of the room came down like a hydralic press and "mooshed" him, as I described it. The scroll and coins survived, although battered and warped some. Knowing how the chest is trapped, during the reset (the chest began to close again) the party propped it up with a ten foot pole, while caused the trap to half-reset. Then, the thief and illusionist held the chest propped while the Half-elf looted aggressively. All of this, start to finish took 50 minutes in-dungeon time. With 400 gp jangling in the Assassin's backpack, the party took their rest in the Skull Room and after a monster-free Wandering monster check, they left the depths of Kharmlund and headed back.

In town one of them bought a townhouse for 75 gp, not a great price, but it's not that good of a house. The mapper sold the map after doing a memorization challenge. The drow was given two minutes of looking at the Mapper's map and to draw as much as possible - they managed a sloppy but close enough recreation that I allowed the mapper to keep his map. The map was only for like, 4 rooms but the payout was a thousand GP for the map - 250 each. When the wannabe adventurers return to their base of operations and find out it's a shite map, well, they might have an issue. But you know, caveat emptor. 

 With that resolved, it was session wrap-up. There was much shopping done, and the party did well.

GM THOUGHTS: I really like this game. I have also realized that with the party moving at a pace of 1 room per hour that I massively overdid this dungeon - Kharmlund has 444 rooms. Oh well. We'll see what happens in two weeks.

 

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay session #5: Those are NOT ents!

 

I really do like Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay.

There's not a lot to say, I just love the game and I love playing it with this particular group. We're five sessions deep (started in January, we're doing pretty well as busy-ass adults) and I just ran a fun little session last night.

It was a pretty fun adventure, guy needs wood, has access to a secret grove of trees and it turns out there's a guardian. Some beastmen where cruelly affixing warpstone to its body for the joy of causing chaos, and this guardian(a treeman, NOT an ent) took off running. The beastmen gave chase but lost the trail, returning to the grove just in time to come into contact with the PCs and get brutally murdered by them. A special shoutout to the halfling who critted with her sling and got a 99/100 and exploded the jaw of the spellcaster. There was bumps and some sluggishness as the group tried to remember how the combat worked - our last game was on the seventh of May, and with one of them being a mom and the other two being highly busy people it's fair to assume that there's just not a lot of brainpower being saved and stored to remember how to roll the math cubes and calculate the invisible health points.

The players found the guardian, dying from its infusion of warpstone and said some prayers to it and took a bunch of its seeds, There was some actual character growth with the dwarf trying to understand why people would ever like him as a person, due to his slayer status.

Honestly it was good shit and it's great seeing my players commit so hard.

Anyway, actual update coming soon. 

Battletech Campaign Rules I like to use.

 Hello,

This system is heavily based on the map campaign of the Battle Companies for the MESBG.

There are three phases in a campaign turn:

Expansion Phase: Players may move 4-12 hexes. There's no need to "turn" like in Classic Battletech. Moving 8 phases means that you cannot take Battlefield support into battle. Moving 12 means you give a free battlefield support card chosen at random to your player.

Battle Phase: Players take their forces, roll on scenario and location tables and battle!

Consolidation Phase: Players do the "math" for their guys and set up for the next campaign turn.

Depending on number of players, there's only so many turns in a year. Campaigns will last a year. For two players, campaign years last 6 turns. 

ATTACKING FORTS: Player with the fort may deploy after where they like.

CONSOLIDATION PHASE: 

FORTS: COST 100 WARCHEST POINTS, BUT GRANT 1D3 BDP ON ITS OWN HEX AND EVERY HEX AROUND IT.

CITIES: GENERATE 200 WCP A TURN

INDUSTRIAL: GENERATE 500 WCP A TURN, BSP COSTS -10%

BATTLEFIELD SUPPORT: 1 BSP/CARD. 1 BSP IS A RANDOM DRAW FROM A DECK OF BSP CARDS FOR ALPHA STRIKE. MAXIMUM OF 10 CARDS.

COSTS FOR REPAIRS, HIRING NEW PEOPLE ETC

 

 

******EXPERIENCE FOR MECHWARRIORS******
XP TABLE
Survive a mission: 1XP
All Objectives Complete: 3XP for each survivor
'Mech Kill: 4XP

 

******MECHWARRIOR ADVANCEMENT******
XP COSTS TABLE:
Improve Skill: 5XP + 1 additional XP per improvement.
BUY NEW PSA: 5XP + 1 additional XP per PSA.

ALL NEW MECHWARRIORS START AT SKILL 4(3 FOR CLAN)

******SALVAGING MECHS******
Roll 1d6 for each mech,
1 - Mech was ruined beyond recognition
2 - Salvage: 125 Warchest Points
3 - Salvage: 150 Warchest Points
4 - Salvage: 175 Warchest Points
5 - One piece of equipment undamaged (Five free bubbles of repair to any 'Mech)
6 - Mech chassis is yours, damage and all! 

******BATTLEFIELD SUPPORT******

1 BSP CARD: 1000 WARCHEST(PERMANENT, REFRESHES EVERY BATTLE, 10/CAMPAIGN)

 

 

******TURRETS******
Light Turret: 10/5 Pilot skill 3
Medium Turret: 25/5 Pilot skill 3
Heavy Turret: 50/5 Pilot Skill 3
Pillbox: 100/5, Infantry scale weapons only
 

You find a flyer from the front: A Ninth Legion Deserters update

 What a may it's been...

Welcome back to my hobby blog. It's been nearly a year since I updated, but I've managed to really start engaging with my miniature wargaming hobby in the most full-time way I can. I was on the 'employment insurance' for about six months (thanks Justin!) after losing my job at the weed farm, but I've managed to find employment with a corporate position, and it's union and pays pretty well(for where I live. If this was vancouver it would be starvation wages, but thankfully I live in a place that I own and I have extra money to buy my plastic toy soldiers, so I'm pretty happy about it all things considered).

I was looking back on my life, and all the things I've done to me,

I'm still looking for the answers, I'm still sear- hold on, that was Mr. Osborne's line.

No, I'm been thinking a lot about what I want from my hobbies, and how it relates to spending. I was diagnosed with ADHD when I was a young lad and those tiktok videos about ADHD "resonate"(ie, can be related to in some fashion) and that probably relates to why my first year of being into the miniature wargaming hobby caused me to, hm, let's say overcommit to being a part of games workshop gaming lines, leaving me with some of my first miniatures ever painted (and boy, do they look like first minis ever painted..) and also buying a ton of Warhammer Underworlds and also buying Space Hulk and also buying the Dominion boxed set despite not being interested in Stormcast or Kruleboyz and also the Kill Team Starter set and also purchasing Blood Bowl Second Season edition and also getting into Battletech and also...

and also. and also. and also.

If you're the kind of person who likes shiny and new things all of the time Games Workshop really does have you covered. You will be left with a mountain of half-finished projects and an empty wallet. What a nightmare! Do not believe the lies about whether or not you can "spend less money" on your hobbies by playing games with a "low model count" and other such nonsense. If you're the kind of person who throws reams of cash at new things then the "only 2-4 models for an army!" game will not help you save money. That's all self control. You can buy a single warhammer army and never buy anything else again and be fine. You can buy the "cheaper" warhammer underworlds and not even realize on your 15th warband, you could literally have just...bought the goddamn warhammer army and been good to go.

I also upgraded my PC with a new GPU and power system just in time for Darktide, only to immediately lose interest in the game after less than forty hours due to not really liking the 40k setting as much as the excellent Old World setting. And generally finding I just don't really like videogames unless it's wintertime because it's harder to get around in winter.

Basically I needed to bring my stuff into focus. Get far, far more aggressive about actually playing the games I wanted to play (I didn't do as much tabletop stuff in 2022 but I also managed to hit the beach with my more outdoorsy tabletop gaming friends on eight different occasions in a mostly wildfire smoke free summer so I don't consider it a waste, especially since the sky is a lovely vomit yellow currently...). I've been logging it in my journal, which I mostly keep for bullet-point to do lists, but I think I've done well so far - actually playing and running the games I bought. 

Here's a quick rundown: 

INIS - 12/02/23

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Session #1 23/01/23

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Session #2 19/02/23

Dungeon Bowl  09/03/23

Blood Bowl 7's 18/02/23

Cyberpunk RED #1 05/03/23

Cyberpunk RED #2 18/03/23

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Session #3 02/04/23

Space Weirdos, two games 11/04/23

Space Weirdos 17/04/23

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay Session #4 07/05/23

And that's just the non-Battletech stuff. I've been going hard on arranging Battletech shit this year.

Classic Battletech (Campaign #1) 09/02/23

Alpha Strike (Teaching Game) 11/02/23

Classic Battletech (Campaign #2) 19/02/23

Classic Battletech (Teaching Game) 04/03/2023

Classic Battletech (Campaign #3) 04/03/2023

Classic Battletech (Teaching Game) 05/04/2023

Alpha Strike (Teaching Game) 11/03/2023

Alpha Strike (Teaching Game) 12/03/2023

 Classic Battlech (Weird Grinder) 19/04/23

Classic Battletech (8000bv Batchall) 30/04/23 

So uh. Yeah. I've been getting my money's worth. And it's not stopping. Fed up with the slow dripfeed of news regarding the Old World I decided to look into getting some Rank and Flank armies on the table and playing games, and after taking a few sniffs at Dragon Rampant, Kings of War, Hobgoblin etc, I settled on on Age of Fantasy: Regiments, because why not? I've been slowly building up an IXLD army for that setting, I finished some Mordheim guys and hey - oh holy of holies, I have finally built enough models for my Skaven army that I can field them in a game. So I'm playing Age of Sigmar this year. A lot if I can help it. 

 
Here's my general hobby plans for the rest of the year:

Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay

Age of Fantasy: Regiments will be added into the game's systems if I can figure out a way to get the players into a situation where they need to lead armies into battle against their enemies. I know you may be thinking "Holy shit Klang, you have deep-ass pockets" and the answer is I'll probably be looking into using cheaper miniature company figures to do this. Wargames atlantic gives you, for example, 40 Halfling soldiers in a box, which can be built as pike, sword, or bowmen. All of them. For about 50$ CAD, or about 37 usd. Less than a buck for a mini? They also have decent Empire chaff proxies in the Conquistadors box and decent Goblins. There's also the Oathmark miniatures from North Star Military Figures. 30 Tolkien-esque Orcs in a box and you can build them as, again, Hand weapons, bow weapons or as pikemen. They also do dwarves, elves, humans etc. Don't get me wrong, I still bought a Steam Tank for the IXLD but basically, I can teach them an easy to learn system and they can do heroic stuff that doesn't involve killing Bloodthirsters of Khorne.

Blood Bowl

I'm just a humble player in the league. I hope I do well. No more buying BB stuff for me, however. I have three teams and I think that's basically all I need. 

Battletech

More battle reports coming for this. Alpha Strike campaign starting. I have a custom army for it mostly built aside from two missing ones. Nothing else to say here, we start on the 20th of May.

 

Age of Sigmar

I finished my Skaven army. Now they need to be painted, mind you, but I can start playing now, and uh, yes I am going to.

Heroquest XP Play Report and a four-quest review.

I have no nostalgia for Heroquest. I didn't have access to a lot of "cool" things growing up, so, in effect, if I enjoy something from the old days, you can generally be sure it's probably pretty good, since I'll be coming into it fresh, untainted by nostalgia.

I really liked Heroquest's conception, which to me, seemed like a fun little dungeon crawler for people who know nothing about DnD and other games like it. It is a remarkable teaching tool, but far too simple for people over the age of 12, I would say. It's hard to actually note this, since I know people with children under the age of ten who basically pull off pro-level Fornite maneuvers I have no inclination to learn(this is me coping hard, I wouldn't be able to do them). I do really wish I'd had access to a copy of Heroquest when I was younger and people who would play with me, because my only experience with tabletop RPGs in college was Disney propaganda about how they would turn you into a gibbering junkie and a jerkoff who said, "Sure, you can play" and handed me a confusing tax-form looking sheet and told me to fill it in with no assistance. Yet, now, with some RPG experience, Heroquest is a little too simple. Roll a pair of dice to move. Take an action, most of which auto-succeed unless it's a trap(debatable on searching for treasure, you do pull a treasure card, but the deck appears without a specific count to have either half or slightly more of a "fuck you, you get a monster or damage" variety of cards in it. Otherwise, that's about it. 

 Enter Heroquest XP, a fan mod that does what several other mods of Heroquest do for the game - adding experience and character progression! I've seen a few here and there and a lot of them don't really do it for me - if you're going to just add races, let people pick whatever of the four races they want, add in a leveling system, maybe even ability scores and skill trees - just play DnD, or Shadows of Brimstone. At least, that's the way I see it. 

Heroquest XP does away with all of that shit and does something fun and interesting with the game, while making it a much more difficult experience for the players and a more fun one. I don't think I'd recommend it so small kids, but gamers who like to screw with systems and cheese and such will have a really good time, at least in my case. So whirr went the printer and out came the scissors, a little tedious for sure, but slotted nicely into sleeves I quickly had a small rulebook and  64 cards.

How does it work? There's a new sheet. Sadly, this is the way, but conservation enthusiasts and legacy mechanic haters will be happy their pad of sheets is worthless and won't be pulled apart to sate the dark gods. I guess. 

You don't pick whatever race you want, and you don't add ability cards. It's still Heroquest. Take four heroes and their starting equipment. Add 25 XP to start and sift through your cards. The cards can be played instead of taking a normal action, many are one-offs, everyone has a passive "level up" card, and some can be taken as free actions and some have conditions for recovering themselves after use. Mind points have more value than the base game. The cards have a base cost that doesn't scale, and you can buy some of them multiple times.

But.

But.

Buying cards also gives Zargon a card for each one you have, meaning he gains more each purchase of a player card. Level-ups are kind of mediocre, since they only afford one body or mind point and in return, ho ho, in return Zargon gets a new card like "destroy the entire room and do three no-save body points to everyone in it" or "everyone must roll a d6 for each mind point they have, if they don't roll a six, they are paralyzed for Zargon's round and cannot defend themselves" or "this monster gets a spell card, Zargon presents two cards to the players and they choose which one the monster gets", etc. There is no safety either, Zargon gets more and more options to fuck with the players and in return, the players get a larger host of abilities to defend themselves. And the difficulty does a good job re-scaling, if the Barbarian is sent screaming to Khorne's mighty realm, never to return, you make a new Barbarian with none but the standard starting XP, and if he had four XP cards, the Zargon player reduces down by three for the next adventure. 

On top of this, if there are no monsters on the board, Zargon begins to flip over cards from the treasure deck until one of the negative card effects appears, but instead of it happening to a specific player, Zargon can choose. If a Zargon wanted to treat the game like it was a competition one supposes he could simply direct all ire to the wizard, then elf, then dwarf and finally barbarian, but I roll a d4 and let fate take it's course. It's a far more difficult game, because in base Heroquest, no monsters on the board means it's time to fidget around, and in Heroquest XP, it means constant attacks by wandering monsters. The orc is a simple foe, but once you get to things like the Fimir/Abomination, things become harder. We tend to play rules as written, because why not! 

In a recent adventure, the players needed to steal gold from chests in a Dread Warrior's stronghold and return them to a prince and the players realized that with Abominations being the spawning monster of the dungeon, they would be having quite a few difficulties very quickly. When they found what was effectively a boss room, they fought a dangerous and deadly encounter indeed, and then afterwards, they left a single goblin alive. This, the wizard put to sleep, you see. The players gathered up their gold, and then proceeded to slow-march out of the massive dungeon, me unable to spawn a single god-damn thing because, well, as you see, there was an enemy on the board. The final stretch of the journey was mostly really just funny, as a single goblin, finally awoken after five rounds of the party walking away and, in blind desperation, trying to murder the dwarf and failing to score more than a single hit then entire time. At some point he managed to get ahead and score a few hits on the barbarian, but end of the adventure, the players use of strategy had neutered Zargon's ability to spawn more dangerous foes. 

So, it's a better game. Feels a little Descent-ish, but simpler, and honestly, a bit more fun, as I have never once enjoyed Descent. There are mechanics you can use to account for what is, a literally harder game. The difficulty scales up, and then down, and overall it's good fun. The rules are on BoardGameGeek, and I am telling you now, go to that site and give them a once over, it's certainly worth the time. It's still Heroquest, but advanced enough to still be Heroquest and not just be an RPG-lite without any of the advantages of an RPG-lite.