Author: Gary

Concerning Conversions

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A ‘Conversion’ refers to a very specific type of miniature project. There’s no hard and fast rule on how to define this but I’ll do my best. Basically, when a model is converted it means that the modeller has taken pieces from elsewhere, often other kits and added them to a model in order to make it unique. It’s an incredibly fun past time of mine and I’d probably say it’s my favourite part about wargaming in general. Making unique characters and units is very fun. It’s very similar to scratch building a model but not as extreme.

A few of my most beloved miniatures are converted ones and I’d just like to talk about things that are important should you really want to customise your own figures to the max. First of all, save everything. Even the sprues if you can. You never know when you may need that pelt pouch that came with your 40k orks you bought when you were fifteen. This is of course not very space friendly and sprues quickly end up being more effort than they are worth. Instead however, you may want to keep what collectors refer to as a ‘bitz box’. Put in a bit of time and cut off all the spare parts from your sprues and store them in a box (or in my case multiple boxes). I use the plastic boxes that come with takeaway food. It might be a good idea for you, if you have a particular large amount of spare parts to organise them into categories like weapons, sci-fi/fantasy, torsos, etc.

I think it’s also worth talking about non-component related things you should keep a stock of if you like adapting your own minis. The top thing of this is putty; Milliput and Green Stuff. That stuff is a  godsend allowing you to fashion parts for things you don’t usually have. Green Stuff is usually better as Milliput is very brittle, making extremely fine detail things impossible. However, Green Stuff is significantly more expensive but is generally how most miniatures that you own start out as before being turned into moulds for plastic and metal. Both are two part epoxies that generally don’t have a shelf life, buy some today, finish using it in five years’ time. To the right here is a picture of a model I converted, something I added a little bit more character to. It was originally a ‘high inquisitor’ miniature produced for D&D 3.5. However, with the exorbitant prices Games Workshop was asking for their Witch Hunter model, which frankly I don’t like very much, I decided I would adapt this guy into something more lore friendly and characterful of the Old World. I started by highliting the trims with gold and washing the model in a dark army painter tone. I then used Milliput to increase the height of the hat to make it look more like the witch hunters of Warhammer.12919474_1311326088882961_1062426483_o 12921967_1311326108882959_104305521_oI decided I didn’t like the torch and cut it off, replacing it with a pistol I fashioned from the head of a great-ax from the orc sprues that Mantic produce. I added a second pistol to his belt because a witch hunter surelyneed a brace of them not just one. I then read that Witch Hunters often cover themselves in weapons due to the danger of their work. As a result of this, I added two thin swords to his back. After painting his boots rather than keeping them black and colouring the hat extension I had something I was happy with. It was very easy and made the mini stand out in a much more lore-friendly and distinctive way.

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Review: Dragon Rampant

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Dragon Rampant, The Definitive Pick-up-and-Play Fantasy Wargame

Overview

So a few weeks ago I got hold of a copy of Dragon Rampant, the fantasy battle rules by Osprey Publishing. The game was released in 2015 and the rules were written by Daniel Mersey, the same delightful chap who did Lion Rampant, the historical medieval rules by Osprey. Anyone coming from Lion Rampant will quickly be at home here as much of the rules are the same. However, Dragon Rampant adds a great deal of fantasy flavour, as to be expected. The book is a fairly slim, approachable volume weighing in at 64 pages. The book itself is clearly laid out (though not indexed) with some stunning artwork. The art really is wonderful, as is usually the case with Osprey. It retails from Osprey themselves for £11.99. Within you will find rules for how to run a battle, as well as the usual wargame stuff; how to handle terrain, how to form cohesive units from your vast collection of miniatures. What is important however is that the rules are generic and allow you to build your own unit types, permitting you the use of any models in your collection. The game generally favours fun over competitiveness, with luck playing a rather large amount in activation of units.

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One of the gorgeous full-page pieces of art by RU-MOR, one of three illustrators to work on the book

Mechanics

The game uses d6’s and I can tell you, you will never need more than twelve at once, which is a nice change of pace from games where you find you run out of dice and have to start rerolling the ones you’ve already used. When it is your turn, you select one unit that has not been activated yet and choose one of three actions, ‘move’, ‘shoot’ or ‘attack’. To represent the line of command, as well as the unit’s individual discipline, you must roll two dice to determine whether the unit follows your command. If it does, then you carry out the activation as normal, if it doesn’t, it ends your turn. In the games we played I approached this mechanic tentatively, expecting to not like the loss of control it inevitably means. However, once we started playing I realised it was great! IT makes the game move faster because it’s always flipping between whose turn it is. It keeps everyone playing involved in the game and is much more inclusive than a true I-GO-U-GO setup. Another unpredictability in the usage of unit’s is the ‘Wild Charge’ mechanic.  Units with this special rule must attempt to charge the enemy if they are within range. It creates some very interesting emergent gameplay and makes the game feel like you as commander have to be more reactive rather than calculating every move with utmost delicacy. In this sense I feel as though Dragon Rampant is the most ‘real’ fantasy wargame I’ve ever played. I feel more like a commander having to send out his orders and react to the unexpected tides of battle. It feels more like a battle and less like chess.

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Concerning MARS ATTACKS

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MARS ATTACKS was originally a set of collectable and tradable cards released in 1962 for children. The original set contained 55 cards and each one detailed an aspect of the Martian invasion of Earth, and the eventual resistance and counter-invasion of Mars by humanity. Topps, the owners of the series, had to end production of the cards prematurely because the violence depicted and the implied sexuality of certain cards. My first experience of MARS ATTACKS was the 90’s film by Tim Burton. It’s bad, it’s really bad. I love it. MARS ATTACKS has always had a good sense of dark humour and the film captured that wonderfully. The giant brained, bog-eyed Martians evoke that camp, over the top comedy so well. I heard as well that the iconic ‘ack ack’ noises that the Martians of the film make is actually the quacking of a duck played backwards.

Card no. 36. My all time favourite.

It wasn’t until a while later however that I really began to appreciate the silliness of MARS ATTACKS in any meaningful way. In October 2013 Mantic Games ran a Kickstarter for their MARS ATTACKS miniatures game. I’ve had a quiet respect for Mantic for the last few years and was sold fairly quickly on the idea of 28mm Martians with freeze/death/heat rays against hapless soldiers. I suppose this pose is a semi-review of that game, as well as a discussion of the series as a whole.

When my pledge arrived I was astounded at how much they’d given me for my money, as well as the quality of the items. The rules are derived from Mantic’s other game, Deadzone, albeit simplified so anyone can pick it up. My brother isn’t really into miniature wargaming but I managed to convince him to give this one a go and we had a blast. The randomness of the rules create a truly over the top feel. He, playing as the Martians, pressed my poor soldiers back through the ruins, killing them all with disintegration rifles. As he was about the finish off the last few of the remaining members of my band of brothers something unexpected happened. A herd of flaming cows came reeling in from off the board and trampled his alien friends. In quick succession, before the Martians could recover, a giant spider erupted from the ground, the result of weird Martian science, and began devouring the scattered aliens. I seized the opportunity and pressed the attack. I think I still lost that game in the end, I can’t remember too well, though what I do remember is that it was fun and funny.

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Concerning Ravenloft

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So the new Ravenloft-based adventure Curse of Strahd for Dungeons and Dragons is set for release in just over a week release next week so I thought it might be a good time to look back over at the original Ravenloft module by Laura and Tracy Hickman. I am fortunate enough to have partner that tracked down a copy of the module and I received it as a Christmas present a few years ago. Hopefully this post will help explain to people a bit of the history of Ravenloft and how it fits into the bigger D&D picture. Beneath is a scan of my copy’s cover page.ravenloft

We can see that on the cover is Strahd, the vampire lord that features prominently in the upcoming module for 5th edition. He’s a Dracula type figure that has a tortured past and that was one of the things that made Ravenloft different. Previous to the publication of the module enemies and NPCs were simply in the game to give the players something to kill or to talk to. The Hickmans changed this; they made the villain the centre of the story. Strahd is the story in Ravenloft and that revolutionized the approach to adventure design. No longer could you simply have a series of unconnected rooms in a dungeon that didn’t make sense outside of itself. The characterization of Strahd as a villain helped peel away the wild and wooly adventure design of the 1970’s and replace it with something more meaningful.

So in addition to Strad what else have we got? We can see that the adventure is labelled as ‘I6’, meaning, for those unfamiliar with AD&D modules that it was the 6th adventure in the ‘I’ series. ‘I’ stands for intermediate, and it was mostly a series of unconnected adventures, though Ravenloft is one of the few within the series to get a sequel. We can also see that the adventure is intended for ‘6 to 8 characters of levels 5 to 7’. This reveals a difference in the game design culture and the understanding of how many PC’s would be in the game. I, along with most people who play D&D I presume would consider eight player characters quite a lot, maybe too many for some people. It reveals that, both the rules for AD&D were faster and simpler (well, I’d ague about simplicity…) and that life was cheaper back in 1st E AD&D.

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Review: Runebound

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The third edition of Runebound hit stores in Decemeber last year. It is an adventure boardgame by Fantasy Flight Games and is very much marketed at the ‘Adventure-in-a-box’ style game. I think I should start by stating that I have never player any other edition of Runebound so I only have this one to go off. Whether that makes me ill-informed or more impartial is up to you. Straight away, as soon as the lid comes off the box you can sense the production value of the game, something that folks who know Fantasy Flight will be used to. The cards, the board and the miniatures are all beautiful. Though I’d like to just mention that Fantasy Flight have seemed to have switched from putting standard rulebooks in their games to two volumes; a ‘learn-to-play’ guide and a ‘rules reference’. I’m not sure what the reason for this was, I imagine it has something to do with making the rules easier to understand for a new player but I have found this new way of doing things (both in Runebound and other FFG titles) to be unintuitive. I find myself, or my friends, spend half the time asking which book the answer to an obscure rules question is in rather than playing. I’d be interested to hear other people’s views on this and if others have found this newer system more useful and why.

In Runebound each player assumes control of one of six characters and must travel the realm of Terrinoth collecting items and becoming more powerful. Each character is significantly different from the others and my only gripe is that there aren’t more of them. It’s a game that, in terms of appeal and atmosphere, is very similar to Talisman, for me at least. When you factor in that in a six player game you have no choice in who you play it feels worse than it probably should. I was expecting more characters and it’s a shame they’re a bit scarce. The board itself is divided into hexes and uses custom dice to determine how far a character may travel each turn by rolling a number of movement dice equal to the characters movement score and then allocating them as they see fit to terrain tiles on the board. This is where Runebound shines, and where for me it becomes praise worthy game. I enjoy the fact that the encounter decks are split into three different types; combat, exploration and social and it give me a real sense of adventure. Some of the encounters are very interesting, becoming a permanent fixture on the board and the fact that these draw decks are modified by the rules of the game’s scenario. We had one game where, as the vile dragonlord Margath was slowly building his power (the first of two scenarios that ship with the game) that a heretical cult of dragon worshippers set up shop in one of the outlying towns of Terrinoth. This changed how we played because anyone entering the town was subject to the cults wroth and as result we avoided the place like the plague.

Another element that I really enjoy about Runebound is the semi-co-operative elements to it (I have a serious love for anything that lets me quest with my friends). There is only one winner to the game, but to achieve that goal the player must work with others otherwise everyone loses. In the first scenario is ‘The Ascendance of Margath’ in which the aforementioned Margath the dragnlord is getting ready to slither out of his hiding place in the Mountains of Despair and attack the city of Tamalir. The game involved players getting ready for a final showdown when the dragon finally rears his ugly head. Continue reading “Review: Runebound” →

Concerning Umberto Eco

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So the Italian author Umberto Eco died a few weeks ago. It was a big enough event to have made national news. I have never read the novel which made him famous, The Name of the Rose, and if I’m being frank, I’m not likely to. However, he is worth a mention from me here because his work as an academic and essayist has massively influenced my own choice of studies and professional interest, both as an undergraduate, and a post-graduate.  I came across his work when I was asked to write an essay on medievalism and modern-medieval culture as an undergraduate. I, as anyone who knows me won’t be surprised to know, decided to write an essay on Dungeons and Dragons. What better way to sneak gaming into something real. My lecturer at the time insisted I make use of an essay by Eco. The essay was entitled ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’ in which Eco talks about the different ways that society reinvents the ‘middle ages’ for its own end. It was definitely interesting and for me, it set me down a path that for most of my time in education, I clung to.

So let’s add a few years. When I started my masters’ degree it was hard to

Umberto Eco, 1931-2016

ignore Eco. In fact he was so relevant I referenced him in nearly every piece of coursework I did. For anyone wanting to have a good, insightful read about how the stories of our society are constructed, look to Travels in Hyper-Reality, which is the collection that ‘Dreaming of the Middle Ages’ comes from. It’s wonderful. I managed to track down a copy for myself a few months ago which alas wasn’t easy, partly to do with the fact I don’t think it’s in print anymore. His essays about what academics like to refer to as ‘medievalism’, that is the use of medieval tropes and things that are perceived as ‘medieval’ to create a narrative that people are immediately comfortable with. I suppose the modern, most relevant equivalent of this would be HBO’s Game of Thrones. Eco’s arguments were that things like Game of Thrones are not medieval at all, and instead use a mythologised version of the medieval to map modern thought and storytelling onto. Ergo, Game of Thrones is not medieval at all; it’s simply what we as an audience perceive to be medieval. Continue reading “Concerning Umberto Eco” →

Concerning Vapnartak

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Every February the York Wargames Society hosts a wargaming convention called Vapnartak. I’ve been lucky enough to be able to attend for the last three years and had a blast every time (and even once managed to convince my partner to go with me). They have a good balance of traders, participation games and demonstrations on, as well as a very good table sale. The convention is split over three floors of the Knavesmire Stand at York Racecourse, with usually the big tables being on the ground floor and the traders sprinkled about all three. For anyone who has a love of miniatures and can get there within the day, I’d recommend it. There’s often several of the big names in the industry there; Warlord, Pendraken, Mantic (though Mantic were not there this year). Of course, Games Workshop doesn’t attend.

This year I noticed that easily the largest game being played was a game of Kings of War by Mantic Games. It was an interesting sight to see, as the game has only recently surged in popularity, especially with the release of its second edition.  To see it being played at an event and even binge the biggest game there was nice because I’ve felt for the last few years that Kings of War is superior to Warhammer.

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Review: Frostgrave

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Overview

Frostgrave is a miniature wargame released by Osprey Publishing that hit stores in July 2015. It allows players to create a warband of up to ten models that will act as a motley crew exploring the ruins of the city of Felstad, known colloquially as Frostgrave. Immediately it creates an atmosphere suspiciously similar to that of Mordheim and it’s hard to not see that as an inspiration. The city was frozen in magical ice following some great magical disaster, but now it’s thawing out. Each player controls a wizard which he creates and outfits with spells. The wizard can (and usually does) take an apprentice and both of them, unlike the other minions in the warband, can gain experience from casting spells, recovering treasure and killing enemies. The game is by Joseph A. McCullough, a
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Concerning Judge Dredd

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I’ll admit now, I love 2000AD. I love the thinly veiled political satire, the weird fiction and the sci-fi. It’s nigh impossible to talk about 2000AD, one of the few things I think good enough for me to maintain an ongoing subscription to, without talking about Judge Dredd. I’ll start at the beginning for those of you who are unfamiliar with the character. Dredd is not a superhero. A few people I’ve mentioned him to have had this misconception so I’ll deal with it first. He simply isn’t when the world he lives in is taken into context. The world of Judge Dredd is a post-nuclear dystopia in which the remains of humanity have

Call-Me-Kenneth goes rogue

gathered themselves into huge metropolitan centres, thousands of miles large known as Mega Cities. Mega City One is Judge Dredd’s home. To keep law and order in the big Megs humanity has more or less signed itself over to an unquestionable, indisputable police state. This authority takes its form as the Justice Department, and it’s judges. Judges are people that have been trained from childhood to enforce the law and are able to act as judge jury and, if necessary, executioner. They are armed with the Continue reading “Concerning Judge Dredd” →