Assault on Complex Alpha

It's a bank holiday, Claire is hiding under a duvet, ill, and I have a clear dining table. What could be a better opportunity to give Strange Aeons it's first spin? As I'm still terrain-less I decided to give the Achtung! Cthulhu tiles a spin instead.

The mission...
 For a while there have been strange rumours floating around of a Russian complex, codenamed Альфа, or Alpha.What is happening in here is anyone's guess, but locals and prisoners of war have been seen going in, but never coming out. The Russians may currently be allies, but our mystics tell us that there is definitely something powerful happening within the underground bunker and it cannot be good for anyone. Captain Harris and his small team have been dropped up the coastline a bit and are tasked with getting into the complex and stopping whatever is happening in there.

In order to get some equipment for my commandos I had to go up to 16 points, which still ony gives me three soldiers to send on their daring raid...

Additional mission rules:
Guard patrol. Guards on patrol do not get to be moved via any specific orders, but will remain on watch throughout their turn. IF they are alerted to the enemy's presence they will open fire and raise the alarm. Each turn, roll a scatter dice to determine their facing. Each turn the guards may attempt to notice a sneaking enemy by rolling above the distance to the enemy on a D6 if they are within their side arcs; if in the rear arc there is a -1 penalty to the check. IF they are facing an enemy who is either in the open, or less than 10" away, they will automatically spot them.

Sneaking. Threshold team members may attempt to sneak. By sneaking they halve their movement rate, but gain +2 to distance checks to be discovered (e.g. if they are 2" from a guard, they would count as 4" away; 3" = 5" etc. If they manage to make base contact with a guard undetected then they cound as charging and gain a bonus of +1CC for the first round. IF this succeeds, the enemy doesn't get to fight back this turn as they have been surprised. IF the attack fails, the defender has noticed them out of the corner of their eye and raises the alarm, releasing everyone from their Patrol state.


MI57 Forces:
Captain Harris (9 points)

Knife, .45 handgun, Thompson, Armoured vest

M	Dex	Con	A	W	Res	Skills
5/4	3+	6/7	3	2	3+	Command

Sergeant Jones (3 points)

Knife, .45 handgun, Bolt action rifle

M	Dex	Con	A	W	Res	Skills
5	4+	6	2	1	4+

Sergeant Smith (3 points)

Knife, .45 handgun, Bolt action rifle

M	Dex	Con	A	W	Res	Skills
5	5+	6	2	1	4+	Accurate

Lurker forces:
The Russian guard detail is led by Serzhánt Anatol (cult leader with Thompson) and 6 soldiers with bolt action rifles. They seriously outnumber the commandos (and slightly out-point them), but they are on guard duty so cannot move to attack yet.


Setting up.
Anatol starts in his command tent with two guards outside. One guard is on the boat, two guard the bunker entrance and one guards the weapon stores. The remaining two are asleep in the bunk house

Harris and his team manage to scale the side of the boat and now need to work out the best way of approaching the bunker...

In typical sneaky commando fashion, they opt to try and sneak along the side of the boat to take out the guard on watch from the raised deck. Smith decides to duck through the wheel house as the guard is looking int he wrong direction. He has to hope that the guard doesn't turn in the wrong direction and spot him... After some careful maneuvering, Smith managed to get behind the guard and successfully took him out without a sound. 1 Guard down.


One of the guards on Anatol's tent seemed to have some inbuilt compass as to where the team was on the ship as he was staring straight at them for quite a while. If it wasn't for the fact that they were sneaking and on the ship, they would have been scuppered. Quietly they dropped from the side of the ship as soon as his back was turned and prayed that he wouldn't turn back and spot them now they were in the open.

Luck was with them and they made it to behind the command tent without being detected. They still needed to sneak down here though as Anatol was asleep on just the other side of the thin canvas wall... just as they duck into cover behind the barrels next to the text, something must have awakened Anatol as he spotted them; maybe something brushed against the wall or a twig snapped... who knows, but he is now awake and aware that something is wrong. He rushes out of the tent and alerts his guards... the game is afoot!

With the alarm raised, the commandos opened fire on the guards by the bunker door. In their haste and darkness, failed to do anything.

The Russian guards rounded the edge of the tent and opened up on the commandos, taking Sergeant Jones out of the mission with a lucky burst from the thompson. The return fire from the remaining commandos took out two of the guards.

Ducking behind cover, Anatol opened fire again with his thompson and dropped Captain Harris, leaving  Smith all on his own ineffectively firing from behind a barrel. Unfortunately barrels aren't all that great at stopping automatic fire, so he wasn't too far behind Captain Harris in meeting his doom...

It looks like the Russians get to keep their secrets for another day and the valiant agents of MI57 slowly bleed out in the snow...
 

After game actions

Recorded MI57 Kills:
Harris: 2
Smith: 1

Captain Harris now has Teratophobia (fear of all Lurkers!)
Sergeant Smith makes a full recovery
Sergeant Jones is now Hemaphobic

This isnt going well for their first outing!

---

That was Really Tense^TM while the commandos were sneaking around... and then the firefight began and everyone died... very quickly! I suspect that I need to try that again with a monster or two instead of a mob of angry Russian guards

Realm Works... works?

For anyone reading today... have a happy easter! The one time of the year that I miss chocolate.

The public release of Lone Wolf's Realm Works software finally happened a couple of weeks ago. As a long time user of Hero Lab and Army Builder for manageing my 40k forces and rpg characters, I was interested to see how their new piece of kit works. I missed the kickstarter as, at the time, I wasn't planning on running my own world, but at some point this year I really will get around to starting that Achtung! Cthulhu game I've been muttering about. In preparation for this I thought I'd give it a go. Anyway...

In the past I've tried to use wikis, notebooks, dropbox and evernote to try and organise my thoughts and ideas for various worlds, but nothing has quite... clicked.

Realm Works takes the concept of a wiki and configures it for building scenarios, campaigns and worlds with specific templates and different relationships as well as normal linking and keywords.
Like any good wiki editor, content can be linked to other articles with links in the text. The benefit we have with Realm Works is that if the articles already exist, it will create those links for us automatically. For example, if in a description I said that "London is in the UK" and records exist with for London and UK, it automatically creates links form that text to the relevant pages. They are apparently working on a global update that will scan all articles  to refresh the data and create any new links that it needs.

In addition to links, we can associate items into groups, such as counties in a country, or people into organisations. It took a while to work that one out as I did the usual IT thing and didn't bother with the manual. A good system should be self explanitory and this one *mostly* works the way you would want it to. There are still some areas that I can't work out or could display more effectively, so I will eventually have to resort to the paperwork...

One of the main ideas, besides making it easier for a GM to construct a new adventure, is to eventually allow the players in a game to see any information about their gaming world that they should know. All data is, by default, marked as hidden, but the GM can slowly reveal parts of maps, character descriptions, plots...whatever they create really.

In order to do this successfully, the system syncs it's data to a central server on this here interwebz. It is possible to run Realm Works in offline mode once a realm has initially been created, but by doing so you're missing out on a lot of the purpose. Granted, you do need a subscription to use Cloud service after the first 6 months, but hey. It's not a lot and it is backing up all your hard work as well, so it seems worth it.

Cloud Sync will also eventually have a store to allow you to buy/sell/swap NPCs, plots, worlds and ideas to integrate into your campaigns. If this works, it's perfect for RPG companies to release new modules directly to the GM in a structured format, rather than as a book or pdf. I love the idea of being able to download a new adventure and pick/choose which elements I want to integrate.

First I need to work out the best way to organise my world. There seem to be two suggeste routes so far. Geographic or Character-centric. Given that  this is Cthulhu we're talking about here, character-centric seems rather short sighted. For Geographic, as this is based in the real world I need to weave in enough real data without flooding the thing with useless bits like ever county in the uk; especially if I'm planing on sending them globe-trotting... I'd end up having to fill in everything.


Time to start playing!

Walls take 2

After making the first part of a wall last week, I had a rather tragic accident. I tried to create a rubber mold so I could work on the other side of the brickwork.. which didn't go too well.

I'm not entirely sure what went wrong, but the rubber just didn't set properly and the air dry clay got damp in the prolonged exposure to the rubber and started to dissolve. I suspect leaving it overnight in the cold garage to set didn't help.

Still. It gave me pause for thought and I've made a new wall that looks better than the first one. This will be getting a coat of varnish to seal the clay before I attempt to create a mold for this one to avoid the same mistake again.

Design wise the pieces will (hopefully) interlock, meaning that I won't need as much footing as the GW walls. The brickwork should be about the same size as the Garden of Morr, so they shouldn't look out of place except the builder hasn't been using skulls in these walls.

Once I've actually got a decent mold for this, the next job will be to try and get the brickwork to line up neatly on the other side. For some reason the GW walls don't match up in any way, shape or form as you can see from one of my bits below

Twisted - a Steampunk adventure game

I've not seen too much about this yet, but at Salute last weekend a company called Demented Games were displaying some early prototypes of some models for their new game called Twisted. The game is set in a steampunk inspired London that is secretly controlled by the omnipresent machine called The Engine that aims to make society perfect; by any means necessary. The Engine controls cities through Nodes that are powerful artifacts in their own right, granting whoever controls them immense power. Queue fighting over the nodes with other gangs as well as against The Engine. Besides the steampunk contraptions, there are a number of alchemically enhanced beasts in the world as well as some sci-fi elements.

This game look ever so pretty with it's beautiful boards as you can see below.

The boards represent the sewers, catacombs and tunnels under London as well as various buildings within the city. The one pictured above is apparently one of the larger board pieces, so you can imagine how big a level could become. The game has been designed to do one off games (if you really want to), but they said that it is best suited for campaign play in a league, with the ability to level up and re-equip your party between games. From the descriptions it sounds like Mordheim on a board and should be pretty easy to modify to play on a 3d setup like the new 4Ground fantasy building that were being previewed at Salute too.

Last, but by absolutely no means least are the rather pretty models!

Bill Psykes

Bullseye

Feygin

This will be getting a September launch on Kickstarter, so there is plenty of time for more information to come out about it. There were flyers out at the event offering a bonus model (Bill Psykes) in the kickstarter if you sign up to their mailing list and enter the show name where you saw the game. Certainly worth doing as he is rather nice!

I can see this being rather easy to enhance with Malifaux and IHMN models too.

Raising the walls

One of the joys of Salute is the raised levels of inspiration afterwards. I've been meaning to carry on with the remaining walls from the Garden of Morr kit, but there are so many skulls embedded in them that it's frustrating and offputting.

It turns out that it's far easier to create a new wall from scratch instead.

I rolled out a piece of air dry clay so that it was about the same thickness of the GW walls and once dry, carved in some bricks about the same height on one side. This is currently sitting in some mold rubber so I can make a plaster version and continue with the opposite side. The clay was good for starting with, but was becoming too fragile to even attempt the other side. for now I've not made it a specific length so I have the ability to pick the neatest section to place between pillars and then top it.

So far I'm feeling rather pleased.
 

Salute 2014

My apologies, I was going to come and find you all to say hello at 12, but I was caught up in a 7th Voyage demo game and lost track of time! I couldn't let Sinbad get away with the treasure... unfortunately my vizier decided otherwise, feeling it was better run run away and try again another day instead. I really do need to get some terrain together and play more as the Crooked Dice systems are fantastic.

After a long wander around all the other stands, I ended up at the Gripping Beast stand  to have a look at Jugula, their new game of gladiatorial combat. One demo game later (and fastest kill of the day!) and I'm now the owner of 8 new gladiators and all the gubbins necessary to introduce some friends to the system as well. Rules wise it's very simple, but as with Saga, there's loads of strategy involved in how you use the resources you have.

The game could easily be played with any range of 28mm gladiators on the market, but, given the scope of the game, I'm really liking the larger multi-part figures they are releasing to go with it all.

.

There are 4 of the initial gladiator types out in the initial release, but the extra equipment pack allows you to create most of the others so it's worth picking up this or the Familia box set if you want some variation. As you can only have one of each gladiator type in your team, at £5.50 a gladiator you're not exactly going to break the bank with this one even if you buy the gaming mat (which is very very nice btw). I'm looking forward to painting these guys up. I just need to debase them first so I can attach them to clear bases as usual.

The only slightly dissapointing purchase of the day was a Vallejo Face Painting set. The paints are great, but the painting guide that came with it was... well. Awful would be the simplest way of putting it. Badly translated and lacking in any form of detail. Never mind. At least I've now got some nicer flesh tones than GW's offering.

Servants of Nyarlathotep

I can't believe I forgot to post these guys!

Infections and plagues spread across warzones. Most of the time they are entirely natural in origin, but occasionally it is something else entirely.  Nyarlathotep's servitor infection slowly twists the mind of the victims until they become cold and psychotic, devoid of all humanity. Eventually the Servitor reaches maturity and bursts forth from the body as a twisted conglomerate of claws and weeping wounds. The victim's head also becomes a giant fanged tentacle...

These servitors need to be directed by Overlords to keep them under control. The ranks of the Overlords are those individuals that evolved slightly differently to the Servitors; they retain eyes in their tentacled heads and humanoid hands able to use modern equipment. The Overlords can be seen directing hordes of Servitors across the battlefield

Cold Ones

 

Cold ones are semi-corporial shades composed of snow and ice; found only in areas of the bitterest cold these servitors stalk their prey by appearing near (or around) their chosen target and freeze them to death.

The models are from Modiphius' Acthung! Cthulhu range (again).

Experiments with snow pt1

After posting my challenge casualty the other day, I got some nice comments about the snow asking how I'd done it. It's been  a while since I've just sat down and had a play with different techniques, so here are some notes I made last year (fleshed out a bit). I'll do a part 2 sometime soon, onc eI've worked out how to take better photos of the snow!!

GW Snow effect

The GW winter effects pack looked fairly promising in the shop, but getting it home and trying to use it was... interesting. This stuff is, as far as I'm concerned, pretty naff if you want to create actual snow as it is basically white static grass. It can be useful for the odd bit of frost covered grass when applied over white glue or varnish; other than that... I wouldn't bother.

Interestingly (or not) their effects packs contain no instructions at all on how to use the stuff. I guess they just assume you'll use it in the same way as flock, but I ran some experiments with it anyway. I wanted to see  how this GW snow reacts with different mediums; in this case, white glue (WG), MIG acrylic resin (R) and GW 'Ardcote gloss varnish (V). The image is a little tricky to see some of the differences; zooming in does help a bit.



Going left to right we've got each medium either mixed (+), or used to stick the flock on (-> ). For example top left is a mixture of the Vallejo resin and the snow flock (R+F) and bottom left is a layer of resin painted onto the base, with some flock over the top (R->F).

As you can see, in all the cases where the flock is laid over the top of the sticky medium it's fairly transparent so you can see a difference between the colours underneath. Whichever medium is chosen, you get light, fluffy looking effect that looks fresh, but thin. If you're doing this, white glue is probably your best (and cheapest) bet. For deeper snow you could try painting the surface with a very very pale blue first to give it a deeper, colder feel.

Mixing the flock with the different mediums is where we start to get some more interesting effects. In each case I've not been overly careful on quantities, but I did learn that mixing a small batch and applying it, then mixing a little bit more works better than trying to do a larger batch in one go as it tends to become clumpy.

Gloss varnish and the resin seem to give very similar effects; I would imagine water effect would also give the same look. In each case, the snow is quite thick, but slightly shiny, as if it's slowly melting in the sun, or under foot. Mixing the snow effect with the pva glue gives a very matt, almost paper-ish looking snow, which is good for very dense, compacted snow, or using as a base for another snow effect.

In future articles I'll be covering some other effects, including crushed glass and baking soda

Cultists of the Old Gods

The next batch of Achtung! Cthulhu models to get completed are the cultists of the Old Gods