Gaming mats

One of the first things that I will need to do when we finally get into the new house is get a gaming mat from somewhere so that I've actually got a starting point to a table. Obviously I can't really plan properly for this yet as we don't have a moving date... but it gives me something to plan for.

GW used to sell quite a nice flock mat for quite a reasonable price, but that seems to have vanished in favour of their plastic modular board of skulls, which is a shame because I really don't like playing on plastic boards as the dice tend to go skidding all over the place.

So. With the GW mat out the window, I need to try and find some other options that will be easy to add home made terrain to without looking odd. This rules out the Zuzzy grassland mat as there's no way I'm going to sculpt grass on, when flock exists.

Most of the other flock mats that I've seen reviewed seem to flake off quite quickly as they are intended to be used for displays, rather than repeatedly rolling it up. Antinocti's mats seem to have vanished, which is a shame as they looked very promising, if a little dull with just the one colour all over.

The best option that I've come across so far is Sir Tobi's mat tutorial as it's straight forward (if you remember to securely fasten the canvas first!) and produces great looking mats that can be rolled up and hidden away. Given that I'm looking to play small skirmish games that only go up to 4x4, a roll of decent canvas should allow for loads of experimentation. This does, however, rely upon time, effort and me getting the heck over the "but what if I want that road there instead"

Out of curiosity, what do you lot use as gaming mats and do you find it is better to leave things like roads and rivers off the mats? My one concern about using Tobi's idea is that my brain is geared towards modularity in everything... this is the joy of being a CMS developer. You start to think everything should be reusable in different combinations.

The hobby

Reading through numerous hobby related Blogger sites over the last few days has raised some interesting questions and inspiration in terms of blogs and the hobby community in general. The reason I've been writing the occasional post on here is so that I have somewhere to dump my thoughts and photos, so it's nice to see how other people are using theirs to benefit others. Andrew Saunders has an interesting article about setting up a community skills exchange that, when I've moved house, I may well add on here. As I mentioned in his comments section (and on here a few days ago) Dakka had some great swap threads that did an excellent job of building a friendly group of individuals that encouraged each other to finish the swap projects and improve their skills as time went on . It'd be great to get a 7TV swap group going as the system lends itself really well to one off models, plus I'm always open to painting new things that I don't have to keep afterwards ;)

Speaking of which, I ended up volunteering to paint a squad for the Bloggers for Charity project as it gives me the chance to have a go at some historicals as well as contributing towards a good cause. Some of the new greens showing up on their blog look like they will be really nice to paint, so I'll be very interested indeed to see what turns up. Hopefully they will arrive *after* our house has gone on the market so I'm not spending every waking moment packing, cleaning or decorating. The paints are in a cupboard, but still within reach.

The other thing that Andrew has is a log of what he's painted this year. I really need to start something like that to try and shame me into painting more as I've been very lax this year.

Something a little different

Some of our friends are heavily involved with the local theatre (Progress Theatre) and when they said they were thinking of doing Neil Gaiman's Neverwhere as a stage production, we couldn't help but leap at the chance to help out. I was mostly on photography and Tumblr duties, while my other half made a lot of the costumes, including all of Hunter's garb.

One of the props she made were some fimo crow skulls to turn into rings for Mr Vandemar (seen in action to the left), which I them painted up in a slightly exaggerated style so that it was more bone-like from the audience.

Vikings for 7th Voyage?

I've been watching the History Channel series Vikings this week and I've now got this real urge to make a 7th Voyage cast as the system should work perfectly well without all the myth and magic.

The issue I've currently got is finding some suitably vicious looking Viking models that also include some shield maidens that don't look like they have walked out of a strip club. I thought this would have been fairly straight forward... but apparently not. Saga Tapestry has a great article on sourcing models for the Saga games system, but pretty much all of the viking models are wearing chainmail which, as you can see from the picture above, the crew aren't wearing. At all.

The only company that I can find so far that does a fully clothed shield maiden is Red Box Games with Ylvfriodr of Ulfrstadt. While it's a really nice model, but like most of the currently available viking models that I can find, she's wearing too much mail armour. I also suspect from the base size that she is going to be taller than a lot of other historicals. Looks like there won't be a Lagertha to join Ragnar just yet.

If anyone can suggest a range of models, preferably plastics, that would work nicely for this type of viking raider... please shout!

Historical gaming

I've never played any historical tabletop games before, I've always been a GW player/painter, but over the last year my eyes have opened up to all the other options out there that don't seem to want to abuse their customer base with yearly price hikes and silly looking new kits. 7TV seems to scratch that itch, but it's been interesting reading something like Wargames Illustrated that caters for so many different systems that I'd love to give something like Saga or Hail Caesar a go. One day I must go and investigate some of the other gaming clubs around here and see if someone can run me a demo. Anyway, I seem to have wandered from why I started this post. While reading some forums on historicals, I came across a group of guys who are planning on having a large charity game at Triples 2014, Bloggers for Charity. These guys intend to try to recreate the Battle of La Belle-Famille, a large battle from the French and Indian War in 1759. I don't know much about the period, but it's very tempting to offer some painting services as I'm unlikely to ever buy that time period myself and it's always nice to mix things up every now and then with a challenge or two.

Cthulhu Wars

What is it with Kickstarter at the moment? There seem to be far too many neat games that have either just finished, are in progress or are due in the next month or two :/

Not only do we have the Call of Cthulhu RPG that I mentioned in a previous post, but there's a neat looking board game called Cthulhu Wars on at the moment too. The miniatures are apparently sculpted at 28mm scale, which is perfect for 7TV horror games as well as Modiphius' One War game and the Achtung! Cthulhu and Call of Cthulhu RPG systems! If only I wasn't about to move house I'd be all over this one...

Call of Cthulhu 7th Edition RPG on Kickstarter

Wow, it's all go on Kickstarter this year... we had the WW2 Cthulhu expansion, Achtung Cthulhu! earlier in the year; now it seems it's the turn of Chaosium to release the next edition of Call of Cthulhu through Kickstarter. At $30 for the Keeper's Guide and Player's Guide in PDF format it's a no brainer really. It's not been up long and they have already broken through loads of stretch goals, including 6 free adventures and extra artwork. Most of the goals so far affect the printed editions more than the PDF levels, but that's fine... they are paying a lot more than I am. Still, we have 21 days left to go, so there will probably be lots more goals broken and more tempting goodies added to the extras.

This will be a nice accompaniment to the Modiphius books and should spawn some extra ideas for A!C games when we get there

Reshuffle time!

I've been rather lax with updates recently for one reason and another, so it's probably time to make things a little bit more generic and cover the other game related bits that I ponder from time to time as well as getting photos of stuff I've painted in one place. Having just said that, things will be returning to writing for a while as we're moving house and all the gaming stuff is going into storage, darnitt!

As part of this update, I've restructured some of the categories to allow more coverage. Tags, as usual, will remain purely for the RPG Plot hooks until someone can tell me how to have two tag clouds.

I never did finish the Hero Lab files for the Achtung Cthulhu books. The data files are complete for the first one, Three Kings, but there are some issues getting the Mythos powers working properly for the second; mostly because there's no clear definition on how these should be handled. The introduction says to use the rules from Realms of Cthulhu, but then misses out things like the stats necessary to use the RoC insanity and magic rules properly. I should probably just email Modiphius for some clarification; I need to go back and refresh my memory on what the exact issues were. There also seems to be a limitation in how the overall Savage Worlds data file has been set up by the Hero Lab team too. It's really flexible in some places, but stricter than the Nun in the Blues Brothers for other things.

 

Awwww... slippages!

I was doing so well with this blog too, but I've missed almost a week now. I should probably try to fix that one tonight or tomorrow as I'm away for a week and probably won't get the chance to update anything.

Yesterday we went to the largest UK games show, Salute, to see what goodies we could pick up. After a long queue we made it in and proceeded to the 7TV demo tables. This is a system I played for the first time last year at Salute and wanted to introduce the others to; I love the combination of humour with a system generic enough to do anything with. The premise is simple enough... 7TV allows you to recreate all those cult tv shows from your childhood... Dr Who, Blake's 7, Captain Scarlett... you name it, it's possible. I wanted to see what everyone thought of it as there are all those neat new mythos creatures coming from Modiphius this year that will make awesome minions for a 7TV game or twleve. Thankfully everyone loved it, so we had to go on a terrain shopping spree as that's the one thing we're short of.

We were quite impressed with the wide selection of companies now offering laser cut board buildings. Most were too sci-fi for a WW2 game, but 4Ground managed to sort us out. Their World At War range has an excellent selection of houses, both complete and ruined, that will make the start of our collection. There will probably be a few posts showing the construction of mine when I get back from Mexico; though the models are going to have to be aired somewhere as they stink of burnt wood.

The thing that won us over with the 4Ground models were that what you see to the left is actually pre-painted. The kit comes with a number of laser cut sheets of wood, each one is painted before being laser cut, , which gives it a slightly damages, worn look to the paint. You just pop the bits out and glue them together with pva and you're done.

For a damaged house it's a bit on the clean side though, so I do suspect I'll be weathering mine at some point.

An Arcane whatnow?

Over the last few days I've been playing around with Hero Lab a bit more, trying to squeeze in the last few elements of the first Achtung! Cthulhu book, Three Kings. It's been a bit nightmarish as some elements on characters do not conform to the Savage Worlds standards, for example Mythos spells.

In Savage Worlds you need to have an Arcane Background in order to cast spells... in Achtung! Cthulhu and Realms of Cthulhu you don't; spells are cast using your Knowledge (Mythos) and have modifiers to the roll instead of power points. The way the Savage Worlds data file has been written doesn't allow you to bypass this in any way, which is awkward.

I'd love to be able to create a proper Mythos Arcane background that doesn't actually do anything other than allowing new spells to be assigned, but this causes problems with the validation as you're only ever allowed 1 Arcane Background in Savage Worlds. In most A!C games that probably won't be an issue, but if someone actually needs to use one of the other Backgrounds for anything, such as Weird powers or Superpowers for the Godlike crossover we'll be in trouble.

The Go To workaround for anything that adjusts a character post-creation seems to be to create things as Hindrances as these can be added at any time and do not require any advances. There's something about this method that really bugs me... If anyone can work out a better solution I'd love to know!

 

Hero Lab night three

Big thanks to TatteredKing on the WolfLair forums for sending me his work on the Realms of Cthulhu Hero Lab files, it's been really useful to see what he's been doing and check if I'm doing things right.... Judging from the various datafiles that I've had a poke through so far, there really is no way to create new equipment titles. That makes me much happier with the progress on the A!C file so far. The only thing left to do is clean up the equipment list a bit as the Three Kings adventure book doesn't contain loads of the equipment information, like ammo types, weight and costs. Ammo is easy enough to fix with this here interwebz and we can mark the cost for everything as Military to get around that one... this leaves weight. I'll probably best guess this one and then check with Modiphius to see if they have any better ideas.

Thinking about some other equipment limitations that I could put in place.

1) Adding equipment sources for Allied and German would allow us to filter out German weapons when creating an allied character (and the other way around)

2) Trying to ad an option in that hides more modern equipment...  I just need to work out if I can hide anything that is Modern, but not in one of the Achtung Cthulhu sources... that should be possible as I've seen lines of code to hide skills and spells.

The most recent thing I've learned tonight is that if you hand code the data file, you can add comments in. If you use the built in editor it strips them all out again.... *Grrrrr*

While I was fiddling around with scripts, I added one item from Heroes of the Sea. In here, it adds the free skill Dreaming to everyone's character. For now I've set this up as a global bootstrap (add-on) so that every Achtung! Cthulhu character gets Dreaming at d4 for free if they have the Heroes of the Sea book selected as a valid source. If it becomes a global skill for all A!C books, or at least for some, I can add more usersources, or change it to the global Achtung! Cthulhu grouping so that any book allows it.

To add the skill for free, first we need to create our new skill, either through the admin interface, or in the .user file.

   <thing id="skACDream" name="Dreaming" description=" Brief description..." compset="Skill">
    <usesource source="ACHotS"/>
    <link linkage="attribute" thing="attrSpi"/>
    </thing>

We need to give it a unique ID, as usual, along with the name and description. Simple enough so far. The compset defines this as a skill and with the <link linkage... /> item we're assigning this to Spirit for now. The adventure doesn't specify, but the editor seems to want it linked to an attribute and Spirit seemed to make most sense. This one needs double checking with Modiphius at some point.

Ok, so now anyone can pick the skill, but we want everyone to get it for free. As far as I can work out (and someone please correct me if I'm wrong) I need to create a setting adjustment

    <evalrule phase="Initialize" message="Free Dreamer skill"><![CDATA[
if (hero.tagis[source.ACHotS] <> 0) then
perform #resspent[resSkill,-,1,"Free Dreamer"]
endif]]>
</evalrule>

In this setting adjustment we're adding a bootstrap line of skACDream, which is out Dreamer skill (skACDream) we created earlier. This will only apply to the character if we're in the Heroes of the Sea setting as the skill only exists here.  The evaluation rule then checks to see if we're using the Heroes of the Sea options. If we are, we reduce the  spent skill points by 1 to counteract us having just added a skill to the character upon creation. *TaDa!* Free skill only for someone using the source ACHotS.

Hero Lab - Sanity

As I mentioned yesterday, I've got Sanity working in my data files now too, thanks to the Tour of Darkness data files!

I know that, technically, I could have left the Sanity field to Hero Lab to deal with it, but that assumes the Horror Companion license is enabled and I wasn't happy assuming that everyone playing Achtung! Cthulhu was going to shell out the additional license costs... I'd like this one to run on the base Savage Worlds install and assume complete ignorance of everything else.

Sanity is calculated from a base value of 2, plus half of your Spirit.

First thing I had to do was add a Sanity thing to the data file. In the editor, these can be added under the Derived Trait tab. When writing the evaluation script we need to be aware that the dice values for the user's attributes are stored as half of the dice value, so d4 = 2, d6 = 3 etc. which gives us a range of 2-6. This also means we don't need to go dividing the dice value of Spirit when calculating Sanity, we can simply add it directly to the initial value of 2.

  <thing id="trACSanity" name="Sanity" description="Those who face the twisted horrors of the Mythos tend not to remain sane for very long. The Sanity statistic is a trait that lets you monitor your character&#146;s mental health. " compset="Trait" uniqueness="unique">
    <fieldval field="trtAbbrev" value="San"/>
    <fieldval field="trtBonus" value="2"/>
    <usesource source="sepActCth"/>
    <tag group="DashTacCon" tag="Basics" name="Basics" abbrev="Basics"/>
    <tag group="DashTacCon" tag="Traits" name="Traits" abbrev="Traits"/>
    <tag group="explicit" tag="3"/>
    <eval phase="Traits" priority="4000" name="Calc Derived Bonus"><![CDATA[
      ~Note: We must also handle an overage beyond d12 on a +1 per 2 full points basis.
      ~Note: We ADD the amount in case other effects have already applied adjustments.
      var bonus as number
      bonus = #trait[attrSpi]
      if (bonus >= 6) then
        bonus = 6 + round(hero.child[attrSpi].field[trtRoll].value / 2,0,-1)
        endif
      perform field[trtBonus].modify[+,bonus,"Half Spirit"]]]>
      <before name="Derived trtFinal"/>
      <after name="Calc trtFinal"/>
      </eval>
    </thing>

In the evaluation script we can see that we're looking at the attribute Spirit and assigning it to the bonus variable. If this value is 6 or more, i.e. we have a skill that improves our chances with additions to our Spirit rolls, then we need to work out what that new value of bonus would be. In order to work out the new value of bonus we need to divide the roll bonus by 2, rounding down and ignoring any decimal places and then add this to the new value of Bonus.

If the value of Bonus is less than 6, then we directly add the value of bonus to the field trtBonus. Tada! There's our rather faff worthy Sanity bonus. I wouldn't have thought of skills affecting the value enough to take it over D12... so thanks to the ToD team!

Now I've got to allow people to lose sanity points, otherwise we've no way of tracking these things.  I know Realms of Cthulhu have added another field in to track this and we may need to switch over to it later, but the A!C pre-gens don't have this listed... so I'm assuming they use a different method of tracking insanity. I'm sure there are other ways to do this, but I figure losing sanity is as close to an injury as you're going to get, so why not track it in the same manner?

Three Kings has one of the characters afflicted with a Special Ability called Fragile Mind, so this was my first injury.
  <thing id="injACFMind" name="Fragile Mind" description="The investigator has had a close brush with the Mythos and has suffered a -2 Sanity" compset="Injury">
    <usesource source="sepActCth"/>
    <eval phase="PreTraits" priority="5000"><![CDATA[perform #traitadjust[trACSanity,-,2,"Fragile Mind"]]]>
      <before name="Calc trtFinal"/>
      </eval>
    </thing>



In here you can see that when the injury is added, it modifies our Sanity trait trACSanity, reducing it by 2. When we remove the injury, their sanity levels return to normal.

I'm sure in future books there will be more sanity calculations, but for now we'll stick at this.

Hero lab - New TimePeriods

The more I look through the data files, the more I find I don't know about Hero Lab... Tonight I managed to workout a few kinks in the Three Kings dataset, so it now has the equipment added to a WW2 filter so you can hide Modern equipment and just see the WW2 items if you really want to, it's own Sanity value so you're not reliant upon the Horror expansion and some injuries that reduce sanity.

Adding the new time periods turns out to be pretty easy, just not all that clearly detailed as far as I can see...

In your .1st file add the following block of code and update the id, name and description fields. This will add another check box onto the Character Configuration screen allowing you to choose which time periods you want to enable for your game.

<source
  id="ACTimeWW2"
  name="WW2"
  parent="TimePeriod"
  sortorder="2"
  default="yes"
  description="Enables the availability of equipment from the WW2 time period">
  </source>

You can see from the parent field that we're extending the existing Savage Worlds setting TimePeriod source. The sort order of 2 puts it in the second position, equal to Black Powder weapons. Thankfully, alphabetical sorting kicks in after that and places WW2 below Black Powder so that it appears to be in the 3rd position, just before Modern. We've now got a filter that we can drop our equipment into...

As we want our new pieces of equipment to still be in use for Modern settings (and I've not worked out how to add new titles into the equipment lists yet) we're going to add our new equipment into the existing Equipment and Weapon categories, but in the XML view we're going to add an additional line to say that this needs our new ACTimeWW2 source. Here's an example of a new pistol from Three Kings as an example:

  <thing id="wpM1911" name="Browning M1911" compset="Ranged">
    <fieldval field="wpDamage" value="2d6+1"/>
    <fieldval field="wpShort" value="12"/>
    <fieldval field="wpMedium" value="24"/>
    <fieldval field="wpLong" value="48"/>
    <fieldval field="wpShots" value="7"/>
    <fieldval field="wpPiercing" value="1"/>
    <usesource source="ACTKing"/>
    <usesource source="ACTimeWW2"/>    
    <tag group="Weapon" tag="SemiAuto"/>
    <tag group="WeaponType" tag="ModPistol"/>
    </thing>

By adding a usesource of ACTimeWW2 we're (as far as I can work out) saying that as long as we are allowing the use of ACTimeWW2 in the Equipment timezones, this will show up. My current issue is that if I hide the WW2 period, it doesn't vanish, but if I hide the Modern period it is all that remains... so it's sort-of working. If I remove or replace the WeaponType group, it responds properly, but then isn't grouped by anything. Creating new weapon groups in the admin console doesn't appear to work as expected and the Hero Lab forums seem to suggest you need to hijack one of the existing items and replace the title, which seems a bit daft! I need to come back to this one again before I move onto the next Achtung! Cthulhu book.

I'll detail Sanity tomorrow as it's past my bedtime...

 

Hero Lab - Getting started

In preparation for eventually getting our game going, I've been having a play with a character creation application from Lone Wolf called Hero Lab. It comes with the ability to plug in a number of different rpg systems with all the skills, equipment and attributes needed to create new characters quickly and easily. Savage Worlds is one of the officially supported systems and it seems to do a pretty good job so far. The one limitation I've currently got with it is the selection of equipment isn't relevant for the time period... it's either got medieval weaponry for fantasy games, or modern day/futuristic weapons. None of those are particularly useful when you need to equip a British Commando behind German lines... much as my player would love to be toting miniguns and plasma guns. If they can stick with it until the Dust book arrives they may get a nice surprise!

Tonight I wanted to see how simple it is to add in new pieces of equipment from Modiphius' Three Kings campaign book. The answer? Pretty damn simple so far. I've not had to venture into anything that adjusts statistics yet though, so we'll see how that all pans out next September when the Achtung! Cthulhu core books start turning up. Tomorrow I'm going to have a go at adding in everything from the Heroes of the Sea book so we've got everything in once place.

After that I want to try recreating a few of the pre-gen characters to make sure everything is working properly so I can balance any new characters I create for them. It'll also help if the villains escape and come back as recurring characters as I can level them up at the same time. It'd certainly be interesting to see Herr Doktor Kammerstein escape and continue his experiments on a grander scale somewhere else...

Before you ask, I'm not distributing these files unless Modiphius says it's ok. There will be a separate post if that happens.

Foyle's War - The Cage

Happy Easter! Tonight's episode of Foyle's War sparked a few interesting ideas for plot hooks and has made me want to go back and rewatch everything else to see what other gems I can pick up and convert.

I am of course, assuming you all know who/what Foyle's War is? For those of you that don't, it's a British detective series set during WW2 along the south coast of Britain. The plots, up to the end of the last series (7), dealt with the war on the home front including murder and espionage. We also get a good look into what's going on in Britain during the war and how it affects the general populace.  Series 8, which started last week, is set after the end of the war and sees Foyle joining MI5 and is starting to expose some of the British Intelligence activities in the months after V-day.

While I'm sure there are factual errors in it, for a Cthulhu game we're hardly looking for historically accurate; close enough will do. Even timescales don't really matter as things can be twisted to suit our events.

A good example of this is, returning to my original point, tonight's episode. I don't really need to go into what is actually happening, or who-dunnit; just a brief synopsis of the episode gets various ideas popping in my head for what this base could really be and how to integrate it with missions earlier in the war.

Defected Russian spies start turning up dead and another Russian turns up at a country hospital all bloody; promptly dying just after giving the local doctor a garbled word/phrase. Shortly after that the Doctor turns up dead as well and all trails seem to lead back to a local military base  that is, on the surface, an installation for recording Russian radio communications. Unfortunately the investigators aren't allowed access to the base...

So, what do you think your investigators are going to find in this mysterious military base that even they can't get into?

 

The Eagle landed at Mapledurham

While loads of other people went off to spend the day celebrating International Tabletop Games Day, we went off to Mapledurham House for a WW2 reenactment day to watch people virtually massacre each other in real life instead. Before you ask, no... that's not me. Mapledurham is where they filmed The Eagle Has Landed, so today we've got a film based plot hook.

Oberst Steiner, a German parachute unit commander, is sent to England on a covert mission to kidnap Prime Minister Winston Churchill and bring him to Berlin. The seemingly impossible assignment becomes more and more feasible as the mission grows nearer with Steiner and his men arriving in England to a very real possibility of success. - The Eagle has landed

The book and film are told from the German perspective, but we can twist it enough to make an interesting sub-mission for a group of allied investigators, simply by telling it from the other side.

The story takes place in a small village with the Germans trying to kidnap Churchill, who is supposed to be on holiday there. What if Churchill was actually there to attend a meeting with the investigators to discuss whatever mission they are about to go on?

The simple option is to throw this in as a quick, one shot as the investigators try to prevent Churchill's abduction. If you want to add a mythos twist to it, or start a bigger investigation...

What if, just like the film, one of the German agent falls into the watermill and gets revealed. But... rather than just being a German infiltrator, he's revealed to be something more, something darker... It seems that the Germans are experimenting with merging man and beast.

Whether this overrides your current mission, or sends another team off chasing mysterious monster factories is up to you.

 

 

It's getting Dust-y

We're in the last few days of the Achtung! Cthulhu kickstarter and a neat new book has just been announced... a 60 page crossover with Paolo Parente's Dust universe. I'm a massive fan of Paolo's world (as the pile of unpainted miniatures can attest to) and was planning on trying to convert the Dust units and walkers over to Savage Worlds anyway, so this is perfect!

Given the size of the supplement it won't have everything in, but it's a good starting point and will probably be one of the first books I jump into when the files arrive!

Lost the plot already...

Darnit. I was aiming to start introducing my players to Modiphius' Achtung ! Cthulhu setting this week. As usual, work managed to get in the way of everything and I didn't have time to finish reading the Savage Worlds book, or create the starting characters for them. On the plus side, I've got a business trip to Mexico coming up soon, so that will give me plenty of time away from distractions to create some characters and finish reading up on what I'm supposed to be doing as a GM!

In the mean time, you'll have noticed I've started mapping out some plot hooks based upon mythos tales and real world disasters from the late 1930s onwards. The aim is to build up a nice big pool of plot hooks that I can pick and choose from as my players start exploring the world. When I use a plot hook, I can then convert that into a full blown post on how we used the hook and what the outcome is for "our" world.

That's the plan anyway...

I will probably need the occasional poke as I do tend to procrastinate somewhat!

Hello world! Goodbye World!

We have a weekly game night that comprises of three adults (apparently) and one teenager (just about) with a slightly unhealthy obsession with zombie and cthulhu related games... to date we've been sticking to quick, out of the box games like Fluxx, Zombies!!! and Munchkin. Recently D asked what a proper roleplaying game was like... he's been playing Skyrim a lot and had heard us talking about the various exploits we've had in rpgs in the past, so we've decided to give it a go.

While looking around for a system to start with, I came across the awesome looking Achtung! Cthulhu kickstarter from Modiphius and their existing line of products on RPGNow. What could be better than Cthulhu investigations in WW2? The stretch goals that have been hit so far are making this one a no-brainer to follow, plus there is a range of miniatures coming to accompany the campaign, which appeals to the painter in me too.

Given that the Kickstarter books aren't due until September time, we'll be starting with the Three Kings book and moving onto the second part of the Zero Point campaign using the Savage Worlds system as it seems to have a lot of scope and support for more widespread horror elements, not just Cthulhu.

I suspect with me in charge it's going to start going a bit Hellboy/Dust Warfare with weird tech and nazi cults appearing all over the place, so I thought it might be fun to start tracking what we do and how our exploits into a mythos infused 1940s proceed...