A Tale Of Two Tortles: Game 1

 OK, so I played the first game of my new Five Leagues From The Borderlands campaign last night.

Our Heroes started out doing a Ride Patrol that ended in a Meeting Engagement with Northern Wolves that had entered the ruined city of Armskirk. Three of them, to be precise, as well as an Unknown Enemy that might represent from one to five of the foul beasts. We will find out later. The forces deployed 16" apart from each other, or 4" in from each table edge. And the Unknown Enemy marker (a black hound) was 2" in from the side.

The first turn pretty much everyone moved closer. Drustan moved to the second floor of a ruined building, because if you have a ruined building with intact stairs as a part of your scenery, you need to dash someone up those stairs. It's one of the unwritten rules, you see. Tundaline did not move, but instead fired her crossbow at the one wolf she could see. She missed.

The second turn had much more action. Both Drustan and Tundaline took shots at the oncoming wolves to no effect; when the Unknown Enemy marker was close enough, it was revelaed to be FOUR more Northern Wolves! Weppi charged in and felled a wolf. When Kipor did the same, the wolf got the better of him and he was down! Alaric the Wily Rogue moved to attack a wolf but failed to hurt it... Isabeau the Street urchin followed him and handily dispatched the pesky creature.

Turn three saw a bit of a decline for Our Heroes. Weppi felled a wolf only to be felled herself by another. Isabeau went down to claws and fangs as well. Alaric promptly killed the same wolf that took down Isabeau. Drustan and Tundaline had another round of ineffective firing. Three wolves and three of the warband remaining, it was a close skirmish so far.

On turn four, both Drustan and Tundaline were successful in shooting at the wolves, killing off two of them with a little help from a Story Point well spent at the right time. The remaining wolf, however, lunged at Alric and brought him down.

Finally, Tundaline took a good shot and killed the remaining wolf at the beginning of the fifth turn. Our Heroes had Held the Field!

In the aftermath, Weppi was found to have some damaged armor. She might have died if not for the timely application of Silverweed Leaf! Kipor too may have succumbed to his wounds but for the Silverweed, and will need to spend a campaign turn recovering from his injuries. Alaric, as it happened, was just Knocked Out and had no lasting injuries. Unfortunately, Isabeau did not survive her injuries; the Street Urchin was dead.

Investigating the immediate area of the battle, the standing Heroes found a jar of spices worth three gold, a lead to a new location, and discovered some news of monsters moving into a nearby ruin.

The warband made it's way back to Mirefield to lick their wounds and recover a bit before venturing back into Armskirk.

A Tale Of Two Tortles

 Let's meet the warband! I am done painting up all of the characters for my "Five Leagues From The Borderlands" solo campaign.

This is "A Tale Of Two Tortles," and features the adventures of a brother and sister as well as their friends and assorted hangers-on. They will be exploring the recently ruined city of Armskirk and fighting against assorted cultists and bandits (The Ruin Within,) Goblin raiders (Duskling Warbands,) and rat-men from under the foundations of the city itself (The Gnawling Horde.) They have travelled to the city and safely boarded in the not-quite-so-ruined neighborhood of Mirefield. Along the way they made a friend of Roysa, a young herder.

Meet Weppi. She is the brains of the whole operation, and my campaign Avatar.

This is Kipor. He is Weppi's brother and second in command.

Tundaline is a friend of the two Tortles from way back when she first came up to the surface world.

Drustan just started hanging out with the previous three adventurers and eventually became another friend.

Isabeau the Street Urchin and Alaric the Wily Rogue, more mouths to feed.

Wayside Shrine

Another day, another papercraft scenic item. This time is the Wayside Shrine from Papierschitzel with a couple of 28mm foot knights for scale. The roof was fairly complicated and I didn't get it together perfectly. I mounted the whole thing on a metal washer to keep it steady on the table. I've got two views of it, front and back.

Van To The Future

OK, so I built the "Van To The Future" papercraft model available at http://nrwstr.com/3d-van-to-the-future I scaled it at 55%, which brought it to 1:56 scale. I had multiple build problems with it, mostly with dark colors bleeding over the cut and score lines, which made accurate cutting and scoring difficult. The wheel assemblies were unevenly sized and caused the sides to warp a bit. I glued the finished model on to a base to partly fix the warpage and give it a bit of height next to a 28mm model. This is not my best assembly job, but is good enough to be some background scenery in a Cyberpunk game.

Cannon Fodder Females From Wargames Atlantic

 OK, so life went sideways for a couple of months. I've been working on a little of that, a little bit of the other thing... but nothing has really been particularly finished.

Anyways, I have completed the first five of my "Cannon Fodder Females" from Wargames Atlantic. They are reasonable kits, I found it difficult to figure out which right and left arms pair up but otherwise they assemble smoothly. I tried attaching the backpacks directly to the square nub on the back, but found it looked better to remove the nub. They paint up quickly, there is not mounds of annoying or distracting detail such as is found on GW kits. Speaking of GW, I have included an Adeptus Sororitas model in the third picture strictly for review purposes. As you can see, the Cannon Fodder match up pretty well in size.

I will be using the entire box (24 models) for Xenos Rampant, and the five depicted here for 5150 Star Army, Galactic Heroes, Kill Sample Process, and whatever other sci-fi skirmish game I manage to get myself involved with.

Cannon Fodder Females and many other plastic kits may be purchased directly from Wargames Atlantic

The Last War Campaign Begins...

 OK, so today I hosted my good friend Kurt for another game of "Forbidden Psalm: The Last War." Since the last time we played we were still mostly learning the rules, we considered that just a playtest game. But this time we decided to play "for real" and kick off a bit of a campaign. And with the experience of our last game under our collective belts, we both created our Scavenger Crews with the aim of surviving through several games instead of just one.

The Crew: Gunther, Glut, Klink, Ludwig, Fritz

The start of the game from my point of view

My Crew (named Kruger's Crooks during the course of the game) consisted of five members. First off, I chose a Specialist; I made her a Witch because it seemed really cool that I can have a bit of a spellcaster in a WWI-themed skirmish game. Then came Klink armed with a pistol, and Fritz who also had a pistol, Gunther with his one grenade, and Ludwig with only a bayonet. Everyone had bayonets! I had a little confusion about how some of the equipment worked, and when I had Kurt proofread my roster he spotted a few errors but we got them all figured out before the game.

The end of the first Turn

Klink and Ludwig attack the Loyalist

We replayed the same scenario we did last time, as it seemed a good idea now that we had purpose-built Crews and knew the rules a bit. Which means we were not only facing each other, but also five enemy Loyalists, poor souls not realizing the war was over and still guarding their supply crates. Based on my experience from last game, my plan was to split my Crew into two small teams that would go after a Loyalist each, and then the three who did not loot their crates would meet up in the middle to attack a third Loyalist. We knew that a random Hostile (or Hostiles!) would spawn in Turn 3, and we rolled "The Thing In The Mist" as a battlefield condition so on Turn 5 we could expect a Martian war machine to enter the battle area as well.

Fritz, Gunther, and Glut attack the Loyalist Who Would Not Die

The end of Turn 2; Klink is already out of the game with his Loot.

Things went well enough for Klink and Ludwig, they overpowered their target Loyalist with little difficulty and Klink then left the battle area with the Loot. The other three were having a tougher time with their Loyalist, who was wearing metal plate armor and was very difficult to injure. Glut the Witch cast Let The Blood Flow which caused the Loyalist at least one point of damage per turn. And both Fritz and Gunther were able to cause at least one point each time they hit with their bayonets; it is the bayonet ability to always cause a minimum of one damage regardless of the opponent's armor. But it took four game turns to kill him!

Why won't he die? WHY?

Some of Bowker's Trench Raiders facing off against a Loyalist

During Turn 3 things went Sideways. Two Ghosts spawned in the battle area, corrupted cannibals intent on picking off our Crews for some quick food. Fortunately for me, the random nature of the spawning meant that they would be more of a problem for Kurt than for me. During this time Ludwig went looting a couple of the corpses littering the battlefield, before being shot down by one of Kurt's guys who had looted an automatic rifle. I used a special once-per-game rule to remove Ludwig from the battle area with no death roll necessary. He disappeared having acquired a rifle and a trench club.

Oh, snap! The Martian war machine has arrived!

We finally killed that Loyalist, now to get out before the Martian notices us...

On the other side, Kurt was holding his own against the Loyalists and Ghosts; one of the spawned Ghosts attacked a Loyalist that had previously been shooting at one of his guys, so that gave Kurt a little breathing space. But at the end, the Martian war machine entered the table on Turn 5. I grabbed what I had looted with the trio on my left flank and left the game, getting away with another Loot crate and a suit of metal armor. Kurt was not so fortunate. He had a crate he had not grabbed and his Lieutenant was stuck in melee combat with both a Loyalist and a Ghost. In the end, the Martian war machine claimed both the Loyalist and the Lieutenant, leaving Kurt's Crew short a member as the game ended.

Kurt is having a bit more difficulty over on his side of things

The good news is that there is some Loyalist vs. Ghost action going on, leaving the Loot free to take

I always enjoy the post-game sequence during a campaign. We had to look up a few rules, but everyone was able to heal their wounds taken during the battle. I managed to accumulate 8 experience points for the Crew, and after all was said and done we had 70 Resources from the Loot. I had more Resources than Kurt, and no casualties, so I am calling this a Win for me even though it was really just a case of me doing better than him. I don't think anyone ever really "wins" in this game. I redistributed some of the existing gear amongst the Crew, bought Klink an Anti-tank rifle from the Quartermaster, got some ammo for Ludwig's rifle and Klinks big gun, and added a Bengal Cat as a Crew member. That wiped out all 70 Resources. But I have a Big Gun and a Cat! I then used five of the eight Experience points to add one to Klink's Strength ability so he can adequately wield that big gun of his. I also equipped him with the plate armor. I'll need to build a new model for him, I found a nice 'kinight in armor" from Reaper Miniatures that I can chop the arms off of to add in the Anti-tank rifle. It will make a fun conversion and add a little flavor to my Crew. Oh, and the looted Trench club? That's sitting back in the Crew's Bunker, waiting for someone else to join up that can use it well.

The Martian advances on Bowker's Trench Raiders...

This game can be purchased at Forbidden Psalm: The Last War

My Generous Wife

 OK, so my wife has a kitten. We can affectionately call this baby "Psycho Death Kitty" to ensure a partial understanding of the damage she can create in even the most mundane of circumstances. In this particular case, she had decided that she enjoyed, for whatever reason, enjoyed drinking the rinse water from my miniatures painting. All of my paints are supposedly non-toxic, but maybe that's just for humans. And I don't want our precious ball of claws and fangs to get sick.

Psycho Death Kitty in her new enclosed kitty bed

The problem is, Psycho Death Kitty is really smart. She is the 12th cat to intersect my life, and is by far the smartest so far. I have tried putting things on top of the rinse water bin, put it under other things, cover it with a towel... she always figures out where it is and how to get to the water in it.

My wife is no happier about Psycho Death Kitty drinking the rinse water than I am. And so, she generously donated one of her plastic kitchen containers with a snap-on lid so that we can keep the water away from the kitten. And it mostly works! She hasn't figured out how to get the lid off, even if she has figured out how to steal the whole container.

The new rinse water bin with its stylish blue snap-on lid

Many thanks to my wonderful and amazing wife for protecting both Psycho Death Kitty and my rinse water!