Battlestar Galactica: the boardgame

Just today I had the chance to play the Battlestar Galactica board game, and to be quite frank, I was impressed. It full-heartedly embraces the paranoia and uncertainty that runs rampant across the rebooted series. Now, I am a fan of both the original show, and the new, and I won't discuss them further here.

By necessity, a solid chunk of the Cylon antagonism is mechanically driven, and, by chance, some players start as cylons, or will become them after a number of full turns. The game encourages distrust, and keeps everyone guessing, even if, by chance, no one player is a cylon initially. The cylon players must engage in a game of subterfuge for as long as possible, potentially having the human players harm their own chances of success.

The game we ran had the full six players called for. Being the new guy to the weekly game my coworkers run, I got first dibs on characters. And all the major characters one would expect were there, with a few (from the expansion) I wouldn't have considered, such as Gaeta or Molly. For simplicity's sake, and my liking of actor Michael Hogan, I played Saul Tigh. Every character has a benefit, a once-per-game ability, and one flaw. He could add a large bonus to any attempt at throwing someone in the brig that I wanted, once per game he could automatically brig someone, but was a drunkard, and would discard his skill chits whenever he held only one, on anyone's turn. The chits perform certain actions, but can be traded in to avoid or incur catastrophes drawn at the end of each player turn. Good stuff, and it really lost us the Galactica at the worst possible moment.

The whole game really sunk in. It left me thinking just how perfect the whole formula would fit for a John Carpenter's The Thing, the board game. That doesn't exist, but I wish it did.

Cheers.

Returning from the hills...

... I came baring a trite little beast known as Pathfinder. Yeah, that game.

Been preparing to move off and away, but in the meantime my little group introduced me to Paizo's game by way of a burlap DM-flavoured sack.

A curious game; similar to 3rd/3.5 in most aspects; but it does away with some of my gripes for the aforementioned games, all but one. One problem that always remained: the hurdles and hoops the Referee must contort through. It's a good game for players, but in my experience, an unnecessary mess for the one running it. Challenge Ratings, point budgeting, and what-have-you.

The majority of my DM/GM/SM/etc. experience comes from the older games, systems, and from even the retro clones. These (as I'm sure I needn't explain) games were quite easy to implement new races, creatures and stuff worth Experience Gain without issue. Especially after a good read through 'Encounter/Adventure' design philosophy as it appears in the Three Little Brown Books, and from forum personalities (mainly WaysoftheEarth from OD&D Discussion Board!). Stocking environments was easier than ever, as was determining damage and EXP gain by Hit Die, and other concepts.

Returning to stat-generating and skill-giving of every damn creature, after such an absence is very disheartening. No longer can I just make something improvised-like and still be fair about it, and quite frankly, it appalls me that I can *will* get caught making things up by the players in the newer systems. Because they can just as easily point out conflicts with modern encounter design, and even argue total Challenge Ratings with me, and act as if I've cheated them. Hell, I remember being chewed out for having to make up stats for monsters (lost their statistics PAGE) as battle was provoked, and barely survived to flee. Not that attacking an entire cult of Hero-grade (level 4+) Druids had anything to do with it.

The Encounter (read: Experience) Budgeting especially pulls my nails. It should be the Referee's own right to place down a troll cave (compleat with defenses), even if the 1st level party thought it was a good idea to walk past the warning signs.

Diggin' that they got rid of those ludicrous level adjustments for Player Characters.  There's too many by-the-book types (of the younger generations anyhoo) and, what if someone wants to play a Lizardfolk or some other creature at Starting Level 1? Wouldn't happen in 3rd/3.5, no sirree!

That is all.

Kickstarter: Champions of Zed

Hello to you lot.

Just stopping by to say that the Champions of Zed is up on Kickstarter, and could use your help, if you've not already. It's all well set out and nicely explained on there what CoZ is if you don't already know.

I'm pretty excited for it and hope it gets enough support. A hard-cover copy would be aces to me.

As for A to Zed. I've been lagging terribly behind schedule, and thankfully this isn't some established, or official, establishment, otherwise I'd have been shit-canned earlier this week, haha! After I go to see the Avengers flick tonight, we'll see about getting me caught up in full.

And Here's an Update. (Finally)

Here they are, as originally promised, though late certainly and in no way fashionably so. Ended up being fairly busy with this and that yesterday, so couldn't take some piccies until just recently. Behold: the inconsistent trial runs of my borrowed camera!

First up is a scavenger/scout sort of fellow from Grenadier's now defunct Future Skirmish line (though still available from em-4, but I'm sure you all know that). Another fine figure from Copplestone's illustrious past. Actually painted him a little while back but never got around to photographing him, and I think you can see some of the dust he's accumulated, oh, balls. Hopefully I've rendered the dark, smoothed leather look I was going for with his hood. I've still forgotten to put some tufts of grass on his base, it seems. Though I've not been able to find any of my flock, nor any of my static grass since I've moved into this house. I've still got lots of wood chip grass from my first days of terrain making (more on that later), but really, it doesn't look that pretty.

prod to expand

Next we've got a smallish group shot featuring the scav to the center, the first of many raiders to the left, and one of my Stalker-eresque conversions brandishing base colours. I like the purple scarf; it's manly. All Copplestone sculpts.

prod to expand

And here's another picture of that loveable sadist. I really enjoyed painting his skin, as I've never had so much space to paint it with before, though through my flailing and failing with photography, I don't know if I've done him justice enough. I've noticed a lot of my blending often doesn't carry over with my pictures, with many of the shots being too over-exposed and whatnot. Do note: this fellow and his base both aren't done; I'm very sporadic in my painting. The last time I was working on this guy was almost last Christmas ago, so a long, long time. How does his hip-pouch look? I was aiming for that sun bleached look all post-apocalyptica textiles should feature.

Now for some 15mm goodness, though I will apologize right now in advance. My deepest sincerity for accidentally saving the following image in .JPG format. I'd not known the mistake myself until just now as I went to upload the image.

Prod to expand

Three Traveller adventurers clad in survival gear, the obligatory barbarian adventurer, and an assassin. I imagined these three adventurers were, rather, clad in survival garments and gear, which would also give me a good excuse for their red, yellow and blue colour schemes. This fits with the overall theme I wanted to present of company-supplied agents or surveyors, armed with military equipment, as I wanted to look into playing Star Frontiers with 15mm scale figures, if only because model vehicles and fliers are more affordable. Only the barbarian and the female adventurer have been completely painted, with the blue-suited adventurer only needing his alice pack and visor finished up. The assassin and the tactical vest-wearing fellow are only in base colours so far. The bases of all are unfinished (needs some foliage). I like the barbarian's reversible shirt and the blue adventurer's grey skeinsuit.

Run! It's got Tentacles!

Actually just today I finally got my hands on one of those damn Volturnian monstrosities that are, the Queequeg. I've been wanting one for some time now, and blam, there it is, and oh boy, oh boy! No spots of rot!

Unlike most monster-type figures out there, I was surprised to find that the damn thing was actually scaled to 25mm figures properly. I've been underwhelmed many times by such 'great' beasts. GW's Red Terror figure, for example, though don't get me wrong, I love it. It just doesn't look like it could show any space marine a gape of the serpent.

And last, but by all means not even remotely least, a small preview of some 'greens' of some armatures I'm bulking up. They're actually not green. I'm using that ProCreate stuff, and because of the aesthetic charm of greyscaled sculpting previews, I've made the image thusly so. I've got some sketches somewhere, but for the most part I'm just practicing forming tiny characters.

They might eventually be Heavy EVA salvaging-types

That's it for today, folks! I'll try to be more regular and improve my camera skills, maybe share some Star Frontiers and D&D home-brew and/or thoughts, or at least find something entertaining or interesting to talk about.

That backdrop is the inside of my second shirt.