Chrome Hammer: Ascension Beta (Sabotage)

Star Breach

Hello, humans!

I was itching for a game to play, something new to ease my fidgety ennui, so I thought I'd finally try Star Breach, by Elijah M. Kelogg!  (I'm assuming the "M" stands for "Multigrain".)

This is an attractive book with glossy pages and nice illustrations and photos of minis.  It's something I could probably convince a friend to play if I had friends.  I mean, friends nearby that I could hang out with.

Anyway, here's what I did.

Gaea Prime: First Defense or "X-COM Please Don't Sue"

 

Let's face it, whenever I see a new sci-fi skirmish game, it seems like the first thing anybody asks is "Can it do X-COM?"  If for some reason you're not familiar with X-COM, it was an old computer game of tactical skirmish combat that explored fending off alien infantry, raiding their crashed ships, and researching the remains to reverse-engineer all of their cool tech to use against them.  Great game.

Gaea Prime: First Defense is basically that: GP's first encounter with alien slavers raiding the Earth for resources, and the adventures of GP's armed forces as they kill the aliens and loot their bodies for research fodder.

Here's how my first game went...

Weasel-Hammer: White Scars vs. Orks!

 Hello, Humans!

This September is Weasel-Hammer month!  What does that mean?  It's a loosey-goosey campaign set in a lost corner of the Warhammer 40k universe, but mostly played with Nordic Weasel Games games.

In the fractious and war-torn Mustelida sector, some kind of Warp disturbance has cut off that region of space from outside communication and travel while dark forces begin pouring in.  Whatever Imperial elements that happen to be trapped there are the only hope for Humanity!

"In the grim derpness of the far future, there is only w... weasel!"

Laserburn: Nostalgia Kills

 Sometimes you can't truly appreciate what you have, or what you've lost, without going back and (re)discovering it for yourself.

Laserburn is one of those things that bears experiencing. It's a sci-fi game from 1980, which if you're reading this in 2020, was about 100 years ago.  This was apparently before the time of common word processors, or technical writers or editing I guess.  Clearly this was type-written and then copied to make books.  But who am I to talk?  I was alive in 1980.  How many beloved games did I write? :)

I actually didn't get into minis games until much later, so I don't have any nostalgia for the game, but I'm also kind of a gaming hipster, so I at least had to try it.  Here we go.

Knyghte, Pyke & Sworde: Objective Battle

 Hey!  It's minis time again!  Finally!

I asked some folks what I should play next, and they said KPS again, so don't blame me.  Unfortunately, the short notice prevented me from painting up new guys, which really is a shame, but I decided instead to mix it up by playing an "Objective" battle this time.

I'm playing both sides, as usual, Blue vs. Red again.  To get objectives, each side rolls twice on a table, in the open, but then secretly chooses one of the two objectives.  The objectives are then revealed, and both sides roll for deployment type.  Blue ended up with "Find the Loot" (secure one of three random tokens) and Red got "Slay the Leader" (kill best opposing Captain), and for deployment I rolled the relatively boring "All Forward", which is just a normal "everybody starts on their side" setup.  The game will only last 4 turns.  That doesn't sound like a lot, but man, there was so much blood in so few turns!

TSoY: Maybe it's Me?

Previously, on The Shadow of Yesterday...

DUN DUN!

"What's going on here?  Where are the minis games?"

I know, I know.  This is just something that I have to get out of my system.  I've got plans for another minis battle report soon.  Maybe next weekend.  My gaming table is my work desk now, so things are more of a hassle to set up.

Anyway, Pedro, outcast member of the Red Company, and his Ratkin sidekick, "Chaser", have shacked up with a clan of bandits in the wilderness, and in a night of drunken camaraderie have agreed to help them knock over a guarded coach carrying valuable cargo.

TSoY: Some of My Best Friends Are Thieves

Another RPG recounting?  Is this what I'm doing now?  I don't know.  It's kind of neat in the moment, and it's a chance to try these games that I'll probably never see in action otherwise.

This is another "adventure" set in the World of Near.  In the previous adventure, Pedro "The Butcher" Vina was hurt pretty badly, and wandered off into the forest, losing track of his ratkin companion, "Chaser", who was last seen trapped in a hallway with approaching soldiers.

I decided that, if this were a TV show, the next episode would pick up from Chaser's point of view, so that's what I did!

TSoY: The Thing in the Tower

I used to be all about the RPGs, but at some point I lost my knack for them.  I might (maybe) be an OK GM, but I am just awful as a player.  Still, I like RPGs and I own a bunch that I've never played (which I'm sure you guys can relate to), so I decided to try the whole "Solo RPG" thing which for some reason feels really new.  I don't know.

First, the game I'm playing is "The Shadow of Yesterday", or rather "Solar System" using the "World of Near" supplement.  I honestly don't know how best to describe the system, but it seems pretty fascinating to me, and the setting is kind of cool, too.

In a nutshell, it's a fantasy world 100 years after a near miss from an asteroid ripped off a chunk of the planet to create the moon.  The world (especially the formerly great kingdom of Maldor) has a bit of a fantasy post-apocalypse vibe.

Knyghte, Pyke and Sworde

Mud and Blood!

Nordic Weasel Games came out with Knyghte, Pyke & Sworde a few months ago(?) (Has it been months?  Stupid Eternal Thursday Virus!) But I hadn't gotten around to playing it because I couldn't get to a printer to print it out, and honestly, my collection of "historical" type minis is sparse.

Eventually, though, I painted up barely enough guys to get a tiny little game going, and just took things slow so I could read the game from my phone.

And of course I'm glad I did.  I'm more of a sci-fi gi, but I'll bet a big game of this would be fun.  Maybe one of my friends will have a couple of good-sized era-appropriate armies to bash together.  (Or I'll just have to paint a lot more guys.)

Chrome•Hammer: //Grid Lock

Another Chrome•Hammer playtest!  This time it's a VR mission, with the goal of controlling all four Stacks on the table.  Forgive me for not being particularly clever here.  I'm just trying to log this for posterity. :)

The Department: Seventh Mission

Mission Seven: The Nightclub

Sorry.  I've been sitting on this one for quite a while now because I didn't have the "nightclub" terrain I needed.  Sure, I could have faked it, but I was also looking for an excuse to do some crafting.  So, after a long time, I finally built my nightclub set, and I'm using it for this mission.  It's not perfect, but it's pretty good, I think.

Ok.  Let's get on with The Nightclub.

Chrome•Hammer: //Virus Upload

This weekend I had a chance to playtest some cyberpunk minis beta rules.  Welcome to:

In the first mission, FOZ Pictures Corporation fought Meyerdyne Corporation over a resource extraction site.  Despite Meyerdyne's ED-2099 droid turning more than once on its own units, the pharmaceutical corporation came out on top, dropping FOZ's stock.

Starport Scum: Curiosity Kills (Almost)

Okay, so nobody's heard from Captain Redd in a while after he went to investigate that crashed transport, and now Agent M and his crew have decided to break into a Wagner-Vogel facility to figure out what's going on.  Before they can access the servers, though, they'll have to disable the security systems.  This is Verdun's specialty, so it shouldn't be too difficult if he can get into the building with the access point.

Starport Scum is kind of like an RPG, if an RPG was a an awesome skirmish game.  We've got characters and they have traits that define them, and they do things and maybe role-play and maybe roll some dice, and then there's a fight.  I mean, there's always a fight.  It's a minis game after all.

The Department FAQ/Errata

Ludanto: Ok, not a really interesting post.  The site that used to host the FAQ/Errata for "The Department" seems to have gone away, taking with it this pretty important list.  Shaun Travers found it in the Wayback Machine (Clever.  I should have thought of that.) so I'm re-posting it here for my convenience and for posterity.  I claim no rights to the text that follows.