Fully Painted: Death Knight and some Zombies

This death knight is a Reaper figure from an old Warlord faction box. I wasn't too sure how I wanted to paint him up, but I knew I wanted his sword to be striking. I started by painting it red—but the paint I used was old, and it looked terrible. So I tried to salvage things by painting the sword in this sort of yellow-fade-red scheme, which came out better than I'd expected. And seeing the finished product really helped me imagine this guy in the game—which will come in handy if/when my players ever encounter him. The sword he's carrying was forged from a smoldering meteorite, and it radiates scorching heat when wielded by the knight.

And below you can see some zombies from the same Reaper/Warlord boxed set. Maybe they're the death knight's retinue? Or just shambling undead with a hunger for brains? This was my first attempt at painting zombies, so I went for a straightforward paint scheme that emphasized their pallid flesh and wobbly gait.

New Dark Heresy campaign begins tonight!

Just a quick note to say that my local group is about to start a new Dark Heresy campaign. I'll be the GM; we're making characters tonight at Chicagoland Games, our local game store.

It should be a lot of fun—Dark Heresy is super crunchy, far moreso than any game I've played in the last couple of years, but sometimes it's nice to sit back with a couple beers and thumb through a rulebook for 4 or 5 hours.

I was also pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm from the crew at Chicagoland Games. Word on the street is that they're pretty ecstatic that we'll be making characters tonight, and they've set aside the big table for us. I'm not sure if we'll play there regularly, but it sounds like we'll get a warm welcome if we so choose. Game on!

Cold City: Actual Play Session Pending...

On the agenda for tonight is a one-shot session of Cold City, Malcolm Craig’s atmospheric game of conspiracy and horror set in postwar Berlin. I’m the GM, which is really ideal since WWII/Cold War history is a hobby of mine, and I also speak a little Russian.

The game’s buy-in is that PCs are members of the Reserve Police Agency (RPA), a trans-national group of investigators who roam the alleys and ruins of Berlin, seeking out the crumbling remains of hideous technology, experiments gone awry and otherworldly monsters lurking in the shadows. Heady stuff, to be sure. Players are encouraged to play different nationalities — and the inherent suspicions therein. This is the Cold War, after all. For our game, I’ve pregenerated a group of three disparate characters, all bound together by the common mission of the RPA: a Soviet black marketeer, a doughty British paratrooper, and an over-eager American photojournalist.

I’ll write up a post-game account of the session next week.

The end of equipment lists

In my unending quest to find (and use!) cool new game mechanics, I’ve happened upon a real gem from the Gumshoe System. This ruleset, dreamed up by Robin D. Laws and implemented in Fear Itself, The Esoterrorists and Trail of Cthulhu, is designed for investigative campaigns — not hack-n-slash battlemap adventures. As such, the system strips out a lot of the crunchier record-keeping elements, including the notion of equipment lists. Instead, each player has the Preparedness skill; this single stat reflects his or her ability to show up equipped with the right tool for the job.

So if a player needs a chemical torch to illuminate a dark, underwater grotto (as happened in a recent Fear Itself adventure I played), it’s just a die roll away. Clearly, the more complex and/or inappropriate the tool, the tougher the die roll will be, thus countering situations where a highly Prepared player might produce a seemingly endless array of useful, situation-specific gadgets from his or her pocket, just in time to save the group, ad nauseum: the “rocket launcher in your pants” effect, if you’ll permit me to coin a term.

And as much as I like equipment lists and all the bean counting that goes into them, I also really like the Preparedness stat — mainly because it encourages improvisation on the part of both player and GM. A mousy librarian facing down a flesh-eating zombie might not be able to roll high enough to pull a loaded revolver out of her purse — but she stands a pretty good chance of finding an oversized letter opener perfect for skewering an undead abomination.

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In other news, I talked myself out of buying Little Fears, a wonderful little horror game I played back in 2003, at the used book store, by arguing that I've got so many books on my shelf and it would just sit there and ... it's a really cool game and ... maybe it'll still be there if I go back tomorrow ...