Pretty terrain for a Song of Blades & Heroes

I met up with my regular miniatures group (well, just the one guy this time) to play Song of Blades & Heroes. The folks at the game shop had recently built some gorgeous new fall scenery pieces, so we whipped up a quick battlefield featuring an autumn forest leading up to a brooding manor house.


My barbarians were assaulting the manor house, which was defended by Karl's humans and elves. I expected him to sit tight behind the walls and wait for me to venture forth — but Karl denied me such satisfaction and instead sallied forth to meet my forces with a rain of arrows from his three archers.


We got to try out the group shooting rules, and they proved to be quite effective. In fact, that seems to be the best way to use archers in SBH: in groups of 2-3, rather than as single shooters. Combined, the elven archers felled my barbarian leader, which wreaked havoc on my loose formation of attackers. Some fled, others plunged into the forest to escape the steel-tipped storm.

The game carried on, but I was on the ropes from the second turn. In retrospect, the attacker probably should have had more points than the defender.

But damn! The game was so PRETTY! The autumn tree clumps looked just right with my marauding fighters mixed in there. And the defenders' keep was cool, too. It had working doors and everything. Overall, we were definitely able to stay faithful to the old adage of miniature wargaming: getting cool toys on the table.

The image that says "D&D" to me

I came to D&D late in my gaming career, only acquiring a copy of the AD&D Players Handbook last year, at the ripe age of 27. Thus this image, while dazzling to my adult self, didn't have near the impact that it would have had on my 12-year-old self had I seen it back then.

Anyway, this is the image that says "D&D" to me. Part of me wants to yell "Don't look at that freakin' mouth, there's some glowing eyes at the end of the hallway! Get your shields up!"

Anytime I want to get juiced up for fantasy gaming, I take a look at this image. And whenever I need to get in the right mindset for D&D in particular (what with its adventuring parties, hirelings, 10-foot poles, secret doors and the like) I take a look at the following image.

My ever-changing gaming interests

It's been months since I've run a roleplaying game, mainly because I've been spending lots of time painting miniatures — and consequently I've been gravitating toward games that will give me an opportunity to actually use those painted miniatures!

Lately I've found a group of guys in Chicago who play Song of Blades & Heroes, the excellent little fantasy skirmish game that I discovered earlier this year. We've been meeting twice a month, or thereabouts, to talk trash and move our little fantasy figures around the table. It doesn't hurt that the game shop where we meet is just 4 blocks from my apartment in Chicago!

The thing with Song of Blades & Heroes is that it's almost a roleplaying game. You can choose unique-looking miniatures, name your characters, send them on specific tasks, etc. The game mechanic is simple enough that it can be adapted to handle typical roleplaying tasks.


For our most recent game, we set up some dungeon blocks to create a full-on tabletop labyrinth, and then we rolled up a "quest for the magic item" scenario that pitted a squad of dark elves against a marauding crew of gladiators and a patrol of evil snakemen. Badass!

Since GenCon, I've become enamored with sci-fi miniatures gaming — starships in particular, probably a direct result of me sitting in on an excellent demo of War Rocket, the pulp sci-fi starship game from Hydra Miniatures.

During the drive back to Chicago, I realized that I loved the War Rocket ruleset, but I decided to collect a more "generic" looking set of starships, so I could potentially use them for Full Thrust, Starmada or any of the other fleet-action rulesets out there. Full Thrust, by the way, is available for free on the web from Ground Zero Games.

I'm just a week or so away from trying out my first game of Full Thrust (or War Rocket, depending on the group). For now, I'm trying to create my own sci-fi milieu, rather than use a published setting. (Aside: Starship minis games seem to have this disturbing tendency to make all their factions into fascimiles of political blocs that exist today on Earth. So we have space Russians, space Japanese, space Germans, space Americans, etc. Weird, that. How about some aliens?)

I'm also deliberately building my starship fleets using a variety of models from different manufacturers. This is explicitly encouraged in Full Thrust, much to my delight. So far, I'm using models from Silent Death, Firestorm Armada, Star Fleet Battles and AeroTech. Check back for photos soon!

My sci-fi bug hasn't stopped with starships, though...I'm contemplating getting some old MechWarrior click-base figures to rebase and use with Future War Commander or Dirtside. I priced out some pieces last night, and it looks like I can get two armies for $30 or so. And of course, they're prepainted...

Flying Blind Down the Railroad Tracks

We played our second session of ICONS last night, and I was not a fully prepared GM. I had miscalculated. I was completely ready to finish the previous (published) adventure (The Skeletron Key), to simply show up and play Heroclix, or to play some combination of the two. But throughout the day before the game, I started to get the feeling that the players who showed up for this game wouldn't have a strong overlap with players from the first game. So, I downloaded the second (published) adventure for ICONS (Sins of the Past) and read/skimmed about 3/4 of it on the el on the way home from work.

Surely enough, we had four players, but only one from the original game. So, we played the new adventure. Like the first adventure, Sins of the Past was a real railroad. I'm generally not into railroading my players, but I understand that non-sandbox adventures tend to be railroads, and the GM just has to deal. When I've run railroady adventures in the past, I feel like I've done well on the fly modifying the adventure to fit what the players do. But this time was different: I simply didn't know the adventure well, and I hadn't read the ending before we started playing.

I think I did alright at the beginning. Within literally the first 10 minutes, the players had left the tracks. They were supposed to form a friendly relationship with the Golden Agents - a classic superhero group from the WWII era - and the Golden Agents would help lead them through the adventure. But the relationship didn't work out this way. This was partially because of my actions. In the earlier game, one of the characters threw a helicopter into a skyscraper, and the one repeat player wasn't very popular as a result. The Golden Agents reacted accordingly. For the most part, this worked out fine, and we managed to progress through set scenes in the adventure with a plot reconstructed on the fly.

But I made a bad decision at the end, right as we got into the part that I had quickly skimmed/not read at all. The characters by all rights should've captured a super villain (a talking monkey with a tommie gun!), and I didn't let them. My actions were a little believable, given the capacities the villains had shown in the past, but they were way too facile - a probability controlling teleporter snatched the hostage away in a single turn. In retrospect, I realize that I did this out of desperation - I simply didn't know what was coming next, and a hostage was the railroaded outcome of the scene (which in turn would lead the PCs to the next scene). Now that I've thought about it and read the full adventure, I know that I clearly didn't need to do this. So, I'm thinking about a retcon to even things out in the next game.

But I still feel like I made a rookie mistake: I railroaded the players with a bs move to further the pre-existing plot. I know that kind of thing can grind. Just goes to show that you shouldn't fly blind down the railroad tracks.

Stuff for sale - fantasy and scifi

ICONS and the Adult Gamer: Actual Play/Review

A couple days ago, four of us got together to play ICONS - the new superhero rpg by Steven Kenson et al. The game is a cross between a cleaned up, old school TSR Marvel supers game and the more narrative and modern Spirit of the Century. The game includes information about several powers, but it's not crunchy - ICONS is heavily tilted toward random character generation and being able to sit down and play quick-like. While I love Mutants and Masterminds (Kenson's other, much ballyhooed supers game), ICONS is a different beast. It's not for the munchkins. Really, it's not for the gritty old schoolers or vampire narrativists either. It's for some goofy, quick fun with a splash of dynamic play and modern cool.

And that's how it actually played. Which was perfect for this particular night. Here's the origin story of said night:

My friends and I are late-20s/early 30s gamers with wives, long term relationships, careers, and in my case, a kid. We're not as grizzled as Old Guy Mike (glad you're back on the blogging scene!), but time is still scarce, and it has empirically proven near-impossible to have a steady campaign going. So, we've decided to make a set, biweekly game. Whoever shows, shows. At our first meeting, we had about 8 people (WOW!!!). Our second was sadly cancelled because of attendance issues. At our third meeting, Pat was supposed to continue his long-running old school, fantasy, sandbox, gritty, savage worlds campaign. But he bailed at the last minute because he had professional responsibilities (you know, like editing fantasy flight rpg books for real money).

I had ICONS sitting on my desktop, and it looked quick and fun. I downloaded the first adventure the night before our game, quickly skimmed the ICONS rules, read the adventure, and showed up with some makers mark for the game the next day.

The game was great. We randomly generated characters in 45 minutes. We played through about 3/4 of the adventure in a few hours. This was quite fast indeed. Much of this speed is due to the simplicity of the system: The GM doesn't roll dice, and only compares PC rolls against NPC stats. (A couple times, muscle memory kicked in and I caught myself reaching for dice when it was the NPCs' turns to attack, and rolling is FUN, but it worked well regardless.) The system was simple enough that I didn't really explain it to the players. I just translated the results of their die rolls for them. In the end, we had a few pretty cinematic combats, some cool between combat scenes, and ended up with what turned out to be some morally ambiguous superheroes (e.g. they wouldn't help a dying CEO/inventor live without a promise that he would sell his entire company - that he grew from his garage in the 80s- to a rival CEO... who was also player in the game.) Good stuff was generated in a limited period of time.

So here's the verdict: ICONS is goofy as hell, but it's also cool and surprisingly dynamic. It's a really nice blend of old school mechanics and new school narrativist ones. If you want a supers game built for long campaigns, you probably want to look elsewhere (like at Mutants and Masterminds). But if you're looking for a fun pick-up-and-play game with little prep needed, this is a great game for you. With our schedules these days, it was the perfect game for the perfect time.

The run-up to GenCon

My biweekly game fell through this week, which probably for the best — I've got to pack for GenCon!

Typically I'll bring an assortment of notebooks, pencils, erasers and dice to carry around during the convention, just in case a game falls into place in a hurry (like lightning, games can strike anywhere at GenCon). I'm not currently signed up for any games, but I hope to do some last-minute registering and/or bump into some folks interested in playing.

As far as shopping, there are a few stops I make every year. First, I go to the dice vendor and buy a big mug full of random dice, which I then distribute over the course of the year to friends (mostly non-RPG players) as gifts to sucker them into gaming. (Disclosure: I also keep the occasional super-sweet dice for myself.)

I also make time to paw through the loose D&D miniatures, of course. It's almost always duplicates of the same dozen figures, and you have to shoulder aside sweaty dudes wearing 3 Wolves Shirts, but it's generally worth it to track down a few plumb figures for cheap.

This year I'm also planning to spend a lot of time browsing cool fantasy miniatures that could work for Song of Blades & Heroes. Since that game lets you use any combination of minis from different manufacturers, it's prompted me to look again at figures from Crocodile Games, Privateer Press, Reaper, Wargames Factory and others.