Rooftop Inspiration

Been daydreaming about a new Big Box of terrain specifically for the infiltration missions that are an expected part of Osprey's Black Ops rules.  The top of one building - maybe two connected by multiple walkways or leapable gaps - should be plenty big enough for a stealth mission.  Heck, the Fiat plant in Turin had a whole race track on top!

A large factory or data center gives you plenty of wide open space,
rough ground, and heavy cover.

Large A/C units provide heavy cover and come in all
shapes and sizes, from single units...

...to large multi-unit monstrosities.

...and to the unpracticed eye, the ventwork looks
pretty random.

A billboard mounted on the roof can serve triple duty as
cover, sniper nest, and gratuitous cheesecake. 

It doesn't have to be all black and gray - you can easily
block out smaller areas for rooftop gardens...

...and add multiple levels, skylights, "pits" leading down into
courtyards below to block movement. 

Every high-tech building worth infiltrating should have its own helicopter pad.

Rooftop access doors come in a variety of shapes
and styles as well.  Brick for the maintenance guys
and glass and steel for accessing the landing pad.

Mix and match to your heart's content.

Anybody ever seen a full table done this way before?  I looked, but didn't see anything in the usual forums.

Grand Wargaming Strategy, Part the Second

Is it too early for a New Year's Resolution?

While deep in the throes of last post's naval gazing, my subconscious maundering was given a second kick in the short pants by Oldben1.  Over on a thread he started on the Lead Adventure Forums he asked for ideas on how to get more use out of his existing stash of  painted figures.  My last post focused on how actual play isn't all that important to me right now, but a plan beyond "buy whatever tickles my fancy at the moment" will help keep my paint brush focused and my mind on what I could be playing if there weren't other things on my To Do list.  You know, minor items like stay employed, raise the kids, keep the house from falling apart.

With the book closed on building the Big Medieval Box, I've been revisiting my generic sci-fi skirmish collection and looking at ways to expand the inventory while narrowing down the focus of the game.  This has always been about a more modern version of Necromunda that is a more personalized, more narrative, and more kitchen-sink style game of small teams and big stories.

The plan for 2016 is to find a game where you've got one small team running up against a changing roster of opposing forces in a series of linked missions.  Sort of a "Captain Mal and His Sci-Fi Friends Power Hour".  That way I can get a narrative campaign going, but still have an excuse to use a lot of different miniatures.  For example, I have a number of different teams of security forces (Sharkmen from Khurasan, Space Mercs from GZG, NBC suits from Rebel, and Octopods from 15mm.co.uk), not to mention a growing pile of random characters, civilians, and general ne'er-do-wells.

Last year the boy and I tried Five Parsecs From Home, but it just didn't grab us.  It's a fun game, but the forces are limited, and the in-game choices felt constrained.  So this next year's plan is to give Osprey's Black Ops a shot.  While I do have a delivery of vehicles on the way, there isn't much more that can be done with the small city-scape terrain set.  Sure, more scatter terrain is always welcome, but a stealth style game like Black Ops calls for a special set of terrain just for those secret missions and cloak and dagger infiltrations.

So that's where this blog is heading. At least as far as wargaming is concerned, it's going to be small unit sci-fi, and a fun and cool terrain set unlike anything that I could find on the internet.

Grand Wargaming Strategy, Part the First

Does it count as a manifesto if you know deep down that it's really more a set of guidelines?

The other day the inimitable Peter Del'Orto had a great post on why he doesn't wargame so much anymore. So that got me thinking about my own view of wargaming as a hobby.

Oddly enough, wargaming is largely my solo hobby.  My hobby time has to be squeezed into the odd nooks and crannies of the day when the kids are busy, and the only things left on the Big To Do list are too small to stress over and too big to start right now.  Which means that the bulk of my active hobby time is spent getting ready to game.  It's all moments of quiet solitude spent at the work table building terrain, painting, reading rules, and prepping orders of battle.  The nearest thing to human contact my wargaming provides is pretty much this blog and the blogosphere, and one or two forums.

Yeah, I get in maybe a game a month solo and one a month with the kids.  Let's be honest, depending on which kid it is, gaming with kids pretty much is gaming solo, just with more distractions than usual.  On average we're probably talking about one hour of game table time for every ten to twenty hours of work table time.

And you know, that's fine.

I get human interaction in countless ways away from the gaming table.  I get gaming time by playing D&D with a regular group of guys who abandoned wargaming long ago.

It's not a waste of time to paint figures that never see the tabletop.  The time spent relaxing with a brush in hand is worth it all by itself.  The enjoyment derived from thinking about all the ways this one figure might be used is not retroactively destroyed if that figure never actually gets used.

Think of it this way.  If you enjoy running, and spend a year training for a marathon, and then get injured and can't run the marathon, that time spent training isn't wasted.  You got out of the house.  You burned some calories.  You look and feel better than you would have if you'd spent all those training ours on the sofa.

So I say, stop worrying about the big collection of figures you haven't used.  Hobbies are processes, not goal lines.  It's great to have goals.  It's enormously satisfying to host a big, successful convention game.  But if you enjoy the process, why worry about the

That's why this blog is more likely to present, "look what I made last night," than it is to present, "look what I played last night."

And there ain't nothing wrong with that.

The Lead Pile Shrinketh

A long, long time ago, I painted up a few gangs for 15mm Necromunda games. One of the gangs consisted of GZG's space mercenaries. 

From the files

In order make a decent opposing force for my son's Space dwarves, I tried to add some power armor to the mix by converting up , and it didn't work.  Fortunately, 15mm.co.uk's Star Vikings make for a great match as the horns and blocky armor fit well with the space orc aesthetic.

Also, Baroka the Crime Lord is all painted up nice and tight. 



My yellow version looks much less menacing that the manufacturer's dark paint job.  This guy could almost be a kindly old mentor.  (Edit:  Looking at it again, I think I shall name him Diabeetus.)  I plan to use it as a bystander figure.

Quick and Dirty Comparison Shot

Let's add to the pile of comparison shots floating around the web, shall we?  Last week I showed you the three power armored figures added to my space orc/space mercenary/mangalore squad.  Here's a shot of the figures side by side:

Just noticed that one of the guys on the left is a little shy - his back
is turned to the camera.

On the left are the Star Viking figures from 15mm.co.uk (SVP02).  On the left are three of Ground Zero Games' space mercenaries (SG15-X05). 

As you can see, the Star Vikings are a little bigger and bulkier than their GZG counterparts, but that's what you would expect for guys in heavy armor.  They aren't quite as detailed as the GZG troopers, but the blocky armor works well as some sort of exo-suit.  In addition to the unifying paint job, the swords are a nice little touch that brings the two units together.

More 15mm Sci-Fi Figures

Hark!  The painting muse is upon me!

Three new figures from 15mm.co.uk in the painted pile.  A civilian type alien, a grey dog or wolf, and an alien strongarm type.  The robed holy-alien will fill out crowds of civilians in urban/spaceport environs.  The dog was picked up for sentry duty.  The big guy?  Just another armed character.

His back plate served as a nice big canvas for some art, and in a fit of nostalgia he struck me as a former gunner for a Gunstar.  He probably mustered out of the Star League following the defeat of Xul and the Ko-Dan armada and now makes his way through the galaxy as hired muscle.

Here is the Star League's actual logo:  

Gotta get a t-shirt with this on it someday.  Now that every Tom, Dick, and Mary has a Captain America t-shirt, you have to go obscure like this to ferret out the geeky fellow-travelers.

The Complete One Hour Wargame

What with one thing and another, it occurred to me that you've never seen the medieval Big Box in all its compact wargame glory.  

One complete wargame

 As you can see, the Big Box contains the following:

• A three foot by three foot ground covering cloth
• One large forest and one small forest
• A farmstead with associated walled field
• A large hill and a small hill
• One small pond
• One rocky base representing rough ground
• Sixty inches of roadway not including the crossroads
• Sixty-eight inches of river including two fords and one bridge
• Two complete 10 stand armies in the 6-mm scale

That's everything you need to make any one of the 30 battlefields shown in the scenario chapter of the One Hour Wargame rulebook.  You could easily use this setup for just about any of the rule sets included in the book, too.  Granted, you may want to swap out the farmstead for something more technologically or geographically appropriate (i.e. a clapboard church for the American Civil War or a petrol station for WWII), but that should be easy enough to do while building another matched set of armies.

When the battle is done, the whole setup fits into a box small enough to fit into the overhead carry-on compartment of your standard passenger aircraft.

All packed away for the night.

It might not be as glorious as some of the Infinity setups you see floating around on the net or have as many figures as a Featherstone participation game, but it's enough to scratch the wargaming itch, and you don't need a lot of scratch or space to put the whole box together.  As usual, the figures are the expensive part, and if you go with an outfit like Irregular Miniatures you can get each army for somewhere around sixty bucks.  That means this whole game costs less than half of an army for many of the Big Box game companies.