Nightwatch - Revised Character Sheet

 After playing through four games of "Nightwatch: Terror and Treasure in the Dark Corners of the World", I've found the character sheets needed a little tweaking.

This should be enough to carry your Guildsmen through the full Long Hunt.  It has more room for the notes that you most often refer to in the game.  That means more room for class abilities and spells, and less space for those rare artifacts.  

Wargame Theory

 Not judging.  Just observing.

Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the average consumer.

Nightwatch: The Solo Wargame

 

This is a game about killing monsters. All kinds, anywhere, any time.

So speaketh Patrick Todoroff, the scribe behind Nightwatch.  

This little gem of a wargame is a solo wargame that features a fairly simple core mechanic upon which you can bolt all kinds of weird and wonderful special rules.

The short version is that you take four heroes onto a table filled with terrain and have to accomplish one of the standard wargame objectives. Break a thing. Cross the table. Find a hidden thing and get off the table. That sort of objective. The trick is that there are four spawn points where increasingly strong monsters are going to be pouring onto the table to stop you.

The core mechanic is that each figure gets four actions: a free move and three potential interactions. You've got to roll above a target number of 4+ to succeed. You get one each of the d6, d8, and d10 with which to try and take actions beyond that free move, and that's the core. Each character class gets two things it's good at, and so it can roll two dice looking for a success. Tanks get to roll two dice in melee and resisting damage. Wizards get to roll two dice when casting a spell or moving.

The enemies that spawn on the table have four classes as well. All get a free move and then they scale up in actions from a single d6 to a pair of d8s to three d10s. So each class grows in power exponentially. From one action to three per turn, and an increasing probability of moving and striking, it gets pretty tough. The last class is the big Big Battle, and that last boss has multiple wounds, multiple abilities, and four actions per turn, making it the end-state goal of a seven-plus mission quest.

If it all sounds a bit generic so far that's probably because it is, but that's all part of the beauty of the system. It's meant to be a starting point for you to use your own figures to really make the game come alive.

Got a giant bat swarm? Fine - they are vermin who who fly over obstacles. A minor threat, but one that can zip freely around the table.

Got skeletons? Give them a +1 to resist damage from bladed weapons.

Got a dragon figure? Make it the Big Boss and give it fire breath, flight, and ferocity. It'll make for a serious threat.

It's a refreshingly open game system, and one that looks robust enough after a couple games to allow for just the sort of tinkering that every wargamer does anyway.

Highly recommended.

The Sci-Fi Dungeon

 You don't have to choose.  These are all shots from a dungeon originally built for straight-up dungeon crawls.  By avoiding permanently affixed fantasy elements, you can change the whole look of the place with just a bit of scatter terrain.

The power core columns are blue wooden dowels normally used to hold the upper bunk of a bunkbed in place.  Painted with a blue glow effect and capped with washers, they would fit right into any engineering section.

Here you can see my rounded terminals with green screens, which are simply wooden plugs that cover up countersunk screws. Washers and paint make them a kiosk for all sorts of IT purposes.

In The Shadow of Giants

Banged out a quick weekend project recently, with mixed results.  These towering trees look okay, but the roots are nil, and they are way too fragile for regular use.

Classic construction method consisting of paper towel cardboard tubes covered with tissue, and the tissue is held in place with watered down craft glue. The problem is that even with the glue dried they're very lightweight they need a much heavier base probably a cap of something harder than just tissue paper over the top.

 I'll get some use out of them but it's hard to see how many games. Which is fine I don't have enough storage for these things anyway.

Nightwatch Roster Sheet

 

My first Nightwatch.

Since nobody else is going to do it, allow me.  If you're ready to play Nightwatch, a solo fantasy skirmish game by Stalker7, then you're going to want to use a more compact and efficient character sheet than those in the book.  They are fine.  They get the job done, but they take a full page to do what could be done in a quarter page.

You can either save that roster above and print four to a page using the "3.5-inch by 5-inch" setting on your printer, or print one to a page four times.

[EDIT: On March 15, 2021, I changed this roster sheet to make it more workable at the table.]

Nightwatch: The Solo Campaign

So I ordered a copy of this based on the recommendation of a viewer over on the channel, Justo Perez, and it's been a real struggle to read.

Not because of what's in it, but because life is hammering away at me with reckless abandon.  Not sure why, but every time I grab this book there's an emergency that drags my attention away.  Very strange.

And disappointing, because there's some real potential in this book.  It's a smallish skirmish game that looks designed to be played by a single player.  You would think that could be said most skirmish games, but we live in strange times.

You'll take two to four heroes, each of which has stats a bit less complicated than what you'd find in a Warhammer Quest style game.  They look to be more on par with what you see in Frostgrave, which is nice because you can also plug in a handful of less powerful and hence less-complex allies.

Then you've got to handle the hordes of enemies, whose stats are (mostly) single dice.  The bigger named entities stand out with more actions and more special rules that complicate matters, but it still doesn't look unmanageable for a single player. 

We'll have to play through a game or two to know for sure.

For now, I really like what I see.  It's specific where it needs to be specific, vague where it needs to be vague, and just open-ended enough to allow for some exploration.  And how about that tagline?

In a grimdark world where everyone is falling all over themselves to wonder who are the real bad guys, where Disney keeps trying to explain that witches are cool, actually, and literal satanic pedophiles exercise global power, it's nice to find a game that admits...

It's the monsters.

Monsters are bad guys.

Go kill them.

More to follow after this game meets the tabletop.