Painting update!

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Dark Ages!

Quick one today, just a couple of pictures of some painting in progress and some comments. First, the pictures:

These are my current project- the A Song Of Ice And Fire miniatures, by Cool Mini Or Not. The kickstarter shipped recently, and I was genuinely pleased with all of the minis as well as - surprisingly - my first read of the rules. After I get to playtest them, I fully intend to review the lot (probably long after the buzz has died based on how slowly I paint).

(Note also the picoarmour cold war units off to the side of the Tully Sworn Shields, for the Bledore/Sablenoir project)

The painting speed issue is what I am trying to work on now - partly with new techniques, and partly by philosophy. The new techniques come from an interesting discovery. Did anyone else know that sharpies show extremely well on a pale primer and leave very bright colour? For these fantasy medieval characters, I am working that in with heavy ink washes to get troops that really pop.

I had discovered the value of metallic sharpies when working on my Warhammer Quest characters in the past, but only now am I getting into using the plain color sharpie markers and it is helping seriously speed things along.

From the philosophy side of things, I am trying to stop being so picky in my paint jobs. Creative blocks or hangups about "making mistakes" often result in me going weeks at a time without painting, and I can't afford that if I want to keep up with all the projects I've placed on my plate, haha. As it is, with these, I am now putting a big emphasis on just getting painting done. Even if something isn't quite right, I can always strip it and do it again later, but at least for now I have painted minis for the tabletop. 

Hopefully that will mean I can break out the asoiaf minis and have a good few games, both with their own rules and my own homebrew, before too long.

That's all for today, thanks for reading!

The Gunmetal Gladiators! 2 - First Blood on Brighton

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Dark Ages!

When last we left off, the Gunmetal Gladiators had been contracted by the St-Ives Compact, called to defend a border world against Capellan Raiders to free up valuable regular forces for use on other fronts.

Before leaving, Grant Johnson, a follower of the Kuritan Baron and pilot of one of the Company's two Atlases, commissions some upgrades to his ride. These involve a rather complex series of replacements among his weapons and a large number of man-hours of work - these factors combine to mean that his relatively new Techs make a couple of mistakes that cannot be immediately noticed or rectified. One, damage to his 'Mechs knee actuators that would make Death From Above attacks more dangerous, is not particularly worrisome. The second, a malfunction in the 'Mech's ejection seat that means an unlucky pilot will be locked in his 'Mech's cockpit if it is killed, would be more worrisome if it were not for the fact that Johnson pilots an Atlas, among the most well-armoured and armed 'Mechs in the Inner Sphere. It could never be destroyed. Never.

20 days later, the Company lands on Brighton. Barely a day later, they are pushed into the field by their Liaison Officer, ordered to defend a friendly force providing humanitarian aid to a local village struck by a landslide.

The terrain in the Gladiators' Area of Operations is mountainous, with a few valleys, surrounded by jungle, containing roads that lead to the area's main urban centre. These mountains, however, have been upset by the gunfire of the last month, and so their muddy slopes have been of great risk to mountainside villages for a couple of weeks now. The ability to bring supplies out to a stricken community would do a lot to bolster the morale of a population that was conquered recently enough and is already seeing more combat.

The Gladiators' two Heavy 'Mechs, the Warhammer of Baronet-in-disguise Davidson and the Orion of Company Commander Cat, check their ranges to the advancing Medium 'Mechs, as yet unidentified visually. Their Weight Class can be established by our magnetic imaging and seismic sensors.

The enemy, who have largely been running rampant over the area of operations so far with their two companies of BattleMechs being opposed only by Ground Effect Vehicles and Irregular Infantry from the planet's garrison, have sent a Command Lance, a Medium Lance, and a Recon Lance, amounting to a mixture of heavy tanks, BattleMechs of various weights, and infantry for securing the supplies. They intend a show of force, and were not prepared for a full Company of Battlemechs to meet them in the field.

The first shots are traded, and the Uziel of the reality show's main character, Jingfrei, is immediately brought down by focused Gauss rounds from the Rommel Tanks advancing from the West. The highly accelerated slugs crack audibly, even through the canopies of BattleMechs, as they soar between the trees to core the Medium 'Mech without any other warning. The entire Company is quickly shaken to the core - their comrade's fate will be uncertain until they can occupy the ground and identify if he ejected successfully. Failure of the mission will leave them unable to confirm even that - he would then be either a POW or dead, to be determined at a later time.

The Gladiators, having seen the power of the enemy heavy weapons and knowing that they are to be on the defensive in any case, cling to cover and prepare to slug it out with the enemy. The enemy, on the other hand, opts for an aggressive approach. Focusing their fire on the largest target in sight - Johnson's Atlas - they push into the river bed, their tanks taking a hull-down position as they tear up the trees around the 100-ton monster.

Against all expectations, the Atlas collapses, setting fire to the trees nearest to it and crumbling into a pile of screeching metal. Another comrade having fallen to the enemy, the Gladiators step up their efforts further. Kojiro, the Banshee pilot accompanying Davidson, takes up position ahead of the friendly infantry, drawing a great deal of fire that would otherwise be directed at them. (Over the course of the game, the Banshee would be reduced to a single point of structure, but with more attacks missing than hitting, survive while having saved the infantry from many shots that could have been sent their way otherwise)

The Nightsky, piloted by Weinstein, Knight of the Federated Commonwealth, leads the lighter 'Mechs in routing the enemy Medium and Light Lances and clearing the South of the field. The Heavies will begin falling back shortly.

In the meantime, the Gladiators' Light and Medium 'Mechs press the South of the enemy forces, and with the combination of concentrated laser and missile fire and the judicious application of the Nightsky's hatchet, drive the enemy from the trees. At this point, it becomes clear to the enemy commander that they have been beat by this unexpected force.

It is too late, however. Their fighting retreat gives them the chance to retrieve some of their destroyed units to prevent them being salvaged, but their Atlas goes down while covering their rear - it is a machine meant to attack, its speed not allowing for a very elegant retreat at all.

The Gladiators' first engagement has been a resounding success! Per their contract, half the salvage goes to the employer, but this still allows them to claim the Atlas, which will be distributed to a worthy pilot for the next battle.

Jingfrei escaped with no injuries, his ejection seat having functioned as intended and thrown him clear of the Uziel when it was felled in mid-stride.

Even Johnson, with his faulty ejection seat, managed to pull himself from the cockpit before the flames rolled over it, escaping with only some injuries after all.

The final tally - 5 damaged 'Mechs for the Gladiators, 4 destroyed for the enemy, as well as a Squad of Heavy Infantry and two Rommel Tanks.

In the down time while the commanders planned their next move to exploit the victory that surprise had given them - and prepared for a more organized enemy force to face them next time - the characters got up to some randomly generated events. Edgar, Light 'Mech pilot of the Drac Baron's Lance, took up Charcoal Drawing, while Marchand and Khalid, pilots of the Locust and Raven respectively, had a romantic entanglement, perhaps fuelled by the adrenaline of their first combat experience as a company. Davidson, the undercover Baronet, and Cat, leader of the Gladiators, went out afterwards to meet the civilians they had helped supply, and become known to the local population - it was not long before the holovid star was pitching this to local news networks, and offering them all access passes to the finest cuts of the footage being recorded by their Raven.

Tune in next time for the next operation on Brighton, as the Gladiators continue their first week of combat operations!

The Gunmetal Gladiators! 1 - Training on Outreach

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Dark Ages!

Recently, I have begun a campaign of MechWarrior 2nd Edition with a couple of friends, combined with the Alpha Strike rules from Catalyst Game Labs and some random tables from various old Battletech Field Manuals. So far, it has been an eventful first few sessions that I'll be happy to relate - but first, some observations.

First, I will note that I am using the online role-playing game service Roll20 (roll20.net). This is an extremely robust system for gaming with custom tokens and all sorts of music with friends at a distance. It's not as kinetic or - I would argue - as easy to pickup and work with as actual miniatures, but it has definite advantages as far as space and resources go.

Two Lances, having just met at the Hiring Hall on Outreach, square off to determine who will be in charge of their newly formed Mercenary Command

In real life, there is a cost for every duplicate 'Mech you want to field, that means I will almost never have doubles of anything. Similarly, I only have so much table or floor space for laying out battlefields in reality. The virtual world has far larger limits where space and terrain are concerned as well. Roll20 also allows for fairly easy play with Probable Enemy Forces (by hiding unit information until LoS is established), meaning our Cooperative play is feasible with a minimum of off-table bookkeeping.

Roll20 has some downsides as well, though. The interface does not always allow for every option I would like - tracking Heat, Armour, Structure, Critical Hits etc are not nearly as easy as they are with printed Unit Cards, but printed Unit Cards are impractical when playing at a distance as far as sharing information goes. This can be mitigated by using the available status bars for tokens, but takes a bit of work. Additionally, where it comes to laying out terrain in large amounts, the slight lag in the site both in terms of controls and the site's likely not having been designed for large numbers of tokens makes it frustrating to make large areas of terrain - so far, we have not had a battle on an area of a size that would really take advantage of the digital medium. I'm planning to try compensating for that by just using photos of my mapsheets from the tabletop in the future, but these do not quite line up properly when adjusted for the site, and their textures differ quite a bit, so tiling them may look somewhat incongruous. We will see!

The last mechanical factor I want to discuss is the MechWarrior 2nd edition character creation system. While I like the ideas of the Skill selection and academy packages, and I can see the "balancing" aspect of the priority system, we did not like what it did to our characters. Random character creation is a feature I like quite a bit, as taking away some control from the players can make for very interesting characters. This priority system, however, gives a large amount of control to the players, while simultaneously seriously limiting them. It seemed to us that the only way to get someone half-decent (even if they had attended a prestigious combat academy!) was for them to drive a Light 'Mech! By prioritising 'Mech in order to get an Assault or Heavy, they seriously compromised either their Attributes or Skills and condemned themselves to a 7ish+ target number (!), that would easily be compounded to a 10 or more when the enemy did literally anything to earn them some defensive modifiers.

Two Lances of the newly-formed Gunmetal Gladiators engage in a simulated exercise on Outreach against two Lances of AI-controlled opponents

Referencing the Alpha Strike Manual, a Target Number for Regular force soldiers should generally be about 4... 7 is the cutoff for absolute newbies, which we all agreed should not have been the case for Academy-trained MechWarriors! As such, we adjusted all Attribute points allocated to all characters up by 4. This objectively made them fairly overpowered from MechWarrior 2nd Edition standards, but at least made them worth playing in Battletech/Alpha Strike...

The other resources I have been using are No End In Sight and FiveCore, both by Nordic Weasel (FiveCore Company Commander has previously featured on this blog! https://darkageaaron.blogspot.com/2017/04/bledore-vs-sablenoir-skirmish-on.html ). The random tables and guidance for Solo Play AI behaviours, combined with some common sense and unguided rolls between decisions, mean that even though we are playing what should be a Game Mastered system, all three of us are participating as players. I am able to serve as a Pseudo-Game-Master while not compromising my own ability to play and be surprised by the events.

On to the game itself! Each player (3 of us) generated four characters, coming to a Lance each. Many of them were randomly generated, with everything from Priorities to 'Mech assignment rolled for, with a few items cherry-picked to taste.

This resulted in a lance composed of a Kuritan Baron, away from the Draconis Combine, and his entourage, one lance composed of the cast and producer of a 'Mech-based reality show from the Magistracy of Canopus aiming for stardom in real combat before hitting the Solaris VII arenas, and one lance (my own) composed of an unlanded Baronet from the Federated Commonwealth, a servant and two Knights, all undercover and on the run.

Our game takes place in June of 3063 (though we are not paying too much heed to authentic timelines), when all three Lances, with whatever Battlemechs they managed to filch or inherit, meet on the mercenary world of Outreach. The world of Outreach, granted to the Mercenary group Wolf's Dragoons after the Fourth Succession War and having only gained in renown after the invasion of the Clans, calls to any aspiring mercenary, and its multi-spired Hiring Hall offers the location for strangers or old friends to meet and form Mercenary Commands of their own in search of money or freedom.

(It's worth noting that the Field Manual: Mercenaries has some rather scathing statistics about the lifespan and salaries of most mercenaries - if we manage to stay solvent and survive more than a year, we will have beat the odds by far!)

Our characters come together in matches in the simulators, and ultimately the leader of the Drac Baron's entourage, Cat, pilot of a mighty Orion, is appointed leader of the newly-minted Gunmetal Gladiators!

Cat's Light and Medium 'Mechs, a Spider and a Trebuchet respectively, sweep around the holovid stars' Southern flank and bring down their camerawoman in her EW-equipped Raven. They will shortly cut apart the rest of the Lance - in the simulator of course!

As soon as that is sorted out, they put out for contracts - due to the high level of technological advancement (two Atlases and an Orion will do that for a Merc!), the Lance receives a more favourable rating from the Dragoons than may have been expected from their numbers, and before long they are approached by two negotiating teams. The first, from the St-Ives Compact, is to hunt and engage raiders from the Capellan Confederation on the recently conquered world of Brighton. This promises two months of fairly active combat. The second, a Garrison contract on a FedCom world, is immediately discarded by the impetuous bunch, and so they pile onto a DropShip to catch the next train of Jumpships to Brighton!

Tune in next time for the next phase of their story - their first live-fire encounter with Capellan forces on Brighton!

Quick Update!

Hello everyone, and welcome back to the Dark Ages! After a long hiatus (mostly from gaming, less so from painting and planning!) I've managed to get another game on the table!

This time it was just a quick round of DBA3 with my wife, who was kind enough to indulge on a slow evening. We r.ployed my Wars of the Roses Yorkist and Lancastrian armies, on arable terrain with a city in the center.

Since I forget which army is which, I will refer to them as red and blue.

Red (myself) was defending, so I set up my army in a battle line across a field, with one unit of Blades detached to hold the city, and a unit of Psiloi detached into the woods on my left. Blue set up opposite, with no terrain of note to deal with. On the first bound, we established that the fields were dry and hard, offering no terrain penalties.

Both armies pressed forward, and Blue's Blades threw themselves into the fray in the city - with extraordinary luck, they immediately routed the defenders, and set to plundering!

The rest of Blue's army advanced and dressed off to face Red, and we were set for a general advance until Blue's general began shuffling her forces, trying to bring more bows to bear and maneuver her piles around the city to join in.

Sensing opportunity, Red's general and his Knights rushed forward and hit the enemy's left. In the ensuing melee, Blue lost Blades, her General, and her Psiloi, leaving the Blue army routing in tatters, and the path open to her camp for the impetuous Knights.

All in all, it was short and sweet as all DBA3 games are, and despite having lost familiarity with the rules over time we picked them back up reasonably quickly (though we may have played cities wrong? With the exception of one lost unit for Red the city had little effect on the battle overall).

It is also always fun to break out the sand table. It is very well suited to DBA, allowing one to go through the terrain setup quickly and kinetically, and providing, in my opinion, a much more aesthetic effect than terrain plonked on a mat possibly could.

Until next time!

20th Century Wargame test

Hello again, and welcome back to the Dark Ages!

I know it's been a while, but real life and distractions tend to have that effect on my blogging. I have something new to document, and it's kind of cool in my opinion, though, so here I am!

For a little while, I've been tinkering with some rules for 20th century wargaming on the tabletop. Well, I've been tinkering with many rules, but these are the ones that are of importance today, as I have finally put them to the table for a playtest!

Wildman that I am, I didn't set up a remotely balanced test, but it was fun to get the dice out and the little men running about a bit to see what happened, and I think the rules are at least fairly solid. They certainly call for another test!

The entire short game listed below took two "rounds" in game, and only one hour, which bodes well for a relatively fast playing game as I had desired. They also had a feel of realism, and though I have a few tables to refer to in gameplay, it was not overburdened with paperwork. A few redundant or forgettable rules were highlighted as well, so altogether, a worthwhile endeavour!





We join two sections from the Régiment de la Chaudière as they advance along a country road, towards a small farmhouse believed to be in German hands.

Not only is it held by Germans, there are three whole Gruppe of panzergrenadiers there, ragged from retreating but determined to fight.







Here we have a period photo from the point of view of the Canadians on the road :



The game begins with the MG42 team on the hillside overlooking the road, instructed to give security while the 3 Gruppe performed basic make and mend or training activities, opening up on the Canadians in the open.

They don't hit anyone, but begin to inflict Stress (a cumulative measure of morale effects under my rules) on the Canadian section. I track the stress with a red die, and the actions remaining to the leader with a green die.



The Canadians return fire with a Bren team along the side of the road, and kill the loader for the MG team, applying some stress as well.



With no more units in LoS of each other and wishing to fire, the Canadians run to cover along the orchard hedge on the side of the road, and the German Gruppe in the woods crests the small hill separating them from the second Canadian section. The hardest fighting is about to start, with close range fire exchanged constantly. The Canadians in the woods move through the trees to make themselves harder to hit, and the fire begins. The Canadians are immediately laid into by the Gruppe's full firepower, and take one casualty. However, the stress from firing prompts an Unpredictable Reaction (a roll on a random event table), which allows them to treat his wounds immediately, and not lose one man for a whole round to providing first aid.


The Germans on the hill looking down on the Canadians in the woods.

The Canadians' second Bren team engages the Germans on the hill, and takes out one rifleman, but it isn't enough. The German MG42 in the cabin parking lot opened up on the Canadians by the orchard then, inflicting one casualty and suppressing them.


The Canadians by the Orchard about to receive fire.

As the Germans continue to win the initiative and get lucky with their firing, things for the Canadians, particularly in the woods, go from bad...



to worse...



By the end of round two, the Germans have pinned the troops in the woods as well as the troops by the orchard, and the Canadian section in the woods surrenders, while the other falls back at speed. Their patrol has been defeated and turned away, and quite soundly at that.


The Rearmost German Gruppe prepares to receive prisoners.

As I said before, quick-playing and not inauthentic feeling - however, I need a better scenario to test it on next time!

Let me know if you have questions, or if you want to see more, and I hope to see you back around next time!

Happy Canada Day and a question!

Good morning!

First off, Happy Canada Day to all! It's unpleasantly rainy here today, which means most festivities may end up being postponed - hopefully you're having more summery weather!

Quick post today, mainly centered around a question I have. I acquired a copy of the old board game NATO : The Next War in Europe relatively recently, and have been really looking forward to playing it. The concept, a strategic-scale wargame of the first days of a Warsaw Pact offensive into Western Europe, with rules for nuclear and chemical warfare, really appeals to me. The counters are nice, with good NATO symbology, and the rules, while long, are comprehensive, and it seems to me like they would be fairly intuitive to learn if I could just start the game.

That's the thing, though. I haven't managed to start the game yet, because sorting through the hundreds of counters to just start the game is so time-consuming and, frankly, daunting. I get most of the way through the US forces about a half-hour in, look at the remaining NATO piles and the tower of WP markers, sigh, and pack it up because I need to do something else.

Now, I don't expect a strategic game like that to be a pick-up and play title, over in an hour, but I'd appreciate any tips anyone has on organizing the game materials or something, so that I can get the game started in a reasonable time and set it back up later if I need to take a break because I have a life.

The box comes with a cute plastic rack, but besides the cover needing to be weighed down at all times to prevent counters fleeing their assigned spots, there aren't enough spots to subdivide the counters in any useful way. You can split each country off (with 3 spots for WP forces), and put all the game counters in the two remaining spots, but you still have to sift through multiple handfuls of counters to find the right ones for setting up each nation. I've considered Ziplocs, but I'm not sure what the most efficient organization would be.

Thanks for your help if you have any ideas at all, and thanks especially for coming by this blog! I hope you've found something you like, and I promise to get something with pictures posted up again... eventually!

Last Weekend

Hello, and welcome back to the Dark Ages!

Just a quick update today - I've been doing some gaming, but took no pictures :(

So I'll just briefly discuss what I did, and hopefully get pics next time I get around to playing some tabletop games.

First off, I tested my edits to the Dark Souls : The Board Game rules with two other players. Given that we were three, the game was fairly easy - not to mention that we forgot one element of difficulty. That said, they still need work. The iteration as we played it removed every single die roll from the game. This made for a fairly enjoyable and faster playing version of the Board Game, and one that your friends probably wouldn't hate you for making them play - after all, we won, and quite soundly.

The issue here is I have only tested it with three players so far. If it is more difficult but still playable with one player, I may have found my desired solution, making it somewhat of a party game with groups and more of a strategy and logic game with a deal of challenge when solo. Unfortunately, I think it may be too difficult solo, even impossible, with deterministic damage values. Part of this is just the toolbox I'm using - the way encounters are determined and how they work inherently guarantees single players get ganked, and multiple players get to spread the damage. There is no sneaking by, only drawing the aggro of single opponents, or speccing and kitting to go fast enough to attack multiple times against slower opponents.

Some of this I may still be able to solve, we'll see - so in summary, DS:BG project still ongoing.

The other thing I did was a game of Form Line of Battle, a 16th-19th c. naval wargame, with my wife. We played out the Chase of the Droits de l'Homme (https://threedecks.org/index.php?display_type=show_battle&id=684) pitting the French 3rd rate ship of the line Droits de l'Homme against the dynamic duo of British ships, the 5th rate Frigate Amazon and the famous 3rd rate ship of the line Indefatigable, commanded by Sir Edward Pellew himself. (that may only make sense if you have read/watched any of the Horatio Hornblower related media available out there - highly recommended to those with even a mild interest in the age of sail)

The action was fairly brutal, with a poor crew on the Droits de l'Homme restricting her maneuvering, but even though she was battered to within an inch of being mission-killed, she succeeded in passing by her pursuers (we played by setting up on opposite edges of a 3x2 ft board, with the short span between us, and halving all distances provided by the Form Line of Battle rules), faking out the Indefatigable and making her way to the edge of the board, winning what was surely a Pyrrhic victory. Just as in real life, the Droits de l'Homme had been splintered and her crew decimated. It's not hard to imagine her running aground shortly thereafter as occurred historically as well.

It's worth noting that even though we determined the ship's crew and command skills randomly, the way they came out seemed quite appropriate. The poor crew and average command of the French ship more than made up for her superior firepower against the excellently crewed and led British ships, meaning that if I had not been able to maneuver myself away thanks to a few lucky rolls, I would have been so many splinters in the ocean. Historically, the French ship had been crippled in a squall shortly before the action, so instead of tacking it on my sailors I could say that the damage to our rigging was what impeded our turning and tacking.

All in all both games were enjoyable, and I hope the next time I break one or both out I remember to record it better for posterity.

As a last postscript, I am about to enter a new phase in my career that may take up still more of my time. While long absences from the blog are no new thing, I will console myself by saying that at least I warned you this time.

Thanks again for your time, and I hope to see you in the comments below here and reading my future posts.