Fuck Yeah Noise Marines

Instant Easy Lazy Dungeon Blocks

Oh my, wherever did this solid dense chunk of dungeon scenery come from? Surely Mister S such craftsmanship and verisimilitude must be expensive, not to mention heavy?

BY NO MEANS! It did, in truth, begin life as a humble pale hunk of mere styrofoam.
The nice part about using styrofoam is you pretty much get a new chunk of dungeon every time you have to replace a major appliance. This here Ghost Tower of Inverness-style dungeon trap came with my new Mac...
So really, this is cake easy--you can do it in like 3 minutes, seriously.

Get some black acrylic. Thin it in water. Why acrylic? Because enamel and oil are sticky and smell bad and hard to thin and because tempera flakes right off and gouache is just expensive tempera and ink and watercolor are just for people who don't know that acrylic is cheaper and does the same thing if you thin it down.
So you get a big floppy brush and dip it in there. Be SURE to use a Cherry Dr Pepper bottle--other bottles will not work.

Remember: Do all this in a clean, dry area--or not, you could just do it on your 80-year old hardwood floor. Fuck it, it's acrylic, cleans up with water.

It might kinda look wrong at first, just add lotsa paint and lotsa water, it'll settle...I personally find the texture can be either Old School Gray Dungeon or do double duty as Brutalized Postapocalyptic Concrete...

It dries pretty fast and voi-fucking-la...
Also, it's fun to throw them at people and they're like Aaaaahh....ohit'sjustafakerockaren'tyoucharming

So, yeah, ReduceReUseRecycleDumpsterDive all that good stuff and pretty soon you'll have an insane looking dungeon and your players will be like Wow where did you get the idea for that 3-tiered-arena? and you can be all It came to me on a vision quest in the desert instead of saying it's actually just the negative space around a coffee maker.

An Embarrassment of Impressive (& More Pie Charts)

Finally finished reading all the way through Secret Santicore and I have to re-say: it is very good. Like I can't think of the last time I saw anything published (for money or otherwise) that had this much stuff that was actually going straight into my game immediately.

People keep asking for The Complete _________(something other than a city)_____ Kit? Well a lot of what would go into a thing like that is right in this obscure little pdf. (And it's nice to see many of the Hack Vornheim Contest winning DMs continuing to come up with creative stuff here.)


The little details really make a huge difference here: like Jeremy Duncan's Vat Spawn character class? Ho hum more mutants, yeah yeah, weird weird--but he tells you they are immortal and their whole personality and skillset 're-boot' every 100 years. That explains so much and suggests so many possibilities. Plus the actual mutations and weirdnesses he gives them seem actually thought-out and playable rather than just the typical Dragon Magazine grab-bag of abilities-inspired-by-the-last-movie-I-saw.

Anyway, highly recommended. Again.


Also worth a look: Zombiesmith Miniatures appears to be producing some intriguingly Cobalt 60-ish miniatures, from what I can tell from their extremely poorly-organized site. (No offense, so far as I can tell, all miniatures sites ever are extremely poorly organized. Whats up with that?)
Aaaaand here are some entirely unrelated infographics regarding the girls' race and class choices over the course of all sessions. I have limited the info to only PCs in games I GMed in order to avoid filling my head with even more useless data and maybe accidentally crowding out things like what month it is and what city I am in.

F--king hydra.

These are my hydras. They are crawling on some homemade terrain during a game of anarchist Warhammer 40k. Yes the spraypaint is terrain.
Here is the thing you maybe can't see very well about my hydras in the pictures: they suck.

Why? Because every round they regenerate on a 5 or 6. Or allegedly they do. Though Viv had one and I had one and they were the last foes to die in this game, they did not roll a 5 or 6 on a d6 once in the whole goddamn game.
Fuck you hydras. Fuck your 5-headed scenery-climbing asses. You are losers.

Ever have a nemesis? I have a nemesis. His name is Cameraman Darren. To kill time while we wait around Hollywood for Hollywood people with Hollywood problems we play games.

Sometimes he wins, sometimes I win, and this is all tolerable and all in good fun when it is a battle of wits--as it often is. It is good to have a Karpov. But sometimes he just wins by fucking raw luck. And when this happens it's infuriating.
It's infuriating because just because he won by pure luck and knows he won by pure luck it doesn't stop him from saying smug things like "Well part of my strategy was to win by sheer good luck."
I suck at rolling dice, pretty much. When I'm DMing this is a pretty decent talent on accounta it allows me to set up seemingly unwinnable tension-crank situations and then say like "Ok, you all die if I roll better than a 2" and then I don't. Which is fun. It spreads a feeling of warmth and peace to know god hates you but is powerless to do anything about it. But when I'm playing? fuck that.
So in this like 3way Warhammer game versus me and Viv I'm thinking "Well my dice suck, but Viv's dice don't suck, so Cameraman Darren's natural favored-by-Jesus status means nothing..."
But no. Round One: I lose a Marine to Viv on account of the random scenery distribution puts my guy at a natural 2-to-1 disadvantage and initiative puts him last on account of I'm a gentleman and am like "Viv's never played before, she can go before me". Round 2: I lose a Terminator (who cannot shoot straight) to Darren, leaving me with just a hydra. Meanwhile Darren takes out Viv's witch and tyranid in one (followfire) shot, leaving her with one hydra.

This leaves Dr Smug with all his guys and me and Viv with one hydra each. And then they just wallow in the gunsights, taking a ridiculously long time to chew up the cannon fodder and not regenerating for like an hour and a half. Fuck you hydras. Fucking hydras.

Now Cameraman Darren alleges his catastrophe-spike goes both ways. He claims he accidentally blew up a city in R0lemaster rolling a negative 300+ anticrit. But whatever. I haven't seen it.

And I wish I could bask in the comfort of all your comments about such holes as you think there are in the 40k system, but, no, this is homemade version and I pretty much rebuilt the whole thing form the chassis up. It was not Games Workshop's fault: it was all down to the dice, and the dice were determined to dispense ignominious death. Fate, I despitheth thee...

Fucking guy...someday...

Last Night's Game In 9 Pictures

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(Visual aids, terrain, and minis used during the TMNT adventure in The Red Palace.)

Oh, and for those keeping up with the rules hacks--removing SDC worked out fine. Felt just like D&D.

Chgowiz, Maze, Minis, Pigs etc.

-First off, RPG blogger Chgowiz is back. This is excellent news if you happen to be a smart person who likes reading about how other smart people play the games that you play.*

His focus has always been on how the game actually works when it's right there in front of you and on getting new people to play. Of which focus this blog mightily approves.

-Y'know how, when someone casts a Maze spell, the victim has to wander in it "for a period of time entirely determined by the creature's intelligence". Well how about some of that "player skill not character skill"? Go here and make a maze to have on hand.

It also works as a cheap dungeon plan generator, if you're having one of those hungover-didn't-prep days.

-I said I was going to write a paean to Shannon, the mini-painter Reaper assigned to "I Hit It With My Axe" as soon as I was able to take a decent picture of the minis she painted? Well here's my best attempt so far:

-Goblin Pigballoon Scout info:
(As Seen On TV)
The pig balloon is generally made by a goblin alchemist. The actual process involves removing the organs and bones, coating the pig with a glossy sealant (often of a gaudy color), and sewing the pig's mouth (and other orifices) shut after filling it with a lighter-than-air substance.

An average pig scout balloon can carry one goblin or one halfling plus 20 gp's weight. Altitude control is not good. The scout is usually armed with vials of standard green slime. Any failed missile attack on the balloon will have a 50% chance of hitting the pig, which will cause the balloon to descend rapidly and comically.

The scout's d20 stats are below, if you're using the old system that's AC 6.

Larger balloons made from giant frogs, giant puffer fish, and even whales have been conjectured but have never been observed.



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*If you're wondering why Chgowiz ever left in the first place, it's because he was sick of internet drama. Those specifically and desperately interested in seeing the last straw (plus some poorly fact-checked guesses about what system my group uses) can look here. It's all over now, though, so if you have some brilliant opinion about it, bear in mind that no-one cares anymore.

Some Pics Satine Took, Plus A Random Treasure Table

So these are from last week when Justine flew in and played.
The reason Kimberly looks like she showed up to play just after auditioning for the role of a porn version of Maude Lebowski is because she showed up to play just after auditioning for the role of a porn version of Maude Lebowski.
(She got it.)
(She also just won Best Actress again, this time at the XBiz Awards, even though they didn't let her in.)

Left to right--Carrion Crawler, (or Rot Grub, if you work at Reaper miniatures and are worried about copyright), Kimberly (on top), Justine (red-head), Connie disguised as a goblin, Mandy, Satine. Frankie was off hiding somewhere (as usual.)

I feel bad about posting a blog full of fluff, so here's a random chart I just now made up...

Treasure Table For When You Realize There Should Be Treasure In a Room But It Hadn't Occurred To You To Write It Up In Advance


1. Gold statuette of a piglet. Is actually a real piglet encased in gold. The piglet is immortal.
2. d4x100 g.p.
3. Looks like a healing potion but it's actually a love potion. Drink it and fall in love with whoever last wounded you.
4. Roll twice.
5. Small carved figurine or chess piece of one of the PCs, precise in every detail, 25-28mm tall. Purpose unknown.
6. d10 x 100 living snails that have been pulled out of their real shells and given specially-made ones cast from pure silver. Each shell is worth 1 s.p. Snails are sentient, communicate telepathically, and will beg PCs not to do pretty much any of the things a PC would want to do with them.
7. An assortment of 10 gems apparently worth d4x100 gp total, 5 are cursed (each in a different way), 5 bless the owner with magical properties (each in a different way). The 5 curses are precisely the opposite of the 5 bonuses and they cancel each other out. Getting rid of any one of the gems will cause its opposite to take effect
8. Small ruined copper golem, about 2 feet tall.
9. Small, elaborately carved stone sphere (or wheel) about half the size of a bowling ball. It can be used as a hamster wheel or hamster ball, however--if any being larger than a cat is shrunk by magical means and placed inside the ball or wheel and begins to move, the creature becomes unstoppable--able to roll through walls and obstacles as if they were cobwebs.
10. This:

Le Tyrranoeil, C'est Different, C'est Fantastique

Found about the French miniatures company, Fenryll, thanks to this excellent miniatures blog.
They seem like they'd be perfect if you wanted to do a Sword & Planet kind of thing without getting too 40k with it...


The minis are great--I like that they have their own distinct style--but I also dig looking at their site just for the retro-Metal Hurlant/Ralph Bakshi-style paintjobs too...

Can anybody tell me the old pulp sci-fi illustrator I'm thinking of whose art looks like the alien on the far right? Did all that super-smooth sculptural shading over everything?
(BigFella reminded me--Hannes Bok)

Minotaurs

There are some things that are really hard to sculpt properly at miniature scale--foxy women, hydras.

And then there are some things that are very easy to get right--or at least people regularly manage to do it.


Dwarves come out ok quite a bit--and minotaurs.

Man are the miniatures people good at making minotaurs.

I am firmly of the opinion that there should usually be minotaurs. Minotaurs hang out in laybrinths, which are the coolest places to hang out.
Even that Warcraft-looking anime-ish guy up there looks fairly decent.

For more information on minotaurs, visit your local library, or just click
here.









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Video is Kyle Kinane. He rules almost as much as minotaurs, and his first CD just came out.