Tuesday, 5 May 2020

Life is about Discovering New Things

Today I discovered that there is a range of colourshifting metallic miniature paints called Turbo Dork!!

My particular favourites are:

Turbo Dork Afterburner
Afterburner
Turbo Dork Forest Flux
Forest Flux
Turbo Dork Ground is Lava
Ground is Lava
Turbo Dork Shell Shocked
Shell Shocked

If anyone wants to donate a pot for me to test please feel free to contact me via the comments below.

Monday, 4 May 2020

Star Wars Day 2020 - May The Fourth Be With You!

This years #StarWarsDay finds us in lockdown and whilst The New Trilogy is still a festering sore in it's cinematic legacy there is still much to be celebrated.

 Enjoy your holiday and fill yourself with A New Hope.




Reaper Bones #15 - The Road Warrior - Mad Max

This week we hit the big 50 and to celebrate I share with you another classic miniature:

Rex, Dark Future Hero (Tim Prow SKU:80009)

This guy has been called many things over the years; The Road Warrior, The Bronze, The Dark One, a raggedy man, Captain Walker, a scavenger and even a blood bag.  Most of us just know him as Mad Max.

Armed with his trusty sawed-off double barrelled shotgun (and less trusty ammo) he cuts the perfect silhouette in the post apocalyptic wasteland.  In the kickstarter he was packed with the Chronoscope miniatures, but let's face it, he's a genre all to himself!

Reaper Bones Rex Dark Future Hero (Mad Max The Road Warrior)

Bones Progress

Reaper Bones: 245 - Painted: 50

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Saturday, 2 May 2020

Justifiers - Long Dead Game Unofficial Miniatures Review

Last week I blogged about my love of one particular long dead game from the 80s, Justifiers RPG.

I have subsequently unearthed some of the custom miniatures I made for each of the player characters.

Justifiers was already dead when I acquired my copy and it was never a big game to begin with.  There were never any officially licensed miniatures and back in those days sci-fi minis were very much dominated by the Grim Dark 40K style.  There was a very small cottage industry of gaming miniature makers like Denizen but they were focusing on anime and movie properties.  There was nothing I could do but make my own.

Custom Justifiers RPG Miniatures
Custom Justifiers PC Minis (LtoR: Fox, Rhino, Gazelle, Bat and Owl)
I wanted the characters to be wearing their company issue vacc suits, so I turned to the nearest simalcrum 1/72nd scale flight crew.  Specifically I chose the the Italieri #1246 Nato Pilots and Ground Crews box set which you can still get today from Amazon

#1246 Nato Pilots and Ground Crews Buy From Amazon
A bit of Milliput sculpting later and I had added the necessary ears, horns, wings, snouts and other animal features to turn these into the required Fox, Rhino, Gazelle, Bat and Owl miniatures to match my players characters.

Needless to say these went down a storm and the other miniatures from the set were given a liberal black undercoat and left to represent NPCs.  The game plot was essentially an escape from a rival corporate spaceyard, so I bought a box of Russian Infantry to be the enemy force.  I have a feeling they were also by Italieri or Airfix.


Being plastic these are too lightweight to be left unbased and I chose the extravagant option of mounting them to 5p pieces (1p pieces were too large).

The moral of this tale is that you can still give your long dead games some table time with a bit of imagination and a few plastic soldiers.

If you want to relive the 80s and play the Justifiers RPG you can buy the watermarked PDF from DrivethruRPG

Old School RPGs - Available Now @ DriveThruRPG.com

Thursday, 30 April 2020

Lasers & Feelings: How can you fit so much game in just 1 sheet of A4?

The April 2020 RPG Blog Carnival hosted by Codex Anathema has the interesting theme of "To Boldly Go" which for me only means one thing... Star Trek.

Star Trek in a Single Page

I'm a big fan of Indie RPGs and when I make my annual pilgrimage to London's biggest RPG convention, Dragonmeet, I always try to get myself in on a game run by the London Indie RPG Meetup Group.  Games are pitched every hour, on the hour and usually run for 2 to 3 hours.  It is very rare that I can't get a game of something at the first attempt.

I first encountered Lasers & Feelings at one such Dragonmeet and was blown away by it's simplicity.  The entire game, including the plot generator, fits on one sheet of A4.  The game unashamedly harks back to the halcyon days of Star Trek (TOS) with its focus on derring do and emotionally chargeds romantic encounters.

Skills (Lasers and Feelings)

The core mechanic of the game revolves around two skills, Lasers (all the physical stuff and technical stuff) and Feelings (all the intuition and emotional stuff).  When you generate your character you choose where on the scale of 2 to 5 you want to be, The higher the number the more adept at Lasers, the lower the number the more adept at Feelings.

Skill checks are done with 1 or more D6 with Laser success rolling BELOW your skill number and Feelings ABOVE your skill number.  A roll of exactly your skill number results is known as LASER FEELINGS and you get to ask the GM a question which he will answer honestly.

Star Trek Original Series Painting
These people are not meekly going on a space adventure

This sort of super simple system often results in Lasers characters being required to make Feelings rolls and the system includes a mechanic for helping out your crewmates by lending them a die.  Counting the number of successes

Like a lot of Indie RPGs the game lends itself to players contributing ideas on the fly from worldbuilding to storyline.  The best games I've played and run have always built upon the skeleton of the Adventure Creator with the best ideas being supplied by the players.  If you are going to try it unleash your imagination and you will have a blast.



Thanks of course go to Of Dice and Dragons for continuing to promote the RPG Blog Carnival.  This is my 6th entry and you can read the rest by clicking the RPG Blog Carnival tag below.