15mm Judge Dredd: The Justice Department

My current penchant is for Judge Dredd, so I dug out some old Laserburn Lawmen which had been gathering dust and decided to splash some paint on them

Street Judges

You can never have enough rank and file street judges on hand when your PCs have just ordered a Crime Blitz or as crowd control reinforcements at that Ugly Pageant.

Standard Justice Department loadouts are the order of the day, but may be augmented with the ever popular Widowmaker 2000 magazine-fed automatic shotgun.  Sometimes a stern warning falls on deaf ears.

Riot Squad

Probably the hardest working Division (also the highest injury rate) of the Justice Department.  Everyone does their stint on the Riot Squad at least once a week.  Some Judges volunteer for Riot Squad duty but the Psyche Squad are always on hand with their evaluation surveys to root out those bad apples that like the detail just that little too much.  You never can be too careful.

The standard loadout for a Riot Squad is augmented with the MkIV extra long daystick, a stumm gas mortar and a riot foam thrower for when things get a little too heated.

Wally Squad

The undercover Judges of the Justice Department (colloquially known as Wally Squad) are indistinguishable from your everyday citizen.

Reaper Bones #39 - Human Barbarian, Goldar

By Crom this guy has an interesting pose.  It's screaming "Come and have a go if you think you're hard enuff!!"

Human Barbarian, Goldar - Matt Gubser (SKU 77047)

My first Matt Gubser miniature and looking back at his back catalogue in the Reaper Figure Finder, I can see some great sculpts.  Matt has since turned his attention to flexing his comedic muscles in stand up comedy, but there is nothing funny about Goldar.

Human Barbarian, Goldar (SKU 77047)

Bones Progress

Buckaroo Banzai - Probably the Greatest Cult Movie in the World

I get a lot of flack from my friends at Dragonskeep Roleplay Club about my tastes in movies.  I'm accused of liking a lot of garbage, but in my defence I watch a lot of films.  The good, the bad, the ugly, the popular, the art house, the esoteric, I will give any movie a go and, as my step daughter will attest, I even cried during the end of Hannah Montanna!

The reason I watch so many films is simply to expose myself to story ideas.  As a Games Master, I rework, hack, borrow, pay homage and down right steal these ideas and use them in my own games.  In fact borrowing these story elements is an essential skills when creating your own stories for Tabletop RPG Games.  

What's New Buckaroo?

Buckaroo Banzai or to use its full title The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the 8th Dimension (1984) is a low budget sci-fi written by Earl Mac Rauch and directed by W.D. Richter (Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Big Trouble in Little China, Brubaker).

The movie follows one adventure of polymath Buckaroo Banzai (Peter Weller) who is a skilled neurosurgeon, rock musician, crime fighter and test pilot as he uncovers an insidious alien invasion by the Red Lectroids from Planet 10.

Buckaroo is ably assisted by his team of crimefighters / band mates, the Hong Kong Cavaliers and by a secret network of civillian volunteers known as the Blue Blaze Irregulars.  Buckaroos connections within the Government run deep and is often called on by the president to resolve issues in times of National Emergency.

Wow that's a Lot of Ideas

Absolutely and it only gets worse.  Buckaroo Banzai is like an onion being peeled, each layer reveals another underneath.  It's a classic story of boy meets girl, boy loses girl, boy saves world from an alien invasion and finally gets the girl wrapped in a shell of barely explained world building which creates tantalising visions of a fully developed and lived in universe.  A classic example is the famous waternelon scene, but I'll tell you later about that one.  

My own particular favourite is the idea that the famous radio broadcast of War of the worlds on October 30th 1938 was in fact an eyewitness account of the Lectroid invasion.  I also love the idea that there is an entire secret network of Buckaroo fans out there who are willing to lend a hand at the drop of a hat is a really useful concept for any GM out there thinking about doing some world building.

Rick and Morty takes the idea of the polymath to the extreme, but I love the Secretary of Defense (Matt Taylor) who is a slimy politician that knows he is completely out of his depth by comparison.  Buckaroo is a loyal subject and gives the government his expertise because he loves his country and wants to help.  Rick on the other hand is contemptuous of everyone.      

Before they Were Famous

I've mentioned our titular hero, but the film has a stellar cast of actors many of whom have gone on to become huge hollywood stars and household names.  Just look at this cavalcade of talent:

• Peter Weller as Buckaroo Banzai
• John Lithgow as Emilio Lizardo / Lord John Whorfin
  
• Jeff Goldblum as New Jersey
  
• Christopher Lloyd as John Bigbooté
• Ellen Barkin as Penny Priddy (Pretty Penny get it)
• Clancy Brown as Rawhide
• Vincent Schiavelli as John O'Connor
  

They Don't Make Them Like This Anymore

Well this isn't strictly true, the Hollywood studio system has emasculated the auteur director and subjected movies to an endless hell of screenings and audience ratings.  There are a handful of directors who have enough weight to just do their own thing but they are thin on the ground.

My search for those stories which don't get told and don't get the big studio budget is how I get tarred with the bad movie taste brush.  If you want to be wowed by big special effects then go see a Michael Bay movie, but if you want to see a story that you've not seen before then you need to look past the explosions and the flimsy walls and open your mind.

I Bought Another RPG... Flotsam

In a recent article I wrote on the Dragons Keep Roleplay Club site in support of the November 2021 RPG Blog Carnival, I mentioned my love of Indie TTRPGs.  

One such game I namedropped as a "Would love to Play" was Flotsam from Black Armada Games.  Well I couldn't resist and handed over my cash to the eBay gods. 

Flotsam: Adrift Among The Stars

The premise is simple, you live in the underbelly of a spacestation.  Unseen and unheard you are the underclass of society, the renegades and misfits that the more prosperous society above cares not to think about.  The game cites such inspiration such the belters of The Expanse, the folk of Downbelow from Babylon 5 but this is a story told many times in the stories of underclass struggle seen in Asimov's Foundation or even Anime such as Battle Angel Alita or Megazone 23.  

Flotsam: Adrift Among the Stars - Joshua Fox (Black Armada)

 
Interesting Game Concept 

Whilst the game has the standard Player Character that we all know and love, it introduces the interesting concept of a secondary character known as the situation.  Situations are the world building element to the game and the way in whihc you introduce threats and complications into the lives of your characters.  

This is not a Rulebook, It's a Way of Life

If your only experience of Roleplaying Games is Dungeons and Dragons then this might come as a bit of a culture shock.  Flotsam is more or less a guidebook on how to run a GMless narrative story.  This is something I have, in middle age, come to embrace through my exposure to Indie TTRPGs like Fiasco! and The Quiet Year.  Flotsam is a game in this vein and is very much focused on the relationships between players as they struggle with everyday life and the challenges that situations throw at them. 

Collaborative world building is a fun way to run a game as everyone gets to contribute their ideas into the mix rather than following a prescribed narrative written by one mind.  Each player gets to introduce their own situation which makes for a much more complex and nuanced experience as characters struggle to deal with the various competing priorities.  Players will make decisions in a much more organic way based on perceived threat and poor information, a totally different kind of play compared to traditional roleplaying games where players come preloaded with information about the world.    

First Impressions

This is a first impressions article and I have yet to bring this to the table but with the festive season fast approaching and the possibility of a Christmas Eve Friday with low attendance, this might just make an appearance.  Fingers crossed.

If you have played a game let me know how it went in the comments below.

15mm Judge Dredd - The Media and Miscellaneous Bad Guys

Well my obsession with 15mm Judge Dredd hasn't waned and I have been busy with the old brush painting up a storm.

Media Teams

The Roman poet Juvenal is alleged to have once said of the Roman people, "Give them Bread and Circuses".  An astute observation that it is much simpler to way to generate public approval by diversion, distraction or by satisfying the most immediate or base requirements of a populace than to , actually provide a public service or create great policy.  This is definitely the sort of thing Judge Cal would have approved of and, to be frank, is a practice readily condoned by the Justice Department, who charged with the responsibility of maintaining law and order in Mega City One need every trick in the book, however old. 

Part of that entertainment is the double edged sword that is the roving media teams that seem to pop up at every public event no matter how small.  In fact the demand for constant 24hr coverage has led some unscrupulous channels to hack into the municipal eye in the sky surveillance system just to meet the demand for new content.  This raw feed has led to them feeling the wrath of the Justice Department and tampering with city infrastructure carries a heavy sentence of 10 years.

Most media organisations like to do it the old school way and hire crews who roam the city looking to feed their daily quota of content.  Here are three such teams of reporters, camermen and hover cams ready to report for duty and capture the mundanity of life in all it's technicolour, Tri-D TV glory.

Cult of the Octopus God

Below City Bottm lies the Undercity.  The concreted over remains of 20th Century New York, home to the troggs, scavs and muties who have built their own rudimentary society in what is left of the old world.  Some of these unfortunates band together in packs, drawn together by a sense of family or a shared mutation.

One such group are the Cultists of the Octopus God.  The unspeakable Elder God who sleeps in an underwater city waiting for the moment when the stars align.  Then and only then will he arise and conquer the surface world devouring all the humans who stand in his way of total domination.  Well at least that's what it said in the guidebook...

Dragonites

The Galaxy of the 22nd Century is a pretty big place and Mega City often features as an interesting holiday destination for alien species from far and wide.  However, it also attracts its fair share of unwanted attention from the numerous warlike species who see it as a crowning jewel to add to their burgeoning Empire.

The Dragonites heard about Earth from their reptillian cousins the Kleggs who had suffered an embarrasing defeat at the hands of one human lawman.  They fled Earth some time ago and speak in hushed tones of the one they call "The Dread".  Dragonites are of course made of much sterner stuff than Kleggs, better armed, more resilient and with a brain the size of an orange, they are much cleverer to boot.