Friday, May 18, 2018

The Children of Gmork for RT/Inq28

I was looking at these Chaos Marines and Space Wolves bits, thinking about why I keep them, and I couldn't think of a good reason at that moment, and then the Internet showed me a very brief advertisement for a new GW skirmish game named Rogue Trader, I guess, but not the same one from 1986.

And I was going to use the SW bits for my Amber College Dungeonbowl kitbashery, just because, but it got me motivated some to sculpt some tabards and robes to put underneath all these leftover CSM  bits, and to use to make a Necromunda Chaos Cult with.

I think I will stat them up in RT1e and maybe convert to Necromunda 17 for a kick.

Interestingly, there is a work-up of Inq28 for Necromunda 2017, already! Which you can find on Yaktribe if you go looking!

Mostly, my ideas for the thing are based around:



Gmork, from the Neverending story. The big wolf that hunts Atreyu (Noah Hathaway, yo!). Servant of The Nothing, sent by The Manipulators to turn the people of Fantasia/Fantastica into Lies in the Real World. Starring: the GW Warg leader, or maybe just a Fenrisian wolf, a one of these barghests I have laying around.



This page of Tzeentch Chaos Renegades from the RT1 era. which I have seen painted all kinds of cool ways, and which I lusted after as a kid - let's face it, those RT Chaos SM were infintely weirder and cooler and more Xaos than the recent ones, which are still pretty cool.

This illustration of what must be CSM but which I took to be a very very weird regular space marines picture, because in my pre-teen mind I made no clear distinction between the good guys and bad guys and maybe even RT didn't make a good distinction, either?

And to use up all these Space Wolves bits and turn them to Evil Ends. I really sort of want to sculpt and cast a squad's worth of filthy, tattered tabards and weird biomechanical neck veins and horned skull helmets and weird insectile-robot arms.

anyways, a cult of Chaos Undivided/Malloc that is bent on dissolution and annhilitaion of everything, not just some dumb aggression.  Fill in the gaps with robots, adeptae mechanicae scumbags, and converted IG and gang-types

We'll see! Fingers crossed.  The Emperor is a Corpse! The Nothing is Coming!

Friday, April 6, 2018

Foul and Deep and Poopy

ALL THIS SEWER DELVING IS GIVING ME THE SPOTS
Let's talk for a second about the term 'Fatberg', shall we?

I can do that. I'm a dad. I can say 'poopy' and without irony and it's totally fine. I say to normal adults all the time "HEY MAN I GOTTA GO POTTY BE RIGHT BACK" before I even understand what is coming out of my mouth. It's a byproduct of fatherhood, and I hope that one day it will pass. I would never say SHIT at my house unless my kid was asleep since, excuse me!, that's a potty word.

A disclaimer, here. I kept hearing about the Barrowmaze a couple years ago. I guess I'd been out of the RPG scene for a long time, maybe 12 to 15 years depending how you reckon it. I was looking for PbP forums to get back into it, sort of low-commitment. Heh! Don't let anybody tell you that PbP is low commitment, by the by. Anyway, I stumbled upon Daniel Bishop's Barrowmaze PbP and quickly found I had little knowledge of the system (DCC) and not nearly enough time to stay on top of it, and so I found GeePlus and thus was history. I wouldn't have found DCC without lagging behind in Daniel's game, and so I shelled out the squibs for a PDF and haven't been impressed like that since maybe the first time I read my AD&D1e DMG!

I have a soft spot for DCC, and Daniel Bishop's stuff. There. I coulda said just that and been fine.

I picked up "Both Foul and Deep" which appeals to the "Underground Explorer" part of my brain. I think when we think of adventures in sewers, we think of "Big Trouble In Little China", the escape from Ladyhawke, and the only other examples I can recall are like C.H.U.D. and some really awful scenes in Aliens Vs. Predator II, and maybe I guess the climax of "IT" by Stephen King. For those, it's drippy water, narrow walkways, and rats. Lots of rats. There's an Indian Jones sewer scene. A lot of CRPGs start with Rats in Sewers. Elder Scrolls: Arena. Lots of Neverwinter Nights freebie modules (i think the sewer steam tunnel set was one of the better ones). I think that we ROMANTICIZE the fantasy sewer, oddly enough, and think that it's a good place to have adventures. We're probably REALLY thinking of the Catacombs of Paris and London and Rome when we think about sewer adventures, when in reality a sewer crawl would be awful, wet, cramped, and torturous. I think this may be the first product I've ever seen that really addresses just how much SHIT you'd find and how sick you'd get if you are so bold and rather let's say FOOLHARDY to go into the sewers of any medieval metropolis, fantasy or no (in reality, I don't think we really had sewers until the early part of the modern era, like maybe late 1800 's early 1900's).

There is a lot of poop in this product. A lot of feces. A torrent of shit. A river of shit. A lot of slime, sewage, and disease. Plenty of awful monsters that have poopy abilities and none would be a good way to die, and all of them would probably not be fun to fight. There's some rationale for having humanoid/human encounters in the sewers - really everybody and everything else you meet down there are likely to be desperate and murderous or at least have the potential for it.

There's a brief adventure/starter with some novel encounters, a couple of dozen new monsters (terrifying owing to their ferocity and filthiness),  also a DCC Patron at the end. I would bond a PC to the Patron Squallas just to drown an enemy in an extradimensional river of shit just one time.

The production values are high, the writing is intelligent and terse, and the Carrion Moth and the Phantom Gentleman are worth the reasonable price of admission. The question remains: how would I tempt the PC's to enter into the accurately-rendered shitty environs of the sewers of say the 3e Ravenloft undercity of Paridon? Poop smells bad! Poop in a toilet smells bad! Poop in the open smells bad (I drove by Tijuana once, I'm just saying)! Poop on the inside the endless world beneath the toilet probably also smells bad!

Fatberg. Look it up!

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