Wednesday, July 6, 2016

Retinues and Scavvy Hordes (also Genestealers)

Been effing around in the basement.  Had too much coffee the other day and felt an urge for finality that I now know will never ever come.  I will be painting these little people probably until the time I pass away, in little batches of like 2 or 3 forever.

Here's some progress, if you're interested. My buddy is sending me my old genestealers (maybe 2nd edition?) and my original Scavvie gang that I never painted. I think he is going to keep the delaques and plastic orlocks/goliaths and terrain, but hey.  It's cool.
 
Some of these figs have needed a little zazz on 'em for maybe 10 or 12 years.



Saturday, June 25, 2016

IRON WITHIN : IRON WITHOUT

It is clear that this sector's secessionist tendencies is due to a deeper underlying cause; some perverse machine at work under the surface. Under siege is all that is good and unites the Imperium of Man together, as if an Engine of Ill Will drives the machine unions to work against the Adeptii Arbites and the Astartes Soldier Brethren.


The cause must be investigated further and each face that comes to light will be voxcast.

NOTA BENE: This servant's eye units no longer work effectively and suitable cybernetic replacements are requisitioned from the Union storehouse. Please forward a surgical servitor and 2.5 drams of Kalma, as per the previously agreed terms.  The hands shake and perhaps the next requisition forms will include requests for bionic brush holders and magnification elements

Tuesday, June 14, 2016

Gangs of Metro City: BURNING ROAD

 for +Jarrett Crader and +Claytonian JP  and +Tony Tucker  the rest of you people that make me want to create a new thing or play games or both

I call this genre DANGERBOOBIES;this is an example of Cosplay that doesn't maybe read the fluff
i GET A BIT CUNTY ABOUT OTHER PEOPLES' SUCCESS and also when I'm drunk i'm prone to drink and leave the caps lock on and make wild inadvisable boasts like HEY THIS MOVIE I WATCH WHILE IM WAITING FOR ZAKS NEW BOOK TO ARRIVE IS AWESOME AND IT COULD INSPIRE A GAME. You may have heard about my irritating and time-consuming project to turn my awesome Space Dungeon campaign on G+ into a 2D fighting game or maybe not, fuck it, i'll provide a link so you can catch up... Go ahead.  No seriously, I'll wait.

Ok, all done? I know! It's a great idea to me, also!  This post is only tangentially related, but since it's my blog, fuck it, you'll have to bear with me before you get to CONTENT because INSPIRATION etc etc blah blah

the objections to the character are deep and confusing
So anyway, one of the things about Space Dungeon: IN THE MAZE OF THE CYBERLICH is that it's a 2d fighting game all about poor human schmucks and alien schmucks and robot schmucks against the Terrible Horribly Combo-Laden Powers of Evil with Awesome Hypers and so, like in my RPGs generally it's not about the PCs having a chance of winning I mean come on let's be serious this is totally power tripping, here, but it's like every once in a while your schmuck will win a round or score a terrific combo and you'll feel elated for a second and TAKE THAT MOTHERFUCKER and it's a lot like Call of Cthulhu without all that messy fucking around with Sanity scores.  I get plenty of Insanity at work, thanks, and sometimes I just want to beat some shit up with my body instead of my GOODWILL and POSITIVE ESTEEM

and so when I was lining up the Good Guys roster for this thing, I kept thinking about Cody and Guy and Haggar from Final Fight.  If you do not recall, O Phillistine, then let me remind you of the goodness that was the late 80's/early 90's in which my meagre mind was formed, sack full of quarters and a face like it was on fire and somebody put it out with an ice pick.  Double Dragon, Yie Ar Kung Fu, Karate Champ, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat.  Yeah, yeah, I know!  No wonder i'm always picking fights.

Henceforth all game maps will be drawn this way by decree
Anyways, the Final Fight guys didn't make it into my heartbreaker SD2d game, since they were too normal.  But a byproduct of the search was that I found out that Final Fight was based on, nay a blatant copy of, Streets of Fire.

Where am I going with this?

Okay, here's the HACK-a-riffic wall of text you assed for


In BURNING ROAD, there are no classes, only Warriors.  Lesser people are there, obviously, but only Warriors come out to play. It's a Neo-Noir shitbag-stomping node-crawl, where you gotta get from this place to rescue that person/do that thing/get back with thugs on your tail. The world is an endless sprawl of wet roads, broken steam pipes, elevated trains, subways, and tenement housing.  Littered in between the fearful citizens' fruit stands, diners, and watch repair shops, there are juke joints and maybe some newspaper offices. Everybody's come back from the war, and it feels like the 50's.  There's pompadours and poodle skirts and it's not like diesel punk, I guess, but maybe if you want, fuck it I don't care.  I guess it begs for lasers and big robots eventually. Everything happens at night but there's no reason why, that's just the way it is, see? Or else there could be aliens, I don't care it's your game.


You get a couple of Moves - these are Mighty Deeds, but you gotta name them up front.  One per level, plus one.  That makes two Moves at level 1.  In all other ways, you're a standard DCC Warrior.  There's small arms and you can choose those as special Lucky snowflake weapons if your group does that, or you can pick a baseball bat, butterfly knife, switchblade, broomhandle mauser.  Something genre appropriate.  For Moves, you get two Deed Dice and pick the best so it's pretty unlikely your Moves won't go off

You spend Luck like normal, but any time you get a breather, you get 1d3 Luck back and 1d6 HP. Any time you get a shot of Whiskey, also, or get romantic with a attractive member of your choice, or have a heart to heart about the past with a pal (even in the midst of combat)


Willem Dafoe and Lee Ving.  Whowouldathunkit.
Any in-game dialog must be somewhat irritable and hostile and passive-aggressive, and use the slang of the 50's which I am not gonna look up for you, doll.  If you don't use it, you lose that next combat's Moves dice, even if you're in the midst of combat, buttface.  That's a Biff Tannen reference.

You can choose to be a Lone Wolf, a Band member, or a Ganger. When I was a drunk last night, there was some benefit to these but I lost it between then and my current state. Lone Wolfs can give away Moves dice or keep them; Band members improve dice chain on actions when with bandmates and coordinated; gangers get Thief Luck dice when with gangers of the same gang and can subtract from other gangs' rolls with those (trying to avoid too many old mechanics but keep same principles). If you're by yourself as a Band Guy or Ganger, go find a chum.  Some Moral Advantage for Lawful, and Intimidation for Chaotic, and Neutral characters can pick
Gimmick gangs.  That's cool.
There's something about colors.  See: Dick Tracy, any modern noir film, Dark City.  Streets of Fire actually has a lot of great examples of what must be gel lights on steam vents and it's beautifully shot and a nightmare of dialog but the writing is pretty spare and straightforward. I'll have to return to colors in scenes, or leave it out, I don't know.  It's formulated in that compartment in my brain that had a lot of bourbon last night.  Red for violence (improved dice for everybody in combat); blue/purple for the same in sneaking; green for fear/terror (reduction in die rolls, little shop of horrors)
neither Joan Jett nor Pat Benatar but somehow both and not as awesome
You only level up when you're travelling, or prepping for the adventure. All the action takes place in a night.  Nodes generated by the narrative;

there;s more, but the world turn monochrome and this headache does not abate and I will have more links for you to consume

Meantime:



+ramonthe3rd  has a fun and simple urban crime rpg thing that I might steal liberally some of the ideas - Fire Elixir, but I can't figure out where I found it, maybe from Reddit or something

Speaking of Reddit, it's a nightmare, but it often has treasure in the deeps, for example in this thread




 





Tuesday, May 31, 2016

Imperial News VOXcast Hive Primus

+++Coded for Sentient/Only;Piety:High+++

Refugees from Sectors SHONDRUAH and DORVASAL continue to move upward into the 2nd tiers and outward to Hives Secundus and Tertius. The stated reason is increased gang warfare activities, which the Arbites are instructed to allow, in the hopes that the villains will slaughter each other and spare the Helmawr and supporting houses the cost of ammunition and personnel. Why do Hive Officials not intervene directly to root out the source of these evils? Do not question, Heretic!, for The Emperor Himself directs the agents of Lord Helmawr...



In other unrelated news, cheap Spook and Spook-like analogs have flooded the markets of all Spires, causing addiction and overdose rates to soar, and production in the local Manufactora to plummet, jeopardizing quota and tithing levels. Shell casings are down 17% and Spook-agonist supplies dwindle. Warp creature incursions are [[[REDACTED]]]. The Conclave of the Sisters of Fiery Mercy Hospitallers have reported that promethium supply levels are running low, and flagellations and pogroms are increased in the 2nd tier fringes as lower-caste workers flee the depths.

In other unrelated news, quotas of applicants for the Black Ships program are surging to record heights! BEWARE THE MUTANT AND ALIEN, AND REPORT ALL PSYKERS TO OFFICIALS

+++end of line+++

(So listening to NPR on the drive into work I actually have to turn it off for a good portion of the drive so as to avoid hearing about this fucking guy Trump. But when I do listen it's about refugees!  Refugees from warfare and gang violence , particularly in Central America where most refugees are provided amnesty and border agents are like MEH WHATEVER TIDE OF HUMAN TRAGEDY and I thought to myself Why don't they just send in troops down there and wipe those gangs the fuck off the maps?

And furthermore it's all about IEDs killing soldiers in Afghanistan and Opiod addiction and overdose and, really, I deal with these problems like at the ground level all day every day and it seems to me that the obvious solutions are only fit for hilarious satirical fictions and just pause to consider the sort of war zone that this country would become if suddenly all production of opioids suddenly ceased... It doesn't need to be a conspiracy - it's just that the negative effects are currently estimated to not yet outweigh the positives, whatever that means

So, let the gangs generate money and resources and then when they get to be a hassle then request a couple of squads of marines to just obliterate whatever an Inquisitor retinue points at, then spray a coat of paint down and let the refugees back in to the vacuum you just made.

Also, Spook! it's fun and every ganger should try it once or 5 times. Maybe some event floods cheap Spook derivatives to the market and everybody tries Psykers powers or limited versions and you can also save it for the inevitable bullish market later when supplies are low.

Please note: all this gaming activity generated by my news stories and work day and maybe a write-up forthcoming. I don't know. I have a lot of gluing and painting to do

P.S. I really loved the Enemies of the Inquisition list from the 4e Witchhunters book.

P.S. The Confrontation rules really put an interesting emphasis on Cherubs

P.S. BONUS LINK

Monday, May 30, 2016

Street Fight in the SPACE DUNGEON

I was, and remain, a guy who imagines he can take anybody in a fight. I'm dumb in the way that all American guys are. I played Street Fighter 2, Mortal Kombat, and Samurai Shodown AND I took about 6 months of karate 22 years ago.



SO - I'm a badass, at least up in my fantasy land in the old imagination zone between my ears. AT LEAST a Level 6/2 Fighter/Thief (not a Ninja, let's be serious). My allergies may get the better of me at this time EVERY GODDAM YEAR, but! No Shinobi will do so, unless of course I am eating Doritos and watching Star Trek. This one time I proposed to Anthony Poliseno while we were working this shitty movie theater job in like 1995 the ULTIMATE CUSTOMIZABLE FIGHTING game, and you could carry around little mini-CDs and whoop the ass of people and spend a sack of quarters and totally not make out with chicks that summer.

And, sad-dad nostalgia being what it is, every once in a while I think about this heartbreaker fighting game I could make if only I had a suite of confusing and cryptic but powerful software to help me, and OF COURSE, since this is the internest, that thing already exists, and who woulda thunk it is has a nicely developed community of wildly creative mashup junkies like you (since you are reading this and I make that assumption) and me.

So, I got my own thing going on and it's set to the same UHF Channel 17 as Space Dungeon in the old G+ community, that being a bunch of doofy rejekts in red shirt outfits and flailing around in hyperspace getting killed and looking for treasure and pissing their pants and dying in a hard vacuum. It looks like this, sort of:

 

And this:



The problem is, it's not real balanced and it's maybe way too ambitious and kinda wonky, and since the various MUGEN factions are not always agreeing on standards there are some terrific and broken characters that I included but they are buggy all to hell, and of course the engine is terrific, AND FREE, but it doesn't exactly do what you want unless you know how it works and can coax it.

It's like some Melnibonean daemon, except it won't take your soul as far as I know, but I sure do think about it a great deal.  I find that I am thinking about Streets of Fire based versions of this in which Tom Cody fights that dragon up there, and of course I want most of the characters to be these shitty thugs that beat you up when you play those other games, and they have absolutely no chance to beat up, physically, the ESSENCE OF EVIL, I mean let's be serious, and I mean, that reflects somewhat on my DM style but I was exposed to Call of Cthulhu as a wee child, sorry, meng.

Anyways, I'll let you know how it goes. Here's the stupid and fun roster:



As you can see it's all about under-powered slobs against the hideous forces of evil, and while it's crippled and broken and awful, I am learning a great deal about the whole language and guidelines of it and that's the only reason I get engaged with stuff these days, is to figure it out.  You wouldn't believe how customizable the engine is and how much raw content is available.

p.s. it's difficult to find pictures of '90's culture, like that arcade in International Mall in Miami where I finally despaired and gave up on the first SF2 games and Mortal Kombat and settled in to Time Killers and Samurai Shodown series...



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