Just a quick heads-up to let you know that the 28mm Predator review has just been updated with the latest offerings from Predastore:
Death-Hunter. Click for a larger version
Running-Hunter. Click for a larger version
For detailed reviews, see the giant post here. And never mind the funky colour thing going on with the backgrounds, I’m yet again reconfiguring the photo lighting setup.
Some of you might remember me time and time again fiddling around with the idea of warpg’s – a combination of wargame and RPG. While I’ve made some forays into it, such as the one-off werewolf game and the short-lived Triton-4, I’ve never really gotten it off the ground. This just might be changing!
My new gaming project called Utopia (from Union of Terra Orbital Platform Insertion and Assault) took off yesterday. The game is a continuation of Triton-4, basically. There’s a game master (that’d be me) and three players, and we are using the wonderful Flying Lead system by Ganesha Games. As the name suggests, the game deals with a squad of troopers sailing around on the massive orbital platform UTP Tien Shan and getting into all sorts of interesting situations. It’s 2100-something AD, and the universe is basically a mash-up of cool scifi influences (Alien, Terminator, Predator, Starship Troopers, Blade Runner, Pitch Black…to name a few), ditching strict internal consistency in favour of having fun and being able to use all the wonderful minis I’ve collected and painted during all these years. What this means is that we might have Weyland-Yutani, the Tyrell corporation and Cyberdyne Systems teaming up to create one hell of a synthetic being in order to fight the growing Arachnid menace, and so on. Canon purists will weep, we will have a great time!
As I mentioned, we had our first game yesterday. We started out by fleshing out the squad of nine by playing a short RPG session before moving on to the miniature game. This worked wonderfully, and we ended up with a pretty awesome group:
Sgt. Salt Brauer, the alcoholic leader of the squad, who is weeks away from completing his tour of duty.
Cpl. “Ace” Wembley, a through-and-through cynic, who also tends to take to drink to forget why she’s in the service in the first place.
Pvt. Lim Evans, the highly motivated, beautiful young female medic.
Pvt. Chora Haugen-Ankerson, Sgt. Brauer’s only friend who reminds him of his second ex-wife. She’s a large lady, and currently training to become an NCO.
Pvt. Wu, the resident sniper from Athens. Wu has good contacts in the supply department, and can get you pretty much anything you want.
Pvt. Diego “Ding” Rodriguez, who comes from a privileged family. After his father was sentenced into prison for shady financial dealing regarding orbital platforms, Diego was forced to sign up.
Pvt. Bjornssen, who is a large, mild-mannered Norwegian and the squad’s tech expert.
Pvt. “Dog” Lau, who’s a pretty despicable, scrawny and shady character with bad personal hygiene. He always tends to be up to his elbows in trouble over one of his schemes.
Pvt. Kenny, who never made it as a professional football player. Kenny is a hulking guy, although not the sharpest pencil in the box. He wields a dreaded flame unit.
Just like that, with maybe 20-30 minutes of light role-playing, we had nine personalities instead of “marine #3” and “NCO w/ shotgun”. This made it much more fun to wade into the miniatures part.
The first mission was set up as follows: the workers on the Alpha moon of the planet Kessler-11 had rebelled and captured the valuable refineries and mining towns. The orbital platform -based troopers would strike key locations around the moon in order to capture or eliminate the separatist leaders. It fell to this particular squad to take the refinery town of Velasco Creek. The town had been taken over by former workers’ representative Bjarn Halmer. Halmer’s workers had received a shipment of weapons from unknown sources and overcome the local police and security forces. They had also captured Weyland-Yutani representative Eldon Burke (related).
A negotiation situation had been arranged. What the rebels didn’t know was that the Union of Terra simply does not negotiate with terrorists, and had no intention of actually getting into any talks – with the exception of possibly trying to save Mr. Burke at the request of the corporation. The orders were clear: the squad was to eliminate Halmer’s men, and if possible, rescue Burke and capture Halmer alive.
How did it go?
Pretty well, actually. The squad split into two groups. While a larger group of six moved towards the landing pad where the negotiations were to take place, a smaller group of three snuck up from behind, climbing one of the large refinery silos for a good vantage point.
The large group was taking pretty long to get to the pad, so Halmer started getting suspicious and anxious. Meanwhile no-one heard Pvt. Rodriguez shove one of the rebel guards down from the top of the silo. After that things started happening pretty quickly.
Pvt. Lau spotted a couple of rebels through the window of a bar. He tried to open fire but this was his first combat mission and he had forgotten to load his gun. Thinking quickly he smashed the window of the bar with his rifle, allowing Pvt. Kenny to fill the interior with a nice blast of flame.
A firefight erupted through the small town of Velasco Creek. Lau and Kenny were hit by a shotgun blast, the furious rebels executed poor Eldon Burke on the spot and Halmer, not knowing that one of his guards up on the silos had been replaced by hostiles, ran right into the open and into the sniper Wu’s lethal sights. Halmer’s death led to half the rebels running away, and everything seemed to be going great for the troopers, who were bulldozing their way through the town and laying down a lot of fire.
All of a sudden one of the rebels managed to actually fire back, and that’s all it took. Bjornssen, the friendly man of the fjords, was no more. Rodriguez and Wu lost their nerve, and for a crucial moment left their vantage point. This breathed some more life into the rebels, and the remaining few got back into position to fire upon the advancing troopers. The same rebel that had killed Bjornssen took another shot and this time dropped Cpl. Wembley. By the time the squad medic got to her, Wembley was already gone. The furious troopers redoubled their efforts and mercilessly gunned down the rebels until only one remained. Despite losing two of his own, Sgt. Brauer kept cool and the remaining rebel was captured for questioning. Pvt. Lau eventually survived, but would need to spend some time hospitalized.
That was the game in a nutshell. A lot of fun, great cinematic moments and improvised narrative as troopers died, flamers roared and guns jammed. A good example of the narrative way the game was handled was that no “out of ammo” result was ever just that. It was always someone having forgotten to load their gun on the dropship, or the gun jamming because of being used as a blunt instrument or something similar. In some places narrative overruled the mechanics. For example, in Flying Lead a model usually has to shoot at the nearest enemy. However, I made an exception to this in the case of Evans the medic. Come on, the so-called rebels were basically civilians with guns! They’re not going to shoot an unarmoured medic with large red crosses on her clothing. Then again, a particularly evil or fanatical character might have, and so on. Flying Lead is a very good system for a game like this, as it is generic and flexible enough to accommodate pretty much anything.
I’m happy to report that none of the problems that we speculated on earlier cropped up. The biggest concern raised was whether the RPG aspect would hinder the tactical task of trying to win the game and vice versa. This never became an issue, and for that a huge thanks needs to go out to my three players. In addition to being experienced gamers, all three are very genre savvy, and it shows.
The RPG element was a big addition to the game, and I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it. I guess we humans are (luckily) built to relate to one another, even fictional, roughly sketched-out characters. Funny as it may seem, the deaths of Bjornssen and Wembley were far more meaningful that the deaths of two anonymous troopers. We even role-played a small memorial afterwards. It was hilariously cheezy (since everyone was well aware that we were, in fact, dealing with two wargame characters that had been created a few hours ago and would be replaced in the next session) but also weirdly touching.
All in all, I’m really happy about how all this seems to be turning out. Not only am I hugely motivated to get new stuff and paint what I already have, but I’m also really into miniature gaming for the first time in a long while – Blood Bowl excluded. I’ll be sure to show off all the related projects that this one will undoubtedly spawn!
What’s next? Well, my players will most likely read this post and I like to keep an element of surprise. Let’s just say that I’ll be surprised if we don’t need a new memorial after the next game…
Here are some pictures from the game for your viewing pleasure. While I sadly haven’t had the time to paint my Zuzzy mat yet, it worked nicely as a barren lunar landscape. The two hipstery pics are courtesy of one of my players, Joonas. You can click on the pics for larger versions.
One of the rebels keeps watch – the killer was the one on top of the next silo
The rebel negotiators with Burke in the front and Halmer the guy in green in the back
Pvt. Lau leads with Cpl. Wembley in the back and Pvt. Kenny on the right
A trooper’s eye view with Pvt. Rodriguez on the left and Pvt. Bjornssen on the right
A rebel’s eye view
The medic Pvt. Evans gets to Cpl. Wembley, only to find her dead
Dice roll as the bar goes up in flames
Privates Wu, Bjornssen and Rodriguez keep watch from the top of a silo, with the Blood Bowl die indicating a jammed gun
The first official trailer for World War Z, the adaptation of Max Brooks’ novel of the same name, is finally out, and it’s..well…it’s..
This trailer really left me with mixed feelings. On one hand it looks like a cool enough large budget zombie fest and I usually like Brad Pitt in his films. On the other, there are quite a few things that bug me:
I know I’m sounding a more than little bitter, so I have to point out that this is mostly fanboy rage. Who knows, the movie might turn out to be a positive surprise! It’s at least nice to see a large budget zombie movie for a change – we really haven’t seen too many of those. Still, I can’t shake the feeling of disappointment. It’s most apparent when the synopses are (rather unfairly) compared:
The book
It began with rumours from China about another pandemic. Then the cases started to multiply and what had looked like the stirrings of a criminal underclass, even the beginnings of a revolution, soon revealed itself to be much, much worse. Faced with a future of mindless, man-eating horror, humanity was forced to accept the logic of world government and face events that tested our sanity and our sense of reality. Based on extensive interviews with survivors and key players in the 10-year fight-back against the horde, World War Z brings the very finest traditions of American journalism to bear on what is surely the most incredible story in the history of civilisation.
The movie
A U.N. employee is racing against time and fate, as he travels the world trying to stop the outbreak of a deadly Zombie pandemic.
Oh well.
Earlier this year I reviewed Flu by Wayne Simmons. Fever is a sequel to the book – or rather a prequel and a parallel story. Fever exposes the origins of the virus and takes a look at the entire epidemic through the eyes of various different players. I was originally supposed to review Fever right after its publication, but never received the review copy and proceeded to forget about the whole thing until recently. Better late than never, right?
The book follows different characters and their storylines. As is typical of a structure like this, the storylines are somewhat interwoven. What made me happy were the references to Flu, seamlessly tying the two books together. Many of the things I wanted to see more of in Flu were present in Fever, for example the military aspects that felt a little detached in the first book.
There are many similarities between the two books and many of the same comments still apply. Simmons keeps his writing compact and efficient, and there’s a lot crammed into the 290 pages. At times this borders on excess, with a lot of different storylines and characters getting introduced, but it gets easier as the book progresses. The style is still very brutal and carnal, and I think Simmons still holds the title of “Author with the most disgusting zombies”, with the flu-ridden corpses (and soon-to-be ones) spewing bloody mucus from every orifice and so on.
With their similarities, we’re still talking about two different books. While Flu had a strong political vibe, with a large part of the conflicts rising from an establishment/anti-establishment setup, Fever draws more from the pool of social conflict. This is helped along by a cast of characters different from your usual zombie fiction fare, through which themes such as sexual minorities and disabilities both physical and mental are explored. This results in a book that feels refreshingly different while retaining a solid genre feel. While not as prominent as in Flu, the anti-establishment sentiment is still present, and you definitely get the feeling that the government isn’t doing a very good job at reacting the problem to say the least.
On a related note a word of possible warning: Fever is bleak – very bleak. While not quite reaching excessive, David Moody -like proportions, this book definitely isn’t a happy read. Personally, I liked it, but I understand it might not be everyone’s cup of tea. A large part of the dark humour present in the previous book is missing this time, making Fever pretty depressing at times. This is something of a double-edged sword: humour helps you relate to the characters (Shaun of the Dead being a prime example) but can easily lead to the whole thing getting silly and unbelievable. Luckily, Simmons is a good enough character writer that his characters function even with the humour turned down a bit.
Overall verdict: If you liked Flu, you’re bound to like Fever. It’s a gripping, bleak zombie read, with thoughtfully crafted characters and plenty of interesting storylines and points of view to keep the reader interested. While it probably won’t leave you feeling warm and happy inside, it’s an interesting, harsh example of a worst case zombie outbreak scenario. If you haven’t read Flu, I suggest reading it before Fever.
As usual, I picked up my copy from The Book Depository.
Some painted stuff for a change, with yet more troopers joining my Colonial Marine/generic scifi force.
The first is another one of Defiance Games‘ UAMC marines. While the crispness leaves much to be desired, they’re still fun to and simple to paint and make for a nice addition to the force.
Click for a larger version
The second mini is a different story altogether. Hasslefree Miniatures‘ McKenzie has been a favourite of mine since I first saw pictures of the green on the FU-UK forum years ago. You know how some miniatures are just so nice that they almost intimidate you into not painting them? That’s what happened to me here. Eventually I managed to tackle the task and I’m very happy with how the model turned out. It’s a great sculpt, with plenty of detail without getting too cluttered. I also think that the Colonial Marine paint scheme fits the model something lovely.
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As always, constructive critique and other comments more than welcome.
For me, this 2012 season of Blood Bowl is over. After playing the 13 league games and finishing third in our division of five, I made it to the playoffs – somewhat to my surprise. Less surprisingly the first playoff round proved to be my undoing, with Vikings IF sending the Drakwald Ravens packing, as well of killing one of my veteran ghouls, Karl Eye-Popper, and putting Ludwig Wightenstein in a wheelchair with a thoroughly destroyed hip. The poor wight suffered a “smashed hip” result in his first game of the season, never amounted to anything during the games he played, and received a second “smashed hip” in the Ravens’ last game. Poor Ludwig!
With my gaming part done, it’s time to look back upon the season. All in all I was more than pleased. My last season of Blood Bowl saw my orc team the Naughty Grinders finish with a 2-2-6 (wins-draws-losses) record from ten games, whereas this season the Drakwald Ravens managed a 4-5-5 record from a total of 14 games. So, fewer defeats, twice the victories and more than twice the draws. Can’t really be disappointed!
The Ravens steadily upped their game throughout the season, and before the playoffs actually had a four match long undefeated streak with two wins and two ties. The only thing I wasn’t happy about was my team’s seeming inability for violence. While a virtue outside the Blood Bowl field, 11 inflicted casualties in 14 matches is appalling, especially compared to the league (sans Ravens) average of over 21. Out of those 11 casualties no less than five were executed (tee-hee) by my number one flesh golem, Max Hurtheimer.
The more I play Blood Bowl, the more convinced I am, that this is the best game GW has put on the market. Blood Bowl combines luck and skill wonderfully – while sometimes horrible luck can bring you down no matter how good you are, most of the time the more skilled player will have the upper hand. It is an important skill in itself to minimize the role of luck, in other words the number of dice rolls you make. While I’m slowly learning the game, the more experienced players often seem to be a move or two ahead of me, no matter what I do.
What makes our Blood Bowl league especially fun is the narrative built around it on our internet forum. Press releases are made after matches, game reports are written for every game and players provide other content such as news, advertisements and rumours or even obituaries of dead players. A great example of this was the surprising death of one of my werewolves, Anti-Christian Wolff. Having just scored a touchdown, Wolff died due to amazingly bad dice rolling during a routine block against a dwarf player. The interpretation was that his heart suddenly gave out. This lead to several news items:
Ravens head coach disappointed in dwarf fans’ racist chants
This sprang from a few of our friends who were watching the game and celebrated the death of the werewolf by chanting the now-legendary “hukasta rukkaset!” which is Finnish for “make the wolf into mittens!” They were interpreted as being dwarven fans.
Dwarf fans respond to racism allegations
In this item the dwarf fans accused of racism were shocked and appalled. They claimed the chanting was a joke, nothing more. This was a parallel to several then-current events where Finnish politicians made racist comments in public, and then claimed that they had been ironic or joking.
Werewolf overbreeding: “This would be illegal with humans”
This was an adaptation of an actual news item dealing with genetic problems caused by overbreeding in dogs.
Drug scandal in the league! Warpstone overdose to blame for Anti-Christian Wolff’s death?
In which a Norse team’s werewolf comments that the combination of overbreeding and warpstone use is a deadly one, and that it is a public secret in the werewolf community.
2 in 1 furry mittens from Stockkleinemann sale!
A parody of then-current sale campaign of the Finnish department store Stockmann. Made by dwarven artisans, the luxurious leather mittens could be turned into furry ones by the touch of Moonstone™.
And so on. This is what makes our Blood Bowl that extra bit special. It’s very similar to the idea of Warpg’s I’ve often talked about.
What’s next? Well, there are still games to be played in this season’s playoffs, and then at some point it’s time for the 2013 season. I’ve already bought a new team from Impact Miniatures, the Middle Kingdom humans who are done in a classic Greek/Spartan style. I’ll have a lot of fun coming up with a back story for those guys. With all this, I’m happy to report that in our group Blood Bowl is alive and well!
We’ve seen zombies associated with a lot of things, but they’re rarely doing good. Here’s an exceptional (in many ways) PSA by the Canadian Heart & Stroke Foundation:
The campaign also features a pretty awesome site at http://www.theundeading.ca/
I think I’ve mentioned my 30th birthday a few times, but I haven’t reported the thing that crowned my party.
When most of the guests had arrived, I was given a short speech, in which it was assumed (correctly) that if there ever was a zombie apocalypse, I had a weapon of choice. I was asked to go get said weapon – a clawhammer – which I did. I was then blindfolded and spun around repeatedly, and the blindfold was removed.
I met Otto, who I proceeded to batter to further death with my hammer, for this here is Otto:
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Yes, my amazing friends had built me a zombie piñata. After some spirited hammering, I was rewarded with a shower of money, candy and other assorted gifts. I just couldn’t stop laughing, it was insanely awesome.
I promised I’d give due credit to not only those who conceived the idea, but also the actual builders, Satu and Taape, so here are the two artisans (who luckily documented Otto’s creation) in their glory:
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Trivia: Otto was named after the lead character from the staggeringly horrible zombie/gay porn flick Otto, or up with dead people.
As proof of my zombie slaying expertise, here’s Otto in his current state:
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At the risk of sounding sappy: I love my friends, thanks everyone.
My relationship with The Walking Dead in its various forms is not an entirely easy one. When I first started reading the comic (from issue #1) it was pretty much the best thing I’d ever seen. Lately I haven’t read it – it started getting a little tedious as things kept going from bleak to bleaker to even bleaker to mega bleak and then some, and the series just kind of lost a lot of its effectiveness.
I was looking forward to the TV series a lot, and apart from the final episode of season one, I was pretty happy with how it turned out. When season two started, I was…well, if not as thrilled as about season one, still pretty interested. I started watching season two, and it was, in a word, boring. The season didn’t seem to be going anywhere. Around episode five I simply stopped watching. It was a huge disappointment.
My interest in the whole TWD franchise waned, until I ran into the amazing adventure game. All of a sudden I was interested in TWD again. This was further fueled by a friend of mine giving me a TWD book, Rise of the Governor, as a birthday present.
Skip forward a month, to the day before yesterday. I’m on a work trip in Mikkeli, and find myself with a lot of spare time. I visit the nearest (“only”, I’m told) video rental store, and decide to give TWD’s season two a chance. After four paragraphs of rambling, the review begins!
I’m happy I gave the series a second look. As it turns out, after a sloooooow start the season starts picking up pace, and in my opinion ends up being as good as, if not even better, than the first one.
The season has plenty of elements that make it excellent. There’s a large, coherent arc that runs throughout the season. There is some great acting, with Jon Bernthal as Shane standing out especially. Some very heavy themes are dealt with, and there’s a fair amount of unexpected twists and turns to keep the viewer interested. There are character deaths, and these are not dealt with lightly, but are important events. The tone is kept pretty dark and sombre, but there are lighter moments as well. Also, the series doesn’t go down the comic’s route, heaping bad things on bad things and piling some more bad things on, which keeps it much more relatable.
The Walking Dead‘s group dynamics work fairly well. There are interesting schisms, which in turn are often dealt with realistically enough to keep the series believable. Some strange decisions are made, seemingly just to further the plot, but these are in the minority. All in all, TWD manages to put together a group of characters that alternatively both garner sympathy and irritate – much like real people. Even the worst of the bunch have some genuinely likable moments, which is a huge plus in my book. This is helped along by quality actors who do a very good job.
While I’m not much of a gore hound, I must remark on the awesomely disgusting stuff pulled off by the effects crew. This isn’t the kind of stuff you usually see on TV, apart from wildlife documentaries. The zombies in differente states of decay are also wonderfully done, and if you get your hands on the dvd box, I recommend checking out the extras.
Of course, it’s not all perfect. The series does use the whole “Carl disappears and appears inconveniently” over and over again. Note to the writers of The Walking Dead: if your repeating plot device is getting turned into a meme, you’re doing something wrong.
Also, as mentioned before, in the first five or so episodes, nothing much happens. This does pay off handsomely towards the end of the season though, as it allows for much more character development than the six episode season one.
Character development brings me to T-Dog. This character, despite having been with the series since approximately the beginning, hasn’t really received any screen time nor character development. Don’t believe me? io9 noted this too, in their article (with some spoilers) in March. I have absolutely no idea why this is, but it’s a glaring mistake and starts to get pretty funny and noticeable around episode 8 or 9.
Overall verdict: Despite a slow start, The Walking Dead season 2 builds up to some very nice zombie action and drama. While there are some weaker elements – “Where’s Carl?”, T-Dog and the slow start, basically – the whole manages to deliver, often exceeding season one. While I almost lost my faith, it seems TWD is back on track.
You can get The Walking Dead season 2 from any decent dvd retailer. Or a video rental store in Mikkeli, your call.
After reviewing the Reaper Bones purple worm I was left with a sloppily washed model sitting on my desk. Since it was already somewhat started, I figured I’d paint it up properly. Not really wanting an actual purple worm, I went for an earthy palette for the colours.
As tends to happen to me, I was very lazy with the mould lines, and they ended up showing a bit too much for my liking. Something I might add to the review: on the soft plastic the mould lines are somewhat difficult to remove. Filing results in a mess, cutting easily takes away to much and scraping works, but not as well as with hard styrene. Of course due to the worm’s round surfaces and textures, mould line removing was more difficult and time consuming than usual.
A question has been raised on the nets about whether the Bones models can be painted without priming. I didn’t prime the model (apart from the wash) but instead started painting with the base colour – in this case GW’s Dryad Bark. The model took the paint without any issues, so I’d say that’s definitely a time and paint saver on the Bones range.
Click for a larger version
It’s a simple paint job, with progressively lighter brown drybrush layers over the Dryad Bark (GW’s Graveyard Earth, VGC’s Khaki, VGC’s Bonewhite and Elfic Flesh) followed by a wash of GW’s Devlan Mud. The teeth were painted individually with the idea of “the more the merrier”. The worm is based on a 50mm round plastic base and the moulded scenic base blends in nicely with my standard sand texture.
All in all, for all its simplicity, I think the finished model looks fine. It was very quick to do, which is nice considering I still have seven more to finish…
Dawn of the Lead 