On the boardgames front: January is OxCon month and all of my boardgaming too place there.

I gave Civ a try only to remember that I’d played it once before when I was half way through the game. (It is quite fun, but I’m still not sure that it is a good game as it feels too much like a game of “Who will blink first”).

I got in a rare game of Seafarers which I proceeded to win by a large margin after discovering a 6 gold and a 5 gold next to each other on the same turn.

I also managed to play half a dozen games of Dead Rising which I’m growing increasingly fond of. The expansions have arrived now so I’m going to have to try it with some other races and custom warbands.

I entered the Settlers tournament and managed to come third (after new rules were invented to tie break the tied tie break for second place). I’ve now managed to come consistently near the top for a few years, so I’m feeling quite pleased with myself.

Finally an honourable mention to Cities, an interesting tile laying game. Sadly it completely lacks interaction. A collection of tiles are selected in a random order, but each turn each player gets an identical tile and places it in their own play area.

Next up, RPGs: A GMing heavy month for me, I’ve been running Fantasy Craft with a Mythic Roman setting on Tuesdays. I’ve been very happy with my players as they’ve taken the plot in directions I hadn’t imagined and kept me on my toes. I think I’m getting better at improvisation. I’ll try to get a proper write up done after the final session next week.

The monthly Traveler game continues. We broke into a disturbingly insecure military base to sabotage the Giant Ancient Anti-Hyperspace Weapon Of Doom.

Finally I ran the adventure from the new D&D Red Box. It went down reasonably well, although one player was unimpressed with the dungeon crawl slog making things somewhat boring for his character (the party tank).

On to wargaming: No plays this month, but great success with my New Year Resolution, which I have so far failed to break.

If I have a quiet evening in, then I will do some painting.

Some nights I manage 10 minutes, some I manage 2 hours (and quite I lot I’m out and thus not subject to the resolution). It has meant that I’ve got through a couple of dozen skeletons, mostly finished a dozen elves, and have another dozen skeletons almost ready for the QuickShade stage. Decent photos coming soon!

I’ve also half assembled the Magnus the Traitor starter set for Warmachine after two people asked me to start playing the game enough times.

The basic premise is a setting much like the Rome and Greece of legend but with some very dirty “politics” going on amongst the various noble houses while rumours of monsters are starting to arrive from the countryside.

I’m hoping to pull off a blend of Hercules, Jason and the Argonauts, Mission Impossible and Alias with the player characters all starting out working for one of the Houses.

This is the first time I’ve tried running a D20 campaign without using prewritten modules are a frame for it. I ran a fair chunk of Dresden Files (with the FATE system) last year and. that has given me some confidence in my ability to run without having someone else give me a plot outline with a stack of pre-designed encounters. Also helping is Fantasy Craft’s excellent NPC system and meadicus’s NPC Builder

A nice mix of characters are emerging so far, including a hoplite returned from the northern frontier, a dealmaker who survives by playing people off against each other, and a merchant assassin.

All those characters are subject to change at the moment as I’m still polishing the details out with the players (most of whom are unfamiliar with the system). One player missed the prerequisites for a feat and presented me with a frighteningly min-maxed character; He may rethink his concept now that I’ve pointed out that he would need to adjust his attributes if he wanted to take it.

As far as plot goes, I’ve outlined a big stack of material that covers city, country and “dungeon” as well as chases, combats, traps, villains and monsters. Since the characters are still trickling in, there isn’t much that is specific to any character’s background, but I’ve come up with a few things that are likely to interact well with the personalities involved.

Hopefully I’ll even have time to write up session reports… that or try to bribe my players to do it with promises of bonus Reputation points.

It’s important to have an appropriate setting for the big fight scenes in your games. The top of a speeding train. A rickety rope bridge over an incredibly deep gorge with a crocodile infested river below. The enormous arch-villain’s lair inside an extinct volcano, complete with piranha pit. (About the only thing that could make that one better is to use an active volcano, really.)

I’ve run a game with a fight on top of a train (which, sadly, didn’t go too well as I was still getting comfortable with the system) and I’ve played a game with a fight inside a train (which was awesome, especially when a Shatter spell derailed the carriage). Neither of them used a tunnel. Tunnels are great, they give you the classic “Oh no! I have to duck down or cling to the side of the train or be hit by a mountain!” situation. So, in preparation for the next time I run a simulationist game I can fit a train in to (sadly my current plotting revolves around ancient Rome) let’s do some research and some maths.

I’m looking at Fantasy Craft for this, it is a 3.5 derivative so I’ll convert everything to 5′ squares by the time we’re done. You should be able to adapt this for whatever system you like though.

First stop, Wikipedia:

The all-time speed record for steam trains is held by an LNER Class A4 4-6-2 Pacific locomotive of the LNER in the United Kingdom, number 4468 Mallard, which pulling six carriages (plus a dynamometer car) reached 126 mph (203 km/h) on a slight downhill gradient down Stoke Bank on 3 July 1938.

Now that’s fast! However, it probably doesn’t account for having to slow down for bends and it doesn’t say how full the carriages are of passengers and/or cargo (and there are only 6 of them). My modern commuter train probably never goes above 70mph (through hilly Kentish countryside).

Still, have now have some baseline figures for speed, how about length?

First Great Western have some statistics about their fleet. Carriages range from about 15 meters to a little over 23 meters. That’s about 50′ to 75′ or 10 to 15 squares.

Back to the speed. If we say 50mph, then that is about 75′/sec. That’s 6 carriages per round (15 carriages if we take the world steam locomotive speed record!). That is a bit faster then I’d like as it prevents me from having the tunnel mouth move up the battlemat for a few rounds to give a sense of impending doom. So, back to history…

The small locomotives of the 1830s, pulling a handful of cars over uneven track, could travel at fifteen to twenty miles an hour. This was twice as fast, over long distances, as anything Americans had previously experienced.

15-20mph is 22′/sec to 29′/sec or 24-36 squares per round. It should be possible to select a speed in that range that will give you two carriages a round for most carriage sizes, and that is quick enough to be a worry but slow enough to avoid the tunnel crossing your tabletop in just one or two rounds.

You can let the train roll initiative or just have it more at the start or end of each round.

Obviously, falling off a train at 15mph is a lot less of a worry then falling off at 20mph, but being left behind could cost a player character their mission … and the GM could always make the train cross a bridge before entering the tunnel.

And finally, a few useful rules to use for this situation. Page numbers are for Fantasy Craft 2nd printing.

For the basic “Fight on a train” situation, you can demand Balance checks (page 69). The surface will be up to 30 degrees but shaking, and the characters will often be attacked.

When the tunnel approaches characters will have a few options:

Diving to lay flat on top of the train is a simple Reposition (page 219) action to become prone.

Jumping into the gap between carriages is an Acrobatics check (page 69). I’d call this a Balance check, for a Narrow Walkway (5-8″ wide) with the usual modifier for a buckled, rolling, sagging, or shaking surface.

Climbing (page 70) from the top of the train onto the side (or the other way) will have a base DC of 10 (Common hand- and footholds/opportunities to brace) or 5 (if they use a ladder). If things are going too easily for the players, you could add a situational modifier for doing this on a speeding train.

Don’t forgot the penalty for being attacked in the current or previous round for those last two checks!

If the fight is going too too well or too badly, then the train can change speed or NPC balance etc checks can be fudged.

One day I’ll run my Steampunk Three Musketeers game and will dig these plans out to test them.

If you’ve tried these suggestions, have alternative approaches, or spotted a flaw in my maths (which I shall blame on the stupid hour of the morning that I’m writing this in) then the comments will be open for a while.

Choo! Choo!

Image by Brian Rosen and used under a Creative Commons license

Doesn’t she have to make a Drive check?

Well, no. This is routine driving, no need to make a check for that… on the other hand, I would like to pad this session a little so I can end at a certain point when 10pm rolls around, and it is night driving on country lanes.

OK, make a Drive check.

With a Drive skill that low, there was a good chance of failure (even though the difficulty was only Mediocre). Time to draw on real life experience.

It was the early hours of the morning, birds are twittering, and you are motoring along, when from under a hedgerow pops a pheasant and jumps into your radiator.

(True story, if you think pigeons are stupid, you’ve never spent time in pheasant country.)

The next section didn’t happen to me in reality, however it is midsummer (game time) and the players were quite specific about their characters’ dinner plans for the previous evening.

It bounces off your windscreen and then straight through the open sunroof, where it lands in (a character’s) lap.

The resulting fallout from this little piece of colour managed to nicely use up a little time before our protagonists (I hesitate to use the word ‘heroes’ for some of this lot) arrived at The Village Where Evil Probably Lurks.

wow. Geoide isn’t in my dictionary!… ah. that’s because the word was Geoid.

I now have a new piece of technobabble for my upcoming Star Trek FATE game. One of my players was talking about having his character be a terraforming engineer so:

Geoide: All in one tool for controlling terraforming systems.

If you aren’t careful, it is quite easy you to let a set of Powers listed in front of you limit what you can do. The rules, however, are quite explicit (at least if you read the versions of the books that I do (Essentials)) that you shouldn’t let them.

To remind myself of this little detail, I have stolen an idea from WFRP3 and present: The Stunt Basic Power.

The party had reached the Keep on the Shadowfell, and received some new characters thanks to a combination of a new player, a lost character sheet and a dead PC. I took the opportunity to put together a Rogue (Thief) Elf and run around dealing out huge amounts of sneak attack damage.

I really liked having a couple of powerful encounter powers (Backstab, offering a bonus to hit and extra damage and Elven Accuracy, offering a reroll) and At Will powers that let me maneuver into and out of tricky spots (for flanking and getting out of Dodge) and get combat advantage (Escape Artist’s Trick and Ambush Trick respectively).

The trade off was that I didn’t get a daily power. This was a terrible shame as it completely removed the question of “Do I burn it on this encounter? Are we going to take a long rest afterwards? Is it worth it?”.

The rest of the party were using the PHBs. Sam and Louise took on roles that stopped us being swamped while Mickey played a Fighter who benefited from enemies clumping together (a good balance as I benefited from enemies staying apart).

Declan took on the role of Warlord and provided some useful maneuvering at the start of each encounter, the ability to trigger healing surges with a bonus (which probably saved the lives of both front line melee combatants at some point) but largely stayed out of the way so he could use his power to make us do extra basic melee attacks.

I think one round saw a monster take four hits with sneak attack damage turn thanks to the use of that power and some action points.

This section, at least, of Keep on the Shadowfell has a distinct lack of roleplaying and lots of tactical miniature combat. I’m not sure if it was due to the party being built to work better as a team, or if it was me finding a class that I liked, some other factor or (most likely) a combination of all of the above, but I enjoyed it more than any other game of D&D 4e that I’ve been involved in.

Hopefully, I’ll get a chance to find out if it as good an RPG as it is a tactical miniature game at some point soon!

(BTW, Troll in the Corner is running a competition in which you can grab a copy of the Essentials kit, so take a look if you want to try it yourself.)

It is a shame that the dice are missing though; I lost them years ago (they were really rather rubbish polyhedrals though). For that matter, I think there was a crayon that came with them so you could colour in the numbers…

Being more serious for a moment, if I were to buy the D&D Essentials box, how often would I grab the wrong box from my shelves by accident?

(I didn’t say how much more serious I was going to be, but perhaps there is such as a thing as too much nostalgia.)

My encounters, over the years, with Dark Sun have been short and fleeting, but the setting has always managed to catch my interest by virtue of being sword and sorcery but unlike just about everything else that falls into the category.

With the release of the new edition of the setting, I thought that now would be as good a time as any to do something about that interest. One nice book with the core of what was needed. Not a fan produced PDF (no matter how good, a book is a more comfortable read), not something out of print and impossible to track down, but a single tome to set the ball in motion.

Wonderful. Setting sorted.

Then I went to look for the rules, and that is when everything started to fall apart.

Six months ago, I wouldn’t have had a problem. Reservations about 4e in general aside, I would have just picked up the cores (helped by the fact that I keep coming across cheap offers for the limited editions of them). Two things are stopping me.

Errata. I gather that there is a big ball of errata out there that has made some fairly major changes to the core.

It doesn’t help when I come across comments such as:

The one thing keeping players sane is the Character Builder. Because it’s constantly updated, we don’t have to worry too much about keeping up with all of the updates. Of course, it makes us look at our core rulebooks and wonder why we bother to carry them around.

Really? I do not play any single RPG often enough to justify a monthly subscription to the rules.

We also have:

WOTC never actually updated the original monsters with the updated math we find in the Monster Manual 3

So, not only is there a lot of errata, but it seems there should be a lot more.

So we reach the second thing which, while being a barrier to me buying the cores, might just provide an alternative. Essentials.

The problem with Essentials is that it just isn’t all that clear if it is going to be enough to run Dark Sun.

I’ve seen forum comments which suggest it is just about possible, but might need a PHB3 to assist.

I’ve noted the utter failure on the part of WotC to mention Essentials on their Upcoming Products page.

I’ve seen the front loading of the product name completely wreck the usefulness of search results on the WotC site (and am having difficulty believing I’m in danger of veering off into an SEO rant on this blog).

I short, I just can’t find any guidance from WotC on the question “Does Essentials have everything essential to make good use of the Dark Sun core?”, which isn’t a good sign for a product that is supposed to make it easier to get into D&D.

I think I might be sticking to my usual system based around a 20-sider. Would anyone like to try to convince me otherwise?

A few months ago I mentioned that I had started pulling together some figures for a game of Fantasy Craft (and excellent system that has just had its first batch of errata). As usual, other projects got in the way, but I have finally got a significant number fully painted — more then I originally planned, but I’ll come to that in a minute. Today I applied a coat of matt varnish and can call the first batch “finished”, so I’ve taken some pictures and will relate the story of how they came to be.

The original plan was to paint a few figures to represent House Deneith mercenaries in my ongoing, but infrequent, Eberron campaign. (I also plan to paint some Orcs, and should probably up the priority of that little project as we are getting close to the session when they come out to play with the merry band of heroes).

When I want to get miniatures, I usually make Foundry my first port of call. They are a little on the expensive side, but produce some very nice figures — and the frequency of their 20% off deals helps a lot! The trouble with getting nice figures is that it leads the fanatical Warhammer players that you call “friend” to make comments such as “They would make a great core to a really characterful Empire army!”. To which there is only one response — “Yes, yes they would.”

So it seemed I was doomed to getting back into Warhammer, and I stuck my head in the Empire army book and tried to figure out what I wanted from an army. The answer was simple, cannons and other things that go “Bang!”. The fluff suggested a Nuln army and, while the text shouted “Black! Black to hide the soot marks!”, the pictures showed a number of units which had gone for a red and black colour scheme.

I took another look at the House Deneith pictures in the Eberron source books. Black and red was a common theme. It seemed the world wasn’t going to give me an excuse to avoid it.

I dabbled with various figures and eventually got to the point where I was painting my first cannon (I have another two still waiting in their blister packs). How was I going to apply my colour scheme here? I looked up and saw, framed and hanging on my wall, the answer in a holiday photo I had taken a couple of years previously.

Too many coincidences?

Meanwhile, Warhammer 8 has been released and given me another reason to keep painting. At the current rate, I should shortly have enough fully painted models to be a reasonably sized army and will be able to take them to the tabletop with some degree of pride.