One of my players does like his miniatures though and was lining up a collection of them as the session started out … I threatened to use all of them if he wasn’t careful.

When it came time for the climatic battle, I decided that it was quite a good idea after all. The expression on his face when he encountered a dozen opposition was priceless.

To be fair there wouldn’t have been so many of them if there hadn’t been a critical failure on a roll several hours before (in game time) that gave them warning, so the party wasn’t expecting such numbers.

These were also relatively new FC players who weren’t used to the ease that Standard NPCs can be eliminated.

As it worked out, the number was perfect. Most of the PCs were wounded and one was nearly killed. Just the right amount of danger to make the attack a challenge.

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.

It took me a little while to figure out what “A must-see in 3D” movie was from their promo. Does this film even have giant robots in it?

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.

I’ve since had a chance to play it a few times (it is fun, and can serve as a nice filler game as running through a scenario only takes about half an hour), and discover that a packing error gave me an extra sprue of Skeletons and no Revenants.

Mantic dropped a Revenant sprue in the post for me without any quibbling, so kudos to their customer service.

One of my acquisitions was a copy of Dwarf King’s Hold. This is a fun little game with fairly simple mechanics, but a fair amount of tactics. I’ve played through the first scenario twice now, once as each side. The undead won both times, but it was a close thing on the second game. I’m looking forward to giving scenario 2 a shot.

The figures are great, but suffer from Mantic’s usual problem of not having enough bases (none in this box). The box set comes with a £5 gift token which I’m going to splurge on getting some more (since I have various Mantic freebies that came without bases).

The other worry I have about the figures is that you really need to glue them, which might limit the set as a mainstream board game (which is a pity, because I think it would suit a certain segment of that market).

I’ve painted up the skeletons by applying some Army Painter Skeleton Bone primer, slapping on some Warlock Purple for the cloth, painting a few bits in black and then dry-brushing a dark metallic paint on the weapons and shields. Then it is off to Strong Tone Quickshade before painting the bases dark grey with a coating of Ash Grey flock then adding a little static grass before applying a matt varnish.

I’m quite happy with the way they have come out, and it has encouraged me to dig out the box of undead that I still need to paint from last year. Hopefully I’ll be able to find a few more days to work on them before the end of Easter.

On a related note, Irregular Webcomic has something similar about Siamese cats which I found fascinating.

Now to find some more cat miniatures to paint!