A Story About DnD

So Eric wants to play this game called Warmachine. To explain why this idea even remotely slightly interests me after The 40k Debacle, I have to tell you a story.

Three or four years ago, I was working on a DnD campaign with Tony. Now, I have discussed this before and how it fell apart and never happened. Following these events, I was all engorged with creativity and such and needed an outlet or I was just going to ooze all over everyone and everything.

I didn't know what to do though. I needed inspiration. I couldn't run with what Tony and I did, because that was ours, not just mine, and I didn't feel like I had the right to do what I wanted with it. I also didn't want to do anything like what I'd done before. I searched high and low, Deadlands d20, Mutants and Masterminds, basically anything and everything that was comfortably d20 compatible but interesting or different from what we'd played before. One day I stumbled upon something called the Iron Kingdoms.

It was amazing and awesome and different. It really struck something inside me and I poured over the books for hours on end figuring out what I liked and what was stupid. I sent countless emails back and forth with Shawn discussing what I was trying to do and trying to get ideas on how to avoid the whole "A wizard did it!" issue with some of the stuff. I even lamented the fact that warjack and workjack were awesome names and I couldn't rip them off and instead had to use steam titan and steam strider in my world. Eventually I scrapped the steam driven mech idea (for now! ::wink::) and moved on to stuff like sodium/water cannons and grenades, and eventually I returned to the mech idea on a smaller, more sorcerous scale via the Soulless of my campaign world. For the most part, I was able to avoid direct copying and instead looked at the books as inspiration and put my own flavor on the Heck If I Know campaign.

So yeah, there is a shit ton of Iron Kingdoms/Warmachine love in my heart. I have thought about buying miniatures from Privateer Press before, the warjacks are awesome, at least the Khador and Cygnar ones are. It would be super easy to drop a 100 bucks on models and books and go nuts exactly like we (mostly Tony and I) did during The 40k Debacle, which would have been less of a debacle if Shawn didn't live two and a half hours away like a Dogdamn heathen.

Anyway, to prevent another Debacle from being added to the roster, I have come up with The Plan, and it is as follows:

-Sell off excess 40k stuff (Space Hulk, my Ork stuff, my Defiler pieces, and probably my Chaos Space Marine Raptors and Raptor Chaos Lord, along with whatever other Chaos bits and pieces I feel I can part with).

-Gauge the group's interest, obviously Shawn and Tony will find this ridiculous (Edit After The Fact: They did).

-Read and comprehend the Warmachine quick-start rules, then use proxies to play several games with multiple armies against multiple armies, i.e. experience the variety of the game. The goal is to be able to play the game at this level of complexity without having to refer to the pdf every few seconds.

-Purchase the main game's rulebook in hard copy and continue using proxy armies (possibly upgrade from 11 points to 15) to play various factions multiple times against one another in great variety. The goal here is to get a concrete understanding of the game and also to find a faction we like the look and play style of.

-Purchase models and faction books as appropriate for our interests and level of play.

-Paint the models and play the game.

Side Goal Alpha: Set aside small amounts of money here and there to finance this bullshit.

So that's that. A bit about the past and a plan for the future.

Pertinent Info: I type this from my parent's house and am wearing my fucking gloves as an additional layer of sock to protect my toes from the rampant frostbite in this glacial Hellhole. My coat is on too.

Bananas!

Did I already do that one? I can never remember what I title these things. (I guess I did. Oh well.)

I finally finished my Black Templar space marine and I am super glad I was able to completely scratch that itch. Good looking model (especially those Black Templar specific bits) but I need some practice with it. I think it needs a bit more red as well. We'll see. Regardless, it is done and I am happy with it as a test model. If I do end up pursuing Black Templars at some point, I have a test model to work on improvements to.

Currently I am in the process of re-painting my ork skin before I move on to the final details of the model. I ended up going over the bright green my guide said to use with the previous shade of green and that looks good, pretty much exactly what I was looking for. I might try a green wash to see if I can get some easy shading on the guys. If you can do it properly I've found ork skin shade nicely, they're very muscular and all the ridges and valleys collect paint well. I think all I need to do is finish up the teeth, do the "lucky" blue Deathskull face paint, and eyes. Maybe a little bit of touch up and detail work as well, then they're all done.

I also have a Blood Angel I'm working on. I really like the red. It has the benefit of being simple and also looking decent. I'm using it as a test mini for my Space Hulk guys, which I eventually intend to paint, if I can find a varnish that works for me. I had some trouble when I tried to use Testor's Dullcote to protect some of my earlier chaos space marines. It left this kind of grayish residue on the models that I did not care for. Hopefully I can attribute this to operator error.

I also played Space Hulk, using my Iron Warriors. It was fun. The time limit on the terminator side really makes you a bit tense when trying to plan out your extremely limited number of moves per turn. Then when your guys start dying on you, each death kind of made me cringe a bit. Genestealers just start coming at you like four or more at a time and it gets pretty hairy for the terminators pretty quick. Sadly I lost the mission. It was definitely fun though.

Up to page sixty-something of two hundred and eight in The Last Blade revisions. The next part is rather tricky because a new character is introduced and he was a red cap and there is some discussion of his nature and abilities that must be removed and heavily altered. I think I have a solution though. I'm not sure how different it will be from what red caps are, but we'll see what happens when I start tapping away at the keyboard. I sometimes manage to surprise myself. Not sure what to do about the leprechaun though. To cut a long story short, work progresses on my revisions.

Totally stalled on Traith Harris, and I've come to the conclusion that roughly four or five chapters of what I've written are totally pointless and add nothing to the story. I think I can salvage pieces of it and incorporate it to where I'm going but it was basically a silly way to show Spineplate, a character from my DnD campaign that has nothing to do with Traith's at this point. Oh well, I intend on converting Traith to GURPS (there is a 4E version somewhere around my laptop) and I think that will be an easy route to getting back into the story. Plus, supposedly we're returning to The Known World on the 26th and that always gets me psyched up about Traith because I know that while they're killing shit or engaging in dialogue, he's back in the 37th busting heads.

Sometimes when they do stuff I kind of zone out and imagine what Traith is up to. Its kind of fun to imagine my world as living and breathing. Witch hunters are out there killing innocents to save them from themselves and Traith is out there caving in faces with that big brass arm of his.

My next few pieces of Inconcistencies are probably going to focus on my attempts to introduce the Sorcerer and the Charlatan (kudos to Laura if you are reading this, neat idea). I also have another idea for that story that makes me giggle a bit. To be fair though, I do a lot of giggling when I write that story because it is so ridiculous.

Music: Survivalism - Nine Inch Nails

Music: Capital G - Nine Inch Nails

Hulks of Space

This post will be regarding the contents of the Space Hulk box. The only unfortunate thing is that the sand timer busted in transit, as did the power sword on one of the terminators.

The pieces of the board are all heavy duty cardboard type stuff. Very durable and they aren't just going to fall apart, they're a lot heavier than you'd expect, the whole box is heavier than you'd expect for any sort of board game. The colors of the board pieces are all pretty nice and the artwork isn't too shabby either, you can clearly see everything and understand exactly what it is supposed to be. All good things.

The rulebooks are pretty nice as well, I assume the rules will be as easily understood as the rules for 40k are. The pages of the books are on the thick side so they should hold up to frequent flipping and use, which is another good thing.

The models. These sculpts are pretty much the most amazing I've seen for plastic terminators. The genestealers all look suitably alien and though they repeat a few looks in the twenty-two in the box, they all look nasty and all look like they're about ready to tear some stuff up. Two are even bursting up out of metal walkways and others are depicted as crawling on or through the ceilings of archways, its good stuff. The broodlord is the king of the crop though. He is enormous and sits atop a heap of skulls with a terminator helmet clutched in one of his massive claws. As a genestealer objective there is a dead space marine captain on a throne, and that is pretty good looking as well. The genestealers are nasty and awesome looking, enough said. As an interlude before I get into the terminators, all of these models are snap fit and and only come in one or two pieces, and when they go together they all look pretty nice, its very hard to tell that they are snap fit models and the mold lines on them are almost nonexistent. It looks like they went to great lengths to ensure that the mold lines fall on corners or the edges of parchment and such and I have heard that this was the intent of the makers, and they did extremely well with this. Things on the terminator side of the fence are even better than the genestealer side. There are only eleven termies so each one is very characterful model and none of them repeat. Each one has a name in the mission books and they all have plates and parchment pieces for you to put names on them and individualize them. Each of the terminators has little bits of genestealer remains on them and one is crouching to rip up a slab of bulkhead with his powerfist.

Space Hulk cost me a hundred bucks plus tax, no shipping because of Games Workshop's until further notice free shipping. From the cost standpoint Space Hulk is immensely worth it if you play marines, especially Blood Angels. That's the thing, all the awesome character of the models is wings and blood drops, the icons of the Blood Angels and some of their successors. Now, filing could get all of that stuff off and some of the better modellers out there would have a pretty easy time converting this stuff. It presents a bigger problem for noobs like myself, but I think I have a solution. Anyway. There are twenty-two genestealers and a single broodlord on the side of the tyranids. At full price, this amounts to ninety dollars for twenty-four genestealers (they come in packs of eight), and twenty for a broodlord (who looks a lot less awesome than the Space Hulk one). That alone is over a hundred bucks. Granted, the bases are odd and some of them would be really easy to hit based on true line of sight, but that brings it down to maybe eighteen useful models for a regular 40k army, or perhaps even sixteen if you wanted to be picky. Even still, we're at eighty dollars. On the terminator side we're looking at one librarian and eleven regular terminators with various loadouts of weapons. Depending on the model, a terminator librarian goes for seventeen or twenty (roughly) dollars and boxes of five terminators (assault or regular) go for fifty bucks a pop. So that is at least another hundred and twenty dollars of models, ones that may require added effort to fit into your army and may not be able to be used based on what type of terminator unit your using. Looks like nine would be fine as regular terminators, the other two have lightning claws and a thunder hammer/storm shield combo, making them assault terminators. So, for a hundred dollars you get one hundred and eighty dollars of relatively useful models, plus a new game to play. A pretty good deal as far as I'm concerned. I've always wanted to play some Blood Angels and I love the look of tyranids, so the box is made of win for me.

Limitivity

Just so you know, this blog will only be available for a limited time in extremely limited quantities.

What does that mean? Nothing. It means that eventually I will stop posting or die and you will stop reading or die as well. Or the internets will break. Games Workshop has a bunch of ads for Space Hulk, each of which professess limited quantities. That means nothing. They could continue selling it for the next five years and still call it "limited" because they stop producing it when they go out of business. It seems to me that if molds cost what they do and they are in fact using the same type of molds they use to make their other models, its just plain stupid to not use the fuck out of them till they break. Unless they're ultra shitty quality molds designed to break and they are counting on the breaking to ensure EXTREMELY LIMITED QUANTITIES.

I remember Hollywood Video here in Bay City used to have video rentals for ninety-nine cents for years. Then they quadrupled their rental prices. Turns out that the ninety-nine cents was a special "limited time only" rental. Don't get me wrong, I don't fault Games Workshop for this method of advertising, its fucking brilliant and kudos to them for making a smart business decision (if you believe the internets they don't make many of those, and also their plastic is actually moon plastic and that is why it is so expensive). If it turns out that Space Hulk is no longer available like a month or three from now, I will totally admit that I was wrong about their use of "limited" as a descriptor. Anyway, like I said, it was a smart move for them to add in limited. I mean you have a bunch of what DnD calls grognards who have actually played the original Space Hulk and all of them will likely purchase it, you add on limited time only and you immediately get the new kids to the game wanting to get all the new toys and you get the psychos that will buy two or three copies so that they can collect one, play another, and then put the third onto eBay.

I don't have any thoughts as of yet on the game itself because it is currently at my parent's house and I am not there.

I need to finish my lone Templar. He looks awesome and makes me happy and I want to finalize that awesomeness.

I started reading Space Marine the other day, I think I may have mentioned that the other day. So far I am extremely pleased with it. There is just something about it that I really find myself digging, which is odd because it is supposed to be utterly atrocious and I'd hate to think I enjoy it only because of my lowered expectations. It has this odd quality where it reads more like a random sci-fi novel than a Warhammer 40k novel. I mean, I understand that 40k is technically speaking sci-fi, but Tony and I never think of it that way. The books are sort of their own genre. Don't get me wrong, Abnett is a fantastic author and there are others among the stable of Black Library writers that are skilled raconteurs as well. That said, the books are kind of like an action flick. Most of them you just turn off your brain and giggle internally as space marines just pound the piss and/or shit out of everything in the galaxy while everyone but the main characters drops like flies. Most of the time the characters are awesome hardassess and the aliens are fucked up nasties and it all meshes into a glorious tapestry of fast paced action and mayhem. Just like with movies, sometimes its just fun to read something that is simple and enjoyable and an easy read.

If you look back to the earlier artwork of the game there's a lot more...I guess you could call it fucked up shit. Anytime you see a human of importance they're all bionic and have cables snaking every which way from them, a lot of the artwork is like a mild dose of H.R. Giger's artwork, kind of cool but vaguely unsettling and I think Space Marine kind of captures some of that in Watson's writing. Tony tells me that the last third of the book is where it really becomes shit-like sludge, so we'll see.

Music: Alcohol - Gogol Bordello

Bananas

There's definitely a lack of coherent intent here. I don't know quite what to post about at this moment, but I do like to keep up the practice of blogging here on a semi-daily basis. Its too easy to go a day without blogging, then two, then a week, then a month, and then its like "Whoa! I forgot this was here."

What I would really like to do is play some DnD, or GURPS, or anything really. I'm playing Shadow Complex on the 360 right now and don't get more wrong, it is quite enjoyable, but it is not what I'm jonesing for. I want to play something with dice. Thank Dog I don't live in Vegas, I love the clink of dice on a hard surface far too much. Fuck, if Space Hulk came tomorrow I would be ecstatic, some topics on the B&C are indicating that people are receiving them today but those are likely the guys who pre-ordered when it first showed up on GW. Ooo!

I've grown bored with my 360. I enjoy Fallout 3 and Shadow Complex, which are what I'm playing at the moment, but fuck, I am bored with technology. After close to a hundred hours spent on Fallout I find it difficult to be as in love with it as I was when my mutton chop sporting lad first stepped out of his vault and saw the signs lying in the dusty dirt saying "We're dying out here!"I want to do something "old school."

I'm not sure how I feel about the fourth part of Inconsistencies Continued. I think it takes itself a hair too seriously to fit in properly with the other parts, plus it is a bit grim and dark, but the Vampire is kind of like that.

For the past few days I've been trying to come up with suitable foes for these characters to fight. I mean, what can challenge the might of the tungsten and titanium clad Robo Socialist? Who can stall the murderous savegery of a Vampire prince of Atlantis? Who could stop a wheelman with a Chevy from the Future loaded with explosives? Who could counter the mad plots of a madman whose genius hearkens back to that of Tesla's own? What lawman could bring down the chain smoking protege of Dillinger (or perhaps Capone) himself?

These asshats:

The Disbeliever, a mad man implanted with vat grown German psionic organs that have opened up strange pathways within his brain and allow him to shoot beams of disintegration from his eyes that erase his foes from the very fabric of reality.

Tosty Mc Fuhrball (an alias), a lunatic Irishman of German descent with a fetish for pyromania who was lobotomized by SS pseudo-scientists and trained by Nazi occultists in the arts of calling fire and explosions into existence from the ether.

Doktor Mayne, a Japanese bioengineer that has traded the frailties of mortal flesh for the enhanced biology of parasitic nanite colonies that have devoured and replaced the very flesh on his bones. Often called the Golem Samurai or the Iron Bushido he is known by the whip-like silicon hair that wreathes his body in a whirling cloud of slashing tendrils.

How's that for you?

Music: Happiness In Slavery - Nine Inch Nails

Music: #75: The Kindness of Strangers - This American Life

Music: Strangers In The Night - Sinatra

Stuff and Things

Hi. I was looking at my Orks and Black Templar marine last night and I found myself really wanting to paint. The orks are definitely too bright of a green. Goblin Green is definitely too bright to be the final color, so I think I'll redo the orks skin in...Knarloc Green I think it is, with maybe a wee bit of Goblin Green in it so there is some lightness to it, but overall it will be a nice dark green that I like. I look at that Black Templar and I get extremely excited because it looks pretty solid right now and I can kind of envision the final product and it makes me happy. I'm jonesing to get back to my chaos boys though and try and play around with some stuff I've read since the last time I put paint to a model. Good times.

So, with our little GURPS group there has been some discrepancy in points and who wants to do what with points. At this point, my Socialist Robot needs 750 points to work properly and not be a lame half effective concept. I could probably, maybe, scale it back to 500 and get the effect I am going for but I would really have to put some effort into that. Eric also wants a high tech character which will need a similar amount of points, or he will be a mage and still need high points. Dan wants to be a gangster and Jeremy wants to be his wheelman, realistically speaking these two characters become blatantly absurd if they are made with more than 250 points. I mean, how do you justify a 25 in strength or dexterity for a run of the mill 50s gangster? It makes no sense.

I have achieved a solution of sorts! (Because I am a downright brilliant motherfucker.)

First off, the most obvious thing is for Dan to use points to purchase contacts and allies and the like to simulate the fact that he is in fact a member of an organization (perhaps an Outfit?). That could easily take up a chunk of change. The other option is to use the Innate Attack Advantage coupled with Limitations like Breakable and Can Be Stolen to simulate his own homemade, lovingly cared for Tommy gun. Obviously to justify this he would have to purchase some Armoury (small arms) skill to simulate his technical know-how. The fact that Innate Attack does not require reloads or clips could be justified by some suitably cinematic method of reloading or the fact that this motherfucker always has a clip (or drum) or two stashed away somewhere (Perhaps in an extradimensional space inhabited by some manner of toothy and hungry extradimensional creature? No one gets that, its ok.). A similar solution could be achieved for Jeremy's character and his grenades, although in this instance it seems like it would be prudent and sensible to apply the Limited Use limitation. I love the fact that GURPS is so damn customizable that you can do shit like this, its glorious.

I broke down and bought Space Hulk finally. Heather actually talked me into it funnily enough. I was really reconciled to the fact that I would not own it, which bummed me out to no end, and she said to just get it if it is going to be a limited release. I am a such a collector that I want to have everything associated with 40k, like to the point where I have considered going online and trying to pick up the original Space Hulk and I have in the past scoured eBay for reasonably priced copies of Space Marine (which has been so retconned out of canon by now that it is only relevant in that Necromunda exists in 40k and there are space marines in it, I mean come on, they talk about Tyranids being around in the 25th millennium). Regardless, I have it pre-ordered and look forward to it, the sculpts on both sides of the bulkhead look pretty slick. Each of those termies has a shit ton of character to them, scrolls and iconography unique to each model, plus their dripping with the remains of stealers they've clobbered into pink mist. The genestealers are slick as well, they're all crawling around arches and walls and there's even at least one bursting up from below a metal walkway that howls Alien at me. I can't wait to see what the Broodlord looks like, hopefully it is crafted from refined awesomesauce and forged upon an anvil of epicness with Mjolnir.

I have determined that Inconsistencies Continued will be a once a week sort of thing, probably mid day on Mondays prior to me leaving for work, so those of you that are interested will find a nice little story waiting for you at the end of your Monday workday. You are welcome. I enjoy writing it, but it is pulling my attention away from other more important writing related shenanigans, like my rewrites for The Last Blade, so I need to cut back on the frequency of its posting.

Music: Discipline - Nine Inch Nails