Two Games Over the Weekend

I ran two games this past weekend, one was the Balin's Tomb Lord of the Rings miniatures game, and the second was a playtest for a tabletop fantasy role-playing game I've been working on.  Only two pictures of the later I'm sorry to say, but I took quite a few of the Balin's Tomb game.

Balin's Tomb
I used the by the book GW Strategy Battle Game rules for this one, with my Balin's Tomb set up that I already posted pictures of before.  Standard winning conditions for the Good side, last 12 turns without Frodo being killed or any 5 Fellowship members being killed.  The rules, and this scenario, are pretty biased in favor of the Good side, so I thought they would probably win, I just wanted to see if the board I was using was too big for the game.

Turned out that three players showed up to the game store to play so I played the Evil side and each player took a set of heroes to play.  This turned out to be a very good thing and when I run this at a convention I'm going to make sure to play the Evil side and have all the players play the heroes.  It was just more fun for them.  And now the pics of the game.

Starting point for the Fellowship, as close as I could get it out of the movie.

At the start of the first turn of the game.  One unit of goblins with a goblin leader (I used an orc figure so it was easy to tell who the leader was in the chaos of the melee to come) has made its way through the door.  This is the only thing I think I will change.  I gave the Good side priority (initiative) like the rules say to do for the first turn, but I'm going to give the evil side priority next time I run the game.  It will allow the goblins to put more immediate pressure on the heroes, and this is a good thing.

Two goblin units in now, this is the end of the second turn.  You can see that the Fellowship are setting up for a bottle neck to the goblin's left of Balin's tomb to try and limit the rushing advance.  It actually worked pretty well.

Third turn.  All three goblin units on the board at this point.  Basically it's a contest of exchanged missile fire between Legolas and Aragorn shooting arrows and a lot of goblins shooting arrows.  Every now and then Gandalf would cast a spell as well.

The big boy makes his entrance and you can see we've got some melee's going on now.  All forces are on the board at this point.

The cave troll makes a go of moving around the open side of the tomb to get to Gandalf and the hobbits on the other side.

He made the turn and was heading for home but the Fellowship won priority and Gimli moved into melee with the cave troll to stop his advance.  You can see Aragorn and Boromir also fighting in a ferocious melee, greatly outnumbered.

Gimli has managed to keep pinning the cave troll and you can see that the hobbits have made their way to the stairs, with Gandalf and Legolas covering their retreat.

Evil won priority for this turn and the cave troll tried to finish off Gimli with one goblin each charging in to occupy Boromir and Aragorn, with a rush of three getting to Gandalf.  Nail biting time!

But, Gimli killed the cave troll, Gandalf survived, and eventually the Fellowship took out all the goblins.  However, Pippin was killed in the process.  The game was a Good victory!

The cave troll is just not tough enough in the game, I'm giving him another wound next time.  Also, I'm going to put some rubble on the floor which will serve as rough terrain for the Fellowship, but not for the goblins or cave troll, so that should liven the game up as well.  But all in all, it was great fun, I love the rules (and I am not a GW fanboy by any stretch), and am looking forward to running this game again in the future.

Dungeon Crawl RPG Playtest
I've been working on a retro-inspired (not a retro-clone) set of tabletop fantasy rpg rules and wanted to test them out.  I won't go into details about the rules, but here are a couple of pictures of the game.  My plan is to run this dungeon (it's about 15 rooms total) at a convention as a rpg-lite type game.  It is sort of like a cross between Heroquest and old-school theater-of-the-mind D&D in that it is played on the tabletop, but the actions of the characters are not really constrained at all, so they can do whatever their player describes.

I had to put the idol from the cover of the AD&D Players Handbook in the game, didn't I!?  He looks too cool not to include.  The thief in this case is climbing up on the brazier to disarm a trap on it before removing the gem eyes.  If you do not disarm this trap, when you go to pry out the gem eyes the brazier shoots a huge blast of flame straight up burning the would-be tomb raider.  You can see many of the heroes I completed yesterday serving as the PCs for the game.

The cave troll is standing in for a demon in the game (I didn't get the demon figure finished).  The party managed to complete the dungeon with only the barbarian dying, so it was pretty successful.

2 New Adventurers, 3 New Doors

I've been hard at work churning out a couple new heroes, another human fighter but the first with a crossbow, and the other a female elf ranger/fighter/archer.  Here they are.

Not much new construction wise, but I decided to try and paint some scale mail on the human fighter, and I'm pretty happy with how it turned out.  Every now and then I put in a gold scale to break it up a bit.

Now an action shot with the three new doors.

Two human fighters and a human cleric coming up behind the two new heroes to provide support.  There is a new door in the background.  I painted a brick pattern on this one, and put a couple of split bead torch slots on for decoration.

Second new door, this one with the split lady bugs serving as skulls flanking the door.  I'll probably do another one where I put the skull on the door itself.

Third new door behind the troll.  I used the same thin pre-cut wooden small circles as shields as decorations on each side of the doorway. 

And finally a larger scale action shot.  The two new heroes blundered into this room of drow and a troll, with a gray ooze sneaking up on the elf.

3 New Heroes and a New Way to do Doors

I know it's been a while since I posted but that's because last weekend I was at the North Texas RPG Convention.  I had a great time, met some new friends, and really got my old school fantasy rpg fix taken care of.  And best of all, I got to meet Erol Otus (if you follow this blog you know how I feel about him!) and Jeff Dee, my two favorite D&D product artists from my childhood.  I didn't get to speak much with Erol (he always seemed to be running his games when I saw him) but he was a very nice guy and did stop and talk to me (a complete stranger) in the hallway for a few minutes allowing me to go a little fan boy on him.  Jeff, on the other hand, had a booth for his products so I spent a lot of time talking with him.  Also a very nice guy and we spent a lot of time talking about the new V&V release that he and Jack Herman are putting together, which of course I backed the Kickstarter for.  I got to play in a V&V game that Jack ran at the con, which was great fun.  I'm a sucker for a good superhero rpg!

But, because of the Con, I was busy the week before it getting ready, so today is the first day I got something new done.  The following are three new heroes, a barbarian and paladin/knight redo, and a new generic archer figure.  Also, I tried a new way to do doors.  But first the heroes.

The first figure on the left is a generic archer figure.  Could be an elf, could be a human, could be a fighter, could be a ranger, could even be a thief with those striped pants, etc.  Simple construction, milk bottle with a bead as a head, tile spacer arms, bow, quiver, and feet, paper tunic and hood.  I mainly did this figure to see if I could do a hood that has those saw-toothed edges to it (I'm sure there is a term from the Middle Ages to describe this piece of clothing but I have no idea what it is).  In the middle is my 2.0 barbarian.  Lots of differences here from the old guy.  Bead head instead of the axle cap, paper hair, paper short tunic/skirt, and feet.  Still used the egg as the body and the split eggs and split spools as the arms and forearms, respectively.  Paladin/knight redo is on the far right.  Except for the feet, he has pretty much the same construction as the old one except that I gave this one a shield and put a decorative tile spacer "doo-dad" on top of his helmet (it is painted gold instead of gray so it is easier to see).  I have also started painting all the bases black.  I steered away from that for a long time, but I think it works better.  It essentially looks like the shadow created from their body, and it works regardless of what type of terrain or room color the figure is resting on.

View from the rear.

I'm quite happy with them.

And now some action shots with the new door.  I liked my old doors, the construction idea for them I stole from DMG, but because I travel to my games instead of being able to have them in my house, I have to constantly transport my stuff.  The old doors look great, but they are a little on the brittle side.  I wanted something that was a bit sturdier and could stand up to constant transport.  I already had a precut rectangle that was thick and roughly "door-sized" and some larger blocks that could serve as each side of the doorway.  For another project that is now dead in the water, I ordered a bunch of very thick long but not very wide rectangles which I thought would be a good "floor" and "ceiling" for the doorway.  It is especially nice because the thick "floor" piece is the same thickness as the thick foam I use for rooms.  So I glued it all together and because there is so much wood surface touching each other, these doors are incredibly solid!

The following is an "action shot" with my new figures, one of my new dungeon tiles out of the thick foam, and the doorway.  There is also a hallway dungeon tile in the pic that the heroes just came from, some old friends in the form of a roaring brazier and a statue of an elven goddess, and also I painted up a summoning circle insert that I can plop down on a tile wherever I need it.  It's just a large precut thin wooden circle I got at the craft store and I painted freehand a summoning circle on it that I stole from the internet.

Good shot of the door here.  I forgot to say that I added a small mushroom cap to each side of the door as a handle.  It's all a bit oversized, but I think the chunkiness of it looks good with these figures. 

The neophyte adventurers are baffled!  Why is there a summoning circle in front of the door?  What significance does the statue of the elven goddess of luck have in its positioning?  Why is the brazier lit and who lit it!?