GAME OVER

Now and then, I’ve been known to flick through the old Rogue Trader books on the train.  One of them – the Book of the Astronomican – has this little old campaign called ‘The Wolf Time’, in which a tattered band of Space Wolves are trying to bring down an Ork warlord who’s all sealed away in his castle.  They have a set list of forces to divide among three skirmishes, each of which represents an assault on one of the generators powering Warlord Kulo’s castle.  They have to win at least one of these skirmishes in order to make their assault – winning two or three reduces the final defences further.  Once those three games are over, the surviving Marines collect together to make their attack on Kulo.  If it takes too long to play out one of the skirmishes, the Marines from that battle arrive late, and the target generator will still be contributing to the Ork defences until they arrive.

The other day I was thinking about how much sense the attack-the-generators-to-enable-the-final-strike scenario would work for an assault on a Necron tomb world (the context in which I’m most likely to play it).  That set me to thinking about Dawn of War, in which the Necrons operate by building generators to bring their Monoliths online… so that gives us a final scenario in which the Monolith replaces the Castle.

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Some time ago, I posted about the Musical Method, in which song titles or lyrics become converted into story frameworks.

Since then, I’ve also been experimenting with pictures.

The Unholy Trinity map from DOOM, extracted by The Green Herring.

Clutter, by mordere, NSFW, by the way.

When originally conceived, this entry was going to be about the Iron Kingdoms/Savage Worlds storyline I planned on instigating with these resources, in traditional “I have planned a narrative which you are now going to explore” style.  Of course, I left the idea to mature and seethe for too long, and now it’s developing into something broader.

For one thing, as always happens when I sit on an idea for too long, it’s mutated beyond the confines of the proprietory setting and system that it was constructed for, and run into the ever-circling notion of a homebrew design.  For another, it’s run into the notions of player agency and the sandbox: my creation of a predefined relationship between resources would surely be robbing all parties involved bar myself of their agency, and I’m increasingly coming to see that as a Bad Thing.

It’s possible that I may do a somewhat teachery thing, which I’ve done several times with my young charges, and simply toss down an image in front of a group of players and say “you’re in this room, this is what you see, and this painting is on the wall facing the window”.  Some sort of narrative inevitably emerges. A little prodding or guidance towards a particular element, what we call a ‘probing question’, and soon they’re doing the work of devising the session for me.

On a similar note, Zak has got me thinking about using tarot cards to define magic items, encounter natures and relationships, and quite a few other things, using a few preconceived notions that the cards then model, and I’ve been pleased to note that Prose Descriptive Quality seems to be available again following some inexplicable download issues (and again, I’m wondering whether cards can somehow be fitted into resolving actions and devising player characters).  The temptation is strong to create some sort of system and setting of play that revolves around the symbolism of the Tarot – like I was trying to do with the Kabbala in the Dark Heresy thing, and not executing as smoothly as I’d have liked.  I suspect that a narrative based on the Kabbala was too prescriptive for roleplaying – more ‘you’re not GMming, you’re writing a novel and making your friends do the dialogue’ stuff – and incorporating that rich symbolism into the backdrops and mechanics of the world might be a better way for me to get my occult kick and preserve player agency – especially if even the GM is at the mercy of the cards.

I’ll get back to you on this.

Also, this blog uses Disqus now.  Disqus is cool.  In theory, y’all should be able to use whatever logins you ordinarily use, but fewer responses should be eaten, and more threaded call-and-response conversations should be possible.

Hello Curis.  I have purchased some Druids.  I do not wish to paint them green.

Several of my previous armies have been legitimately accused of being Dark And Boring, which I now use as shorthand for the kind of painting I absolutively, posilutely strive to avoid in my own work.  I take the opposite standpoint to Chip, who’s a big fan of many and varied shades of Ubiquitous Brown; that’s what floats his boat and it’s certainly appropriate for the miniatures, but I find that by the time you’ve done the obligatory shading, fading, weathering and staining and generally taken steps toward an interesting, yet still ‘real’ colourscheme, too much brown is not particularly exciting, and frankly I want things to look exciting.

The studio scheme opts for classic druidry and places green alongside its brown to enliven it, but frankly I’m not a fan.  Partly to avoid Green Fatigue in case I want to paint any Cryx in the near future; partly because it’s the studio scheme and my previous diversions from such have been well-received.

Stuck for ideas, I decided to google ‘druid’ and see what happened.

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I have rather strong feelings about Chaos; I see it as an integral part of the 40K milieu: the ultimate corrupting power, rooted in the very worst of human nature, a source of delightfully Boschean horror-tropes.  Chaos is the formless night into which the Traitor Legions’ failings – primarily the hubris of Horus – casts them, in a sort of Paradise Lost in space kind of way, and the Treachery itself is fundamental to the crumbling, decline-and-fall nature of the Imperium.

The Chaos I know is a rich, fulfilling stewpot full of sinister.  It has the Traitor Legions, to be sure, with their ten thousand years of hateful, bitter exile, and it has the Daemons alongside them, working one another’s strings; it also has mutants and beastmen and cultists galore, radical Inquisitors and recidivist organisations embedded in the Imperium, and it even has freebooter Orks and Khorne-worshipping Stormboyz tagging along for the ride.  Tactically, I think of Chaos as a ragged horde of the galaxy’s most desperate, with the Traitor Legions at their malignant heart; oh, I like playing raids and incursions of the Legions as much as the next fanboy, but I cherish a Chaos that’s more than Space Marines with spikes on and all their shiniest wargear traded out for daemonry.

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I’m going to interrupt the Settling Series today, since I’m feeling all excitable and want to get something out of my system.  Trust me when I say that the upcoming Settling posts will unpack all this bad noise about conflicting goals in depth and detail, and apply them specifically to Choosing A New WFB Army; for now, here’s the deal with 40K.

I had an Ork army which I wanted to do, which would have had a lot of narrative investment, a lot of conversions and unique stuff, and generally been fun, but it would also have had a high buy-in cost and probably been very frustrating on the table.  I currently have a Tyranid army which is, so far, quite good on the table and easy to plan in financially manageable chunks, but which I’m having trouble painting and personalising.

N++’s Punk Artposts are helping me identify and articulate the problems with painting the Tyranids, which are thus:

1. it’s an assembly line process, which I have a nasty feeling will always be the case with any army scale game,
2. in trying to match real beetles, I’m not entirely doing the Tyranid anatomy justice, although I’m gradually learning to address that as I tinker with the methods I’m using,
3. while I’m experimenting with methods that are new to me I’m doing it in a very uncoordinated way.

The last point needs unpacking and thinking about, and the kind of thinking which it provokes doesn’t fit into the list, so:  I’m trying out a sort of cross between the methods in Dave’s first article; the latest batch of Nids have been done with blue washes over gesso, with a few spits and spots of bright orange to pick out the eyes and biomorphs.  It’s a sort of Sin City in blue tones concept that takes account of colour theory.  It has too many variables and, as an experiment, it’s a mess.  On top of that, I think I still have a lot of the scenester programming in me that makes me look at the ‘all shades of blue’ and think ‘unfinished and bland’ rather than ‘hey, that’s different’.  It’s quite hard to shake that insistent inner voice saying that it’s not done unless it’s done the way everyone does it (three colours, Codex or near-Codex scheme, washed and highlighted).

This, right here, is why I don’t like having to think too hard about painting.  It gets in the way of actually painting, and that’s problematic because… well, I’ve been anguishing to the saintly Hark about this for a few days now, and she gave me a long look yesterday and asked “Boyf, do you actually enjoy painting?”

Truth is, I don’t.  At least, not always.  I like doing single models or very small groups.  Mostly, though, painting is an inconvenient journey between two things I actually enjoy (modelling and playing).  Dave’s dead right about assembly line painting being soul-destroying, but it’s a trap that I can’t really avoid putting my foot in.  See, I like army scale games.  I like playing them with painted models.  I like the sense of achievement from knowing that I painted the models myself.  I really like modelling.  I just don’t like the process of painting lots of models in the same scheme and style, and when you have your initial 1000 points to do, in a high-model-count army, that sort of comes with the territory.

The Tyranids have financial appeal, tactical appeal, modelling appeal, but they don’t have the opportunities for personalised narrative or the aesthetic variety that I need – unless, perhaps, I were to take a cue from second edition and paint each unit however I damn well please.

Maybe not.  My instinctive reaction there is ‘rainbow vomit’.  I don’t know if that’s an honest reaction, or what the gaming/painting scene has taught me to think about anything that challenges the wall of drab.  After all, my Cryx have at least four different schemes involved, and they look good; I had a Chaos army that had a very similar sense of variety to it.  The thing is, I don’t know if that works for Tyranids – but is that ‘doesn’t work for Tyranids’, or ‘doesn’t work for the painting meta that says Tyranids need to be a uniform horde’?

Only one way to find out.  Remember those beetles? Well, I was originally thinking about choosing between them, but… well, why should I have to?  I have three Tyranid ‘types’ in the army so far, so how about treating each of them as a different subspecies within Tyrannus Níðhöggra and painting the blighters differently?  At the very least, I can pick different accent colours for different Tyranid types to stop myself chewing the bed with boredom…

Gaunts (since I’ve started them that way)

Stealers (something about the pattern suggests a good fit with ‘stealer anatomy)

Warriors?

That Warrior idea might be going a bit far; if I were to trade in the purple for a dark blue then they’d all have at least one colour in common.  Of course, I’ll also have to find another scheme I like for the Carnifex and/or Trygon sub-species.  The tiger beetle on the left there is kinda sexy and I think I can see him as a Tyrannofex without too much effort.  A Trygon would have to have a similar variety of tones; they’re far too big and mean-lookin’ to get away with just two colours on (or is that the conditioning talking?)

I’m resisting the urge towards a spotty Trygon. For now.

It’s still not quite Punk Art, though, is it?  It’s still theorised, researched, planned and pretty much not spontaneous at all.  Worrying about whether you’re doing Punk Art right probably proves that you need to do it… why am I so uptight about these ‘nids?  Is it just that I don’t want to ruin models that I intend to game with by doing something that I’m not sure will work?  I’m pretty sure it’s not.  I’ve experimented with Warmachine figures – albeit after three years of learning how to paint them.  Maybe it’s just that I’m new to the Tyranids and haven’t got a feel for the models yet.

Is there a place for research if you’re trying to paint from the heart?

For that matter, is this something you can try to do at all?