The Epic Win

This Thursday just gone, I tried a brand new (relative to m’self, anyway) game. I say ‘relative’ because, well, Epic has been around for quite a while. So long, in fact, that while I dimly remember playing one game when it still had ‘Titan Legions’ on the front, it’s been through two total revisions since then. It might as well be a completely new game as far as I’m concerned – especially since all I remember about Titan Legions is being enthralled by the little spinny-roundy void shield counter in the base of each Titan, a piece of business which I still think should have survived into games like Battlefleet Gothic (where it’d have done nicely to indicate the relative positions of ships in the third dimension, and made the whole thing feel a little bit less… seafaring).

Anyway, I also dimly remember promising I’d try to say something intelligent about new games when I tried them out, so here it is; I quite like Epic. I’m not immediately head-over-heels for it like I was with Freebooter’s Fate, not yet, but I quite like it.

The early stages of an Epic demo. Note the presence of an embarrassing, twice-broken, dead-to-the-world digital camera on the left; fortunately, the Blackberry seems up to the job of taking table-wide shots. I’ll be using these captions to demonstrate principles and report on the two turns that were completed before we realised what time it was and decided to go home.

Recommended Reading Review: M. A. R. Barker, ‘Create a Religion in your Spare Time for Fun and Profit’

Some time ago, Kent spent some time talking up this essay by the author/engineer/creator of Tékumel as being exemplary and inspiring stuff for the GM interested in establishing their own campaign world. Relevant to my interests though it assuredly is (and I’ll get around to building worlds once I’ve blown the dust off my practical at-the-table GMing skills, as it’s all for naught if one’s running a boring and directionless game), it’s taken quite a while to get around to reading it.

They have a Cave Troll. No, really, they have. It’ll be along any minute now.

i was impressed by how the starter experience was laid out.  Quite liked that you can turn the box into a board of just the right size for the scenarios – i see wot they did thar.  It was nice that the scenarios followed the film version of events, and that they explained how the rules mechanics translated into real fighting. For instance, in melee, where the loser of a fight has to back away two centimetres, the booklet translates this as “representing the losing model backing off, desperately trying to escape the enemy”.  Obviously it has to be aimed at the youngest end of the hobby market, so it does come off as a little simplistic and twee, but it’s not terrible.  The way that the battles got bigger was good for teaching you the rules and making sure you’d grasped them firmly, before moving on to more rules.  One or two of the scenarios seemed a little unbalanced – but then again, it’s difficult to balance the fact that some of the Fellowship are very impressive, stats-wise, vs. the Goblins, that have a pretty poor statline.  Vice-versa, it’s difficult to balance nine dudes vs. millions of gobbos.

Hark’s Lady Thoughts on the Mines of Moria Box Set.

i’ve said it before and i’ll say it again, i’m very impressed by the sculpting on these little dudes. i feel that makers of action figures could learn a lot from whoever did the sculpting of the Lord of the Rings models, ’cause i can actually tell the difference between Aragorn and Boromir, despite the fact that they’re both beardy guys. This impresses me.

It’s been a bit of a learning curve with the painting, though, as the techniques i use for this are completely different to the techniques i use on canvas. For a start, the amount of paint you use is different – obviously due to the size of the canvas, ’cause i like mine about three foot square, and here’s twenty-five millimetres of plastic, but even taking that into account, i have to use a hell of a lot less on the brush than i think. As little as possible is key – sometimes you put as little as possible on and then you still take some of it off to get the effect you want.

Actual Play Review: Freebooter’s Fate

I have a cold.

I have a cold because I spent part of my Friday night sitting on the platform of a suburban station somewhere in the greater Birmingham area.

I spent part of my Friday night sitting on the platform of a suburban station somewhere in the greater Birmingham area because I’d popped over to meet the Frontline Gamer and play some Freebooter’s Fate.

Of the available factions I alighted on the Brotherhood because, frankly, they look prettiest, and I’m trying to learn about stealth and actually using terrain intelligently.