AWG alternate wargames general: Japan Rising edition

Get people to playtest, see if you can book tables at local shops to do demos, maybe local conventions, then sure you can always try KS.

Arabian is a sorely underused theme, so I support you on that. Looks are a big draw, and I'm more likely to be drawn to something that won't blend in with my other minis.

I'm currently discussing it with a friend and hashing stuff out, and I've come to a fork in the road. I can give the system a setting, and cram everything with fluff (a particular strong point of mine), or can not have a setting and make character creation robust, but generic...which seems to be like pretty much every other system out there.

>I'd want to buy the shit out of minis if they looked like something out of Morrowwind or Zeno Clash.

Well a new Runequest line of minis is coming up, plus Mad Knight Casting is planning on coming back next year. Closest thing you'll get to Morrowind, considering the head designer of it started off as a designer for RuneQuest.

Another question about Mantic, did anyone tried thei Dungeon Saga models? Did they actually look so good like on their web-store?

That's what Wrath of Kings did and nobody plays that.

What was unique about it? Can't say the models really stood out to me, other than say the pig men.

Nobody plays it because of CMON.

It's one of the few games with thick girl cheese cake.

>thick girl cheese cake.
The hell is that supposed to mean?

Minis of fat girls in chainmail bikinis

It's my fetish. They're not even in chain bikinis, they're just naked.

Take my advice with a pinch of salt, because chances are what I want out of a skirmish game isn't what everyone else wants, but I like a skirmish game that's got an interesting setting - but one that lets players make up their own characters to act in it. A setting that inspires is great, but having a sense of "these are my guys and this is their story" makes for a campaign that people get invested in.

who makes good shield bits that are easy to get en-mass on their own?

New Batman edition.
PDF is free now.

While I enjoy most of the new rule changes new cards and shooting change tick me off

Whatever happens, a new skirmish game is going to be the smallest of dogs for quite some time, that's why you need something compelling to bind people. And rules probably aren't going to be it, the rules need to be competent but you aren't going to outcompete the literal shitton of generic or nongeneric skirmish wargames out there on rules alone. What gives a game stayingpower and makes people stick around is an interesting setting and fluff, an aesthetic you don't get anywhere else. Look at Malifaux, it would never have caught on as it did if it weren't for its setting.

Gripping Beast make medieval shields at decent prices.

Unfortunately for fantasy stuff you generally seem to be at the whim of resellers on eBay charging £1 each

Em4 Miniatures do their bag of 50 shields for £1 or whatever it is, 3 styles but they're all circular.

bump

I have the box. The models are crisp, not hyper-detailed but really good for the price. They are absolutely the best boardgame miniatures I've owned and wouldn't look out of place amongst wargaming stuff.

Oh what'd they change about shooting?

page 10 bump

This.
CMON is like Veeky Forums for mini's companies.

Are there actually miniature wargames focused on Kaiju?

Do want.

Once upon a time, Privateer Press had Monsterpocalypse, which was a collectable tt wargame. But - possibly due to botched movie deal legalese - they killed off, buried, and have since erased all support and evidence of the game. Fans have been upset for years about the fate of the game.

Mostly because it was a really fun game. Not perfect, was one of the worst examples of icon overload, but was still fun and pile driving an enemy monster into a building felt so good.

icon overload?

Every special rule in the game had an icon used on the miniature's card. The game had 30 something different rules and icons to keep track of. Some were easy, things like faction and alignment icons or really common rules, but everything else needed you to look up what they did.

Every single stat was represented with a symbol, same with some special abilities. It was just crazy symbol heavy. One of the proclaimed benefits was all the model's stats and stuff were right then on the base so you didn't need cards or sheets to have stats handy, but people made stat cards because nobody could remember what all the damn symbols meant.

Still one of the best games I ever played.

I'm gonna place a not chunk of that blame on CMON being dickheads with distribution. The game itself is fine and the models are unique and pretty damn nice. It's just that you can't get them anywhere because CMON can't into proper distribution of anything that isn't a board game.

I swear; if it wasn't for their boardgames that people just can't seem to resist throwing millions of dollars at they'd be at risk of going under because nobody would be able to get ahold of their damn products.

so what places are good for bits and lots of them without being bullshit priced? i need to feed my conversion machine

>Not perfect, was one of the worst examples of icon overload...
Also, the blind box format was a stupid idea as far as I am concerned. Just let players buy exactly what they want.

Bumping with this ridiculous, glorious bastard from Dark Age.

>Also, the blind box format was a stupid idea as far as I am concerned
This is the main thing that killed it. I remember exactly when it turned up at our LGS, they bought heavily into it and tried to push the game on just about everyone. A lot of people were interested too, but the moment the booster/blind box format came up literally everyone lost interest.

Yeah, that was a stupid move on their part. And relaunching the game as a non-blind format would be so damn easy.

God I love that fucking thing. Except I'm terrified of ever playing against one because, if I remember correctly, it will basically rape faces everywhere it goes.

>Except I'm terrified of ever playing against one because, if I remember correctly, it will basically rape faces everywhere it goes.
It's beefy as fuck, has a chance to ignore a non-critical ranged attack each time it's attacked at range, and can either death beam through chaff infantry, or demolish a single target in melee, and to top it all off it gives a free bioenergy each turn for the spell pool. As a CORE fan, I am a bit jealous of how safely it can kill things compared to the similarly-priced IC0N-CL457.

They made a model of the Bismuth Golem, the madmen

Anyway, this weekend has been one of EXCITED SPACE NOISES so it's time for some thoughts on Ravenstar Studios' Cold Navy minis.

First up they are not exactly the best quality. Some mold slippage (my battleship's port turrets were missing a barrel, and my frigates were highly variable in shape for the fine details and panels under the nose). No panel lines, thankfully, and no flash. Although two of my cruisers didn't have the holes for the base to attach drilled.

But there's things like the models not being nicely symmetrical, panel lines not quite being the same on each side of the ship etc that are a real letdown because if these were as crisply cast as, say, GZG's metals or even most resin minis (like the Hasslefree mech I bought) they'd be the best spaceship models on the market.

The very anime aesthetic means you don't have a million tons of greebles everywhere like a BFG/Full Thrust ship, which some people will like.

The resin across my order was clearly from multiple batches, varying from pale yellow to Forgeworld-style grey to a bluish-white colour. I washed it very thoroughly and it took primer fine, and I was careful not to get too much dust anywhere.

All in all these look good from a distance, are exactly the style of minis I needed, but close up don't hold up compared to cheaper competitors. That said the convenience of resin rather than unwieldy 6" slabs of metal is undeniable.

Its one of the scariest 200 pts. models due to just how pure beatstick it is. Him and the Fire Elemental.

Damn. Almost makes me glad nobody here plays Dark Age so I don't have to worry about someone plopping that hefty fuck down acress the table from me.

And then I'm sad because Dark Age is so fucking good.

Just surround them with irradiated Buzzblades and watch them pout.

Well none of the factions I would play have access to Buzzblades, so that'd be a bit tricky. I suppose with Ice Caste I could throw spear slaves at it.

Well, only one group is going to be heavily Arabian. The rest is a mix of Tolkein movie elves and Romans; mix of Abyssinian, Phoenician, and Mesopotamian Dwarves; Egyptian crocodiles, Romani-Slavic undead Goblin escaped slaves; and tribal humans mutating into little dragons.

I'm trying to play up a Mediterranean feel.

For the beatsticks, really either drown them in bodies or piece trade. All tge 150+ models are effective against each other, and as scary as the Fire Elemental or Cabrakan are, its still hard for them to cleave through 8 bodies if spaced correctly.

That's cool. Just don't make anything too much of a "been there, seen that" and people are less like to pass it over or find a cheaper source for suitable models (lots of Roman minis out there).

What makes me nervous about this is that it is mostly resin, with a few metal bits. Resin always freaked me out a little. From the fragility, to the toxic dust, to being really hard to strip paint from due to the porosity of the material. Also the $70 price tag. Great centerpiece model, but $70 still feels a little costly for something that won't make it into every list due to how many points it eats up.

Jesus Christ, what caliber is that Thompson? Are the bullets the size of fully grown men, or a Volkswagen Beetle?

A full grown Volkswagen Beetle.

I've never really had any problems with resin being anymore brittle than my plastic models. I guess thinner resin parts are more likely to bend and warp, but that's a minor problem to me.

And yeah: $70 for a single model is a bit much. At least they aren't going the GW/PP route of making a giant, impractical, model and then forcing it down the community's throat.

Typically resin is more fragile and brittle, making it prone to shattering or breaking via impacts. Consider if you would rather chance equal-sized plastic and resin minis fall from table-height onto a hard floor.

Although, as far as resin goes, Hawk Wargames has some magic British space resin that holds detail very nicely, but is softer and is more resistant to shattering or cracking than other resins. Almost like Finecast, if it was firmer and not shit. Dropzone models are a pleasure to work with as a result of the resin quality.

>typically resin is more fragile and brittle, making it prone to shattering or breaking via impacts
I only ever had this problem with Forgeworld, Finecast and PP resin, never with other manifacturers.

Standing close to them doesn't stop it, only 1 ping, and shooter changes.

>to the toxic dust
I feel like the dangers of this are vastly overstated, like with lead miniatures back in the day. The mold release is probably worse than any resindust you might breathe in.

Does anybody have an Excel spreadsheet for SilCore/Heavy Gear/Jovian Chronicles vehicle construction? Thanks in advance.

Monster Island used to have a general on here back in the days. Irrc there are some 1d4chan pages on monsters created by fa/tg/uys.

>Monster Island
Never heard about that and I've been here for a while. Is that a homebrew or actually published?

Bumo

I'm almost thinking a very crunchy fantasy skirmish game would be the best thing for a kaiju wargame.

Just play it with little capsule toy sized kaiju and 6mm buildings.

In fact I'm extremely tempted to grab a bunch of the cheap Ultraman and Godzilla toys, prime them and repaint them then have a big-ass monster rumble.

You could probably print out a bunch of buildings and put them together with tape/glue if you wanted a really cheap game.

I could see a well made kaiju game being quite popular if it was as cheap/easy as grabbing some toys off of ebay and printing out the board and city.

Off to Tenerife until October so this'll do for now.

I've got so much random fantasy stuff to paint, please keep October similarily broad because I've painted enough sci-fi for one lifetime.

>tfw you play a test game of your WIP game and it actually works as intended

Theres still stuff to fix, but man is it a good feeling when you can finally get stupid bullshit to stop happening in your game

Damn nice! Any chances of seeing the rules?

Unfortunately I'm still mid rewrite, so the rules in their current form are pretty much impossible to interpret unless you wrote them because its all stream of consciousness stuff.

I'll be prettying up the rules over the next few days to release and get some feedback for the next rewrite, but the gist of the game is that I want to make a more streamlined, user friendly fantasy skirmish game in the vein of Mordheim.

What's your basic intent for attack resolution and turn order?

Totally understandable. I have my own pet project that is at the stage of mostly scribbled notes and paraphrasing.

Do you care to at least give a quick rundown of how things work?

Turn order isn't too weird or wonderful, its an I go, you go system with activation points instead of GW style phases. Each unit can be activated a maximum of three times per turn and draws their activation points from their teams communal pool. The size of the pool is determined by summing the Activation Points value of each unit under the players control at the start of a turn, most units contribute less than 3 points, but certain "leader" units can contribute more. Killing them is usually a good idea as it can severely limit what your opponent can do by draining that sides activation points pool.

Attack resolution occurs simultaneously and is a bit more complicated. It is possible, if unlikely that two units locked in combat can both kill each other. Both players declare what they're doing before they roll, add their weapons stats to their base stats and roll off. Every successful roll causes your opponents unit to take a toughness check to see if it results in a wound, by taking their base toughness, adding the modifiers for their armour/shield and subtracting the amount your roll succeeded by (I need to make a 3+, I roll a 6, my opponent now has a -3 modifier to their toughness check). Failing a toughness check results in a wound being removed from that unit. One unit loses all its wounds, its dead. Both units lose all their wounds, the one that lost the most that turn is dead and the other unit continues with one wound. If both lost the same number of wounds and now have zero wounds remaining, both die. I'm not gonna get into determining whether someone who survived runs away or stays fighting for the sake of brevity.

Most of the depth in the games combat system is intended to come from the interaction of equipment like armour and weapon type, where certain weapons like hammers work really well against opponents entombed in metal, but are inferior to faster stabby weapons against more lightly armoured opponents.

So kind of like Infinity's order system, without the ability to dump all your AP in to one guy.

What die do you use for the system, just a D6?

I actually don't know anything about Infinity so you may be right, I should probably go read those rules.

The system just uses d6, although the game will move significantly faster if you've got a decent number of them and in a few different colours, just because it helps keep track of things like how often a units been activated.

The aim of the game is relatively low barrier to entry but with enough depth to be interesting to people who know what they're doing.

I couldn't find Monster Island on 1d4chan, but I did find JAEVA:
1d4chan.org/wiki/JAEVA:_Giant_Robot_RPG_system

Anybody have recommendations for good cannon minis? The larger and more ornate, the better.

Look at some historical models. Bombards back in the day were bonkers sometimes.

Any suggestions though? There's a lot of retailers out there.

Perry Brothers are sort of the go-to. I don't know how big their cannons can get, but they make quality stuff.

And on the note of historical stuff that I don't think /hwg/ wants to discuss: can we talk about how threadbare KoW historical is? I was looking it over again today and fuck man; there's like nothing to some of the lists. I get they have the generic units, but they just don't always work (see Ottoman Empire and their plethora of cavalry). I think they could have dropped the mythical stuff from the back and dedicated some more pages to fleshing out the lists.

Looks good man, what system is that for?

How is everyone else doing on their group build?

After much searching, I found some that seem baroque enough. Wish they had a size comparison with some other minis to see if they're big enough though.

Thanks pal, when I do get to play stuff these days it's either Heroquest or Song of Blades and Heroes. Simply doesn't appeal to me any more having a grand army with £100 centerpieces or whatever.

So, I recently got interested in Song of Blades and Heroes and I'm a bit concerned about the rules regarding terrain.

Is there any reason why I shouldn't use more than "two to six scenic features"? Will it affect the game negatively?

I just really have my heart set on making a 3'x3' village.

Not at all, do remember how movement works though, you only get to place the measuring stick once per action, so going around a corner might take two actions.

I made the mistake for a while of just using a measuring tape like 40k, game works better if you actually make some cheap sticks from Balsa or whatever.

I actually think it's better if you really congest the table with terrain. Just make sure you allow most of the flat area on terrain pieces to be clear. What I mean is if the terrain piece is a flat hill with trees on it, don't reduce the movement of the model for moving between the trees. Same for floors of ruins and the like. But moving over bushes or over walls or through a swamp are what reduces the movement

Thnx, user!

Spread it, it's irritating how every Song of Blades and Heroes archive only has the 2008 v4 rulebook when this newer v5 one is somewhat clearer and better translated.

Unfortunately in v5 I've only ever seen this inksaving version rather than the full one with a bit of art and colour. Beggars can't be choosers, really I could pay for the proper one.

If you do that user, you'd better post it here

I wish I could have edited the MERCS 2.0 rulebook. Mine just arrived in the mail, and it feels like every other page there is an error or information conflict. Fuck, I'd edit it for them just for the price of getting a copy of the corrected book.

Do the faction cards supersede what is written in the rulebook? Because I'm getting mix ups with template sizes, modifiers, etc. in the rules vs. what is on the cards, and I vaguely recall that cards are the final word on model-specific rules.

>Fuck, I'd edit it for them just for the price of getting a copy of the corrected book.

I know a few companies will actually send you a corrected copy if you send in corrections, so its worth a shot

Hey /awg/ anons, quick couple of questions for you guys. I recently got my woman into painting minis with some Shieldwolf maidens. So,
A. Is shieldwolf a decent system, and is it worth trying to teach her
B. Is there a better system i could try so me and her can get our dice on together. The more rules light, the better, as her attention span isnt the best

Thanks friendos

I believe the cards are final word. What sort of issues are you noticing? I've seen a few mistakes on the cards themselves (EU demo has attack & move, but it isn't listed on the front of the card for some reason).

There's no such thing as a Shieldwolf system, they just make minis. They backed 9th Age in their endeavours, but I'd use their minis for simply skirmishing or something.

Otherworld skirmish sounds like what you need - nothing too complex, some lighthearted dice throwing.

Most noticeable (and least important) is book/card disagreement on pronoun use for a given model.

More importantly, there have been errors in the book regarding how personal abilities work, how templates or ranges work, or how much kit abilities change numbers (To list a few: ISS Demo has B/S/M for the EMP grenade, but is listed as being able to attack enemies within 3 card lengths; Texico Jaguar listed as having Melee 1, but with the wording for Fighter (which IS what he has); Keizai Waza Demo's toxin grenade listed as having Toxin 2 that lasts for 3 rounds instead of 2; Texico Breacher listed with Act 2 and a 1 card mine template for dynamite, but is Act 1 and frag grenade template on the card).

Also, this is a bit of a personal gripe, but the Keizai Waza Demo has some very poor wording for Hot Potato. "This MERC can relocate any grenade placed in short range to another location in short range of this MERC." This seemed straightforward, and I assumed it was meant to limit how many of your MERCS can be clipped by a single grenade if you're bunched up. However, the book offers advice that seems to conflict with the wording.

"...HOT POTATO even allows him to relocate friendly grenades, giving them an extra card length of range." One might assume this means that another teammate can toss a grenade from further back, and he can give it a 1-card range boost. However, he is the only KW member that carries a grenade, so he would only be able to boost his own grenade ranges. This doesn't make a whole lot of sense, since he has B/S/M throw range, and you would think he'd just opt for the M range instead of using short and then chucking it further with his personal ability.

Also, even if he did place the grenade at short range, I don't really see how it can be used to give the advertised "extra card length of range," because the rule reads like he moves a grenade at short range to another location ALSO within short range of himself.

As far as hot potato goes, I think that's a general text for the tip. Also consider that House o could bring him using the Load on which meana guys with grenades he can extend the range of.

I agree some things are worded kinda poorly, but it hasn't stopped me from enjoying the gane overall.

Looks like you're correct. In my sperg frenzy, I neglected to consider how it interacts with House 9 (both in taking the Demo as a guest MERC, and the Shock trooper with the other H9 MERCS).

The errors shouldn't detract from my enjoyment of the game, either, but I have always found it particularly grating to see careless errors in what is otherwise a very well-made and put-together product. Although the book has been useful so far in letting me know that Fighter only adds the +2 to melee attack rolls if you MOVE and attack, as well as clarifying how the Sefadu leader's spear consumption works.

Well, I've got some super robots, and some more coming from a board game kickstarter, so I'll just take a gander around Akiba while on holiday and see what I can find.

So if you're wanting to play one-off games, Mass Effect Terminus is feature complete. All factions are now in and fully costed, including the Quarians and Geth.

Maybe campaign rules coming later if people are interested

Been trying to figure out what minis would work well. Infinity would probably be close, and I vaguely recall someone mentioning Enforcers from Deadzone. If looking for something a little more true to the series (although they are limited to Male/Female Shepard, EDI, Garrus, Kasumi, and some Cerberus mooks), Studio XIII Models has some really nice looking minis available on etsy. They look well-cast, and the prices seem reasonable, although I have no clue what the shipping rates would be for something from Ukraine.