Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Shaking off the digital rust

Hi All,

Long time no post. The run up to Halloween and the culmination of Zom(b)orctober had me a little out of sorts. Just one of my moods I guess, but I was just struggling with trying to keep up so I took a step back. So what I have for you are a few random things that have come across my plate and, hopefully, some direction for upcoming posts.

I've been acquiring bits and bobs and hope to have some good stuff to share with you soon on terrain making and what not. Hopefully some figures and bases will be here soon as well.

I've been trying to get another Cthulhu game together but schedules are not lining up right now. One of the players is not jazzed about the Basic Role Play (BRP) Sytem that Call of Cthulhu uses, so we are going to try FATE. I ended up buying a PDF of Present Day Cthulhu Powered by FATE, by Starbright Illustrations, from DrivethruRPG. I mainly wanted to see how the FATE principles might be applied directly to a Mythos game. Perhaps I could have figured it out myself, but they have some good background and monster stats that I can use as guidelines. Hopefully I'll get my act together soon and release the 7 or so hours of audio, and slightly less video, of our sessions from the first adventure. I like the Call of Cthulhu setting but am not so married to BRP that I'm unwilling to try a different system. I do feel that perhaps part of the clunkiness of BRP is more due to my lack of experience GMing it and having not played or GMed in decades.

We did play the first half of the intro Goblinquest scenario, I hope to finish it tonight. We got a little bogged down in dice rolling, I'll give you the report thoughts in a separate post. I think it may be mainly my son's short attention span.

I also rolled up two Warhammer Orc Warbands using Erny's awesome rules, Warlord. I think these could easily be extended to all the races of Warhammer. I hope to use these warbands as a jumping off point for the Tale of Painters thing, which I need to check in on.

6 Zombies and 5 orcs is all I got done last month, so lets hope I can get rolling on painting. I am planning to start prepping in earnest as Curt's challenge tends to get announced in mid November. Last year I was woefully unprepared.

Lastly I will get back to giving opinions etc about photographing miniatures. Hopefully you can get better performance out of your setup, the juries still out as to whether or not I really have improved my photography with what I've learned. And look for the 2nd issue of Wargame Bloggers Quarterly WBQ to be released into the wild soon. If you were a member of the G+ group, you'd already have it.

Here are some random pictures of stuff you may, or may not, find interesting.

A few pickup trucks for Hugh. Closest is a Chevy Silverado, my Toyota Tacoma and I think a Ram 2500
 Hugh was asking about Pickup trucks awhile back, here are two I parked in between. The top of my cab is about 6 ft off the ground, I have the jacked up TRD suspension. The two on either side are full size pickups, mine's a 3/4 ton, and you can see they are considerably larger.

A silly book I saw on the shelf at Barnes & Noble
Oh yeah, welcome to Roy Williamson of RW's hobby blog. I could have sworn we were already following eachother. It looks like he may have lost his blog and had to restart it. Anyway welcome aboard and go check him out and follow him. You may have been before.

10 comments:

  1. WBQ has been released in full now Sean. It is appearing on various blogs and G+ groups as I type. Thanks for the shout out mate.

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    1. Hi Michael,no problem. I hope to get my act together to submit my photography article for the next one.

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  2. Hi Sean. Thanks for mentioning the WBQ. Was completely off sight for me. Will have a look into that one later.

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    1. Hi Paradox0n, no problem. I think WBQ is really good. You get to see really high resolution versions of pictures and maybe read some posts you might have missed.

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  3. Roy Williamson is me (r.a.e. g1ngerbh0y), so we already know each other Sean :)

    Yeah, I had to close down my other blog and renew my account due to google+ corrupting it and leaving me pretty much unable to comment on my own blog. So a new start and everyone can talk to me - and I'm getting together a blog game for 2015.

    Cheers for the welcome.

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    1. Hi Roy, okay I thought so. Too bad about the Google+ problem. I stayed away from G+ integration because I'm not totally sold on G+. I find it a tad baffling and somewhat distracting from just blogging.

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  4. It can be difficult fitting in real-life activities with our hobbies at times, I hope you stick with finding a solution on rules for your CoC group (mine is thriving)

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    1. Hi Joe, yeah. I think the main thing is to try and remember that the hobby is meant to be a stress reliever, not a source of stress. I wish we could just play BRP and be done but I can understand that, for some people, the mechanics of the rules can be an obstacle to enjoyment. I think the main problem is failing rolls that lead to missing clues. I haven't worked out how to give them something if they fail.

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    2. The missing of clues shouldn't be a game-breaker, my players miss them all the time.
      There are numerous ways to still guide them on the task at hand. - for example my characters all have contacts (as suggested by the players 1920's handbook) who occassionally "fill in the blanks"

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    3. Thanks Joe, you are right. The other problem was being able to ad lib when they went after complete red herrings. Again, my inexperience was more the problem. I have the Investigator's Companion. It's on my to read list.

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