Cthulhu Masters at Expo

Just a sneak peek for those who aren't watching the facebook updates at Expo, some of the prizes for the Cthulhu Masters this year.

Because no prize is complete without a box...

And where would Cthulhu be without sinister Idols...

Or Cryptic Letters...

Or photos of things that may never have happened...

And with great glee, I can report that Yog Sothoth have kindly sponsored the masters this year with a copy of The Express Diaries for every person who enters the competition this year.

Booking for the tournament opens at 22:00 this evening and places are sure to go fast

And I've let the blog go a little...

Problem inherent when you're organising so many things, some of the things that aren't immediately essential go by the wayside, but I need to start coming back to this anyway, and in doing so, I might get some of the impetus back.

But not tonight, tonight I sleep alone, for Tiny wife is in deepest darkest London, and my world is a emptier place without her...

So this is John Dodd, in the Socialist Republic of South Yorkshire, and Goodnight England, Wherever you are...

Star Realms - Game Review

I’m a latecomer to Deckbuilding games in general, it was only last year that I came across Dominion, and that was my introduction to the concept.  I have to say that as far as game ideas go, I really like that both players are working from the same deck and have access to exactly the same resources at the beginning of the game.  The only problem I ever had with Dominion was that you didn’t really know who was winning till you get to the end of the game and tally up the points, so you don’t tend to adjust your strategy to reflect that.

There is no such problem with Star Realms

Star Realms is a two player deck building game that has all the cards you’re going to need in the base set, it works on a similar premise whereby players buy cards from the centre of the table and build their deck up to do what they want, but instead of victory points being placed within the deck, the winning criteria for this game is reducing the opponents Authority (Hit points) to zero.

 

And as with all Authority, it can be overturned...

The mechanics of the game are almost identical to those of Dominion, players start with two vipers and eight scouts, vipers do a single point of combat (damage) and scouts provide a single point of trade.  Players start with a hand of five cards, they get to buy as many cards as they can afford in the turn, then play any combat effects, then discard all their remaining cards and draw another five.

There are some subtle difference to Dominion in the way the game plays that suit the style of the game very well, the first of which is that there’s no limit to the number of cards that you can buy in a turn, if you have the trade points available, you can keep buying till you run out.  There’s a pile of cards separate to the main deck which is made up of Explorer ship cards.  These are worth two points of trade rather than the one of the scouts, so there’ll always be things that can be bought at the beginning of the game, even if the cards drawn from the main deck are initially too expensive.

The main deck consists of ships and stations, with each faction having a particular focus towards how that faction is played and what it will work well with.  No card has a play cost, if they’re in your hand, you can play them, ships go into your discard pile when you’re done with the turn, but stations remain to be used again and again.  The only defensive measures you’ve got against incoming fire from the other player comes in the form of outposts that absorb a certain amount of damage before being destroyed.  When destroyed, the outposts go back in your deck and will eventually come around again, but you have to balance carefully your offense and defense. 

Most cards have more than one function to them.  All cards have a main effect, and that effect occurs whenever you play the card, but many cards also have an Ally effect and/or a scrap effect.  Ally effects come into play if you have another card of the same faction out at the same time, and scrap effects can be used at any time, but to use it, you have to put the card in the main deck discard pile, not your own, so you only ever get to use it once.

The trade pile always has five cards in it at any time, as soon as one is bought, it is replaced with another from the main deck, and there’s no danger that the main deck will run out before one side has battered the other one into space dust.  

There are four factions within the basic decks, each one having a different style of play

The Blob faction (Green) are an organic battle fleet that works by delivering lots of damage and drawing additional cards with which to press the advantage.

The Trade Federation (Blue) are the main defensive fleet, their ships offer lots of trade but also raise your authority level so that you can keep going even though you’re taking hits from other fleets.

The Star Empire (Yellow) are a direct attack fleet that don’t deal the same levels of damage as the Blob fleet, but have additional damage in the form of causing the opponent to discard cards from their hand so that their next turn will be reduced in what they can do.

The Machine Cult (Red) are all about efficiency, most of their cards have the ability to remove cards from your deck or discard pile to streamline its efficiency, the larger of their ships allow you to remove things from the trade pile in the middle of the table.  

It’s very difficult to build a deck that’s completely one of the factions, the trade deck being properly shuffled tends to have ships of all different types coming up, so working out which combinations work for you is an important thing early on, diversifying will only give you a deck that doesn’t work too well, but most decks with two factions in them can be very efficient.

The artwork on the cards is excellent, all brightly coloured vistas with a clear idea of how big the vessel you’re playing is, and I don’t know about everyone else, but I like the idea that even though all the cards are the same size, you get the idea that you’re playing something massive when you slap a dreadnought down, far more so than you do when you’re playing a viper.

Playwise, there’s no one faction that’s stand-out overpowered, and there’s a lot of work been put into the balance of it.  There’s expansions for the game that I haven’t picked up yet, but I’m sure I will be, and while I know that a self contained game doesn’t need expansions, I can’t help but think that this game could easily support more factions (even if the trade deck replaced one faction for another completely), and that the game would only benefit from greater diversification.

Available directly from White Wizard Games at http://www.starrealms.com/ they also have an app for playing the game when there’s no one else about.

Why things shouldn't be spun out, but kept fresh and live...

I don’t read the various Horus Heresy novels, I started out reading them with the best of intentions, but it was eight years back when I started, and after the first few, I came to the realisation that like many things games workshop, they were just going to milk it for all the money they could before bringing it to an end.

It’s not that I object to them making money off their own IP, I just have a problem when it’s something that everyone already knows about, everyone knows how it started, and everyone knows how it ends, and they knew that more than twenty years ago.

Especially after how it was first told...

Behold White Dwarf 131…

Without question, my favourite issue of White Dwarf ever, mostly for the fact that it had two of the best pieces of fiction that I’ve ever read in it, and another reason, that was only to become apparent in later years…

The first piece of fiction was The Emporer and Horus, by William King, which detailed the last hours of the Horus Heresy, when the Emporer took the fight to Horus and nearly paid with his life…

It took two pages…

There was nothing wrong with that bit of fiction, it was tight, sharp, and encompassed all the things it needed to do, it conveyed all the emotion that was going on and the gravity of the situation, it conveyed the end of a struggle that had been waged across a galaxy…

It took two pages…

As of right now, the Horus Heresy saga spans 13093 pages, not all of which is immediately related to the events of the Heresy, some of the books deal with minor incidents out in the middle of nowhere, some of them deal with events that had no apparent (as of now) bearing on the events of the heresy, and some of them are very relevant to the heresy, but take a while to get to the point.  In all, there’s a number of other books planned, and most of the GW employees that I’ve spoken to either have no clue when it’s going to be finished, or aren’t allowed to tell people when it’s going to be finished (much in the same way that you can’t refer to mark 6 armour as womble armour anymore), so it’s going to keep rolling till they announce that the next book is going to be the last.

And you can be sure that it’ll be written by Dan Abnett, which is a good thing.

But I can’t help but feel that this could have been done tighter, sharper, and then the books could have moved on to other, newer fiction, on subjects that we don’t know about, maybe even…

Something original…

  

Which brings me to the other piece of fiction in this issue, Inquisitor Kryptman by Lindsey D Le Doux Paton, which detailed Kryptmans encounter with something that resembled a Grabber Slasher (as they used to be known), and the final moment of the story, where they make contact with the Scythes of the Emporer, and the contact is too much…

“Warn them, WARN THEM, the tyranids are coming, THE TYRANIDS ARE COMING…”

More emotion packed into one statement than the rest of the story put together, and it’s things like that that stay with you when you read, I’ve never forgotten either of those stories, nor the artwork that went with them, and they mean more to me than all thirty of the novels that have been brought out since, because they resonated with me, and since that point, I sought to make my writing more like that, because words are like anything else, a small number of the right ones will make up for any number of the wrong ones…

And I believe that with all my heart, if people spent more time doing new, original things, and inspiring people to buy them because they were interesting and new, the world would be a better place, and stagnation would be a thing of the past, it’s not as easy as making something 6547 times longer than the original story, but it works better…

Rant over…

The other thing about this episode though, is the featured store in the front cover, and a man I was to come to know well…

Although I’m not sure about the hairstyle, reckon he looks better now :)

World War Kaiju - Book Review

I love big monster films, so does Tiny Wife (more than I do in point of fact), I particularly like them when they play the monster as being something largely unstoppable (which they would be), and I like it when people put thought into what they’re doing and don’t just head straight for the fight scene (or have swan diving godzillas, 1998 pay attention), so when Pacific Rim came out, it was on the must see list, and remains one of my favoured films of all time...

But there aren’t enough Giant Monster films out there these days, and the ones that there are tend not to involve the Giant Monster all that much.  Anyone see the recent Godzilla film?  Two hours of film and only ten minutes of Godzilla, what’s wrong with this picture...?

So it’s always pleasing when you find something that’s got a Giant Monsters and a bit of plot work to go with it.

Enter World War Kaiju...

I’d already taken a look at this when it was at the Kickstarter stage, but as I’m sure many of you can sympathise, I spend too much time on kickstarter and occasionally rein myself in, even when the shiny is so bright I can almost taste it...

However, they did kickstart it, it did do well, and from that, they released a number of copies into the world, so I got a copy for Tiny Wife...

Stop looking at me like that, I really did get it for Tiny Wife...

The fact that I found it brilliant too doesn’t come into this, it’s her book...

Seriously...

The story is told in flashbacks, as a reporter questions a soldier on what happened in the final days of the war.  It’s an alternate universe story, where instead of dropping Fat Man, the atom bomb, the Americans found a way to drop Fat Man, the Kaiju...  Before long, other countries were experimenting with this new technology and before long, there were Kaiju popping up everywhere. 

The story itself is fairly simple, and makes up most of the drawn elements of the book, with a reasonable amount of text in between made up of reports about the operations, scientific calculations, formula’s, and the general sort of random snippet that really interest me. 

There’s a whole world dreamed into this book, and I suspect that this first book has just scratched the surface of it.  There’s a website devoted to the comic, dividing the known Kaiju into their respective countries or alignments, so you’ve got American, Soviet, Nato, and Rogue Kaiju, none of which have any allegiance to that country, only the understanding that that country has (what they think anyway) control over them.

It's available at the moment at www.worldwarkaiju.com

I liked the book a lot, it doesn’t take itself seriously, but it has enough reverence for the subject matter to not make it a joke, I know there are plans for a second book at some point and this time...

I will be backing it on Kickstarter...

Stealing Cthulhu - Book Review

So who’d want to do that?

No one sensible one presumes, after all, even if you manage to steal it, what are you going to do with it?

This is a book by Graham Walmsley, originally published back in 2011, which details the finer points of Gamesmastering for Call of Cthulhu.  It’s not often that I read a book on gamesmastering, and to be honest and fair, most of the time, I don’t feel the need to.  I’ve been running games for more than twenty years and running them well, so like most people who’ve been doing something most of their lives, while I’m open to new ideas, I have a reasonably healthy conceit that I’m not going to find any.

Cheerfully proven wrong in this case...

Reading this book has reminded me of how much I did learn in the early years, how many times I found something new and it was like Indiana Jones discovering Tanis for the first time.  When you start GMing, you don’t know anything, you figure that being God is easy and the path goes one of two ways.

1: They start acting with impunity, nothing can stop you, and you can do anything, these GM’s never make it more than a few years, players won’t put up with them and it won’t be long before they find themselves either as a player, or at a table of one...

2: They start learning, and every lesson they learn makes their games better...

This book is for those who intend to walk the second path...

The book starts with a basic premise, the understanding that most Cthulhu games follow a particular theme, one that starts with Investigators finding something strange, things go bad, things get weird, the mythos shows up, everyone goes mad...

Shooting commences...

And that’s also the problem with most Cthulhu games, if you play it that way, it turns into Paranoia with added tentacular complications.

There’s a lot of people out there now saying that I’m wrong in saying that it’s not how the game is played.  In truth, yes, a lot of people like to play Cthulhu like that, and if that’s how you like to play it, then have fun, play your heart out and never think anything more of it. I see Cthulhu as a setting that gives you the best chance to have an involved game against impossible odds, but like all things I come up with, it’s my opinion, and you can take it or leave it as you see fit. 

But here’s why I think that Tentacular Paranoia is the wrong way to play it...

If you read Lovecraft, those who were involved in the story often made little difference to the outcome of it, they were incidentals, bystanders almost, as the mythos creatures went about their undecipherable plans.  They were mostly powerless in the face of what happened, and the notion of turning up with guns or secret knowledge conveniently gleamed went out the window when the first page turned.

And that’s a million miles removed from most Cthulhu games, where investigators turn up, already know the stats for whatever they’re facing off against, and have no concern over what it is beyond the finishing of it.  The problem is that there’s too much information out there, and most savvy players know all about it, so the only thing they have to worry about is the failure of a SAN check, and everyone opens fire...

There are some who don’t run games that way, and doing the job I do for UK Games Expo, I see those people every year, I know their games will sell out almost instantly because the experience of playing the game in the way it was meant to be played is something that people search out every time after they’ve played it that way, and those who don’t play it like Tentacular Paranoia get their name about fairly quickly.

This book is one of the best resources I’ve found for how to run games of Cthulhu properly, to recapture that sense of fear at the things that the investigators may have to face, to bring something unknown back to the table, and the best part of this is that it doesn’t take much to do it, it’s changing a few things about the world the investigators are in, it’s following the way Lovecraft did things, as the title suggests, it’s Stealing Cthulhu...

And giving it back to your players...

There’s sections on what each different branch of the Mythos do normally, and how they can be changed to work differently, advice on cultists and monsters, when to use each, and more importantly, when not to use them, a distinction that is more important than most people starting out with Cthulhu would believe.

At the end of the book, there’s a set of rules for playing Cthulhu without the masses of rules presented by the regular books, a system that Graham calls Cthulhu Dark.  Replacing all the rules with simple die rolls and working on a narrative basis in a style more reminiscent of FATE than BRP, it works well for experienced players, and the rest of the book provides all any GM needs to get players to that experienced stage.

The theory is that you can’t teach old dogs new tricks, but there is the point that sometimes the dog needs reminding of the things that he learned long ago, sometimes it’s not enough to know something, sometimes you don’t use your whole arsenal because you haven’t used it in so long, and if you’re new to the game, you don’t have the arsenal in the first place, and that’s what I got from this book, a reminder of all the things that make these games excellent.

It’s available from RPGnow or from Grahams website direct at

http://thievesoftime.bigcartel.com/product/stealing-cthulhu

And unlike Cthulhu, it’s worth paying for...

The Butcher and the Cleric - Acolyte Miniatures Review

I like games with interesting pieces, from the hundreds of different types of chess sets out there, to the millions of miniatures for wargames, all the way up to the massive pieces used in Cthulhu wars.  I like the idea that the pieces you use to play the game are not only relevant to the game, but also accurate for their use.

That said, there’s a great deal to be said for well crafted miniatures that you can use in a variety of different games, and it’s there that we find the latest offerings from Acolyte Miniatures, the Butcher and Cleric Roberto de Foresta, both ostensibly for a series called the House of Lies and Bones, which by itself sounds intriguing, but which has yet to be expanded on, so I’ll stay to the review of the miniatures themselves.

Both of these mini’s were provided by Acolyte miniatures for review purposes.

Not for Beginners says the packaging

I’d be inclined to agree

The immediate point I’d make is that the detail on both figures is fantastic, the lines are clean, the casting is immaculate, and the main body of both miniatures is sturdy and likely to last well.  I started out with the Butcher, which is cast in 32mm and is larger than the Cleric (down to needing a larger base, which I’ll come to in a minute), but still only has three parts to the whole of the mini, so construction shouldn’t have been a problem. 

Looking at the way the figure is put together, with drilled points at the end of both arms, I expected that the hands would probably have a counterpart section so that they could be fitted into said drill points to make putting the figure together easier.

Not so...

No problem though, out with the modelling kit, snipped off the spare from the end of the hand and tried to fit it...

Still not so...

Sanded it down to flat and fitted it on that way, no problem, and then came to fitting the mini to the base, and that’s where I encountered the problem that it didn’t fit into the base provided, the wording on the mini stood proud of the slot and wouldn’t let the figure descend, sanded it down and it fitted fine, then I took a look on the website to see that the Butcher miniature on the website at

http://store.acolyteminis.com/#!/The-Butcher-32mm-Resin-Miniature/p/41223052/category=10636010

had the same profile, and figured that they must have sent me the same model for my review, particularly as I had one more figure to review...

Which brings me to the Cleric...

Excellent news, this one fit in the base without any problems, very fine detailing on the figure and all the component parts of it (of which there are many).  I considered going with the sword, but considering that the sword was the only one of the weapons that didn’t have a hand already attached to it to attach to the arm and the hand provided wasn’t positioned in such a way that it would hold the sword properly, I went with the hammer.

Easy to put together this time, and both figures are now finished and ready to be painted (which I will not show the results of as I’m sure my painting isn’t up to professional standard) for use in any game I see fit.

The greatest strength of these figures is the detailing that’s been done, they really have gone to town getting all the individual lines and contours well cast, and well painted, these figures would be a boon to any game that’s played with them.  The attachments aren’t the strongest I’ve ever encountered, which is a problem you run with anything that’s very finely cast, but when assembled, you’re never going to be picking them up by the extremities, so that shouldn’t be an issue. 

Which brings me to the matter of costing.

Acolyte are presently offering either of the figures on their website for £12 plus postage, which puts them at less expensive than smaller models in the GW finecast range, delivery is noted as 4-6 weeks from point of order, but the packaging that the two I have arrived in was well sealed and properly foam protected so the figures would arrive safely.

Overall, they’re very nice figures and there’s clearly been a lot of thought go into them.  I’d like to know more about the storyline that they both come from and I’d like to see more on the website regarding what’s coming next (as there appears to be 54mm and 72mm figures coming up as well), but as a start into the market, they’re excellent quality and will certainly find use in a number of games I run.