Hell & Uncivil Disorder and Small World

We continued our monthly session with a Spanish Civil War game using the Hell & Uncivil Disorder rules. The rules are rather loosely written and ambiguous in places, and we had to make decisions when situations came up during the game which were not specifically dealt with in the game.

The scenario we used was from Atacar es Vencer!, which contains 12 scenarios for platoon-plus size forces, with one or two tanks or armoured cars in some of the scenarios. Though not written for the Hell & Uncivil Disorder rules, it worked pretty well, and provided a tense scenario for both sides. The Republicans managed to fight the Nationalists to a draw, despite having lower quality troops and lacking a tank or any anti-tank guns.

My interest in the Spanish Civil War was sparked many years ago, when I watched this episode of Alas! Smith & Jones:

It took me decades to finally find a set of rules that comes close to what I want a game of SCW combat to feel like, and it's doubly satisfying that this is a group project with figures and vehicles painted by four of us.

For our second game we played a game of Small World, one of my all-time favourite boardgame. I came last in a three-player game, despite chalking up a decent 99 points by the end of 10 turns. I have asked for a rematch, and maybe we will play this again during our August session.

Hasegawa Egg MiG-15 Ork Dakkajet Conversion

It all started when Adrian posted about the McDonnell Goblin fighter on the group chat. I was reminded of the Hasegawa Egg Planes series, and had the idea that I could convert one into an Ork Dakkajet. I looked at some photos of the Dakkajet, and realised that it was probably based on the MiG-15, which was one of the planes in the Egg series.

To give the plane an orky look I dug up the bits from an Ork Killa Kan I bought a long time ago but never ended up using - I was planning to make a model using a film cannister. I add some orky weapons, I ordered a pack of Orc HMG Tips and a pack of Orc Biker Heads from Puppets War.

For the construction I decided to clip off the wheels so I could fit these horns to the front of the plane and weapons under the wings.

A Gork head adorns the nose of the plane.

I glued the orc biker head to the torso of a Mad Puppet infantry trooper, and used some 2-part epoxy to sculpt a fur-lined collar and upper arms to the jacket.

After I was satisfied with the set-up, I sprayed the main parts of the model red, and then glued the weapons and orky embellishment to the fuselage and wings.

The plane was pretty plain, so I added checks to the rim of the intake and the tail, and some wedge-shaped decals from the Space Wolves sheet the the wings. I then weathered the model.

This was a fun little project, and I am tempted to do another conversion with an Egg plane soon.

Grimdark Future Game - Infected Colonies vs Orc Marauders

The battlefield. Spot the Tehnolog tank!

Rick and I happened to have the Sunday open up last-minute, so I traveled down to his place to pass him the dropship and tank I painted for his Traitor Guard army, and to give his terrain set their first bloodying.

I made up two lists of about 1500 pts in Grimdark Future, and Rick played the orcs while I played the Traitor Guards using the Infected Colonies list. For the scenario I had the Guards defend a city-block, while the orcs would come in from any table edge.

Rick opened the battle by charging his Trukk right at the tank and disgorging a unit of Boyz, which proceeded to close-assault the tank.

While this occupied the attention of the tank and half my forces, his Bikes and two units of Boyz attacked from the other end of the battlefield.

I ordered the Guards defending that flank to give ground and fall back...

The dropship - now featuring twin-linked lascannons!

Then sent in the dropship/gunship to strafe the Bikes.

Some of the Boyz did make it into close-combat and eventually gain a foothold in one of the buildings, but the Orcs have taken a beating from the gunship and could not hope to take the whole block.

It was a short game, but we both had fun shoving figures across the nice terrain, rolling lots of dice, and making pew pew noises. Grimdark Future is a fun set of rules for this kind of thing, but the lack of suppression and morale rules does make it a bit simplistic. Perhaps we will give Xenos Rampant another spin in the near future; after all, Rick's collection of second-hand 40K figures is huge, and hopefully I will be able to feature more of them on this blog soon.

John Wick #2

image from: http://wikimapia.org/1539581/IRT-Powerhouse

After escaping from the laundromat, our party decided to split up, with Alice going to meet her contacts, while Bruce and Joseph would proceed to visit a dance club runned by the Uppsala mafia housed in the IRT Powerhouse to gather more information from Alice's contact there. Along the way Bruce and Joseph were accosted by Mori, the erstwhile caretaker of the Japanese Garden where Delany was found murdered (see PC profiles here). Bruce and Joseph were able to convince Mori that they were framed, and Mori decided to follow the two on their mission to find the truth so he could be reinstated.

The trio arrived at the club and met its owner Gunther Eriksson, who revealed that the "person of interest" they need to find was one Yulian Pavlov, a member of the Tarasov family who was currently under the protection of the FBI in The Provincial Hotel in West New York. Gunther also informed the trio that he had tipped the High Table off on their arrival so as to not incur their wrath for assisting the trio, but would not hinder their escape, and would in fact lend them the help of a driver named Jason. Just then High Table enforcers entered the building, but our trio were able to elude them by smashing a window and misleading them into thinking they had fled through it, while they sneaked off and met up with Jason.

The party then proceeded towards West New York, but while in the Lincoln Tunnel they realised they were being pursued by the enforcers. Jason was able to put some distance between their car and that of the pursuers, and Joseph shot out a tyre of a car between them, which blocked the tunnel and allowed them to escape.

After they crossed the Hudson River, the party stopped by a motel and at Jason's suggestion they abandoned their car, and Bruce jacked a Volvo as their means of transport, and they drove to The Provincial Hotel.

Bruce knew from his work that the FBI used The Provincial Hotel as a place to house their witnesses, and that they rented the 7th and 8th floors of the 8-storey hotel for that purpose. The party managed to get a suite on the 5th floor, and proceeded to plan how to snatch Julian from the FBI.

Bruce put on an overall he found in the trunk of the car they jacked, and walked up to the 7th floor, where he was intercepted by an FBI agent. Bruce knocked out the FBI agent and took his key card and communications devices, but the commotion brought more FBI agents from the 8th floor. Joseph joined Bruce and kept the agrents at bay with warning shots, and in the confusion the rest of the party was able to reach the 8th floor via the lift.

The remaining agents on the 8th floor retreated into the suite and called for a SWAT team to be sent. Our party breached the room, and in an impressive display of shooting Joseph took out four agents in successive double-taps. Bruce and Joseph searched the room for Yulian, and when they went out onto the balcony they were shot by a sniper from the building across the street. Jason and Mori retrieved the two from the balcony, and Mori performed first-aid on them. Bruce had suffered a minor injury, but Joseph was severely wounded and would need medical aid soon or die.

The party was finally able to find Yulian hiding in the closet in an adjoining room. when he realised that the party were not there to kill him, Yulian agreed to go with them. The five then departed the suite, with Mori carrying Joseph on his shoulders. Just as they exited the door of the adjoining room, they caught a glimpse of a man entering the other door into the main suite itself. They made their way to the lift landing, with Jason covering the rear - just as they turned the corner, Jason caught a glimpse of the gunman exiting the door: it was a man of uncertain ethnicity, wearing a dark suit, and sporting shoulder-length black hair in a centre-parting, and a beard...

The party continued towards the lift landing, and passed the dead bodies of more FBI agents. Knowing that they would not be able to flee the gunman with one of them wounded, and that the SWAT team would arrive soon, they entered the utility room and barricaded themselves inside. Fortunately, there was a laundry chute in the utility room. One by one the party entered the chute even as the gunman tried to breach the room. Jason was the last one to leave, and caught a bullet through the door as he entered the chute. Before the gunman could follow them, however, the SWAT team arrived on the scene, and our gunman had to turn his attention to them...

Prepping and Running the Game

This session was based on the module Schroedinger's Box, which featured the task of getting to someone under the FBI's protection in a hotel.

Again, the session was mostly about the PCs moving from one locale to another, while being pursued by persons with hostile intent. Players being players, they did not respond to every threat with maximum force, but preferred to find a less risky way out each time. Until they didn't.

The high point of the session was when Joseph's player managed to make four successful shooting rolls - in Covert Ops you could perform multiple actions each round, but suffered a 20% penalty on each successive roll, so four successful rolls in one turn was rare indeed.

Despite that, the session ended with the party in dire straits, with one member near death, and them being pursued by John Wick himself. I was doubtful that they could survive being caught between John Wick on the one hand and a SWAT team on the other, but one player asked about a laundry chute, and I thought that was a reasonable thing to find in a hotel.

Tehnolog Bronekorpus Main Battle Tank

So a long time ago, before the war in Ukraine, I bought a Tehnolog heavy tank model when I bought their smaller-scaled ZOD tank company to check out the size. It was a pretty crude model, and it didn't really fit with the aesthetics of any of the forces I had, and I kept the model in my bits box.

Since then, Rick joined our group, and we started looking at Grimdark Future, and I decided to finally get the model built and painted for his traitor Imperial Guard force.

To maximise the use of the model I magnetised two of the main gun options from the kit, and added a twin-link lascannon Nowfel printed for me. To give the model a more GW look, I used an Imperial vehicle cupola I had in my bits box.

I sprayed everything with my usual grey primer.

For the paint scheme I decided to go for a two-tone urban camouflage based on the Japanese Self-Defence Force pattern. I applied masking tape to the model to give vertical and horizontal lines, and then sprayed the model with a lighter grey paint.

Once the paint has dried I removed the tape and applied some decals. The turret numbers came from some WW2 tank decals I had, and the Imperial Aquila and the Chaos symbol were GW 40K decals. In my mind the Chaos cultists painted Chaos symbols over the Imperial Aquila when they turned traitor.

I painted the tracks a dark grey, and then started the weathering process by creating a muddied look for the dozer blade. I did this by dabbing red-brown craft paint to the bottom of the blade, then a lighter brown paint at the middle part of the blade, and then mixing the two paints to form a in-between colour to blend the two parts together. This gives the appearance of the mud drying around the edges of the business end of the dozer blade.

I then did weathering to the rest of the tank by chipping, washing, and dabbing brown paint over the tracks, wheels, and the lower parts of the vehicle. The vision ports were painted in blue.

I tried my hand at painting the heated metal effect on the melta gun.

And also the plasma glow effect on the plasma cannon, which didn't really work.

All in all it was a simple project. I hope to see this guy in action soon.

Sci-fi Sentry Guns

So after our game of Zombicide: Invaders last month our group decided that we will try to progress beyond the first scenario of the campaign.

My part of the endeavour is to make and paint up a sentry gun model.

As Nowfel had printed me a few twin-link lascannons for the dropship project, I decided I would use the remaining guns I had as a basis for the models.

I rummaged through my bits box and found a pair of legs from a Tehnolog walker I bought a long time ago. It was a simple job attaching the lascannons to the legs, and then gluing the legs onto some 40mm round bases I had.

Unfortunately, I laid on the spray primer too thick, which gave the surface an uneven appearance. Instead of stripping and painting the models again, I decided to make them look weathered instead. I also used some weathering powder for the base to hopefully help them blend into the game tiles.

They look rather basic and boring now, but hopefully once I get my hands on some decals I can liven them up a bit.

Mork Borg One-shot

 

We couldn't get the whole gang together for a session last month, so Dave agreed to run a one-shot for Sheng and I instead.

The game he chose was Mork Borg.

I have never actually looked into Mork Borg despite all the hype I saw about it, so I was happy to have a chance to play it.

Getting into the game was actually very easy, since the (almost) art-free version of the rules is available for free from their site, AND you don't actually need to read all the rules, since there is an online character generator available.

Your character has four ability scores, hit points, re-rolls... and that's it! The gameplay is player-facing, which means the players roll to attack and defend against monsters, but since you only need to (and can only) know your ability score modifiers, you don't really need to know much beyond rolling.

Dave ran a quick dungeon for us, which was old-school on the 80s way - in one instance we fight off undead, and entered the next room to find some human guards sitting around a table playing cards as if they didn't just hear a combat happening behind their door.

We got into it, had fun, and managed to complete our mission and flee with our lives from our double-crossing quest-giver, meaning there is a chance for a sequel.

Over all I found the rules too simplistic for me. It has strong Dungeon Crawl Classics and Knave vibes, but has a lot less crunch.

I believe that much of the excitement around Mork Borg was due to the aesthetics, which has spawned or revived a whole movement, and that to really get into the spirit of the setting you will need the full rulebook experience and invest time into learning the lore.