Terror on the Moscow Road - Forces of Darkness

Here's some pictures of the tormentors of the Grande Armee for my Retreat from Moscow horror game. The more conventional pursuers will be Cossacks. Most of these figures are either Foundry or Old Glory. I know these are designed for the 17th-18th century period but, as I had a lot of these already, I figured I could consider them some of the more irregular bands of Cossacks rather than the uniformed ones.

A fearsome leadership

A Sled gun. The gun is an old Flagship naval gun and the carriage is scratch-built out of wood and cardboard. The crew are slightly coverted 17th century Polish artillerymen from Old Glory.

Perry Opolchenie Cavalry, to represent more regular forces. I got them mostly for the impressive hats.

Children of the Night - Wampyri

Erszbet Batory, the Blood Countess

Wolves - the werewolves are West Wind, the dire wolves are Blue Moon and the ordinary wolves are some very old ones, Ral Partha maybe?

Vive L'Empereur?

Terror on the Moscow Road - Making the Board

I've done some more work on my Russian Retreat horror game. I just wanted to note how I constructed the winter boards.

I used beaded styrofoam insullation panels. The hills were simply pieces of scrap styrofoam that I carved up.

The river and the road were carved into the boards using a heated styrofoam cutter. I made the ice covering using blank sheets of Shrinky-Dink materials. In case you don't know, these are craft kits that allow kids to draw and color images on an opaque sheet, cut the image out, and then place them in the oven to heat. This causes them to shrink down but the image and colors become more intense. The sheets are nicely opaque so made for excellent ice. I didn't heat them, just cut them to match the river bed. I then built up the river banks to cover the edges using Scenic Express PlasterWrap.

After carving the features into the boards, I painted them with some cheap craft paint. I first put down a coat of light blue, followed by a coat of white. I added a second coat of white and then sprinkled everything with snow flocking. The road was painted a muddy brown. The river bed, under the Shrinky-Dink ice, was painted a dark green.

The road appeared somewhat over-sized since I wanted to create a sort of sea of mud impression as if a large number of people and vehicles churned up the area.

I then added winter trees from various train or Christmas decorations sets, most of them gotten fairly cheap at after Christmas sales.

There was one thing that I noticed when I was painting the figures up. One of my favorite movies is "The Duelists" and the brief portion of the movie that takes place during the retreat from Moscow is one of the most memorable. There were a couple of figures that I think resemble the main characters. They are probably going to show up as characters in the game.

"Pistols next time."

Desperado Game

This week my group did a quick pick-up game of Desperado. Desperado is a very simple very fast shoot-out game with usually very high body counts. We had six players who each ran two characters and I GMed and ran the occasional by-stander. One player was the town sheriff and his deputy while another ran a pair of criminals. The other players could choose which side of the law they were on. Here's the town, Skinned Ass Gulch, Arizona Territory:

Most of the buildings are from Game Craft Miniatures but with a few of the beautiful 4Ground Wild West series. The Sheriff's Office:

The Saloon:

The trouble started when a couple of bandits tried to steal some horse:

This led to a more general shoot-out when the Madame at the saloon, who was in cahoots with the bandits opened fire on the deputy. After a hail of bullets, one of the bandits escaped with a horse and the Madame was shot-up but rescued by her girls, although she still had 1 hit point left, out of 100.

At this point, the stage began to leave town, loaded with a shipment of silver from the local mine. The sheriff decided that he needed a better retirement plan so he and his deputy seized the stage and tried to run it out of town. The local post master/lawyer tried to stop them and was killed for his trouble. A recently arrived couple of newlyweds decided to take ove law enforcement for the town and tried to stop the former sheriff. It ended badly for everyone involved. The couple and the original deputy were killed outright, along with an outrider who had joined the attempted theft. The sheriff ended up shot in the groin and bleeding out without a chance for recovery. The stage was ultimately taken by the original horse-thief who had ensconced himself on the bluffs to the west of town from where he watched the entire episode, occasionally putting in some rather ineffectual pot-shots.

Ren Faire

I haven't had much time for gaming lately. We did manage to make our annual pilgrimage to the Pennsylvania Renaissance Faire. My son Nick and I wear Polish-style costumes that my wife Deb created. Here's some photos: