Solomon Kane - Travels in Cornwall and Africa

Work is progressing on the Solomon Kane game that I will be running at Fall In in November.

First, a new Solomon Kane, this one from Gorgon Studios.  A little pricey at $10 but since it is for the star of the game, I think worth the investment.  It can be found in the Convention Models on the Gorgon website.

The other main character of the game will be Dark Agnes de Chastillon, one of Robert Howard's lesser known characters.  It's too bad she's only in two stories and a fragment of another - she's definitely one of his more interesting heroines. 

As I mentioned previously, the game will have three scenes, each on a different board.  The first will be on a small manor in Cornwall, where an evil nobleman has kidnapped the lady love of one of SK's companions, setting the story in motion. 

The building are all from Sarissa Precision.

 The manor is defended by a troop of Irish mercenaries and a witch.

The second scene will be using the Venice board I discussed in my last entry.  The third will be in a lost Egyptian temple in the jungles of West Africa where the tribesman worship a vampire queen.  Pirate The Fishhawk is supplying her with a sacrifice for a special event.

The Fishhawk's ship

"Wings in the Night"

"How the heck to I get out of here?"

Ah, Venice

I am planning on running a Solomon Kane game for Fall In.  It'll be using the CROM rules (available from Matakishi's Tea House).  It will consist of three "reels," each on a different terrain board, most of them 2' x 2'.  One will be a rural English Manor House, another will be a ruined city of the ancients in the African jungle, and one will be in Venice.  I've finished the Venice board.

The board is a thick plywood to which I added "streets/sidewalks" made of scrap styrofoam and covered with cobblestone sheeting.  The canal is simply painted and glossed.

 I had picked up several of the Plast Craft Carnevale line, very reasonably priced and relatively easy to put together.  I painted them with various craft paints mixed with sand.  The larger building on the lower right is a modified foam board kit from Gamecraft Miniatures - it's from their Middle-eastern line and I add the roof, balconies, and steps.  The gondola is a modified dollar store canoe.

Here's some additional views of the board:

Here's some action shots:

 Here's Solomon Kane and his companions enjoying some calamari:

The tentacles are made from fingerpuppets I got from Amazon for a about $5 for a pack of 5.  I simply stuffed the fingerholes with newspaper and glued them to washers.

Historicon 2014: Spamalot, Conan, and Other Stuff

My son and I attended another Historicon. We had a great time although we ended up not playing in that many games as previous years but we ran two big games that appeared pretty successful to us.

This was the premier of our second annual Musical as Wargame event. Last year was Les Miserables, this year was Spamalot, played on Friday night. Not as much singing this year since Spamalot has dialogue but players were still able to do a re-roll if they belted out a Broadway tune.

We had a great turnout with all of the players acting wonderfully silly. I had originally posted the game for 8 players but we ended up with 14 playing, some walk-up playing smaller roles. We used Howard Whitehouse's new Outlaws of Sherwood as the base rule set but with a number of special rules to reflect the madness. Even with large number of players, it seemed to go pretty smoothly, although if I run this again I may try to streamline the combat rules for Lancelot's attack on Swamp Castle. We also had a fair number of spectators during the evening.

Too much stuff went on to give a blow-by-blow but some of the highlights were the limb-lopping of the Black Knight, Tim the Enchanter incinerating a line of French can-can dancers, and Sir Lancelot making the Red Wedding look like a picnic. However, Sir Lancelot was unable to rescue Prince Herbert from his unhappy wedding when he was attacked from behind by Sir Robin who proved remarkably courageous and actually managed to keep from getting slaughtered by Sir Lancelot. Of course it didn't help that Prince Herbert's attempt to shoot Sir Robin with an arrow ended up hitting Lancelot. King Arthur made an appearance and broke up the fight and put his knights back onto the quest, leaving Herbert weeping.

Brother Maynard and his monks battle a French maid and mime.

No one expected the Spanish Inquisition

The players who got to Castle ARGGG to find the Grail was the rather odd combination of the Lady of the Lake (who is a major character in the play vs the movie), the Knights Who Say Ni (who had worked out some sort of deal with the Lady, I think it was for a Grail-shaped beacon for their garden), and Sir Bedivere the Strangely Flatulent. Despite catapult-flung cows, the French were defeated and Sir Bedivere managed to retrieve the Grail itself. Arthur and the rest of his knights were still dealing with the Killer Rabbit. The ladies of the Castle Anthrax had earlier been driven out by Sir Bedivere's proficiency in "chemical warfare."

Saturday afternoon, we ran "Conan, What is Best in Life?" using the Crom rules from Matakishi's Tea House. They are a great set of rules, simple to pick up in about 5 minutes but with the need to make choices to make it challenging. We had ten players who all remained engaged throughout the game. It was run in three scenes with the ultimate goal of rescuing a princess who was to be sacrificed to summon an Elder Being. In the first scene, Conan and a virtual army of companions had to storm a desert village to rescue Akira the Wizard. In the second, the party had to obtain a magic sword from an ancient tomb. With wizard and sword, they then attacked the temple in scene three, succeeding in rescuing the princess just as the evil Thoth Amon had his knife to her throat that would have completed the evil ritual.

Conan in the Tomb of King Kull

Red Sonja dispatches some Snake men

There were some very fine games. The center piece was the All Quiet on the Martian Front. I didn't get a chance to play in it but a friend did and said it was a great game.

Here's a couple other games:

CROM! First Try at Conan-style Adventure Rules

I recently picked up the Crom rules from Matakishi’s Tea House and decided to give them a try on a snowy Saturday.

The rules are simple, fun, and fit the genre excellently. One of the players said that they so gave him the Conan mood, he went home and watched the Arnold movie after he left.

The mechanics are quite simple. Each character has a pool of dice that, at the beginning of the turn, allocates the dice to movement, combat, or special (everything else, magic, opening locks, etc.). Sequence is by card but dice allocated to special can be used to grab the initiative to move first.

Whatever is rolled on the movement dice is the number of inches moved.

Combat is resolved by the attacker deciding how many dice he wants to devote to an attack and then the defender chooses how many dice to use for defending against the attack. Both roll and the higher number wins, inflicting 2 points of damage plus 1 point of damage for each “6” that is rolled. Hits reduce the number of dice in the pool.

Special tasks require target numbers to be rolled: “6” for an average task, “12” for a difficult task.

Movement, combat and specials can be done in any combination. A player may voluntarily give up a dice for the duration of the scenario to count it as an automatic “6”

Main characters have large dice pools while lesser figures have only a few dice to spend and may have specific limits on how they are allocated. Thus Conan has 16 dice to divide any way he wishes while an average minion has only 2 movement dice and 2 combat dice. This allows for the recreation of the heroes reeving and smiting huge hordes of minions.

Magic is mostly for summoning evil creatures from another dimension (Conan actually took place in the Cthulhu universe) and lots of special dice are needed, allowing for interruption by any mighty-thewed barbarian who might happen by.

The only thing we thought that might need tweaking is the missile combat rules. Shooting is handled by the same rules as combat, attacker and defender roll dice to determine who wins except if the attacker loses they don’t suffer any hits. Because the table on which the game is played is intended to be small, there are no ranges for bows and such, the only limit is line of sight.

In our game, this led to the one player who was running Subotai, Conan’s sidekick from the original Arnold movie, to become the team sniper. He set up on the nearest high point and knocked off minions and whittled down major baddies for the other heroes to finish off in hand to hand.

We talked about adding some range modifiers or even some additional dice penalty for multiple shots taken in the same turn. This was the only problem we had with a delightful set of rules.

The rules contain a mini-campaign of 5 or 6 linked scenarios and this is what we ran with some modifications. I had three players who ran Conan, Red Sonja, and Subotai. They later picked up the wizard based on the character played by Mako in the movie. The goal was to rescue a princess who had been kidnapped by evil cultists to sacrifice her as part of a summoning ritual. Along the way they had to find the wizard, an ancient crown and a magic sword to fight the great evil. The final scenario had them breaking up the sacrifice. Below are some pictures from the game.

Slavers' Den in Shem where our heroes must rescue a wizard (We combined a couple of the scenarios from the rule set here).

Slavers' camp

Harassing the wrong lady

A rather inhospitable house of hospitality

Storming the prison

Surprising a Snake Priest

"The key's on the wall"

An early archeological dig

Disturbed scorpion

Cavern of Ancient Kings

Wako ambushed by skeletons

Inside the tomb of King Kull

The jungles of Kush

The Dark Citadel of Thoth Amon

A princess in distress

Battling to the rescue

Demon from another plane

"My Hero!"