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:

The Road from Moscow

I've not gamed Napoleonics but the Perry brothers' recent Retreat from Moscow has changed that. Absolutely beautiful and evocative, I've bought most of the packs so far. The question was how and what I'll use them for? Coincidentally, I just finished reading the historical horror novel Twelve by Jasper Kent. The book is about a dozen vampires who join the Russian army to help fight Napoleon's invasion. Honestly, I was disappointed with the book, found it rather boring with the few action and suspense scenes too far and the lengthy navel-gazing internal monologues of the book's hero made it a ponderous read. The worst part was that most of the epic aspects of the invasion and retreat occur "off-stage." BUT the book did give me an idea for a horror skirmish game of having vampires and werewolves stalking the Grand Army along with the Cossacks.

Here's some shots of the winter board I created:

Here's some of the figures I've finished painting already:

Bigatures: Using ideas from miniature wargaming in (quasi) real life

I haven't had much time for gaming since Historicon so this post isn't really about gaming per se. Rather, it's about an overlap between gaming and my other hobby, community theater. I recently used some miniature scenery building techniques to build scenery for a show I am in.

My kids have been involved in school theater for years now and I've helped out with scenery building on occasion, despite a complete lack of carpentry skills. Over the last couple of years, I gotten involved in acting myself, which in community theater means also helping with other aspects of production, including set building.

The show I am in now, a romantic comedy called Almost, Maine by John Cariani, takes place on a single winter night in a small town in northern Maine. The scenes all involve the interaction of people watching the northern lights. It’s done in the style of “magic realism” so some of the scenes contain somewhat surreal elements and the set is intended to be very stylized.

The problem was how to have a simple set where the northern lights could be prominently on display when you have an almost non-existent budget. At this point, the redoubtable but now sadly moribund Major General Tremorden Rederring Colonial Wargaming website came to the rescue. I recalled the instructions on how to create stylized mountain flats from this page:

http://web.archive.org/web/20080705040111/http://zeitcom.com/majgen/24mtsc.html

(Thankfully, that entire wonderful website is preserved on web.archive.org.)

We expanded it to create a slightly three dimensional back drop for the stage as well as creating snow piles scattered around stage. We used about 8 packs of the beaded foam insulation panels and some white batting. I used my heavy-duty Styrofoam cutter and my hot glue gun and went to town.

After I explained where I got the idea, the rest of the cast started calling the scenery, "Bigatures."

The whole thing cost less than $100 and I think it looks pretty good, if I do say so myself. It also works great for reflecting the northern lights effect that is really crucial to the plot.

Les Miserables the Wargame:The Premier Performance

Over the past few years, my entire family has become heavily involved in local theater. My son Nick and daughter Maya perform each year in the school plays and musicals and they have each performed in local community theater productions. Nick in fact won a local award for his high school musical and competed in the National High School Musical Theater Awards in New York, actually performing during the award ceremony at the Minskoff Theater on Broadway. Since I retired from the Navy Reserve a couple of years ago, I’ve performed in several community theater productions. My wife helps quite a bit backstage, mostly with costumes. We’ve been big fans of the Les Miserables musical for years and so eagerly waited to see the movie.

Watching the barricade scenes in the movie, it occurred to me that I already had most of what I needed to stage a game based on that fight. Thus was Les Miz the Wargame born. It premiered at Historicon this year and I think was quite a success.


The formidible barricade

The rules I used were based on Howard Whitehouse’s Astounding Tales! and the large scale battle rules I wrote for AT! called All God’s Children Got Guns. Although designed for pulp games, they are quite capable of adaptation to other genres.

I had 9 players who each controlled one of the lead characters along with one or two “units” of extras. None of my games are particularly serious so this was more in the way of a spoof with the lead characters getting special rules particular to their motivation in the movie. For example, Eponine had a special rule that whenever Marius, the object of her unrequited love, was hit, she could make a stunt check and leap across the table to take the bullet herself.

I made it clear to the players that it was virtually impossible for the rebels to win an outright victory but each character had victory conditions other than a military victory. A lot of them involved setting a glorious example by dying for the cause of liberty.


Part of the first assault

The game consisted of a series of assaults by government troops on the student-rebel barricades. If one or more of the 3 government units lost a morale check, the government player could declare an end to the assault. Between assaults, any government casualties were returned. The rebels had a much smaller capacity to return casualties to play and one character could loot the dead for extra ammo as the rebels had a limited ammunition supply. Finally, the government could roll for the entry of the 4 artillery pieces and the rebels could roll for the unlikely general uprising by the entire city.


"Lovely Ladies" throw some interference

The biggest special rule was that any in-game communication had to be sung, since the entire movie/stage play was sung. Additionally, a player could reroll a bad dice roll if they could sing a few bars from any musical. If the song they chose was from Les Miserables, they could choose the better of the two rolls, otherwise, they were bound by the second roll. No song could be repeated.


The death of Enjorlas

I was a bit worried that some players wouldn’t get into the over-the-top nature of the game but I needn’t. All of the players embraced the spirit of the game with gusto, if not particularly good singing. One player had an incredibly extensive memory of show tunes and another had a remarkable ability to come up with game-appropriate lyrics on the fly. It was a thing of beauty to see.

Nick and I were struck by how similar the battle played out to the movie. Inspector Javert, who starts as a spy behind rebel lines was discovered quite quickly but released by Valjean. The first assault was fended off but with some losses to the rebels. The second was cut short by Marius threatening to blow up the barricades with a keg of powder. The third assault proved to be the finale since the artillery showed up and devastated the remaining rebels. Valjean knocked Marius unconscious and escaped with him into the sewers but was pursued by several of Javert’s gendarmes.


The final assault

Where it differed from the movie was interesting. Enjorlas, the main rebel leader was killed at the end of the second assault. Eponine survived the fighting in the streets but chose to lead the gendarmes on a different route away from Marius. When the gendarmes discovered this, they shot her. But Marius lived. Javert suffered a moral crisis from being released by Valjean and flung himself off the nearest monumental architecture. The street urchin Gavroche, who is shot on the barricades in the movie, survived to pop a cap into the dead body of Javert, just to be sure…


Cast photo

A great bunch of players made the game a rousing success. A very good example of the enthusiasm they brought to the game is from Walt O’Hara, whose blog, Third Point of Singularity, is a great gaming resource. After the game, he prepared a comic book version of an AAR that is far more eloquent than the foregoing:









Walt's original is posted at http://www.calameo.com/books/000114110f6d02e42d677