Merits of Merit?

Since Power Legion is out, let's use it.  I haven't had a chance to play with it yet, nor will for a little bit, but in the evening moments I'd like to see what I can do to see what the system can do.  To that end, I'd like to look at one of my favorites: Merit Comics.  Hard to find, rarely referenced, but Merit Comics, first in the early 40s with Maximum Comics, then in the 60s-80s with the Merit Universe, set in such classic locations as Port Pacifica, Defiance Heights, and Haywood Crossroads.

I can't sculpt, I can't modify, but I have a bevy of Heroclix that are easy to repaint, and from there let's see what we can do.

Starting at the top, let's look at what a hero, rather a Villain in our case, looks like in Power Legion, starting with my favorite.  Pure late Sixties, may i bring to you the Atomic Cosmonaut.  One of the Archvillains of Paragon, first showing up in Stupendous Stories #4, but not really coming into his own in to the early teens arc of Paragon and the Port Pacifica Protectors.   First a simple cosmonaut traveling with his partner (later to become the Devolved) on the Invader Probe where he met the the two Americans (later Cosmos the Evolved and Paragon), over his history he became more and more non-linear, calling versions of himself from the future and past to aid him in his battles, and stepping in and out of time with his (its?) teleporting abilties. When communicating very alient, distant, without sense of time or location reference.  What's not to like.

Atomic Cosmonaut Villain 48 Pts

Mind	Agility	Strength	Knockout
d8	d8	d8	d12

Traits:
Teleport d8
Lethal d8
Damaging Aura d6
Intimidation d10
Duplication (3)

Figure: For this one I intend to use an easy fit that inspired the entire effort-the Evil Cosmonaut from Horrorclix.

Duplication is a missing power I feel from the rules, something of the style of Jamie Madrox or Multiplex. Something like this is needed to represent the non-linearity of the Evil

Duplication: Spend one action to create a duplicate, up to Power level. Each duplicate requries separate activations, but each duplicate other than the first can only take one wound before disolving. Which duplicate is the original is kept hidden until a duplicate is wounded. After the intial # of duplicates is created, additional ones can be created, but each one reduces KD by one step

For those who are checking the math, for simplicity sake I've divided the Power Legions points by 10. It makes it easier for me to baseline forces.

...Power Legion?

It was an oridnary enough day recently.  I was wandering around, and in my usual circuit of web comics I decided to stop on a dead link of mine, namely Goblins.  The owner had gone through a bit of diffculty some months back, but you had to hope.

Well, he's back.  Slow and steady, but moving in the right direction.

Well, on that note, after several months of silence from one of my favorite Web Comic properties, I figured I'd go and check a few other things.  At top of the list was a rule set by the name of Power Legion.  I've been waiting on it for years.  Produced by the same folks who brought you Song of Blades and Heroes, I think most folks expected a variation of the core rules....

Wait, what?

You haven't played SOBH?

Well, go on, it's $8-games run from 30m-1h; 5-12 figures; playable at seven, enjoyable far beyond, infinately flexible

No, seriously, go on.  I'll be here.

Ok.

Back?

Good.  Anyway, Power Legion was the superhero version of the "Song" rule set.  Long story in danger of getting longer, I went ahead and searched and found a reference to errata.  Errata?  A few short moments later I found it.

It?

Well this.

So I bought it.  It's who I am, the rules version of Hoarders. In review though, it wasn't a mistake. While I have deep respect for Supersystem, the industry standard for many years, it always felt a little too slow for superheroes.  Don't get me wrong, it's a practical, linear, translatable system.  Then there's Power Legion

It's not just another Song of <Fill in the Blank> rule set.  There's a few key differences.

1. Stats-There are four instead of just two, bringing a level of complexity above what you're used to.

2. Polyhedrialismo-No longer dealing with single stats, a hero (or villain) can run from d4-d20

3. No more doubling-there are wounding effects.

Now don't get me wrong, it's got its flaws (take this with the grain of salt originating from yours truly trying to deal with a seven month old, close quarter, and trying grok the rules).

1.  Powers are missing.  There's 91 included, so it's not from lack of trying.  I dropped a note to the developer, and he mentioned there was an intent for expansion to address at least one of the power, but part of it is clearly interpretation.

2. The version reads through a little light on examples and somewhat light on campaign components.

This said, it's a great starting point, I hope there's more coming, but happy with at least this much

So...2mm?

Actually yes, 2mm.  I'm looking soon to a world I'll have to give up the hobby room in to have a bedroom for another child.  My wife is doing the best she can supporting a hobby she find infantile, but it's greater DC-space remains a premium, and with as much as I get to the hobby (see blog title if there's any confusion) I will have to reduce.

While my eyes are good, I'm going small.  How Small.  Well, below please find my Late Roman Archers, my Sassanid Cataphracts, a Sassanid Elephant, and a Beer (the Tradition from DCBrau). Drink the last, paint the first three.

So, yeah, tiny.

At the least these are armies I can paint, base, and store in a limited space.  You should see these guys based on 1" x 1/2" to 1" x 1" bases shortly, but deeds not words.

In case you are interested, there's a good guide here. Especially the article on Atomic DBA that I'm using as the foundation.  I could do this large, with bases with twelve of these little castings each, but I'm going easy.  I could also do generic armies, instead I'm going to be stubborn with separate armies for each of the ones in my little "7th Century Collapse (or Rise depending on your point of view) Campaign". Like my aspirations for DBAesque Moderns, color is a major theme (little byzantine humor there).

Current Figures
  Byzantines - Red
  Sassanids - Purple
  Arab Conquest - Green

Phase II
  Visigoths - Blue
  Avars & Bulgars - Orange (Both, options, one army)
  Lombards - Black
  Khazar - White
  Lakhamids - Yellow

Still looking at some other options - Slavs, Ostrogoth, and Moors are shortlisted, but before I plan too much let me at least basecoat what I have.  I think this range would be perfect for Horse and Musket, but, you know, one project at a time.  More the pity there's only one source for these figs.  Irregular has a mixed rep-everyone always says they "paint up well", but can be a little rough.  Their selection is unequaled though, and looking at their smaller scales, whether these or the Dark Dwarf 6mm army I bought 16 years ago, there's few, if any better.

I wanted to make one last comment, in case you are still reading - I tried to buy some metal bases from the brick and mortar around the corner.  Apparently they can't get them for me.  When did we stop being able to get metal bases...but ok. I am going to go back to my porch and yell at kids in my yard, pining for the days when hobby shops were plentiful and I could afford Games Workshops models.

Further Thoughts on The Battle for Planet Earth

This is an opportunity post I started while I had a two month old passed out on my chest.  As the twin of this points to, he's six months now, so little progress was made. This means, probably, few links and no pictures.  Not sexy, but an opportunity to spitball.

Since I started this, I have failed the Guild challenge.  Between work and parenthood, it wasn't happening.  but I still have my fleet.

I can't argue that the ships from Bandai are cheap.  Running two bucks a pop, they're pretty well detailed, and well the occasional headache occurs putting them together, there's far worse I've encountered with fantasy figures in 28mm.

The problem is that of scale.  I originally bought these figures with an eye to mixing them with Silent Death ships.  I was inspired by this post and the rest is history.  The problem is that some mix, some clearly do not.  If you look at the lead figure variants here ships match, but the Bandai plastic Okita and Kodaikan (if you're still following me, bravo) are close to the same size.  Or in more sane words, Cruisers and Destroyers are roughly within an inch of each other in a game which huge ships clock in at 6".  A possible explination is the size of jump drives....but I will noodle on this.

As a side note for anyone who might care, I am a fan of Silent Death, it was the go to game for college days.  It plays fun but two problems arose, periodically.  The first is the moment we all remember from every bit of space anime in history, when the ships get to standoff distance, and every torpedo is released, and has to be tracked.  The other is the Conga Line of Death, where intiative feeds into ordered distruction. Still, fun and quick.  I'm now looking to see if I can convert CY6! to something playable...project 107 on the pile.

So what am I saying.  I like these ships.  I have now about 30 of them.  And I still have no clue what I will rule set I will use.

Why Wargame?

Don't worry, this is not a diatribe on existential angst or desire to imitate a smoking French philosopher.

I missed Historicon.  This is all the more disappointing, as it was a mere hour down the road, but there were more important things to deal with, like a drooly now six month old who eats my clock and gives me an adequate excuse not to blog most days.

So I looked at some pictures and remembered my last big east coast gaming convention.  During one of the events I remember seeing a Roman vs. Roman battle, Phillipi I think.  It was pretty impressive, scenery was well done and the figures looked wonderful in 28mm.  Out of all the battles, that one stuck out, as the Cohorts, or Legions, or whatever the force divisions were for this particular rule set, were stacked on a 5'x6' table with no space in between them.

Is this wargaming:  lining up troops, moving them forward, and rolling dice.  One can write a software program to determine the result (not me mind you but someone).  That doesn't seem fun.  Lately I've been fascinated with Check Your 6!, the skirmish game, and DBA.  Why?  They give you decisions to make.  I look at a number of convention games I played, and few of them really give options.  You take your barbarian horde and charge the Roman wall-the table doesn't have room for a left or right-and what?

I have been reading a few documents of late.  There's not a lot of time, but between a doc on the Northern Crusade and anthology of award winning sci-fi, I've been reading about the Soviet Operational Art.  Why?  It's because it's not just about the battle there, it's about preparing to be in the battle at a much higher level that wargaming I see allows.  It's because I was thinking about  the Ulm Campaign as I read about it in the End of the Old Order.  This is a game where armies campaign , and with surprising little in the way of battle, the Austrian Army capitulated.

I've seen boardgames that capture the strategic, and wargames capture the tactical.  However, for you wargamers out there, when have you actually chosen the ground your soldiers fight on?  I think that is the game as much as the actual battle.  That is what gets my juices going, and that is what I'm trying to figure out. There are options I am exploring, and really Battlefinder has the best starting point when combined with a simple game system (read: DBA), with Too Fat Lardies' philosophy on blinds, but, I'm still figuring this out.

The fact is, though I am a fortunate man, I do not have a great wealth of space for gaming nor funds (wargaming library to the contrary).  What this means is me thinking back to that table, way back at the beginning of my monologuing, with Philipi.  It's about the scale.  I can put one 28mm figure on a 1"x1".  Or I could put a cavalry stand in the same space.  How?  This is the point of solution where I am certain someone is going to throw something at me.

Irregular Miniatures puts out a series of 2mm.  I've been looking at a number of 3mm figures, be it Jet Aircraft or Cold War formations.  I realize it's microscopic, and as the poor painter I am, this is just a space saving option to use something just one notch over counters.  For me, it's about the game, not the spectacle, so this will work for me, particularly as we consider what a 4'x3' table could bring, especially when the stands are 1" x 3/4" for infantry.

It's not ideal. No one is pretending that much.  But my fleet of Starblazers ships sits in drydock.  My 15mm Romans and Celts sit only basecoated.  I have either time or energy lately, and that, I hear, for fathers, is not unusual.  So I plan to start a project where an army costs roughly $7, and limit the focus to the 7th Century, with Sassanids, Barbarians Successor States, Byzantines, Arab Conquest, Bulgars, Avars, Khazars, Slavs and the rest tumble together in a mess worthy of gaming. Obviously from the list I'm not much on limiting.  It'll shake out, I'm sure.

Will it work?  I'll let you know. I order this weekend.

In the end, if I'm using 2mm Micro Wargaming to wage a war of maneuver as well as the battles as well, then I will be satisfied.  Even if it's just a bunch of glorified counters.

Well, I'm still alive

Couple quick points.

1. MDF buildings are great. Mad Mech Guy has some excellent products.  On the other hand, shipping is not, and I'm going to have to hold off for more until there's a US Distributor.

2. I painted a platoon of Rebel Minis Titan Marines (like everyone else it seems).  I'll post a photo later on these, but the best part was I completed these guys in an afternoon (with some overflow). It feels good to be able to paint fast when there's actually time.

3. I finally got to play Tomorrow's War, a two and a half hour game for the Pilot Rescue Scenario (done in 28mm with the AT-43 figs I have laying around bought when FF stopped carrying them).  I like the theory, but this is a game set that has certain ideal dice pools, and due to a slight change to the group mix, we had fireteams shooting at each other at inches apart from each other. I think it's still a system with potential, ,but as much as we tried we could not actually cause any casualties to each other.
  -Of course we might be missing something in the rules.  I like them, but it's about appropriate dice pools.  I'm still

4.  I'm trying the Guild Challenge.  I've been distracted by my BSOS (Bright Shiny Object Syndrome), but have completed four of the Space Battleship Yamato ships in preparation for my Battle for Planet Earth project.  I'd like to do a 5th, as it's almost done, but between a BC Hockey Game I have to go out to watch and a eight week old, progress is unrealistic to put it mildly.

Cruiser Ceres-Terran ship, good old C4 (Big Mamma Boom) that was on a shakeout cruise with the Mimas (D19) and Deep Fleet Destroyer Pallas (D37) when they encountered a pair of raiders.

Cruiser Mimas (left) and Pallas (right)

One of the two Raiders identified from the incident, Labled as Raider TYR in the encounter Database. (Yes, this is a Earther ship from the series, but I'm not using Star Blazers as a basis for anything).

So, More dust coming

As I've mentioned, it's been a modestly, at best, success as the year closed out, buy now we're well entrenched in 2014.  So what has happened lately?

My current project has been a macro scale space warfare game (as I've explained earlier, Gamer's ADD).  Originally this started as a desire to find some larger scale spaceships to mix in with fighters for some escort/interceptor battles in the deep Black. One of the gentlemen behind Silent Death mentioned a Star Blazer injection kit being available cheap (under $2 a ship, except for a few destroyers which were two to the package).  Oh, and shipping....they did come from Japan.

So if you have a good deal on a ship, the transitive property leaves me thinking that I could have a great deal on a fleet....or three.

Current count is 46 ships on order, many back ordered.

Here's three of the ships, with their rare earth magnet bases sitting on nails in remarkably poor light.  The  Cruiser Ceres (CC-4, Big Mama Boom), sits in the fore, with it's traditional escort (Pallas) and its deep space Picket Fleet escort (Mimas) which joined it right before the Incident.  As you can see on the right the two raiders (Tyr and Freya) still being painted.  It's been slow, but we'll get there.

Why slow?  Well, Chinese New year brought me more than a new year of good luck.

Both he and his mother are healthy.  But needless to say free time is going to be a dear commodity for a little bit.

Back to the trivialities that keep things sane...The ships themselves are not to scale, a common complaint among the wargamer community.  The two "Raiders"-Captain Avatar's Cruiser (Crew ~700) and the Missile Boat (Crew ~20-no I'm not that much of a geek, it's mentioned in the first episode) are both the same size.  And what size?  The smallest ship I've found is 3.5", the largest 5.5".  Many of the ships are still on order, and I'm still a little flummoxed on basing, but once painted they're pretty, and fun to put together.  I'm normally a Fleet Action Scale kind of guy, but for these I'll make an exception.


Incidentally as I write this the original series is sitting on Hulu for the watching here.  I'd never watched the series, and after watching the few episodes I have, I think I would have avoided the ships out of response to the series.  I'm chalking it up to fortuitous timing.

2014...What the?

Seriously, it's 2014?  So... dagnabit.

Ok.  2013 is not one to complain about.  Since last I wrote:

I found out the Fall In the theme was "Armies of the East".  Which was great, except that I didn't have any Asian Armies and it was 30 days out.  Quick trip to Noble Knight games and with a Wester Chao Essex pack on the way I figured, may, just maybe I could get it done in time.

It's not a large army-but it was complete, with enough time to get in an extra camp done for the Successors. It was my first uniformed army, and that doesn't hurt getting figured painted in a hurry.  I liked the way they looked and need to get a photo up soon...but their performance left much to be desired-1 and 3 followed by the 0 and 3 Successor game.

Then there's the side projects, space fighters, superheroes, a pile of 15s, and the occasional organizational project.

All this with work chaos and a Little Donnelly on the way, it's not so bad.

Next thing you know it's End of year and someone mentioned a sale of Star Blazers injection plastic kits that had been rereleased.  So a few minutes here and I found myself with a few fleets.  Really, how bad is forty ships....Let's face it, I have GADD (Gamer's ADD) and bad.

Then a buddy mentioned that there's a group out there, the Guild that's all about having quarterly progress against a single goal.

So now we' have the Invaders, the Raiders, and the Terrans.  My first build will be the incident at 1996 TL66 when two invader craft (designated Arsenic and Fire-Invaders are tagged by Alchemical symbols) encountered a deep space shakeout cruise of the CA Ceres and the DD Mimas.  The rules will be Full Thrust Cross Dimensions-with each posted ship i hope to list the stats.

It's a project. Obviously the kid will take the priority but four ships in three months will be doable.  Hopefully.

Right now Phase 2 looks to be an expanded Earther Fleet, including the BB Uranus, 3rd Destroyer Division, and the CL Triton.

Phase 3 Will be their foes, more details, but likely BB Scorpius, the DHs Antares and Dschubba, GBs Pi and Rho Scorpi.  

Phase 4 Will likely be the fighter augmentations and at least one carrier (the three decker is a nice mini).  Currently my ships are roughly (and I said roughly) 1/1200 (but it varies like a yo yo) but my fighters are 1/300.  I'm not sure I'm ready to do that interaction, but it might work for a scenario where a wounded cruiser is being hunted by a pack of torpedo bombers while a destroyer escort and some interceptor aircraft try to save it.

That's enough for now.  See you space cowboy.