revford blog

100 Zombies and other Dead bits

Tue, 28 Sep 2010 11:39:06 GMT

I'm now up to 100 finished Zombies. Levi has another 30 on the go and along with whatever David and Zak produce we're looking good for that massive horde at BLAM.

The four walls of the church are built and undercoated, the base is assembled but needs paint. Just the foyer to build for that one.

The pub base and two walls are done and painted, we need to cast up more blocks for the other walls. Levi has done the barrel furniture and Harvey is in charge of woodwork.

So all in all, it's getting there.

Movement for Diary of the Dead

Sat, 25 Sep 2010 09:52:57 GMT

Movement rules, nice and simple.

Survivors move 6", Zombies move 4", Vehicles move 10".

If you've laying face up, it costs half your move to stand up.

Move penalties for weapons apply to Vehicles too, to fire a half move weapon from a car, you could only move 5".

You can move out of or into a Vehicle at the start or end of it's move.

You can grab someone by moving into base to base contact. Once you're grabbed, you can't move and have to fight in the Melee phase.

Vehicles can move once grabbed, but it costs 1" of move for each person grabbing on. It also costs 1" of move to run someone over.

When a vehicle moves, roll on the following table for each person grabbed on or run over.

Weapon Rules for BLAM 2010

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 12:55:20 GMT

Weapon stats for Dairy of the Dead, it's time to get some of these rules written down, rather than floating about in our heads.

The game rules are based an extremely cut down version of Legends of the Old West by Mark Latham and Rick Priestley, with much taken from V for Victory by Guy Bowers and plenty of influence from the 2HW series by Ed Teixeira.

Rng is Range, Sht is number of Shots, Mv is how far you can Move if you want to shoot.

In all shooting, you roll the number of dice listed under Sht to hit, any that come up 4+ are Hits, 6's are Head Shots and 1's are Clicks.

Head Shots kill Zombies instantly, there is no need to roll for wounds, but you still have to roll for cover. Head shots have no special affect on Survivors.

Click mean you're out of ammo, you can spend your next shoot action to reload. Reloading a weapon has the same move restrictions as firing it. For example, you can reload a Half Move weapon after moving 3" on foot, but not if you've moved the full 6".

The target can claim Cover from any scenery that partially blocks line of sight, the shooter must roll 4+ to miss each item of cover between him and the target. This includes other models. Cover is rolled after the to hit but before the to wound.

Once you've decided which shots are hits, roll those dice again. 4+ is a wound on Survivors or Zombies, 6's wound Vehicles. Wounded Survivors are removed, wounded Zombies are placed face down. Any model hit but not wounded is placed face up. Vehicles ignore the first wound, then are disabled on suffering a second.

Bad Ass Weapons wound Survivors and Zombies on a 3+ and Vehicles on a 5+.

Rerolls can be used on any shooting dice, that is to hit, to avoid cover or to wound. Yes you can use a reroll to avoid a Click. Yes you can use a reroll even if you've hit in the hope of getting that Head Shot, but you run the risk of turning a hit into a miss.

I think that's about it for shooting. I'll post up another rules chunk later, we still have Moving, Melee, Priority & Turns and Noise & Spawning to cover.

The British Army

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 12:50:05 GMT

Small in numbers but with superior firepower we have the British Army in their Land Rover Wolf.

Major Davies leads the team with a Combat Pistol, along with two Assault Rifles and the Bad Ass LSW.

Alongside their primary mission to search for other survivors, the Zombies have reduced even the Army to searching out valuable food and fuel supplies.

The Major is from Gripping Beast, the Infantry are from TAG and the Land Rover is from S&S.

The Mantic Zombie Horde

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 12:26:15 GMT

Just when I said I was done with Zombies, the Mantic Zombie Horde arrived. Another 60 plastic Zombies.

I'll get what I can done, but it's all about getting the scenery finished for me at the moment.

The Cult of the Golden Shower

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 01:50:21 GMT

The Cult of the Golden Shower, servants of the sinister criminal mastermind The Alchemist, riding in their gigantic golden monster truck.

Leading the Cult in this mission is Henry armed with the Bad Ass Sword, along with Terry with his Shotgun, three Cultists with Pistols and Randy Nolan the creepy dwarf with the lantern.

Beyond the ever valuable food and fuel, The Alchemist demands more zombie brains for his demented experiments.

Miniatures are from Pulp, while the truck came from Poundland.

Smugglers from The Worker's Republic of Borkova

Fri, 24 Sep 2010 01:37:27 GMT

Time for a few shots of the Survivor teams for Dairy of the Dead, our rural themed zombie game for BLAM 2010.

First up we have Uncle Joe and his Borkovan smugglers, riding in the Borkovan Brown Hummer.

Uncle Joe's stylish 'tash marks him as the owner of a Bad Ass Pistol, one guy has a Machine Pistol and all the others carry standard Pistols.

This gang of criminals were here importing Borkovan Opium to raise money for the revolution back home when the Zombie Apocalypse struck. Now they need to raid the village of the weak bourgeois capitalists for viable food and fuel.

Miniatures are from Copplestone, with one TAG MP5K swapped in to give them a little more firepower. The Hummer came from Poundland.

Zombie Painting Complete!

Thu, 23 Sep 2010 15:27:35 GMT

I'm done, 77 zombies painted, from ZombieSmith, West Wind and Cold War. As long as Levi and David turn out about 40 each, along with as many as Zak can turn out, we're all set for "Dairy of the Dead".

We've now got 3 weeks to get the scenery finished. The board needs road markings, 4 of the 5 houses need woodwork, the church only has two walls and we need to cast up more blocks to finish the pub. Better than last year but we could still be on the road to fuckupville if we don't get on with it.

BLAM in Wargames Illustrated

Sat, 30 Jan 2010 09:55:53 GMT

There is a write up with photos of BLAM 2009 in the latest issue (268) of Wargames Illustrated.

A few photos of my stuff made it into the magazine, my TARDIS console, The Doctor, Katie, Vic and K9 from our Doctor Who game, as well as my Goa'uld and a few Jaffa and from the Stargate 1895 game.

More photos of the minis are available here:

• The Doctor
• The Goa'uld

I'll try and get some shots of the full TARDIS interior up soon.

Also I wanted to make sure and credit Rattrap Productions for the rules we used for Doctor Who, The Brokers of Death used the .45 Adventure rules with the Amazing War Stories supplement.

One last note on the Stargate credits, that Goa'uld is a Priest model from the Crocodile Games Wargods range.

Things I learned about running a game at BLAM

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:56:22 GMT

During our game of Doctor Who at BLAM 09, "The Brokers of Death", and whilst playing some of the other excellent games put on by our fellow Lead Adventurers, I picked up on a few things that I'll change when we come to run another Adventure outside our normal gaming group.

Firstly I learned that while both .45 Adventure and Doctor Who are extremely popular on The Forum, it seems there isn't much crossover between the two groups. Here is a diagram to explain:

The lesson being not to assume that because a certain set of rules or setting are popular, that everyone will know what's going on.

Also try to keep things simple and set things up so they require no prior knowledge other than info you can give people on the day. In less that 3 minutes.

One thing I think we got right was simplifying the NPC character stats down to a single line, from the full sized tables used in Rattrap games. Those tables are great for players who are experienced in playing the game and want to see all the options available, but would be unmanageable for RPG type games with massive supporting casts.

A single player character or guest star NPC looks like this:

Where a group of extras look like this:

All extras, unless otherwise noted have DR 4 in all locations which is normal for unarmoured people. Extras use the standard hit locations, any hit to the head or torso is a kill, any to the arms or legs leave them wounded and unable to go on.

Also included is a picture of the model and a character quirk to give them a little personality.

This really speeds up NPC use and generation and lets us run lots of characters without too much trouble.

Extras are similar to the 1/2 Grade or Hordes of Mooks rules from .45 Adventure, but even simpler and for people who are basically just moving and reusable encounter markers.

The game only had three NPCs with a table of stats, Weird Des the cheap Merc running security, Professor Goatse the Vorlon and our villain The Raxacoricofallapatorian. Everyone else was a one liner.

For K9, I removed the parts of the table that didn't apply, he doesn't have Arms or Legs, then moved the skills he still needed from them around the table:

As I was running as late as a late thing, I realised that the sheet I took with me still said Legs instead of Motor, but you get the idea.

Now that I think about it, I should have applied this logic a bit further and simplified the sheets even more, The Doctor and Katie don't need a HT score, as it's used for shooting for example.

In the best games players either didn't need to look at reference sheets at much after the first few turns, or even at all. Simpler sheets with no unimportant information will really help with this.

On Props and Hats, it should be a wig or hat for everyone, or none at all, they can be of various levels of silliness but it would stop people worrying too much about who has to wear ridiculous looking costume and who doesn't.

Both Props and Costume bits for everyone next time.

Last note is timing, I'd guessed, based on the games we'd played in the past that the scenario would take about 45 minutes for experianced players, or an hour for people new to the system. It actually took around 2 1/2 to 3 hours for a game.

This was mostly down to people having long conversations with all the extras, which is good in a way as that was the point of the game, to have a story based adventure rather than a shootout, but I think next time I'd cut the number of Extras down so Heroes can get to the Guest Stars faster, also find a simple way to mark out who is a Guest Star and who is an Extra. Maybe a sign with the story title, Starring and Guest Starring notes with pictures of the Stars and Guest Stars.

And that's about all I can think of for now, other than have everything ready by August so we have plenty of time for any last minute changes.

I'll post up the full set of Encounter Cards, Guest Star and Extras stats soon. For now our Heroes are available here:

Doctor Who

Crossfire Rules

Mon, 26 Oct 2009 13:01:55 GMT

Levi the rules we used in Matakishi's Modern African Skirmish are available here:
Crossfire: WWII Rules & Organisations

With more about the scenario here:
Operation: Running Deer @ The Lead Adventure Forum
Operation: Running Deer @ Matakishi's Tea House

We're Off To BLAM 2009

Fri, 23 Oct 2009 08:17:39 GMT

It's we're off to BLAM in about an hour, just time to finish the scenery. :)

I'll post some pictures when we get back.

For any Lead Adventurers who what a sneak peak at the rules we're using for The Doctor and his Companions, look here.

The Doctor

Doctor Who for BLAM

Sun, 17 May 2009 16:46:12 GMT

BLAM is coming up again soon, I couldn't find enough junkies for the Dealers game to work so it's a change of pace and I'm thinking Doctor Who .45 Adventures.

With that in mind, here are a couple of newly painted minis for the event, first Katie, The Doctor's new companion. I decided to create a new character for BLAM rather than use an existing one. The mini is from Artizan's side of the Kiss Kiss, Bang Bang range.

Alongside Katie we have Professor Goatsie, a solicitor attending a space trade conference on a distant moon. His mini is a Vorlon from the Mongoose Babylon 5 range, now sadly out of production.