Nightwatch: B-Team Takes a Trip to Town

Posted by Comrade on March 24, 2023
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We got together earlier this for another game of Nightwatch, specifically to introduce a couple new players to the game. And while this game wasn’t specifically set in our ongoing Nightwatch campaign, it was fun in retrospect to imagine the events of this game happening concurrently to the primary campaign. This is the “B-Team,” and what they may be lacking in combat prowess they more than make up for with the size of their h e a r t s !

Anyway, this was a fun one-off game where we didn’t worry too much about the outcome … we just focused on rolling dice and having fun!

Somewhat by accident, we set up a rather extensive urban battlefield for this game. It turns out that everyone had thought *they* were responsible for bringing terrain, so we ended up with way more terrain than we needed. Hence this cluttered, yet strangely beautiful setup.

The scenario called for the players to defend the small well in the grassy courtyard in the center of the table. The red portals represent possible spawn points for the waves of bad guys that will emerge at random to menace us.

We had a wide variety of heroes in our game … a bladesman, a wizard, an alchemist, and a ranged combat specialist. Overall, a nicely balanced group, ready for anything that could possibly get thrown at them.

The action started on the first turn, when hordes of vermin poured forth from sewers and drains beneath the village. Nightwatch describes its bestiary in general terms, and leaves it up to the players to decide how to represent them with miniatures. In this game, we decided to draw on our collection of ratmen models, starting with Vince’s rat swarms to represent the vermin, followed by my vintage metal Skaven for the hordes.

The terrain tile above had a nifty subterranean staircase, so naturally we placed a spawn portal down there. And we cackled with glee whenever the vile ratmen would come boiling out of the stairwell!

Vincent’s nifty town bulletin board ended up seeing heavy action as the battle raged around it. I need to make one of these, too!

In the photo below, Mumblemore dances atop the veggie cart while in the background you can see a smattering of gore tokens representing the bad guys who have been taken down over the course of this game.

We’ve found that casualty markers or gore tokens are pretty important for this game, because you need to mark the location of slain corpses so that individual hunters can move into contact with them to undertake various and sundry tasks: robbing their pockets, slicing off an ear, maybe pulling out a gold tooth. It’s all covered under the Burdens section when creating a hunter.

The battle got pretty heated by the end of the game, with ratmen surging up from the subterranean depths and the heroes flinging spells and grenades all around the battlefield. The first couple of sessions of a typical Nightwatch campaign aren’t particularly deadly, which makes them perfect for a learning game like we set up here. You can dig in, explore the rules, slay some bad guys, and then survive to make it back to town and go through the post-game campaign steps.

That’s exactly what we did after this game, actually! Even though we weren’t playing a typical 7-session campaign, we nonetheless went through the post-game campaign steps to determine how much loot we found, which artifacts we ended up with, etc. It was great fun and made us even more excited to return to our ongoing Nightwatch campaign.

Quick & Dirty Modular Necromunda Terrain

Posted by Comrade on March 23, 2023
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Earlier this month I finished up two little terrain pieces to bolster my collection of rusted industrial scenery, which has been used over the years for a variety of sci-fi games such as Grimdark Future and Necromunda.

These pieces follow a successful formula I’ve used quite a bit in the past, which is technically termed “gluing stuff onto cardboard boxes.” Yes, it’s true, this minimalist approach is a great way to literally throw stuff against a wall and see what sticks.

The boxes here are sturdy Magic card boxes, upon which I affixed all manner of greeblies, doodads, and textures. The hexagonal grid on the bottom piece always prompts questions – yes, it is a sheet of punched-out cardboard tokens from a board game. Just goes to show you … don’t throw anything away! It might be needed one day.

Painting was a simple affair conducted with a big sponge and large brushes. I sprinkled sand and grout onto patches that I really wanted to rust up.

In retrospect, I think I went a little overboard on the whole rust effect; these pieces are a bit brighter than the other stuff in my collection, so I may go back and tone them down. (Or not; I’m famous for almost never returning to a project after it exits my painting table.)

The best part about these terrain pieces is that they’re 100% modular. They can even be stacked up to make a decent LOS blocker.

The overall effect reminds me a lot of some of the levels in the new Darktide video game that are set near the hive surface, with sun-blasted corridors and rusting machinery lying around. Good stuff!

Hopefully these rusty edifices will see some action in early April, when our group has a game of Grimdark Future Firefight scheduled (the first in our casual escalation campaign!). I’ll be bringing my Dark Mechanicum warband, the Seekers of the Fractal Schematic, with some … reinforcements, per the campaign guidelines. Stay tuned for more!

New Narrative Campaigns Section on Comrade’s Wargames

Posted by Comrade on March 20, 2023
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Hark, gentle reader! Do you hear that? The grinding of massive gears hints at some foundational updates to Comrade’s Wargames. Specifically, I have created a new section on ye olde blog to collect the various narrative campaigns that I have taken part in recently. These campaign chapters have heretofore been sprinkled throughout my blog as individual posts, spanning months if not years. The new page attempts to list them all in rough chronological order for ease of reading.

The page itself is creatively named “Narrative Campaigns” and it is linked in the menu bar on the front page of this blog.

The page, in turn, displays links to three additional pages showcasing the backstory and a listing of battle reports from three recent narrative campaigns. They are:

Chronicles of Üthdyn: A Fantasy Tabletop Campaign Setting
Frostgrave: Mystery of the Night-Haunted City
Nightwatch: Beyond the Borderlands

In keeping with tradition here at Comrade’s Wargames, these narrative campaigns feature beautifully painted miniatures from me and my buddies, alongside visually stunning terrain and a compelling tabletop narrative. I’ll continue to update these pages as we play additional games for them. Grab a cup of your favorite beverage and dig in!

Grimdark Future at C3 GameCon

Posted by Comrade on March 7, 2023
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I ran a game of Grimdark Future Firefight at C3 GameCon last month! I’ve run many convention games before, and it’s always a real joy to welcome new players to the table and give them a glimpse at this wonderful hobby that has brought so much happiness and creativity to my life.

For this game, I selected Grimdark Future Firefight because I wanted to get my gorgeous infected city terrain onto the battlefield. This was a batch of terrain that I commissioned from Morti5 Studios a couple years ago … my pandemic splurge, as I recall. It’s a big setup, and I haven’t had very many opportunities to get it all onto the table at the same time. That changed last month!

The best advice I can give to anyone who is considering running a convention game is this: “Focus on the spectacle.” Get your best terrain and your most impressive painted miniatures onto the table. You want to attract peoples’ attention, to have them walk across the room to inspect your little miniature world, and have them say “What IS that?!” in a breathless tone of voice. If they do that, you’ve won before a single die has been rolled.

Pick a game that’s simple to teach and explain, and then strip out all the superfluous content. Don’t worry too much about game balance. Toss out special rules and anything that slows down gameplay. A convention game is not the time for flipping through a rulebook. Make sure each player has some cool figures that perform exactly like they’re modeled to behave – the guy with the big gun goes boom, the rogue in the cloak is good at sneaking around, the barbarian charges into battle. Just aim to give the players a taste of the general gameplay and provide a few opportunities for them to explore deeper strategies. If they like the game, they’ll do all the additional research on their own.

Anyway, my game had four players with some basic background in tabletop RPGs, but none had played Grimdark Future Firefight. No problem! I provided printouts of the 2-page rules document as well as prepared teams of commando operatives for each player.

The scenario pitted the four players against two GMs (me and my buddy Daniel). We’d be managing a city full of plague zombies, and they would be running the infiltration teams tasked with killing the zombies and retrieving the data cores from deep inside the infected city.

The game unfolded exactly as I’d hoped, with the players whispering about strategy as they warily eyed the roaming hordes of plague zombies arrayed against them. Who’s gonna take the left flank? What about that bunker full of zombies? Grimdark Future Firefight is a pretty simple game, and after a short explanation they were chucking dice and pushing plastic around the table.

The scenario (players against the GM) is one I’d definitely recommend for future convention games. It was structured so the players couldn’t lose – the only question was how badly they would beat up the zombies before we hit our turn limit and the game ended. This led to lots of high fives and backslaps as the players laid waste to the zombies and generally felt awesome. Again, this is a key goal of a convention game: make your players feel like they’re capable and in control.

We got plenty of onlookers as the game progressed, due in large part to the impressive terrain setup. At the end, to no one’s surprise, the players emerged victorious – though we all agreed that it was a pyrrhic victory, and that the commandos were almost certain to be slaughtered once night fell and the zombies regrouped.

Once again Grimdark Future Firefight gave a great game that was perfect for newcomers. After the game, each player received their very own custom purple dice emblazoned with our game group’s logo – the Majestic Gamers. You can see a pile of them in the lower right in the pic above.

As I was packing up, two other guys from my game group (Lawrence and Paul) were arriving to set up the next session – an introduction to WarCry! Like me, they also had a full house and seemed to have a blast teaching new players about this fun game.

Thanks to the fine organizers of C3 GameCon for giving us space to host a fun afternoon of gaming! We’ll definitely be back next year.

C3 GameCon Painting Workshop

Posted by Comrade on March 3, 2023
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In February I once again took part in C3 GameCon, a small local game convention held at a community center here in Corvallis, Oregon. I participated in the inaugural event in 2022, so I was excited to host some events for this year’s convention.

Up first on the agenda was a reprise of my popular drop-in painting workshop. This emerged as the most popular session at last year’s convention, so I wanted to recreate that experience and also put a little bit more planning into it. I have vivid memories of attending “Paint & Take” events at GenCon, where companies like Reaper or Privateer Press would set up a bunch of tables with a random assortment of paints, and then let you grab a free mini and try out some new colors and techniques. These events are super accessible … literally you just sit down and start painting using whatever’s on the table in front of you. I wanted to bring that experience to C3 GameCon.

We ended up structuring the workshop as two back-to-back hour-long sessions. They were designed as drop-in events, where someone could sit down, grab a paintbrush and a free mini (generously printed by my buddy John) and try their hand at painting. I provided all materials – paints, brushes, minis, palette paper, water cups, as well as a little tip sheet.

I had 25 seats packed into a little side room at the convention, and I’m pleased to report that my sessions were “sold out,” all seats occupied by painters of varying experience levels. Most were novices, but a few had advanced skills. All were welcome!

Last year I tried to inject an instructional element to the painting workshop – offering step by step lessons to some participants, while others just jumped right in and started slinging paint. This year, I skipped the detailed curriculum in favor of a more open, come as you are type of experience.

Jim and Rian from my local game group dropped in as well, and they really helped out with setup and teardown, as well as providing that “veteran perspective” when new painters had a question. Here’s Jim (right) and I (left) toward the end of the evening, celebrating a fun event that hopefully kindled some hobby flames for these new painters.

I’ll definitely do this session again next year!