Skulldred Errata so far

Here are some errata for the GX Skulldred:

Wildsides
So I just noticed that the entire wildside page is missing entirely from this build. 

It works like this- on a 'wild' roll, your model performs its wildside action (bottom left of card).

 A hero reads a wild as 2 pips.  A leader as 3 pips.  Rolling a wild is a good thing for them.

Any model within near range of a hero or leader is inspired and instead read their wild as 2 or 3 pips respectively.

A model within far range of a leader who can draw line of sight to them also gets 2 pips on a wild as they are under command of that leader.  Downed Leaders and Heroes do not inspire or command, funnily enough.

Sample wildsides provided in demo are;

Lock up - model loses activation. If engaged in combat, disengage- if you cannot do so, roll 1 critical hit die.

Vanish- model dissapears back to the dark realm it came from, cackling as it goes.

Blind Fury- make 1 move action towards nearest model and attack it- friend or foe.  If two or more models are equal distance, Roll die to determine which player gets to decide which is chosen- on a hit- owning player, on a miss, opponent.

The full rules have dozens of wildside options, each giving you more points the more terrible!  Advanced rules include terror- which blocks inspiration and command, standard bearers and musicians which chain command from a leader to distant models and spells which impose wildsides on heroes and leaders.

RELOADING

If a weapon is marked as 'reload', place a reload counter next to the model or on its profile card.

A reload action takes 1 pip.

Some weapons require 2 pips worth of reloads- they get two reload counters on their card.

JAM

When any ranged weapon rolls zero hit dice, it has jammed or it requires some attention before it can fire again.  Place a reload counter on it.

Have fun X}

Skulldred demo table

So after a lot of work and penny pinching, I am slowly managing to assemble a new demo game for Skulldred Skirmish at The Arcade.

The game itself is also coming along, having been partly reassembled from locked PDFs of earlier versions.

The current version knocks size scores down one dice, so human sized models get 2 dice instead of 3.  It also limits gangups to 2 dice, with more possible for swarmers (a special ability).  This makes the regular game less about just tight clusters, spreading out the combat to give a more RPGesque feel.

To simplify things further, all attacks that land cause a straight line back recoil (unless you have dodge special ability that gives you a 180 arc), and the most drastic change is models with armor get an 'armor save'- the attacker rerolls the damage dice, and any dive that roll equal or less than the armor score gets discarded.  This makes it immediate and allows little guys to get lucky shots in on big guys.  If this brings the damage down to zero, the model still has to recoil back or be stunned.  This also allows for multiple wound scoring attacks for heavy weapons (the remaining damage is how many wounds you score- capped to 3 for heavy weapons and 4 for magic) and extra damage dice attacks (like explosives).  

Magic and power attacks are charged by spending pips on power dice- so magicians charge up for bigs spells or keep a steady stream of little ones if you need to.  Things like dragon breath, dragon punches, petrifying gaze and spinning attacks are powered by power dice.  Power is not just for wizards now!

So those changes are all working nicely.

After six years of hell, it will be finally good to kiss this project and set it free.

Barbarian warband

Oh just found this on my phoney thingie.  My barbarian warband work in progress.  I think there is butter on my lens.  Very romantic.

I popped by the Garema place game store in Canberra today and picked up a pack of warmahorde skorne girlie figures in dresses with drum hats that took my fancy.  I plan to beat the fancy out of them with some converty type skillage.  Does it annoy people I don't give a crapette about minis official names?  All part of my evil plan.

So as you can see the barbarians are at various stages of paintyness.  I am planning to push them along with my dwarfs in a wantom baccinnalia of flesh painting- then once varnished on to my high and tunnel elves.

Skulldred Raid Project part 1

First up I have to apologise for the camera work this post.  My proper camera is not charged and I have only a short window to blog- buts since this stuffs all work in progress, it will do for now.

The gaming project I have decided to work on first is my Skulldred family battle board- the one I play my wife on.  I decided to complete everything associated with that core game first.  That means some choice scenery items, player models and tokens for things to rescue and loot.

So the project kicks off with a baggage train for adventurers to protect and raiders to raid.  My pack mule collection was rather thin- especially since I picked up a boxed set Bill the pony without reading the text and found, well... something out of The Cell.  Turns out the boxed set was incomplete by one half of bill.  If you ever list things on ebay that are incomplete, I think its polite to write that in the title for lazy people like me in general and specifically for me.  :)

Citadel packhorses- adventurers boxed set and bill the pony... uh, make that half a bill.

Fortunately for our little Demi-Bill I can rebuild him.  I have the technology.  A pointy implement, paperclip and some epoxy putty.
That leads me to a great tip... I have been using 5 minute epoxy putty to do armatures and building understructure for bases.  Its like having a slightly smelly, milliput that understands my patience is limited and behaves accordingly.  The brand I use is Knead-it.  Though it should be called Knead-it-wearing-gloves-or-you-get-a-nasty-rash.  Great stuff.
Once I get some sculpting time (commissions at the moment) I am going to place the model in front of a mirror and sculpt the B side using a bit of green stuff.  I probably will stick my tongue the corner of my mouth whilst I do so, just to enjoy the cliché.

I also started tacking down some resin treasure items to poker chips, but think I will post them once their are done.  Besides, I ripped them off from Phreeds treasure tokens on his blog.  ;)

The Adventure Ends
Citadel FS28 Slain Adventurer, Grenadier Death Giant, Citadel WF6 Aggressive Aardvark (Cerebus)

Last to begin but first to finish is my slain adventurer token, played here by a citadel FS28 slain adventurer.  The cause of his situation is Citadels, well, shall we say blatant 'omage to Cerebus.  I have decided to rebase him.  I realised he really should be on a bar room flagstone base standing on a pile of dead folk and spilt tankards.  I am also going to strip and resurface him like I did the pack mule above -he is just too rough and will look great with smooth blending and some properly defined fingers.  Still, no time for that right now, so I will leave him be- and perhaps get some Skulldred sessions in with the little guy first.
The Grenadier Death statue is is inspired by the recent Citadel Garden of Morr statue.  I realised I had just the thing for my scenery, so a quick repaint later and voila!  Again, it needs rebasing on a stone plinth methinks.  I find many of these figures on ebay that are broken.. thinking I may make a bunch of these at some stage for the table if I can get these cheap enough.

Now the progress on the main stars.  I am going to do myself a bandit warband, though since I do not have the figures I need, I decided to finish off the small Realm Of Chaos warband I started so I can game with them.

Kats Amazons rebases.  A mix of Reaper and Citadel figures
Daves Chaos raiders:  Mainly converted and Augmented Citadel 1980's chaos champion figures

So these are the best ones so far- rebasing them took the majority of time here, but I have pushed the painting along a little on my team, and scratch sculpted a chaos shield for the horned champion and blended in the new Reaper weapon swap for Big Bertha.  Lots to do still.
A spike backed chaos warhound arrived the other day, which I think will make a great addition to the team.

Well thats my hobby time all used up.  Back to sculpting figures for other people.  Hope your enjoying the blog so far.

Realms of Chaos divide!

I really do not like square bases.  I realised my army of vintage chaos figures are just going to sit on the shelf unless I did something about it.  Inspired by Donvoss of Berlins brilliant 6 man warbands for Realm Of Chaos recently posted here on Lead Adventure I decided to move it across to 30mm round bases for Skulldred.  You can see my rant about how brilliant I am finding my new bases in previous posts.

Daves 'Eavy Meddlers -Skulldred Warband
Converted citadel warriors, Chaos Champion

Remember this conversion?  The spikey club (aka Dil-dorr- wrecker of retreats) unfortunately was just not strong enough to stay on such a heavy model, so I am replacing it with a suitable metal weapon from Reaper minis.  Needs some milliput to form a rigid support and perhaps a chain to tie it all together.

Original Chaos Warrior - Big Bertha conversion

The other conversion is just a headswap- taking the modern chaos sorcerer head and situating it on an old chaos warrior and dressing the join up a bit.  Think I will add some severed heads to that one to really tighten the look up.

The brilliant think about skirmish gaming is you really get to focus on your individual models more.  Huge armies look great, but a skirmish warband is real narrative delight.  With Skulldred, I am focusing on making a game that can play smoothly with around 20 figures per side.

Skulldred

So recently I wrote a skirmish rules system based on the things that annoy me about wargames.  Well, I went ahead and published the .pdf for all of you to give it a playtest if you like...

www.skulldred.blogspot.com

Its free to download- the price of admission is sending me some feedback on how it went so I know if its worth dedicating a huge chunk of my time to developing.  Just because I have some crazy ideas on what sucks about dice mechanics and the bad habits game designers fall back on, does not mean it directly translates to a fun games experience for all.

Skulldred is maths lite, stripping back all the bullshit like comparison tables, effect result tables and so forth, and instead focuses on getting the very core basics of the game right, so if does not matter if you have a handful of vanilla troops or a freaky warband- everything is on the table, easily remembered, dramatic and fun.


Anyway... love you to give it a go! 

Skirmish rules, what to do?

So I have had flu for a few days, and apart from painting a new banner and blogging, haven't been able to acheive much.  Codene and coffee do not good minis sculptures make- and I certainly don't want to be touching my business accounts with this lack of concentration and a thumping headache.

So in my waking hours I have been laying on the couch- which is next to the wargaming table I posted up a few days ago, and my thoughts have been turning to systems.

 I wrote a draft of simple skirmish game system that you can play when you have the flu.  Or drunk, or terminally stupid- all of which is a good thing in my book, vis-a-vis game systems.  Something that you can dungeon bash with, do small skirmishes and probably 50 miniatures a side battles if you want.

So I am pondering now what I should do with it.

My issue is that it would occupy a similar space to what Andrea has done with his wonderful Songs of Blades and Heroes game series- and I would not want to steal any of his fire- SBH becoming the standard of indie gamers skirmish systems is a good thing in my book.  Just take a look at all the wonderful little warbands people are putting together cheaply and joyfully, and compare that to the mainstream games to see what I mean.

That said, my game (beta name Skullbash) it is a neat little system that some players may enjoy, as it has quite different mechanics to SBH.  You never modify a units target numbers, you only ever add dice to your handful for each strategic bonus, its all out in the open and you tot up the dice before the roll- so it gives you that dramatic 'hangs on a dice roll' feel.  Results can be seen at a glance the moment the dice settle.  No tables.


So what are your thoughts?  Should I bother doing a beta playtest release?  I guess if it is a cheap PDF download or a POD print yourself jobbie then both could coexist nicely.