Yet Another America Hill

ByDankelzahn

Yet Another America Hill
Wednesday, January 31, 2007

This week we discovered that the hills we had been fighting over were really the wrong hill. Luckily we finally found the right one this week.

Before I get started, I have to make a couple notes:

  • It’s been a while since this game was played, so I’m a little iffy on all the details. I’ll try and fill in as best I can, though.
  • This took place before Remix and we played throws the old way when they happened.

Here’s a copy-paste of the rules from the last hill fight:

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Mirror Match/Battle of Dead Man Flats

ByDankelzahn

Mirror Match/Battle of Dead Man Flats
Wednesday, February 7, 2007

Prorpger and I decided to play a mirror match for this one, so I built a force to match his usual Menoth list and we both fielded the following:

  • Severius
  • Avatar
  • Revenger
  • Revenger
  • Paladin
  • Knights Exemplar
  • Choir (x5)
  • Wrack
  • Piper of Menoth

One of Prorpger’s Revengers is still unassembled so a Repenter filled in for this game.

The table had some hills and woods spread out, but featured some standing stones in the middle of the table with a small plastic corpse in a coffin on it. Since there was no central hill, the table was dubbed Dead Man Flats. We played out on the table in front of the window, resulting in the following view from the mall:

The Fishbowl
In “the Fishbowl”

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America Hill, the Final Solution

ByDankelzahn

America Hill, the Final Solution
Wednesday, January 24, 2007

This week we decided to try another tweak to the America Hill rules. We discovered that the hills we had been fighting over were really the wrong hill. Luckily we finally found the right one this week.

To help encourage people to take the hill, we added Woldwompers. Woldwompers were independent models that could be activated by various warcasters or warlocks if they were in control of the hill. Woldwompers had the same stat line as a Woldwarden but with -1 SPD and -1 ARM. They also had a fury of two and could be forced by any controlling warcaster/warlock, and the fury would dissipate at the end of each player’s turn. Woldwompers had no animus, no chain attack, but maintained All Terrain, Elemental Construct, and Spell Strike.

  • At the end if each turn, the player with the most models on the hill gained 1 VP. This is turn, not round – we went this way to place more value on the hill.
  • At the end of a turn, if a player had their warcaster/warlock on the hill, they could activate one of the three Woldwompers immediately.
  • At the end of a turn, if a player had their wracaster/warlock on the hill and had or tied for the most models on the hill (units counted as 1 model), they could activate two of the three Woldwompers immediately.

America Hill

Despite the steps we played the hill as “smooth” so it could be climbed freely. We didn’t want to overemphasize the steps too much.

After rolling to determine order, we arranged ourselves around the table as follows:

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Team Game – Fanatic Alliance vs. Cygnar

ByDankelzahn

Team Game – Fanatic Alliance vs. Cygnar
Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Although we took a week off from the free-for-all game, Renwolf, Patman, Jgoewert and myself wound up playing a multiplayer team game, 350 points per person. Turns out a couple of arch enemies but aside their religious differences to do something important – try to beat up on some Cygnar.

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Earthdawn: First Dawn, Session 1

ByDankelzahn

We finally had a chance to start First Dawn, the Earthdawn campaign that I’m running, this last Sunday. After talking to the players, we decided to start this campaign a little differently than our normal style. I wanted the characters to be more powerful than starting Adepts to rationalize their choice to be leaving their Kaer, but not all of the players were familiar enough with the game system to make more advanced characters without a lot of help. So to speed character generation and to help build a more cohesive group, we met a couple weeks before our first actual game session for a character generation session where the players would design their characters and personalities and I would take those and create stats later.

After giving the group the rundown of life in the Kaer and the different races and disciplines that they might have to choose from, everyone came up with their general character concepts. From there we began fleshing out backgrounds and motivations, tying the characters together while at the same time developing the Kaer where the game would start. Before the character generation session I had known what sort of overarching plot I wanted for the campaign, but I hadn’t imagined that the players would hand me the perfect vehicle to make it personal for them during character generation.

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Getting some Hordes off my desk

ByDankelzahn

One of the original intents for this site was for me to chronicle my miniature painting, and now that I have a digital camera I can attempt to do so. Although I’ll try and share any tips and techniques when I get the opportunity, the real goal is to help motivate myself to continue to progress through my unpainted figures. The pictures here aren’t as good as in my finished gallery, but they’ll suffice for WIPs.

Shortly before the holidays I started assembling some of the Hordes miniatures I had recently picked up second hand to try to get a small army. Although I knew I wouldn’t have everything painted right away, I wanted to at least get things assembled to the point that they could be fielded. For the Seraph that meant painting it completely as I didn’t want to try to paint that thing once it was fully assembled and on its base, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

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Fear the Boot and the Fight For America Hill, Round 2

ByDankelzahn

Fear the Boot and the Fight For America Hill, Round 2 (350 pts.)
Wednesday, January 3, 2007

After the fun we had with the first attempt at the Fight for America Hill we decided to try to tweak the rules to encourage people to take and hold the hill instead of hiding on the edges and sniping adjacent opponents. Our first try was to add VP rewards for claiming the hill.

Scoring:

  • Having the most models on the hill at the end of your turn scores 1 VP
  • Having the most models on the hill at the end of the turn of the player across from you scores you 1 VP

With those changes we rolled for initiatve and picked starting locations for the second try at taking America Hill.

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A New Year of Blarg

ByDankelzahn

Christmas has past and it’s now 2007 and the beginning of the year looks like it’s going to be busy for me. It’s T-minus a week and a half until I start running my Earthdawn game. Even though it’s only going to be five to six sessions long I want to do enough prep work to make the character generation session we had the other day pay off. The weekly Warmachine gaming night at one of the local gaming stores is still going strong so I plan on continuing to attend that for the foreseeable future. And of course I have plenty of miniatures to paint so will still do some of that every week.

I really want to maintain a blarg per week but I have enough going on that it might be difficulty to maintain that pace. However I will be cheating and calling this post this week’s contribution – that should help me stay on schedule. ๐Ÿ™‚ I’ve got a few topics laying around I want to write about but a vast majority of them are RPG related and that category is already out pacing the others. I don’t see my running Earthdawn as likely to change that, either. Then again the other topics don’t get quite the comments that role-playing so maybe that’s not a bad thing.

Fear the Boot and the Fight for America Hill

ByDankelzahn

Fear the Boot and the Fight For America Hill
Wednesday, December 28, 2006

It was a cold and dreary night, but none of us cared because we were all crammed in the back room of the local gaming store, crowded around a table moving our little pewter figures around foam we called โ€œhillsโ€ and felt we called โ€œforests.โ€ Somewhere in the midst of our madness we had a wild and crazy Warmachine/Hordes King of the Hill style game between myself, Eye Tyrant, Prorpger, and Patman while Superduck (aka the Breadstick King) watched on).

We decided to have a 350-point four-way King of the Hill style match. Instead of scoring on every turn, each player would earn a victory point if they had more models than anyone else on the hill at the end of their own turn starting with the second turn. The board was dominated by the hill in the center, but there were a few other terrain pieces scattered around the board. Only the hill in the middle and the forest between the Patman and my own deployment areas got any use. The hill itself had some rough edges but to be fair we decided the whole thing was a smooth surface and a model only had to get on part of it to be โ€œon the hill.โ€ Prorpger threw a plastic American Flag that was sitting around on the hill, giving it its name. Which was fine until we realized this must be Early America Hill since there were only four stars and three stripes on the flag. Regardless, the battle was soon joined…

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Dankelzahn the Gamemaster

ByDankelzahn

I’m not going to pretend I’m an amazing gamemaster. I’m usually told my games are fun, but there’s a lot of things that I see myself do that I wish I would do or had done differently. The blarg that follows probably shouldn’t be taken as advice that should necessarily be followed – it’s collection of my thoughts on my own gamemastering style inspired by some of the discussion that took place in the comments of my introduction blarg.

In my opinion, nailing down a gamemastering style is more difficult than a playing style due to the different nature of gamemastering. This isn’t true in all cases – some gamemasters run games completely transparently, where the players are aware of most of the decisions, difficulties, and stats surrounding everything he does. But I’ve noticed I don’t run games like this, which can give players one perspective based on what they see while giving myself a different perspective knowing why I’m doing what I’m doing. This probably needs some clarification.

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