Most of the time when an experienced player is trying to explain Warmachine and Hordes to a potential new player, they’ll use a common phrase to compare and contrast the focus and fury mechanics that drive the two games:
“Hordes is Risk Management, where Warmachine is Resource Management.”
I cringe every time I hear that.
Read More “The Fallacy of Risk vs. Resource Resource Management”
To our players:
We have decided to do something radical. We’ve been paying a lot of attention to our forums and talking with our players at the conventions this summer and it’s clear that the anticipation for MkII is driving everyone a little batty. Many are excited, some of you are a little afraid, but the suspense is killing everyone and the speculation is killing us! So after a great deal of deliberation we have decided that the best thing we can do for the mental well-being of our community is to completely change our plans and do what we said we wouldn’t: we’re going to put all of the MkII rules and model information online as PDF downloads, because four more months is just too damn long for everyone to be holding their breath.
The St. Louis Riverdogs are pleased to announce our second Annual Privateer Weekend at Diecon 9. This will be the premiere event for the Midwest prior to Gen Con 2009. Privateer Weekend contains 3 days of spine crushing, cortex smashing fun over more than 8 events. The terrain is amazing and includes specialized scenario tables. The competitors are top tier in both skill and personality. The gaming will be second to none. Featured events over the weekend include three steamroller competitions, an ongoing Tide of War competition, Iron Kingdom knowledge tests hosted by Capt. Saulty Dog, and our main event, an official Hardcore tournament on Saturday. If this wasn’t enough, monsters will also be running loose throughout the city as we host 3 monsterpocalypse events over the weekend.
Check out http://diecon.gamestlouis.com for our complete event schedule and follow the link to Diecon 9 to see other convention activities and pre-register. Or check out http://www.diecon.com for a summary of all convention events and to preregister. Preregistration can be done by paypal for $26 for the entire weekend! Those wishing to participate in our Saturday’s official Hardcore tournament should select PP Hardcore under the list of Sat Events. There is an additional $5 fee for the Hardcore event that will be paid on site but those who play in hardcore will receive a specialized dog tag for participation. A summary of our event schedule is below.
Read More “St. Louis Privateer Press Weekend II: June 5th – 7th, 2009”
Iron Agenda: The podcast about Warmachine, Hordes, and whatever else is on our minds.
We’re finally ready for an official announcement! The Iron Agenda Podcast is an hour long discussion in which we will try to cover two topics – one strategic topic and one more meta-related topic – when discussing Privateer Press miniature games. That said we’re certainly going to stray from this format from time to time. In fact we’re occasionally going to stray from PP games entirely – we already have plans for a Pulp City episode for example.
In addition to the regular hosts you’ll hear other voices from time to time as we have some of the other locals on to provide additional views on whatever topics we happen to be discussing.
Our first episode has been released on our web site as well as an initial Episode 0 designed as an introduction to our show. Episode 2 and Bonus Episode 1 have both been recorded and are currently being edited – our feed will be updated as soon as they drop.
We’re still finding our voices and settling into things but we’d love to get feedback from anyone who cares to listen.
As exhausting and draining as it was, Privateer Weekend was a phenomenal success. The PP Weekend committee did a fantastic job organizing the events and putting the weekend together. We had a number of great players come in from the surrounding areas and every tournament that was run was packed. And to top it all off we were able to reach the 32-man requirement for our Official Hardcore tournament and still had about a dozen people playing in a Hordes Steamroller event that ran simultaneously!
The St. Louis Riverdogs are pleased to announce our first Annual Privateer weekend at Diecon 8. This will be the premiere event for the Midwest prior to Gencon 2008. Privateer weekend contains 3 days of spine crushing, cortex smashing fun over more than 7 events. The terrain is amazing including specialized scenario tables. The competitors are top tier in both skill and personality. The gaming will be second to none. Featured events over the weekend include three steamroller competitions, an ongoing tour of duty competition, painting competitions, Iron Kingdom knowledge test against Capt Saulty Dog, and our main event, an official Hardcore tournament on Saturday.
Check out http://diecon.gamestlouis.com for our complete event schedule and follow the link to Diecon 8 to see other convention activities and preregister. Or check out http://www.diecon.com for general convention information. A summary of our event schedule is below.
Read More “St. Louis Privateer Press Weekend: May 30 – June 1, 2008”
Last year one our local Privateer Press Pressgangers and his friend in Indianapolis got together and devised a competition between our two cities to collect canned goods for our local food pantries, with the city donating the most cans per player to take ownership of the Harvestthrall Trophy.
This event, dubbed “Foodmachine,” featured interesting twists on the typical Warmachine rules to help encouraging food donation – in addition to having the entry fee replaced with a required can donation by donating additional cans during a match a player could have a number of effects on the game such as generating extra Focus points and re-rolling his or his opponent’s dice.
After the success of the event Privateer Press provided coverage of that event in No Quarter Magazine and promote the second year of the event nationally. In 2007 the Foodmachine event, organized on the Harvestthrall web site, featured nearly fifty competing local communities across the globe.
Some of you may have noticed a sudden jump in post counts over in the category listings but no new articles on the front page. This isn’t a mistake – I’ve recently ported roughly a dozen battle reports that I had written up on other forums here. There were a number of reason contributing to the decision, one of which was to actually have content to post over here going forward. 🙂
I decided to backdate the entries to the dates that I initially posted the reports in their original locations. I felt that that having the commentaries in that order would help make them easier to understand as some of them reference and build off of earlier reports. To help people find this new content I’ve included an index of the new battle reports below, though they’re still accessible through the usual archive-browsing methods.
12/28/2006 – Fear the Boot and the Fight for America Hill (350 pt. Multiplayer)
1/3/2007 – Fear the Boot and the Fight for America Hill, Round 2 (350 pt. Multiplayer)
1/17/2007 – Fanatic Alliance vs. Cygnar (350 pt./each Teams Game)
1/24/2007 – America Hill, the Final Solution (350 pt. Multiplayer)
2/7/2007 – Mirror Match: The Battle of Dead Man Flats (500 pts.)
1/31/2007 – Yet Another America Hill (350 pt. Multiplayer)
2/14/2007 – One More America Hill (350 pt. Multiplayer)
6/27/2007 – Trollbloods vs. Legion of Everblight – Not America Hill (500 pts.)
7/18/2007 – Circle Orboros vs. Legion of Everblight – Cat Fight! (750 pts.)
7/25/2007 – Legion of Everblight vs. Protectorate of Menoth – Battle of the Frail (500 pts.)
8/15/2007 – Spontaneous America Hill (350 pt. Multiplayer)
8/22/2007 – Trollbloods/Circle Orboros vs. Legion of Everblight – A Family Affair (1000 pts.)
9/19/2007 – Trollbloods vs. Protectorate of Menoth – Smoke in the Skies (500 pts.)
Smoke in the Skies, 500 pts.
Wednesday, September 19, 2007
About five years ago or so I was starting an Earthdawn RPG campaign for a group of friends. I decided to start the campaign off with the published adventure titled Terror in the Skies which would feature some airships and expose the PCs to that quickly. One character was a Sky Raider so I felt it was appropriate, plus I had run the adventure before and was comfortable with it. The group like using miniatures for combat so I got a crazy idea. The adventure had deck plans for the two large galleons that were in the adventure and would inevitably wind up in a battle in the skies. So one day I scanned the two upper decks into photoshop, resized them to scale for 25mm miniatures, and printed them out. I then took the pages, glued them down to cardboard, and cut them out for use on the table top. The group loved them and they made the boarding actions really fun, but then the ships got tossed into the closet and remained unused until recently. After debating what scenario to play for a little while, Prorpger, Superduck, and I came up with the idea to use the cardboard ships to do a variation of the Smoke on the Water scenario from the campaign in the back of Escalation.
The rules of Smoke on the Water were pretty simple – two barges pass each other on the table. Each barge was its owner’s deployment zone and moving d6″ during its owner’s maintenance phase. Each barge can be damaged like a structure and is ARM 16. When either barge touches the opposite table edge, both barges immediately stop and whichever had sustained the most damage immediately sinks. Whoever holds the last barge wins. If a model was knocked off the barges, it was removed from play.
For Smoke in the Skies, we added a few rules based on the ships we were using.
With that we put together a couple forces to do battle.
Read More “Trollbloods vs. Legion of Everblight – Smoke in the Skies”
Spontaneous America Hill, 350 pts.
Wednesday, August 15, 2007
While Prorpger and I were finishing up some delicious food court delectables a couple local players asked me to set up an American Hill battle for them. Considering how long the last oversized America Hill game went I was surprised people still wanted to play but what the hell, right? So four of us sat down for yet another rumble for bragging rights up on high.
For those who haven’t read an America hill report yet, the rules are as follows:
- Immediately activate the Yellow Woldwomper
- Immediately activate the Blue Woldwomper
- Immediately activate the Red Woldwomper
- Place any one model currently on the hill or within 3″ of the hill within 6″ of its current location. Model may not be placed more than 4″ above the table surface. There must be room for the model’s base at the destination.
- Place 1d4 3″ cloud effects in play anywhere completely within the warlock/warcaster’s control radius. These clouds remain in play for one round.
- Place 1 3″ fire storm template anywhere within completely within the warlock/warcaster’s control radius. The warcaster/warlock must make a magic attack roll against each model in the AOE ignoring LOS, cover, concealment, elevation, Stealth, Invisibility, or intervening models. Each model hit suffers an unboostable POW 12 damage roll and the Fire continuous effect.