First Thoughts - The Devil's City

Yesterday I discovered two amazing looking books on Kickstarter I really wanted to bring to everyone's attention.

Matt Corley, the creative mind behind; Tales From The Margreve, Lamp Light's Sanitarium, and Harper's Tale has recently turned his focus to investigative horror set at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century building up from a basic foundation of 5e D&D.  So what I'm saying is, if you like:
-D&D 5e
-Horror RPGs
-Call Of Cthulhu
-Ravenloft: Masque Of The Red Death
-Investigative RPGs
-Horror stories or games based on real (seriously!) world events
...then this is a Kickstarter you owe it to yourself to check out!

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/37222410/the-devils-city-for-5e

The Devil's City Kickstarter is basically comprised of two books.  First up an illustrated 90 page novella co-authored by Matt Corley and Sara Tantlinger based on a fictionalized version of the story of HH Holmes (I'll come back to that in a bit for those of you not familiar).  Like I said I'll elaborate in a bit but if you're a horror fan, the story of HH Holmes is definitely a case of truth being far stranger than fiction.

The second book will be Horror In The Windy City.  A 5e compatible campaign book that will build on to Mr Corley's existing Whispers In The Dark game.  The author has extensive experience writing horror gaming and he has shown he consistently 'gets it' in terms of writing excellent thinking-person's horror rather than classic D&D hack-n-slay style.

So that's what the Kickstarter is, now let me tell you why I backed it, and why I hope you'll consider backing it too.

From a gaming point of view I've always liked D&D as a game system and it's the system the greatest number of existing players are familiar with, and the greatest number of potential players are open to.  Most of my gaming friends and I have always liked the idea of Call Of Cthulhu and in all fairness it is a good system but in my opinion it doesn't have the familiarity or the ease of use of D&D.  I really think for a ton of gamers investigative games could be a real inroad to discovering D&D outside of the more traditional 'dragons inside dungeons' style of gaming.  As prep for this I'm planing on running a group through Whisper In The Dark in two weeks.  I'll let you know how it goes, and how it works.

From a story point of view the story of HH Holmes has always fascinated me.  Again I have to reiterate, this is a TRUE story from our real world.  I'll give you the truncated version but if it interests you the way it interested me do some research online and back this Kickstarter!
HH Holmes was 1890's version of Jigsaw from the Saw movies.  He built a hotel in Chicago that was filled with secret passages, dead-end hallways to nowhere, and (in a manner of speaking) traps.  In short he built a hotel, invited people to stay there, and then starting murdering them once he got them inside.  I can't stress enough, this is a real thing that happened in an American city just over a century ago!

So there you have it.  An investigative horror RPG set in an only slightly warped version of our own world 130ish years ago.  A talented creative team, a game that manages to be familiar and new at the same time, and an inroad to a whole new genre of gaming.

I hope you'll all check out the Kickstarter at https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/37222410/the-devils-city-for-5e and my plan is next week to write a full review of the novella, and the week after that to provide a review of of my Whispers In The Dark game-play experience (hopefully integrating) Horror In The Windy City's new alignment system.

-Jay

It's starting to feel like after playing D&D for 30+ years I'm working my way through the Monster Manual

Tomorrow or Monday I'm hoping to show off my newest old-school fantasy figure, I'm just waiting for a friend to confirm they've received theirs so I don't blow the reveal.  In the meantime I got a few more of WizKids D&D miniatures done and it's definitely starting to feel like I'm basically collecting the Monster Manual at this point.

First up another cool multi-purpose model.  The Blink Dogs!
In D&D Blink Dogs are intelligent good monsters who have a limited teleportation ability.  They also feel like a nice counter-point to the Hell Hounds I painted recently.  In addition I've been planning to get back to Strange Aeons at some point (probably 2018) and I think I could also use these guys as Hounds Of Tindalos.

My next pair of models I can barely claim to have 'painted'.  I had a pack of the WizKids Ghosts sitting on my desk and I kept thinking I could just wash and base them and probably be reasonably happy with the result...and I am.

That's it for now.

Hopefully tomorrow I'll show off something that I think a grand total of a dozen people on the entire Internet will be as excited about as I am.

-Jay

Shoggoth.....or maybe something else.....or maybe lots of other things.....

Awhile back I picked up a Reaper Shoggoth model intending to use it in my Ravenloft game as a similar but slightly less Cthulhu-y monster for a pre-amble to Curse Of Strahd.

I had been playing online on Roll20 but since that game concluded I've been thinking about running a game around an actual table top (like real people!) and for that I'm going to need to get some models done.  I can easily see myself using this model for a ton of different RPGs and miniature games so even though I don't need it right away I'm sure it will get used a lot in the future.

One of the things this has gotten me thinking about is trying to build up my collection of  'monsters' for D&D.  I have a lot of humanoid creatures (orcs, gnolls, goblins, etc) but I could use more of the larger monsters (Hook Horrors, Umber Hulks, etc), after all every mid-level encounter I run can't always be Owlbears.  Hopefully there's some more creatures in my near future.

-Jay

Strange Aeons: Threshold vs Serpent-Men!

My painting has been pretty varied over the past year but over the last couple of months the only game I have played with any consistency is Strange Aeons.

For those of you unfamiliar with the game Strange Aeons is basically a Cthulhu skirmish miniatures game where one player controls, grows an develops a team of investigators known as Threshold Agents, the other player plays an ever changing roster of monsters and horrors from beyond time and space.

For today's game my team of Threshold Agents was raiding a tomb wherein a cult of Serpent-men were holding a dark ritual and concealing an ancient spellbook.

My team snuck up to the inner chamber of the crypt and with a few lucky rolls were able to almost immediately neutralise the high-priest of the serpent-men.

Everything seemed to be going my way until reinforcements began pouring in.  A surprise attack took out Diana Skully before she even realised what was happening as she was struck down by a magical bolt from one of the newly arrived cultists.  Nigel Bottomtooth was next to fall to a Serpent-man in close combat.  The agents intrepid leader Rick O'Connell held out on his own for two more turns and even took out another Serpent-man on his own before the weakness brought on by serpent poison made him easy prey for a final attack.

The Threshold Agents will return to fight another day!

-Jay

"We will fight them on the beaches of Dunwich, we will fight them on the landing grounds of Antarctica..."

I've mentioned before that I had been struggling to find some period (20s-30s) appropriate figures for my Strange Aeons games, so I finally (and I mean finally, this guy has been half done for YEARS) finished a figure I had picked up for playing Weird World Wars games.  I think this somewhat proper English gentleman could fill in well as the member or leader of a team of Threshold agents.

The real question for me now is do I own the title of 'Most British' war gaming miniature of all my friends or does Darren's model of The Trooper from Iron Maiden still trump me?

-Jay

He's a doctor, I'm sure he's here to help us...

I've started going back and adding to my small (very small) collection of "pulp" gaming figures.  I'm primarily using these figures for Strange Aeons but I'm not a fan of their miniature line so I've been trying to find pieces elsewhere for what I need.

My first addition is a doctor (not sure what he's a doctor of mind you) to add to my team of investigators.  The figure itself is actually from Black Scorpion's Old West range but I figured he was suitably generic looking to have worked his way forward into the 20s.

The doctor is from the same pack that Zoe's earlier "Miss Kitty" figure is from and I have to say if you're looking for a pack of townspeople for some different eras I would definitely recommend checking out the Black Scorpion line.

-Jay

She started out as as skeptic, but now...

The third member of my initial Threshold team for Strange Aeons is Dianna Skully.  I picked her colour scheme and look based on Dana Scully from the X-Files slightly re imagined as a pulp period character.

I mentioned in my previous post that I wanted a mix of skill types for my characters and Dianna is filling the academic role.  This is a tough character in the game to develop because her lack of combat skills and upgrades has made her survivability (through my first 3 games anyway) quite poor but she hasn't yet developed the skills to be particularly useful as a treasure seeker/researcher.  I did catch one lucky break early on, she sustained a major injury in her first game and got a lucky roll on the recovery chart so she is now basically fearless.

So far I'm happy with what I have but I think I need to add 2 types of figures to this collection so I have some other choices when I inevitably need a replacement for a fallen team member.  First I need at least one and hopefully two generic armed men in suits as replacement Threshold agents if I want another combat oriented character, secondly I need to paint up a couple of legitimately academic looking (students, professors) characters so that I can potentially replace a single fallen Threshold agent with multiple cheaper civilian characters.

-Jay

Two war buddies with the Innsmouth Look

Over the years my gaming hobby has had a strange relationship with H.P. Lovecraft and the Cthulhu mythos.  I've always been a fan of the background and I've read all of Lovecraft's better known works but even though Call Of Cthulhu is one of those RPGs that's been around for ever I have only ever played it once, and that was about 20 years ago.  I'm not sure why it's never been a game system or setting that I've used but I suspect a lot of it has to do with the fact that I'm not entirely convinced nameless horror and not being sure if you're going insane or not works well with a group dynamic.

Fast forward to now and there is a new way to game Cthulhu, Strange Aeons, a skirmish miniature game that none-the-less has some narrative and story telling elements anchored in Cthulhu mythology.  In preparation for my first games I dug through my backlog (by the way the one thing it turns out I don't have a lot of is 'pulp' miniatures) and I came up with these 2 figures to represent my first two Threshold Agents.

For my first 3 Threshold Agents (the third one should be done tomorrow) I took a mix of skill types and equipment.  My leader is Rick O'Connell (the guy with the 2 pistols) and he's an all-round solid fighter type who is brave and decent at either ranged or close combat.  His buddy Nigel Bottomtooth will eventually be filling a sniper role on my team, I say eventually because until he's acquired another skill or two he's actually nothing special with that rifle.  My final team member is more of a scholar but we'll cover her tomorrow.

If you're considering another skirmish game I would definitely give Strange Aeons a look.  The rules are balanced and there are some interesting scenarios in there.  My only knock against it would be that starting out it isn't really possible to end up with any characters that feel like the hero or protagonist of a story...but maybe that's really kind of the point.

-Jay