TableTop Day at Tabletop Nation.

I'll start by saying that I intended to write this post a couple of weeks ago, a day or two after Tabletop Day itself. However, due to a technology failure (my phone's micro SD card going kaput), I had lost most of the pictures and all of the video that I took on the day. These included some stills of great looking gaming tables, and a video of an absolutely beautiful 4' X 4' Carnivale table. I did though manage to retrieve, from my phone's messages folder, the pictures that I had been sending to friends throughout the day. (For those, see below with details of exactly what they are.)

For those that don't know, Tabletop Day was an international event on March 30th 2013 created by Geek And Sundry which commemorated the first anniversary of their You Tube show TableTop, presented by Will Wheaton.  It was also supported and promoted by geek queen Felicia Day. It was to promote tabletop gaming in all it's forms. Here's a link that explains much more accurately and succinctly than I, what it was all about. http://www.tabletopday.com/index.php/about
The idea was quickly taken up by the gaming community with events happening all over the world.

And where better to go than to Tabletop Nation to help celebrate and play a few games.


I will now go back to the aforementioned game, Carnivale. Unfortunately, I ran out of time to get an intro game of this skirmisher set in a post-cataclysm Venice in 1793. In the setting, most of Italy has been swallowed up by a risen Mediterranean Sea and Venice itself sits on the northern edge of a great magical rent in the sky.
There are four factions to play. These are:

The Patricians, the corrupt, decadent rulers of the city;

The Guild, thieves and roughians;

The Rashaar, sea monsters;

And The Ospedale, madmen and the doctors that keep them.

There are also The Gifted, independent special characters such as The Abomination and Harlequin.

My favourite of the four factions is The Ospedal. The doctors of which use their madmen charges as psychic batteries to power their arcane weapons. And they can get a rhino, what's not to love about that.

I took the five pictures above at a previous visit to Tabletop Nation. The models in them are the actual ones that appear in the Carnivale rulebook. Neat huh?

Here's a link to the official Carnivale site: http://vesper-on.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=section&layout=blog&id=6&Itemid=12&lang=en


The game that I played most at TTN on TableTop Day (and invested in) was X-Wing from Fantasy Flight Games.
I had heard that it was based on the Wings Of War games system. I have an old copy of Wings Of War from before it was re-released with lovely little aircraft models. The planes in my version of the game are simply pictures on cards. If my version of Wings Of War was version 1.0, then I'd describe X-Wing as Wings Of War version 3.0 but in space and Star Wars. An idea that is shared by a friend that I introduced to the game shortly after the 30th.
As with most stuff from Fantasy Flight, the quality of the models and components are first class. The litle X-Wings and TIE's, not to mention the Millennium Falcon are a joy.

Here are some pics: Unfortunately, the gaming mat makes it a little hard to see the models in the first two.

Luke Skywalker and Biggs Darklighter engage two TIE Fighters while Darth Vader in his TIE Advance lurks in the background.

A lone surviving X-wing and the Falcon take on a squadron of TIEs and Slave 1.

If you need to ask what this is...Well shame on you.

The rules are really simple but fun. The game plays quickly and smoothly. There are various pilots that you can assign to each ship which change their abilities and points costs along with upgrade cards to give you an edge. And there are custom dice...I love custom dice.
I'm looking forward to getting my hands on a Y-Wing, A-Wing, X-Wing expansion pack (which comes with, I'm informed, a Wedge Antilles pilot card) and a TIE Interceptor. Hopefully I'll be able to pick them up at Salute (Europe's biggest wargames fair) on Saturday 20th of April, as they were out of stock at Wayland Games (who share space with Tabletop Nation) on TableTop Day.


I want to make a clarification to something that I posted earlier on this blog. I had stated, that in the DreadBall tournaments that I attended earlier this year, I narrowly missed out on qualifying for the SuperBall (national championship). It turns out that I missed it by a much wider margin than I thought, as the events were not actually qualifiers for the SuperBall. Still a lot of fun though.

What I beleive was wrong with the ending of the Watchmen movie.

Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' masterpiece is my favorite graphic novel of all time. And I have read a lot of graphic novels by some truly great writers and artists. With this in mind, you might be forgiven in thinking that no matter how good the film was, that it would never be good enough for me. You'd be wrong. Going into the cinema, I was willing and happy to find that in a couple of hours time I had a new favourite film. It didn't happen. It really didn't.

Okay, now, spoiler alert. If you havn't read the graphic novel, don't read on. If you havn't seen the film, don't. Read the graphic novel instead.

In Watchmen, the world is on the brink of nuclear war. Ozymandias, the worlds most intelligent man, comes up with a plan to avert this. Along with a group of scientists and artists (who he later kills to keep the secret), he creates a giant "extra-dimensional" being which, when it materialises in New York City, kills off the city's entire population with it's psychic "death" scream. With the perceived threat of a very dangerous and powerful potential enemy from somewhere other that Earth, the planets population will hopefully unite, their previous squabbles paling in comparison.

In the movie, the psychic alien is completely written out. Instead, the threat to the world come from faked (by Ozymandias) manifestations of the ever increasing power of Dr. Manhattan, one of the former Watchmen. The problem with that ending is this. In the original, the countries of the world can unite against a common enemy. Dr. Manhattan however, is not only an American but an American soldier. His powers being an american asset have  further pushed the world toward mutually assured destruction. Seeing a greater destructive threat coming from that source would further galvanise America's allies and may even gain it new ones. The world would be even more divided that before it had happened. Somehow in the movie, the human race unites instead of being further pushed apart which is the effect that I believe the manifestations would have had on the psychology of the people of the Watchmen world.

I really don't see any reason, other than time and financial factors, why the ending was changed. Putting in the creation of the alien would have added maybe another 30 minutes to the length of the film. The arrogance of the Hollywood script writers at the belief that they could write as good a, or better ending that the great Alan Moore exasperates me.

Boycot the film. Buy the graphic novel and experience one of the greatest stories ever written.

Warhammer World.

It's only February and I've already been to four games tournaments this year!

The first, which I talked about  in my last post was a DreadBall tournament, as were the two that followed it, one at Hammerhead (a wargames convention held Kelham, Nottinghamshire), the other at Wargames Workshop in Milton Keynes. I managed to come joint 5th out of 10 at Hammerhead and 4th out of 10 in Milton Keynes.

My fourth tournament of the year saw me awaken (after only two hours sleep) at the stupidly early time of 5a.m.. It had to be this early as the coach from outside Games Workshop's Chiswick store was due to leave at 6:15. Yes, the tournament was at Warhammer World, Games Workshop's Nottingham H.Q.. The tournament was called "Invasion", was a Warhammer 40,000 event and consisted of patrons of some of London's Games Workshops. It was a doubles event with each player taking a 600 point force which must be legal as per a standard  force organisation chart. I took a force of Necrons lead by a Destroyer Lord with Sempiternal Weave, a squad of six Wraiths with whip coils, two squads of five Necron Warriors and four bases of Scarabs. My partner took Grey Knights. He had Castellan Crowe as his H.Q. choice supported by two squads of five Purifiers and a Dreadnought.

The day consisted of three games. The first saw us facing a father and son team who had a combined force consisting of Space Wolves and Chaos Space marines. We managed to beat them quite considerably. My proudest moment was when my close combat contingent (my Wraiths lead by my Destroyer Lord), after dispatching a squad of Thunderwolf Cavalry, took out a squad of Terminators lead by non-other than Logan Grimnar.
After lunch, in our second game, we fought against a two guys using Slaaneshi Deamons and Tzeenchi Daemons respectively. This pair turned out to be the overall tournament winners. They beat us too. They were good players who knew their armies well. The Tzeench player had two squads of Flamers. It is the general consensus of 40K players that for their in game points cost, these daemons are way, way over-powered (the guy they belonged to even said nearly as much). I honestly don't know that if these models had not been on the table whether my partner and I would have won or not. We certainly would have stood a much better chance and it would have been a very close game indeed. One thing that I thought was a mistake by Matt Ward (the guy that wrote Codex: Grey Knights), was that despite the Warhammer 40,000 universe fiction, The army (at least the options that my partner took) had nothing special that was particuarly effective against Daemons. In the stories, the Grey Knights are the most elite of all Space marines, a specialised chapter whose job it is to destroy daemons.
Our third and last game saw us facing off against a couple of young lads who were using Necrons and Tyranids. The Necron player took, for his force, a special character, Illuminor Szeras, plus two squads of 19 warriors. The Tyranid player took a big monstrosity the name of which I don't know plus loads, and I mean loads, of Hormagaunts. They went for strength in numbers. It didn't work. We beat them, but it was close.

They day, which included a hot meal and coach travel there and back, cost £30. I thought it was good value for money, a change to the usually inflated prices that games Workshop charge.

Now how about some pretty pictures and a bit of video?

This video is of the gaming hall at Warhammer World, to show the scale of it.

Warhammer World includes a very nice Dwarf themed pub called Bugman's.
This is a pic of the Bugman's fireplace which even has fake glowing wood.

Some of the wall art in the pub. An orc's head on a shield.

Bugman's, along with it's fake fire, even has fake stained glass on the doors to its balcony. They are just stickers but do look rather good with the sun streaming through them though. The orc head is fake too by the way.

The front of the pub is actually in the gaming hall. here's a picture of it.

Here's a closer look at the pub sign.

DreadBall Copper cup and Tabletop nation.

On Sunday, I went to Tabletop Nation (my second visit there) to play in the DreadBall Copper Cup.

DreadBall is a Sci-Fi sports game produced by Mantic. It has the flavour of games such as Speedball 2 and Rollerball.

The tournament was run, extremely well by Rich J from Enfield Gamers, a wargames club based in Ponders End, North London that meet on Tuesday evenings. Due to the distance between where I live and Ponders End, I rarely get the chance to go down there now unfortunately, so it was good to see many members of the club at the event. Here's the address of the Enfield Gamers web page. http://www.enfieldgamers.co.uk/ New members are always welcome.

I managed to come 4th out of 20 players in the tournament. I was very pleased with my performance but gutted that I narrowly missed out on third place. It wasn't the fact that I missed out on getting a voucher for more "toys" but that the first three placed players got an invitation to the DreadBall Super Bowl later in the year. There will however be other DreadBall events this year that I believe will give players the chance to get a ticket for the Super Bowl so I may enter one of those and try my luck again.


Tabletop Nation itself is a wonderful gaming facility coupled with Wayland Games' bricks and mortar store. It has the most beautifully constructed gaming tables that I have ever seen, so much so that I couldn't help taking some (jerky) videos of them. I thought Id share them with you.

The first is a table designed to play Infinity (a 28mm Sci-Fi skirmish game) on. It features a brilliant ruined elevated roadway.

 

This second table is made for Bolt Action (a WWII 28mm game). This is a really beautiful table.

This third one seems to be for a 6mm skirmish game. I think that, partly due to the scale of the scenery and partly because there is not enough room on the board for large formations of troops.

This last video features a table that I think would be great for Warhammer 40,000. I can just imagine an Imperial Guard force on the raised paved area, Basilisks shelling no mans land while Chaos cultists skulk in the trenches.

Here's the second of tonight's posts, another story. This time with a Warhammer 40,000 flavour.

 

Trooper Merrick slid the output control on his lasgun to maximum. He could still hear the words of the quartermaster when his platoon were issued with the Sibian VI Pattern weapons: “Keep the output slider set at standard. Any more and you're likely to burn out the emitter assembly.” He didn't care. Any moment now a force of Traitor Marines were going to be cresting the hill that his trench overlooked and if he had any chance at all of breaching their armour he needed to increase the power of his weapon.

In the last few minutes the ambient temperature had increased by twenty degrees. If Merrick had for one moment taken his eyes off of the ridge of the hill, he would have seen that the sky had clouded over. With a crash of thunder the rain started to fall. So heavy was it, that view of the guardsmen's targeted area became indistinct.

Minutes passed and the rain didn't ease. Then they came. Slowly. Heads rising above the hilltop, then shoulders, chests and legs. Walking, not charging, the blue and gold armoured Chaos Marines approached the trench. With the traitors moving this slowly, Merrick thought, he and his fellows may just stand a chance. Lasfire erupted from the trench. Trained guardsmen aimed at the weak points on their enemy's armour, visors and joints. Then the Archenemy opened fire.

The poor visibility didn't seem to be hampering the accuracy of the Chaos Marines. By the time their first volley was done, fully half of the guardsmen in Merrick's section of the trench were dead. Guardsmen began diving for the bottom of the trench to avoid the withering bolter fire. Merrick wasn't the first to hit the dirt but he certainly wasn't the last. He needed more firepower. He switched his lasgun to full auto. More shots in a shorter length of time meant he didn't have to expose himself to enemy fire for as long. He steeled himself ready to stand up and fight. As he looked up he saw the monster. The Traitor Marine loomed over him. It slowly raised it's boltgun to meet Merrick's face. The guardsman rammed the end of his weapon up under the Marine's chin and fired.

The top of the Thousand Sons Marine's helmet exploded outwards and with it a coarse black dust. The dust fell and settled on Merrick. All of a sudden, the trooper could see all the failures he had ever made in his life. He saw all the people who had ever loved him and how he had hurt them beyond words. He saw how due to his weakness, his comrades would all die, suffering horribly. He saw through time how his actions on this day would lead to the fall of the Imperium itself. There was only one way to save mankind and that was to end his own life.

He raised the muzzle of his las to his forehead and pulled the trigger. However, the last spurt of fire from his gun had burned out it's workings and rendered it useless. Culim, the guardsman to Merrick's left and his long-time friend, tackled him to the ground. He tore the affected trooper's weapon from his hands and tossed it aside. He took his canteen from his webbing and used the water within to wash the dust from Merrick's face and hair.

Merrick looked at his friend realising how close death had just been. Then he remembered the battle and how if he was going to live, he must re-join it and continue to fight. But without a weapon, how was he going to do this. Then, on the lip of the trench, he saw it, the fallen Traitor's boltgun. He grabbed it. It was old, but seemed to be in working order and loaded. Merrick stood up to his full height, looking down the boltgun's sights over the trench. Immediately he found his target. He aimed at the Chaos Marine's throat and pulled the trigger. With a sound of tearing metal the muzzle and barrel of the boltgun folded in on themselves. Merrick could only stare as the components that had previously been at the front of the weapon emerged from the back. The boltgun fired. The shell entered Merrick's cheek. Then his head exploded.

Trooper Culim wiped his friends brain and skull off of his face and continued to fire.

Here's a short story I wrote at a creative writing class a few years ago. The brief was vague, I remember it being something along the lines of "someone remembering something whilst walking". Very vague, though probably not quite as vague as I remember it. Anyway, here it is.

Marcus reflexively looked down at his wrists as his watches beeped their alarms. He always wore two. 6:42, one hour to sun rise and time he should be getting home.

He'd been out all night again at his gentlemens club. A special place for like fellows. After leaving, he had walked through Soho, up Wardour Street and into Leicester Square.

He exited the square on the South-East side. He hadn't taken this particular route for years. Then he remembered why. He stopped suddenly as the restaurant came into view. Her smell was the first thing he remembered. Jessica, white musk, always white musk. Then her hair, soft, the fringe that half covered her eyes. He used to joke that she could see about as well as an Old English Sheepdog. He scolded himself for being so soft. He couldn't allow himself to have these feelings. That life was dead to him now.

He walked on quickly. He turned right on to the Charing Cross Road striding past the National Portrait gallery. He had resided in London all his years but only once been inside. It was on a school trip. Most of the pictures had been much of a muchness to his young uneducated eyes. All except for one. It had been a painting of a man in a purple velvet suit standing in a dark room. Marcus remembered thinking how distinguished he had looked. The man in the painting had an aire of danger about him, a fierce glint in the eye. Marcus had wanted to be him.

On now through Trafalgar Square. Glancing up at the lions guarding Nelson's Column, an even earlier memory came. Strong arms lifting him onto the back of one of the lions. His father. His mother was at street level in front of the lion, taking his picture, bright sunlight glinted off of the camera's lens. He had thought his father so strong. True strength was what Marcus now possessed.

A few minutes more and he had arrived at the door of his basement apartment. Beautifully furnished and this close to the centre of London, it had cost a lot of money. He hadn't payed for it of course. His fellows in The Brotherhood had acquired it for him. He opened the door and walked through the hallway. He entered his bedroom. He disrobed and lifted the lid on his coffin. It was a clichéd thing for those of his ilk to sleep in, but practical. He ran his tongue under his fangs, tasting the blood he had, had earlier in the evening. To bed now, the sun would be up soon.

I'm going to begin my first proper post with what I did on Saturday. It was the 1st of December and time for the yearly roleplaying convention called Dragonmeet. Dragonmeet has been running since the 70's and I have been attending for about five years. Since I've been going it's been held in Kensington Town Hall in London, which is very accessible by bus and The London Underground. The event features a trade hall, participation games and seminars and is great fun. It's mainly a roleplaying con' but also featuring each year are board and card games and art displays.


I first had a wander around the trade hall and picked up an expansion to the dice game Quarriors.

Quarriors is a very simple yet fun game of dice combat where you aim to roll (out of the six dice you're allowed to draw from your bag each turn) enough of the in game currency (called Quiddity (yes that is a rather silly name but realy doesn't distract from the quality of the gameplay)) to promote creatures (that have already been rolled on drawn dice) up to your "ready area". Once there they can attempt to destroy other player's creatures to prevent that player from scoring glory (victory points) and may trigger other effects. Any Quiddity that's left over can be used to purchase other dice (more creatures, portals or spells) from "the wilds" which are then added to your dice pool. Of course, if you want to spend all of your Quiddity on a really nasty creature such as the Mighty Quake Dragon, you are not forced to summon any creature to your ready area at all.

But I have digressed. The expansion that I purchased is called Rise Of The Demons. I believe that it contains some nasty tricks that you can play on your opponents but I will find that out for sure when I play it tonight.


I also had pretty much decided to purchase a new set of roleplaying books from which to run a game for my Monday Night RPG group. But more on that later.

While waiting for my friend to turn up, I decided to go into a seminar in which Steve Jackson (the English one) and Ian Livingstone were to speak.
Here's a pic of them.

They spoke a little about the beginnings of Games Workshop and about their series of Fighting Fantasy books which have been re-released, some even as smartphone and tablet apps.


After the seminar, i found my friend playing a demo of a card game called Lords Of War. His conclusion was that it was good but not something that he would play very often. The people promoting the game though were incredibly nice and personable...and they gave me a lollypop!


While waiting for my friend to finish his game, I did indeed by a new load of roleplaying books. I had told myself that, this year, I would not be buying any as I didn't think that I would be in the right state of mind to run a game for my group in the upcoming months. What got me though was the artwork in the following picture.

Some of you might recognise it as the cover to Titan. It is the world sourcebook for the Fighting Fantasy roleplaying system. I also purchased the core rulebook, Out Of The Pit (the monster guide) and the players handbook. The above picture took me back to the end of the 80's when I was just discovering roleplaying. My school library had a copy of Titan and all the kids thought it was cool but really had no clue as to the wonderous hours of fun it could help to provide. It was really this picture that sold the game to me on Saturday. The system is probably the simplest I've ever come across in my years of roleplaying which is great as it won't tax my already befuddled mind too much. I hope to begin running a campaign for my group in the first quarter of next year. Last year at Dragomeet (again when I'd told myself that I wouldn't be buying or running any new games) I ended up purchasing Atomic Highway and it's companion book Irradiated Freaks, a post apocalyptic adventure, again with pretty simple rules and chocked full of mutants. I ran a five-month campaign of that. after which the story was carried on by the friend who, this year, had come with me to the convention.

After a brief lunch, my friend and I took part in a session of Albion. This RPG is set in a post-apocalyptic Britain after sea levels have risen and a mysterious and impenetrable wall of mist surrounds the islands. In Albion, magic has returned and technology (all of which has to be licensed by the ruling druidic councils) has all but disappeared, the height being the steam engine. It has a very elegant and intuitive system. The games creator even popped his head in to see how we were doing. Dragonmeet always attracts top creators from the RPG world.

Dragonmeet will be on again next year, I beleive in the same location. The date set for it is the 7th of December. If you like roleplaying and are fairly local, why not check it out.