Fanstorm Armada - Developing the Game

Spartan are working on FA v3.0 right now, and I could be wrong, but I'm not liking the sound of what I'm hearing in terms of rumours and rumblings. Derek Sinclair, the rules designer who's primarily worked on DW, Planetfall and latterly Halo, is getting in on FA. I can't say this gives me a rosy feel inside. Derek was not involved in the development of the v1 FA, nor v2.0. I don't know about v1.5, but that was a clusterf*ck of copy/paste errors from DW v2 which was written at the same time.

Planetfall for me was a catalogue of how NOT to develop a game, with it evolving faster than The Thing on steroids in front of your eyes. I believe in a living rulebook, but not one where what I buy is invalid by the time it hits the shelves, or by the time the ink has finished drying on the 48 pages of PDF downloads that came out with alarming regularity - to say nothing of the shocking lack of proof reading, leading to more errors and re-writes than most Hollywood C-list films. Halo was much better produced, but I subscribe that this is down to 343s involvement, and not so much Spartan's change of spots. I find HFB a bit bland and far too dominated by boarding and Spartans, but that's understandable because of the Halo franchise - it's still not what I want to see come into FA.

"OK Alex" I hear you say "So you don't like what's happening at SG. So what? Are you just going to sit on your behind and moan about it? You're so negative....blah de blah de blah..." (ok, maybe not that last bit, but I wanted to cover myself!)

Well, I haven't been idle in this regard. Myself and a set of designers from across the world (now named "TheoryMachine") have embarked upon the project of Fanstorm Armada, to continue where the FFG left off, and continue the development of FA in a direction that preserves what we love about the game, strengthens those elements and tones down the ones we don't. As we're not a company and aren't in this to make money, suggestions and alterations from the community are more than welcome, and everything we suggest will be published for free distribution. We don't want to infringe upon what SG is doing, and we're not going after any IP, we're just fans of the game making suggestions about how to make FA a better game.

In a prior post, I mentioned movement. This is one of the largest chunks of time in FA - understanding that FA is a game of strategic and tactical manoeuvring is one of the greatest understandings that any player can discover about the game, and as such it should be preserved in the greater part, but speeded up. I discussed how to do this before, and mentioned some templates. Here is a PDF of those that forum member Ryjak made;

FA Movement Templates PDF

That's great, but we all want better gaming aids, right? As I have a 3D printer, this was something I figured I could cook up, so 15 minutes on Tinkercad and I produced the STL file. Printed at 0.2mm with 15% infill took just under an hour, and here are the finished articles;

They could do with a bit of tweaking on the print settings, and I might cut the longer ones down to 3" as well, to make them easier to get into tight spots (which is one of the issues with the SG 45 degree template). Here they are in use - I've set up a common situation in FA - the knife fight. In this example, the Dindrenzi Dreadnought really doesn't want to be so close, but it's decided to go for it. 

It has a 2" Turn Limit, so we use the Turn Rate 3 template.

So you can see two advantages of this method here straight away - firstly, the template is narrow enough for you to get it into tight spaces - you'll see that in the other pictures too. Secondly, you get an immediate idea of what is possible - where the model is going to end up, which reduces moving and then "backing up", which is one of the big slow-downs in many games. This also has a secondary thought-process speed-up, since you're concentrating more on actions rather than logistics of movement.

So we've moved, and can nicely line up the two Ba'kash cruisers in our dual rail cannon sights. Now let's look at the Ba'kash move (assuming they survive!)

Here the Ba'kash cruiser turn (using the Turn Rate 2 marker) would cause problems with model placement, and not be good for a port broadside shot, so instead the model moves 1" forewards...

and we can see now that a turn will clear the model nicely, and set us up for a nice broadside of drive-by boarding assault...

One more inch of turn...

...and we're aligned.

With 4" moved, there's plenty left to cruise alongside, probably setting the scene for a rear-arc shot next turn!

I hope you can see that this is pretty liberating for FA in a couple of ways, yet preserves a VERY important part of the game, since movement is a central and critical part of Firestorm's feel. Given that Spartan Derek isn't even considering movement mechanics yet, I'll be adopting this movement system and then moving onto other areas first - after all, you don't build a house and THEN work on the foundations, do you?

Runewars Painting 1 - Rune Golem and Carrion Lancer

In a prior blog post I mentioned picking up Runewars at Salute 2017, and pledged not to play the game until I'd painted the minis. Inspired by Sorastro's painting guides (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmGwuoxuJ4U & https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gvtB1z1-cH0), I set about painting the two largest minis in the box.

The Rune Golem I painted pretty much exactly as the guide, just to adapt my painting style and learn from Sorastro's technique. I'd highly recommend his videos, they're very east to follow and produce great results. Here the work in progress:

Here is the finished Rune Golem - Overall I'm pretty pleased with the result:

The Carrion Lancer is a bit more involved - I also wanted to adapt some of the colours from Sorastro's work, since I wanted a cooler palette for my army, using steel and purple as the main colours, and I wanted the maw and boils to be more "realistic" - or perhaps "organic" - than the bright green used in Sorastro's work. In any case, I started exactly as per his guide;

Here you can see I was using a blue for the cloth, which I decided to change to purple as I wanted to adapt the blue for my humans - I thought it would tie them in with the Rune Golem well and I didn't really want too much of a Spartan theme for my army as Sorastro had.

So here you can see the subtle blue-green on the carapace, the washes and initial highlights, plus the colour change from the nice bright blue to a more dark, sinister undead purple. I also based the maw and rear (rectum?) in a flesh washed with red. Next was to build up the highlights across the model:

Here most of the highlights are done, with just a few to go on the lance, reigns etc. I also have the base to do, the varnish on the carapace and maw and a few other bits and bobs. They didn't take long to do, just quite a bit of time between steps (for the base to dry etc). Here's the finished Carrion Lancer:

I really enjoyed painting these models - they take paint very well, they have great detail and  are very striking models to put down on the table. I'm looking forward to the challenge of the rest of the box now!

D&D 5e - Session Zero - the most important one?

I'm a member of a few D&D 5e groups on Facebook, including ones for DMs. I'm always amazed by some of the commentary, often by DMs, with complaints about their players behaviour. Sometimes it's also about DMs too, but the ratio does seem out of kilter with the ratio of players to DMs. Anyway, distribution aside, many of these comments are pretty shocking - players and DMs throwing tantrums, demanding certain things "or else", using their phones (for non-game related stuff) whilst playing - all sorts of disruptive behaviour that would generally be considered anti-social in just about any other setting.

There are questions on some home-brewed rules - a common one being critical failures. Many DMs have house-ruled that a natural "1"  a player attack equals a dropped weapon, a broken bowstring, an attack that hits another player or some such. Cries of outrage are expressed - "My group would never tolerate this", "This slows down gameplay and fun for all", "You're destroying the rules" - all kinds of things are mooted and counter-argued.

Distilling down to the route cause of an awful lot of these, a huge source of these issues boils down to communication - or a lack of it. Some of these get so bad that players are excluded, forced out, or in some cases, groups even disbanded entirely. Now the group I DM is a pretty large one, yet we rarely have any of these issues. Not only that, but none of us knew each other at all this time last year...we were all strangers and got together through MeetUp. Surely we aren't that different? Why haven't we come across this?

Well, I think the reason is that we had a Session Zero - essentially a discussion between us all on our experience, how we wanted to play, what we thought was fun, what we didn't want, schedules - pretty much everything. Everyone had a voice, everyone agreed with what we decided and we had created an open environment where if things changed, we could bring it up. We did this before even rolling a single dice. When we did then roll for stats everyone had a clear idea of what the path ahead of them was - some chose to roll, some chose standard stats, and they also had the option to points buy - that was one of the agreements we made.

We covered things like;

• What style of play did we want? - minis, tiles, paper, "theatre of the mind" (we chose minis),
• How should the characters level up? (we chose needing a long rest after gaining the relevant experience)
• Regular sessions or ad-hoc? (We chose regular)
• Where to play? (A couple of the players offered their home dining room, which was great!)
• What was acceptable at the table - mobile phones being a primary topic. (we agreed phones could be left on in case of emergencies, but not used at the table unless for a D&D related app, like a stat or spell tracker)
• What classes/races, optional rules etc would we use - like Feats, for example (we agreed that we'd just use Players Handbook races & classes, and then expand out from that when we all had a bit more experience with 5th edition)
• What, if any, home-brewed rules would we use? (more below)

Now we use a critical fail mechanic, whereby a 1 in melee will drop the weapon, a 1 on a ranged attack risks hitting another creature in the way. As our party often takes risks in firing into combat, this has resulted in a LOT of very cinematic (and often hilarious) moments - to the point where the party has been named "The Backbiters". Does this mechanic slow the game down? No. Does it hamper the party in a way that breaks the game? No. Is it breaking the rules? OF COURSE NOT! This is D&D! Don't you remember Gygax's famous quote about rules?!?!?!

Now we're not perfect - no group of humans is - we've had some tense and/or uncomfortable points around the table before...but these weren't brought on by rules discussions or mechanics. In any case, they were aired and passed pretty quickly, and we moved on...everyone remained friends. Why? Well, I think we've got a good bunch of folks, which helps, but also everyone has agreed to a common framework in a group franchise - we're all part of this, and all have a similar understanding - in the main because of our session zero.

Everything we have done since that point has thus been an exploration together - everyone is there to have fun, and I'd say we're getting better at it all the time - the sessions we've had in the past couple of months have included some of the best sessions I've ever played  - and I've had skin in the game since the early '80s....

So my advice to any group starting out in D&D, any DM looking for a new group or any existing players who want to get into another campaign - have a session zero. It might seem like a waste of time when you first suggest it, but in my opinion it forms one of the best foundations for building good sessions in the future that you can have. So what are you waiting for? Get together and get talking!

Runewars Unboxing

In my prior post I mentioned I picked up a copy of Runewars from Salute this year, and I thought it would be timely to do an unboxing. This is a Fantasy Flight product, and the only other foray into their ranges for me is (like many others) through X-Wing. This is a bit of a different beast, however, and I'm interested into how it's going to pan out.

Now the first thing to say is that the box is BIG. I mean, it's not huge from an X-Y dimension front, but it's DEEP - deep enough that you can't really hold it in one hand (at least, not if you have hands my size). If you can, then you also need to be strong, because this thing is also HEAVY. This gives you an immediate feeling that you're getting quite a lot for your £75-£80.

Opening the box confirms that feeling:

There is ZERO space between the box lid and the contents - you're presented with rulebook, Learn to Play guide and Lore Book, FFG Catalogue and wrapped token sets up front and personal. I noted (with some amusement) that the token on the bottom right-hand of the photo above was a "Proof of Purchase" token just like in X-Wing (that I've yet to find any use for!).

Taking a closer look at the token sets, these include the order dials that look like an especially interesting mechanic for this game, which I think might set it apart from some of the other similar games out there. Also recognisable are very X-Wing-esque movement profiles, but I resisted the temptation to open this pack until later.

I also mentioned above that you get three books - a Learn to Play, Rules Reference and Lore guide. Taking a closer look at these reveals no real surprises - the Learn to play features lots of graphics:

The Rules Reference is less colourful (mainly having a lot of text references, as you might have guessed):

Whereas the Lore Guide is very nicely and lavishly illustrated, which is very welcome and lends a real sense of professionalism and the feel of a polished product to the whole package.

Now I know that I'm really wanting this set to get into the minis, ennjoy painting them and maybe use them for D&D, but all of this stuff so far also has me intrigued and excited - it feels like a product that's had a lot of thought put into it, and it's been produced with FFGs signature marketing skill. As I've said many times, I'm not a natural fantasy player, but this already has several hooks I'm liking. So let's get into the minis.

Well, removing the books and token pack reveals this clever tri-compartment card divider, which could have been blank but is instead nicely rendered in a single-colour print of the box artwork - again just giving that feel of extra polish. In the centre compartment are all the other bits you need to play the game - dice, bases, cards etc:

Removing the card divider then gets you to two large press-seal bags:

Inside these are more bags of the minis

So where do we start? Well, with the big minis of course! The first one I looked at was the Carrion Lancer - this is made up of 5 pieces plus the base. These all come without any sprue attachments or major cleanup required:

The detail on the minis is really nice, despite the simplification necessary for this sort of 2-player boxed set economy. Here is the smallest piece, the lancer torso:

The models are designed to be push-fit, though everyone will cement them of course. Still, the fit is excellent right out of the box - here is the completely push-fit assembled mini - no glue used here at all

This is impressive stuff, and as we turn to the other large mini - the Rune Golem - we're not disappointed here either:

Looking at the smaller commander pieces, FFGs ingenuity in how they've split these pieces up really comes into its own - this again is push-fit, and you would never guess how it's been split to make it - I'm looking at it now and I can't even remember, and I made it!

The other really nice thing about these commander minis is that although they come with these scenic bases, they can be taken out of them to mix them into larger units, which is a simple but clever thing to do.

So let's move onto the rank and file troops. For me, I think this is where this set really sets a good standard, as not only are the designs good, but the level of repetition is low - you multiples of each sculpt, but there are four sculpts for the basic units, which keeps these units from looking too "samey" - it's also one of the things that usually drives up cost in 2-player sets. Here are the skeleton archers:

And here are the melee versions:

Now you only get melee versions of the human faction:

BUT  you also get a mounted unit - only four strong, but again, two different sculpts, which I wasn't expecting.

So what are my first impressions? They're good - this looks like a very well produced and well thought-out game, which I'd expect, but the level of polish and presentation is extremely high. The minis themselves are very cleverly constructed to be able to be push-fit and played with, and although I'd personally never do it, it is possible. The minis themselves are good - not GW multi-kit good, but with the compromises needed for this sort of product, they're very high - compared to Mantic's Dungeon Saga, for instance, they're definitely superior.

You get a lot of product for your money, and it doesn't feel like FFG have scrimped on it at all - which is a good thing, I want to feel like they are respecting my investment. Some people have commented that they could have cast the two factions in different colours, and whilst that's true and would have allowed a clearer experience for new wargamers, I'm not sure that this set is really aimed at them, and I personally like the grey plastic - it makes it feel more like a miniatures game than a board game.

So, as an initial impression I'm going to give it a good 8.5 out of 10, maybe even a 9. The limitations on the minis just pull it down a little, but not much given the understandable choices FFG have made as a manufacturer. I hope the gameplay lives up to these first impressions!