3D Printed Gaslands Barriers

 This next set I've been working on for a while. They are a set of barriers set up for the Gaslands game which I thought would be a perfect fit for my use of them within the MEST :: Retropocalypse setting.

These designs are available on thingiverse.com at https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:3990615 and https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:2933354. They are created by sablebadger and I scaled them up to be correct for 1:56 (28MM) figurines.

Technopunks against some Radspyiders.

Different view. I have an LED lantern for that crazy light.

Threw more scatter elements atop the terrain blanket. It looks to me that those two Technopunks are gonna die. Also looks like I need more terrain!

Heavy Weapons Minis

More from my backlog.

Red Army Heavies

These are some minis that I think will go well with the Retropocalypse genre, They'll serve as the Heavy Weapons unit for the Red Army even though they look like they are using Aztec headgear.

What was, and what shall be.

The Leader

Heavy Squad Automatic Weapon

Flame-thrower

Heavy Beam Weapon

Automatic Multi-munition Shot-gun

Group Shot.

Next Up

These next are from my bin of shame.

They are the last of my primered figures identified first in a blog post back in 2013.

They are all mostly HeroClix figures which I'll repaint for my Pulp / Supers genre. I want to paint them up very quick so that I can move beyond them to my backlog of Orcs and Goblins for the Dunjon of Death.

There's 15 figures shown here, but I've got about 25 more elsewhere. Total 40 to paint with "tabletop quality"; I'll slap-dash colors but I'll take time with the faces and hands.

15 of 40 from the backlog bin.

CelestiCon 2014

EDIT: 2014.11.02 I the pics that I got from Kyle! 

CelestiCon Pictures

Alrighty.  I've finally got some time to write something.  Here's what it looked like at CelestiCon 2014 with our Retropocalypse offering using the MEST 1.5.8 rules (or so).  We had two 4-hour sessions and the first one was a rough start for me; I misremembered some rules and called them incorrectly during game play.  You know the deal; what you remember play-testing is different than what is written in the rules.  It made for some stress and some grumpiness for the players especially since - as a practice - I hand out free copies of the rules book.  Otherwise I think it went okay.  

As always I didn't get a chance to take photos during game-play.  I'll just need another 8 years for my eldest child to get old enough to responsibly shoot pictures for this blog.  Until then, here's what I have; the start of the first session;

I'm setting the character cards up.
Giant man is admiring my precision.

This is one of the faction cards and the top
of one of the character cards.

A close up of the Cultist character cards.

Here's Anika from the She-wolves.  Her faction wasn't used.

Here's a better shot of the entire set of minis
and character cards.  There's a total of 7 factions
with about 10 minis each.

View from the far side of the table.  CelestiCon organizers
were very generous and gave us a humongous set
of tables.  Any how, from this corner the Vault Dwellers
faction was used and they pinned down the Survivors faction
across the board at the left.  `should have been there.

This corner had a father and son? team each playing
as the Red Army faction.  They pretty much caused
problems with the Mutant Hillbillies across the board
and at the left. The Survivors at the right were
also limited in mobility as a result.

Here I am trying to be precise.  I actually confused
myself numerous times.

The Red Army team.

We tried our best to keep everybody involved.

Actually might be early during game set-up.

This is from the Survivor's faction view point.

I tried something new with this leaderboard concept so that
I could track Resource Points.  I will need to redo the
concept a little because I had a hard time moving around
the magnets which I used as pins for scoring as they would
continually stick to each other.

Simple AAR Session One

Five players arranged as so:

MH|  |VD
--+--+--
RA|RA| S

From the arrangement you can see that the Vault Dwellers (VD) have a lot of breathing room. Their Comm-link equipment and AI/Bot characters allow them to dominate during any action.  The Survivors (S) are literally cornered within some ruined building walls because of the nearby presence of the Red Army (RA) as well.  Some activity occurred at that half of the board to pick up objective markers for Resource Points but there wasn't otherwise a lot of movement.

At the left side of the battlefield the Mutant Hillbillies (MD) had to deal with the remainder Red Army team. From what I remember, Leroy (the mutant gator thing) finally got to rush into the fray at the center-line of the battlefield to acquire some more objective markers but during this process Ben (the mutant critter thing) got kild-ed.  The middle Red Army player placed a soldier atop the gas-station building and that essentially created a large area with which he could cover.  

Three hours passed very quickly at 4 Turns into play.  I started this session without declaring all of the rules and abilities for the players in order to not bore them but apparently I spent a lot of time during the session clarifying rules and re-playing actions in order to be fair to each player.  I corrected this failure in my communication in the next session.

Simple AAR Session Two

Two players arranged across each other at the middle third of the battlefield as so:

  | C|
--+--+--
  | S| 

I remember it was Cultists (C) versus Survivors (S).  This was a surprisingly tense session as both players seemed to be tactical game veterans who quickly grasped the rules.  Not so!  The Cultists player was experiencing her first tactical miniatures boardgame and was doing a phenomenal job of keeping the Survivor player - a veteran of many game systems and battles - tasked with tough decisions.  

In this session I did my best to inform each player of their various options and character or faction abilities as soon as I could.  It came back as a reward to watch very interesting game-play unfold.  The Survivors rushed to areas near the center-line road to cover large fields of fire which forced the Cultists player to eventually make the hard decision to risk penetrating that line with a few characters in order to acquire more Resource Points.

About two hours passed and the game concluded with a hand-shake.

The young guy sitting down is a veteran of tabletop affairs.

Our lady opponent was surprising in her tactical
acumen being that this was her first meeting engagement!

Aha! A chance to explain a rule! I think these two
enjoyed their game, and if so; I'm happy about that.

CelestiCon 2014

UPDATE
Quick update about the MEST effort; we've been whacked over the head several dozen times since our last post.  Work, family, ... the boring stuff that consumes nearly everything involving minutes, hours, days, weeks, and months.  Sorry about that.  Unfortunately life happens and hobbies come last.  Good news; just 20 more years before retirement!

Retropocalypse

This year we decided to check into CelestiCon 2014 which is running in my home town of Fremont,

CA.  Here's the Web site URL for the Events search page;

http://celesticon.com/schedule.php

Enter the keyword 'MEST' and you'll find two Retropocalypse events each 4 hours long running on Sunday starting at 10:00 AM PST.  We will be pleased to receive each and every one of you that stop by.  Just like our previous entries for PacifiCon and DundraCon you'll discover that we'll do our best to take care our guests; we provide the minis, dice, rules, terrain, and hair-loss inducing GMing and you provide the tactical brilliance to play and win.

Files worth reading are duplicated here for quick access:

MEST Basic Rules version 1.5.8
Retropocalypse Character Cards
Retropocalypse Faction Cards
Retropocalypse Agenda Cards
Retropocalypse Mission Brief

Retropocalypse at DundraCon

Aggro and myself ran the Retropocalypse scenario at DundraCon just yesterday. Our first session ran for nearly three hours and we had 6 attendees. The second session ran for 1.5 hours and we had a repeat attendee and a new intrepid player. Our attendees demonstrated mastery of the basic rules very quickly. We did not expect such a large audience for the first session and it required the doting care of the both of us to ensure our guests experienced maximum enjoyment. Something had to give and we soon forgot to get enough sequential pictures to build a proper AAR.  However, in all cases our intrepid gamers did express to us that their time was well spent.

The six players in the first ran one team each of the various available factions issued at random.  The Red Army was not selected. The second session was two mini-games with two players each  (me + one, Aggro + one) at different ends of the battlefield.

At the start of each session I laid out the rules booklets with gamer card attached.

Booklets removed.

Those yellow stars are the Objective Markers. We didn't have time to build a thematic set.

Sometime around Turn 2?

Pa just took down a Scavenger.  "Get off my lawn!"

Sort of blurry.  You can see Herr Maske at the left with the She-wolves moving up towards the middle.

Done and Distracted.

Deep in the mix.  Those little bowls helped us corral the numerous dice.

From the second session, my one-on-one game.  Princess is Hidden and Ready.

A little blurry. 

Leroy about to move a bit closer to Princess and Onyx.

Ben is protecting the Object Marker.

Leroy by his lonesome.

Pa and kin Hidden.  Pa looks a bit Distracted.

Leroy caint really be hidin past them barrels.

Long view of the situation.

I think here my game was called.  Leroy took out Onyx, Princess looks out of it, and Moondog has no ranged weapons.

DundraCon 2014

New Year New Conventions

It's 2014 and I want to see about getting more exposure for our game system MEST using the Basic Rules.  First on the things to do is to attend more tabletop gaming events and so on Sunday February 16, 2014 Aggro84 and myself (kitrok) will be attending DundraCon!  It's the day after Valentine's Day and so it should be worth the trip to the dog house. =)  Just Kidding.

You can search for our event entry by using the keyword "MEST" here:
http://www.dundracon.com/Events_GameSearch.php?GameType=Miniatures

Retropocalypse Mayhem!

We'll be running the game on that Sunday using the Retropocalypse genre we introduced at PacifiCon 2013.  As before, I'll be handing out printed materials to for all attendees of our game.  We'll have two 4-hour sessions back-to-back starting at 10:00 AM PST each one allowing up to six-players.  You can get a preview of the content we'll be running by examining the Downloads documents at the right of this post; of key importance is the Retropocalypse Mission Brief and the character cards.

Previously at PacifiCon

Last year's photo-op is shown here for the curious:
http://matter-energy-space-time.blogspot.com/2013/09/pacificon-2013-noble-pursuits-pictures.html

As well, if things are organized in our favor; we'll have a side-board table using the Schleich "New Heroes" gladiators to demo for visitors.  These figures are pretty awesome and stand about 90mm (about 3.5-inches) tall instead of the normal 28mm many of us are accustomed to.

MEST Update

Layout Changes and Rules Update

I've re-arranged some of the widgets to make the downloads available; that is now with a big red title bar at the right-side of this blog post.

Particularly of interest for some people would be the new Retropocalpyse "post-apoc" genre documents that we recently used at PacifiCon 2013.  Some explanations for the play-aides and how to use them are shown with the origin listing via the Google Sites page.  Anyhow that stuff is to the right.

Also to the right are the character cards that I used for the Fantasy Gladiator demo.  These are mapped to the Papo and Schleich 1:18 scale (90mm) figurines that I placed upon 3-inch diameter bases.

NOTE: I created a few updates to the MEST Basic Game rules in order to prepare for this post.  The furious editing ("debugging") I've been doing to the basic rules has quieted down a bit now since I had to scramble so much for the recent gaming convention. I think agrro84 and myself can probably move forward and begin consolidating and debugging the Advanced Game rules from all of the notes that I've got; some of which is laid out on the Google Groups site for MEST Tactics.  Most of this come through as we build out the aforementioned Retropocalypse genre document.

PacifiCon 2013 Noble Pursuits pictures

I see that aggro84 already beat me to throw-ups for PacifiCon 2013, but I'll just add my shots here.  I'm actually a worse photographer than he is but these pics need to go somewhere!

Fantasy Gladiator Arena

After the MEST Tactics Groups member ssendam asked me about setting up a tutorial or introductory scenario I got the idea to build an arena.  The goal was two-fold; the first was to have something that I could lug around that looked visually impressive.  I could bring these bits to a gaming convention for example.  The second goal was to have some figures and terrain that I could use to conduct training sessions. 

So, @sssendam, I will eventually answer your request with a video or HTML5 animation!  Work-in-progress gentlemen; this stuff takes time. =)

For those who want to know more about these figures, see my earlier posts.  These are Schleich and Papo figures.

Spartan vs. Cyclops

Gladiator vs. Northerner.

Roman vs. Egyptian

 As a side-note on the gladiator display; we used it as a quick and easy visual grab for new-comers.  The idea was that we'd use the arena to explain the basic game mechanics before migrating players into the main game.  Some people that signed up for the Retropocalypse event (basically a "Wasteland" or "Fallout" scenario) had thought I was doing a switcheroo on them.

Retropocalypse Board One

We set up two 48" x 60" boards for the Retropocalypse events.  This first board focused on a rural town; much more like Cormac McCarthy's bleak "The Road".  I think that thematically it wasn't what people expected because the imagery from Fallout and Wasteland is much more like a desert town than something rural.  Next time we'll just ditch the mid-west rural towns and go all Southwestern.

Retropocalypse Board Two

This is the board that we ran our games on.  We ran a session in both of the 4-hour blocks.  Each player chose an assembly of 4-6 characters.  Here's a sample of what they look like at this link.  I prepared a lot of hand-out materials for the game.  Each attendee to our games received a saddle-stapled copy of the plain basic rules (via here), a mission brief introducing new weapons and traits for the Retropocalypse genre, a faction card, and several character cards.  I'll create another blog post and introduce these assets more properly later.

I think this is from the first game session.

The long strip of road in the middle makes
for a crazy barrier that few would cross seeing
that it would be sort of suicidal.

Long view of that same road.

Those familiar with our rules would know that we
emulate the UK gamers and use measuring sticks.
Very useful to get range and direction at one time.

Yep. That's about 8".

Those tokens with the stars are Objective Markers.
aggro84 will try to get prettier stuff painted up for these
in the near future.  When an OM is touched it is removed
and the player gets to draw a Resource Card that
can confer intragame benefits.

Whee! I got one!  Not a good position to be
in even though behind Hard Cover.

A.J. Smithson of the Vault Dwellers is an Elite
with a Heavy Machine Gun.  Nasty even without
using the Fire-lane benefits.

Miscellaneous

This is Mike O'Brien's Dust Warfare/Tactics battlefield.  It had 8 players and 4 GMs. The table was 24 feet long.  He is not affialiated with Noble Pursuits but the guy is legit.  He informs me that the flying saucer at the center are two ski-pads glued together.  I saw it close up; the smoke plumes are lit by flickering electric votive candles.  A very nice effect.

From Mike O'briens vantage looking down-range.

Looking across.

Banner Stand

We placed this custom-made banner and stand next to our tables.  Unfortunately for us our tables were next to the vendor booths and more than once I had people asking me if we were selling anything.  Also, I didn't figure that the lighter airy design would fade into the walls at a distance.  I think for the next `Con I'll chose stronger colors and more contrast.