May was a really packed month. I took a week off which gave me a lot of hobby time and I ended up having a bunch of gaming going on as well, all in all a very good month, but crowded. That means this is my longest month in gaming post yet, but hopefully some of it is of interest.
What I Ran
Nice Marines
Nice Marines is a one-page RPG by Grant Howitt. It is very much inspired by Warhammer 40k, and it imagines players as space marines in charge of running a newly conquered planet. And it’s good, the core joke is that marines are good at fighting but cause hilarious (and lethal) collateral damage when trying to govern a planet.
For this I ended up building a web app VTT, I’m not sharing it because of IP reasons, but you can see what it looked like above. Nice Marines avoids stepping on GW’s toes, well my app steps on Nice Marines’ toes and those of GW but I was very happy with the result. It was obviously built via vibe coding and it’s more work than I’d normally do for a one-shot, but not a huge amount of work, and I learned a lot about what features are worth caring about in this kind of thing. My favorite part of prep was certainly writing flavor descriptions for a bunch of legions, you can read them here, these had basically no impact on the game but I had fun. I’m probably going to build something to support flexible Lasers & Feelings systems.
As for the game itself, this was the first time I’d run or played a one-page RPG and I found that I was wanting a little more direction. The players are presented with a series of challenges they must overcome. The core joke of the system is that the more confident a marine is in a particular approach to resolving problems, the more likely they are to succeed, but also the more likely they are to cause collateral damage.
Mothership - Decagone
Decagone is a module that really excited me, it’s a time loop. And yeah, it worked out pretty great. We had a party of 4 with pre-gens and each time we did the loop I gave the same description of riding down an elevator, and this was important, I played elevator music. Having that repeat musical cue was very fun and I loved the players groaning each time we restarted. I’m not an adversarial GM but that doesn’t mean I don’t want to hear my players groan.
The adventure itself is a little sparse, you’re in a deep sea research lab and you need to stop the time loops before you go insane. The module is good, but if I were to write a time loop knowing what I know now, I’d change a few things. I think a few more obstacles that are hard on your first attempt and easily bypassed after would have been helpful.
Also it really needed more NPCs. Talking to NPCs who don’t know they’re in a time loop is a lot of fun, and that doesn’t happen much, only 2 rooms in the facility have NPCs. I think more instant-death traps are also worth adding because like, come on, why not! One thing I do want to hand it to the module is the number of ways in which a run can be a total failure, restarting in the elevator, this is a good thing!
But overall the module was a blast, and the real-time nature of the time loop and tight 10 minute loops both worked a lot better than I expected. I did surprise my players with the time loop. The module recommends setting a player-facing timer at the start but I’m positive players would guess the time loop nature pretty quickly, and the start of the second loop is such a nice moment when it’s a surprise.
I’ve been working on a custom VTT for Mothership and I’m very happy with where it stands, though I’ve got some more work to do on it. There was a disaster right at start time but I was able to get it resolved in time. I’ll write more about this VTT at some point and likely share it, but it’s got a lot of features I like, and no features I don’t need, which was the goal.
I have a number of other Mothership sessions on the calendar for this summer and more plans past that so I look forward to getting more familiar with the system, which I’d not played in 3 or 4 years.
What I Played
Legions Imperialis
I got a weeknight game with my friend Ben, this was a really good game. He’s going to NoVA so we did a 2000pt, 14 activation game on a 4x4’ board to match NoVA’s missions. We played the Stronghold Assault mission which has 4 objectives. We played using progressive deployment which isn’t part of the NoVA missions but is just the better way to play the game. I, scumbag that I am, took a full Pioneer Company with 2 max size units of Rapiers, 2 Lightnings, and 2 Marauders. Starting progressive deployment games with most of your army on the table is amazing, and having access to infiltrate is of course great.
Round one I had a good position, but his Shadowsword rolled a 6 and sniped one of my Bombers out of the air, a major loss on turn 1. Turn 2 I got some good charges off onto his tanks, and in general this started to show the power of Rapiers. I had 12 las Rapiers that were basically holding down the center of the board, I killed off his Leman Russ Exterminators giving me a lot of flexibility to start moving the Rapiers up toward his main armoured units. While tanks and infantry were fighting over the center of the board he decisively won the air game, I was soon only down to my Colossus. On turn 3 I used it to take out a squad of Vanquishers before it was sure to go down to his fighters. That same turn he brought Arvus Lighters in to drop on my back point, but that was kind of doomed to fail with my Rapiers holding a building within range of it, he garrisoned a building but my 12 demolisher shots took it down.
Turn 3 he got ahead by holding both mid points putting him up by 8. However as we went into turn 5 he was almost tabled. My chance to win was taking his back point, which I had two units in range of, Malcadors and Ogryns. I won initiative and the Ogryns took control of the building next to the point, I had to do this so they could keep his infantry unit out of it. However he had Dracosan Demolishers and despite shooting first I couldn’t damage them before they blew the building out. However, my Quad Launcher Rapiers again saved the game by killing his infantry unit off. I had one tank on the point so his Lightning had to kill 2 undamaged Malcadors which is technically possible but he didn’t spike the dice. This gave me a 20-16 win, it was a really good game, quite brawly, with a lot of close combat but also a lot of tank on tank shooting.
Age of Sigmar Spearhead
When GW launched Age of Sigmar 4th edition in 2024 they included a new small-scale game, Spearhead. Spearhead is, for GW, a pretty radical take on a smaller scale version of their games. You have fixed army lists, fixed objectives, and a heavy reliance on non-dice RNG. And I liked it quite a bit!
My friend Andy runs some local events and is a big booster for the game, so when I painted up some Bonereapers I asked if he’d give me a demo game. He graciously agreed and we played at his place, I took the Mortisian Elite Spearhead and he brought the Stormcast from Skaventide. Both are pretty elite armies with 4 units/heroes and both with around 10 models.
Our first few turns were pretty uneventful. I won the roll-off but elected to go second, so I could deploy/hide in a corner while waiting for my Morghast Archai to show up turn 2. And that worked pretty okay. Andy got too aggressive with his fast moving Prosecutors so they went down. The second turn saw a scrum on one of my home objectives that ended up with some very hurt units not quite going down. Both our generals were on one wound and we both had a unit down to one model.
I ended up being able to take out his general, and didn’t lose mine, which was a pretty big swing. We’d stayed fairly close on points turns 1-3, but on turn 4 he was down to a handful of units, I got a double-turn and established pretty complete control of the map as he was nearly tabled and I had managed to keep all my units alive. I think this matchup is pretty good for the Bonereaper Elite, having a unit that turns off ward saves for their attacks, as well as just having a more elite force vs his elite force is good.
I’ll probably talk more about Spearhead later as it’s a very interesting game, but glad to start playing it and it’s incredibly susceptible to “oh, I’ll just pick up another army” as they come in one box and are fairly self-contained hobby projects.
Brindlewood Bay
We played our second session of Brindlewood and I enjoyed it even more than the first. The game’s system is so good and smooth. This time we were on the set of a Great British Bakeoff knock-off and it was a great setting for our murder mystery. Having played so many one-shots recently it was nice to see some connective tissue with a few recurring characters, but my favorite bit was one of our old ladies revealing she’d kept the handgun from the first session.
There are a lot of things I like about the system and setting, but I think the player-generated mystery solutions are really what makes it sing. With players in charge of the answer to the big mystery players have a lot of tonal control, which is good! Our solution this time involved a throuple to explain the, as I put it, “sex death.”
I think our GM did a good job of ramping up the danger and void (mythos-y background plot) in the second session. Those things existed in our first session but this time it felt like they were really much more front and center, and having the buildup is good. I’m not sure how many sessions he has planned but I look forward to seeing them continue to ramp up.
As a last note, one thing I really enjoyed was as part of this bake off themed mystery he had the players generate images of the cakes we and some NPC contestants made. If you hate AI and want to stop reading now feel free. If you’re still with me, I thought this was a fun touch. None of the players were big on watching bakeoff and we had described our pies earlier in the session but having a chance to make some elaborate cakes with prompting was fun, and as someone with aphantasia visual references are really nice.
What I Played on my Computer
Mixtape
Mixtape is short, I hit credits at bang-on 3 hours, and I really enjoyed those three hours of my Sunday night. Mixtape tells a story with the lowest possible stakes to the player, and the highest stakes to the characters, and I think it balances that really well. The game is set in the late 90s, shortly after high school graduation, the protagonist, Stacy, is leaving for New York tomorrow. This is her last day with her best friends Slater and Cassandra. And as a player I loved the big event looming being a plane flight. This isn’t a big deal, and as an adult I know these kids have the rest of their lives ahead of them. But this also is a big deal. These three best friends, will they stay in touch? Will they grow apart?
It’s the stuff of 1,000 coming of age movies, but I think it’s pulled off really well in this game. The game’s central conceit is that Stacy is a huge music nerd and her One True Skill is making the perfect mixtape. She introduces each new song by breaking the fourth wall, and it’s lovely. The game has a lot of sequences where you’re just cruising to the music, these are where the game gets closest to gameplay, but it’s a very relaxed, very chill kind of gameplay. You can hit a truck on your skateboard, but there is no isekai, you just reset a little ways up the road.
The music also bears mentioning. The soundtrack is, in a word, great. But this isn’t a hits of the 90s soundtrack, very few songs are from the 90s. This game is framed around a music nerd putting together a soundtrack to her life, so it’s a lot of stuff from prior decades. I suspect to some degree licensing costs played a factor, we don’t have a lot of huge hits, but we have some big names, and everything fits very well. I’ve seen complaints along the lines of “I don’t know these songs” but that’s the point!
The game is short, I recommend getting it on sale, but after finishing the game, in one sitting, I was left watching the credits and thinking that this feels the most like a movie of any game I’ve played. And I mean that in a very good way. It told a story we’ve all heard before but it did it well.
Forza Horizon 6
I used to play more racing games but these days I just play Forza Horizon as it comes out, and I can’t recommend that enough. Horizon games are a great balance between serious driving game and easy to pick up simple racing. And they’re gorgeous, now more than ever with the latest engine and set in Japan. I was off for the release week and I’ve put in a bit over 30 hours so far, a lot for me. Forza does so many things well, from making it easy to create and share car designs, to having a really nice games-as-a-service setup with a constant content drip, but no paid passes, it technically has microtransactions but I don’t think people use them.
Horizon 6 doesn’t fix some longstanding gripes like the story being lame, but it also doesn’t have to make any big swings because the formula is so damn good. It runs like a dream, looks great, and I’m very happy with it.
What I Hobbied
1 / 5
This is the month my hobby ADD really kicked into high gear. I have a lot of Warhammer Fantasy and Warmaster models to get ready for September. And having a deadline is great for kicking my procrastination into high gear. I finished another few dozen Legions Imperialis models (not pictured), started on some Lasers & Dragons cave terrain (not pictured) and assembled a lot of models for the September event but also 40k and AoS.
First thing I’ll say is that I primed and assembled a lot of stuff this month. Not counting that as progress because painting is what I really track/care about, but having them ready should pay off.
As to what I painted, first up is my Bonereaper Mortisan Elite Spearhead. This is an elite spearhead that only has a handful of models, but they’re big and take a while to paint. I enjoyed these a lot. The Arcani suck to build but otherwise things went pretty smoothly here. I had to change course on the bases but I’m pretty happy where I landed with them, and they should tie into my other Death bases while not matching 1:1. A lot more for this army is on the docket so I’ll keep working on it.
A much smaller project was knocking out a squad of B2s, I have more droids to paint but these got me moving. Then we have a somewhat weird thing but a while ago I took a number of 28mm scale STL files and printed them at 54mm scale. This one is from UNIT9 and I like her a lot. This was mostly painted with artist SoFlat paints and that yellow is out of this world bright (also, toxic).
All of that is preamble. My main hobby project this summer is an event some friends and I are running in September. For it I need to paint 3 Warmaster armies, some terrain, and a few dozen 28mm models. The terrain I’m dealing with is Dungeons and Lasers plastic terrain, and I really like the stuff, and have built up quite the stash. The good news is it paints super fast, phase one is prime grey and do one drybrush. I’ll come back and do some washing but for now this is fine and if it stays in this state it’ll still look very cool on the table.
I also needed to make Warmaster progress so I did more work on 10mm Wargames Atlantic dwarves. The dwarves are the protagonists of our event so their army needs to be big. This works pretty well when I plan to combine plastic WGA models with 3D prints, I can bulk out the army with plastics, and come in with 3D prints for more esoteric units. One thing we’re doing for the event is making some extra dwarf units and I’m not going to show them off until after the event but I painted up the first one this month and I love them so much.
Lastly, I started on the Night Goblins we’ll need in both scales. They’ve always been one of my favorite GW armies and step one here was rebasing some unpainted models from 20 to 25mm bases, and with a quick trip to the freezer that was pretty easy. I decided to paint these in batches of 8/16 for reasons of having some nice holders for 8 paint handles. I finished up my first set and started on some more. The 28mm stuff worries me a lot less than all the Warmaster I need to get through.
What I Read
The Infinite and the Divine by Robert Rath
Coming into this book I knew the hype, and I was pretty skeptical, this is a Warhammer novel after all. But I’m pleased to say it lives up to the hype. The modern lore for Necrons is great, 99% of them are mindless drones, but the 1% who are sentient and conscious are all bursting with personality and no small bit of Space Madness.
Trazyn is in many ways the ideal protagonist for a Warhammer novel, because he can so clearly stand in for us deranged fans, spending countless sums and hours on our collection of little models. What is varnish if not a stasis field? And more than anything else Trazyn is a great protagonist because it gives the author free rein to pull whatever they want out of the 40k universe. I got the annotated edition (more on that below) and my favorite annotations were Rath clearly delighting in the fact that he got to pull in some weird bit of 40k lore, or represent something from his childhood gaming memories on the page.
And if Trazyn is a good stand-in for the Warhammer fan, Orikan is an excellent foil. While you were busy collecting models, he studied the crystal. He’s that weird friend from high school who got really into new age stuff and really out of vaccines. With the time frame the book is set over this dynamic really plays out well. I also want to call out how deftly Rath contrasts the Necrons with other species in the galaxy. Trazyn helps a lot here as he’s fascinated by all of them. But Orikan is just as important to show that no, actually Trazyn is pretty weird, why would someone care about these primitives?
I think the only real narrative failing of the book is that by starring two big names you know that nothing much will happen to the status quo by the end of the novel. Legions can fall, civilizations can collapse, planets can die, but our two heroes will emerge from the other side, their necrodermis repairing any damage they took in the novel.
I got the annotated and illustrated edition, and I’m of two minds about it. On the plus side I love the neon green page edges, and the ribbon bookmark feels luxurious for a novel. On the other hand, the annotations are really only worth reading on your second trip through the novel. They’re covered in spoilers, and I feel like there must have been a better way to do this. I think plenty could move to the end of each chapter, as the spoiler is usually for only a page or so later. Another approach could have been color coding them. Read green on your first read of the book, save red for a second. And then the illustrations, I mean no insult to the artist, whoever they are (GW after all doesn’t like crediting people), but I think they have a number of issues. First, they’re small, they’re not given full pages but half or quarter pages, just give me a full page one. Second, it’s very clear their budget was limited for commissioning this art. I think the style is nice, and I don’t have complaints about the skill, but between their limited palette, their small size, and my third complaint, they feel cheap. My third complaint is that they’re all or almost all of Orikan and Trazyn, and not in the same frame. Without the context of the novel, you’d be forgiven for thinking they’re all illustrations of a random, singular Necron. The book has a lot of awesome scenes, it makes me want to make dioramas! But the included illustrations are same-y and limited.
The Vulture Lord by Richard Strachan
This book is much lower profile than the last, and that’s totally fair. Whereas the last book was great, this one is pretty good. But I do think it deserves more attention, I don’t have the post to hand but I recently saw a post on Blue Sky saying the best Warhammer books feel like they could just be science fiction (or fantasy) novels without the IP attached. It was actually in reference to The Infinite and the Divine and I totally agree with that sentiment.
The Vulture Lord does a lot to highlight what more Warhammer books should be doing. The protagonist is just a dude, living in a medieval city, but every decade the king comes to town. And the king is an Ossiarch Bonereaper, drawn to the town once a decade to watch The Games, when a new living vessel will be chosen for his dead son’s soul, for it to inhabit for the next decade. It’s a good premise and highlights some of the things I really like about Age of Sigmar. Age of Sigmar feels like a universe that could encompass 10,000 D&D campaigns, each unlike the last. And that’s what’s happening here. We have a city of mortal humans, living in the realm of death, protected by, and subject to their terrible god-king.
What follows is an interesting tale, well told. We’re presented with a little slice of the Realms, and it doesn’t really have anything to do with the tabletop game, which is good. This is what I want from Age of Sigmar novels, 100 unconnected vignettes of people living their lives in weird and fantastical places.
What I Bought
Johnson²
A Mothership module, I added it to my cart as soon as I read the description:
Farcical Whodunit: A mystery for the ages with a colourful cast of suspects featuring: Johnson, Johnson, Johnson, Johnson, Johnson, Johnson, and Johnson. Don’t let the farce fool you, there’s plenty of horrors lying in wait across Gemini Station.
I look forward to running it.
Blue Rose: AGE & Aldis: City of the Blue Rose
Green Ronan had a clearance sale with a new Blue Rose addition hitting crowd funding. I took the chance to pick up these two books as I have some interest in the AGE system, and in general I find Blue Rose and it’s focus on romantic fantasy to be quite ineresting.
Assorted GW things
Between AoS, 40k, and the aforementioned September event I had a number of odds and ends to pick up. Hopefully, I will make a lot of progress on them in the next few months.
Star Wars Legion Sepratists
d I want to get my Sepratists (droids) into good shape for Legion 2E. As part of this I picked up the customizable Super Command Droids, Greavous on a Bike, and the B2s I painted. I think with some progress here and there I can get most of my Sepratists done this sumnmer.
Coming Up Next Month
I have another Mothership one-shot I’m running in June, and then a short Mythic Bastionland campaign I’m playing in starts mid-month. RPGs are rounded out by starting running a DCC module, and a 2-shot D&D 5E game starting. For wargaming I have a Warmaster game scheduled, plan to check out Rangers of Shadowdeep, and probably am doing some kind of 40k game when 11th launches.
Then the big thing looming over the month is I’m headed to Philadephia at the end of the month to play Rangers of Shadowdeep and Warmaster with friends, to prepare for the fall event. I need to make progress on minis for both games for that session to work.