Bish, Moobs and the Irish

Last weekend I had a lovely trip visiting our friend Bish over in Great Yarmouth, ostensibly to start work on Darklands Lite™ but inevitably to gawp at his paintjobs and sink a few jars in that lovely seaside town. And so it proved! We got a game in and lots of ideas flowed, especially to do with what else we can do to speed up play.

Just some of Bish's amazing Mierce Miniatures!

Buddies, Lite

The main focus of last week's game was to test out a quicker way of striking / parrying, as well as mustering quickly, and both proved to work extremely well.

I deliberately didn't work out a muster until I got to Bish's, and then I told him to make me an Irish muster based on the new mustering system: it took him ten minutes, surely some kind of record. So that worked!

The game itself was very quick. I used Irish, Bish used Norse, and over the course of six battle hours (which took about two hours in total) the Norse were victorious, much to my chagrin!

The Irish were defeated!

So, the new striking and parrying rules: simply put, each profile will have a ‘to hit’ roll and a ‘to block’ roll, whether either be for combat, shooting or sorcery. On each profile these will take a very simple form, such as 3+, meaning that roll would work on a 3 to 9. There will be some modifiers for various things, but not too many, and a lot of the current modifiers from abilities or traits (such as the ‘tough’ trait) will just be incorporated into the roll for that profile.

Profiles for Darklands Lite will therefore be a lot less complicated, as a lot of the workings for C+A and M+W are now unnecessary; I should be able to fit them onto playing card size, and hopefully be able to offer them as printed cards or a PDF that you can print yourself.

I'm playing The Parkinson on Thursday this next week to further test Darklands Lite, using some of the ideas Bish and I mulled over. These include (but are not limited to)

• Reducing attack dice (and so, wounds) by 2/3rds, so players aren't rolling so many dice, which takes time; reducing both ensures the current profile balance is retained
• Combining weapons into one weapon for each profile (unless this is absolutely not viable)

As well as that, I'll be visiting Bish again in November to get even more playtesting in (and like as not, to sink a few).

I hope to have finalised Darklands Lite by the end of the year, with the rules themselves ready in January.

Exciting times!

Moobs Galore

You may have noticed that the amount of moobs visible on the new webstore has increased by rather a lot over the past week, and that's down to the new ograx of Baalor sculpted by Ivan Flaman from the artwork by Roberto Cirillo and Thomas Mahon. Ivan's taken his time on these guys and it really shows; we've been working him hard!

The utterly incredible Haakon on srónocx!

I've also been working hard on these ograx myself, mainly so that you can actually see them (using Blender) and print them (using Lychee to support the files). I'm still undergoing a learning process on Blender - who says you can't teach an old wulf new tricks - but I'm getting there, and part of that process includes making 360 videos to show every part of a miniature off.

I'm still working on how to show a unit off properly on video, so for the moment I'll probably restrict myself to the nobles and monsters; but either way, they're definitely eye candy that might persuade you to grab yourself some fatties!

Digital Files next week

I hope to have most of the digital files for the ograx sorted for next week, but Ivan is utterly exhausted at the moment and hasn't finished all the cuts; not only has he moved house recently, he's also moved countries, so it's been very, very hectic for him over the past couple of months. So please bear with us on getting them to!

The Look of the Irish

Our relatively-chaotic-but-normal service should resume next month with our first digital Érainn battle host; this will feature the long-awaited fiannagh as well as a plethora of new Irish, too.

Here's a look-see at some of the new Irish, courtesy of Rafael Callegari!

Fiannagh with swords (work in progress)

The battle host should include:

• Rudraige the Fat on foot and on horse
• Tlachtga
• NEW Cormac on foot
• Cormac Fir Danu
• Fiannagh with swords
• NEW Fiannagh with spears
• NEW Fiannagh cavalry
• NEW Stump Beast

By ‘NEW’ in big letters we do of course mean miniatures that were never part of a kickstarter project, although you may have seen some artwork for them at some point. Either way, lots of cool Irish things next month!

Fiannagh with spears (work in progress)

...and with that, I think we'll leave it there for today... next week there should be lots more wips and lots more Darklands musings!