Savaged Firefly

First off - I hope to be posting here more often.  I probably lost most of my followers by being a slacker but hey, my own fault.  Then again my gaming has taken a steep dive since I don't have a gaming group.

I decided to run a Savage Worlds game in the Firefly setting after getting the Serenity role playing game books.  I didn't like the game system in the books and thought that it would be better served as a Savage World game.  And so it began.

There is a distinct lack of canon in the book.  The book is licensed and Joss didn't have the chance to build out the 'Verse in only one season.  Insert short session of sobbing here over the cancellation of Firefly.  Without enough setting material the game would be difficult to play at best.

There's been a few people who have done work on filling out the setting and adapting the existing material to work with Savage Worlds.  There's a few highly detailed pieces that are interesting in their own way but don't add enough to game play.  I'm using bits and pieces of those for my work.  Luckily Pinnacle just released their Sci Fi Companion book so what I need for the ships and other sci fi stuff is in place.  And the setting is mostly low tech for game play.  I'm using less than a dozen pages from the companion book.

Onward!

One thing that's completely necessary is the planets.  Even in the canon only the planets used in the series are listed (with a couple of extras) and the information is sparse.  There's no city names!  Even in the published adventure book there's no city names!  First order of business - generate list of city names.

Hrm.  So what are the cities like?  Time to check out Traveler and have a hard look at their world building rules.  Those will help with some of it.

Next sticking point was while I was building out cities.  I needed to put in Alliance presence.  There's no official Alliance military structure.  ~sigh~  So set the planets and cities aside to build out a realistic but not overly detailed military structure.  My friend Brian had a look (he was in the military and plays a lot of historical wargames so he can see it from both sides) and made corrections.  I'm questioning why one rank got dropped so that's a bit on hold.

Once I get the military structure I can work on the types of presence and how big they are.  That will be a standalone document that I'll be putting on this site as fan created material.

Then it's back to the cities.  I've got some that I used in my games with a few place names and those are the first ones I'm expanding.  I'm also working on the cities for planets where I expect my players to go.  It's so much easier than making it up on the fly.

Finally - genealogies.  Somehow I'm on a kick of having a lot of Chinese families in this game.  Maybe because half the universe is populated by Chinese so they're going to be around.  I made the 'mistake' of putting in a family relationship during a gaming session and so it began.  I've got the idea for three of them and I can continue to split them off with marrying into Anglo (had to look up the wording from the series) families.  I like a cohesive  gaming world and it's always fun when past events come back to bite players in the butt.

Finally - crime "bosses".  The series had less than legitimate business contacts on several planets.  I'm doing the same thing.  I decided to base my NPCs on my friends.  They're all on board with this and have come up with suggestions for their characters.  At least one is even painting their own mini.  I think of it as an homage to them.  I'm also using names of people I know for businesses.  Might as well work those in and some of them have cool names.

All the documentation will probably be on the front page of the website so it's easy to find.  I'm also going to work on separating out my specific things (like the family connections) from the basic documents.  I'll provide the families if people want to use them.  It's so much easier when someone else has already done the work, right?

I have a couple of other things going on as well but I'll try to keep this blog more current as I go.  I feel bad for leaving it alone for so long.

Dungeon Crawl

I've been lax about posting pictures from the dungeon crawl in action.  Back in February.  But hey!  Here they are now.

I asked players to take pictures during the game since I've found that I tend to be too busy to take enough pictures.  They did so I have pictures!  Here's some of the better ones.

My first sculpts - dragons

There's an artist that makes 'dice dragons' and they're darn cute.  They're very much chibi in style and while that's not my kind of thing the dragons have potential.  They're also a simple style and the artist was kind enough to post a YouTube video on making them.  So I had a step-by-step tutorial on making the basic figure.

I had to get past my "I can't sculpt" mental block.  It took a while and once I started I found that I could do this.  I could sculpt!

This was my first dragon.  I learned a lot from him, mostly in terms of body size.  He's longer than I wanted but hey, it was my first one.

The wings need to be pre-baked before adding the membrane and I didn't want to haul out the toaster oven so I made a second one using the experience from the first one.

As you can see I got the scale better.  I still have work to do on refining things like the spine spikes and all the horns.  I think I need to leech the clay for those so they're not as droopy.  The front legs are also thinner than I want them to be.  I don't know if I want to paint irises on the eyes or not either.

After saying everything that's wrong I still think they're cute.

Insult to Injury

I'm not going to name the company here.  It wouldn't do any good.  But here's my tale.

I was accumulating a 15mm army as a gift.  A large army.  As such it's generally not something you can do at one time.

By the time it was about 2/3 complete there was no longer a reason to have it, since I wasn't going to be giving it as a gift.  I won't get into that either.

The company says I need receipts to return them.  Um, who keeps receipts for extended purchases?  A pack here and a pack there add up over time but I can't see who would keep all the receipts.

I was willing to pay the 20% restocking fee even though I tend to disagree with restocking fees when I know they just put them back in the bins.  It was worth it to me to get back the 80% of the cost I would recover.

I received an insulting reply insinuating that I may not be the rightful owner of the minis, that without receipts they can't prove that I deserve a refund, and that I should try eBay.

I did reply with affront but I think I'll be out the shipping cost and end up with a box full of minis I never wanted to see again much less go through all the headache of trying to sell online.  I'll be lucky if they don't try to charge me return shipping.

I won't be buying from them again.  Ever.  Their customer service has shown me that they don't really care about the customers that aren't known, repeat customers.  This is appalling.

If I were vindictive I would make this far more public and be a lot harsher.  Since I don't plan on patronizing them again I would be burning a bridge I never planned to cross again.  But I know it's useless since their loyal customers won't change and there's no benefit in making a public fuss.  Well, any more of a public fuss than this.

Serenity RPG - First Reading

For whatever reason I got a bug that I needed the Serenity RPG.  More on the bug in a moment.

Unfortunately Paizo seems to have half the books in stock and seems to be in no rush to get the other half back in stock.  I happened to be on Amazon buying a different book when I decided to look around.  Yeah.  My seven dollar purchase turned into more.

I did my first read through of the rules tonight.  Mind you, it wasn't scouring the rules so I knew everything there was to know about the game.  What struck me immediately was how closely they resembled the rules for Savage Worlds.   I would almost say Serenity is Savage Worlds in Space with Licensed Characters.  This isn't a bad thing because the Savage Worlds rules are fun and flexible and it's nice that they're similar in nature so that knowing one gives you a leg up on the other.

A few things got old quick.  Quotes from the movie litter the book.  References to Firefly episodes are scattered throughout the text.  The writing style tries for the vernacular of the series/movie.  It's like they were trying to make SURE that you knew this was a Licensed book by using as much as they could.  Given that they probably paid quite a bit for that licensing I can't say as I blame them.  Yes, I just did the same here.

I'm on the fence about this now that I own everything.  They do provide pre-gens for the Characters as well as pre-gens for characters, if you get my drift.  If anything I could see running this as an RPG at a convention using the Characters but I don't know how it would hold up for a campaign.  Trying to stay as close as possible to the canon means it's very possible to come up with characters even more useless than a bard in a core group.  Someone is going to want to be Inara and it just may be the 50 year old guy.  Creepy but true.

The bug.  The reason this all came about was someone asking about the game and minis in a forum.  It doesn't seem like there's a good set of Character minis out there.  There's some attempts but I haven't seen The Crew and the singles I saw weren't of the greatest quality.  This is where the bug comes in.

I've been meaning to try sculpting.  I took some classes at ReaperCon when I still went and I've got extensive notes and pictures.  It's something that I've almost done many times.  Now I've got a project with detailed artwork I didn't have to provide.  I'm not sure when I'll start and now that I've read the rules I'm not feeling the push to do it immediately.  We'll see how things go with creative leanings.  If a miracle occurs and I turn out good figs then I can decide if I want to start a "Space Cowboy" line in my store to go along with the rules.  That's really a pipe dream but I'm not ruling it out.  I won't pay to have others sculpt them but if I can do it myself it's a possibility.

DungeonBash is active again

Well, it will be soon.  I'm working on it!



These are most of the unfinished minis.  OK.  Some of them.  I've got friends helping paint the monster and they have or are painting about 3/4 of them.  Props to Michelle B and Lyn S to doing this.



Michelle painted most of these.  I did paint the player characters!

I've got a few 1 inch dungeon sections left to finish painting and one piece to repair from the last time I ran the game.  Nothing some epoxy won't fix.

The most difficult part for me is getting all the new lists together.  There's very few spells that are appropriate for a non role playing game.  Everything has to deal with combat.  I'm scouring the books looking for those spells.

I've got a nice deadline for play testing now.  One of the gamers here has been after me to run this for his group and we've settled on next Sunday.  I won't have the final versions of anything since this is playtesting and we'll be using empty bases for some of the monsters but that's all part of the process.

I'll try to get some pictures of the new game in progress.  Depending on how much time we have I hope to run a full game (2 hours) and then spend some time running encounters to see how they balance.

Yes!  Once I get it all worked out and after I've run it at the convention I'll post all the rules.  I'll even post the list of miniatures I used for the monsters for those who don't want to hunt for them.  This is a fan derived work for DungeonBash (a copyrighted game) but I have permission to post it as such.  I've mangled the original game enough that I don't think I have any problem meeting the guideline for a derivative work.

Teaser - Mini Conversion Soon

I'm starting in a Deadlands game and of course need a mini.  I've decided that going forward, when game appropriate, I will make both a standing and riding version of my mini.  It's just cooler.  I know Litko makes horse stand bases and they're very nice but they're just not as cool as the mini on a horse.

I plan on doing a WIP on how I do this since it will be an interesting process.  I know it already.  The minis have been ordered.  It isn't the same mini for both either.  Painting will make them look the same but I liked the different looks for each situation.

For anyone who's interested the character I created is a Deserter.  She deserted from both armies and I took the Wanted major hindrance. Added on top of that she's got a very distinctive revolver.  I think this is going to be a very fun character to play and the GM is happy with all the horrible things she'll be able to set up for my character.  I'm not afraid to make characters that are going to have trouble in the game.