First FUDGE dungeon-crawl

I gamemastered my first game of FUDGE today, and had a great time. Four players and I played through the first part of a dungeon crawl in a creepy crypt. I stocked a dungeon map by Dyson Logos (players, don't go looking!) with stuff I thought made sense and guessed on stats for some monsters (the descriptive nature of FUDGE really helped here).

I didn't get any pictures while we were playing, but I set up the tiles again afterward. The tiles are D&D tiles that I got as a Christmas gift, and I really like them. I need a better way to organize them in the box because I spent way too much time trying to find the ones I needed. The miniatures are from my collection (mostly old Warhammer miniatures, but some D&D and Ral Partha too), and the giant centipedes are from the dollar store.

Here's the chunk of the dungeon they managed to explore, as it was before they entered. When we were playing I added areas as they were revealed by opening doors, etc.

The first thing they faced were a swarm of giant centipede things that had been nesting in and feeding on the corpses in wall-niches (marked with red dots). The adventurers tried to hold the door shut, but the angry worms pushed their way in and attacked.

The party took care of the bugs, but their ex-blacksmith tank character had taken a wound. Lucky for him he had a high tolerance for pain so it didn't slow him down.

They were more careful about barging in after that, and walked past a room with some armored guardians lurking motionless in the corners and explored more of the crypt. They found a statue with a suspicious amulet, but the danger sense of one of the party warned them before they caused problems by actually touching the amulet :)

Unable to resist the room with the guardians and the altar that they could see on the far side of the room, they attempted to get at it without entering the room using a fishing rod and hook. Seriously. Due to a character who was an expert fisherman and some good dice rolls they managed to hook the altar...but then knocked it over awakening the guardians.

The party managed to hold one of the double-doors closed so they only had to fight one of the guardians at a time and they were eventually victorious.

I had a great time running the game, and I think the players enjoyed it too. Fudge is an interesting system, and I like how the mechanics made the game feel. We definitely have some learning to do, and I need to figure out  how best to handle simultaneous combat rounds and combat with multiple characters and monsters.

Fudge cries out to have broader games than just dungeon-crawling played with it though. The players had made characters that had flaws and gifts that were not very relevant to combat situations. Or skills for that matter. I suspect that would even out over multiple sessions, even in a dungeon-crawl kind of game, but it didn't in the short session we ran through here.

6mm skirmish on hex grid

To keep from having to do a lot measuring and precise placement of miniatures, I decided to try out a hex-grid. I think it's going to work quite well. This works out to 0.5" from center to center of each hex.

I think it's a good idea. I can measure distances by counting hexes (and not be too far off), and I like the slight 'uncertainty' about a figures actual position that it adds. Line of sight should be pretty easy to figure out as well.

It looks like about 3 figures can fit in any given hex, which sounds about right. I guess you'd have to let figures in neighboring hexes fight in close combat as well as figures in the same hex. Perhaps only allow friendly figures to share hexes?

Magnetized Epic-scale building ruins (and Squats!)

I magnetized a bunch of ruins for the 6mm skirmish set. This is really starting to come together. A little one-sided in that it's all ruined walls, but I think a few more solid pieces will round out the set nicely.

I'm also happy to have scored some Squats on eBay, so I have another (of my favorites!) retinue for ItEN.

I had an idea about doing some Genestealer Hybrids using parts from some of the cheap Genestealers I got on eBay and some parts from my bits-box.

These are a few rough mockups for how that might work. This will be some serious conversion work.

 

Yay! I got some new miniatures in the mail (eBay is awesome).

This should give me enough variety to do an interesting Space Marine retinue for ItEN, and perhaps Orks. I'm not as familar with Orks, so I don't know exactly what I have here, but it looks like an Ork in some power armor, some with rifles and bayonets and some little guys with long rifles. They'll need some backup to fill out their retinue, but I have a few Ork sprues coming in the mail from the UK.

I'm not sure how useful they'll be for small-scale skirmishes, but I'm excited that there will be three big Ork Stompers in the package too!

6mm scale skirmish game

I started a project to take 6mm-scale figures (Epic 40k at this point) and individually base them so I could use them in a skirmish-style game. My goal was to make something like Warhammer 40k, but scaled down to take up less room. And I like really tiny things.

Inspired by a number of  projects on the web, I decided to base them on magnets and play on a metal surface  to minimize the amount of moving around the pieces would do. I tried a number of different options to see what would work best. Here's a first pass on magnetic bases. 

Some of these are based on cut-outs from sheet magnets (like you can get a craft stores...refrigerator magnets). Some are based on rare earth magnets, and those work well. I had originally ordered 6mm magnets (about 1/4", the size of an Epic mini base), but found that you can't bring the bases to close together (the poles will repel each other). I order some 4mm and 2mm magnets to try out different combinations.

What I ended up doing was drilling 2mm holes in the bases and gluing 2mm magnets flush with the bottom. This gave me the look I wanted (a scaled-down 28mm miniature) and enough magnetic pull to adhere well. Here are the beginnings of some groups I've put together.

These should work will with square-gridded maps too. Here's some miniatures layed out a 1/4" grid map (originally intended for the Star Wars miniatures game, 25% scale). The map is sitting on a small magnetic whiteboard.