Strange Aeons: Game 2, "Treasure Hunt"

In my last game of Strange Aeons, we rolled Treasure Hunt. That evening was my team's second game and at 16 points, it seemed like I would be able to cruise with a good chance of winning. All I found was death and sorrow (which includes the Burger King stop on the way home).

I don't have many pics because the game was over pretty much when it started. I played T, Pete and Trish's teenage son, whose pseudo-indifferent ass-beating style both enrages me and leaves me in awe. The sides:

Threshold Team :

1. Agent Connery:Bowie knife, twin .45's, Heroic, Stat Decrease & Two Fisted (Ranged).
2. Agent Petri: 45, bowie knife and Tommy Gun, Heroic.
3. William Forsythe: .22 and bowie knife

Lurkers:

1. Cult Leader with .22
2. Cultist with .22
3. Cultist with shottie
4. Night Gaunt

The Board: The old Hetfield place sits alone and dark as the Threshold agents Connery, Petri and civilian William Forsythe approaches from the South. Here, the board is separated into zones, any of which may contain treasure, assuming the Threshold are left alone to search for it.

Awesome terrain and Lurkers minis by Pete Ceretti

Threshold straddles the sections of the board, readying to search for the artifact mentioned in William's father's journal...

The Night Gaunt closes way faster than anticipated. I seriously misjudged the distance it could cross and left Petri just inside the daemon's Charge range, which it promptly did. It crossed the board and got into melee with Agent Petri before anybody had a chance to shoot at it. A critical blunder was forgetting that when Petri won a combat he could have backed off and allowed everyone to shoot the damned thing. Instead, he stayed toe-to-paw with the beast and paid for it in blood. The Night Gaunt took Petri's tommygun from him, broke it half and then handed it back to him, thanks to Destroy Weapon. Great.

Agent Connery watches as Petri's face is shredded and Forsythe is torn to bloody bacon ribbons.

Upon seeing Petri leaving the game with a minor injury, Connery failed his Resolve check and charged the Night Gaunt with Frenzy. It took double attacks (plus his popped Heroic) for Connery to run trains of 6's +CC bonus but it didn't matter, he was outclassed in melee (thanks to the Gaunt's Parry) and could only come close to besting the creature. The Night Gaunt eventually took Connery out.

So William Forsythe III met his doom at the paws of a frantic Night Gaunt, trying to intercept a coup de grace when Agent Petri was laid low by the grey daemon. They never once tried to find the artifact, they were too busy fighting the Night Gaunt that crossed the board at tickle-speed. While Agent Petri recovered from his wounds at a Massachusetts hospital (at taxpayer expense) the Forsythe family had a second burial in as many weeks, the previous being Williams father, also an archaeological professor, murdered by their maniac butler and secret congregant of the Church of Dagon, Wannamaker. A strange symmetry was at play in the Wannamaker family too, as his brother, a Threshold conscript, died to a Formless Thing on the old Hetfield place. The slain officer's wife has joined Pete's Threshold team, eager for revenge for her husband and absolution for her brother-in-law's insane evil.

Somewhere in his office deep in the Northeast safehouse, Agent Connery stared at his twin .45's and obsessed over the dread he was feeling about ever firing them again and how different things would be if only he squeezed those triggers at ol' Hetfield's place...

So, 1 win one loss, Petri has a full recovery (but with facial scars) and Connery has Ballistophobia. Just another day at the office....

Facial scars for Petri!

New Tommygun for Petri!

Strange Aeons: Objective Markers

I finished 8 Cthulhu objective markers, mounted on 2" bases. Let's hope the Threshold never sees what happens when they are all assembled and aligned as above...

Same as big daddy there, gave them my bronze treatment and green jewel eyes.

Strange Aeons WIP: Nightgaunts (Conversions)

I wanted to do some conversions for the Strange Aeons Night Gaunts, featured in both H.P. Lovecraft's writings and his childhood nightmares, which were probably like this:

Go check out the original Uncle Mike's miniatures here: Strange Aeons Nightgaunts

I knew I wanted to use Legion of Everblight Harriers since the body type looks like a pretty good match to the illustration in the Strange Aeons rulebook and I already had two Harriers thanks to my buddy Finn at Spindango Fundulation. My buddy JWoolf over at Headwound Minis gave me some GW Bloodletter heads when I decided they'd work best. Together with some snips, greenstuff and some sculpting you get this:

The sell will come with the painting. I haven't decided to either be faithful to the description of a face that is a featureless void or just simply do a monochromatic paint scheme. A featureless void would need some gap filling to mute the facial detail, which I happen to like.

In terms of the game itself, 2 Nightgaunts are 16 points of mayhem and can each Destroy Weapon, which is good in-game. They have Parry and a good enough CC bonus (+2) that starting agents fighting them solo will have to literally be very lucky to survive. They should count themselves lucky if the worst that happens is that they have to re-arm in the re-equip phase. Oddly, buying an agent a Meat Cleaver for 1BP isn't a bad first purchase choice after other skills as the CC bonus matches the Nightgaunt's and cancels out the monster's Parry with its own. If you have that and agents fight together against it the good guys may pull ahead on dice, on average. A bowie knife armed, A3 starting agent would win 1/3 of the time in a straight fight I think these creatures and zombies will be the first gribbly things an agent sees after Cultists so better be ready.

Tickle!

Strange Aeons: WIP Scenes of Horror or R’lyeh Gotta Pee

I have 4 Scenes of Horror for Strange Aeons in the works. First up is a scratch built obelisk/monument/mausoleum/crypt entrance/gateway to another dimension, what have you. I realized after I got this together it also sorta looks like an outhouse. I'm with that.

Materials list: 

1. Empty dental floss container
2. CD
3. Some plasticard off cuts (tile and shingle)
4. Krylon spray texture
5. Textured wallpaper
6. A large Cthulhu figure from FFG’s Bag o’ Cthulhu http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_minisite_sec.asp?eidm=11&esem=2&esum=107
7. Arch and door from GW’s Advanced Heroquest
8. Hand from GW Zombie Sprue
9. Cardboard
10. Superglue and hot glue
11. Oil based primer (for the textured wallpaper)
12. Sass

 So the layout is evident by the pics. I cut the lid from the dental floss container and used it as a stoop, which was Crazy Glued. I removed the metal bit that cuts the floss too as you see in the pic above. I glued the Advanced Heroquest arch to the wall, allowing for how the door swings out and I had to cut some sprue into bricks for the bottom of the arch. I then spray textured both the stoop and monument with texture paint to hide cracks and add some interest to the deal. 

I also masked off the Cthulhu statue and texture sprayed the bottom slab of the stature for a nice unifying look with the rest of the monument. I did two coats.

I cut the stoop tile to run across the threshold and fit flush with the vertical face of the floss container, so there was no gap under the door when it was mounted, then glued that on. I added a tile pad for underneath the monument and glued it all down together. 

Steel wool it

Slice it

Rub it down/ oh no!!!!!

Note that you should scuff and cut the surface of CD’s beforehand to give coatings some traction, otherwise it could start shedding your glue and paint jobs. Another thing I was surprised to see was that some of the cheap CD's that would be great for Strange Aeons are terrible. The writing sloughed off a few, probably due to cheap label printing. Do yourself a favor and wash them after the scuff and slice, set the aside to dry and see how they look after drying.

Next I trimmed out the base in textured wallpaper. Sometimes it looks good to mount stuff on top of the wallpaper but I didn’t this time for two reasons. First, the monument is literally heavy and could probably rip off the CD since the textured wallpaper is mostly foam and paper so I wanted a bond right to the plastic CD. Second, the monument looks heavier and more sunken, therefore more ancient, when the ground seems above the level of the tile. I cut a few tile out but will paint the underlying area as tile too, to give the illusion that some tiles are really sunken.

I cut some cardboard as a header for the tile overhang, glued that on and added a molten blob of hotglue to the inside before attaching the roof tile piece, since it needed back filling to grab and secure the tile as the cardboard was too thin and lacked surface area for superglue.

Closing in on the final part of assembly, I trimmed an open zombie hand and glued that to the door, so that once painted and assembled, it will look like something is emerging from inside. I intend on painting glowing eyes inside the door. I had haughty ideas of lighting this nerd up but I have finals the next two weeks so nerts to that.

I spray primed the whole project black so if I can just get some paint time I can finish it up. More pics when it is done.

Strange Aeons WIP: Graveyard board

Pete Ceretti's Grave Yard WIP

Mr. Pete Ceretti is a busy, busy muffin. Here we see the layout for a Strange Aeons board that uses a few kits and will serve as a good setting for the scenarios Restless Dead, Body Snatchers and The Problem with Dead Things http://www.strange-aeons.ca/doc/SA_DeadThings.pdf

We'll be meeting tomorrow and probably making an inventory of Lurkers and Threshold models and the terrain efforts from each of our camps.

So far, Pete has a bunch of models already done and probably all we need as far as Threshold goes, though I'll be painting up some Hasslefree martial artists. Pete and Trish have some building kits and cars there are starting into and I have some Lurkers in process. On the terrain front, I'll be working on a hospital that Pete is providing me and I'll be building a converted Maniac doctor and also rehabilitating a 4'x4' water's edge board I completed many years ago that needs repair.

Reaper will be releasing their awesome Tiik warriors soon, which I will buy a handful of for Deep Ones because they are just so bad-assed looking. Seriously, Julie Guthrie, have my babies.

Strange Aeons WIP: Scenes of Horror Template

In Strange Aeons the antagonists (Lurkers) can rock out some templates of terrain that messes with the mind of humans on the board. The rulebook gives you a lot of room to do what you want so go ahead and show mass mutilations, clutches of monster eggs, zombies breaching the lawn, portals to the outer dark, the local DMV. It's an open page. The stone steps are just foamcore carved into blocks and two metal GW skull pillars. The girl is an old Dark Eldar slave girl (who I think was supposed to be a Sister of Battle).

I forget why I had built this many years ago, for a Mordheim Vampire game I think, but it seemed a good fast track to a scene of horror so I'm glad I stored it away for another strange day. The rulebook says a CD-sized template is what you use, so I mounted the piece on there, will add texture paint, maybe put some banks of candles and pentagrams on the pavers and repaint the victim/hostage/cultist/whatever-she-is. Yes, she can be removed and her standard-sized base can be replaced by an idol or something else appropriate.

Mordheim POV: Ichabod and Ozzy's Furry, Scary Time in Mordheim

Not THAT kind of furry-scary. Actually, that's pretty accurate...

The PAGE group saw a furry, fun and rather scary Coreheim 3-way game Sunday night at the studio in downtown Philly, for what we hope is an ongoing trend in the club: steady forays into Mordheim.

Edit: See The Goblin perspective on Jason's Fine Blog SOuND OFF

Steven (Skaven) Jason (Goblins) and myself (Undead) knocked the dust off of our ancient Mordheim understandings and grafted on the fresh changes that Coreheim brings to the blasted lands of Mordheim in a gorgeous row that ambled about the board like a true monster. Rawr.

I brought my original Mordheim demo board that I built in... 2001? Stephen brought a great building ruin and I threw in my original cardstock Mordheim terrain. We elected for a king-of-the-hill scenario, winner controls the top floor of the center building. Crap! Zombies climb at Initiative 1!

View from the Undead deployment area. The Skaven deployed opposite and the Goblins to the right.  The objective was to hold to third floor of the tallest ruin for 3 turns.

View of "the surface"

To get us up to speed, Ichabod and Ozzy, ghoulkin followers of the Vampire Lord, discuss their experiences following their Master into the crypts of Mordheim...

Ozzy: Uuuuugh, where am I? What happened?

Ichabod: You’ve been unconscious for hours. You’re bleeding from your eyes and ears and you are still a moron.

Ozzy: Is that good?

Ichabod: Sure, why not.

Ozzy: They took my shield. Then my net. Then my club. Then… my pants for some reason? But why?

Ichabod: Right. Just sit there and let me get through this. No, there. Sit! There! SIT!

Ozzy: Whose pants am I wearing now? Are these my pants?!?

Ichabod: Silence! Our lair was invaded. So when we got to the lower crypt, the Necromancer raised 7 zombies and sent them into the shadows of the ruins after the squeeks and snarls we heard in the dark, the Skaven interlopers. The zombies ignored the trauma to their putrid flesh as rocks rained down from the broken façade. Suddenly…

Ozzy: OH!

Ichabod: Shut up! Suddenly, we heard clamoring behind us as that wretched greenskin fungus known as goblin followed down the main stairs with spears, shield and all manner of savage intent. They must’ve followed us from the hinterlands!

Ozzy: Why are my knickers filled with gravel?

Ichabod: That’s normal. So no sooner had the vermin lord skittered to the top of the ruins, exalting his claim on our territory, did our Master surge forward like a magnificent blur, incensed, his warspear wickering against the 3 vermin warriors that cowered at the base of the ruins. The dire wolves flanked around the left side of the ruins to trap the Skaven in the middle while the damned goblins hurled insults and arrows our way from the right. We couldn’t stop the Skaven as they crawled up through the ruins, they were too fast!

Ozzy: I named those mean doggys Rash Mouth and Drippy. I remember our Master was hit in the groin and belly and laid down on his back. A lot. And the Rat Ogre seemed nice...

Ichabod: Ssshh. Anyway, that usurper Necromancer called upon dark magics beyond life to make himself more powerful.

Ozzy: It smelled like toast and boom-boom.

Ichabod: Our Master kept rising up over and over and over, to the horror of the ratmen until he ran one Skaven through! The ratmen despaired to see their warrior writhing in the agony of death! Our Master refused to slake his thirst on such dirty blood! The vicious Rat Ogre continued to fight in the zombie throng, hurling corpses to and fro.

Ozzy: Zombie thong? You talk funny words.

Ichabod: I’m glad you’re bleeding again. The Necromancer pressed the zombies in with whispered words to protect our fallen Master. The goblins were so excited to fight that they literally cartwheeled down the slopes, crashing to the crypt floor, a clatter of weapons and curses!

Ozzy: Then what?

Ichabod: Then the damned goblins got closer and a wild Skaven jumped three stories down onto a Dire wolves back, stabbing and biting it.

Ozzy: Whoa, that is amazing. You put different pants back on me?

Ichabod: That was about the time I fell down the slope trying to help The Master. Then a crazy-ass Skaven doffed you cold as you looked at shiny stuff on the ground.

Ozzy: Gravel is shiny.

Ichabod: No it isn’t. The Rat Ogre drove off the Necromancer and zombies. The dire wolves followed the Master as we slipped into the catacombs. The Ghoul chortled at the both of us and made off with your pants.

Ozzy: And the goblins? The ratmen?

Ichabod: They are still fighting. The Skaven lord still holds the ruins. The Master is not pleased.

Ozzy: I’m itchy where a sexually active person is.

Ichabod: I hate you.

Undead Summary: 4 zombies destroyed, Ozzy KO'd and robbed of all equipment. The Vampire showed stupid toughness which was good. They found 2 shards of Wyrdstone, one cashed in for a Talisman for the Necromancer. 2 pieces of gold and 1 shard left in the coffin, er, coffer.

Goblin Summary: They fell down a slope, wounded the Rat Ogre and killed a large rat. +1 WS to spear henchmen, +1 BS to archer henchmen, talisman to shaman. Solid second place finish.

Skaven Summary: 1 warrior dead, one large rat lost, one wound on the Rat ogre and a crap ton of advances plus Wyrdstone. Steven elected not to cash in or explore. Overall, the big winner of the night, holding the objective and getting a ton of loot for little loss.