Podcast: CLASH! Dawn of Steam - First Impressions

With International Tabletop Day having been just yesterday we had a great day of playing games, drinking tea, and just having general fun.  As part of the day's hijinks we recorded another 'First Impressions' podcast for a recently received Kickstarter game: CLASH! Dawn of Steam from Mad Ape Games.  We'll hopefully have a full review up and running within a few weeks, but in the meantime we hope you enjoy listening to our first impressions of the game quality, as well as our photos of some of the card which caught our attention for one reason or another!

Creating a Warmachine BioShock Army, Episode IV: Elizabeth Comstock

Welcome back to the ongoing WarmaShock project!  Okay I just thought of that on the fly, but it's kind of catchy, so I think I might stick with it!

With my BioShock Warmachine army now standing at a warcaster and one solo, I decided to press on with one more solo.  Granted it'll feel like serious progress is being made once the force starts to bulk out with units and warjacks, but before I moved into that territory there was one more character from the series who I really wanted to bring to life...

Elizabeth Comstock; BioShock Infinite's female lead.  Back when this project was just going to be a small collection of BioShock-looking miniatures, Elizabeth was the first model I set my sights on, but once it became an army list I knew that with Booker DeWitt leading the force, Elizabeth had to be included.  The entire story of BioShock Infinite follows Booker's attempt to rescue her from the city of Columbia - initially as a job, and eventually out of loyalty to her.  A lot of Infinite's players became very invested in the Booker/Elizabeth relationship as the game progressed - myself amongst them - and so I wanted to try my damned hardest to bring justice to the character with her miniature.  All the more so since the Booker model turned out quite tidily!

Elizabeth does wear a number of different outfits throughout the main game and the Burial At Sea expansion, but I've always been a fan of the white corset and blue jacket/skirt look in the image above, so this was the outfit I wanted my Elizabeth to wear.

As per usual, the first order of business was to decide which model was going to be used as her base.  Unusually for this project, however, I was able to use an actual Warmachine miniature instead of having to plunder the dark world of Malifaux!

Madelyn Corbeau, Ordic Courtesan, seemed the perfect starting model for Elizabeth Comstock.  A few alterations to the model would be needed, but the corset was there, the long coat, and the hair was almost perfect.  My initial plan was to just leave the model as it was and just paint it up to look like Elizabeth, but ambition soon got the better of me and I decided to do everything in my power to turn Ms Corbeau into Ms Comstock!

The first thing I did was to start trimming and filing back the parts of the model I didn't need.  The cigarette in Madelyn's left hand was clipped off and filed back down - before any Burial At Sea fans pipe up, yes I know Elizabeth smoked in the expansion.  However, in the main game she didn't, and it's the main game from which I've taken the outfit, so I feel justified in this.  As the image of Elizabeth shows, she wears a short jacket, not long gloves, so I filed down the tops of Madelyn's gloves to make them easier to blend into the jacket when it came to sculpting time.  I also clipped and filed back the ruff around her neck, as again this wasn't part of Elizabeth's outfit.  This just left the jewelry on her forehead, which was a little tricky.  I couldn't get it entirely flat without damaging her hair, so I did my best to scrape it off with a sharp craft knife to give her a bare forehead.

I'd been lucky enough to get a cobblestone 30mm resin base for participating in a local Warmachine steamroller event a week previous, so with this acting as as the streets of Columbia it was time to crack open the green stuff and get sculpting!

To start with I needed to make Madelyn's coat into Elizabeth's skirt, so I rolled a nice thin piece of green stuff and blended it across the front of the coat, and along the slit at the back, making the skirt one complete piece all around.  That was the easy part!  The next part took a few attempts seeing as I'm still learning to use green stuff properly.  I needed to sculpt a short jacket on her upper body, covering her shoulders and blending into her gloves, and then coming to a stop around half way down her back.  As I said, this took a few attempts, but after a week the model had a jacket I could finally be proud of!  Or at least most of a jacket, for it was still missing one element: the cuffs.  Seeing as Madelyn is wearing long gloves, they blend seamlessly into the hands of the model.  With Elizabeth I needed the hands to be bare, which meant adding the cuffs to the miniature to separate the hands from the forearms.  This proved to be much simpler than the rest of the jacket, and I was happy with the result after my first attempt.

I've also been trying to do something a little more interesting with the bases.  With Booker I added a few drops of blood, which seemed fitting seeing as he spends the game rampaging across the city!  For Elizabeth I wanted to do something different.  I didn't want to throw blood all over the base, but I wanted to add something to make it look more like the city of Columbia.  That's when it struck me: flags!  Columbia is a very all-American city, and you can't turn anywhere in the game without seeing red, white and blue flags, banners or bunting.  So I decided to drape a bit of bunting across the base, as if it had fallen down onto the streets during all of the fighting.  This was just a simple matter of creating some green stuff triangles and then tucking them neatly in against the kerb stones.

With the model now assembled and heavily covered in green stuff, it was time for the fun part: painting!  I've never been quite so impatient to start painting a model, in fact I almost didn't leave the green stuff time to set properly before starting, which could have ended badly!  I also can't remember ever being quite so anxious about doing a decent paint job - the fact that Booker was already waiting for her to join him in the display cabinet at Titan Games just piled the pressure on even further.  But with a belly full of tea and the TV on in the background, I managed to steel myself and do a job I was pleased with overall, and here's the result...

So that brings my running total up to three!  I'm currently planning to use Elizabeth as Madelyn Corbeau for obvious reasons, but I may experiment using her as Alexia Ciannor.  This may sound odd, but bringing back Risen each turn could be a nice way to represent the way Elizabeth opens up tears to bring support through from other worlds to help out Booker.  It might work, it might not, but I'm keen to give it a try!

I think Elizabeth will be the last solo for a while.  I want to get Andrew Ryan and the splicers on the go soon, and I have a pile of Big Daddies waiting to be built!  So thanks again for reading, and keep checking back for the next addition to the army!

Creating a Warmachine BioShock Army, Episode III: Eleanor Lamb

For those who may have missed the start of this article series (you can catch up from the Article Archive tab above), I'm currently working my way through a project to create a Mercenary army for Privateer Press' Warmachine tabletop system based on the BioShock videogame series.  Seeing as this is quite an ambitious project, and one which will require a fair amount of conversion and artistic license, I've decided to chronicle this project from start to finish.  In the last article we looked at the creation of Booker DeWitt - the protagonist from BioShock Infinite and the army's warcaster.  In this article we'll be stepping away from the floating city of Columbia and heading beneath the waves to Rapture, the setting of the first two games in the series.

 

"BioShock Harder" ...or something.

 

Before I start to go into the creation of today's miniature, I'll just quickly address something about BioShock 2.  It is, unquestionably, the game that divides fans of the series.  Some think it's terrible, some love it.  At the end of the day, this is a tabletop blog and not a videogame blog, so I won't be delving into the details of whether it was a good game.  All I'll say is I thoroughly enjoyed playing it, and just leave it at that.

 

When this BioShock project first started out, there were just a handful of characters from the games which I wanted to bring to life in 30mm form - ironically Booker DeWitt was not amongst them!  Elizabeth Commstock from BioShock Infinite was one, a Big Daddy and Little Sister from BioShock were two more, and one of the Big Sisters from BioShock 2 was the last.

The Little Sisters from the first game became one of the most iconic images in modern videogame history.  One of the things I loved about the sequel was that it took place a few years after the original, and so we got to see what happened to these little monsters when they grew up.  Being a big fan of the series I had a copy of the artbook on-hand, so had not only plenty of images to work from, but also the designers' notes as well.

The Big Sisters never quite became as iconic as the Big Daddy/Little Sister pairing from the first game, but still I found the idea behind them quite fascinating.  Their design was based upon the idea that these little girls had grown up into young women, and in their own way were trying to emulate their Big Daddies.  Unlike the Big Daddies, however, which were specifically designed during the heights of Rapture, the Big Sisters were left to cobble together their own outfits, effectively attempting to recreate the Big Daddy look with whatever they could scrounge from the now-derelict city.

 

 

Now, whilst Booker was undoubtedly the most important model in the army, he was still a relatively simple build.  His skyhook may have required a bit of finesse, but the Lucas McCabe model at his core already had most of the work done for me.  With the Big Sister, things were going to be a little more of a challenge, as I really couldn't think of a model which came close to fitting the profile!

As usual, it was off to the Malifaux shelves to try and find something to use a starting point.  One of the things about Malifaux models in general is that they're more realistically scaled, as opposed to many systems which have exaggerated heads/hands etc. to emphasise certain elements of the model.  Seeing as the Big Sister is quite an emaciated figure, Malifaux did seem the best bet for a suitably slim female miniature.

After a bit of searching, it seemed that the best model to use as a base was to be Rusty Alyce from the old metal Leviticus crew  (most of the Malifaux box sets have been rereleased as plastics at this point).  I should point out now that if you do a  Google image search for "Malifaux Rusty Alyce" you'll actually find a much better Big Sister conversion than mine!  But I'm still very much a conversion beginner, so I'm happy enough with my outcome... I can always try again in a couple of years!

 

 

It was whilst looking at how to convert her that the idea came up to make her into more than just a regular Big Sister.  In BioShock 2 the player takes on the role of Delta - a Big Daddy who is trying to be reunited with the Little Sister who was taken from him.  It's not as gripping and heart-wrenching as the Booker/Elizabeth relationship from Infinite, but still made for a good gaming experience.  The Little Sister in question was a girl named Eleanor Lamb, and towards the end of the game, circumstances force her to become a Big Sister.  She's the only Big Sister who the player ever sees without her helmet on, so I thought it'd be a nice idea to turn Rusty Alyce into the Big Sister version of Eleanor, rather than a generic Big Sister.  Seeing as the plan was to use her as Dirty Meg on the tabletop anyway this worked quite nicely, as she could jack marshal a warjack which could be modelled after her Delta.

 

With the base model chosen, it was time to start turning her into a Big Sister.  As with the Big Daddies, the most distinctive part of the Big Sister is the helmet.  My original plan was to use an Attunement Servitor from the Convergence of Cyriss faction in Warmachine, but after opening up a blister of these I found them to be far too big.  Fortunately I was able to return these, but on the downside I ended up picking up something much more expensive in its place!

 

 

The M&SU crew from Malifaux contains Arachnid Swarms, which served perfectly as Big Sister helmets.  Seeing as I only needed the one though, the majority of the box set was left in tact, meaning I can still assemble and use it as a Malifaux crew if I so wish!

 

With the helmet chosen, I just wanted to concentrate on the oxygen tank and basket on Eleanor's back, and the large, forearm-mounted syringe on her left arm.  For the syringe I went back to the M&SU box, and took a part from the Joss model - the tank shown on the lower-right part of the sprue below.

 

 

Obviously the cable had to go, so I clipped it off, drilled a small hole in its place, and glued in a shortened sewing pin to finish the weapon.  Then I just filed it down a little to fit more snugly against Rusty Alyce's arm, glued it in place, and then used a little bit of Green Stuff to make it a more seamless fit.

This just left the oxygen tank and basket on her back, so for the oxygen tank it was back to the world of Malifaux, though this time it was for a new release!

 

 

The Flesh Construct had literally just arrived in at Titan Games on the day I was building Eleanor, which was an absolute stroke of luck.  I don't have a sprue photo for this one (as with Booker, Eleanor was done before the idea for this series was suggested), but you can see the syringe-like container on the back of the Construct from the box photo.  Seeing as the Flesh Construct is so much bigger than Rusty Alyce this was actually a very good size, and so with a little bit of trimming it served the purpose of Eleanor's oxygen tank.  The rest of the Flesh Construct won't be going to waste, as he'll be taking on the role of another BioShock character, but I'll leave you to guess which one for now.

This only left the basket, but with no suitable alternatives in any system, this was just built manually using thinly-sliced strips of plasticard.

 

So, here's the result...

 

 

As I said before, she's not the best Rusty Alyce/Eleanor Lamb conversion I've ever seen, but I'm satisfied that she met the designer's goal of "cobbled together Big-Daddy-esque outfit".

Many thanks to Gmorts Chaotica for use of his unboxing photos for The M&SU.  If you enjoyed this rambling insight then please go back and take a look at the Booker DeWitt article!  And of course check back in a couple of days, when I'll hopefully have Elizabeth Commstock ready to join him...

Creating a Warmachine BioShock Army, Episode II: Booker DeWitt

Hello again, lovely readerfolk!  If you had a nose at the last article you'll have seen that there are grand plans in motion to create a BioShock themed army for Privateer Press' Warmachine tabletop system.  In that article I talked about how the idea came about, so here we'll be taking a look at the first model to find its way onto the painting table and get the ball rolling.

 

 

The centre point of any Warmachine army is its warcaster.  With no warcaster there is no army, and generally the entire army will be built around the warcaster's spells and abilities so as to pull off the most effective combos.  This created a bit of a dilemma right off the bat: who should take on the role of the warcaster?  With a universe as rich and well-designed as BioShock's there are no shortage of characters to choose from, so who should get the honour of being the pivotal character when this army finally gets to march to war?

For many, the most central BioShock character is Jack - the protagonist from the very first BioShock game.  The player watched the story unfold through his eyes, and heard the tale of the rise and fall of Rapture through his in-game discoveries, making for quite a personal experience.  However, you never see more than his wrists in the game, and you never hear his voice, so he didn't give me much to work with in terms of fashioning a model in his image!
(EDIT: Having just finished the Burial At Sea DLC from BioShock Infinite I do now have a slightly better image of Jack, so he may well feature in the army at some point...)

In BioShock 2 you take on the role of one of the Big Daddies - a Delta - not as iconic as the classic "Mr Bubbles" Big Daddy, but much more human-looking, and therefore more relatable.  However, in spite of this, there's still an overall lack of the human connection.  His relationship with Eleanor Lamb in the second game was superb, but the lack of a face, a voice, and a real name still severs the human connection somewhat.  Delta will certainly be featuring in the army, but he didn't quite cut it as a pivotal character.

Then we move onto BioShock Infinite, where the player takes on the role of Booker DeWitt.  So straight away we have a full name for our protagonist.  His image dominates the box art.  He's the most vocal character in the game, whether he's muttering to himself or conversing with Elizabeth, so we have a very clear idea of his personality.  In short, he's real.  He's tangible.  He's someone we can connect with.  Booker has a tragic past, he's on a mission of redemption, and the developing relationship between himself and Elizabeth tugs at every heartstring from their initial meeting to the final scene of the game.  If there was ever a character who deserved to be the centre of a BioShock army, it's this man.

 

 

So the BioShock character had been decided, the Warmachine character had been decided in advance as Magnus the Traitor, so that just left the hard part: bringing Booker DeWitt to life in 30mm form!

It was quite obvious from the offset that I wasn't going to find a miniature in the Warmachine range which was even close to resembling Booker, so it was off to the Malifaux shelves to try and find a suitable doppelganger.  After looking through all of the crews on offer at Titan Games and coming up short, it was starting to look like I'd have to start trawling through the more obscure tabletop systems, until someone suggested Lucas McCabe of the Relic Hunters - one of the Malifaux crews not on the shelves at the time of my browsing.  As a stroke of luck, one of the regulars had an unpainted McCabe crew which they no longer wanted, and so a few days later I was able to see if he really had the makings of Booker DeWitt!

 

 

As soon as I had the miniature in my hand I knew I had the base for Booker!  I've always described McCabe as "Indiana Wolverine", and I'm sure I'm not the only one, but in terms of outfit he was pretty much perfect for the role, even down to the neckerchief!  So now came the task of converting him into the hero of BioShock Infinite...

It should be noted at this point that I'd like to post some photos from various stages in the process, but seeing as the suggestion for this article series didn't come up until after Booker was finished this wasn't an option, however GMorts has granted me permission to steal photos from his Malifaux unboxing articles to help ease things along!

 

The first thing I did was clip the whip out of his right hand.  I left the hand on at this point as I wasn't sure how I was planning to use it, but the whip was distracting me and had to go asap.  The second thing that had to go was the "stupid Wolverine hair" as I kept calling it.  This required some very delicate knife-work with a very sharp hobby knife, so I had a more conversion-savvy friend take on this task for me!  With the whip gone and Lucas' new haircut in place, it was time to move onto the weapons.

Now as awesome as Booker is, there's nothing particularly distinctive about his outfit.  Sure, at a convention I can spot a Booker cosplayer a mile away, but at the end of the day it's just a shirt, a waistcoat, a pair of pinstripe trousers and a neckerchief.  When people look at my warcaster I want them to know straight away that this is Booker DeWitt and not just a generic waistcoated character, so he needed something to make him stand out, and if there's one piece of equipment that defines BioShock Infinite, it has to be the skyhook...

 

 

Being a floating city, the best way to travel around Columbia is to ride the skylines, and to do that you need a skyhook!  This became the most iconic piece of Infinite equipment, and so I knew that my Booker had to be equipped with one.

Seeing as skyline riders obviously don't want to fall to their deaths 30 seconds into their journey, the skyhook is designed to fit snugly half way up the user's forearm.  Upon looking at the gun in Lucas McCabe's left hand, it seemed to me that the makings of the skyhook were right there!  The stock nestles in against his forearm, and the way the strap falls against it actually makes it look as though the stock is lashed to his arm.  I clipped the barrel off the gun, just leaving the trigger guard, and stock.  From this point on it was going to be a custom build, so I dived into the bits boxes at Titan and started searching.

For the hooks themselves I had it in my head that the best thing would be to find some meat hooks, and glue them at the centre with the hooks an equal distance apart.  A short distance in, however, I found a Dark Eldar sprue with some very fine hooks which would do the job perfectly.  It took a bit of trimming, dry-fitting, and trimming again to get them to a suitable size (originally they dwarfed the rest of the weapon!), but eventually I had them looking just right, and applied a spot of superglue to fix the formation in place.

At this point, however, my iconic skyhook was nothing more than a trio of hooks glued onto a trimmed back gun barrel.  It certainly looked as though it was heading in the right direction, but didn't yet look like the finished article.  It still needed something at the centre of the hooks, as well as something to hide the point where they attached to the barrel.  I did try a few bits and pieces from the bits boxes, but the thickness of the plastic on even the finest detailed pieces bulked the skyhook out far too much.  Fortunately Games Workshop have released basing packs which contain a selection of brass-etched cogs and gears, which were just what I needed to complete the skyhook without the bulk of plastic alternatives.  With one small gear attached to each side in the centre, and half of a larger gear hiding the joining point on each side, the skyhook was done!

 

This just left Booker's right hand, which needed a period-suitable firearm.  This took a mercifully short search, and I found a hand holding a revolver on World War 2 miniatures sprue (possibly Bolt Action, I can't say for sure).  I have to confess I wanted to give Booker a rocket launcher that was on the same sprue to increase his awesome factor, but a friend reigned in my enthusiasm and suggested the less-is-more approach!

Seeing as the hand with the revolver was the perfect size for the miniature, I clipped off the entire left hand from the Lucas McCabe model and replaced it with the new one.

 

The streets of Columbia are smart, white cobblestone, so I found a suitable resin base to attach Booker to, and all that remained was the painting!  So it's my great pleasure to present to you the first model in my BioShock Warmachine army: Booker DeWitt!

 

 

I hope you've enjoyed this article, and if so then please check back for future entries when I'll be putting together Elizabeth Commstock, Eleanor Lamb, Andrew Ryan, splicers, and of course those iconic Big Daddies!

Creating a Warmachine BioShock Army, Episode I: Conception

Welcome to Games & Tea, good readers, where the great will not be constrained by the small!!!

 

*ahem*

 

Excuse me, channelling Andrew Ryan there for a moment.

 

Good day, ladies and gentlegamers!  I'm afraid this is going to be the start of another one of those pesky tabletop article series which seem to be creeping into the Games & Tea lineup more and more often.  This won't impact upon our board game reviews (in fact our next one is due up in the next couple of days!), but as this is a very special project I've just decided to undertake, it was recommended by Gmorts Chaotica that I record the process.

 

 

So the project (as you really should have figured out from the title) is to create a BioShock army for Privateer Press' Warmachine tabletop system.  I don't play many videogames these days, but in the last few years there are two particular series which have left a major emotional impact and secured themselves a special place in the blackened cavity I call a heart.  The first of these is the Mass Effect series, and the second is BioShock.

My primary army in Warmachine is Khador, and within Khador my favoured warcaster is Karchev the Terrible.  Being mostly a warjack himself, he does favour very warjack-heavy army lists, which usually need to be complemented by a lot of repair crews, which in itself mens recruiting Mercenaries.  In a recent attempt to make his 50 point list even more jack-heavy and ridiculous, I decided to let some of the Mercenary fixers jack marshal their own warjacks, and that meant having to pick up my first Mercenary warjacks!  It only took a few moments on the Privateer Press website to decide which Mercenary warjack was going to be my first, as one glimpse of the Mariner immediately conjured up images of the underwater city of Rapture.  I knew I had to do something special with the model - I didn't want it to just be a Mariner, I wanted it to actually be recognisable as a Big Daddy, so with a bit of customisation, this was born...

 

 

Whilst I never intended for this to be the start of something greater, it did get me thinking.  Surely there must be other BioShock-esque models scattered amongst the many and varied tabletop systems?  Wouldn't it be a nice idea to collect and paint up some of these just to have a BioShock shelf in my display cabinet?  I popped into my FLGS Titan Games and spitballed the idea with the owner (who doubles up as my longest-serving friend and the man who got me into the tabletop hobby!), and he made a counter-suggestion that I build a workable Mercenary army around the BioShock characters.

I have to admit I wasn't instantly sold on the idea, but he always has a way of convincing me, and we were soon sitting down and penning a 50 point list.  Unfortunately there aren't a great deal of Warmachine models that fit the BioShock aesthetic - either for Rapture or BioShock Infinite's Columbia - so we had to start getting creative.  Being a Victorian alternate reality steampunk system, Wyrd Miniatures' Malifaux seemed to be the best place for us to find the characters of the BioShock series, so our list soon came to comprise of three sections:  The BioShock character, the Warmachine character they would be used in place of, and the Malifaux model used to represent them.

 

With many miniatures in need of some serious customisation, and several Malifaux crews required to complete this task, it's going to be quite a long and ongoing process (at this point I've bought 6 crews, totalling at over £150)!  However, I can't wait to see how the final army looks, and I'm looking forward to bringing you all updates as the months progress!

Diary of a Roleplay Beginner #1: Introduction

Greetings, readers, this is Rob from Games & Tea (which you probably knew as you're on our blog).   So far G&T's been primarily concerned with board and card games, with the occasional look at game systems which verge on being board games (I'm talking about you, Puppet Wars and X-Wing).  But a few weeks ago we were approached by the lovely folks at StoryWeaver and asked if we'd be interested in reviewing some of their roleplays.

Now whilst we have no issue with the idea of reviewing RPG's, the fact of the matter is we've never played one before and so wouldn't have a clue where to start.  However, I've always been roleplay curious, so have decided to take the plunge and throw myself into the world of D20's, character sheets, and furious pencil work.

 

I personally have a number of friends who have roleplayed in the past, and many who still do, but I know a fair few who - like myself - are interested in roleplay but don't know how to go about getting into the hobby.  The whole notion of roleplaying can seem very intimidating to an outsider, and so I'm planning to run this diary within Games & Tea to chronicle my early steps into what looks to be an awesome side of the hobby.

 

What I won't be doing is bringing you detalied reports of every roleplay session, I think this would stray away from the point of these posts, and I imagine even the most awesome roleplay events to fall into the category of "you had to be there".  What I will be doing is talking about my experiences immersing myself in these new worlds for the first time and creating my first characters, the feeling of being involved for the first time in both the narrative and combat sides of roleplay, and perhaps in time even going on to my first experiences as a Game Master.  So to start with I'm going to have a ramble about how I've managed to get myself into a roleplay group, and the past couple of weeks spent studying the rules tome (the word 'book' wouldn't really do it justice) and creating my character.  You may want to read all about it, you may not.  Either way, I'm going to keep talking.

 

The Beginning!

 

Between tabletop systems, board games, card games and TCG's, I've been an active hobbyist for roughly 12 years now (I was a late bloomer), but roleplaying is one aspect of the hobby I've never ventured into.  I've always liked the look of it, but breaking into RPGing seemed to be the issue holding me back, and from speaking to a few people I know it's not an issue I'm alone in.  Unlike a new board game or even to an extent a lesser-complicate tabletop system, RPGing never looked like something a group of inexperienced gamers could just sit down and have a go at.  At the very least the GM really needs to know his onions, and to help facilitate smooth play at least one of the players does as well (again, all from an outsider's perspective).

 

So I'm a frequent loiterer at our FLGS Titan Games, and a few weeks ago I was hanging around on a Sunday afternoon, playing board games, buying things I couldn't afford, stroking peoples' faces, and just doing all of the other usual gaming store activities.  As the hours wore on and closing time approached, some friends of mine started to congregate around the large gaming table at the front of the store; it seemed I had unwittingly stumbled into a roleplay group, and they were gearing up to start off the first session of a new campaign.  Seeing this as the perfect opportunity to see what roleplaying was all about, I pulled up a chair, ordered in a pizza, and sat down to watch these guys lose themselves in a fantasy world for a few hours.

This is the nice thing about having a hobby store to hang around at; if you're interested in trying something out then the chances are there'll be some people around who also want to give it a go, and also that there'll be people ready to hand-hold you through those crucial first steps.

 

 

In this instance, the fantasy world was that of Western Immoren, the setting for Privateer Press' Iron Kingdoms system.  Those who are familiar with tabletop wargame systems may already be aware of Iron Kingdoms, as it shares the settings with their popular tabletop systems Warmachine and Hordes.  Not having played either of these games before, a lot of the background of the characters was lost on me, with religions, races and classes meaning absolutely nothing.  Even so, I sat there quietly (for the most part) so as not to interrupt the flow of the game, and took in as much as I could about the goings on of their party.  The GM did kindly offer to let me fill in the conversational side for one of the NPC's (non-player characters), but having no roleplay experience I didn't want to mess up the game's setting and so declined.

 

The first thing I noticed was how pretty much anything is possible in a roleplay scenario.  This is something I'd heard tales of before in tail-ends of conversation, but had yet to witness first-hand.  After the party had been set up on their initial starting point, one member (a priest) headed into the streets to feed the poor, one (an aristocrat) decided to go and worm his way into the local noble's good books, whilst the rest of them just decided to all start drinking for a while.  Whenever an incident came up which required a dice roll to determine success or failure I tended to get a little bit lost on how the GM reached the result, but still thoroughly enjoyed the narrative element of the game.

By the time the session's big combat encounter came along I was quite invested in the party's characters, and even though I was just an observer, I found myself genuinely caring whether they made it through the battle in one piece!

Anyways, to cut a long story short, they scraped through (again, most of the mechanics of the combat went straight over my head), and the session came to end with the story ready to be continued next time.

 

Having thoroughly enjoyed sitting in and seeing how a roleplay works - and with a copy of the Iron Kingdoms core rulebook on the shelf in Titan - I immediately picked it up and threw myself straight in!  It did help that the next session wasn't due for another few weeks and that I was about to go on holiday for a week, so I'd got a deadline in which to learn the ins and outs of Western Immoren, and create a character to slot into the group.

As soon as I picked up the book I realised I'd set myself something of a monster task, with it clocking in at a total of just over 350 pages.  The first 200 of these are all about the titular Iron Kingdoms themselves, and so whilst they aren't necessary for understanding how to play the game, an overview is needed to understand the world you're inhabiting, as well as the way your character is going to behave and respond to certain events.  With no small amount of trepidation I found myself a suitable bookmark and started reading.

The background section proved to be an overall interesting read.  There were some sections which were true page-turners, and some which trundled along like a dusty old history textbook, but with over 10,000 years of Immorese history to get through that's no real surprise!  Along with the history, there are sections on the main nations, people, and races of the Iron Kingdoms, as well as cultural points including religion, law, commerce, education, technology, magic... pretty much everything you could want to know about the world lies within these 200 pages.

 

After reading about history, the major nations and their inhabitants, I started to get restless, and so skipped ahead to the character section of the book.  By this point I'd got enough background knowledge that I felt I could comfortably start creating my Iron Kingdoms character.  I already knew I wanted to be a male human, and I'd chosen his nationality.  After a good old flick through the character pages I chose his career paths, selected his skills, and then started his mini-biography.  Now I love writing (hence rambling away on Games & Tea any chance I get!), so sitting down to flesh out my character gave me a massive buzz, and it was here that I found the gameplay and background parts of the book starting to mesh nicely.

I'd start to write a bit and then think "hmm, does this fit in with his culture?" so I'd flick back to the reference part of the book, tweak his background a little bit, and keep going.  After I thought I'd finished, I went back and carried on with the reference section, and every few pages was finding some small detail which would really help to embellish my character, or a point which would cause an issue with the history I'd written for him.  This constant reading/tweaking really helped to give my character an organic feel, and on some nights of the holiday I'd lie in bed thinking about how else I could give him more depth.  In the end my first ever roleplay character took just over a week to create, and at the time of writing this I'm extremely excited about getting myself into the fray.

 

Reading the rulebook has helped to throw a lot of light onto that first session where I sat by feeling a bit lost, but I genuinely think it helped to watch that session as a non-roleplayer.  Whereas some sections of the rulebook probably would have left me scratching my head, the experience of watching other people roleplay first allowed me to put examples to the rules, and the whole thing made a lot more sense.  I'm sure I'll need a bit of hand-holding to begin with, especially in the narrative areas of the game where there are no real limits to your gameplay options, but with a supportive GM and understanding players, I'm confident it's going to shape up to be a brilliant experience.

 

So at this point I don't have much more to add.  I'll be posting an article next week about how I'd found my first session as an active player, and hopefully more in the future as I gain experience and start taking a look at other systems!

 

And speaking of other systems (I really should give them another nod for gifting me with PDFs of their rules), the two StoryWeaver roleplays I now have in my possession are Rapture and High Space.  While it may be some time before I get round to branching into another system, Games & Tea's friends over at fellow hobby blog The Hobbynomicon have recently played their first Rapture session, and I understand The Caustic Triton is planning to write up an article about it so pop over and pay them a visit!