Mustering and mustard

Here's an inspiration. Dylan Gould at his Hobby Works is painting a 3,000 point dwarf army for Warhammer Fantasy Battle in just a weekend.

It takes an effort to complete a project that big of course. For added challenge, the Storm of Magic supplement for WFB could be about to raise the bar, through army expansions and expectations.

Let's not think about the time assembly takes too, let alone conversions if that's the way you like to go, and I do. I'm sworn off new wargame forces for now, beyond skirmish level anyway. Luckily there's a lot of skirmish games out there. The wargaming label here will turn up a fair few links, as will blogs like Miniature Review and Tabletop Fix.

If you want some dwarves like Dylan's, don't forget Brian has some for sale, classic Chaos too. On the subject, ArmChairGeneral has a Tzeentch army and cards going.

I'm meandering a bit in this post, having read round the blogs and let the mind wander. I'll hopefully have a Deep thought Sunday up later, but for now it's more practical ideas.

For example, I can't help pondering how a battle of dozens or hundreds might be run as roleplaying rather than wargame, even presented fully in written fiction. I'd love to try something like that at a convention. It certainly suits the minus level characters idea.

After all, as, say, christian is reminding us at destination unkown, and NetherWerks with their roofcrawling, dungeons are just one venue, even for Dungeons & Dragons.

A post at Symptoms of Radness looked at the overlap a while back, here, and it's very inspiring. Shawn at Blue Table Painting is looking at blurring the lines by blending Warhammer and D&D to tie in with the Valhalla gaming weekends he's running.

To get a seamless link-up might be tricky, and with dozens or hundreds of players trickier still. The most obvious way to go seems to me to be resolving increasingly compact pockets of interaction simultaneously, stopping at set intervals to check for new entrants or effects from other pockets or beyond. Cool problem to ponder anyway.

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Chaos dwarves, dwarves and a broad blunderbuss

Brian at A Gentleman's Ones has some classic Citadel Chaos dwarves and dwarves for sale. They look great. I like the later Chaos dwarf style too, though I know it's not everyone's favourite, and ideas like the blunderbuss. Interesting weapon in general.

I've statted one up. I used Gotthammer's FireZone, which may be aimed more at sci-fi, but can certainly cope with fantasy, and has plenty of options for weapons. It's a very well-made skirmish game and free to download. I plan to do some sci-fi stats for it too.

Broad blunderbuss

The broad blunderbuss is a tough, crude, ranged weapon with a flaring barrel and bore. It is filled through the muzzle with solid shot, whether cast metal or simple scrap, brick or stone. A black powder charge spews the mass a short distance across a wide arc.

Range  Acc  RoF  Dam  Type

  3 / 3"    +1     1       5     Jet 9/3, Reload 2

Notes: Range in FireZone is split into bands, with a modifier for each full band out from the firer; the first number is the number of bands and the second the length of each.

The blunderbuss also fires a Jet, and the extra numbers are the dimensions of the cone, a length of 9" and a width of 3" at the broad end. Accuracy here is a small bonus to represent the overall difficulty of missing. The weapon has a Rate of Fire of 1 and not surprisingly a reload is necessary, requiring 2 Action Points, likely to mean about a turn.

I've kept Damage low relative to the sci-fi weapons Gotthammer stats up in the pdf.

I hope I've not missed anything, but if I have, feel free to point it out. If you haven't had a read of FireZone yet, I recommend you do. It's here. Don't forget Brian's dwarves though.

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