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That isn’t a typo in the title – with BOYL 2017 almost upon us, I’d thought I’d better get on and publish the long overdue details of last year’s game. For those who weren’t there or haven’t been following the blog, it was a 6 player, heavily GMed game in which 6 human factions explored a ruined jungle temple. The scenario was based on a tiny background snippet in the Book of the Astronomican, which amongst other things mentioned an ornithopter.
Here is a PDF of the background, the house rules and the six individual (secret) briefings for each player.
Inquisitor Cynole briefings
Shortly (in days, not years), I’ll put up the GM info and the battle report of what actually happened last year.
I’ve got a good selection of Ramshackle Games trading goods painted up for next month’s BOYL game. We are planning a ‘sandbox’ style game where players can bring a gang, and compete to make money at the rough fringes of the Imperium in Helsreach, Logan’s World.
Here’s an Imperial Guard patrol looking for contraband in a merchant’s stash at the edge of the town.
 “Get those crates open, boys” There are lots of types – water barrels (valuable on a hot, dry world), crates of ore, boxes of space spice, oil barrels and various boxes of trading goods/weapons.
 “I think I can see something buried under the spice” I’ve been experimenting with a rough, stained, rusted look (historically my style has been fairly neat and clean), and I’m really pleased with how some of these boxes turned out. Main change is that I’m using a folded up blister pack sponge a lot, to apply both patchy staining and highlighting. It is a bit random – some are better than others, but you have to just ‘let go’ a bit.
Last week I noticed that the site had gone down again (Database Connection error). Before I got round to doing anything about it, it has come back up again (Hooray). As I hadn’t made any manual changes, and another WordPress site on the same server had also failed in the same way, I’m suspecting either:
- An automated WordPress update broke both (unlikely, it normally emails when there’s an update)
- The hosting has gone wrong
Anyone else had any experience of this?
The first instalment of Helsreach buildings is well on its way for BOYL.
- Surface – this is an old sheet which has been painted with a mixture of PVA and paint and then sprinkled with coarse sand. Newspaper is put underneath the sheet, which sticks to the sheet and stiffens it, helping to prevent cracking when it’s rolled up. Still needs more painting/drybrushing.
- Adobe buildings – one of these has been cut from foamboard, the other two from cork tile. I’m going to use cork for the others as it has a better surface texture. The two rectangular ones fit exactly inside each other so they can be packed into a smaller space. I think I could nest about 3 before the inside one gets ridiculously small compared to the outside one. I’ve kept them deliberately plain because it’s quick and it also makes them more generic. I’ll do some more that are more specifically sci-fi/Helsreach.
- Shack – this is cardboard, scraps of mounting board and cardboard. They are fun to make but very time consuming compared to the simpler adobe buildings. I’ve got some more half built, and this one needs more weathering and painting.
- Industrial buildings – The left hand one is a hot chocolate cylinder with a mounting board platform. In the past I’ve made some very complex industrial buildings. For this one I restricted myself (for speed) to just sticking a few bits of card on it to form panels and then gave it plenty of weathering. The right hand one is mainly CDs – it has a bit more decoration, but again, fairly simple.
- Courtyard – This was originally built to be the inside of the Mos Eisley cantina for 25mm West End Games Star Wars – the arches are the little booths like the one where Greedo got shot. It languished unpainted in a cupboard for a few years until I decided to press it into use for this. It’s a little low, so I made roof pieces with a larger upstand to disguise this is a bit.
Hi, sorry I haven’t posted for a while. Health and 6mm Napoleonic distractions.
Was looking to apply static grass to bases, wanted it to stand upright, but didn’t fancy spending £40 on something I wouldn’t use an awful lot. Found this article; https://www.thespruce.com/build-grass-applicator-model-train-scenery-2381741
I went to Poundland and got a bug zapper for a whole £1, to wilkos to get a metal tea strainer for 80p, and to a hardware store for an alligator clip – 65p.
Don’t have a soldering iron, so used a small connector to lengthen the cable for the Alligator clip. The tea strainer had plastic handle within the wire handle. I removed that and used a pair of pliers to shorten the wire handle, then cut the plastic insert a bit shorter and re-inserted it between the remaining prongs of the handle, securing it in place with some electrical tape. I bared the end of the red wire in the bug zapper, wrapped it round one of the prongs and used more tape to secure it. The other terminal in the zapper had 2 white wires. I cut one away completely, bared the end of the other and used an electrical connector to extend it with another piece of wire and put the alligator clip on that. Didn’t need to pack the handle with wood – made a hole in the plastic handle of the tea strainer and screw the zapper handle back together through it, which seems to hold it well.
Popped in some batteries, and it worked! Popped some blobs of pva on a plastic bag, attached the alligator clip to the bag, put some static grass in the tea strainer bowl, turned the zapper on and shook the tea strainer over the blobs to deposit the grass. The stuff I have used is very short, but I am very happy with the first go.
Before I get started on making some buildings specifically for Helsreach, (that’s the Logan’s World city featured in Rogue Trader – nothing to do with the later book), I thought I’d collect up all the pictures for reference. Here they are in one handy image. 
Architectural elements are:
- Adobe mud buildings
- Small square or rectangular windows
- Lines of wooden beams projecting from walls
- Rough planking
- Small projecting balconies
- Signs – many vertical and mostly in an oriental character set
- A generally ‘piled-up’ haphazard look
I’m thinking foam card (which isn’t perfect for adobe but looks ok once textured), combined with rough balsa wood and printed out signage. Does anyone know what the oriental characters that he has used are – I could do with finding some images that look similar to do a cut and paste with?
To celebrate the site working again, here’s a quick post. Rowan and I went to Warlord HQ last night and had another game of Antares. 1000 points this time – Concord vs Rebel Ghar.
I fielded Concord with:
- 1 Command Squad
- 4 Standard Squads
- 2 Squads of 2 Light Support Drones with Batter Drones
Rebel Ghar fielded
- Fartok with 2 battlesuits
- Battlesuit Assault Squad
- Tectorists
- 1 Squad of Outcasts
- 1 Disruptor Cannon
- 3 Black Guard Squads
I didn’t deploy particularly well – I put the Command Squad on one flank where I wasted the group activations. The Ghar got their dice early in the first couple of turns and concentrated on knocking out the support drones. Their
 Ghar advance on pinned Concord With the support drones out of action, the remaining Concord could do little to stop the battlesuits advancing – I concentrated on trying to knock out the basic Ghar squads in the hope of destroying enough command dice to break them. My most successful squad on the left flank took the Disruptor Cannon out, and then another Black Guard squad towards the end of the game, but other than that it was a disaster. Fartok lost one of his squad, but using his double activation dice stormed through the middle and wiped out a full Concord squad in one go. All that was left in my centre was the battered remnants of two squads. Desperately they shot at Fartok and his accompanying battlesuit in the hope of a lucky hit, and they got one. The battlesuit died and Fartok failed his break test. Their reprieve didn’t last long – bearing down on my right flank was a wall of Ghar, co-ordinated by a Command Squad, that advanced steadily and shot them to pieces, ending the game with a strong Ghar victory (again).
As mysteriously as it broke, this WordPress site has fixed itself again. I got an email saying it had automatically upgraded, and I went to look at it, and other than the debug messages I had turned on, it was working again. I didn’t get round to investigating it much, but some of the logging implied there was a duplicate ID in the wp-options table (two rows in a database should never, ever share the same ID). Sort of implies an error in the MySQL, because the database engine shouldn’t really allow those rows to be created, whatever the calling code tries to do. Anyway, perhaps something in the update caused a regeneration of the tables at a level that cured it (even though database repairs in both WordPress and MySQL hadn’t worked).
Better take a backup right now!
Inspired by the classic Carl Critchlow artwork in Rogue Trader (see below), Curtis and I are planning to hold a big jet bike race through the streets of Helsreach, Logan’s World at BOYL 2017.
 Jet bike race test game – models from the Ramshackle kickstarter We finally had the first test game on Sunday, where we changed the rules as we went along, until we felt it was running right. We tried it with 12 jet bikes (most of which sadly still unpainted), so it had to be simple fast and furious. Initially we were thinking along the lines of X-wing manoeuvre templates, but soon abandoned that as being far too slow and laying out templates was actually pretty inaccurate. These are machines with a maximum move of 300″ per turn in the original rules, so they needed to cover some serious distance.
It has turned into a much sleeker rule set where the riders have to size up what’s ahead of them on the course, and decide just how much risk they want to take each turn. Great moments as one rider with a lucky roll of 6 burned his way up through the pack to catch up with the leaders, while another rolled a 1 and disintegrated against the concrete boundary wall.
Jet bikes have jumped to the front of the painting queue (serious loss of discipline there, but hey), and I’m now really looking forward to the next test game.
 Jet bikes race through Helsreach streets in the Rogue Trader rulebook
After a bit of a break, I’ve picked up my sculpting tools again, partly spurred on by the Oldhammer Chaos Pig contest. I’ve also been finishing off some long run WIP in with a view to getting another casting run done.
 Space Vampire sculpt My recent sculpts are a bit of a mixed bag, but one of the themes is sci-fi undead. Vampires appear in the original 40K, but a suitable model is hard to find. Most models are very firmly fantasy, and would look a bit odd taking on some marines, so I did this much more minimalist rendition. The original sketch had his hands open, but I soon found that this was almost impossible to sculpt, and probably hard to cast too, so I went for fists – he’s calling down some psychic wrath on someone. I think he would also make a suitable chaos sorcerer, or something for your players to hunt in an Inq28 game.
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