GASLIGHT at Origins 2012

This past weekend, Buck Surdu, Dave Wood, Greg Priebe, and I, traveled out to Columbus, Ohio for the Origins convention.  Out goal was to showcase our "G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T." and "Look,Sarge, No Charts" rules systems to a different set of gamers other than the regular folks we see at the local HMGS East conventions.
   Buck and I each ran two GASLIGHT games and two LSNC games, and Dave Wood ran three additional LSNC games.  The two GASLIGHT games I ran were a Fleet Battles by GASLIGHT scenario and a regular Basic GASLIGHT scenario.
  We arrived Thursday evening, and Friday morning I set up my first game which was my Fleet Battles by GASLIGHT scenario called "Hunt for the Valkyrie on Mars."  The back story for this scenario was that a large German aircraft carrier on Mars had been caught in a Martian storm and blown off course and badly damaged.  It was now lost in the middle of nowhere and crippled.  The German and British fleets were searching for her, the Brits wanting to destroy her, and the Germans wanting to save her.

The German Aircraft Carrier 'Valkyrie' launches two fighter groups in an attempt to fight off a pair of attacking British patrol ships.

A player moves his ships.

A view of the battle, as ships from both sides swarm around the Valkyrie.

Two players check the range for ship to ship firing

The fighter groups attack again.

In the end, the Valkyrie's engines failed her as she suffered a series of failed Sustain rolls, leaving her susceptible to torpedo attacks from the British.  She eventually took a critical hit, and broke apart and fell to the Martian surface.  All the players seemed to have  good time, and i really enjoyed GM-ing the game.

That evening I ran my "Lost Legion of Venus" GASLIGHT game.  This game has a French force consisting of Foreign Legion and regulars which is lost somewhere on Venus and has become surrounded by hordes of local Parrotmen and Lizardmen.  The French must survive the battle and beat off the attackers to win.

A view of the table near the start of the game.

The French form what the players dubbed the "French Question Mark" formation

The Lizardmen's pet dinosaur moves to attack a French Walker

A view of the French defensive perimeter.

The dinosaur attack on the walker damages it's gun barrel and the player controlling the walker coincidentally rolls to Shoot and jams the gun (a roll of 20). The dinosaur, however falls down (roll of 20 on a melee attack) and our heroine, Victoria Hawkes seizes the opportunity and rushes forward to attack the beast while he's down.

Meanwhile, at the other end of the French line, the second walker has succumb to a shot from one of the Parrotmen's big guns, and is destroyed. It's crew however survive and bail out of the wreck.

Another view of the table as a player measures their rifle range.

A brave Foreign Legion officer, his company destroyed, fights off two lizardmen and the Lizardman King.

The French defenders are slowly overwhelmed.

The game was declared a marginal Venusian victory at the end.  The French forces were shattered, and their walkers destroyed or disabled. Though surprisingly, Victoria Hawkes, usually a bullet magnet, survived!
  All the players seemed to have a good time, and really got into the spirit of the game.  For me, the great players and the way the battle unfolded, made it one of the best runnings of a GASLIGHT game I have had the pleasure to run.

Moss Mounds On Clearance at Jo-Ann's

I was at my local Jo-Ann's craft & fabric store over the Labor Day weekend, and was pleasantly surprised to find these really neat "Moss Mounds" on clearance. There were two kinds; large ones that are approximately 7 inches in diameter by 6 inches in height, and were priced at $2.97 each, and smaller ones that were approximately 3 to 4 inches across that were priced at .50 cents each.
These will be very useful for my Venus project. I'm not sure if I want to leave them as is, or add some bits of foliage to them to give them a little visual interest. Perhaps I will use them as Parrotmen burial mounds and add a few small flowers to them. One of the downsides of them is that you cannot easily stand figures on them without them sliding off. So, adding some foliage might make some nice anchors to catch figure bases on, so as to help solve this problem.
They are shown with 25mm Kroot 'parrotman' for scale.

Quick and Simple Parrotmen Houses for Venus

About six months ago I saw these small (appox. 5") .99 cent wooden bird houses in the craft store and thought that they would make cool houses for my Venusian Parrotmen. Where better for Parrotmen to live, than in birdhouses? I bought a half dozen of them with plans to finish them in a suitable woodsy style, but was always stumped at the best quick and easy way to texture them to resemble a trunk-like bark surface without doing a lot of spackle work.
Then last week, when I was in JoAnn's, I stumbled upon rolls of thin paper-like "bark". Ideal for my purposes of texturing the surfaces of my parrotmen houses. The stuff appears to be made from a composite of flattened decorative fungi. With this stuff in hand, I began to create my houses.

How the birdhouses come; straight out of the craft store.

First, I paint the top portion and the bottom a dark brown.

Shown also is an example of rolled "bark" in it's craft store packaging.
It comes in several different lengths, and I found it in the floral department.



I cut the bark to size with scissors and applied glue,
then held it in place with rubber bands while it dried.



Then I slathered the roof with glue, and applied a big clump of "floral moss",
pressing the moss firmly down into the glue.



When all this dries, I remove the rubber bands and trim up the moss for a neater look.
I also wrapped a bit of twine around the perch to give it a finished look.



Here's the completed house with it's base flocked and detail plants added. Next to it, on the right, is an ornament that is very similar in style that I found in Walgreen's at Christmastime last year. It was loose in a box of similar woodsey themed ornaments labeled "Natural Ornaments"