Wrapping up Frostgrave

As September wraps up, let me share the wrapup of our Frostgrave campaign. We started the scenarios in the Forbidden Pacts supplement (lots of demons and barbarians), and my original warband, the tavern folk, lost its wizard when she failed a survival roll. So the next game I replaced the townspeople with my lizardman warband, led by the elementalist Topo Chiko (above).

In the final scenario in the Forbidden Pacts book, you encounter a barbarian lord on a rhino as kind of a final boss. We didn't have a rhino, so we used one of my barbarians on a Reaper Bones bulette-equivalent.

There was lots of back-and-forth with my opponent's warband, struggling to snag treasures as various barbarians joined the fray. The barbarian lord was tough, but several Elemental Bolt spells helped take him out.

After that, we set aside Frostgrave for a few weeks, but we shall return. It's a fun game, and the closest to an ongoing role-playing game campaign I've had in a while.

Drilling down to childhood memories

This week's game night featured not a miniatures game, not even a sci-fi or fantasy board game, but an old-school Milton Bradley game from the 1970s called King Oil. The object is to drill oil wells and make money. It's kind of like Monopoly in that you buy and build up properties with a lot of play money exchanging hands, but the uncertainty of whether your drilling attempt will be successful adds some tension to the game. I remember playing this with my cousins at our grandparents house back in the day. Growing up in West Texas among family in the awl bidniss (as Texans pronounce it), I appreciated the theme of this game.

The board is randomized at the start , so you don't know what result you will get when you pick a drilling site. There are three levels of successful well (such as the gusher pictured in the top photo) which cost certain amounts of money, or you could end up with a dry hole, which also costs money and forces you to cap the site. You draw cards to get royalties for each producing well, and maybe a chance to by more properties on which to drill. Once you have enough rigs on a piece of property, you can run pipelines to your opponents' fields, making them pay you a certain amount for each well on their property. It was a nice little nostalgia trip, but I'm wondering how widespread this game was outside the Lone Star State. Anyone else remember King Oil?

Recent & not-recent Ogre acquisitions

I recently received my copy of Ogre Battlefields, the long-awaited expansion to Ogre Designer's Edition that I purchased back in 2013. In addition to the new maps in ODE scale, there were plenty of counters added as stretch goals in the crowdfunding campaign--including some three-dimensional Ogre models in new color schemes.

And I didn't blog about it at the time, but several months ago I got my copy of Ogre Miniatures Second Edition. I have a couple of copies of the first edition from eBay, so this was more of a way to support the publisher than any real need.

In addition to the templates for running minis games, this product also came with some 3-D models--including rare units like the Vulcan and Ninja.

While all the counters are nifty, I'm more of a miniatures player these days, so I'm thinking about selling off the sheets--at least the faction reskins--which should go to someone who will get more use out of them. But whether you prefer miniatures or cardboard, it's a good time to be an Ogre player.

Running the gauntlet

My last Ogre game was over a month ago. I used my Monopolis setup and used the forces from the Mark V Attacking scenario in the original rules. But instead of killing the command post, the cybertank had to get all the way across the long axis of the map with four of its missiles.

I took the Ogre, while Wes played the defenders and tried to intercept me. However, I used the roads and terrain to make sure he couldn't get too many units in the same place--fighting them a few at a time is a lot easier.

Still, prying infantry out of a city is a rhymes-with-witch, and they were able to keep picking at the Ogre, slowing me down.

The defending armor units contributed to my misery, but by aiming at treads, they left me free to strike back. I conserved my missiles, using two of them to take out a howitzer and another long-distance shot (the remainder I needed for victory conditions).

In the end, the cybertank limped off the far edge of the map with two treat units remaining and the rest of the defenders in hot pursuit. It was a narrow victory, and seemed like a balanced scenario.

Speaking of Ogre, there's a crowdfunding campaign to get the two largest cybertanks, the Mark VI and the Doppelsoldner, in plastic miniature form. It ends in a few days, so go on over and take a look if you're interested in more Ogre minis.

And then there's this ...

I can't remember the name of this critter, but it's a Reaper Bones miniature.

Ugly as all git-out, but fun for me to paint, using those color-shifting paints I got at Michael's craft store.

We have Lovecraftian organic alien-ness combined with Geigeresque biomechanical aesthetics. Works for me!

This is another creature to play the role of summoned demon in our Frostgrave campaign. Anyone know what this critter's called?

UPDATE: My thanks to joe5mc for IDing this mini as "gug, eldritch horror." I'm flattered that the author of Frostgrave stopped by the Dreadnought.

Sympathy for this devil

Another Wiz Kids mini, this time a Bone Devil from the Pathfinder line. He will come in handy in future Frostgrave scenarios from the Forgotten Pacts supplement.

A simple paint job: basecoat black, drybrush lighter shades of brown all the way to linen then vintage white. I then filled the eye sockets with color-shifting blue paint. The base is drybrushed gray, then white.

It's not gonna win any awards, but it looks decent enough on the tabletop--and it's the first non-terrain piece I've painted in quite some time, so I'm glad to get this done.

Some more scatter terrain

I picked up these braziers from the Deep Cuts line by Wiz Kids, and they were very easy to paint: I first coated each cauldron in black, then drybrushed a dark gray, then drybrushed a lighter gray. The flames, which are cast in translucent material, received a coat of color-shifting yellow blended into some color-shifting red to make color-shifting orange. This was a nice result for very little effort that will provide some more scenery for the next Frostgrave game.