Song Of Blasters Ponderings

Hi!

I've had an unexpected week of holidays and have spent much of it off out enjoying the equally unexpectedly nice weather we've been having so must admit that hobby time has been rather limited. What little time I've had spare has been dedicated to lots of illustrations and background scribblings for my Somewhere on the Border project but I've been pondering my ad hoc ruleset Song of Blasters and some of the possibilities it has.

I had originally based it loosely on Song of Blades and Heroes but with a few tweaks as I never really liked the fact that close combat seemed to involve lots of pushing and shoving and actually removing a model as a casualty was surprisingly difficult. Over the last year or so, the rules seem to have developed a bit of a life of their own and have morphed considerably.

Song of Blasters SD Scale

Instead of the two stats of Quality and Combat that Song of Blades had, along with the assorted special abilities which gave each model some more character, Song of Blasters has Quality, Move, Shoot, Combat and Armour as well as special abilities. I felt that the extra stats were needed as I found they worked better but still kept things simple while allowing for a game to run in about half an hour with a reasonable number of figures.

Song of Blasters in 15mm

As things developed, I tried the rules with 15mm sci-fi, Epic scale and my SD scaled stuff and found it worked fairly well for what I was looking for in a game. I've since added more crunchy bits for magic which makes things a bit more interesting without requiring much record keeping or faff. I've also tinkered with using different kinds of dice for this and that and each little revision has brought me closer to what I'm looking for in a game.

Song of Blasters 6mm scale

I must admit it's been hugely entertaining as I play around with the rules but I've been tempted to give it a try with some more RPG Lite elements with smaller numbers of figures (possibly half a dozen a side) with multiple wounds and more in depth abilities such as different modes of attack and defence with everything based around a heavily scenario driven approach.

I'm not sure where I'm going with this project but I'm interested to see how it develops as I'm tempted to use it to paint up some small warbands that I've had kicking around for a while and seeing how things develop. Hopefully I'll be able to post a sample battle report in the coming week or so once I've got myself sorted out but I also need to start compiling my notes as much of the rules are scribbled on bits of paper or stored haphazardly in my rather poor memory and I could really do with putting it all into some sort of order and seeing how I get on...

Having re-read this rambling, I realise it's a bit of a drabble but I kind of wanted to get my thoughts in order and always find posting something on my blog helps so apologies for the meander and thanks for putting up with it!

All the best!