Tuesday 23 November 2021

Flintloque/Planet 28 Mashup

 Hi!

I managed to play out a quick game of Planet 28 using my old Flintloque figures the other day in a much needed bit of hobby time after our flat got flooded no less than seven times in the last couple of months!

Sadly I only managed to get a couple of fleeting shots (apologies for the crappy lighting and often blurry nature of said shots!) of the action but the scenario was a really quick test game to see how the system worked with black powder level technology and it was rather fun to boot!

Sharke and Harpy been scouting the local Goblin settlements cantina in search of some grog to requisition for the lads in the 95th Rifles but stumbled upon an Elven patrol and a shootout ensued.

Harpy and Leftenant Sharke

Sharke is armed with a rifle, sword and light armour whilst Harpy has a volley gun. Game wise, the Rifle has a long range and decent amount of stopping power but takes 2 actions to reload whilst the volley gun is short ranged but deadly if it hits but takes 3 actions to reload successfully.

Ferach Voltigeurs 

The Voltigeurs are armed with muskets which have a fairly decent range and stopping power and take a single action to reload. The Orcs have a decided advantage in close combat whilst the Elves are generally better shots.

The battlefield consists of a huddle of huts with several patches of trees and the odd standing stone with the Orcs entering from the right and the Elves from the left.



Things began fairly slowly with the Orcs splitting up and approaching the Elves from different sides of the village but the Elves still got the drop on Sharke with one Voltigeur getting a lucky shot off which caused eight points of damage to the doughty Half Orc.


Furious at getting shot, Sharke forgoes returning fire and charges the startled Elf with a bellow and manages to badly maul his foe (16 points of damage!) before driving the Snivelling and now badly bleeding Elf back. But the badly beaten Elf was made of surprisingly stern stuff and reloaded his musket with a shaking hand and muttered a prayer before pulling the trigger. Opening his eyes, he sees Sharke lying flat out on the ground, seemingly dead (I rolled a perfect success for his shot which resulted in maximum damage and Sharke rolled terribly for armour!) Could this be the last we see of the exploits of Leftenant Richard Sharke?


Meanwhile on the other side of the village, the two remaining Elves had taken potshots at the Bog Orc Harpy but only managed to enrage him and I had hoped that his Volley gun would make short work of the pesky Elves but he managed to miss at near point blank range and had to resort to clubbing the pointy eared Ferach to a pulp using the now unloaded weapon like a bludgeon, swearing profusely whilst he did so.


The game concluded with the badly wounded Voltigeurs legging it before the wrath of Harpy who paused to scoop up his possibly dead officer before heading to the cantina for some much needed refreshments and pour some booze down Sharkes throat to bring him back to the land of the living.

All in all, I really enjoyed playing the Flintloque/ Planet 28 mashup as its such an easy system to tweak to work with whatever figures or indeed setting you have. Musketry is fearfully effective and I think in subsequent games I make mess around with wounds and armour levels a smidge but I am looking forward to getting some more games in the near future!

Sadly I am finding Blogger to be a total pain in the bum at the moment with a lot of features I've used for years inexplicably changed, removed or in some way made infuriating which has resulted in me blogging less than I'd like. (case in point the text box where I've been displaying my painted figure count!) Hopefully it will return to something like normal soon but I have started using Instagram too and will see how things go over there. I post under Spacecowsmith so if you fancy having a peruse, do feel free!

In the meantime, All the best!

Friday 5 November 2021

Returning to Flintloque, Sort Of...

 Hi!

I've been sorting through my assorted gubbins and found myself rummaging out my Flintloque and Deadloque stuff and it got me to thinking about finishing off the odds and ends that I've got based but not finished.

Now I doubt I'll be able to play full section level combat using Flintloque as I have a really small gaming area and lets face it, the attention span of a gnat so the prospect of needing 15-20 figures a side isn't something I really want to contemplate. 

Instead I'm thinking of using a hybridised version of Planet 28 and Brutal Quest and playing a number of linked scenarios with a handful of characters a side and see how things go.

I've still got most of the Flintloque box set to paint up but reckon I have enough painted to make a start on trying out some test games using my Deadloque games. I need to paint up a small base board to represent the frozen winter of the Witchlands and a couple more pieces of scenery as well but I'm quite looking forward to the prospect of playing some games again.

I'll get some terrain painted up in the next couple of days and will post my progress here so watch this space!

All the best!

Monday 1 November 2021

Designing Fantasy Land Ironclads Part 1

 Hi!

I've spent a bit of time looking at my scribbled notes and ideas about the design processes and possibilities for a fantasy Land Ironclads setting and thought I'd use this post to work out some of my ideas!



My initial aim is to get my Dwarf and Orc landfleets built and into action so I'll be looking at them initially and post a bit about what aesthetics and type of play they will be aimed towards.


The Dwarves specialise in engineering and have no magic or magitech, relying on the tried and true steam engine to power most of their vehicles, with a few exceptions so they will stylistically be lumbering and slow moving classic tank designs with a majority of their firepower aimed forwards to suit their defensive nature. The smaller vehicles in the landfleet are the Ironclads, well armoured and armed but slow. Similarly the heavier Anvil class is basically a beefed up version of the Ironclad with heavier armour and guns and are intended to plod forward and blast anything that gets within range of them.

But I also have the Warhammer and Battle Forge classes, proper cruiser level Land Ironclads who will be able to dish out serious amounts of firepower while trundling around. While the Warhammer has a single medium turret and two medium gun barbettes, they also have a pair of light gatling turrets to deal with any marauding infantry trying to sneak up on the flank. The Battle Forge is a bit of an oddball with a heavy gun turret but also a very powerful broadside which doesn't fit too well with the modern Dwarven approach to battle.

Ironclad Formation

I still need to make more cruiser level Land Ironclads for the Dwarves and plan on making a couple of big Battleship levels as well but am currently pondering on how to make these look. One of the best things about working in such a small scale is that I can make machines pretty quickly and easily and with the nature of an industrialised people who are fiercely clannish, they will have a fairly wide variety of styles and makes of warengines depending on which Hold they come from. 

The Dwarves also make use of walkers so I'm going to make a bunch of War Golems to give the Dwarven forces some more mobile contraptions and am contemplating making some larger Living Ancestor class Golems for a bit of fun!

There's also the Airfleet to think of as I already have a Dig bomber and some Gyrocopters to buzz around and annoy opponents and suspect that I'll be beefing this branch of the military up as well...

Finally I want to add some specialist Land Ironclads to my collection in the form of a carrier and possibly some heavy artillery too to give me a really large selection of stuff to choose from for the upcoming campaign.

The Orcish Horde is a very different beast.

Titanosaur Gun Wartowers

The Orcs are a culture that thrives on war but are largely nomadic and use vast lizard like creatures to act as their weapons of war so I've got several small and medium level Warbeasts done already but feel that the Orcs will also be getting some experimental and very unreliable Land Ironclads too as they attempt to modernise their forces. 

Gamewise, the Warbeasts will be quicker and probably more manoeuvrable than the clanking Dwarven machines and better suited to rushing forward and getting into close combat with their opponents, relying on the combat prowess of the Warbeasts to crush enemy formations. This will probably mean that I've got a lot of sculpting ahead of me as the beasts will probably be quite cheap gamewise as they're a bit fragile so need numbers to make up the deficiency in lastability.

Orc Formation

I've currently got Necrosaur and Titanosaur gun wartowers which will form the bulk of my forces but will give the force more options by including rocket wartowers and twin titanosaur heavy gun batteries to give them some long range punch. Coupled with lots of infantry and cavalry, the Horde should fight quite differently from the Dwarven defenders.

Land Ironclad wise, the Orcs will be getting some Orkish style scraptech. Bodged together from all manner of sources, the Orcish Land Ironclads will be formed of a fairly readily available small class and rarer but heavy cruiser classes to act as mobile command and bragging bases for the Khans to lord it over their followers and as already mentioned, they will be pretty experimental with some interesting weapon options ranging from spar torpedos to the Eye of Gorath!

Necrosaur Gun Wartowers

The Orc airfleet will consist largely of Darkwings and Wyverns, small to medium sized winged lizards which will be available in considerable numbers as they will rely on swarm attacks to wreak havoc on their opponents. 

Fluff wise, the Orcs in Aeroth are actually Gorathian's, a race imported from another planet by the Elves long ago to act as soldiers in their army but The Death caused by the thrice cursed Elves use of the World Killer Engine to defeat a mysterious foe has left them trapped on Aeroth and desperate to get back to their own world, or failing that to conquer this new one. They are a largely nomadic culture but do have several permanent settlements which are more like military camps than anything else. They have subjugated the Goblins and use them as manual labourers who farm, raise flocks of smaller creatures and generally act as cannon fodder in Orc attacks.

Thus far I've spend more time thinking about the Orcs and Dwarves than I have the Elves and Human Barbarians who make up the other two major factions in the game but here's some ponderings on them too!

The Elves are masters of Magitechnology so have access to all manner of arcane weapons of war. Their frontier forces make plentiful use of Earthbound Dragons. Twisted and mutated descendants of the true dragons are fast moving and capable of carrying Powerlances mounted on their scaly backs. Next up there is the Landfleet, beautiful but deadly grav vehicles who use Liftstones to float effortlessly over the landscape and powered by Earthpower, an arcane energy that the Elves contain within great crystals and allow the vehicles to move, fire weaponry and in some of the larger and specialised classes shield them from incoming fire.

The Elven forces will probably find themselves outnumbered by pretty much any opponent but their long range and deadly firepower will balance the scales somewhat and their rapid moving and oft times shielded vehicles will tip the odds in their favour more often than not.

The Elves also have access to the largest and most powerful of airfleets with dragonrider wings and great flying barques that can rain down destruction upon any foe with near impunity so there's plenty of interesting stuff to play around with!

As for the Barbarians, they specialise in Elemental magic so can summon great elementals to crush their foes so there will be a number of different sizes and types of elemental to make ranging from stone elementals armed with massive boulder throwing and combat potential to fire elementals capable of searing opponents to wind elementals who specialise in bringing destruction on airfleets.

They also make use of warbeasts like the Orcs so will have chariots and wartowers armed with small shard guns, elementally charged weapons that fire iron bolts at great speed and capable of transporting infantry. 

I've also got loads of other stuff to work on, be they the Sea Demons, Daughters of Leviathan, the Horned Folk, Children of the Moon, Followers of the Worm, The Knights of the Eternal Light, the City States, the Order of the Tower, Grey Elves, The Stygian, The Fallen, Mercenaries and more! 


Hopefully I'll get chance to flesh out each of these forces but I want to get the Orcs and Dwarves finished first as well as delving into the setting I've been creating as well so apologies for all the rambling but I've found it rather fun to start getting the project moving on so do expect more Land Ironclads updates soon!

All the best!