A Brave New World

With the Raiders seen off, at least for the time being it is decided to take the opportunity to search the wagon they were so desperate to retain.

Hidden under some old clothing is a small child who tells you that he was on a scavenging hunt with his father and two men from his settlement when the raiders found them.  His father instructed them all to flee while he held the attackers off.   The child watched as his father was gunned down and ran back to help him, where he was easily overpowered and taken as a hostage, no doubt to be used to extort even more from his homestead.  The two others managed to escape and headed into the sewer network below the factory.

Unfortunately, all the gunfire disturbed a pack of feral Ghouls which, although killed off most of the attacking Raiders also cut off the two scavengers from escaping the sewer system.

Not being the type of people to turn your back on someone in need, or rather just knowing the look on Preston’s face should you not offer to help, it’s time to prep those guns and go down into the gloom to rescue those scavengers.

So, a search and rescue mission sounded like it could be fun.  Just for the added excitement, it’s going to be in poor lighting, and why is there an ominous green glow?

For this scenario, we reduced the range of interacting with investigation tokens down to the much smaller red range ruler.  We also had a rule that if you entered the murky water or ended the turn in the water you would take radiation damage.  In addition to that, the yellow toxic waste barrels also had an area effect where if you ended your turn within a certain range, they would also cause radiation damage.  Finally, the feral ghouls, once killed would respawn at the far end of the board.

The survivors had to search for two lost scavengers and then once located, safely exit the sewers by one of three exit ladders.

My friends Adam and Tarron for Alpha Strike here in Perth, took a break from all their Battletech videos and managed to take a hasty video of the game.

Once they have sorted it out a little, I will upload it here too.

Adam and Tarron of Alpha Strike here in Perth did a little battle report, recorded on a mobile phone.   Just a word of warning, the camera moves around quite a lot so not for those with motion sickness.

For the next game in our little campaign, we should continue to make sure the metalworks factory is secure.   There do seem to be some odd noises coming from the sewers that run below the building and I wonder why there are so many barrels of nuclear waste lying around.

Is that the sound of someone calling for help, or is it just the sound of the plumping groaning as it continues to collapse?  Only one way to know for sure.

For this, I am going to use the sewers that form part of my Port Blacksand project.  It will mean I can use something I already have to hand and also buy me a bit of time to get other stuff finished.

I managed to get a day to get stuff done and set about adding some paint to the crashed aeroplane stl I had printed out ages ago.

For this I turned to my go-to painting medium, Rattle-Cans.

I started with a grey filler primer over everything followed by a cheap grey primer from the local hardware store.  After that a few progressively lighter shades before finishing off the hull with a gloss white.  Once that was done, I masked of the hull structure leaving the area I wanted red clear and gave that a nice coat of read spray paint.

Next up I used a variety of different spray paints to create some weathering.  Black, Brown and Zandri Dust.

The bases were sprayed with Brown, Desert Yellow and Zandri Dust.   I didn’t mind about overspray as it just added to the weathering.

I used Citadel technical paint over the bases to create a cracked earth look and then dabbed dark brown paint on pits of the wreckage with a sponge.  Finally, I added small amounts of silver to show some chipping and add some variety to the colours used.

The crates were pretty much painted in the same way, but I used a really cheap wide kids paint brush to paint them.  They were supposed to look rough anyway so no point in using expensive paintbrushes on these.

The wooden-looking framework was Rattle-Canned with Black followed by a light dusting of Brown.

Sure, there is still more detail I could add.  The bases for one need some work done on them and I will probably add some lettering to the plane hull at some point but at the moment my printer is out of ink so I can’t make a stencil.

There are also parts of the gantries which should be metal that are currently painted brown, but for now, it’s playable and nothing is stopping me from going back and adding more detail.

The whole lot took less than a day to paint, so I am pretty happy with that.  It’s not the best paint job I have ever done but I think with the post-apocalypse wasteland you can get away with things looking a little rough.  I find it adds to the charm of the setting a bit when it all looks a little rough anyway.

I had to come up with a quick scenario on the fly, so I decided that the Raider who had started loading up the cart before being scared off by the Ghouls turned up with some backup.

Again, we kept things pretty simple as we are still learning the rules.  I decided that during the lull our group of survivors had found a way to decommission the Turret, unfortunately reprograming it was just too difficult a task, so the only viable option was to completely take it offline.

This was a simple mission of defend the factory, whilst also clearing the grounds of yet-to-be-discovered traps.  The survivors have to fight off the Raiders whilst also discovering and resolving five danger tokens outside the factory.

The Raiders on the other hand want their stuff in the cart and will be trying to force the Survivors to abandon the field.

This was a relatively short battle, but we did realise that Raiders are a lot tougher than Radroaches.

We decided to let the Raiders use their armour stats as shown on the cards, whilst our survivors did not.  The only armour they get is what they can find or buy.   We figured this would be a good way of making it a little tougher on ourselves and also keeping the card management for the AI down a bit.

We are also running our own interpretation of the campaign/settlement mode.

Everything we do and everything we find has some form of impact on our little campaign.  We are not gaining caps (money) for just winning a game.  We actually have to find stuff to sell to make money.   Likewise, if we want to add more members to our force we have to recruit them by spending caps.  This expenditure is an arbitrary way of showing the cost involved in going out and actively seeking out potential recruits.  We are using the caps cost for Battle mode for ‘buying new recruits’ so to add a basic settler to our gang will be a lot easier than adding a Brotherhood of Steel Knight for example.

I think over time we will fine-tune a settlement mode that we are happy with and use the official Modiphius one as a guide to how we want ours to work.

I guess at some point soon I should start thinking about making some more terrain to add some variety to our games.

Well, this project system has done it again with a nice double post in error.   So looks like I will have to put something else in here to fill the space as there is no option to delete complete posts.

So, to fill this space with something I guess I will share some images of a piece of terrain I have been sitting on for a very long time, possibly as long as two years now, that at some point I will get around to doing something with.

For this battle we tried to keep thing fairly simple.  The Sole Survivor, Piper and Preston Garvey would be searching the ruined steelworks for suitable pieces of metal that could then be used as crude armour plates.

Breaking off the bits required whilst keeping enough intact to be usable would not be easy and required a strength test at -4.  However, there was a bonus of +2 per extra person assisting with the action.  Any plates successfully removed would provide a hard armour +1 bonus for the next mission.

Mixed in with the metal pieces there were also numerous other items to be looted, some would turn out to be nothing but worthless junk, some would be items that could be later sold, and some could just turn out to be traps.

The factory was infested with Radroaches and a family of Feral Ghouls had also taken up residence.  In addition, there was a Machine Gun Turret near the front door (Which the players didn’t even notice on the table until it started firing).

Not many pieces of metal were secured, mainly due to the Turret catching players by surprise and making them take a huge detour to avoid facing it. However, the mission was classed as a success as the factory was cleared out and made secure.

Although badly bruised and beaten we had managed to find a couple of Stimpacks and a Radaway to help patch us up meaning that we would be heading into the next mission with Piper and the Sole Survivor having one radiation damage and Preston having one normal damage.

Out of the items we discovered the most notable included, some Leather Armour, a Usable piece of Steel Pipe and one piece of Metal that could be fashioned into a crude piece of armour.

The game was great fun.  The players enjoyed it so much that they wanted to continue playing, so on the fly I had to come up with another scenario.

After a rather disastrous start to our timid steps into the new world, it became very quickly apparent that we would not survive for long without some form of protection.  Thankfully a nearby steel manufacturing plant could provide some raw materials that could be very handy.

The mission is simple, get in and gather some useful bits of steel that can be crafted into some form or crude armour plates, if we are lucky, we may even find some other useful items.

Approaching the outer wall, it looks like someone had the same idea and an abandoned cart loaded with goodies has been left outside. Hopefully, whatever scared them off is not still here.

The table is set for the three of us to fumble our way through another game of Fallout Wasteland Warfare tomorrow.

The table was set, and it was time to get some figures out and have a go at actually playing a game of Fallout Wasteland Warfare.

Both my friend, Adam, and I had read through the rules and watched plenty of YouTube videos in preparation for our first tentative steps into the world.

We decided that we would play cooperatively as ultimately the plan is that a small group of us, Myself and my two Battletech buddies, would have a go at setting up a settlement and hopefully watch it prosper as we worked together to build a better world.  For when we needed to scratch that itch of going head-to-head, we would shift over to Fallout Factions and run opposing gangs there.

We chose to arm our small motley crew of rag-tag humans with the bare minimum, a bolt rifle here, a stun baton there, nothing too fancy as we imagined that this was a group of newly acquainted people just starting out.

We kept the AI controlled enemies to the basics of Molerats and Radroach’s, which we figured we should be able to handle without too much drama, oh how wrong were we?

Now this game really does make you feel like you are totally unprepared for all the nasties out there and it wasn’t too long before we realised just how squishy people really are in the irradiated wasteland.  Before long, our team was swamped by gribbly creatures hell-bent on sucking out our juicy innards.

Thankfully this was a learning game before settling down on how we intend to go forward and we certainly learnt a lot.   Having no armour makes things scary.  When things charge you, it is a fight for your life, none of this heroic wading through things unscathed.    Some of the larger things in the wasteland just got a lot scarier and even the smallest piece of armour became a lot more sought after.

The game does a great job of capturing the feel of the video game where at low levels you do feel vulnerable to almost everything.

After the game, we sat back and reflected on how we planned to go forward with this, and we decided that we quite liked the feeling of being completely out of our depth.  It made those small finds so much more important, the small victories so much more awesome and all of a sudden, our characters were at risk of being lost by our carelessness and that the loss of even one person would send shockwaves through our little settlement.

So yes, there will be more.  We will start up a little group, head into the wasteland, and see where our adventures take us.  I know one thing for sure, I will enjoy doing more terrain for this at the very least.