A planet where apes evolved from men?

We finally got the whole group together to play the first session of Into the Forbidden Zone. Since it’s a published adventure I don’t want to post any spoilers, but I will say that a jailbreak scenario is a great idea for a first game: it provides a simple reason for a group of wildly different characters to have to work together (especially important here since the PotA world is so stratified), and it gives them a complex task to perform right away, with several different possible approaches.

The players came up with some great ideas during the game, each of them really leaning in to the strengths and weaknesses of the provided pre-generated characters. We have one player who is…let’s say less than enthused about the setting, but he chose to take on the mutant character, whose psychic abilities make her essentially the spellcaster of the group and therefore the most complex to play. But he really got into it, taking the time to figure out some innovative solutions, even helping me out by getting some needed exposition out of a dying NPC.

The Statue of Liberty dice tower is an impressive table decoration. However, its practical use as a dice tower is somewhat limited — it’s a bit too large to pass around easily, so only the players on one side of the table got to use it. More importantly, the “tunnel” for the dice is fairly narrow, with room for only two or three dice at a time. For a game where players are routinely rolling 8 or more dice at a time, it’s a little problematic. Still fun though.

When I backed the Kickstarter for The Roleplaying Game of the Planet of the Apes, I had originally skipped the Higher Calling miniatures set. It consists of two usable miniatures and two terrain pieces, one of which is pretty much just a big display piece. I couldn’t really see a diorama of the missile-turned-religious-icon from Beneath the Planet of the Apes being particularly useful.

I did include the Liberty and Death set in my pledge — I could see some value in the Statue of Liberty terrain piece for other post-apocalypse games, plus it’s a dice tower which I found very amusing. When my stuff arrived, I was so impressed with the Statue of Liberty model that I scrambled to see if I could get the Higher Calling set as a late pledge/preorder, and luckily I was able to.

I’m still not sure whether the missile will be of any use in the game, but the boxed set does include a reference card for it that provides an in-game effect, so I may try to work it into the campaign. The Statue of Liberty has a similar card — it causes human astronaut characters to have to defend against mental trauma when they see it, as the realization dawns that they’re not on an alien planet after all…

I’ve got the rest of the miniatures done. The Lawgiver statue has an in-game effect, giving ape characters that believe in the tenets of their society a bonus to their skill rolls and the ability to resist fear effects, but if they see it being defiled or otherwise disrespected they have to roll for mental trauma. Most of the campaign takes place out among the mutants in the ruins of New York, but it still might be interesting to have the statue appear in unlikely places.

Our roleplaying group decided to push the start of the campaign out a week, which gave me time to finish up most of the miniatures.

I used my usual approach for this batch: black primer, a drybrush in grey so I can see the details, then flat mid-tone color followed by washes for the shadows and drybrushed highlights. The only exception was the three mutants, who started with grey primer followed by a few layers of drybrushing and then a bit of speedpaint for the faces and spot colors.

I have the remaining five miniatures mostly done — they’re just waiting on a coat of varnish. I’ve also got a terrain/display piece: the Alpha/Omega missile from Beneath the Planet of the Apes. I most likely won’t need it for the game, although part of the campaign does take place in the underground ruins of New York so you never know…

Wow, a coveted Golden Button for my first project of the year! Thanks Ben, Gerry and John for the kind words, and congratulations to the other two winners as well.

One of our players had to cancel at the last minute. Another player was out too due to a planned absence, and I didn’t want to start a campaign with two players missing so I had to pivot a little. I ran the three remaining players through the introductory one-shot adventure, something I hadn’t originally planned on doing. It turned out to have been a great idea — none of us has much familiarity with the West End Games d6 system, so it was a good trial run to get used to the game mechanics.

It was also extremely useful for me to get a sense of the way adventure material is written for this game. The game’s authors favor a “sandbox” approach, giving a fairly structured beginning scene or two and then providing a map and/or a list of potential encounters that the players can experience (or not) in whatever order they choose. It’s good for making the players feel like they get to decide where to do and what to do, but the approach can sometimes feel a little vague and unconvincing, especially if you’re the game master trying to shoehorn a plot into it all.

Both the intro adventure and the longer Into the Forbidden Zone campaign we’ll be playing through use this approach. It was great for me to be able to see it in action: the adventure started with a simple premise (the players are all ape characters who are chasing down rumors about some particularly wily and troublesome human beasts), and then led into a map with different encounters at different locations. The players were given a few rumors about the different areas to get them started, and then were free to go wherever they wanted, and the text gave me plenty of leeway to have the human antagonists appear wherever I needed them to, but sprinkled in other encounters as well.

They ended up exploring less than half of the map — at one point they failed a survival roll and got lost in the jungle, and the sandbox nature of the material let me use that to steer them in directions they might not have gone. It also let me scale the adventure to the time we had available to play. The campaign uses a similar structure, and this trial run gave me some good ideas for how to manage it. We’ll (hopefully) start the campaign proper next week, and now I’ve got an extra week to finish painting the miniatures…

I got all the player character miniatures painted in time for our first game session. I also finished 3 additional primitive humans, and one extra astro-naut (just in case whoever plays that character wants to gender-swap).

Originally I had planned on using the Dallimore approach — the artwork in the rule book is in a loose, brush strokey style that I quite like, and I wanted to emulate that on the models. But I was in a rush to get them done in time, so I opted for a basic Speedpaint approach instead, using white drybrushing over a light grey primer as a base coat. I definitely learned a few things.

1. Don’t paint when you’re in a hurry

I don’t play in tournaments so it’s rare that I’m on a deadline to finish anything. I really don’t like being in a rush (I gave myself 3 months to finish my entries for the UKGE painting contest last year). I think you end up making more mistakes and having to say “good enough” because you don’t have time to fix them. That’s not to say that you should spend forever noodling at your models, but this is supposed to be a relaxing hobby, and I like being able to finish every model to my own satisfaction.

2. If you must paint when you’re in a hurry, don’t use Speedpaints

Yes, Speedpaints (and to a lesser extent, washes) are a huge time saver in a lot of ways, but at the same time, they can often be…unpredictable. When working on these, I had a lot of issues with the paint pooling in big blobs — normally I would be moving the speedpaint around a bit as it settles to avoid this, but with 10 figures to get done in a short amount of time, I wasn’t as attentive as usual. I freely admit that this was user error on my part and not really a failing of the product.

3. Don’t second-guess yourself

I ended up spending about 3 extra hours going over each model to “fix” the spots where the speedpaint hadn’t done what I wanted it to, and the result was something more like what I originally had in mind for these. So I guess it’s a win? Anyway, I’m happy enough with the final result but I will definitely approach the rest of the models a little differently.

The crowdfunding campaign for the new Roleplaying Game of the Planet of the Apes included a nice set of miniatures that I’d like to use in the game, which I’ll be running shortly. I don’t think you need to use miniatures for every little thing when playing a RPG, but they can be useful when playing out combat or other scenes where each character’s position is important.

We’ll be using pre-generated player characters for the game, all of whom are more-or-less represented among the models, along with some (but annoyingly, not all) of the campaign’s antagonists.

The catch is that we’re starting in less than a week, so there’s no way I’ll have all of these done in time. I’m going to prioritize the player characters for this week, and work on getting the rest done over the coming weeks as I need them for the game. In the mean time, I’ve got a fair amount of Apes-compatible models from Star Schlock and Crooked Dice that I can use, as long as the scale works out…

The first session involves a jailbreak that I’ll want to have miniatures for, so hopefully I’ll at least have the player characters ready in time — I can substitute the Star Schlock gorillas for the prison guards, and a smaller Crooked Dice models will work fine for the NPC prisoners. If I need more primitive humans I can dip into my fairly large collection of Savage Core stuff…