This week have a treble hit of gaming fun, I know that’s a bit crazy me but that’s just how the week panned out. Game night on Tuesday saw us have an introduction to Gas Lands. Al picked this up and as I mentioned last week it looked like a really fun game. None of us have yet done any conversion work and to be honest I’ve only picked up one car so far. Having said that you don’t actually need a converted car to play the game, you just need the sheet that goes along with your car where you write down what upgrades you have taken. So we lined up three abreast, the flag dropped and off we went. Now I have to be honest and say we messed up the first round but then we began to find our feet. By the time we reached third gear on round one we had already had two wipe-outs, which Al reliably informed us he had never seen on any of the play test videos he’d watched. The next few rounds followed a similar patter but because I ended up on the other side of a barrier to the others I managed to pull out a bit of lead. Some lucky dice roles and a bit of caution saw me lined up on the finish line ready to streak to glory. I can tell you now with confidence this is a game that will kick in the goolies as soon as look at you. There was me expecting to race across the finish line with arms aloft only to spin out and crash into a barrier. Fortunately I still had two hull points left so did manage to crawl across the line on the next turn. All in all it was really fun game and once you have a couple of games under your belt will become second nature.
One thing I have noticed whilst looking for cars to use is the silly prices some of these things are going for on eBay in particular. I put a bid in for a selection of old beat up cars, and they are advertised accurately as wrecks. The final bid was for over £30 which is good for the seller but just silly money for what was there. Following the game I had a trip to the local supermarket and picked up this little lot for £xx. A lick of paint and some weapons and jobs a good one. Although I am going to keep my eye out for some minis. If I can get them for the right price an Italian job crew would look nice.
We then had a double helping of D&D. Now this is starching things a bit but in terms of the Waffle the week runs Saturday morning to Saturday morning. So having a session last Saturday night and other last night (Friday) brings them both in scope for this week. I’m repeating myself a bit here but I’m really enjoying this foray into D&D and that is rubbing off with a new found enthusiasm for gaming in particular. Which also rubs off on hobby time, so all in all it’s been a really good start to the year.
On the D&D front we’ve managed not to get anyone in the party killed yet despite some real blundering about as we find our feet. The Saturday night session was broken up a bit as half the party joint late so the rest of us has a little side trip and got very drunk, our characters not us, in the process. The level of role play for this was amazing, proving that all that practice has finally paid off. We managed to make a little money along the way. More importantly we have started to piece together a little more information about what is going in the world around us. Or at least we think we have but knowing Anna (or DM) we’re probably completely wrong. Talking about our DM she has introduced a couple of rules that I can’t find anywhere in the players hand book. The first is whenever you roll a natural twenty for a test you have to come out with a cheesy one liner, appropriate to the feat you trying to accomplish. Adds a nice touch to the proceedings. The other is that if you deliver the knock down blow in a fight you have to describe how you delivered the killing blow. Again a nice touch and it starts to bring out the character of the players, although I’m now starting to think about this more in line with what my character might do. Both of these are nice touches but what they really do is get you into the spirit of the game and really add some fun to proceedings.
Saturday also saw us do our first bit of dungeon delving and again Anna’s preparation really paid off. She has produced some lovely A1 laminated maps and to represent the fact what we were in a dungeon with limited visibility she had used some ‘liquid chalk’ to cover the map. As we proceeded further into the dungeon whoever was at the front of the party would scratch off some this covering to reveal the map below. At times I’d rather have not been able to see what was coming after me but no one died so it was a good night. She also trough in a number of puzzles that added another dynamic to the game, especially when we were taking damage for not solving them quickly enough. The end result was that we all took a bit of damage but completed the tests presented to us by the wraith who as guardian of the tomb. I manage to stop Orrakk from plundering the place and getting us all turned into the undead and we got a nice little reward at the end. Leaving us all ready for the next adventure.
I’ll come back to Friday night’s adventures after a bit of a hobby update. I’ll start with a mini success with a new Halfling Monk model. I ordered a few so that I could play around and find out which one works best, so you can expect to see a few more over the coming weeks. This one fits in well with some of dice rolls in that I keep missing with my quarter staff but doing well with my unarmed attacks. So I’ve dropped the quarter staff with this one and he’s just there, open handed and fury footed read to protect his companions.
I’ve been patient with my two Crystal Brush wan bees applying the primer over the weekend and then leaving it for a full twenty four hours before doing anything else. That anything else has taken the form of me working on the base for (goblin name) because I thought on balance it was the easiest part of the model to start with. As it’s also wooden I did the barrel at the same time. I deliberately kept them as separate pieces as I wanted to go for a different wood effect on each and this seemed like the easiest way to do it. I’ve still got a way to go with them but I feel they are coming on nicely and with a bit of time spent on them this weekend I think I can make some good progress.
Part two of this weeks D&D adventure could well be our penultimate encounter. Things didn’t’ start well with our overnight camp being attacked some pretty poor dice rolling all round. The only thing that really saved us what the DM was also rolling poor dice. After recovering from that little escapade we ended up tracking down a goblin we had been looking for and if it wasn’t for a particularly talented healer in our midst we would have lost a couple of members of the party. But once again and more through luck than good judgement we manged to survive the encounter and get a bit of time to heal. You know how bad things are going when Corey with two attacks rolls a natural twenty followed by a natural one. At this point we decided the safe thing to do was to head back to town to regroup and look for some work that might not quite so taxing. But that’s not what the DM had planned for us. The town was under attack by the half ork slavers we had been hearing so much about and one of the towns folk we had met before who had managed to escape told us the rest of the folk had been captured and were being held in slave carts on the other side of town. Now we have a half ork in our party so the plan was for him to escort one of us, as if he had captured him, to the other side of town to free the towns folk to help fit off the slavers. The others would cause a distraction to make things easier. Or at least that was the plan. What happened was an ambush and we are now in a fight, to be concluded next week, that I don’t think we can win.
So on that cheerful note I’m going to end this weeks update. The rest of the weekend is going to be spent painting and thinking about how fast my character can run away. Have a good weekend and I’ll catch you all next week.
