Things have been rather quiet on my blog lately. Yes I have left it untouched for almost a month. I just have not had time to post. But stuff is going on behind the scenes. I have been busy getting ready for the games I am running at Cold Wars; painting up some new figures, making some new terrain, plus designing some weapon cards for Forsaken. So things may look quiet but they aren’t.
Cold Wars seems like it is still as ways away. But I know I need to get my butt in gear so it does not catch me by surprise. I already submitted my two Forsaken games I am running that weekend for the convention. One is a zombie scenario the other is a scenario with vampires, werewolves and humans. Due to the dead line of the online PEL (Dec 14th 2007) I ended up submitting the vampire and werewolf game with only knowing that I wanted to run one and the general outline of what I wanted to do. So since that time I have fleshed the scenario out more and already created the characters for the 3 groups involved.
Chuck and I ran a play test of the werewolf and vampire scenario the other weekend and it went rather well. The werewolves were very tough, as I had planned for them to be. I hope to be play testing it again soon and plan on taking some pictures this time. The basic rules for Forsaken certainly feel like they have come together and are running smoothly. I have some writing revisions I need to sit down and do. Plus I need to start putting together the website with information for playtesters. I believe opening the rules up to a larger group of playtesters will certainly get things moving faster. Oh so much to do.
So while writing the Forsaken rules I have had to make some decisions on the rulebook layout. I know the rules are going to be in black and white. I looked at a number of rulesets that are print in B&W to see how they did their examples. The two choices are illustrations or photos. I found that the photos can be difficult to make out even in the rule books by the bigger game companies printed on coated paper. I decide to go with illustrations. But even with that decision I needed to choose how I want the illustrations to look. For me it is easier to create them in illustrator over drawing them by hand and scanning them in. Plus they will look more polished over hand drawn images. Below are two test examples I created to see what looks nice and will still print legibly. I think they turned out pretty good and should work nicely in the rules. Now I just have to put together all the visual examples I need.
Things have been quiet over the past few weeks and here is why… To give myself a swift kick in the butt on my rules and further along to be ready for demo games I signed up to run some games at Southern Front in Raleigh, NC. I had about 6 weeks or so to come up with 2 scenarios, finish a number of terrain pieces, get the rules in solid shape, as well as paint 42 figures. For me that was a pretty big task. I would say I am a rather slow painter, plus genreal life and work have been rather busy of the past few months.
Well the kick in the butt worked. I did put on two different scenarios. Both games went well and I had fun running them. But there sure were a few times when I wasn’t sure if I would get it all finished for the con. I was still putting things together, adding finishing touches, etc on up until 10 minutes before we left for Raleigh. But I wouldn’t have been able to get all this done without the help of Cecelia, who helped cut out paper terrain and was my personal inspirational coach and Jerry who helped out by painting 25 zombies for me. Thanks to you both.
Now that the convention is over I am glad I did it. I am hapy with what I got finished and the quality of the games that I put on. Plus the games provided some nice feedback for the rules. It helped show how quickly players were able to pickup on the rules after a brief introduction and any problems areas there may be with the rules.
I am already making plans to run more demo games at local game stores as well as a number of conventions in the number of months. At least things should be easier for these upcoming conventions as I will have more time plus not quite as much work will be needed in a short time.
I will be showing photos of the figures and games that I ran at Southern Front over the next few entries. I hope you like what you see.
So it is time for me to go on about some music I have been listening to recently. Last week I got the new album by The Birthday Massacre,Walking With Strangers. I am quite pleased with it and have been listening to it quite often. I have their other two albums (Nothing and Nowhere and Violet) and with this one they do not disappoint. Walking With Strangers continues with the soft flowing vocals of Chibi and their darkish electronic, guitars and 80’s influenced sound but with better production quality than the first two. I love how the songs go from something that could be straight from the 80’s to heavy guitar riffs like in the song Red Stars. Chibi’s vocals flow quite nicely whether it is a softer song or something heavy. It is worth a listen.
When I get some time I am planning on converting over the epic projects I have on my old site. Plus I am going to dust off some unpublished photos of epic stuff as well. Hopefully within the month. Just things are rather busy right now for me.
So I finally decided to give in and create a blog about my various miniature projects and what not. My intent is for this to replace my old website, Audrey’s Oubliette. We shall see.