The Fires of Redemption Flicker

The Bodysnatchers made a foray into the eastern end of the underhive. They were able to thwart a Redemptionist uprising, word spread to the grateful settlements and now there are three new mouths to feed.

The trading posts are filled with rumors of a shadow in the hive bottom, strange whispers have been heard on the sump winds and the Ratskins no longer travel abroad. A creeping darkness has descended on the underhive.

Come to Oakland It'll Be a Lot of Fun Dudes !

I sent out the word, but I will grab up some space to go on some more about it: THIS weekend, Saturday evening through all day Sunday I'm hosting games at my place in Oakland and all Op-For is invited.

I'll have the place to myself and there is room for 3+ tables and plenty of room to crash for out-of-towners.

So far I've got 2 yesses and a maybe, so despite my woefully last-minute planning it looks like we can make it happen. So sound off in the comments if you can make it. Itinerary is open to discussion. Warmachine, Necromunda, Space Hulk, Warmaster, etc.

You're a Winner!

Space Olympics... Galactic Cup... Hmmmmm.

p.s. somebody think up a way to determine a winner for Darth Santa's gift.

Seasons Beatings

The new poll for January is up. Vote early and often. It will only let me have it open for a week (limits of blogger again).

An Imperial transmission was intercepted yesterday. We've learned that Darth Santa dark lord of the Gift has used his funds to purchase a prize for the weekly gamers. He wants us to figure out a way to determine a winner over the next few weeks, then award him the prize. It is unknown what exactly the prize is, but Darth Santa stated "I like her fashion sense."

"You are part of the Rebel Alliance and on the Naughty List. Take her away!"

Warmachine Month Begins

Two heated battles ensued.

A strong and nimble Cygnar force unsheathed sharp bayonets against a combined assault by Khador and Mercenary armies. The battleground itself proved a challenge with both narrow passageways and tight bridges to cross. The powerful armies converged on each other at a narrow bridge centered on the battlefield. Unconfirmed reports from a mortally wounded Devil Dog, claim that Magnus fell to Caine and his calvary and trencher fire.

Meanwhile...


High Exemplar Kreoss encountered a Circle Orboros force on route through a small wooded area. The sneak attack began as Krueger's formidable army emerged out from hiding in the nearby forests and hills. The powerful wolves took their toll on the Protectorate forces, but in turn powered their own demise. Kreoss summoned the almighty power of Menoth and knocked Krueger's forces to their hairy knees. Then the Holy Zealots followed up with a napalm assault. At that point, Krueger's soul was destined to be claimed for Menoth.

Tau heading home

The Tau head back to friendly space sectors to re-group and gather more allies to the cause.

Dweebs or Sportos

Several Op-For members were spotted playing football yesterday morning. Not Bloodbowl or Slamball or some boardgame, actual football. It would have been a good time to strike, as they were powerless without their dice. At least one Op-For member was later seen hobbling around complaining of soreness.

The Death of Algoris

Super Death Rays, Wanna be grays, many pointy ears and mustache twirling villans. The Battle for Algoris, days of legend.

OK so it wasn't that big of a deal, but a big 1500 point Exerminatus mission including 5 fleets and 5 players is a good time. The christening by gaming of the Barney Garage was also pretty cool. May the Fufu Berry flow.



Eldar, Imperial, and Tau fleets going after poor gassy Algoria, Ork and Chaos rising to defend it's helpless inhabitants (cultists, demons, slavers, interstellar crime lords, and all...).

2 newly painted fleets:





Order fleets had a cunnin' master plan and played off the anti-elfy, fufu berry drinker hatred and drew the defenders out away from the planet, allowing the imperial death ships to deliver their payloads and kill Algoria Primus, mega-death dudes!

Nice bloody fleet action the way we like 'em.

More pictures here:

pics

CB out!

Exterminatus

Target: Algoria Prime

Estimated Casualties: 3.7 Tera-death

Fleet-Chaplain please lead us in the hymn, "Swift is the Emperor's Divine Judgement."

Commence Armament Rituals on my mark...

...Mark...

Primal!!!

Some Hordes/Warmachine pics from this weekend:

Trollbloods vs. Circle.

Grumpy old Trollblood Shaman Hourluk Doomshaper was telling
whippersnapper Kaya Wildborne:

"Get off my lawn!"

















Champions charge in and kick the Orboros first wave back to Stonehenge. Kaya and the Gatormen countercharged cookin' up some trollblood gumbo. Hourlok was able to get a bead on Kaya and beat here into the undergrowth with his "Withered Staff".

Imperial Inspiration

Not that I want to encourage them, but I followed the interwebs and ran across a great site for scratch-build/mash-ups for the Imperial Fleet. Check it out.

Bob DeAngelis' BFG site

Here is a shot of some of his cruisers. Maybe this will spark some ideas.

Warhammer!

Came across some pics of a game Damon and I played a while back. The skaven beat down the empire on this one. The rat magic phase was super hot, and I hate the bell......"THE BELL!"

Waaagh.....Dry Dock

Waaaagh, da dry dock! Da boyz needz more terror ships and I have some munched chaos and imperial cruisers kicking around. Here's the first of a couple "looted" terror ships. Main body is a chaos cruiser. Upper castle and launch bays are from an imperial bridge and imperial launch bays. Orky Bridge structure, tail fin, and ork fish/boar prow are plasticard. Looks a little like an angry sea cow, so I hereby christen this ship "Bad Grox".

>>Attached Recon Data Download<<

Name: Unknown Vessel

Type: Escort

Class: Infidel

Location: Steig Tertius (-Exterminatus-)

Dauntless Class Light Cruiser "Thunderchild" Captain's Report:

We spotted the vessel in high orbit around Steig-3. As soon as it was in range of our active sensors, it powered up for a full attack run at us. I ordered the helm hard to port, bringing our batteries to bear. They must have realised they were outclassed, for she disengaged. Our short ranged scanners captured this image just before they entered the warp:

It is currently unknown if any other ships are operating in the Steig system.

>>End Transmission<<

More Board Games

Here is another set of board games available...

Board Games:
Hero Quest
Fireball Island
Crossbows & Catapults
Cranium
Balderdash
Fact or Crap
Ingenious
Monopoly - Standard & Dot Com versions
Electronic Battleship
Cashflow
Scrabble

Card Games:
Mag-Blast

Plus a big set of clay poker chips

Here is a shot from the BFG game. The Imperials as they swing around a large green planet.

Making PDF's useful . . . and READABLE!

I hate reading pdfs. I've tried several viewers, and no matter the power of my computer they are slow and awkward. I came across a new method almost by accident, and I feel the need to share it. Maybe I'm not the only one who struggles with pdf game manuals, etc., so . . .

I've been lifting jpgs out of pdfs for awhile now using Adobe Reader, but doing so one by one is a pita. I found a program that converts the pdf to images wholesale (any format you want, really) and once I had the pages as pics, before cropping them up for the illustrations (as I was going to do) I was browsing using Picasa's picture viewer (the one that replaces Windows XP's default picture viewer that loads when you double click a pic) and I was floored by how much easier I could navigate--and what's more actually READ!--the doc. And, mind you, this is before I threw the pics into Picasa proper.

So you have a pdf you want to be able to read or reference on your computer without having to print it out. Do this.

Go to http://www.online-tech-tips.com/computer-tips/how-to-convert-a-pdf-file-to-word-excel-or-jpg-format/ and follow method 2 of converting pdf's to jpg. It will take you to Omniformat downloads http://www.omniformat.com/download.html
Get the 2 programs you need and install them. It is free. It takes about 30 seconds to load while it shows you ads, but otherwise has full functionality.

Using Omniformat, you will set up a folder to drop your pdfs in, and Omniformat will convert them to anything you want. Set it to convert to png (superior to jpg because it's lossless, but functions more or less the same with various programs), and set resultion to 300dpi in the preferences. Take your pdf and drop a copy into the Omniformat watch folder. DO NOT drop the original in, as the program erases the pdf when conversion is done. You will have png pages in a few moments. Move the pngs to to a folder in your library.

Open Picasa (and if you don't use Picasa, you should, period). Go to tools, options, and in the file types tab, make sure png is ticked. Add the folder where the pngs are to Picasa, and then move the folder to a new Collection called "ebooks," "library" or some such.

Why do all this? Do it once and you will be convinced. In Picasa when the thumbnails are at their largest size, I can view 12 pages at once, at a large enough size to tell what I'm looking at. Pic a page with a single click from the thumbnails view and hit Ctrl-4 to start a full screen slideshow. On my monitor, this is the perfect size to read. Esc brings you back to the thumbnail view. Click once on any thumbnail and press and hold Ctrl-Alt to get an instant full screen of that page (and you can scroll through the pages as long as Ctrl-Alt is depressed). You can also view at any zoom you want and navigate in the detailed view. Seriously, this method competes with reading a paper book, and that's saying a lot. Going from thumbnail to full screen and back in a blink of an eye gives you a an amazing sense of the book as a whole. What's more, in essence every doc in your entire library is open at the same time, and you can flip from one book to any other instantly. Make a new book by grabbing ten pages from one and throwing them into an album with ten pages from another. Add tags like to pages like "bookmark" to show where you stopped, or mark sections like "critical hit tables." I could write a whole post on the uses of tagging up a book. Really, I can't say enough how excited I am. I have a ton of pdf's that were next to useless and are now at my fingertips.

But from here you can go on to grab out the illustrations you want from the pdf. Browsing in Picasa, "Hold" all the pages you want pics in the tray, and throw them into a temp Album. Export them to a temp folder on your desktop with Use Original Size box ticked under Image Quality and Image Quality set to maximum. Either use Photoshop or another image editor to crop, or reimport that temp folder of duplicate images into Picasa (add folder), and crop them there. Hit Save to Disk in the top right of the folder to make your crops on the files themselves. Note that Picasa saves a backup of the uncropped file in a folder called "Originals" in the same location as the photo. So go into that temp folder you just made and erase the Originals folder.

Anyhow, it sounds like more work than it is. After you have the programs installed, the workflow is fairly easy, and the payoff is immediate. I can't tell you how much time I've lost dicking around with pdfs in an attempt to read them. Anything you plan to spend more than 20 minutes reading, do this, trust me.

Game night 10/30

Alright sports fans! It was Battlefleet Gothic this games night with a 1500 point fleet engagement with 1000 points of orks and 500 of tau in one corner:















vs. 750 of imperials and eldar each.






























Notice the giant asteroid field in the center, proved to make the game interesting and call for some cool fleet action tactics.















Imperials and Eldar were victorious with the ork hulk and Tau capital ship disengaging and cutting their losses.

Fun game!

Check here for more pics:

Pics

Necro Heavy and Gorax proxies from Masquerade

No one would mistake this for a werewolf, so it's perfect as a gorax for my circle force.


And this guy is too funny to pass up. Stock fig for Orlocks, or tweak to taste.

http://shop.masq-mini.de/index.php?cat=c11_Pill-Bug-City.html

Discussion: Blog Uses, Future, and Wishlist

Let's discuss uses we see for the blog and features we'd like to include. Be as specific or general as you like. And think not just in terms of the blog, but the group's online presence as a whole.

Join by commenting on this post. I'll start things off by leaving the first comment.

Throwing fuel on the Fires of Redemption

A little inspiration to get the photo libraries up.

Gaze upon the Awesome:

Game Library Post

We need a game library, here's a list of board and card games I have kickin' around. Feel free to borrow:

Board Games:
Carcassonne
Age of Mythology
Scrabble
Acquire
Runebound + Expansions
Lord of the Rings Risk
Twilight Struggle
Alhambra
Star Wars: Epic Duels
Pirates of the Caribbean Life

Card Games:
Settlers of Catan 2 player card version
Infernal Contraption
Legends of the 5 Rings (5-6 decks)

I guess we could do this for wargames armies too, but I'm lazy so that'll have to wait. Maybe we should sticky this to the sidebar or something.

CB

Geek idols....

Hey dude, we need cloaks and giant anhks to wear around our necks!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Mp7Ikko8SI

CR's current projects

I've been working on my Gorkamorka warband, they just need a bit more work. I have two things in the works, first is jazzing up the Ork terrain. I want to give it more of a fortified and lived in look. "Jobs a good 'un, but it could be betta." Second I want to run a Necromunda one day campaign. Another rip off of Heart of Darkness, with boats and other madness. I just need to make some sump terrain like RG's only bigger. Crazy bigger and some boats. I promise not to play Credence while we play, though CB has catachans in his gang...

"Da Bakk Door" - western entrance to Mektown.

count me in

Add another metal-man to the list. Just remember to play it safe like GI Joe used to promote...



..ok, so maybe these aren't the original public service message.

We are the Red Team, the guys trained in the tactics of the enemy, ready to kick your ass and keep you from getting cocky. Face it, in the real world the good guys almost never win. Cobra had cooler gear than GI Joe, Anti-heroes are sexy and Villans always get the best lines.

"You're a fool to live by rules, the rider wearing black is gonna shoot you in the back."