Necroday III Report

Op-For's annual all-day Necromunda event was a great success! Aug 2 2009, 8 players brought more than 10 gangs and there was non-stop mayhem in the underhive until early in the next morning. Thanks everyone who came and made it happen!




















See full-size pics on Flickr, where you can comment on individual pics.

Here is my personal report--others, please add your report in a comment!

I played four games. First up, my Redemptionists, the Red Dragons, were massively outgunned by the Machine Cult. Despite loosing a heavy, the Cult had little trouble rescuing their comrade and dispatching the sentries. The redemption had a mediocre post game but no tragedies, and are slowly building their ranks, biding their time, and forming a plan. The underdog bonus didn't hurt in the post-game.

No surprise (to me anyway) that the Dust Brothers performed much better in their games. They took on the underhive fuzz (Princint 414) in classic shootout. The Brothers took up cover in a warehouse and the enforcers took several fortified surrounding positions. Trouble started when a small contingent of enforcers charged over a sump bridge toward the warehouse. They encountered heavy fire, retreated back on the bridge, and were torn apart from both sides, as friendly fire from the heavy stubber did as much damage as the Brothers themselves. The enforcers effectively defied targets to the Brother's usual MVP Hellhammer, but the bridge incident was enough to route the enforcers in the end.

In the next game the Brothers raided a secret stash of the Bodysnatchers, and came out victorious again. With surgical precision an elite band of Brothers snuck up to the loan sentry as Brother Malka brought the plasma cannon to bear on the stash gateway. In a turn the sentry was silences, the stash blown and the alarm sounded. What remained was for the brothers to fight their way back to their own turf.

In the final game the Dust Brothers faced up against the reigning tyrants of the underhive, the Machine Cult. The brothers were unperturbed by a massive deficit in gang ratings (nearly a 1000 points difference) and fought cautiously but effectively despite unfamiliarity being the underdog. A low-bloodshed game ended with an untimely bottling of some of the less stalwart of Hellmammer's men. I'll leave it to my opponent to mention the incident with the hallucinogen grenade--let's just say a daring maneuver on his part won him the game and resulted in a tragic mishap for at least one brother. Despite the loss, post battle yielded skills in spades for the brothers, and a few of these will even be helpful. The brothers swear revenge on the Van Saar infidels!

Warmachine Video Game

The Privateer forums were maxed out, twitter feeds checked every 15 seconds. The wait was over. As they let batchs of people into the presentation at GenCon, news slowly spread out. It's Official. The new big thing for Warmachine is a Video Game for XBox, PS3 and PC. Or is maybe someday...

Here are some pictures that were taken at the presentation...





A better view of the rendering.


Here are some insites gathered from the Privateer Press forums of the "Next Big Thing for Warmachine".

- Fast paced Action strategy game, focusing on a more skirmish level (like Company of Heros)

- Single and online Multi-player game modes

- Player will take command of a Warcaster, with Warjacks, units, solos

- Each faction is playable. Mercs faction will be available later as downloadable content

- Possibility to customize your own warcaster

- Focusing on PC, Xbox 360, and PS3 systems

- Hordes may be a sequel

- Developer is a new company called WhiteMoon Dreams. Looks like they opened shop in May 2009. Former developers at EA that worked on Medal of Honor and Fallout. They have 11 employees and one game already called Aftermath.

Actual presentation has 2 rendered images and a short looping animation. Goal of meeting was to generate interest and support in the community to hopefully lead to a game development. There is no actual game available at this time. The PP forums are not excited.

Here is the link White Moon Dreams (the developer) has put up

Wholesome Entertainment

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fa7ck5mcd1o

Mega Shark vs. Giant Octopus...

dope!

Bagged another one boys...Warmachine/Hordes

OK, so TS and I played a game of Warmachine vs. Hordes action last night out in the Santa Rosa Op For southern annex (my garage), and the trollBLOOD was flowing! The fanatical forces under the command of Severius laid the serious smack down on the trollblood and allied bog trog infantry. The notorious trollblood bounty hunter and his old rhulic drinking buddy Brun Crackback were on the run from the rampaging Menite forces trying to avoid capture and a trip to the gallows and barbeque in their honor by ducking in and out of terrain.

Grim hunkered down behind a rock outcrop, dodging redeemer rockets, spells, zealot bombs, and taking shots with his high caliber rifle while keeping an eye on Severius scalp. He popped his feet restricting the enemies movement and avoiding capture 1 more turn. All the while the crafty Brun Crackback was moving around the Menoth flank, and then POW burst from the woods and gave Severius a face full of blunderbus shot!

Bloody for the trollbloods (just Grim and Brun were left standing to probably 60-70% of the remaining Menoth forces), but goes to show that you can't keep a good troll (or dwarf) down, especially when there's a bounty to collect.

Op-For on facebook

We've recently set up a facebook group for us and I'm posting to to discuss what we plan to use it for, address some concerns that have cropped up, and gather everyone's thoughts.

First off, is facebook a threat to the blog?

I think this is a valid concern, but one we can put to rest if we all make a conscious decision. Most of the uses I see for the facebook page are mutually exclusive to those of the blog. I'm going to outline them below.In order to keep the blog strong, maybe we could all ask ourselves before posting, would this work as a blog post, and if so, then post it here, and if not, post it to facebook?

Second, do we all have to participate on facebook?

I think it would be great if we could get all members on facebook so at least there is a little picture of you on the Op-For roster. But I don't think it should become one more thing that we have to constantly check. I'm imagining most of the stuff I will be posting to the facebook page is stuff you could safely ignore if you weren't interested.

Third, why facebook in the first place?

The reason for facebook is it offers a great way to do some things I wanted to do, but had no other good way to to do. I was on the phone with CR and wanted to trade some workbench pics back and forth and email just wasn't cutting it. I was considering Twitter but I had just joined facebook and a quick investigation showed facebook was really ideal for this kind of back and forth.

With the facebook wall, you don't have to save up something worthy of a blog post. The picture management is a million times faster and better than the painfully clunky blogger or yahoo! mail. Having the chat there in facebook is also convenient.

For instance, if I have just taken some castings of dungeon walls out of the oven and I know CR or someone might be interested, the blog is not a good place to share my progress. The conversation might not even make any sense out of context. And then if I want to follow up on that two hours later after some assembly work or something, I can't go back and add content to my blogger post, I'm stuck with having to make a whole new post. Eventually, I might want to make a writeup of the whole project and that would make an ideal topic for the blog, but until then I want to share NOW. And did I mention the picture management of blogger makes me want to cry, especially with my lousy connection speed?

Also, a lot goes on in the weekly games that doesn't wind up on the blog, and as I'm participating from a distance facebook looks like it can better keep me in the loop.

Another thing I've noticed is that it's hard to get a conversation going in using blogger comments. After about 5 comments, the conversation dies out. Facebook seems like a great way of carrying on more lengthy conversations, like, say planning of a convention game or an all day event.

Which brings me to another advantage, that Facebook has what seems like a great way to manage events. I managed last year's Necroday event with a service/site called Crush3r, which worked well, and I think I may continue to use it in addition to a facebook event page, but having a facebook event page seems to bring everything one step closer together. We can leave simple messages on the facebook wall like, "Painting up my Eschers this week" or "can't game until August, too much else going on."

The facebook page so far

So far four of us have joined the facebook group and already I get a great sense of it. There's a list of members with office titles, a wall to post whatever content you want, a fast and easy picture management where we can comment on pics, and a way to link to facebook events.

So those are my thoughts on it. Let's discuss it in the comments! What do you think, pro or con?

Nullhorizon.com Relaunch

http://nullhorizon.com/

I've been working on a new version of the Null Horizon Studio site for some time, and I'm finally rolling it out. The main thing is I'm expanding the scope of the site--before it was mostly showcasing my commissioned figs and now I'm going to focus as much or more on my own projects. I should have a lot of new stuff up in the coming weeks.

Try it out and see if there are any usability issues or other things I need to work out. It's still a WIP and the new platform is more easily modified than the old so let me know if I can improve it (there are few areas I have in mind already such as how the individual galleries are laid out). I could really use your input, thanks!

Oh, and I made a page on Facebook for the studio as well. Just a stub at present, but I plan to use it for sharing pics and ideas from my workbench in addition to networking. I just joined facebook and I think it'd be fantastic for sharing stuff like this back and forth. Null Horizon on facebook

The rest of July

So the votes are in for what people ewanted to do for the rest of July, and it seems that we are at a bit of an impass! What's everyone thinking we should do this week? I'd not mind some fantasy or 40k personally. I'm prety warn out of privateer stuff, and without CB I don't think its a good idea to do some WHFRPG because you will die! I'm actually intersted in a hobby night at some point, if anyone else is interested??