MEK OP Game Night: Runebound

The first Saturday session of the semester had about 12 in attendance, with quite a few new faces. There were two big events: a Warhammer 40k scenario between Ork and Space Marine armies, and a 6-player Runebound. We also set up a couple of nights for RP sessions on Monday and Wednesday, which are going to be run independently of the main club meeting times.

2nd edition version: Even nastier!

The Warhammer game finished after about four rounds, in a fairly inconclusive draw. Everyone involved broke off to work on assembling the new Grey Knights set, which will probably be a multi-week project. Most of the glue work seems to be finished, but there's still an enormous amount of painting to be completed.

The Runebound game took about four hours, and ended with a fairly tight battle that resulted Dragon Highlord Margath on the first attempt. I think if we play again, we'll probably try incorporating a few 2nd edition rules, including the respawning of lower-level encounters. With that many players on the map, the endgame usually involves only a couple characters that are able to handle red-difficulty encounters.

My attempt to set up a WiF campaign seems to have mostly fizzled. I suppose there needs to be some kind of permanent culture already in place to support that style of game, and the current swing of the wargaming pendulum is pretty heavily in favor of both "miniatures" and "fantasy/SF themes". A historical hex-and-counter system is a hard sell.

I'll probably run a Space Empires: 4x game next week, which is the simplest strategic-scale hex-based game I have. It's similar enough to established computer games like Civilization and  (especially) GalCiv that it should feel familiar even on a first play-through. We obviously have a lot of new players to integrate into the routine. I might run it with no ground combat, just to make everything run a bit faster the first time through.

Personal notes

Currently the state of the Fantastic Frontiers rules draft document is too messy for me to feel comfortable shopping it around, but I might try to play through a couple selected playtests with people I can trust to be patient despite Enormous Glaring Problems. Removing EGPs is an immediate concern, so I can avoid coming off like a crank who wants everyone to play my half-baked vanity project at the expense of time that could be better spent moving around Ork motorcycles dripping with guns, chainsaws, and spiky bits.

Immediate priority: Finishing off some fantasy encounter tables with lots of classic monsters from my old D&D sourcebooks (MM1 &2, and the Cyclopedia).

Realization in which I take perverse pride: The two items in a classic monster stat bloc that virtually everyone ignored back in 1st edition ("% lair" and "Morale") end up being of critical importance in a skirmish-scale game with a persistent world map!