Wargaming Wednesday: The Beards and Battleaxes RPG?

Cover art from one of the GW army books

Hello everyone, sorry for a lack of posts Friday and Monday, things were a little troubled on the home front. But here we are again, talking about gaming. After venting my frustration last week, I began thinking of a gaming project I could undertake, something simple, specific, and entertaining to me personally, while at the same time, viable as a product that can be shared to folks out there in the world at large.

So I settled on a game about dwarves.

I like dwarves. I've played them in various RPGs. The Dwarfs (not Dwarves, but Dwarfs) were my first Warhammer Fantasy Battle army. They're short, stout, and bearded, just like me, and although beer isn't my go-to form of alcohol these days, I can certainly appreciate a well-brewed pint of ale or stout. Dwarves are also usually portrayed as gruff, curmudgeonly little assholes who don't like taking shit from anyone and hold grudges far longer than rationally reasonable, and yes, guilty as charged on all counts.

A single player-race game might seem limiting, but it is also focused. It lessens the number of decisions during character creation and reduces the rules and word count, keeping the game tighter. Also, I would probably stick with tradition and limit any form of Dwarven magic to a kind of rune-crafting, coupled with perhaps some kind of holy boons or blessings from Dwarven gods. Again, it limits player choice, but also alleviates the need for a player-side spell catalogue (which in many games can be equivalent to all the other rules put together).

From a GW Dwarf infantry minis box

As for adventures, I think a lot of the major bases can be covered. Dungeon and underground exploration is an obvious go-to, but you can also have dwarves patrolling the areas around their strongholds, overland expeditions, trips to human (or non-human) lands and cities, long-distance explorations, diplomatic trips, monster hunts...with a little thought, almost any adventure type is possible.

As for the rules, I think I have a good foundation I want to build upon. Originally I thought of going with the core rules I developed for my stalled-out Tankards & Broadswords RPG, but I think for the moment I am going to set those aside and try something a little more basic, and if that doesn't seem to fit my needs, we'll reconsider. I think the rules should be simple, avoid a lot of math, and most difficult of all, not be just a generic system but an expression of the concept of the game. How we get there, we'll have to find out.

So, I'm going to leave this be for now. Next week I hope to have a few more details on this, and as time goes on, we'll build bit by bit. In the end, this is likely just going to be a downloadable PDF that anyone can enjoy, so we're keeping it as simple and straightforward as possible.

Wargaming Wednesday: eBay Miniature Rescues

Today I just wanted to spotlight a great YouTube channel, eBay Miniature Rescues. Casey is a talented painter and a very nice hobbyist (I've exchanged emails with him before and he was polite and very helpful), who specializes on - you guessed it - finding used and often ill-treated miniatures on eBay, buying them, and then doing a paint-stripping and repainting project with them. His channel appears relatively new, with only a couple dozen videos, but the quality has progressed enormously over time, and the production value of his video work is now absolutely fantastic.

Here's a recent video where Casey strips and repaints an older Warhammer Fantasy Battles model.

As you can see, pretty darn cool. Although he tends towards the fantasy side of the miniature spectrum, Casey will also do Warhammer 40,000 rescues, such as this squad of Chaos Marines:

Although Casey's painting talents far exceed my own, he's given me some of the confidence I needed to begin my own eBay rescue projects. If you are interested in going out onto eBay and finding your own miniatures, as I talked about in a previous blog post, Casey even has a video on some good searching techniques:

So, if you have any interest in the second-hand miniatures market, you absolutely should check out eBay Miniature Rescues.