Welcome back!
I suppose I should just admit to myself that I’m not going to update this blog as frequently as I would like to. The trouble is that I like to wait until I have something new to say or announce about the projects I’ve been working on, and I often get caught up in projects that really shouldn’t be talked about for some time yet. It’s not a matter of secrecy for its own sake—we just don’t want to create expectations that we don’t meet later. Schedules sometimes shift and components sometimes change, so I usually have to wait until my projects are fairly close to release before I can speak with complete confidence about them.
Anyway, with that in mind, here are a few things coming up that I think you’ll find interesting…
Dark Legacy of Evard
First, a heads-up: My entry in the Encounters program, Dark Legacy of Evard, begins its season on May 11th. I found a copy on my desk yesterday, and I’m pretty happy with how it turned out. Not only is it an adventure I’m proud of, I think it’s a good ghost story too, and I hope folks will really enjoy it. If you’re interested in playing through, check with your local hobby stores—the Encounters program is running at thousands of stores around the country, and all you have to do is show up to play. I don’t want to say too much about the plot for fear of spoilers, but let me begin with this: Who’s buried in Evard’s tomb?
The Tale of Erekan the Swordmage Concludes
For the last couple of years, my weekly gaming has consisted of playing in Steve Schubert’s home campaign. Two weeks ago we wrapped the campaign after our party defeated the Lich Queen of the Githyanki, seizing from her the last piece of the Rod of Freedom. My character in the game was the human swordmage Erekan. It was a great deal of fun and I enjoyed the mix of characters at the table, but I’m ready to shake things up. We’re starting a new campaign with 5th-level characters, and we’re trying something a bit different. My fellow players decided they wanted to play our own thieves’ guild, so we gave ourselves the character-building limitation of “everybody be able to stealth.” I decided I was ready to play a striker, but I didn't want to just default to thief. I like the slayer-fighter from the Essentials book, since it’s a good combination of durability and damage, and it’s not overly cerebral (Erekan was the party’s voice of caution and deliberation in the previous campaign).
At one point in our character-build discussions Dave Noonan made a disparaging remark about gnomes, and I immediately threatened to build my character as a gnome slayer. “If that means you are a slayer of gnomes, then by all means go ahead,” Dave replied. Anyway, somehow or another our conversation then equated gnomes to smurfs, and I struck upon the perfect appellation for my character concept: Stabby Smurf. Unfortunately it turns out that gnome and slayer do not synergize in the least, and I have to admit I’m enough of a min-maxer that I have to find at least some small association of race and class. So, no Stabby Smurf; I’m trying out a half-orc or shifter “bounty hunter” with my slayer instead.
Air Force Miniatures 3D Printouts
OK, on to Axis & Allies miniatures. Last week I saw a fascinating bit of technology I’ve never seen before, the so-called “3D printing” used for our prototyping of the airplane models in the Angels 20 set. The machine sprays thousands of layers of some sort of silica dust, building up a reasonably durable 3-D object like a sculpture of an airplane at 1:100 scale. This isn’t the process by which we’ll manufacture the actual miniatures themselves—it’s just a “rapid prototyping” that lets us check the sculpture and scale in this brand-new game. Fascinating stuff! Anyway, I was very pleased with the results: The models look awesome! My favorite was the I-16, which is just a tiny little fellow compared to some of the later fighters but oozes character. (In general the Angels 20 set leans toward early war, so we’re looking to represent more fighters in the ’39 to ’42 time span.) It’s one of the weaker units in the set, but anybody playing a Russian “army” will be able to field a small horde of them. We also doubled up on the sculpt—we do a lot of that in this first set—by designing a Chinese I-16 “Abu” to go along with our Flying Tiger. It turns out the Russians provided a ton of military aid to the Nationalist Chinese in the early years of the war, including hundreds of fighters (and a good number of volunteer pilots, too). Here in America we only know about Chennault and his boys, but the Russians provided three or four times as many planes to China as we did. Anyway, I sat down with producer and brand manager Brian Hart yesterday to go over paint schemes for the various units, and I’m extremely stoked. These models are going to be great!
War at Sea 6 News
I saw some speculation on the message boards about how installations might work in the game. Since we’ve got a shore battery coming in set 6, I figured I’d provide a sneak preview of the relevant special abilities. Here goes:
Installation 12 — This unit can be attacked only with Bomb or Gunnery attacks. Enemy Ships with a Landing ability that are in or adjacent to this unit’s sector can invade this unit. If they invade, roll two dice at the end of the turn and add the Landing values of all adjacent enemy Ships to the roll. On a total of 12 or higher, this unit is destroyed.
Coastal Facility — This unit deploys in a coast or island sector on your side of the map. If you have none, it deploys within three sectors of your side of the map. If you deploy it in a coast or island sector, line of sight to and from this unit isn’t blocked by that coast or island.
The “free floating” installation may seem weird, but the sculpt we’re using is based on Fort Drum from Manila Bay. It was a fortified island, so it makes sense that it could be in a sea sector. A different sculpt might have a slightly different version of Coastal Facility.
Oh, and by way of apologizing for such a long break between posts: You IJNCVLF fellows will be pleased to learn that set 6 includes the Taiho. She was the Japanese flagship at the Battle of the Philippine Sea, and unlike previous Japanese carriers, she featured a well-armored hull and an armored flight deck. Like the American carrier Lexington—another seemingly large and well-protected carrier—Taiho was done in by an explosion of fuel vapors hours after her aviation fueling system was damaged. It’s a good sculpt (we even managed to get the funnel’s outboard angle), and it should be a fine addition to the AANM game.
One final thought: My nightstand reading these days is James Hornfischer’s Neptune’s Inferno. Hornfischer is the fellow who wrote Last Stand of the Tin Can Sailors and Ship of Ghosts. It’s a very readable history of the fighting around Guadalcanal; I highly recommend it. A number of years back I read Robert Ballard’s Lost Ships of Guadalcanal, which provides another fascinating account of the battles and shows you what became of shipwrecks. And heck, as long as I’m on the topic of my reading, let me say that I am very much looking forward to Oil on the Water, by Eric Bergerud, which should be out in September of this year. Bergerud is the author of one of the best books on the air war in the South Pacific that I’ve ever read, Fire in the Sky. He also wrote Touched with Fire, a book on the land war. There aren’t many authors that combine an examination of the hardware with an account of the campaign and a long look at tactics, organization, and the men doing the fighting. I’ve been waiting for him to get to the naval war for years now.
That’s all for now—back in a few weeks!
