More Photos from The Battle With Sea Serpent!

 These are courtesy of Curt, and better quality than mine.

Battle in Orkness Harbour

 We fought the conclusion of our latest Beowulf adventure on table last night.  Pictures from the game are below.  Spoiler alert if any one cares to play the Seven Stones adventure.

Thigmund the Thee Therpent swims into the harbour for this full moon’s  sacrifice.

The sea serpent is a 3D print from MyMinifactory printed off by local gamer Jeremy.

The sea serpent and the town.

The town buildings and long ship are MDF kits from Sarissa Precision sold as a Viking Town set along with a dock.

Instead of the town’s sacrifice, the raft carries Alys with a torch and  a barrel of pitch and oil

Alys narrowly avoided becoming gravlaks and substituted the flaming barrel.

The serpent took its revenge with a couple of nasty tail attacks as Alys swims for shore.  Duncan the Old Ways spiritual leader comes to her aid and is killed in her stead.

The final action between the sea serpent and the adventuring party plus followers.  The figures are mostly Gripping Beast except for the four heroes on hexagonal bases. 

The four heroes are by Handiwork games, publishers of the Beowulf RPG, and 3D printed by Curt.

Beowulf Miniatures

 A bunch of freshly painted minis for tonight's Beowulf show down with the Sea Serpent.  These represent the Heroes' followers and Local NOCS.  All minis are 28mm Gripping Beast.

Sea Serpent for Beowulf Adventure

It's been nearly two months since my last post.  I've been doing games with our local group almost every week, but not much in the way of painting.  Fall is never prime painting time for me as its always a busy time with a lot to get done before the snow comes.

We've been chugging away at the Beowulf adventures and are now onto our fourth in the series.  To date my crew of adventurers has defeated a troll, a revenant and a giant adder all of which were unbeatable until they discovered their secret weakness.  No PC deaths yet, but there have been some close calls and deaths among their followers.  

Prior adventures had been done virtually using Zoom and Roll20, but we are able to game face to face so I want to fight the final battle for the current adventure on table top.  It features a giant sea serpent and I found some time to paint one up.

It's a 3D print sold by MyMiniFactory and printed off by gaming buddy Jeremy.  We'll see how the serpent fares net week/

Beowulf Adventure 1. The Hermit’s Sanctuary

 

My new bookmark fits the theme nicely!

The first Beowulf Adventure is the Hermit's Sanctuary, which Handiwork made available as a free download on Drive Thru RPG.  You get some pre-generated characters, a lite version of the rules and a very nice scenario.  This was created as a teaser for their kickstarter and like everything else connected with the game was nicely produced.

This adventure is a bit Agatha Christie with Trolls.  You hero (or in our case party of heroes0 goes to the aid of an isolated island sanctuary beset my a recently appearing monster.  The party had great fun working though what is essentially a looked room mystery.  The socail interactions with NOCs are nicely thought out.  For instance the order that you approach the NOCt matters  as success with one chaacter may lead to a better (or wrse) chance of success with another.  They had to peice together bits of the mystery from the NPC's stories, ancient standing stones and other evidence.

 This was my first experience as DM in 40 years, and my first  experience with DnD 5e so I was rusty and made lots of errors.  I was too easy on my party, but it was fun with a good end result.  They solved the mystery, killed the Monster, sorted out a few things with the NPCs and sailed away.  Another weekends work for the Dark Age adventurer!

What I Played During Lockdown

Our group did a number of Zoom games during the lockdowns over the last year.  One of the games was an RPG campaign DMed by me using Handiwork Games Beowulf game.  We had a lot of fun with this very well put together and thematic RPG.  It is based on early medieval epics such as the Anglo Saxon Beowulf, although there’s room for Danish, Slavic and Celtic heroes and even Irish Saints.

Beowulf is by Handiwork Games and is best described as a DnD 5e hack.  They took the core 5e mechanism, hacked out a few bits and added different stuff.  Gone are magic using PCs, DnD alignments, and character classes.  Every PC is a hero, essentially a beefed up fighter and the only magic is run by the DM or NPCs.  They have really bought into the early medieval theme and the world created holds up very well.Beowulf was designed to be run in tandem play, one DM and one Heroic PC with a number of NPC followers representing the heroes’ followers.  However, we’ve run it using a party of up to four PCs and it’s worked very well.  I just scaled back the follower NPCs and scaled up the bad guys as required

An Actual In Person Miniature Game

I've been rattling on this summer catching up on my paitning production over last winter's callenge becasue paiting since summer began has bascially come to a standstill. There's just too many things to keep me buy and by the time I call it a day it's after nine pm and I don't feel like setting my stuff up. 

 

However, there has been a fair amount of gaming activity thus far in 2021, including some in person gaming at Curt's new clubhouse. Back in June I ran a 1879 War of the Pacific Ironclads game using David Manley's excellent  Dalhgren and Columbiad Rules. This was a repeat of a game first played in November 2020 just before we locked down for the pandemic again. I don't recall enough for a detailed AAR but highlights are as follows.

• The Chilean's had a blockading squadron of wooden vessels commanded by myself keeping tabs on Sylvain's Peruvian force of two ex-US Civil War monitors and two spar torpedo boats.
• Stacy took the receiving Peruvian squadron including the ironclads Huascar and Indepencia and screw sloop Union.
• Curt was coming to my rescue with the two Cochrane class ironclads.
• The Peruvians focused on my squadron aiming to take out as many wooden ships as possible. 
• I randomized the positions and headings of my blockading squadron with scatter dice, with most of them stirring north towards the oncoming Peruvian ironclads.  Scared of Sylvain's torpedo boats I made the mistake of continuing to steam North towards Stacy.
• Stacy sank all of my force, but I at least put up a decent fight.  
• Curt arrived and roughed up the monitors with his much better ironclads.  At this point the Peruvians called it a day to save the Ironclads having inflicted considerable damage while keeping Stacy's sea going squadron in good shape.  Sylvain crept back into port needing some repairs and the Chileans resumed their blockade.
• Once again D&C gave a good quick game that was fun, quick to learn and gave reasonable results.  All ships are 1/2400 from Tumbling Dice.  Good detail and nice little castings.

A typical D&C confused melee!  My Chilean Was up class, Peruvian TBs excited harbour and a Peruvian IC at the top of picture.

Spar torpedo attack.  Stylvain's comment that it was like something that Space Orks would use wasn't far off!

A hit!  A palpable hit (or two)!

Sylvain monitors slowly exiting the port and coming under fire from the Cochrane class ICs.

Another hit and a fire!

The two monitors taking it from both sides as the Cochrane twins split up.  The Chilean vessels closer inshore steered between the shoals to make it safely back out to sea, while the monitors had enough and steamed back home while they could.