Crowdfunding, Wolsung and Sedition Wars

I signed up to three or crowdfunding projects last year. So far they have all come good!

The two I am going to look at today are the ones I have most recently received the good for.

First off, we have Wolsung, a Steampunk Skirmish game produced by Micro Arts Studio (MAS) in Poland. The crowdfunding project was launched on Indiegogo and well exceeded they initial goal, although that compared to some of the bigger crowdfunding projects of recent months, it was still quite a modest project.

The project was set up to produce a hard-backed rulebook for a set of skirmish rules based on the popular Polish Wolsung RPG rules. However, along with the rulebook MAS also included most of their range of Wolsung figures and some really attractive laser cut buildings and scenics as part of the promotion.

Having access to a laser cutter I haven’t actually bought any laser cut stuff from anyone before, so I was quite intrigued to get my hands on some of this so that I could see just how someone else designs theirs…

I also took a fancy to quite a few of the figures. Now, if it comes down to it, I probably wouldn’t have signed up to this one if it had just been for the rulebook. I already have more than enough different Steampunk rules, but I still need some more interesting figures before I can consider starting to run a game. So I threw in my name and over the course of the promotion I increased my contribution several times.

Here is what I ended up receiving, in the parcel, late last year.

Firstly we have the rulebook and the laser cut building. The second photo shows the other two laser cut packs, a raised walkway (including the Wolsung ruler) and some market stalls.

Next up we have a faction starter set and some resin barrels/boxes. Finally the various blister packs of figures (including a couple of packs of MAS’s very nice resin bases).

 

Just yesterday I finally received the first parcel from the Sedition Wars Kickstarter project. I say finally, as I subscribed to this one back at the end of June last year and they have been promising to deliver from about September onwards… However, as the project was one of the Kickstarter runaway successes it is easy to see how the scale of production forced the delivery time back.

Sedition Wars is a board game based in the world created by Studio McVey. It features a group of human troops searching their way through a building complex and fighting a selection of mutated monsters (think Aliens meets Space Hulk). Now I can’t say much about the game mechanics yet as I haven’t had a chance to read them, however the miniatures are fantastic and the artwork on the board tiles and in the rest of the game materials is of an equal level.

This is what I got:-

Wow, what a box, UPS managed to puncture the box, but fortunately there wasn’t anything missing or damaged inside!

Not quite so impressive once out of the huge box, but for a board game it come in another very large square box… The other items here are the “freebie rewards”.

Once in the box you get a better idea of all of the contents. 50 miniatures with bases plus dice, counters, game boards etc.

I haven’t un-bagged any of the Sedition Wars miniatures yet as I really don’t want to loose any of the bits. I am clearing the current projects and then I will be spending a bit of time getting them together.

I will be spending more time on the blog looking at both of these games, as I assemble them and prepare to play.

Toy Soldiers: Laser Cut Corridor System

I have just read an interesting blog post over on Dr. Offset's Creature Laboratorium and Taco Stand.

It is his attempt to produce a laser cut corridor system for gaming with, cut into clear acrylic sheet.

He has no plans to sell them as the production cost seems fairly high, but it builds nicely on the experimentation that I have been doing and i thought I should pass the link on...

15mm-corridor-system

I will certainly be following the developments of this system closely, as several people have already asked me to try something similar!

Toy Soldiers: First Sculpt!

I was tidying up a box of figures the other day and I found my very first figure sculpt. I made him around 1986/7 while at college doing my model making course. We had a very active roleplaying group, I used to play every Wednesday evening ( MERP and then Rolemaster) and also on a Sunday morning (everything from Call of Cthulhu through Judge Dredd, Traveller, Paranoia, and anything else you could mention) and we also played a few sessions of Stormbringer on a Saturday afternoon.
As well as the roleplaying we regularly bought Citadel and Ral Partha miniatures (there weren’t many other manufacturers around then – or at least not as easily accessible). I still clearly remember buying my first box of plastic space wombles, what a revelation they were…

OK, so you have a group of science fiction fans and role players who also happen to be training as professional model makers, it is only natural that we also painted minis and eventually had a go at sculpting. Now before I go off on the whole sculpting thing let me just add that my group of roleplayers included Ivan Bartleet, who won the very first Slayer Sword in 1987, and also Tim Adcock, who went on to build many of the vehicles and tanks that GW have released over the years!

Back to the sculpting. Anyway, we all used to have ago at converting the occasional figure (our miniatures that we used for the roleplaying games developed as our characters did). Then I sculpted a dead orc, which I don’t really consider to be my first sculpt, as it was more or less a half figure, sculpted lying flat on the ground. After that I thought it was about time I had a go at a full figure. So in the naivety of youth I decided I wanted to sculpt Geiger’s Alien.

Now bear in mind that, at the time, Greenstuff was pretty much unheard of in the UK (outside of Citadel and a few select others I assume), we were all still using Milliput epoxy putty to sculpt and convert our figures.

Considering all of these factors, I don’t think it turned out half bad! In close up it may not have a great amount of detail, but figures in the 1980s didn’t have the level of detail that they do now. Also, as you might have realised, this figure was never intended to be cast!
Excuse the poor photography, I only took these at 10.30pm last night, with only the cameras flash and the normal room lighting.

RPG PDFs: An Indulgence!

Thanks to a post over on the Evil DM's blog, I have just spent a hour fighting my way through the RPG Now website and spent around $70 on PDF downloads!

But it was all worth it in the end!

Basically, Adamant Entertainment, an RPG publisher is having a sale over the next three or four days and selling all it's PDF products for $1 each.

They produce the Thrilling Tales Pulp rules for the d20 system* as well as various other games and accessories.

Anyway, I couldn't resist. I already had 3 or 4 of the Thrilling Tales books, just to see what they were like, but now I have the whole lot!

I also picked up the Sword and Planet rules called Mars , and it's two supplements.

Finally, while looking through Adamants listings I saw that they also do a series of PDF books for a steampunk RPG system called The Imperial Age. I couldn't resist them either!

I have to say, I have used RPG Now before and it has worked perfectly well. However, today as I was filling up the shopping basket (remember, we are talking approximately 70 items) the shopping basket reset itself several times and I had to start over!

That would not be to much of a problem if you could add multiple items at once, but no I had to re-add each item individually aarrgh!!!

Anyway in the end I got around it by placing several smaller orders, instead of one big one!

*Anyone who knows me will know I have a strong dislike for the d20 system. However both Thrilling Tales and The Imperial Age offer so much potential source material that could be used for both pulp/steampunk table wargaming or alternative RPG rules, I felt I could not miss them.