LETS PLAY DOOM

E3 came and went (I assume) and it looks like it's another year of mediocre games. If you got excited about any of these games clearly you and I have completely different taste in things because I didn't see anything worth getting excited over.

EXCEPT DOOM

Not the Doom that they showed in the trailer. That Doom was slow and gory, like somebody looked at the turd that is Brutal Doom [1] and was like "Yeah! What Doom is missing is hyper-violent decapitation and a weapon select screen and really slow imps for some reason! Everything should be muddy and brown! Killing something should take up your entire screen for three seconds so you can look at an animation that totally won't get repetitive after you've killed your 50th demon!" What a joke! You're telling me that over 20 years they can't get somebody who actually likes Doom to make a sequel of it? There's nobody on the Bethesda team who has looked at what the Doom community is still producing in terms of wads and total conversions and mods? Nobody who understands that Doom is about movement punctuated with shotgun blasts, about space management? Doom is like a beautiful dance... a beautiful dance with chainsaws.

I didn't see any of that in new Doom, but that's fine. Old Doom, real Doom still exists and nothing can change that. [3]

This is the only Doom the world needs, and yet there are 4 of them.

Anyways, I'm actually a little grateful for the new Doom thing because it makes me think about what, exactly, I like about old Doom, and plus it's given me an idea.

The Age After 12

In an effort to shake free of my FC-induced drudgery [1], I've decided to attempt to inflict 13th Age on my standard gaming group.

The timing, as it turns out, is pretty good; one of them is going to be out of town (and without reliable internet access) for a month, and another one is going to be leaving in about a month to get some job training. [2] I knew about the job training in advance but the out of town is a bit of a surprise, and our Skype chat is a lot more lonesome without him.

Anyways, though, there's a lot that I like about 13th Age, including the part where I'm allowed and encouraged to make things up again. And so is everybody! The players all have their backgrounds and Unique Things (which can be anything), which means that the campaign is exactly as high or low fantasy as everybody at the table agrees. Like any game where everybody is coming together to make things up, you kind of need to set a baseline of what sort of game you're interested in playing, and I imagine that explicitly saying what it is sort of wrecks the "illusion," [3] but honestly this is exactly the way I like to run my games anyways. It's nice to read through a PDF and think to yourself, "Oh, exactly! This is exactly a thing I've always wanted to try!"

Plus the designer's notes. Oh man, do I love those designer's notes. They lay out exactly where they disagree on things and sometimes both of the designers don't even play by the rules they wrote down for you to try out, instead telling you where the baseline should probably be and then both running in opposite directions. It's really freeing, and nice to see a "standard" fantasy game treat itself like a set of suggestions instead of The One True Law. This philosophy carries into every description of every class, and in every monster's writeup. They give you some ideas and then let you pick any of them, all of them, or none at all and there's not even a hint that there's a "right way" to do your fluff. It's great. 

The closest the game comes to having a One True Way is in the description of the Icons, which are technically not necessary but if you don't use them then you're sort of going against the spirit of what they're writing. The Icons are written into a lot of the fluff and, as I'm finding out, if you want to do away with them, you have to invent your own and they're probably going to be kind of similar. You can't quite create them in pairs, but you do need your Icons to tell a certain story about your world. It's a bigger task than it seems, but I can't blame the designers for wanting to include their new idea strongly into the world. It's just that if the Icons don't fit into your idea of the world, you've got a bit of work ahead of you.

Still, though, I'm excited. Maybe more excited than I should be, given that one of my group apparently doesn't want to play but is too polite to bring it up. I'm sure he'll be passive-aggressive but I really don't have time for passive-aggression...





[1] The way that I've found FantasyCraft most tolerable is if I ignore wide swaths of the rules in favor of running games more or less the way I usually play them. The longer I play the system, the creakier it feels, and I can only slap so many patches on it before I wonder what the point was.

[2] And then one of them doesn't want to play, which is whatever. Your loss, man. He doesn't seem to want to play anything that isn't FantasyCraft so I'll have to look for a new player soon, I imagine.

[3] I used to be more tolerant of this sort of thing, to be honest, but long years reading the uninformed and ignorant opinions of random internet strangers has soured me on this sort of thing. If you rely on some sort of illusion of "realism" to get your jollies in games, then you are reveling in ignorance and I can't take that any more seriously than I can take somebody who thinks that movie critics are "ruining things they liked" by pointing out flaws. Things you like can have flaws, and your group can (and should!) have frank discussions where you explicitly lay out what your expectations are for this game and what kind of themes you like. It's like pulling teeth from my players (many of whom are uninformed and a little ignorant) [4] but then when they tell me that they don't care, I just look at the character sheets they hand me as implicitly informing me as to what kind of game they want to run.

[4] There's nothing wrong with being uninformed or ignorant, to be honest with you, it's just people that think they're informed and urbane that rub me the wrong way. I remember reading from person on Reddit sagely declaring that a game mechanic was bad because it was "immersion-breaking," as though looking at your character sheet and rolling dice to beat a target number provided by another human being in front of you narrating a situation could possibly be "immersive." Ugh, please.

Arcane Legions Component Review

Unpainted Romans and a good view of the plugboard the soldiers go into. 

 

Disclaimer: None of these pictures are mine- I just got them off the internet.


I bought Arcane Legions for $5. $5 for a new miniatures game sounds about right, even if you can't mix and match your little men with other games, or if they're weirdly specific.

And they are unique- the point of Arcane Legion is that your little men can travel around their formation, becoming faster, better at blocking, or better at attacking depeinding on where in the formation you plug them into. You can see what their abilities are by a little slip of cardboard that you stick on top of plastic base with a thousand little holes. A red die means attack, so if you have a figure there, you get to roll a red die to fight. A white die means defense. Blue dice are ranged attacks. A yellow chevron on a black background means movement. It's pretty neat. As your figures die you have to make choices about what you can afford to lose, and you have to regroup when the situation changes. It also lets you visually see how many men you have, and what their basic capabilities are on the card, so you can pretty much just play with that. You don't need a bit of paper or a "codex" or anything.

There's a turning assistance bit, which slides into the notches on the sides of the bases. Since movement is measured in base lengths and turning is assisted by the little plastic bit, you don't need a tape measure or ruler. I haven't played yet so I don't know if this is a step backwards or forwards, but it is different. It also means that you need a couple of spare bases hanging around so you're able to measure things. I'm not sure why "base lengths" is the core unit of measurement but whatever.



The plastic bases themselves are thick and seem durable. There's a notch in one corner so you can see which way to put the cardboard over top of it. There are a bunch of shallow circular holes on each one. The box comes with two sizes- one that's square, and one that's rectangular.

The cardboard is universally less impressive than the plastic bases. It's flimsy and weak. This includes the box, which has an unpleasant, slick texture. It reminds me of boxes of Chinese knock-off toys. The cardboard "inserts" that go in between the bases and the minis are also flimsy, although not as slick. You can print out your own inserts if you want, but apparently since the company's out of business you'll have to download a third party program.


The miniatures themselves are serviceable. They're on sprues, for some reason, so you'll have to clip them off. The placement of the connecting plastic is really, really strange and is hard to get at with regular cutters you might have around the house. I had to use a utility knife, and it's really a pain. I've had to clip little bits of flashing off of long spears, tiny curved swords, and next to thin, skeletal arms. One of the miniatures has only a single narrow foot connecting its body to the base, and I'm afraid it's going to break off.

The plastic seems softer than Games Workshop plastics, too- it's easy to bend and wiggle the figures. With all of the skinny arms and long spears, you really have to be careful about where you put things and how you handle your men. The pegs, at least, are firm and solid, but it's a pain removing them from the pegboard because of their flimsiness. You can't just grab them by the head or shoulders and yank on them. If you have trimmed nails you're going to have to resort to using some sort of tool to get them off there.

LOOK AT IT. GOOD GOD.

The miniatures themselves are nice enough. They're all unpainted, except for the commanders, who seem to be machine-painted. Unpainted miniatures are fine and I'm not entirely sure why they chose to paint the commanders. It's more irritating that I'll have to strip and re-paint them than it is to have not had them painted. The machine painting is really not good and there's no way I'm leaving them like that. Seriously, look at that picture. All three commanders (one for each faction) are painted to the same level of quality. The coolest is probably the undead Egyptian guy, but I can't find a picture of him online anywhere. He's got a nice hat, a crooked sword with blood on it, and green skin. He's also the best painted of the bunch.

For the non-commanders there are some greek hoplite dudes, some egyptian undead guys, some roman legion type guys, and some chinese soldiers. They're detailed enough- not Games Workshop standard, but better than toy store army men. They're also actual-scale, so no heroic proportions. Faces and hands are tiny, and weapons are thin sticks. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that sort of thing. Since there aren't a million tiny details, it shouldn't take excessively long to paint. You could probably finish a batch in a couple of hours, if you're efficient and you know how you want them to look in advance.

Overall, I'm pleased with what I paid for them. Granted, I only paid $5. I'm not sure how I'd feel if I paid full price. Since the game isn't supported anymore it seems to go on sale often, which is nice. On Amazon it's going for $10, which is a reasonable price for what you get.

Too Long, Didn't Read: Some good, some bad, but at least it's affordable. Pick it up if you're interested in getting into a miniatures game when it's "dead" and the plastics are cheap, and if you have a friend who would play it with you. If you clip off the pluggy bits you could probably repurpose them.

Arkham Horror, or How I Got Murdered By An Old One

Me and the wife were playing Rayman Legends for a while yesterday. She was playing by herself first while I was playing Sim City, but the game is more fun with another person. So I hopped in and we gathered Lums and saved Teensies. Pretty fun. For a while.

I got tired of the game, but we still wanted to play something together. Why not Arkham Horror, I suggested? It's gathering dust and besides, I'll make you a drink.

She said yes, and away we went.

We played for a solid four or so hours. That's two games in a row. It includes getting wasted, goofing off, and explaining all the rules and how to win. It was a great time.

Our first game we squared off against Ithaqua. She was the researcher (which looks a lot like her, believe it or not) and I decided that plucky salesman Bob Jenkins was my speed. We lucked out and both somehow managed to start with Tommy Guns and off we went, spraying demons with bullets. I explained that we have to close the gates before Ithaqua comes out to see what's crackin'. She asked how we do that.

"You gotta go through 'em and come back!"
"I have to go to The Great Hall of Ceelano?"
"Well I'll be going through that one, but that's the idea."
"Oh, cool."

We forgot that Ithaqua brings icy winds that reduce your stamina when you stand out in the street, but we had a hell of a time anyways. The Elder Sign I used to close the portal in The Woods turned out to be a serious boon; every other Mythos card tried to re-open it. The Witch House ended up being home to a couple of Warlocks almost the entire game. The researcher went unconscious due to some poor rolls against a Dhole. Some good portal closings got us rid of most of the more nightmarish monsters, and good sneak rolls got us the rest of the way.

The streets were drowning in monsters. We were down to our last handfuls of sanity and hoping beyond hope that the seals were enough to keep the doom at bay. We finished the game when Ithaqua was two doom markers away from coming to visit.

Six seals down. That'll do it. We saved the world!

But the night was still young-
so we played again!

This time it was the scientist (me) and the student (her) stopping Yig, with his serpent cultists. I picked out Yig since he had such a small doom track and he got extra doom when you killed a cultist. I figured battling an old one might be a good change of pace from the skittering scurry of avoiding him.

It turns out that we got screwed by luck- an early Mythos draw accelerated the doom track unless we sacrificed an Ally. It was the second turn and we didn't have any Allies. We fling ourselves through portals and do our best, but it wasn't enough. Yig comes.

It smashes half of our items and gives chase.We have to make more and more difficult speed checks or we lose stamina and sanity. It wasn't long before we are overcome by our eldritch enemy.

So two games- one win and one loss. Not bad. Here's to hoping next game comes soon and we can squeeze out a win. I'm thinking Azathoth next time, or maybe Nyarlathotep. Azathoth is cool because when he awakens you automatically lose (he destroys everything immediately) but at least you have time to stave him off. Nyarlathotep is neat because he has unique minions although I don't much like his depiction in Arkham Horror. Oh well.

Anyways, it was a great evening and I'd do it again any time.


One last thing: It's still totally bullshit that she travelled to the Plateau of Leng to take a nap and find two bucks. I'm running through monster-ravaged streets, machine-gunning eldritch horrors while she goes on a vacation. I go to the the City of the Great Race and am driven nearly mad by the unending horror. She goes to the R'lyeh and it's a little smelly and then she gets more items. Why can't Bob Jenkins get a break?

Seriously, where would you even get money here?