Info Dump!

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First, this:

Alien Machinations

OK, much as I love Mutants and Death Ray Guns it does lack a few things I really want. So over the past while I’ve been working on a number of expansions and mods for MDRG.

And now I’ve decided it’s high time I put them all in one place so I can find them when I need them.

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The image above is one of the major reasons I’ve done all this. Aliens.

Mutants and aliens go together like chicken and waffles. You know, spAce-poc; like if Heavy Metal was a wargame:

Anyway, Alien Legion has always been one of my favourite comics; it’s been percolating in the back of my mind for years, decades actually. Then I got into MDRG. And then I discovered Machinations of the Space Princess.

Machinations is a great rpg in its own right. But what I especially like about it is its excellent list of playable alien types and their typical characteristics. (And it turns out the alien list in Machinations is nearly identical to this list on Wikipedia.)

The Machinations alien list is not unlike the list of Mutated Animal types playable in MDRG. So I mashed those two ideas together. Nuts and gum, together at last!

I will appreciate any advice on my alien list, especially from people who know both Machinations and MDRG. You can reach me through this site’s Contact page.

And speaking of playing an Alien Legion party in MDRG, I strongly recommend you pick up a set or two — like I did — of C-P Models’ Alien Federation figs. They’re pretty much Alien Legion, the minis.

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I also wanted to add this guy …

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… and his ilk to MDRG.

But unlike the magic system in Fightin’ Fungi, I wanted to take advantage of the hundreds — if not thousands — of spells out there in the wild for the various old-shool D&Ds (since I’ve already written my 3d6-in-order converter).

I wanted as many bizarre — but simply written — spells as I could get so I pulled entirely from Space-Age Sorcery, Eldritch Weirdness and Lamentations of the Flame Princess.

Also, check out Reid San Filippo’s Crawling Under a Broken moon. Excellent work!

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Finally, Tim over at the wicked-good blog The Savage AfterWorld gave me permission (thanks Tim!) to mod for MDRG — and publish here — his excellent Time-Displaced character race/class for Mutant Future.

Now I can field the occasional pulp gangster or Viking raider in rubble-space.

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All introductions aside, here are my files. I hope you like them:

Increased Randomness in MDRG (Artillery is still under construction)

Aliens in MDRG

Battlesuits in MDRG

Broken Moon Wizards in MDRG (Apologies for the chaotic (heh) layout)

Cyclopic Chickens in MDRG

Time-Displaced in MDRG

Metamorphosis Alpha Converter to MDRG (or as I like to call it: Heavy Metal, the roleplaying game)

Star Frontiers Converter to MDRG

Traveller Converter to MDRG

 

[Edit: For a slightly different — and I think improved — version of my Chickens goto: this text that is a link to something awesome. That book also includes some classic alien types. And cannibals.]

 

[What about second edit?: I posted a link to these docs on a forum and somebody made a comment about not having a very extensive figure collection. He doesn’t use the game’s random generators because they often come up with characters for which he has no model. I gather he just uses the Warband Calculator to stat up minis from his collection on a fig-by-fig basis. I offer a meet-halfway solution:

Use the game’s — and these — random tables to generate your force. But if you generate a character-type for which you have no model, just add one to the roll until you land on a result for which you do have a mini. (Adding one to the last entry on a table wraps the result back around to the first entry.)]

Amazing Things Are Happening!

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Over the past month or so a trio of really cool things happened!

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First, I was invited to talk with the guys on the Skirmish Supremacy podcast.

Check it out: Skirmish Supremacy

Good times! [The audio’s a bit choppy; I think that’s on me as it was my first ‘cast and my first go at Skype. So, apologies to Nick and Tim.]

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Second, Interloper’s Cyclopic Chickens made an appearance on the Guerrilla Miniature Games YouTube channel.

Ash and Jay had a throw-down of This is Not a Test, the latest chapter in their series called Nickel-City Stories.

Check it out:

There was much rebawking!

[Then round two came out today: Nickel’s Back]

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Third, Ganesha Games — makers of Mutants and Death Ray Guns — co-created a Kickstarter called Project Simian Ultra X. It’s cool. But what’s really cool is this: Ganesha and Interloper are collaborating on the campaign book for the project! Andrea from Ganesha is writing up my figs as the rivals and enemies of their Simians.

This is gonna be great!

Three Things

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Here’s what I want:

things_01_02_and_03

The third film —  that red one on the right, there — doesn’t exist. It’s the poster I knocked together for the sequel I want to see happen right after Carpenter’s original.

The title is “The Thing” in Russian (well, according to Wikipedia and Google Translate).

Taking information provided in Carpenter’s flick and in the ’11 prequel, I want the Russians — warned by Kate, the survivor of the prequel — to go to the American station and find MacReady and Childs frozen outside per the closing scene of the ’82 original. [But because I want my dream third Thing to be about Cold War Russians and not about Kurt Russell and Keith David (I love both you guys, just not for this flick) I don’t want it to go exactly how Carpenter has talked about his sequel ideas.]

Since the “alien copy monster” part of the story is out of the bag because of the survivor of the prequel, I want the third one to be more the Aliens chapter of the story. Eerie Soviet nuke-suits and AKs all around. Cold War paranoia writ large. Some kind of a Commissar maybe, or at the very least a KGB plant.

I thingk (heh) extruding all of the following through the 3D printer that is Thing 1 and Thing 2 gets us quite solidly to a red and unpleasant land.

solaris_2010_01

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For good measure I recommend tweaking the final product with equal doses of FPSRussia, every Armageddon scene with Lev Andropov and these:

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And because it’s the secondgoddamn week of winter” the Russians have their work cut out for them.

Oh, and I want Simon Roy to at the very least storyboard it. He is a guy who gets Russians-meet-Aliens:

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It is a dream I have.

[Edit: Speaking of Russian/Aliens, this movie has to have a Kamov in it!]

Honesty is the best policy

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I recently realized something about the shenanigans of published RPG articles, modules and supplements that throws off my various 3d6-in-order, etc. converters for Mutants and Death Ray Guns and Song of Blades and Heroes.

The characters in those RPG books were statted to be the class the writers wanted them to be for the story they were telling. None of those knights, witches, thieves and wizards were randomly rolled.

So to keep things honest I now do the following:

Immediately after converting a published character’s 3d6- or d%-in-order abilities to Song Of stats, degrade Quality and Combat by one each.*

Then apply Level advances to stats and special abilities.

*: No need to do this if you know for a fact the character was rolled randomly in order.

Thirty years on, I like what I like

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In 1984 Pepe Moreno created “Bunker 6A.”

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In 2013 Hajime Katoki directed “A Farewell to Weapons.”

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[The above link is a Japanese voice/Spanish text version of “A Farewell to Weapons.” This being the interweb, with its millions of Japanese speakers and millions more Spanish readers, I’m posting it anyway. Besides, it’s awesome in any language.]

“Bunker 6A” is about an extremely deadly eponymous pillbox. I loved the story and it led me down the Rebel-hole (but that’s another tale).

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“A Farewell to Weapons” is about an equally merciless autonomous tank which IDs itself as GONK-18

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The two stories are similarly short and end in near identical fashion:

bunkerend01

gonkend01

 

Incoming!

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Now that it’s en route to casting, I can show you something.

Inspired by this:

And this (step ahead to 2:20):

https://vimeo.com/74577166#t=140s

I’ve done this:

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Another masterpiece by Bob Olley.

It comes B.Y.O.T. (Bring Your Own Torso) so you can make the rider look however you want.

Here are two excellent lists of torsos, arms, weapons and heads for all your space-poc needs:

The Imperial Patrol; and

The Twelve Olympians.

Of course you could also just dig a fig out of your lead mountain and chop it in half.

This horror should be ready for takeoff in December.

Dralasites and Death Ray Guns

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The madness continues. Today’s installment covers converting characters from Star Frontiers into models for Mutants and Death Ray Guns, and vice versa. I give you Dralasites and Death Ray Guns:

Dralasites_and_Death_Ray_Guns01

There is a ton of great Star Frontiers info here.

And Fight On! magazine published (in issue #11) a cool little article translating dralasites into 3d6-in-order D&D. It’s “Ducks, Dragonewts, & Draala” by Jason Vasché & Cal. You can find it here.

Time to dust off those Vrusk and Yazirian figs you’ve got squirreled away.

Warlords of Def-Con 4

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These two are a little too good together. I say that because they’re practically the same film.

They’re close to the same length.

Their palettes are similar.

Both were released by New World Pictures. Warlords was filmed in New Zealand. Def-Con was filmed in Nova Scotia. ‘Nuff said.

They both have a similar “rules have changed” line delivered by a criminal pseudo-soldier to a captive woman.

The images on both of the above posters are only vaguely relevant to the content of the films they advertise. For example, there are no androids in Warlords and there are no skeletal astronauts in Def-Con. Would there were in both cases!

Don’t get me wrong though. If you’re up for a double-shot of early ’80s (Warlords is ’82, Def-Con is ’85) high-Cold War post-apoc despotic barbarism, then queue ’em up.