Games in the pipeline for the autumn and winter

It's usually about this time, as the summer holidays approach, that I start thinking about games to prepare and play in the autumn. It's been an odd time for tabletop gaming generally, due to the pandemic and periodic lockdowns here in the UK, and I would say things are still far from normal. Although there is much talk about how the UK will be dropping restrictions later this month, I'll believe it when I see it.

I've been playing in some very long roleplaying campaigns over the course of the pandemic. The two main ones have been Tomb of Annihilation for D&D 5e (I was playing a male Dragonborn druid who was turned into a female drow - and back again - my character's memoirs, written in Draconic, will be entitled 'There And Back Again: From Cold Blooded Male To Warm Blooded Female'), which has been completed, and Eternal Lies (written for Trail of Cthulhu, but we used Call of Cthulhu) where I played a retired smuggler from New Orleans roped into saving the world against his better judgement (he ended up losing most of his Sanity in Tibet and retiring to an island in the bayou to get better acquainted with bourbon). Both are fairly epic campaigns, and it was great to have been able to complete both.

My Thursday evening group has progressed onto Descent Into Avernus, another massive D&D campaign (I'm playing a female fighter - the Lady Olivia - from House Hawkwinter in Waterdeep), but that has been suspended temporarily and we are instead involved in a 5th level mini campaign / side quest involving pirates, zombies and ninjas in Chult (Forgotten Realms). I'm playing the halfling bard Parsimonious Tweed, kidnapped on the high seas, and now just trying to stay in one piece as zombies overrun the pirate lair.

My Friday / Sunday group has also moved back onto D&D, this time with the continuation of Rime of the Frost Maiden. Here I'm playing the barbarian / pirate fugitive with a secret turned wannabe warlord Hfhrd Shark Killer. I'm shortly taking a break from this to go spend some time in the Mediterranean with any luck, Covid restrictions permitting.

Ideas for future RPGs

Summer is a good time for looking a potential future gaming projects. At the moment I'm trying to work on the following:

Achtung Cthulhu: I've been promising the next instalment of this for some time, and it is nearly ready. This chapter is the 1940 one and follows on from the 1939 adventure I wrote before the pandemic (Horror in the Hebrides). I've set this up now on Roll 20, and it really just needs a few small additions before it is ready to go. I'm also doing some early brainstorming around the 1941 scenario (of which more later). I don't really want to give too much away on these, suffice to say 1940 takes place in Turkey...

Call of Cthulhu: I am also planning to run the four adventures from the Golden Goblin Press Lovecraft Country Holiday Collection over the next 12 months (which I backed on Kickstarter), ideally scheduling them in around the holidays concerned. These fall on Halloween, Christmas, Easter, and 4th of July (it being America). The investigators are actually kids, and all distantly related to each other. There is something of Stranger Things in this, although all the action still takes place in the mid 1920s. The first chapter sees the kids going to Dunwich for Halloween with their families. One of the things I like about it already is the fact that there is usually at least one of the cousins who lives locally to that scenario. I feel it would somehow be more atmospheric to play these around the same time of year...

The Devil In The Woods: this is a one-shot (I say one shot, my adventures tend to stretch over three sessions these days) set in England in the early 16th century (reign of Henry VIII). I'm using this as an opportunity to teach myself Green Ronin's Chronicle System, at least the basic aspects of it. The adventure as it stands is for HeroQuest (the Robin D. Laws RPG not the board game), but I'm less than enamoured with that system, so am taking the opportunity to convert the adventure over to Sword Chronicle.

A Long Way From Home: this is a science fiction one shot, originally written for Call of Cthulhu, but I'm converting it over to Those Dark Places, which is a new gritty / industrial sci fi RPG from Osprey. I've had a read through of TDP, which is inspired by the likes of Alien, Event Horizon and Outland. It leverages the same milieu, where characters are the crew of space stations or starships in a bleak universe with no aliens and no hyperspace (and no Prime Directive). The game is relatively rules light and does not get too bogged down in tech, which I like.

Star Wars: Finally, having played some Star Wars D6, I'm mulling over actually running some one shot adventures, using some of the old material that got published in the 1980s and early 1990s. These will probably occur on an as-and-when basis when there is little else available, so we shall see how soon we get to that. Having said that, I've ended up GMing more than I expected during lockdown, including some Monster of the Week, Trail of Cthulhu and Night's Black Agents, so who knows? Further details on how those scenarios played can be found on this blog.

Dungeons & Dragons: Finally, I'm also in early planning stages for a 5th edition D&D campaign. It has been over 15 years since I ran a D&D game (2005 IIRC), but the grognard in me has me planning to run module B6 The Veiled Society. I originally ran this as a campaign kick off with 1st level characters in Basic D&D back in about 1985 and it went very well. I'd really like to run it live, with miniatures, rather than on Roll20, hence have not been in a rush to get this out into the wild. The plan would be to use survivors from this adventure in B/X1 - Night's Dark Terror. Conversion work may well begin in the autumn.

Miniatures gaming plans

On the miniatures gaming front, I'm painfully aware that my progress painting miniatures is very slow and that plans to paint whole armies currently look unrealistic. My main painting and gaming projects really break down into the following:

Frostgrave: I'm working on a new halfling warband for Frostgrave, which I hope to get finished in September if I play my cards right; this with a view to getting a few games of Frostgrave in over the winter when opportunity allows. I now have the 2nd edition rules, which see several big changes in the way warbands are composed initially. There seem to be more free options than there were, meaning that under strength warbands are a thing of the past. The big question is whether I use the same tactic I used in the previous campaign and take a few dogs into my starting retinue, or instead rely on more archers.

Warhammer 40,000: I'm involved in a project to play one game from each of the editions of Warhammer 40K over the next year or so. This could be quite a challenge to complete, but it is interesting nonetheless. We hope to gain some good perspectives on how the game evolved since it first came out. We are working on our armies for Rogue Trader, aka the first edition of the 40K game, which was published in 1987. I've never played classic RT before, and I'm not using my Necrons as these were only released after 3e. I decided to try to build a Genestealer Cult invasion force, as it forces me to finish painting my Genestealers (the core of a projected Tyranid army). I'm supplementing them with Genestealer hybrids and a Patriarch, using the Genestealer Cult list from an old White Dwarf issue from the 1980s. We are aiming for a 1500 point game. More on this when I've made more progress.

Lord of the Rings: I'd also like to progress my Fellowship of the Ring campaign, which has been written up on this blog over the years. This is a very slow campaign, and on current form we are probably getting one game in every 18 months, which really needs to speed up. I think I got distracted by a Blood Bowl league in 2018-19, and then the pandemic arrived. We have been working our way through the campaign in chronological order, and the hobbits are currently being pursued to Bucklebury Ferry in the Shire (so we haven't got very far). Hopefully more to come from this over the winter. Who knows?

Bloodbath At Orc's Drift: Some years ago we played the opening three battles in this Oldhammer campaign from Joe Dever and Gary Chalk (we even played Ashak Rise three times). Write ups on these are on this blog, although the formatting leaves a lot to be desired. Sadly we never got around to the climactic battle at Orc's Drift itself. Reading the scenario notes, it is obvious that this game would play best with six players and an umpire. The opportunity to get that many players round a table has been elusive for a number of reasons. I'm now wondering whether sometime in the vicinity of Christmas might be timely. I'm hoping that the pandemic in the UK will remain relatively under control, allowing us to combine it with mince pies and mulled wine. I'm also keen to use the original Warhammer rules (2e) for this. More on this in the autumn as the project slowly progresses...

AD&D Battlesystem: I'm mulling over the practicality of a Battlesystem game using a situation that is developing in our current Rime of the Frostmaiden campaign. I've been keen to try Battlesystem ever since it first came out in the 1980s. Back then I could not afford many figures, but I loved the idea of using a tabletop wargame to supplement a roleplaying campaign, and have written on this on this blog. Now it's more a case of getting the figures I DO have painted. But having said that, I like the idea of taking a tactical situation from a live campaign and turning it into a tabletop wargame. I'll be evaluating how realistic this over the next few weeks using existing terrain and figures. We are playing the RPG campaign using 5e D&D, and Battlesystem was written originally for 1e, then updated for 2e, but 5e does seem very backwards compatible, so it could be relatively easy to do this. Let's see.

I should also add that opportunities for miniatures gaming have been zero since the pandemic appeared. I hope to be able to complete my solo play test of Dragon Rampant in the next few days. I will try to post that on this blog once I do.