Backburners & Battlemechs

with a side of 90s miniature nostalgia

This Week’s Post is a bit of a rollercoaster. A positive approach to the reality of having a pile of unfinished projects and a negative rant about my feelings toward the state of RPG twitter.

Let’s look at the good side of things.

But I no longer fear it. The backburner serves a purpose. Ideas can be repurposed, mechanics stolen, and some projects may rise to the Live Projects board again. 

The Doomed started as GRIMLITE, which I never expected to be played by anybody but me, and pretty soon I'll have some news on the exciting future of that game.

The backburner is not a thing of shame. It is a thing of pride. 

You might think that Mythic Bastionland has slipped onto the backburner, but after coming back from holiday I decided to take a little break from changing the document before I get a chance to test it out some more. I want to avoid over-development before I’ve done a proportionate amount of actual in-field testing.

So expect that to surge back into life in the next few weeks, but at the moment I’m diverted by a couple of secret things and…

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Elsewhere my fling with BattleTech continues to grow in passion and intensity.

The Beginner Box and Game of Armoured Combat starter set are both fantastic self-contained ways to dip into the game. Naturally I ended up getting both.

Painting these minis was a fun challenge. They’re a lot more blocky than the ultra-detailed GW stuff I’ve been working on, which means you have to bring a little of the detail yourself.

I liked the idea of each Mech being unique, rather than sticking to rigid regimental colour schemes, like a little bunch of rough-and-ready wandering knights.

I finally gave into my dark curiosities and picked up the weighty Total Warfare core rules. This heavy tome of cask strength BattleTech makes no concessions to streamlining, and is more than I can handle.

But something calls from within.

Even the famously daunting Technical Readout Sheet for each Mech was starting to look appetising.

While I’ve never really been engaged by RPG actual plays, I have a real affection for watching videos of miniature games being played. Perfect lunch break viewing when split into bite-sized chunks.

In particular, Guerrilla Miniature Games are to blame for hooking me into BattleTech and their videos have been invaluable in tackling into this intimidating ruleset. Sometimes these things feel insurmountable until you watch somebody else do it.

If you’ve always been curious about this game, but feared the high crunch levels, you can grab everything you need to try out a trimmed-down version of the game right here on the official site, along with an exemplary set of free resources for any game publisher to learn from.

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Coming Soon

This week, Patreon backers got an early look at another one of my nostalgic miniature-based posts, starting with my first distant exposure to Games Workshop’s Epic games.

I came into Games Workshop games at an interesting time in their history. Like the last days of the Wild West. 

The focus was clearly on Warhammer 40k and Fantasy Battles, but in the catalogues I'd see adverts for relics from the past. Man o'War, Space Hulk, Blood Bowl. Weird stuff that would tease me from catalogue pages, but remain trapped in the past. 

But this Epic game was still being talked about a little in White Dwarf. 

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