Stomach flu sucks & Mantic Games armies

D&D adventure this weekend was cancelled due to me (the DM) catching my daughter Penny's stomach flu (which I probably gave her because I work at a school and who knows what crazy things the students have).

Oh well. Got around to making a new figure for our Goliath ranger, Sergeant Enforcer, and did some shopping around on the Reaper Miniatures website for some random hero figures for a future dwarf army I am planning. I need an army for next year's Orctoberfest as I sold off my old Bretonnians (I kept the newer models) and thus don't have a 2500 point army anymore.

What sucks is that I can't get to 2500 points with my Bretonnian army without shelling out an obscene amount of money. Even if I go all cavalry I need to buy some 2 or 3 boxes of knights which will run over $100 but then I have no archer or men-at-arms support and everything else is taken up by characters. To get the proper support I'd need to shell out another $100 just for some 200 points of archers and/or men-at-arms.

Enter Mantic Games. My god are those models cheap, good looking and so plentiful! One of their dwarf box sets which retails for around $100 is around 1500 points in GWs books. Then add some characters and runes and you've got close to 2000. A few more cheap box sets and it's easily 2500 for less than $150 or so. It also helps that I've got 3 28mm scale catapults that I can use for grudge throwers to help round out the army.

To help finance this new army I did have to sell some other things first though. Out went my AoBR Deathwing, my Deathwing Land Raider and some tactical squads I didn't use anymore (thankfully I made profit on those so I can replace the Deathwing stuff if I wanted to later). Once those make it to their destinations I'll place an order for a new Dwarf army. May not be GW but whatever, I can still play casually and at independant tournaments.

The Adventures of Outlaw Shizzle - Episode 1 "The Great Escape"

Haven't had any time at all to play any kind of wargame and I'm so dissappointed I missed the Remembrance Day Challenge. But that's life I suppose.

Instead of being too down that I can't get my gaming fix, I decided to start up a Dungeons and Dragons 4th edition campaign with my old playgroup. We haven't played an RPG in a long while and 4th edition D&D seemed like a great place to start. The ruleset is quite straight forward and there's a lot of variety to keep everyone happy. Not to mention we were all itching to play some kind of RPG again.

One of the things we always hated was character creation as it took a while if no one knew what they wanted to be exactly. So we decided to assign a role to everyone (each player took on the role of striker, controller, leader or defender) then roll for random classes in each role and then finally random races. We ended up with some interesting combinations and shortened character creation time considerably (no looking through each book to figure out what to be).

• The defender of the party is a dragonborn warden named Cardiac Bison
• The striker of the party is a goliath ranger named Sergeant Enforcer
• The controller of the party is a human invoker of the Raven Queen named Jack Crusher
• The party has two leaders (we had a fifth player who rolled his role randomly), one half-elf cleric of the Raven Queen named Mr. Hunter and one dwarf bard named Andre Zodiac.

We were all fans of the WWE at some point and one of the players had a wrestler name app on their iphone and named everyone in the party (and the party name too) using it, so the names of the characters are kind of strange (the app did speed up the character creation as well)

The party was balanced and the players got to play characters they haven't played before. Not surprisingly being veteran gamers my players all did their best to min/max their characters to be the best they could be.

Anyways what follows is a recap of our first adventure.