Sunday 19 September 2010

Welcome and Hobby Highs and Lows

First up another welcome along to my newest follower, Andrath. I hope you like what you see, feel free to comment on anything you see herein.

So recently my hobby time has been affected somewhat by illness, but that seems to be past so I have been getting back to Pulp City and I will be demoing the game at the club this Tuesday when I'll be giving Rob a game.

With that in mind I've spent part of the week getting my Pulp City house in order (as it were), I've put together a reference sheet that includes the new rules, printed out all the cards that I downloaded some time ago and got them all cut out and laminated and finally went back over the rules and popped onto the PC forum to clarify a few things (thanks again for your help Leon).

I was feeling a quite pleased with myself and really looking forward to Tuesday, then this morning I went to put my finished cards in the box with my models and discovered that all the minis had got a dirty yellow tint to them, most notable on Gentleman and Solar as they are both predominantly white, but all of them have been affected to a greater or lesser extent.

It appears that for some reason that the varnish has reacted with the corrugated plastic of the box they were in (a Figures in Comfort Company Box which I picked up a little while ago), the plastic of the box has discoloured in a similar way to the models and unfortunately having tried a suggestion given to me over on Lead Adventure Forum to try and clean it off that didn't work it looks like I've got a bit of repainting to do in my future :(

Still, I'm not going to let it get me down, I still get to play my first game proper on Tuesday and I'm excited about it, plus I've almost got a couple more figures ready to go.

First up is Apebot:



The big lad is basically done, finally. This is the 3rd lot of paint I've put on him now and whilst I'm still not 100% sure I like it, I'm a lot happier than I was with the last two attempts. The lamppost is from Fenris Games. I just need to get him varnished (though I may re-highlight the red first...I haven't decided yet).

On the painting table at the moment is the chap that started this whole trip to Pulp City in the first place, Guerilla:



I'm really happy with the way he's coming along and I reckon a couple of more hours work should see him done plus an hour or so for the base, hopefully I'll be able to field him Tuesday night, we shall see.

Anyway, that's it for now, I do have a few more thing bubbling away but more on them next time.

Take care.

J

Saturday 18 September 2010

Hello, Good Evening and Welcome

I'd like to extend a welcome to my newest follower Dr. Willett's Workshop.

I hope you enjoy my little corner of the web and don't mind my occasionally, (ok, mostly), random mumblings on this hobby of ours :)

My posting drought is nearing an end as I'm finally over the lurgy that's been plaguing me for most of the month, so expect more content very soon, mostly Pulp City related at the moment, but there should be some variation in topics soon as well.

Watch this space.

J

Wednesday 1 September 2010

All by Myself

As we're roleplaying from Thursdays from now on I decided last night to break out one of my 2'x2' boards and get to grips with the basics of Pulp City so that when I take it down the club the games should run somewhat smoothly.

The main thing I wanted to accomplish was to understand the bare bones of the rules at first, I'll add in agendas, minions etc. at a later date.

So, I decided to do a little level 3 encounter using Solar and Jade Hawk as the heroes with Rook and the Gentleman acting as their opponents, I dug out my AT-43 scenery box and set up accordingly:



Over the next 5 turns the game went fairly quickly, just over an hour and 15 minutes, which wasn't bad for a learner, though I did occasionally get old and new rules muddled, I was pretty much on top of it by the end, here are some more pics from the game and some of the thing I learned:


End of turn 1. Jade Hawk has learned that charging Rook may have seemed like a good idea at the time, but his high Defense compared to her Strength means she needed to use her Trump roll to even scratch him and he can take a lot of damage.


Turn 2. Whilst Solar has fun hurling a concrete barrier at Gentleman, Jade Hawk learns to use the right power for the job and uses Wing Sweep that targets Rooks lower Agility score to get the hit and move to get closer to the now very wounded Gentleman, unfortunately Rook's next go involved him getting up and firing off a Sink Hole at Jade to put her flat on her back to see how she liked it and reduce her health alarmingly.


Turn 3. Solar and Rook took to beating 7 shades of whatsit out of each other rolling 6's all round to keep canceling each other out, Solar's origin allowing him to get a slight advantage over Rook and injured him a little more.

Jade Hawk goes to finish off Gentleman only for the dice to fail her completely allowing the Gentleman to Point Blank her out of the game on his next activation...ouch, that's no way to treat a lady.


Turn 4. Solar breaks off from Rook and gets revenge for Jade Hawk by taking down Gentleman only for Rook to charge and get a great attack roll result which is as impressive as how bad Solar's defense roll is. Solar is not looking well.


Turn 5. Solar tries to get some distance between himself and Rook so he can hit him with Sun Ray, but more bad rolls allow Rook to get in and land the finishing blow with a certain amount of ease...Villains win.

All in all I rather enjoyed myself, the new rules have definitely streamlined the ease of play and I like the Power-up dice pool idea, it came in handy in a couple of places (though not handy enough for the heroes unfortunately).

The Action Points and the way you activate models is quite different from any other game I've played, but is a very nice way of doing it, being able to activate models more than once until they've used their AP allowance makes choices of action critical and in larger games should see some interesting tactical decisions being made, and only being able to do 1 action per activation (or 2 if it's a move or hold action) makes you think about things differently than other games, I like it.

The new way Trump traits work if great and a lot more straight forward than in the original rules, a lot less to remember and also the new abilities Trump Traits give are a lot more likely to be used.

Things I learned: Lvl 1 Supremes going up against Lvl 2 ones really isn't a good idea, but once that lesson was learned (the hard way:), things got easier.

Scenery manipulation is fun, I need to get a street board done so that cars and lamp posts can go a-flying :)

I NEED the rulebook to be out soon, as fun as I hoped it would be, from the sound of it the rest of the new stuff is going to knock this game out of the park (if you forgive the analogy).

Hopefully I'll get another practice game soon to try out the parts of the rules I didn't use yesterday, then I think it's time to unleash the game on the club, can't wait :)

More soon.

J