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 Kid_Kyoto wrote:
Because apparently fixing time machines is like repairing plumbing.

Hot Tub Time Machine suddenly makes sense.

Hey, thanks for all the pics of cheescake mechanics! Need some for my next painting project. Like about.....30...... Might be a bit ambitious on second thought......

That cover is completely unappealing to me in every way something can be unappealing. I'm not talking about the feminist stuff, I really don't care all that much about that at all, I mean everything else. Its just, boring. It tells me absolutely nothing about the setting, the pallete is very "bleh" in the way it all blends together so that absolutely nothing on it jumps out at you or grabs your attention, the name is uninspired, etc. etc. etc. Hell, even the faces of the two characters on the cover, can you say "BORING"? Absolutely emotionless, 100% expressionless, they look downright uninterested and as a result uninteresting. If the characters in your game can't bother to be interested in anything, why should I be?

The RPG cover is meh. I do however like the cover of the upcoming adventure ,OP; Apocalypse cover.

http://www.modiphius.com/dust-adventures.html

Yeah, but that one is also a draft cover, the real cover is still being painted.

Please note Operation: Apocalypse is a draft cover. The legendary Spanish artist Pintureiro (he painted the cover of the Achtung! Cthulhu Investigator's Guide) painted the cover for DUST Adventures!

@Brook, oh I know, I just prefer the cover as it conveys a better atmosphere is all.

Oh man. I somehow understand the overly attractive female thing, but females in auto-dismounting clothing is a bit too much even for me. Not to mention it makes it feel like they've been victims of attempted rape or something, having to run away with their clothes barely on.

BrookM wrote:Re: art - That's how Paolo Parente rolls I suppose. This isn't the worst of it in all honesty, his Dust comic is so much more worse it easily surpasses the cheesecake of the tabletop game and goes into fetish.

@modiphius: Question regarding the art of this one, will there be new art? I saw the preview page that showed off the characters you could be and those designs are all years and years old by now, so will it mostly be recycling old art or will it feature newly commissioned stuff as well?

It's actually by a Spanish artist called Pintureiro, not Paolo. We wanted a fresh look and will be showing off a lot of the Dust universe people haven't seen, so there might be a few classics in the book that RPG gamers won't have seen before, but we're commission a lot of new artwork for it. You can see an example in the Campaign draft cover for Operation Apocalypse:

Accolade wrote:It's not that I think it's oversexualized (trust me, the Kingdom: Death stuff makes this look like child's play), it just seems inconsistent with the other stuff I've seen from DUST. You have this WWII-mecha feel going, with a 1950's style, and then you have the girl with the trendy glasses and the tiny shirt. I just feel the two characters shown are so juxtaposed against each other and the tank in the background.


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 modiphius wrote:

 Accolade wrote:
Yeah, seeing this cover it makes me realize why people generalize wargamers as a bunch of sex-starved neckbeards.

Just, why?

EDIT: I'm sure the product itself is interesting, it's just the cover is so damn cliche.

Actually we toned down the over sexualised imagery by making her more of a contemporary girl - but had to stick with the same outfit obviously as that is the character.

I understand, and I hope I didn't come off as too dickish with my comments. I'm sure it's not really all that important, it was just a detail that stuck out to me immediately.

Ah no don't worry :-) I made a point of toning down the girl but she still had to look like she could do the job - she's a well known mechanic in the story - it's a sensible outfit, not over the top and so we had to balance keeping her looking like the character whilst updating the look. We're doing a LOT of new art for the book with a new artist Giogio Baroni who's just finished the DUST cross-over book with Achtung! Cthulhu and he's got the right feel of pulp action and the look of the dust universe.

We were originally going to do a Kickstarter but with the Babylon issues decided just to do a pre-order and fund the core book and campaign so people would know it was happening regardless. We'll have a free preview of layout and intro rules in a month if you missed the playtest. It's a nice introductory level RPG with easy chargen, and you can integrate Dust Tactics or Warfare battles in the rpg if you like, or convert your heroes to tabletop figures.

I still like the Adventure art, even though it is a draft.

I'm going in for an oil change tomorrow. I certainly hope my local shop has swapped out all the overweight, tattooed guys for equally competent but Paolo approved techs!

Here's the original piece of Rosie, done back in '08 or the likes.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Sedition Wars had Jada, who was not one of the Serenity crew.

True, not actually part of the "Calamity" crew, but she might as well have been a Kaylee evolution:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/001/060/205/1ce0e4b28c24a71897ee3a6f388649d8_large.jpg?1381486228

chaos0xomega wrote:
. Hell, even the faces of the two characters on the cover, can you say "BORING"? Absolutely emotionless, 100% expressionless, they look downright uninterested and as a result uninteresting. If the characters in your game can't bother to be interested in anything, why should I be?

But that neutral expression is their most important feature! They are the Keanu Reeveses of roleplaying.


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timd wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
Sedition Wars had Jada, who was not one of the Serenity crew.

True, not actually part of the "Calamity" crew, but she might as well have been a Kaylee evolution:
https://s3.amazonaws.com/ksr/assets/001/060/205/1ce0e4b28c24a71897ee3a6f388649d8_large.jpg?1381486228

I thought she was supposed to be a Tank Girl reference. Whatever. Still more than a decade too late.

I know this is more of a minis question (so mods feel free to tell me if I should instead take it to the long dead kickstarter thread to necro) but did they ever come out with the big turretless tank destroyer for the SSU they showed there? The one that looked like a Jadgpanther II from World of Tanks but was a russian TD is the one I'm referring to.

I don't see any pictures of that in the 'unlocked' stuff on the KS page. The KS seems to be a bit of a mess though.

I think the cover is very nicely executed and would be a fine piece of interior art, or maybe the cover of a supplement. Not a great main rulebook cover though. I don't think I'd know what the RPG would involve just by looking at that.

Birdwatching, maybe?

Maybe ostriches? Something with a bit of risk, there's clearly some weary tension there.

 plastictrees wrote:
I don't see any pictures of that in the 'unlocked' stuff on the KS page. The KS seems to be a bit of a mess though.

I think the cover is very nicely executed and would be a fine piece of interior art, or maybe the cover of a supplement. Not a great main rulebook cover though. I don't think I'd know what the RPG would involve just by looking at that.

It's about 3/5 of the way down the KS front page and looks to be a valid add on for $40 under the name "Sergei Shtemenko" unlocked at $275k.



https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/duststudio/dust-operation-babylon

The turret seems even bigger than the one used on the other tank from a first glance but I'll have to see if they're reusing that with a different barrel (and just mounting it differently) to make a "new" tank. The chassis looks to be the same as the other two tanks (just with a rear mounted turret).

 plastictrees wrote:
Maybe ostriches? Something with a bit of risk, there's clearly some weary tension there.

It looks more like the kind of tension you see after he makes a move to kiss her, and she turns her head away, and he's all, "I thought we had chemistry," and she's all, "I don't want to mislead you; you remind me of my brother," and he's all thinking, "What? I'm nothing like your brother." But he doesn't say it, because he knows the truth is worse. He knows.

But they still have to work together.

Apparently renovating townhouses near abandoned war zones, if the cover art is to be believed. No wonder they're staring at that ostrich.




Also, won't it be hard to roleplay in a universe where all of the background hinges on mysterious aliens we know nothing about?

"Navigate complex personal relationships in a world torn apart by war! Unrequited love and awkward small talk has never been so comprehensively described using charts and d20s!

DUST Adventures!

Also there are walking tanks."

 plastictrees wrote:
"Navigate complex personal relationships in a world torn apart by war! Unrequited love and awkward small talk has never been so comprehensively described using charts and d20s!

DUST Adventures!

Also there are walking tanks."

I was thinking more along the lines of:



DUST Adventures (TM) is the exciting game of preventative maintenance! Will smexy mechanic girl's new filters keep the engine free of grime? Or will studly grenade dude have to do a full lube job? Only you can decide!

 warboss wrote:
I know this is more of a minis question (so mods feel free to tell me if I should instead take it to the long dead kickstarter thread to necro) but did they ever come out with the big turretless tank destroyer for the SSU they showed there? The one that looked like a Jadgpanther II from World of Tanks but was a russian TD is the one I'm referring to.

They have not "come out" with anything from the Kickstarter. For some unexplained reason Battlefront is not paying Dust Studios for the Kickstarter units and not shipping out products to their backers. Backers have been met with nothing but silence and locked threads on the official forums when asking what in the world is going on. My guess is this is going to dissolve into a legal nightmare and no one is getting the Babylon releases from Battlefront.

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
It looks more like the kind of tension you see after he makes a move to kiss her, and she turns her head away, and he's all, "I thought we had chemistry," and she's all, "I don't want to mislead you; you remind me of my brother," and he's all thinking, "What? I'm nothing like your brother." But he doesn't say it, because he knows the truth is worse. He knows.

But they still have to work together.

Actually Bazooka Joe is a traitor and has an affair with a filthy commie. Rosie on the other hand only loves the cold, unliving metal of the Mickeys under her care.

Joe appears to do some serious manscaping on those eyebrow's.

Orrrr someone shaved them off and drew a new set on with a sharpie.

The cover of Operation: Apocalypse is by the same artist who drew the draft cover for it, Gio Baroni - he's drawing all the internal art on the games too. :-)

 BrookM wrote:

 BobtheInquisitor wrote:
It looks more like the kind of tension you see after he makes a move to kiss her, and she turns her head away, and he's all, "I thought we had chemistry," and she's all, "I don't want to mislead you; you remind me of my brother," and he's all thinking, "What? I'm nothing like your brother." But he doesn't say it, because he knows the truth is worse. He knows.

But they still have to work together.

Actually Bazooka Joe is a traitor and has an affair with a filthy commie. Rosie on the other hand only loves the cold, unliving metal of the Mickeys under her care.

Can you blame him? Commies are so welcoming; from each according her her abilities to each according to his needs.

Rosie is just coming to terms with the idea that feeling and vulnerability are not the same thing, but since her father passed before she could confront him about his high expectations and on-off neglect, she must make the long journey to catharsis on her own, the mechs in her care serving as a metaphor for her own emotional growth, cold mechanical pieces that must learn to walk, to live, again.



But really, How do you set up an open sandbox in a fictional world where many elements and factions have been left deliberately vague?

Well, a roleplaying game would be the ideal background to do some expanding in with regards to the background. To date we haven't had an awful lot of fluff dumps, just the odd bit of info from each expansion by FFG.

Back when I really was into Dust I was so starved for fluff at the time I not only bought the first issue of that whatever-you-pray-to-awful comic book of his, I also shelved out cash for a "sourcebook" (which was more an artbook, but still a massive waste of money as it's less than 30 pages and well.. if you know the creator you know what most of those pages are made up of) and I was stupid enough to buy the Dust boardgame, hoping that it had fluff, but nope, it's just a gakky RISK variant that uses art of Dust.

 BrookM wrote:
Well, a roleplaying game would be the ideal background to do some expanding in with regards to the background. To date we haven't had an awful lot of fluff dumps, just the odd bit of info from each expansion by FFG.

Back when I really was into Dust I was so starved for fluff at the time I not only bought the first issue of that whatever-you-pray-to-awful comic book of his, I also shelved out cash for a "sourcebook" (which was more an artbook, but still a massive waste of money as it's less than 30 pages and well.. if you know the creator you know what most of those pages are made up of) and I was stupid enough to buy the Dust boardgame, hoping that it had fluff, but nope, it's just a gakky RISK variant that uses art of Dust.

That's really disappointing to hear. The fluff is usually what pulls me into a game. I wish more companies put some effort into introducing new players to their works.

The worst experience I had was with PP's Grind, which did not even have a single paragraph on what the Jacks were, who they were playing for, what motivated them, or why I should care at all about them or the game. There was an advertisement for WMH in there too, I think, but it gave no reason to want to play the game other than game mechanics and mini pics. It almost felt that they were trying to exclude me from interest in their brand.

The absolute best I've seen, on the other hand, was Defiance Games of all companies. Their boxes had great artwork, nice graphic design, little teasers of background or vignettes to fire up the imagination for what you might want to use some UAMC or Hudson's Bugs for. Inside they had a crd with some rules on it, but half of the rules were a section called "That's Good/That's Bad," which was not only funny but offered more insight into the background of the units than all the cards in all the boxes I had ever bought from DUST, AT-43, Alkemy, WH, 40k, Confrontation or Dreamforge. It's a shame the company was run by a real schmuck because it could have really helped elevate the packaging standards in our hobby. Mantic tends to put some flavor text on their boxes, and they used to include some great inserts that hit all kinds of hobby buttons in the boxes (although I think they stopped with those), so at least somebody thinks of us as rounded gamers with imaginations and not just bleep-bloop rules cogitators. The only other one I can recall was Arcane Legions, who included little MTG-style blurbs on all their cards.

I guess to make a long story short, I don't know why I should care about DUST as a setting and apparently neither do the people who sell it. This can be a problem for a roleplaying game.

And for the record, I did try to read up DUST when I first started buying the models and it felt extremely unfinished. Last time I looked into it, during the Kickstarter, it seemed to me like the pledgers were hoping to unlock new factions just for some new background.

I'm going to wait for reviews with this one, while I may have sold off all my Dust stuff not that long ago, I still like the setting, so if the book has fluff in it that delves into things more than FFG's attempts at it did, I'll pick it up somewhere down the line.