Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Also, on that note, combining those 2 factions into 1 would also allow us to have more varied supernatural gangs. So I’m thinking in the Kickstarter it might be more streamlined just having 2 new gang starters rather than 3.. So just Unsung and Wormwood Wardens (mixing in what I was planning for The Wicked). That will also mean a lower funding goal too.

So for the funding goal we would have the the Wormwood starter pack with Werecat, Werebear, Wendigo and Rake. Unsung will get JW Clarkson, Janey Bower, Colin Buchanan and a Rustler henchman. Then for stretch goals Wormwood will get a booster pack with a werebat, revenant, 1 zombie and 1 cactus cat. 2nd goal will be an Unsung booster with Ruthie Mae, Cookie and 2 other henchmen I haven’t decided on yet. After that I’d like to add in the jersey devil as a large monster followed by a new artillery piece.. and then a support pack for each and stop there... I’d rather have a finite goal and get everything done in a timely manner and then do a new campaign after everything ships, rather than have it go on and on with tons of goals and end up being really late.

What I’m planning to do is have 3 types of 4-man box sets for all gangs eventually.. Starter sets get 1 gang leader hero, 2 professionals/fiends and 1 henchman/minion. Booster packs get 2 professionals & 2 henchmen. And Support Packs get 1 new Hero (who’s not the leader), 1 professional and 2 minions. large monsters and artillery pieces will be solo models, but other than that I'd like to stick to the 4 man boxes for everything. Just makes it easier.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh and, also on that note .. I'm still kind of torn between dropping the support packs and booster packs in favor of packing everything except starter sets as solo minis. Solo minis would give folks more options for expanding their gangs and also have much lower stretch goals.. but that comes with lots of extra SKUs and overall not as "retail friendly" as easy-to-grab-off-the-shelf box sets.

The oversized image makes it a little difficult to read this page, if you could edit it to smaller that'd simplify things...

Factions could make it interesting. Corvus Belli's Infinity has great success with their factions. Players develop a certain loyalty to a given faction (or three). Factions create a narrative which can bring life to a game.

For my part, I am fairly familiar with several Western themes; the narratives were fairly obvious to me based on the character design of the Miniatures.

Yeah that's kinda of what I was thinking.. developing each separate gang we have now into full separate factions, so there would be a whole bunch of factions kind of like Infinity. But I still want to allow folks to mix characters between gangs as allies, but they'll will work a lot better together if you stick to one.

So, thinking about the Kickstarter.. it’s still a long ways off. I’m gonna guess August or September. Planning ahead as usual. What I think I’d like to do now is present it like a 2-player starter pack, so it would be a retail boxed set that has the Unsung and Wormwood Wardens starter packs plus a printed rulebook. The book would be a bit smaller, really just some background info and the core rules and some model photo galleries and stuff like that. I’d leave out the campaigns and character creation stuff and have that all be like optional online rules. That will keep the page count lower and make it cheap enough to include in the box without costs getting too crazy. Maybe I’d could do a fuller print-on-demand book with the printed rules + other stuff later on?

So, if it’s going to be a 2-player starter set… does it need to also have stuff like dice and a mini tape measure? or terrain stuff? Kind of worried that if I add too much it will be too expensive, but if I don’t it won’t be a “proper” starter set. What do you think?

Here's a new design I was thinking about for the BWG 2.0 cards.. what do you think?



Should I make the health be more like a bar where you can put the card in a sleeve and use a dry erase marker to keep track of your health, kind of like Warmachine?

I think I'd probably be using model photos instead of art though, since I won't have full color art for every character.

And the card backs will be kind of like now, just plain text for reference listing all of the skills and weapon special rules too.

Looks damn good!!!

Sounds great (but I still miss the canevall gang from your 2nd kickstarter)
Immortals would be great too.



And maybe grey aliens !?

Aliens might be fun but if I did that, it would be a long ways off. I want to get the monsters all up and running first and stick to that for a while. It might be tough to do aliens without them being too corny, or too overpowered.

I’ve also decided for the new starter sets I’m just going to stick to the 5-man sets, so it will match what I already have. I might also repackage the werewolves into a 5 man starter, rather than the separate 3-pack + 2-pack I have now.

So I’m planning to do 5-man starter sets, and then 3-man gang booster packs and 3-man minion/henchmen packs that are more generic and able to join any gang in their faction.

More stuff swimming around in my head today... So, once we get the BWG 2.0 rules done and released next year-ish, I’m planning to repackage all of my original minis and starter sets to include updated stat cards reflecting the 2.0 rules, plus a new quickstart rules sheet with each starter set (if it won’t drive up the costs too much). And then hopefully do a re-release and try and get stores interested in carrying the game.

On that note, thinking about the hired guns.. I want to cut down on the amount of SKUs I have so everything will be more retail-friendly. At first, I thought of grouping them up into packs of 3. There’s 12 in all right now. Just been wondering, do you like having all of those extra hero models to choose from? Would it be better to maybe turn them into their own separate gangs? Or, have them all join other gangs as 3-man booster packs? If we did that, they wouldn’t all be heroes anymore if we add them to other gangs.

Also been wondering about the Artillery. I’m planning a 3rd artillery piece called the Heavy Bolter, designed to shoot wooden stakes at pesky vampires. Bob is sculpting that now. Would it be good to keep them as 3 separate pieces (Gatling gun, werecatcher and heavy bolter) .. or would you rather see something more like one pack that has 1 carriage, and all 3 weapon options? Then you can build the one you want and/or use magnets to swap out the weapon you want to use each game?

I don't play Savage Beasts, but if I did, I would prefer the one carriage with weapon choices. Privateer Press did that with some of their models and it gave players a chance to use a couple of options with warjacks and Beasts. Good, flexible options.

Will the 2.0 cards be available for purchase?

Yes, I'll have downloadable cards like now and then I'll be using Wargame Vault for print on demand cards for folks that want them.. but I'm going to change that and offer them per gang rather than one huge deck, that way people can just get the gangs they want. The only thing is that you need to order a minimum of 10 cards, and all of the gangs just have 5 members. Right now anyway Maybe I can still do one big deck too, so that might be a teeny bit cheaper if someone wants to get them all.

If you can design the castings for the carriage and the weapon choices to have holes for the magnets it would fantastic!

Even if you could not include magnets in the pack you could state "Accepts xxx sized magnets" and folks could get their own.

Yeah that would be cool.. I'll have to think about that, it might be tough though because the gatling gun and the werecatcher both connect to the carriage in a different spot. Not sure how Bob is going to do the Heavy Bolter, I told him to just make up something that looks cool and fits on top of the same carriage. So we'll see what he comes up with first

So here's what I'm working on now



Going to try and get a nice hardback rulebook done in the Kickstarter. I've also decided to stick with just the 2 major factions (Mortal & Immortal), but instead of mixing beasts and undead together we'll have separate gangs. So we'll have the Unsung mortal gang, and then the Wormwood Wardens beast gang, and The Wicked undead gang.

Getting some new art done for the Wicked.. they will have a Brujah, Revenant, Wendigo, Rake and Ghoul

That cover in hardback would be badass!

have you thought of adding "Savage World / Deadlands" stats to add a cross over audience?

I am sure you could work out the licensing with Shane Hensley easily.

Actually I haven't ever really looked into Deadlands at all. I know it's a similar theme so I was afraid I'd end up copying too much from them or whatever. So I thought it would be better to just do my own thing and make up my own little world

Forgot to post here, but i added it to facebook yesterday.. here is the concept art for the undead gang, The Wicked. From left to right there's a Wendigo, Rake, Brujah (not undead, just evil), ghoul and revenant.

So, I’m trying to come up with some good ideas for Blackwater Gulch objective markers. In the new rules, you can set up objectives on the board for people to capture. So rather than just putting a glass bead on the board I thought it would be cool if we could have something that fits the theme. These would be small pieces that come with a plastic base, maybe 5 to a box.

At first I was thinking just a crate or barrel would be good enough, but I’d like to have something cooler, just don’t know what. What kind of objective pieces would you like to see?

I also thought about putting together an optional print-on-demand Loot Deck where if you capture an objective, you can draw a card and get a cool item that you can use in your game.. or keep for other games if you are playing in a campaign. So that's why I was thinking having a crate or barrel would be good for storing loot, but crates & barrels feel kinda boring.

Objective ideas:

Loot bags like you would take from a bank

Half opened crate filled with bullets or coins

A set of saddle bags

Whisky bottle(s)

It's been a while since I've been able to make a good visit, here's my two cents.

As for Artillery, a good old Mountain Howitzer would be a blast! The casting would be simple; the rules might be tricky though.

Historique makes some excellent markers for Bolt Action, it's a one-man operation, but he does excellent custom work. http://www.historiqueshop.com/index.php?id_category=19&controller=category

Cool those are some good ideas for objectives. I think I may try sculpting them myself when I get my copy of zbrush, I think it will be easier to learn starting out with inanimate objects. I may still do some crates and barrels, I was also thinking it might be cool to make some obstacles that are piles of crates and barrels and junk, maybe around 1x1x4” long? I may also try casting them myself, since they would be flat on the bottom I could probably do them as a 1 piece mold where you just pour the resin over the top rather than a 2 piece mold that would need a pressure pot and all. I could probably also do some custom printable tokens for objectives or to keep track of damage types or wounds.

I’ve been thinking about the 2 big factions lately.. The sides are pretty uneven with so many human gangs. Been trying to think up some ideas for more evil gangs to join them. Maybe something like the Hellfire Club even though that was a London thing? I’d like to do Tommyknockers who I was planning to have be kind of like subterranean goblin types who like to eat unsuspecting gold miners. The Traveling Zarconis circus gang could be evil, and we could give them more of a mystical vibe and add in some circus freaks? I don’t think I want to do a straight up demon race like Warhammer style though, I was thinking demons would be more like evil spirits possessing people. I think after these 3 new gangs are done I’d like to do the Zarconis next though, they’ve been pushed back off the list for the last couple of years now.

I still keep going back and forth on packaging ideas I just can’t decide.

I still plan to do the 5 man starter packs as usual. But for adding extra characters to the existing gang, I’m starting to wonder if offering them in bigger packs of 3 is a good idea? Since I’m going for more of a character-driven game where each person is unique, maybe it would be better to offer all of the supporting characters and minions as solo minis? I’m kind of thinking this will also help out in the Kickstarter, and give us much smaller stretch goals where we can basically just unlock 1 new guy at a time as add-on items.

What I’m planning on doing as far as gang building goes is it’s all based on the gang leader’s race and gang, so each character card has 2 icons at the top. The main race will show up first, so your gang leader can recruit any other character with his same race’s icon. And then there’s his gang icon, and he can recruit anyone with that icon too. He also gives a special bonus ability to only his gang’s characters, not his whole race. I thought that would be a nice & easy way to encourage people to stick to one gang, while still giving the option to recruit others if you want.

So I’ve decided not to do the strict mortal vs immortal faction thing, as long as a character matches the leader’s race or gang, then they can join up. Most of the time the races & gangs won’t mix in the official characters, but there will likely be some “good” supernatural characters mixed into human gangs eventually. Not often, but just a few rare cases. But I do plan to have some evil men joining supernatural gangs. So this seemed like a good & balanced way to have a little more diversity.

Just a general status update..

I’m planning out the Kickstarter now, and if all goes will I will probably be doing that around the 2nd or maybe 3rd week of August. I’ve decided, then undecided, and now redecided to stick to the 3-model starter set format I introduced with the Savage Beasts campaign. It’s mostly do to overall costs to produce stuff and also to have a lower KS funding goal. The rulebook is coming along nicely, I’m laying it all out now. At first I was thinking it would be 80 pages, but I think it’s probably going to be much bigger.. possibly around 120. I’m also going to put together a deck of loot cards, where you can draw a card if you capture an objective and might find a cool new weapon to use or a consumable item or a rare mystical item. I haven’t decided yet, but I was thinking about also including a special loot card with each gang starter set, something that fits their theme that you can mix in with your other loot cards.

I’m planning to also include the old gangs too as add-ons, they will eventually get repackaged in the new format, but that will cost a lot so I’m going to keep the old gangs as is for now. I’ll have a pledge for just the rulebook, and then a sweet spot pledge where you get the book, loot deck and the starter packs for all 3 new gangs. No concrete prices yet, but I think the rulebook will be $30, new starters $18 and loot deck $15, and the sweet spot pledge will have a nice discount for everything and will also come with a free Jackalope mini.

I’m probably going to launch the campaign just showing the 3D sculpts. Maybe if I pick up Zbrush finally I’ll try doing some 3D painting, but I kind of feel like that’s cheapy and you should show real painted minis instead. I would like to get minis to paint first, but I’ll need the funding to get the molds done, and also with GenCon happening soon, they won’t be able to get the master molds done till some time in August anyway.

And speaking of molds, I’m still on the fence about switching to resin. I got quotes from a few different companies and they’re all about the same, resin itself is more expensive than metal, but I will save on mold costs since I do a lower volume (a couple hundred copies vs a couple thousand). I think it will also be a lot better for some of the beast models that are bigger than average men and a little more expensive in metal. So I’m still trying to decide but I’m leaning more toward resin at the moment.

So right now I just have 5 more sculpts I’m waiting on.. The ghoul for the Wicked, a new werebear and werecat for the Wormwood Wardens, and then Ruthie the preacher and Van Dyke the ranger for the Unsung. I should have most of them done in the next week or 2.

I prefer metal, but if you do use resin please let us know who you are using. If it is Prodos/Archon/Whatever name they are using today I won't be supporting.

No, the resin companies I've been thinking of are here in the US. It would probably be Valiant. If I stick to metal, it will be Iron Wind Metals as usual. Iron Wind just said they didn't want to do resin minis, they only do resin for big stuff.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh also, one of the main reasons I wanted to switch to resin is because I'd like to be able to get my own 3D printer, but all of the prints that can do the detail I need in my price range can't produce prints that can stand up to the heat needed for the molds for metal minis.. so if I get my own printer, I pretty much have to switch to resin. The printer I'm looking at (FormLabs 2) is $3500.. it's really expensive but having a 3rd party do the printing for all of my new sculpts will be over half that, so it might be worth the investment now.

So, I just submitted a printing quote for a 2nd edition special edition box set. I’d like to see how much it would cost. I was planning to have it include a softcover version of the rulebook, 1 deck of loot cards, 1 deck of updated character cards for all of the old models and whatever ones we can unlock in the campaign, and these custom dice we were going to make a while ago and never did..



I was thinking that might be fun for a special Kickstarter thing. I would just print the minimum amount and when it sells out eventually I’d switch over to just a regular rulebook. But I want to make sure it will be affordable enough first, and one drawback is the lead time.. it would likely take about 6 months to arrive at the warehouse from the moment I send them the final files, so I would imagine I wouldn’t be able to fulfill the campaign till probably something like Q2 next year. But we’ll see how it goes. I’m mostly just curious to see what the costs will be like.

Here is a new rulebook preview, I've decided to break up all of the gangs so that each and every character in the game will have a 1 page bio. This will crank up the page count, but also hopefully help convey that it's a character driven game where everyone is unique. Here's a PDF for the bandidos and a pic of the 2 page spread. Mostly just filler text for now, but I'm working on it...

http://skirmishgames.com/download/442/

I could almost understand the gibberish sample writing used as spacing, the layout looks great, lesser folks should get half a page.

 Necros wrote:
Oh also, one of the main reasons I wanted to switch to resin is because I'd like to be able to get my own 3D printer, but all of the prints that can do the detail I need in my price range can't produce prints that can stand up to the heat needed for the molds for metal minis.. so if I get my own printer, I pretty much have to switch to resin. The printer I'm looking at (FormLabs 2) is $3500.. it's really expensive but having a 3rd party do the printing for all of my new sculpts will be over half that, so it might be worth the investment now.

I wish I knew where 3D printing was headed. Once upon a time (5 years ago) it was hailed as "the next big thing" but lately a lot of the big players in the industry have been dealing with cratering stock prices, layoffs, and a general climate of unease. I know the spools of material end up being quite expensive, and obviously the cost of the machines is still not at a consumer level. Then you add in the fact that it takes some skill to actually create the models via software & I wonder what the future holds. I kinda thought we would all be 3D-printing our own minis by now, but it has yet to come to pass.

And part of me would be sad to see BWG switch from metals to resin, just on principle. I remember when Black Scorpion switched to resin, that was kinda sad as well.

Yeah, I think 3D printing needs another breakthrough to make printers more affordable for consumers for the level of detail we want. The liquid resin method gives good results, but I personally don't like the idea of spilling it all over my carpet which I know will happen eventually.

I'm gonna stick with metal for a while yet, it's just better for small minis. Big models I'll do in resin though. If the Kickstarter goes well enough I have a few big monsters planned, those will probably be resin.