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Those are some good looking catachans Baxx! Good job.

Oh, they very much are, excellent job!

If only the rules for jungle fighting weren't such a joke.

Thanks! Very pleased with Wargames Atlantic SpaceNam minis.

Greetings all,

My first painting for 2024 was a quick Kill Team. The Hand of the Archon is now painted up and ready to hit the table. I all ready had a Craftworld, Harlequin, and corsair team so it seemed appropriate to get the Dark Eldar team. It looks like I am the "space elves" guy at the True Crit Gaming Guild.



I used Armypainter Speedpaints and got the whole Kill Team painted in about a weekend. If you are interested you can see the full process on my blog here:
https://bloodandspectacles.blogspot.com/2024/01/on-painting-desk-hand-of-archon-kill.html

Apart from the red shoes, which feel off, these Dark Eldar look great, Easy


And for everyone - what's your experience with Blades of Khaine? On paper they seem pretty weak, and extremely vulnerable with unreliable save, low Wounds and few operatives and offensively they are also not that impressive. But I heard that they are doing well in tournaments. What's the recipe for their success, if you can indeed confirm that they can be consistently successful?

Its so they can click their heels three times, and get the hell outta there at a moment's notice.

I recently just did a 5-day Challenge to paint up a Sisters of Battle compendium Kill Team for a Narrative Campaign we were starting at my local.



You can see the progress from day 1-5, some DIY terrain I made, the Sisters on a board, more Hand of the Archon, and other stuff on the blog that maybe of interest to Kill Teamers.

https://bloodandspectacles.blogspot.com/2024/02/5-day-challenge-epilogue.html

My first wargaming of 2024 was the start of a Kill Team narrative campaign.



The Hand of the Archon takes on some Vet Guardsmen during the Siege Perilous around Powellington.

My Hand of the Archon were fighting for the forces of Chaos, and brought home the first Chaos victory.

You can read some details about the campaign and prep work on the blog if that is your thing:
https://bloodandspectacles.blogspot.com/2024/02/5-day-challenge-epilogue.html

My KT group tried playing Spec Ops, but it was such a dull, mechanical experience. Zero extra excitement wasn't worth additional bookkeeping and imbalance. This video sums up pretty well how it went for us too (even though it wasn't the Ashes of Faith one)


GW "campaign systems" are hardly playtested at all, I believe. There are tons of options to gain, loads of tables full of bonuses. Playtesting them all in all plausible scenarios and combinations would take ages even for a large team.

I think it's just one guy who gets 2 or 3 weeks to write everything down, because other important deadlines (production of physical product related) need to be met, so he works overtime producing whatever strikes his fancy, just to meet the word quota. And afterwards players treat this as official rules, so something akin to the word of god, which is weird, as, if they have tried out the campaign, they probably have more experience with it than the writer.

Whenever I ran campaigns (quite a few, actually) in WH40K or WFB I always used my own rules which I knew would fit my gaming group.

Umm, this guy first makes up a bunch of house rules to change how SpecOps plays, he then complains about the results?

Typical Dunning-Krueger behaviour at its finest. Yeah go ahead and change game rules without thinking the changes through. Sounds totally legit and hey, "must be better than what the dorks at GW could ever come up with"

Comedy gold

Yeah, with our campaign we are kind of skipping the special ops part and just making it a simple Imp vs Chaos board zone control campaign using a points system that rewards a lot of different behaviors such as painting, getting involved, and playing games.



Nothing that fancy really, just an excuse to play some games and paint some models.

Tired of getting guff from my gaming guild for bumming barricades and tokens I bit the bullet and got an Octarius box.

Therefore, I am getting all the barricades, widgets, terrain, and Kill Teams painted up.

The starter is pretty good, I like how the tutorials are structured too.

I haven't had chance to play through it yet for various reasons, but it looks solid.

I finished painting up the Vet Guard pretty quickly. I have oved onto the Orks, but.... they are not as easy to paint quickly. A lot of details and lack of uniformity makes them tough to speed paint.

Finally got some paints back on the table this year

Heel, cur.

An (imperial?) noble of Old Earth for my Unification Wars project. Trying to convert some regular humans from various things in the bitz box, in this case a hideously soft-detailed Reaper witch. A one-day job to test how to sculpt and paint candles.








Gamewise she might end up leading a counts-as Starstriders team down the line when her court retinue gets in line.

This is awesome! Great theming and lighting. I wish KT could see something more solid for narrative approach than very formulaic and mechanical Spec Ops, so that such projects could thrive.

I also wish I could contribute to this section being less flooded by LI and having more KT content, but my next project (Nurgle Legionary team) is progressing slowly. Getting all Legionary operative/weapon options from the Plague Marine box (magnetising, conversions) takes some time and painting (first time experiments with oils) may also be a slow process. With techniques I know it is usually pretty automatic, but a new approach will require more deliberation at every step.

Thanks Cyel, looking good on the smelly boys too. Have fun experimenting, oils are great for all sorts of stained schemes.

From the ammount of skull i would think those are khorn worshippers

I'm still playing Kill Team. Probably my all time favorite Warhammer game. here's my current project, a hand of the archon kill team that was a surprise gift from my sister.

Cyel wrote:
This is awesome! Great theming and lighting. I wish KT could see something more solid for narrative approach than very formulaic and mechanical Spec Ops, so that such projects could thrive.

I also wish I could contribute to this section being less flooded by LI and having more KT content, but my next project (Nurgle Legionary team) is progressing slowly. Getting all Legionary operative/weapon options from the Plague Marine box (magnetising, conversions) takes some time and painting (first time experiments with oils) may also be a slow process. With techniques I know it is usually pretty automatic, but a new approach will require more deliberation at every step.

These Nurgle Legionnaires are looking great! Am looking forward to seeing them painted.

 Sherrypie wrote:
Have fun experimenting, oils are great for all sorts of stained schemes.

Yeah, it appears to work fine These still require quite a lot of work on the details and further weathering, but the oil wash itself did the job I expected it to do. Actually it feels similar to the method of using wood stain to paint armies quickly, popular in early '00s.

Cyel wrote:

Actually it feels similar to the method of using wood stain to paint armies quickly, popular in early '00s.
]

Ah, yes, the infamous "dipping" era. I remember the harrowing pictures of whole units dunked in a mix of wood stain and lacquer in a bucket, sometimes even fastened to a drill for quick removal of extraneous liquid

As it made people, who would have otherwise never painted their models, play with painted armies, I didn't complain

I'd rather players who don't enjoy painting took shortcuts, to still offer a FPA experience to their opponents, than just drop a pile of grey plastic on the table with no excuses given, as if it was the default visual quality of the game.

I got to use my Order of St. Augustine Martyred SoB Kill Team in our Imperial vs. Chaos campaign.



You can read all about it in the Bonus Material on my blog for the week here:

https://bloodandspectacles.blogspot.com/2024/04/wargame-design-all-sizzle-and-no-stakes.html

Cool report! I got my rear handed to me twice in a row last Saturday by a Compendium team, so I am not going to underestimate them anymore

I've also had very similar thought about stakes for combat in RPG recently. Without them combat is boring, because the loss condition doesn't exist - well, it does, but it is an unsatisfying one as it means the end of adventure. It's undesirable by both sides of the fight - players and GM, so both are going to avoid it, which makes it a non-stake.

Bringing actual stakes, ie a loss condition that is different than Game Over, makes the fight so much more exciting. For example - we didn't die, but we didn't make it in time to stop the execution! A loss that our characters need to live with.

Probably a topic for another thread, but your observations about GAME OVER and both sides wanting to avoid it make a ton of sense to me. Yet, obviously other players feel very different, I mean look at the rise of OSR where death as a lose condition is a big part of the appeal. I don't really get it.

For Kill Team, we have been playing a simple Warzone control campaign that has greatly enhanced the "stakes" as winning and losing give points to which faction control the Warzone. Good fun and dead simple to run and administer.

 Easy E wrote:
Probably a topic for another thread, but your observations about GAME OVER and both sides wanting to avoid it make a ton of sense to me. Yet, obviously other players feel very different, I mean look at the rise of OSR where death as a lose condition is a big part of the appeal. I don't really get it.

While we're on the topic, I can try to open that a bit as a big fan of meaningful stakes and certain playstyles that fall under the OSR umbrella (which is nowadays almost so broad as to be useless without further explanations). My preferred campaigns are very much on the nihilistic void side of things, where players have no right to succeed but plenty of opportunities to try.

Character death is a big part of OSR games that ride on the "combat as war" vs. "combat as sport" idea. Most adventurous RPG's such as D&D treat lethal situations as sport, something that should routinely be engaged in and enjoyed for the spectacle without much stakes to it as there are large HP buffers, plentiful back-up mechanisms like healing or resurrection and so on to keep it all in pretty light tone. This often ties together with a notion of "fairness" or "balance", like there should be limits on what can be brought against a particular group of protagonists at any given time and the gamesmaster should prepare to avoid such situations from snowballing too far. The combat isn't there as an actual life or death stake, it's there to let the characters show off their cool moves.

On the other end of the paradigm spectrum there is the idea of treating violence as something dangerous and irrevocable, something that pitilessly crushes and maims those who engage in it and there are no holds barring you from mucking it up big time if the conditions say so. There is no avoiding GAME OVER from the referee side, as the referee is a neutral faciliator of the world where the characters can make it big or hit a wall by their own actions. A big portion of OSR is closer to this end of the spectrum. In this context, exploring a world is often more important than propping up individual characters before we know they're worth something. We don't mind that an individual character is likely to die off in the process by getting whacked in a meaningless street fight or by stepping into a land mine, as those are consequences of other larger decisions like engaging with particular adventures, not gathering enough intelligence before acting et cetera. A proficient player will become much more likely to survive with any particular character and thriving in a world where we all know that death is on the line, no punches pulled, is a worthy achievement for the player. You might think of it as high score, having gotten a character from rags to riches without succumbing where so many others have. It's cool to riff about interesting characters, but in this paradigm it's even cooler to riff about them knowing how hard a journey it has been to get there.

There are certainly plenty of other stakes than death involved, too, like getting crippled, threatened, robbed, put in a politically precarious position and so on, but death is the ultimate price for an individual. It is intuitive and powerful, as it caps whatever achievements one player might have gotten up to with one character: you did this, now make another one and improve on it. But it's not just about the individuals, as character deaths often do not mess the big picture up all that much. Mercenary bands carry on as soldiers die. Adventuring parties recruit new members. Organisations live. Those factions might still suffer consequences beyond the individuals, too: rampaging monsters on the countryside, crazy magic on the loose, whatever. In a game that is broadly more about exploring a world, such consequences can hurt regardless of whether a character survives or not.

If you're interested in the topic more broadly, I heartily recommend Eero Tuovinen's Muster for a treatise on playing a high-stake wargame in such RPG's: https://preview.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/413382/Muster (pay what you want PDF).

Thanks for explaining the thought process Sherrypie. I sense there is a Survival Horror aspect to it as well.

However, I don't want to clog up the KT thread so created this thread to discuss Stakes in Wargames (and other games) here:

https://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/0/813515.page#11657703

Yes, survival horror is a big part of that kind of fantasy-effin-Vietnam play where the player characters are quite often nowhere near the top of the food chain.

But let us continue in the other thread

Finished! The bases indeed smell of Khorne, but my wife likes them (in natural light red creates a nice backdrop for all the browns)