Giant Olive on Legs / Gurps Stats

ST: 12   DX: 7   IQ: 2   HT: 10

HP: 12   Will: 10   Per: 7   FP: 10

Speed: 4.25   Move: 4

Dodge: 7   DR: 0

SM: 0

Traits: Blindness; Cannot Speak; Doesn't Breathe; Doesn't Eat or Drink; Immunity to Metabolic Hazards; Injury Tolerance (No Brain, No  Eyes, No Neck, No Vitals); No Fine Manipulators; Slippery; Unhealing (Total); Vibration Sense.

Armour & Possessions: Chucks (DR 1, $50, 2 lbs.)

Joaquín Wearing a Giraffe Mask Upside Down

Wargaming Weekend

Two weeks ago my cousin Sven came over to Berlin for my birthday. I'm 44 now which means I have been into tabletop and role-playing games for 30 years.

My original plan was to organise a HOTT mini-campaign for the weekend, but we played one game of Warhammer, 40K and HOTT instead.

The first game was Warhammer Fantasy on Friday night. Krüger came over and teamed up with Sven against me for a 1500 point battle. They played orcs & goblins, I played wood elves.

My list still is a bit fragile because I started to collect wood elves not so long ago. Their list included a giant, 4 trolls, a large unit of orcs, a unit of orc boar boys, 2 units of night goblins with fanatics and some goblins on spiders. A nice looking army.

The game felt a bit like the horrible German boardgame "Mensch ärger dich nicht". The dice and our lists determined what happened, strategic thinking didn't matter much. The worst moment was when I managed to cast "The call of the hunt" on my eternal guard, an augment spell, giving each model an extra attack, and still lost the unit in close combat that turn. The game played itself. It was a waste of time.

I'm not saying that this was anybody's fault. Actually balanced, exciting games are difficult to organise if one player brings a fragile list and the other players have a lot more models to choose from. The game was over after turn 3. (I guess I have to put some effort into making my list less fragile.)

Saturday afternoon, my cousin and I played 40K. We played the 5th edition, including some rules from the 6th edition like overwatch and rolling the charge range. Because of peer pressure half a year ago I thought I had to switch to the 6th edition, although I like the 5th edition much better. (It's a pity that Alessio Cavatore left Games Workshop.) After endless discussions my friends and I compromised on using the 5th edition as our main ruleset and including our favourite rules from other editions as house rules. This way everybody has to think what rules he really likes and why. Games are much more fun this way, I think.

So on Saturday we played a 1000 point battle. The scenario was capture + control and spearhead. Sven had brought his Tau from Munich, I played Plague Marines. Sven's Tau are one of the coolest armies I have played against. They are really well painted, with lots of stuff on the field. The game was quite exciting. It lasted for 7 turns and ended in a tie.

On Sunday morning, which was my birthday, I played HOTT against my cousin. I think HOTT is my favourite game at the moment.

I played wood elves: hero (general), 4 spears, 3 shooters, 1 behemoth, 1 flyer.

Sven played goblins: warband (general), 3 warbands, 2 riders, 2 beasts, 1 behemoth, 1 hero.

I was the defender. I put a temple in the centre which led to both of us dividing our armies into two parts. The 4 warbands on Sven's right side, including his general, stayed in the woods and didn't make it into close combat.

At the start of the game, his hero killed my flyer.Then my hero general killed one of his beasts.

His hero killed two of my shooters.

My remaining shooter killed his hero. (Wow!)

Two of my spears killed his other beast.

My hero general killed his behemoth.

I won the game and we went to a Greek restaurant in Kreuzberg to get drunk. Thanks to everybody involved this was a great gaming weekend.

Playing GURPS with my Kids for the First Time

Ok. This was cool. Saturday morning I played GURPS with Lina (5) and Hendrik (3) for the first time. I had prepared a dungeon for them which you can find here. They played princess Blume and prince Marmelade who went into the cellar beneath the royal kitchen to fetch some giant olives for the cook.

There they encountered two dire mice. One got away with a keychain. The other attacked with a broom. Prince Marmelade got hit on the head, but defended himself super-hero style, shooting electric rays out of his hands. Princess Blume narcotized the mouse with "sleep", a mind control spell. Well done.

Prince Marmelade then opened a locked door to a 3m x 3m room using his lockpicking skill. There they found a little box filled with cookies in the form of islands. (I had baked the props Friday night.)

They went around the dungeon and explored the other rooms with the help of a talking cat, picked up a flute and found a room filled with giant olives on legs wearing sneakers. Prince Marmelade opened the door to that room with a wire. The giant olives got out and escaped, but the prince and princess were able to catch one of them and bring it to the cook who probably made a Greek salad out of it.

The game took about an hour and was lots of fun for all three of us. Level 2 will be about prince Marmelade and princess Blume trying to find the cook's missing keychain and Alex, the kitchen boy. I hope I find time to prepare it soon.

What I'm Working on

5 green creatures.

6 pieces of area terrain.

The Karubi Island Dox Dox

Krüger and I have talked a lot about playing an orcs versus wood elves campaign on one of the Karubi islands, using HOTT and Warhammer as rule sets.

Sven plans to come to Berlin a couple of times this year and wants to bring his freshly painted goblins. So it makes sense to kick off the Karubi island campaign with a HOTT mini-campaign, involving 2 tribes of orcs & goblins and my elves.

I drew a map of the island Dox Dox.

1 Kachelaj Oxib Tzuk - the largest forest on the western side of the island. It's where the elves live.

2 Kachelaj Imul - rabbit forest.

3 Suq - a large area of swamp. Giant mosquitos and Labyrinthodonts live there.

4 Kachelaj Jamaril - a very large forest on the eastern side of the island. Jamaril means "peace" in the language of the human population that lived on the island long before elves and orcs arrived. Actually it isn't such a peaceful place any more, if it ever was. Ruins of ancient temples are scattered throughout the jungle. Some of these are still used to summon old gods and demons.

5 A tribe of orcs & goblins under Krüger's command.

6 Juyub Labal - the bad hills, also called "the pumpkin hills" by the elves.

Now here is the problem. The elves who like to live in forests settled in the west where they found 2 small forests. The orcs on the other hand, who prefer mountain caves, settled in the east, but in the east they found a large area of tropical forest and only 3 small hills (Juyub Jamaril). It would be best if the orcs moved to the west and the elves to the east, but instead both parties defend their territory and try to conquer the whole island.

Sven's Old Campaign Map Resurrected

In 2008, around Christmas, my cousin Sven made a map for a HOTT campaign, involving 5 parties: dwarves, pirates, elves, undead and dark age Germans on horses.

We got together with a couple of friends and started to play the campaign but were not able to finish it because we only had one day. It was fun anyway.

I have been thinking about Sven's map lately, because I want to use it as a setting for our ancient "imagi-nations" project, as a landscape where all the different parties meet. (Maybe "imaginary ancient kingdoms and city-states" or "imaginary ancient lands and islands" would be a better name for the project.)

I drew the map again, only changing little things. Forests grew a bit and mountains appeared where there were none before. Caused by the movement of tectonic plates?

Here are some suggestions for names, mostly ideas from the original map. These should be translated to ancient Greek at some point to go with the imaginary ancient things theme. I will try to translate to English for now.

1 Granitinseln - granite islands

2 Eisenzipfel - iron ding dong

3 Augenkralle - eye + claw

4 Grünhuhnland - green chicken land

5 Farnoth - no idea what that means, the name was suggested by the Elven player

6 Wambeler Bucht - Wambel bay

7 Löwenkaff - backwater lion. Home of a thracian tribe under king Rhebulas. I'm going to play these.

8 Schwarzwassermoor - black water moor, land of the dead

9 Krabbwasser - crab river