Dorward Online

As Darths & Droids said this morning:

It’s important to have an appropriate setting for the big fight scenes in your games. The top of a speeding train. A rickety rope bridge over an incredibly deep gorge with a crocodile infested river below. The enormous arch-villain’s lair inside an extinct volcano, complete with piranha pit. (About the only thing that could make that one better is to use an active volcano, really.)

I’ve run a game with a fight on top of a train (which, sadly, didn’t go too well as I was still getting comfortable with the system) and I’ve played a game with a fight inside a train (which was awesome, especially when a Shatter spell derailed the carriage). Neither of them used a tunnel. Tunnels are great, they give you the classic “Oh no! I have to duck down or cling to the side of the train or be hit by a mountain!” situation. So, in preparation for the next time I run a simulationist game I can fit a train in to (sadly my current plotting revolves around ancient Rome) let’s do some research and some maths.

I’m looking at Fantasy Craft for this, it is a 3.5 derivative so I’ll convert everything to 5′ squares by the time we’re done. You should be able to adapt this for whatever system you like though.

First stop, Wikipedia:

The all-time speed record for steam trains is held by an LNER Class A4 4-6-2 Pacific locomotive of the LNER in the United Kingdom, number 4468 Mallard, which pulling six carriages (plus a dynamometer car) reached 126 mph (203 km/h) on a slight downhill gradient down Stoke Bank on 3 July 1938.

Now that’s fast! However, it probably doesn’t account for having to slow down for bends and it doesn’t say how full the carriages are of passengers and/or cargo (and there are only 6 of them). My modern commuter train probably never goes above 70mph (through hilly Kentish countryside).

Still, have now have some baseline figures for speed, how about length?

First Great Western have some statistics about their fleet. Carriages range from about 15 meters to a little over 23 meters. That’s about 50′ to 75′ or 10 to 15 squares.

Back to the speed. If we say 50mph, then that is about 75′/sec. That’s 6 carriages per round (15 carriages if we take the world steam locomotive speed record!). That is a bit faster then I’d like as it prevents me from having the tunnel mouth move up the battlemat for a few rounds to give a sense of impending doom. So, back to history…

The small locomotives of the 1830s, pulling a handful of cars over uneven track, could travel at fifteen to twenty miles an hour. This was twice as fast, over long distances, as anything Americans had previously experienced.

15-20mph is 22′/sec to 29′/sec or 24-36 squares per round. It should be possible to select a speed in that range that will give you two carriages a round for most carriage sizes, and that is quick enough to be a worry but slow enough to avoid the tunnel crossing your tabletop in just one or two rounds.

You can let the train roll initiative or just have it more at the start or end of each round.

Obviously, falling off a train at 15mph is a lot less of a worry then falling off at 20mph, but being left behind could cost a player character their mission … and the GM could always make the train cross a bridge before entering the tunnel.

And finally, a few useful rules to use for this situation. Page numbers are for Fantasy Craft 2nd printing.

For the basic “Fight on a train” situation, you can demand Balance checks (page 69). The surface will be up to 30 degrees but shaking, and the characters will often be attacked.

When the tunnel approaches characters will have a few options:

Diving to lay flat on top of the train is a simple Reposition (page 219) action to become prone.

Jumping into the gap between carriages is an Acrobatics check (page 69). I’d call this a Balance check, for a Narrow Walkway (5-8″ wide) with the usual modifier for a buckled, rolling, sagging, or shaking surface.

Climbing (page 70) from the top of the train onto the side (or the other way) will have a base DC of 10 (Common hand- and footholds/opportunities to brace) or 5 (if they use a ladder). If things are going too easily for the players, you could add a situational modifier for doing this on a speeding train.

Don’t forgot the penalty for being attacked in the current or previous round for those last two checks!

If the fight is going too too well or too badly, then the train can change speed or NPC balance etc checks can be fudged.

One day I’ll run my Steampunk Three Musketeers game and will dig these plans out to test them.

If you’ve tried these suggestions, have alternative approaches, or spotted a flaw in my maths (which I shall blame on the stupid hour of the morning that I’m writing this in) then the comments will be open for a while.

Choo! Choo!

Image by Brian Rosen and used under a Creative Commons license

Doesn’t she have to make a Drive check?

Well, no. This is routine driving, no need to make a check for that… on the other hand, I would like to pad this session a little so I can end at a certain point when 10pm rolls around, and it is night driving on country lanes.

OK, make a Drive check.

With a Drive skill that low, there was a good chance of failure (even though the difficulty was only Mediocre). Time to draw on real life experience.

It was the early hours of the morning, birds are twittering, and you are motoring along, when from under a hedgerow pops a pheasant and jumps into your radiator.

(True story, if you think pigeons are stupid, you’ve never spent time in pheasant country.)

The next section didn’t happen to me in reality, however it is midsummer (game time) and the players were quite specific about their characters’ dinner plans for the previous evening.

It bounces off your windscreen and then straight through the open sunroof, where it lands in (a character’s) lap.

The resulting fallout from this little piece of colour managed to nicely use up a little time before our protagonists (I hesitate to use the word ‘heroes’ for some of this lot) arrived at The Village Where Evil Probably Lurks.

I like Transformers: The Movie, I sat through Transformers, I skipped Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen and now Transformers: Dark of the Moon is coming.

It took me a little while to figure out what “A must-see in 3D” movie was from their promo. Does this film even have giant robots in it?

A lunchtime game of Words With Friends resulted in:

wow. Geoide isn’t in my dictionary!… ah. that’s because the word was Geoid.

I now have a new piece of technobabble for my upcoming Star Trek FATE game. One of my players was talking about having his character be a terraforming engineer so:

Geoide: All in one tool for controlling terraforming systems.

I posted recently about getting my hands on Dwarf King’s Hold.

I’ve since had a chance to play it a few times (it is fun, and can serve as a nice filler game as running through a scenario only takes about half an hour), and discover that a packing error gave me an extra sprue of Skeletons and no Revenants.

Mantic dropped a Revenant sprue in the post for me without any quibbling, so kudos to their customer service.

I received a job advert today, which opened with:

Reinhart Django was an excellent guitarist, he could play brilliantly, even with fingers missing! Could you code well without your fingers? is your passion for Python Django so deep, that you would, through adversity code with a single digit?

My reaction to this was a desire that recruiters would spend as much time matching CVs to jobs instead of just carpet bombing anything with a keyword.

How naïve of me. Twenty minutes later, the same recruiter sent me another advert for a different job with the same boilerplate at the top.

They do spend as much time matching CVs to jobs as they do thinking up clever things to prefix their emails with.

Wargames conventions are dangerous places, and my bank balance took some hits when I went to Salute this year.

One of my acquisitions was a copy of Dwarf King’s Hold. This is a fun little game with fairly simple mechanics, but a fair amount of tactics. I’ve played through the first scenario twice now, once as each side. The undead won both times, but it was a close thing on the second game. I’m looking forward to giving scenario 2 a shot.

The figures are great, but suffer from Mantic’s usual problem of not having enough bases (none in this box). The box set comes with a £5 gift token which I’m going to splurge on getting some more (since I have various Mantic freebies that came without bases).

The other worry I have about the figures is that you really need to glue them, which might limit the set as a mainstream board game (which is a pity, because I think it would suit a certain segment of that market).

I’ve painted up the skeletons by applying some Army Painter Skeleton Bone primer, slapping on some Warlock Purple for the cloth, painting a few bits in black and then dry-brushing a dark metallic paint on the weapons and shields. Then it is off to Strong Tone Quickshade before painting the bases dark grey with a coating of Ash Grey flock then adding a little static grass before applying a matt varnish.

I’m quite happy with the way they have come out, and it has encouraged me to dig out the box of undead that I still need to paint from last year. Hopefully I’ll be able to find a few more days to work on them before the end of Easter.

Mike has been writing some interesting stuff about the genetics of horses (with a focus on what colour schemes are sensible to paint onto calvary).

On a related note, Irregular Webcomic has something similar about Siamese cats which I found fascinating.

Now to find some more cat miniatures to paint!

… and 18 more photos taken on Saturday 12 November 2011.

… and 43 more photos taken on Saturday 1 October 2011.