spooky_squirrel

Just wait until Hoffman fully joins us. Then you have all our non-construct tools too. Of course, the new Governor-General is actually expanding on his duties and giving him better resources so he'll be less tempted. Does he know that Anna is why Ryle got hurt, or does he still think Ramos and company are to blame?

Non-black black gives you the ability to tint your 'black' as well as give it some depth that straight black doesn't have. You start with the color you want to tint, and use black wash (thinned out black paint if you don't have a designated wash) to create shadows, then follow up with the base tint color to do highlighting. If you want more layers and depth, you can mix a little of the base color into the black wash to create intermediate bands between the shadows and highlights.

Now that my digestion of the new book has gotten far enough in to be puzzling over the pursuit reworks.. I definitely agree with this. For example, the rework to Drudge didn't hurt the concept at all but better illustrates it through the skills and gives the Drudge tools that can help the team beyond being harder to kill. The old core Drudge struck me and a few others I know of as just a way to start with an augmented limb and potentially build towards a tank. The rework gives it more than just being a Rail Worker in game, especially at higher ranks with being able to cheat down incoming damage and gain additional AP from being badly hurt--and the option to have a toolkit instead of augmented limb(s), which allows for being too stubborn to die as a mere human. That's not even looking at the healing flips for a speech, to include allies who hear it. Stoic "cannae stop industry" seems better represented there. I love that Academics can actually use their background in more circumstances than even before (being able to think around a problem by treating it as something the Fated was already knowledgeable in is cool), to include giving them some ability to figure out what they're dealing with even in combat. There's some priceless ability there: to be able to tell your beaters where to shoot/stab/hammer in combat, what weapons to use, or when to leg it and find some mercs or thugs to take the brunt of it. Or, let's avoid combat altogether by having the long-winded academic bore everyone into a daze, if not unconsciousness with a lecture about some nuanced reading of Darwinian Evolution as it applies to Gremlins in a specific region of the Bayou, or the socio-political ramifications of [zzzzzzz....].

Here's what can be really twisted about that: her Kill the Gamin ability is a (0) on an upgrade, which means if she's already in position, she can (0) to kill the Wind Gamin, get a free 5" push for herself to put her near another marker or scenario-relevant location with 2 AP left to spend. Move and interact? Interact and move? Move into hiding? Charge a scheme runner that thought itself out of her threat range? Sandeep in Headhunter is definitely not dead. It's just going to involve more thinking about things than: With more complexity comes more fragility, which steers things to a place that is a little better.. but doesn't address all the things that can make Sandeep seem overwhelming. I know here in the PacNW, his mobility is what makes people fear him; but most 'Deep players up here are going Commands and bringing another min damage 3 beater to take the "pay attention to me or die trying to score" route to victory.

Visions Sandeep has some seriously janky stuff to it, even with Wind Gamin being altered a bit. Interesting thing is if the summoned model is a Wind Gamin, Kudra blowing it up gives any friendly model on the table a 5" push. That's something else going to sit on top of a head marker or getting lined up for attack/scoring.

If every non-unique nephilim (grow path, to include Mature) had pounce, Lilith's rooting supported by something pushing things around (no shortage there) would go from "ow ow ow" to "am I dead? I think I'm dead. Oh wow, that little punk baby thing now looks like a rangy punk teenager with hooves and claws"

An interesting idea would be modifying her Ca LOS to work similar to Rasputina's, only instead of Frozen Heart, it works through Black Blood. That aside, as a master she does really well, so it's not that the theme needs to support her. So if the interest was to have a Nephilim subfaction, the Nephilim leader(s, if we include Nekima) would have to support the theme more or the theme would need more internal synergy (which introduces an inherent instability/fragility, but that's the trade off in play; also introduces complexity in testing).

Or a model who is hard enough to kill to require some effort and lethal enough to kill things. They don't need to pick up the heads themselves if they're producing them and tossing them back towards some significant support pieces. If you want to be really dirty, your helpers are accomplices that chain activate after the beater got down to business. If said model is hard enough to kill to require some effort to deal with, you're pulling quality or quantity AP into a model that they cannot score the strategy off of. If they decide not to, said model is killy enough to produce heads on its own and punish them for not spending effort killing it. One of the other things I like about this is it allows you to convert a (0) into an attack on the Ram trigger--you're targeting a friendly, they relent, you can get a shot of choice for any Ram. Sure, it's only a 2/3/4 with no triggers.. but it's off of a (0) Action's trigger. Under Ironsides you can be at positives on attack and damage too, if Amina gets scratched up a bit beforehand. Then, since you've only used your (0) so far, take your 2 General AP and get some work done and pass the table over to your opponent; who now has an angry beater of a peon in their face and a smirking lawyer screwing with their battle plans.

Being ancient, it's not likely to have a health update that eliminates that

Sandeep is still good in Headhunter, he still has activation control and an ability that allow (0) interacts, even while engaged on a trigger. Visions Sandeep can still park a yammering Banasuva around some heads to force the opponent to burn resources just to get the head marker needed to score. Colette has always an edge over him because she has prompt, movement tricks, the ability to hand out AP via All Together Now, and all minions and showgirls can choose to interact as a (0). The only thing Wind Gamin gave Sandeep outside of the stuff I mentioned above was a summonable significant model that was immune to the scenario. Mei Feng can still use her Jackhammer kick to keep a body engaged (preventing head retrieval), Ironsides can still pull people into her black hole until she finally dies. Ramos can still spawn spiders and sacrifice them for explosive effects. Any master can use Amina Naidu to convert your own people into Peons--let that sink in for a moment as you read how Headhunter scores. With Wind Gamin being brought down to something more reasonable, the only thing that really changes is that the Wind Gamin are no longer autotake by virtue of outright denying the strategy (and potentially schemes).

Absolutely, she can be super frustrating to face (several local players will attest with enthusiasm). The nice thing is is that if I notice that my opponent has no idea what they're doing, I can ignore that I have her Vent Steam ability and still do stuff that will help my opponent think about positioning, threat ranges, and focusing on the scenario scoring conditions. In later games we can start talking about focusing, built-in positives, and stoning for positives and providing scenarios where it's relevant.

Not sure. I don't consider myself higher-powered, even though I play Arcanists and have Sandeep, Ramos, all the showgirls, and Myranda. I go with the 'rule of cool' idea where I play the stuff I like the look of (mostly). When I figure out that something might be a little too high octane/intense for more casual games where someone is trying to figure something out about their models or the rules, it goes on the bench and more interesting stuff comes out. For the most part I play masters and crews that many others might dismiss on paper (wisdom of the internet kind of stuff) because it's fun for me, interesting for my opponent, and makes for a good game. Sometimes, especially during tournaments, I set aside the let's make an interesting game motive and drop something that is reliable, stable, and capable. Which ties into the OP topic: "fun" is relative. Some people find their fun in trying to break the hobby of others. Some people find their fun in pushing models around a table while enjoying tasty beverages and interesting conversations. My idea of fun is a game where my opponent and I don't know how the game will turn out until the dust settles when the flip to continue fails or time is called. This makes interesting games fun for me; games that are a blowout in either direction are less so because I already know the outcome, I'm just settling the differential (win or lose). The interesting thing about Vent Steam is that it lasts until she activates again. So she can activate when she needs to in later turns--typically when her front line needs to advance further than her bubble currently reaches. One thing to bear in mind is that if Mei Feng takes Vapormancy, she gets a trigger to Vent Steam on her claw and kick attacks, so she can actually do work and get Vent Steam up. It potentially gets uglier if she's using her Emissary's Conflux for another attack. So she can still be doing stuff and get to triple Vent Steam (if the cards are right), Railwalk to frontline node, take built-in trigger to kick, trigger for Vent Steam, then Vent x2 or go to town with attacks. My regular opponents are learning how to work around Vent Steam, but I'll still use it when there's shooting/casting in the opposing crew. For 1AP I force every hostile Sh/Ca action to have a Focus or Soulstone tax. For 2 AP I mess with everything that's not coming from something that can Focus twice. That being said, it's not a total shutdown. My opponent can still flip high and I can still flip low. If you're on triple negatives to cast a Lure and pop the Red Joker? Well, unless your target had Counterspell, they're going to be leaving the bubble. Now I'm not going to tell you that Mei Feng is lower powered; she is under-represented in my local and regional meta. Last large event I went to I saw players from multiple states who had never seen Mei Feng on the table, including a Guild opponent that dropped Perdita into me like he was expecting armor. She has some things that she does really well but there are also things that she will need a miracle to pull off. As for the metric of rating masters against enforcers or henchmen.. eh.. If you grade a fish on its ability to climb trees and measure it against a monkey, the fish is going to suck. I don't know why someone would rate Von Schill as lower than an enforcer, unless they're trying to use him to do something that that enforcer is good at and he is not. He's not Ashes and Dust, but at the same time A&D is not VS. I've only ever played against him, and when he's being used to buff his crew and be a disruptive element, he's a solid take. He's also really hard to put down unless you build your crew to kill him, which might limit your ability to deal with the other things he's bringing to bear and complete the schemes--which disrupts you without even needing to flip cards. If he's not being used for his strengths and synergies, he might seem a little lackluster. The same thing can be said of other masters. If I'm using Toni Ironsides and not trying to get mileage out of Hand Picked Men or Mei Feng and Vent Steam, I'm missing out on a major ability. Sure they can potentially beat stuff down, but they're not A or S tier beaters. They're not going to threaten murder the way Howard Langston does, but Hank is never going to support the rest of the crew and modify the board state the way that those two masters can.

I've played into Tara crews and Lynch crews that were absolutely hamstrung. Their biggest beaters were The Nothing Beast and Huggy respectively.. and it turns out that everything they do is a cast action. :blackjoker:

This is along the lines of what I was thinking. I appreciate the Penny Dreadfuls for doing something like this (each one suggests that specific Fate Steps can be met by interacting with a specific sidebar character or setting), which seems like a good idea and easy to either build in, swap out on the fly, or skip altogether (especially important because every DM/GM/FM has had to deal with no-shows and other things that derail what was intended for the session). Avoids Railroading the Fate Steps and makes them related to the story without being critical to the parts of the story that aren't solely about the one (or more) Fated with that Fate Step.

Out here in the PacNW we don't have team rankings (though there's talk of making city-specific bragging rights events), so when we make a point of making sure that people from different metas/clubs face off in Round 1 we don't have to worry about artificial inflation/deflation of a team's ranking. We're also still in the growing phase, so some 'clubs' are really just 2-4 people who get together a couple times a month to play while others are closer to 6-8 per. A lot of that is because of what @Clousseau mentioned: When people travel from British Columbia down to Seattle, WA, and others travel up from Portland, Oregon (or further) for a larger event (30+), we assume it's because they would like to get some games in that they wouldn't normally. I know it can be a little salty to travel several hours to only face people who you play regularly anyway, and the first round is the only round that the TOs can guarantee who you might face--everything after that depends on how the first round plays out. I might get my teeth kicked in by a total stranger, but that's fine: I saw something new and it will help me be a better, more rounded player. That being said, traveling around the UK isn't quite the same monster, so maybe it's easier and/or more frequent for various clubs to face off with each other

Related to @Stur's recommendation: you can use a modelling putty like Green Stuff to build up a stronger contact point by making it look like the flames are spreading over the ground. For storage/transport, I'm using a pluck-foam tray that's deep enough to fully contain the 40mm base on its side, and I used a couple pieces of the removed foam to make a support platform for his upper body. So far it's been reliable.

Heck, nobody wants zombie hordes in their backyard. In "civilized" areas, it'll be Death Marshals and Lady J. In the Badlands it'll be Nephilim and Nekima/Lilith. Other ressers will want control. In the north you'll have the issue of Arcanist/Guild escalation of force and constant conflict making it hard to cache your followers near at hand (they're busy hunting down each other's spies and caches) and you have to deal with the fact that December is not going to be too keen about anything connected to the Grave Spirit being nearby. The Ten Thunders are sacrificing their Three Kingdoms presence to increase their foothold here, and they're certainly not going to stand idle with regards to rogue elements. Care to store your zombies in the Bayou? If you're running a game and you've got a Necromancer in the party trying to raise an army, there are many things that can be used to keep that in check. I'm not saying kill your player's character and/or destroy all their efforts. Escalate as needed. If they're starting to get cocky with their graverobbing and cache of zombies, post Guild bounty notices around town. Make it harder for them to get around places even by themselves without seeing stuff that tells them that the Guild is starting to figure out who they are and where they live. Introduce hazard challenges where zombies are a liability (look at the fluff for McMourning when the Guild is investigating missing Guild Guardsmen who disappeared near the morgue). If they haven't cooled down and decided to lay low and be a more discreet member of the Fated crew, have them get ambushed by Death Marshals. Let them get away, but now they're being hounded and have less (or no) followers. Even Nicodem knows to disappear if a Death Marshal pays him a visit. If you reach a point where you need Lady J on the table to bring your player back in line with the story, then the game has been derailed (in my opinion) and it might be time to end the session and go back and review the Session Zero stuff where you as the Fatemaster and your players as the Fated discussed expectations of the game. If it hasn't derailed and your intended climax is to have the Fated have a hostile encounter with Lady J.. well.. she's a master, so you can assume she's a high ranked character (13-14) and that all of her results are 20+. Once some stats have been released for her, then you'll have some canon resources.

This is why I've been getting fairly decent with Mei Feng (Arcanist). Local Arcanists shrugged her off, local 10T is focused on Shenlong, Asami, and that direction in general.. leaving all the playspace for me. It also means that the first time that many of my opponents ever see Mei Feng on the table is against me (while I've been practicing against people who are trying to figure out their tournament crews), so it becomes a more interesting puzzle for them as well. Aside from the sticker shock of "Vent Steam does what?!" against a cast/shoot heavy crew, that is.

This is the thing that makes Gremlins amusing, and I think more "must do [blah] if able" is not out of character for them. It definitely would make the risk-reward balance trickier, which can be a bit of a turn off for newer players. The interactions in Malifaux can get very complex as it is. This is the reason I avoid power combinations outside of tournaments unless my opponent asks to see what they are like. Even in tournaments I feel that some combinations are too far over the top* and that securing a win via said combinations is not worth the sense of having exploited something that probably should not be there. *clarification: if the combination requires 4-5 models being in specific relative locations and a near-perfect control hand and/or flips, but has devastating effects then it's not over-the-top. The trade-off there is the complexity of it makes it unreliable. The less reliable a powerful combination/interaction is, the more it comes down to outplaying your opponent. If the combination is self-contained in a single model and goes off reliably, then it's a candidate for a cuddle-bat tickling (sorry Mech Rider and Wind Gamin, this bus is for you). Completely missed opportunity there! Now now, a lot of people have something that'll send them to the salt flats.

This is why mine is still on my project bench. I've identified where to magnetize it to make it easier to transport (just like the Arcane Emissary), I just need to do the drilling and shaping to make the join as smooth as possible.

They're recruiting you. It's okay. Just don't accept more favors than you can handle. Hey, the tech trade has to go both ways You might ask them if they had some of the Brewmaster's special stuff. You know, the stuff they used to interrogate Von Schill?

Just picked up my copy yesterday, and I definitely appreciate the ribbons. A solid add; having multiple ribbons allows me to mark several sections so that if I'm preparing for a session I can use them to mark sections for player reference (especially that Session Zero that @Amberleigh mentioned) so that they can do their Tarot flips, Creation, and Equipment purchases--while I compile notes on what they've flipped and what they sound excited about. Whether I'm running a Penny Dreadful or a custom story arc, I can make sure that the game gets up and greets them properly. I also really appreciate the background information being all right there. Stories (and storytelling) are enhanced by fully fleshed out characters, so knowing why Nekima and Lilith are murderous towards humans helps shape interactions both in scene and behind the scenes. It especially helps solidify what the Quarantine Zone really is and is not. I'm still digesting all of the added fluff and haven't gotten into a whole lot of the mechanics yet, but I'm loving what I'm seeing so far. ..and yeah, beautiful book.

It looks interesting, and with having to discard a card to pass it definitely makes for some interesting decision making, as well as making it so that you cannot deadlock on passing.

The Long Game ability on the site preview card not actually in anymore?

Have a Metal Gamin headbutt a Rail Golem twice (Protection of Metal gets involved too), then Power Loop in the Ca 8 and go to town with the Locomotion. Can the Golem take Debt? I think so.. Debt to the Guild on that key turn and get a chance at another Tome for keeping the steam going and bonus damage on all those free attacks. Don't forget to Power Loop in the Ml 7...