Gnomezilla

Out, out, out, out, OUT! Get your stinky grubby abomination-making hands off of our nice clean constructs! (This shouting and flailing is about as effective as you'd expect from a jealous Malifaux Child trying to push an Ikiryo out of position.)

Are you kidding? I postponed purchasing a large arachnid to move wardens up in the queue, and I want to paint AND to field a large arachnid quite badly! (Never enough scrap!)

Wardens! Finally, the wardens! And several other pieces which will make Guild happy, but especially wardens! ...I should have finished and published my March Chronicles battle narrative before now. It has a girl witchling handler in it, the only model I don't actually have that's part of the story. That's eerie. (Not least because this is now the third time I've written up a battle narrative out of my imagination, and had it happen less than a week afterward.) And now maybe I will have two girls in my crew. Both handlers, of a sort.

Except Lucius--and the Brutal Emissary itself. It's wielding a victim in a cage as a weapon. It doesn't get much more Lawful Evil than that. Even Justice and Perdita have totems in chains. Even Hoffman has an avatar with a greatsword that's an un-ornamented tool of slaughter. They might not match as well as the rest but you can't deny they match aesthetically. It's really not. It's the Lawful part that itches, but if anything, playing Hoffman also makes the Evil feel kind of squirmy to me too. Or maybe I'm just looking at the Avatar of Amalgamation and getting completely weirded out. Very subtle, but still, body-horror that some days I just can't overlook. I'm never going to be able to face putting this thing on the table. Horror checks against yourself are supposed to be a Lucius thing.

I am interested in hearing from someone, anyone who's tried out Lucius' emissary upgrade. Changing the suit must not decrease his reliance on high numbers, which is sad, but it is such a delightfully weaselly thing to do, saying "no, it's this suit, because I said so". This is true and I had not noticed it particularly. We do have some flexibility after all. Makes me feel better about playing in this faction. (The idea of being on the side of law and order still makes me itch in uncomfortable places, though.)

A Victory for Constructs Everywhere (McCabe vs. Ramos) "I was hesitant about escalating this arms race," I said, "but I am getting very sick of seeing Reconnoiter flipped after just knowing my opponent is bringing Ramos..." A freshly assembled Johan hit the table. And it was the only thing he hit that game. He may as well have had a pulse weapon for all the times he swung at a steam arachnid, with decent flips no less, yet missed. After two turns of Johan being nothing but a tarpit to steam arachnids, an electrical creation detonation, and a steam arachnid detonation, that original steam arachnid-- "He's dodging to the left! He's dodging to the right! And now he's jumping up in your face!" --killed off a wielder of a relic hammer. We shook on it. Truly, as Ramos' player said, a victory for constructs everywhere. MVP--no, make that MVC--of the game, possibly of all time among constructs.

We really need to stick a disclaimer on the starter box about how the models in there are not the usual play style for their respective factions. Mostly. (the Malifaux Child* makes a note to get a stamp made with that disclaimer and start going around stores and stamping their stuff) If you must have a powerful ranged attack threat range, then you're Guild. If you must have the speed to close the gap and melee as fast as possible, then you're Neverborn. But how can we pick if we know very little about you? Or what if you have to have in play style is something else altogether? I want to pick out your play style first, and then find out what you like in fluffy themes to play with and look at, and find the overlap. Do you want to charge in and hit things as hard as possible? Hit as hard as possible when you want but also have the option to mess with the other models on the board to your advantage and their disadvantage? Shoot everything from a safe distance one by one and sort through the corpses later? Blast the enemy several models at a time instead? Keep your master out of trouble by having it buff up some other model on its side and send that into the fight instead? Keep your master out of trouble by taking over models on the opposing crew and have them do your work for you? Do you enjoy looking for legal loopholes in the gameplay mechanics? Do you not understand how people can optimize without a spreadsheet? Do you want to not think too hard about your hobby and just hit things? That's the playstyle questions. Now about your fluff. (the Malifaux Child looks at your profile picture, and frowns) You're not actually gonna install that wired-up skull into an interface either organic or construct, are you? First, 'cause it'll send you to Rezzers or Outcasts instead. Resurrectionists make all the undead and Outcasts use the spare parts Rezzers won't even touch to cobble together stuff that's even worse. Second and more important, because if you do my Guild crew will come by and show you how clockworks are supposed to work by slapping you upside the head with properly constructed giant stompy bots! But there's over a dozen random fluffy themes in Malifaux. We'll see what you like and what we've got that complements those. *That's my profile picture. It's supposed to be a boy, but I had it painted up as a girl. My crew still has way, way too many boys and no girl models otherwise.

It's rumored that the 2016 Miss will be Arcanist, as it was a prize for placement in the Nythera event and Rezzers got stomped in that. (The discussion of the potential Miss brought the laughs, and the potential Guild Nightmare the whimpers of "please stop being horrible HORRIBLE people".) Also, are you sure you counted Miss Pack the original Miss, a Nurse?

Four extra soulstones in hand are a minion's worth of AP I'm not getting, that's how I look at it. And I play Guild, I'm already short on AP. Therefore I want every soulstone in hand to guarantee me at least one AP, preferably in turn 1, with maybe one extra held against the need to reflip initiative and keep an important model alive that way. I discount the need for reactive soulstones otherwise. Fortunately Hoffman's cache is exactly the amount I'd need if I needed to buy a suit for every one of his AP in turn 1, and since Hoffman can find a use for nearly any card which could appear in my hand, in practice that means I'll still have at least one stone left at the end of turn 1. Therefore there is no need to add more unless they are left over during crew selection.

I have 10 Thunders wave 2 deck and nobody has needed the general upgrades from that, so I can mail those to you. (Shenlong's crew and anything else pure 10T are still available. McCabe's and Yan Lo's crew and compatible model cards have been claimed.) Print on Demand are single cards printed, so not nearly as much waste. You'll only need to buy Mei Feng's crew's cards, plus those five 1st edition model cards you want and any others you need, up to the minimum of 10 cards...and if you need filler, I seem to have mislaid my brass arachnid card yet again... Don't forget to NOT buy the deck box for overseas postage, since the deck box is too tall and makes the postage be upgraded from "letter" to "package" mail rate.

...I don't have a strategy card for jokers, no. That explains it, thanks.

Hey what the heck, no editing this as I'm trying to set it up! (We kind of forgot it had a set scheme pool, the first time we tried it out. Was fun regardless. Thank you for dreaming it up & sharing it!)

Going through GG2016 deck, cannot find Collect the Bounty, where is it located please?

I cannot disagree more. When our local slow players (myself and a Resser) face off, the difference between 35ss and 50ss is literally the difference between ending the game and maybe, if we're lucky, getting to the end of turn three. The lesson we've learned is that whoever doesn't score strategy points every turn and schemes ASAP has probably lost. This helps explain why the Resser plays faster with Seamus-and-his-belles than the others, thank you for that. (Won't help me, though, I choke on unanticipated developments in the game.) Good mental math helps too.

I didn't know about these but then I don't go to tournaments*. My local scene is casual so we've gotten individual variant models in bags for prizes at our less-than-32-player casual contests**. In clear plastic bags may I add, so there was no mystery. At least the players who log on here this week now know. The link has not gotten over to Facebook yet and I am not on Twitter at all. Now, is there a path where a store itself orders these kits as it is for some other games, or is this channel of distribution strictly Wyrd -> henchman -> community? We players need to know who to annoy and we who used to be FLGS employees also don't mind knowing the chain of annoyance command. *There's one coming up from my henchguy (the prize is a box, heck if I can remember what box it is, but it was shown around the group to whet appetites for the tournament so a mystery box it was not) (found it, it's Dark Carnival wow. that is...just...), and one just behind us from the other local henchguy (no idea about the prize structure, at this point I was so annoyed to have another one scheduled on a day I absolutely cannot attend without risk of long term couch exile that I didn't even inquire). I'll make it someday. Please don't ready the relic hammers. **And mercenaries, no less, so anyone could use them. And they're going to better painters than I, which is absolutely for the best***. ***Any way of sticking an itsy bitsy teeny weeny wooden spoon on a 40mm base already littered with random junk?

How Not to Shoot (Hoffman vs. Misaki [10 Thunders]) A Samurai unshoulders his gatling gun and aims at...the Malifaux Child. He was giving me tips all through that battle, so I said, "Are you sure you want to try that? She's still manipulative." He did try that. He didn't succeed at that. He didn't have Favor of Jigoku. He cost himself a VP from Bodyguard as the recoil from the gun did so much damage. That was my first battle ever. Later I learned what Sidir was capable of with his own machine gun, and I was even more puzzled. But to be fair, that battle was odd all around. Misaki charged into melee with Hoffman, and he burnt her to a crisp. The austringer's raptor, randomizing into a combat against two enemy models, dive-bombed the watcher every time--it must have been territorial. I think Sidir and the Malifaux Child were the only models on the table which performed as advertised.

If All You Have is a Can Opener, Everything Looks Like a Can (Hoffman vs. Von Schill) Von Schill was low on wounds after the chain harpoon had reeled him away from the Freikorps and toward the construct bubble. He ripped his shirt off--mobile toolkit passed, peacekeeper blocked LoS to everything else--and then I was educated that I'd left a 32mm gap in the bubble as Von Schill jumped into the middle of it. Half naked. I was somewhat taken aback. I was rather more taken aback when he then threatened Hoffman with a literal can opener. Fortunately for me he flipped a black joker, giving me time to think. The next construct to connect with its attack was the mobile toolkit. Which automatically ignores armor. Which did just enough damage to kill Von Schill for the Assassinate. Now I affectionately call the mobile toolkit 'the better can opener'. I Am NOT Squadron Commander Lord Flashheart (Hoffman vs. Seamus) 13 for the first belle (henceforth to be called Lucy). Black joker for Hoffman. And then the second belle. And then Sybelle. Who smacked Hoffman into insignificance on the first lash, and succeeded on the obey on the second--at which point Seamus' player spent some minutes puzzling over what Hoffman, alone among the wreckage of his constructs, lured far away from any scheme markers (and let's not forget, now too insignificant to remove them even if they were in range), could do for her. Conclusion: nothing whatsoever. She gave him a tongue-lashing about his uselessness and let him go. Final: 5-5 tie, and a total loss of dignity for the Guild...

What? No! Things can't change, I just got here!

I was at a loss to explain the Malifaux Child's on its pathetic Pair of Daggers until I ran into a punk zombie with paired katanas and also*. Does the pattern hold? Do all models with 'paired' weapons get positive attack flips? Do they need to be filed just under relic hammers in the 'neutralize first' list? *and that was before Nicodem had so much as laid a fingertip upon it. Oi to the world, indeed.

Now that I cannot work around. Sadness. (I had the 11+ in hand already. It was going to be used for a Child 'redirect power' powerloop-and-sacrifice, but then Seamus got red joker for initiative and the Child died to collateral damage from Sybelle.)

*looks at profile picture* I can work with this.

I miss having Nordic humor in my everyday life. Again, my local meta is slow and devoid of ranged attacks, so I get to experiment a little on turn 1. It finally dawned on me that experimenting could include putting the targeting systems on Hoffman himself and puppeting/applying fast to two or three other models (depending on whether I wanted to heal the damage immediately, or later) for the rest of turn 1.

*hand raised from the prat in the back* I won't be able to borrow a Shifting Loyalties book for a little while, so two quick questions on the Brutal Emissary... 1. I had the idea that since it took the personalized upgrade to bury Lady J, that it couldn't bury masters by default, which takes 3 focuses off of the Hoffman focus optimization (1 of which can be restored for 6ss ((2ss for O.S.A. power tap sending Hoffman to 4AP per turn, 4ss for another construct to borrow that AP from)) ). 2. Bury-and-copy 0AP actions, or 1AP actions only?

[The primary battle in this report was a story encounter, Charlotte at the Windmills: three 50mm Windmill tokens to be claimed as in Squatter's Rights, and Charlotte the brass arachnid at the center of the board, base contact + 1 AP to activate her for a victory point, limit 1 reactivation and 1 VP per side per turn. A demo game for a friend who, like me, played a gnome back in EverQuest. I am pleased to say, he picked Hoffman and he won handily.] "Come on! I said I found an abandoned brass arachnid! Don't you know what you can do with one of those?!" she shouted. Then she clapped her hands over her ears, quick. There was only one in the crew who could talk back, but the others weren't silent, and now Ryle was wailing like some mechanism was in need of oil. Which wasn't true. That was the whole point of her being here, instead of where she belonged.... The note had come into the workshop the day before, and was handed around the workshop until Hoffman had found two mechanics who could puzzle out part of the unreadable handwriting. It was certain that McMourning had requisitioned Ryle for some task. It was probable that part of the rest of the note ordered him to not send any other constructs. The postscript was a near total mystery except for "ref---n--". Reference, the mechanics had agreed. Hoffman had read, to himself, 'refinement', and made sense of McMourning's wish to separate Ryle from the protection of other constructs. Well, two could play at being clever with their orders. "Child!" She'd scrambled to stand at attention at the urgency of his command. "Follow Ryle on this task. You are to provide maintenance which cannot be entrusted to untrained people. Assign her a temporary toolkit." So when she bolted out of the workshop and fell in line behind the abomination, instead of keeping an uneasy distance away from him, she had marched after him with head held high. The pair caught up with McMourning in the middle of a crowd of lab coats and raised voices and the whirr of multiple bone saws. "Finally you show up," he snapped at Ryle, not pausing while he filleted a bit of mystery meat he'd conjured out of nowhere. "Late. I thought he had some regard for punctuality," he flicked up the hood of a witchling stalker with the handle of his scalpel and slung the meat into that concealment, "ought to understand my time is valuable," the stalker quivered, clutched itself around its middle, and burst into popping green flame, "can't expect me to spend every waking moment penned up by myself in that morgue," again magicked a piece of mystery meat into his hands, "professional mixer, don't see what's so professional about it," twiddled with it, slapped it into the goggled face of a Freikorps suit and spattered the remaining stalkers again, "go over there and make yourself useful," flicked the scalpel blade at Dr. Grimwell and the lacerated hats of Samael Hopkins and Francisco Ortega. "No. Stay here," the child countered. And such was the near perfect copy of Hoffman's tone that the abomination obeyed her instead. McMourning looked pointedly underfoot. "Who are you, small one?" "I'm here with him. You take both of us or neither of us," she pointed at Ryle and then put her hands on her hips and acted childish again, "and I'm not a construct, so there." "I won't." "Fine then. We won't help you. And I'm definitely not gonna help you with that lab coat lady sneaking up behind you." The doctor twitched so hard he shuddered away from the stalkers, but Nurse Heartsbane walked after him, quite calm, keeping firm and even pressure on the electroshock paddles. Sparks danced across the top of his already shocked looking hair. The child decided she liked the nurse. "I think I like the nurses. Thanks for sending one to help," she said later that day. They'd parted ways, one group of lab coats heading back to the asylum, the child following the other back to the morgue. It turned out to be the same place that handed out almost-certainly-rat-kabobs on Tuesdays. It was a good place, to a street cousin. She liked McMourning better already. The feeling was not mutual. "I didn't send one to help." "But the downers are really helping. Usually he screams during maintenance." The child waved a bath brush clotted with human effluvia and disappeared down the hall. Curiosity piqued, he followed her. And stopped dead in the doorway, right behind where she'd stopped dead in the doorway and dropped the brush. It wasn't the sight of Ryle sitting immobile in the tub that stopped them, nor of the raw debrided flesh that must have been part of 'maintenance'. (Although, in McMourning's professional opinion, he was well past due for a fresh coat. Just try to quietly and discreetly patch up your colleague's mistakes, and what do you get for your trouble? A dependent dumped on your office...) No, it was the nurse, draped over his gun-arm and dreamily running her fingers along his veins... The child had sounded quite like Hoffman, before. She sounded exactly like McMourning, now, even to the jealousy. "YOU, GET AWAY FROM HIM THIS INSTANT!" they screeched, together, pointing imperiously out of the room. And with a psychic snap, her bond to the Guild changed its anchor point. Her heart still belonged to Hoffman, but McMourning had her brain.... "I said, it's a brass arachnid! Stop flinging those stupid syringes and go get it! It's awesome!" The child snatched a syringe out of the air, shook down Dr. McMourning's special mix of liquefied organs back to the tip, and flung it back. It stuck McMourning good and hard. His eyes went blissful for a moment, and he staggered forward, "Oh yeah..." and then he shook it off. "I didn't need that!" "You did too! You're not smart enough to go get it yourself! Not like some other people--" She cut off mid-complaint, because Hoffman was there after all. She saw the familiar manipulators in the distance beyond the windmills, and her heart leapt. The child turned her eyes to the abomination, reaching out to tell Ryle not to shoot-- And she couldn't remember how. The child burst into tears. She could do nothing but watch as McMourning wound up the brass arachnid. It skittered over to Ryle, twiddled with the settings on his gun-arm (at its touch the abomination stopped howling), and then returned to its guard point. The doctor turned to watch all this, and so turned his back on the windmills. A hunter stepped out from behind one mill, silent, one step at a time, with that buzzing in its frame the child knew well. It settled into place, at the perfect distance to pounce upon McMourning. Beyond it, bolts and scraps of metal rose into the air and reassembled themselves into the essential points of a brass arachnid. They, too, skittered forward in silence, no two pieces of metal contacting one another, and brushed the insinuations of claws across the hunter's frame. Its eye-lamps lit anew. The child might have warned him, but she would not. McMourning never knew what hit him. Once he collapsed, bleeding, she was the only one in the crew with a voice to shout orders. So she did, with a voice gone hoarse. When the peacekeeper charged up to Ryle and crushed him, she had the nurse fling another syringe and stick him with healing drugs before she sashayed off to a different windmill. Sebastian she told to go wind up the brass arachnid, but he couldn't puzzle it out, instead shearing off course to shear off most of the hunter's upper plating. The watcher flapped its wings atop yet another windmill until stray bullets from Ryle's gun punched through its shell. The peacekeeper reached out a single buzzing claw and, slow and gentle, spun the key in the brass arachnid's back. Hoffman again copied its essence and sent that out as well after the real one itself failed to reach the peacekeeper's controls. She watched teary-eyed (but drying up out of sheer wonder) as Hoffman simply...assimilated the idea behind the brass arachnid, and didn't know that Sebastian, without something to cut up nearby and a firm order to stay put, tended to wander off in search of a body-- "No!" --Nor that, much like Ryle, the less the child bothered to sound like his true master, the less Sebastian would listen. Hoffman's wounds dripped red and brown and streaks of green from the bone saw's filthy blade. He reached over the shoulder of the smaller man and aimed his torch at a particular point in the bone saw's engine. It ignited, and so did Sebastian. The peacekeeper first knocked out the abomination, and then the nurse, as she flung her final syringe and it landed full in the soulstone eye of the mechanical attendant. Hoffman shivered with poison, but looked across the field at the child. She came to him, cowering. "I'm...sorry..." It wasn't enough, she knew, and she swallowed all the rest. The mechanical attendant pulled out the syringe and tapped it against Hoffman's leg, then walked past her, and he clacked along after it, to slowly kneel by Ryle and inspect the injuries. "He looks...well maintained." "McMourning didn't touch him. I didn't let him," said the child all in a hurry, and then spoke slower. "The nurse helped though. She injected him. He didn't scream this time. He didn't feel it as much, I think." The peacekeeper stomped past the child and picked Ryle up. Hoffman straightened and looked back at the brass arachnid, then at the abomination again for a long while, then at the child. "Child," he began, "...you did your duty. But McMourning and anyone who works with him is not to be trusted around Ryle. Ever. Now you have to choose. I can write off this as your service to the Guild, your debt paid in full, and you can go work with him if you like. But you will never return to the workshop, on pain of death." She shook her head violently, no. "Or you work for me, and only for me. If the Guild orders you to serve another leader, for however long, I pay you, through the workshop, with the proper forms. You do not take soulstones from anyone else. You do not take orders from anyone else. You absolutely do not take advice from anyone else, unless I know and approve of it." He produced a small stack of papers--her battle drawings!--from one of his pockets. "Now. Choose." Her lip quivered, and she all but flung herself at him to hug him. If the guardian had been there, she would have died, shorn in half by the great blade. As it was, it took one of the peacekeeper's unoccupied arms, the mechanical attendant, and the walking frame's manipulator claws to immediately untangle them and hold her at arm's length. The child stretched out her arms again. "Take me back! Please!" He didn't answer right away, but busied himself straightening and smoothing down the rips the bone saw had left in his attire. Slowly she took the hint, and unloaded her pocket of the syringes she'd lifted from McMourning's lab. "But they helped, really," she sighed, and placed them on the ground. "I will be the judge of that." She nodded. Her bond to the Guild snapped back to connect through Hoffman once more. She looked over at the brass arachnid, and its workings made sense, then back at Hoffman who was never to be second-guessed. He handed the papers over to her. As she walked behind him, she leafed through the stack and found something new: Guild forms. One form approved of her collecting visual battle data in the manner taught by the Freikorps. Another placed her on the permanent payroll of the workshop as an apprentice, with food and lodging allowance so much per annum.... [End Child in the New World. Further battle reports may go here, or in a new thread. It depends on what narrative suggests itself.] [Series 1 of the battle narratives: Child in the New World] [Interlude: Sin Eaters (March Community Contest 2016)] [Series 2 of the battle narratives: The Constructs' Apprentice]

Guild brings the list known sometimes as the Foxhunt list (see Puppies and ponies thread) with McCabe and Guild hounds and whatever mounted riders that player likes. There was a guardsmen gunline list once but that has been left far behind. I wasn't exaggerating about the pure construct list earlier either. When the Resser asks what on my side is living, and I only point to Hoffman, the Resser gets annoyed (and goes and buys a box of canine remains just to make a point). Seven Samurai makes me giggle.