Gnomezilla

The girls had had a chat while the boys finished doing...whatever they thought they were up to with that melee (the child sighed a prim little sigh in imitation of Hannah and the Freikorps librarian drawing quick watercolors of the fight). "Why're you making pictures?" The librarian had looked to Hannah for permission, and gotten it. "This will capture more information about the battle, faster. Look at the muscles around Von Schill's eyes," she'd tapped the paper where the tint was already dry, "what exactly was he looking at?" The child had hesitated, and squinted slightly to match. "That makes my face stiff. Uh, that means I can't look around? So only Hoffman?" "Just so, child," Hannah had answered. "How many enemy constructs were there? Count." "They are not enemies! An' there's four regular ones an' three spiders. There was five but he stabbed whatshisname already. The cranky spider guy." "One swarm, not three spiders. And do you think Von Schill cared about that at all?" Hannah's fit of pique had ebbed away as she laid out her leader's train of thought and saw the sense behind it. All the same, she would have to have a private word with him about... "...Nope? Oh, I get it! He was only ever gonna go attack Hoffman--!" The child had not been pleased. The librarian had cleared her throat. "That's enough of a lesson; we aren't tutors to children." ...propriety. "Hannah? You're goin' pink again." And so, when Hoffman was next sent out to deal with a threat, the child followed along behind the constructs with a pad of gridded paper borrowed from the workshop and a pencil. While they walked back to the workshop afterward, she let the mechanical attendant pull the wagon, while she sat on the half the shell of a deconstructed yet not muddy hunter and drew: One hunter by the side of a fallen brick wall, with its harpoon tangled with a twisty greatsword, but the living blade swinging down unstopped by the length of chain wrapped around it; A burst of soulstone light (drawn in as squiggles in the air) around something with stubby wings and the weirdest edged sword as the peacekeeper's claws dug deep into its chest; That same monster scraping his weird edged sword over the armor of the peacekeeper and leaving no mark against the metal except another streak in the polish; Hoffman and the constructs standing in the middle of a bog that had liquefied the ground under them, and a hunter sinking into the black mud. "Sorry," the child said to the austringer walking just in front of the attendant, "I don't know how to draw guns, but you did good shots."

This starts off with a weird assumption. I have not seen many games yet but a game which does not have more than a few models in each other's faces by the end of turn 2...well, I haven't seen it. There is always at least one player who needs to be up close and personal. Or just wants to. (And our meta does not have anyone playing a controlling master who messes with the opponent. Yet. We're getting a Pandora soon. ) Please single space between every paragraph. Your style of writing is a little bit confused to start with and I really do need the extra line breaks to help break the ideas up into each separate section instead of tangling more between two or more paragraphs.

The child just about opened her eyes, letting loose a giant yawn. Joss again jiggled the arm bracing her against his shoulder. "Wake up. We're here." "Ok...where's here?" She peeled herself off of his pauldron and looked around, wriggled out of his grasp in two seconds and ran inside. He followed her sprint through the various garages and around the tool stations. When she took a corner too fast and lost her footing, Joss was able to catch up, just in time to see her pick herself up off the floor and start to report to Hoffman. But she cut herself short two words into it. "Go away!" she shouted over her shoulder. "I have orders--not from you." "Then go lookit a toolkit!" she snapped, and pointed back along the route they'd gone. Hoffman kept on welding. After awhile Joss shrugged and turned his back. "Sorry I'm late..." Joss heard something small and metallic clink, down at the child's level. "Ramos was askin' me a lot of stuff I didn't get. What's he care? What kinda special project? Who's a Hannah? I'm a Minta. Oops. I told him that. I didn't mean to tell him anything." She went quiet. Joss grinned to himself. His boss could get anyone to spill anything. Once he'd been ordered to carry the child, she had thawed enough to trust them, and had only stopped talking to nap. "How does it happen," Ramos had said after the child nodded off, "that a child here long enough to be warped realizes that it's lost? If it thinks it can turn back the clock trailing along behind someone else, it's--well, that fits. But he had to have accepted the idea first..." Hoffman, and the reassembled attendant, and a ring of additional constructs: Von Schill glared at each one in turn. Negotiations were not going well. The child had spied something worth investigating and ducked through the battle lines. "'Scuse me," she said to the lady standing beside what was and yet was not the most awesome piece of two-legged clockwork in the area, "what's that?" She pointed. "Off of the battlefield, child, ah am not getting involved and neither should you." Hannah was incensed enough to have less than perfect enunciation. "But--" "Ah have had it up to here with men who expect you to do something for them just by reading their minds!" The soulstone powered suit gestured way up out of reach of both of them. "Now Von Schill has the human decency to at least vocalize what he expects out of you, and with Von Schill ah am staying, even though he--oh lord, save me from menfolk." Hannah trailed off as Von Schill tore off his shirt, flexed his weaponry to the full extent of his range of motion, and leaped into the midst of the constructs with a crash. "Why'd you turn pink? It's not like you're doin' the embarrassin' stuff." "Never you mind that, child." "Did he just threaten Hoffman with a can opener?" The child's tone wavered between outrage and sheer disbelief. Hannah sighed. "Men..." "...Did Hoffman just stab him with a better can opener?" "That's a toolkit, child." "So? It was a better can opener than your master's."

Yuck. I am very with you on Neverborn stuff looking creepy but some of the Outcasts are pretty well up there in creepiness too. Being creepy, not just looking it. Which is why I dipped into it just long enough to collect a Malifaux Child mercenary and had her painted up as a girl child instead of a boy child and marched her out of faction without looking back. She's allied permanently to Guild now. Next to no creepiness there. There is a very interesting thread called The Zinc Lich's Malifaux Personality Test where he has looked at what people like in other games and matched them up with a master of similar playstyle. Maybe go skim it for someone whose tastes were like yours and see what was suggested? Although I have to disagree with almost the very first thing he said in there. Sure most of the Guild dispenses justice in milligrams but I have been doing it with kilograms. Of big stompy mechanized metal. To the face. (I have not been winning yet, but I am still new at this...and killing only equals winning part of the time.)

I believe the word you're looking for is "blackmail". See above... I did dislike that the resultant critters were not at all Living (in fact I wonder whether 'cannot hire Living' can be a valid restriction--imagine swapping your access to Joss and Howard Langston for Lazarus, Coryphee, and Rogue Necromancy) but could not be pure Construct. Your solution is excellent and that it also gives something back to the somewhat neglected Marcus is a bonus.

Hi and welcome to the steep end of the curve when it comes to assembling your own minis. There is no hurry in buying your extra box because you will be spending a decent amount of time putting that first crew box together. I am very lucky to have someone good at assembling minis in-house so to speak but he has started to hand off the 'easy' models to me*. Along with a bottle of very liquid plastic cement ('plastruct' is the kind in use here although I know now I would have liked a smaller bottle with a very thin dropper spout instead of a brush) and an x-acto knife and lessons on how to use the unsharpened side of the blade to scrape off the mold lines after the pieces are cut off of the sprue** and how to test fit the pieces while they are still dry and shave off teeny amounts of plastic for better fit***. And a little dropper bottle of brush-on surface primer because I dislike the stink of aerosols even though everyone else will say spray primer is faster and easier, and a medium size but good quality brush with which to apply it, which brush is still too large for the details. Painting lessons are still waiting for the primer to dry. No question that you want to smash face with those choices. The next things to buy will be things which do not smash face but do other jobs instead. I hand that question over to the experienced players... *A week or two after I asked about the progress on the assembly and basing of Howard Langston. (waits for the snickering to die out) Not one you personally need to look into as 1: you cannot hire him, 2: he also smashes face and you will not need the help. **When the pieces come out of the box attached to a grid ready to be cut away, that grid is called the sprue. No idea where the word came from. ***Actually, just go to GMorts Chaotica blog. He is a godsend with detailed notes on the assembly of very nearly every plastic Malifaux mini you could want. Has already saved me from one moment of "omg I broke it" panic. Apparently everyone breaks that particular 'it' and just glues it back on, stronger.

Now to me that says that, unlike the rest of the Guild's jolly little extermination campaigns, his is succeeding. For all that the Latigos put holes in things, the population of Neverborn never seems to decrease. HowEVer. What future is there in the Guild for a Ryle Hoffman, already so far gone from humanity that he's pure construct subtype, when he wakes up? Hm? You'll get your mechromancer, I think. Someone who just cannot grasp why the use of the best available parts for the job gets so frowned upon. When technology hasn't surpassed nature, use nature. It's sensible. The original owners aren't using it any longer. Someone who gets along just swimmingly with McMourning. (With everyone, really. I'm imagining Captain Carrot levels of deliberate obliviousness to the dark side of humanity, here.)

GIMME! It can't be THAT bad, I got most of Guild's non-damage triggers on a 5.5"x8" single sheet, although it must be said that a lot of lines were "ram crit +1" repeated*, or "tome ignore armor" repeated. And that I print in darn near 8point font block capitals when necessary. ...ok, maybe with Gremlins/10T and their pick-a-suit-any-suit-will-do triggers included it gets that bad... *ought to change our slogan from "We Know What's Best For You"** to "All Additive Bonuses, All the Time" **gingerbread cookie for the reference

They have a bit of surface texture which frosts them and a reinforced line where you could cut a slot out of it and an off center dot for extra strength and the Wyrd logo cast into it.

She woke up feeling weird. Maybe that was because her head was still downhill from her feet. But when she sat up and the weird feeling drained out of her head, worse feelings came in. The hilltop was empty. No monks. No watcher. No Hoffman. Nothing but a lot of footprints. The child patted the outside of her bib pocket. It clanked. They had not searched her. And so she had done her duty. But he was gone, and there were a lot of footprints. Lots more than a Guild rescue party. Or the monks that attacked. Lots, lots more footprints. About four times too many footprints. She stumbled to her feet and took off running after the trail. "I think he's still a little punch-drunk, boss." Kaboom! "You think? And mind your feet." Kaboom! "Yeah, I think so." Joss stomped out a stray flame starting to rise around red-hot metal. "Should knock him out again." Some of the shrapnel around their feet scooped itself together into another pile. Kaboom! "I admit," said Ramos, "that the idea tempts me--" They both paused, but there was no more scrap to be detonated. The watcher flew in an unintelligent circle, dragging Hoffman sideways before pulling him away from the others. "--but he is in no fit state to make it back to Malifaux City on his own. Since I for some reason have no raw material for arachnids, that means you would have to shepherd him--" Ka-fizzle... "--and that...wasn't his work?..." Ramos focused his own electromagnets and jolted Hoffman's frame with the feedback, sliding himself closer to the sounds of the secondary combat. Then he cupped his hands and shouted over the rest of the distance. "I thought you were keeping them occupied well away from us!" "I was!" Langston's conduit coils waved in the wind, each one keeping a hunter at bay on either side, while his feet flickered over yet another pile of scrap. "And then this little thing shows up and, surprise me with all the noise it's making, but it's no gremlin." "You leave Mr. Hoffman alone!!!" The child pointed at the scrap pile again, and this time when its pieces rose, it was not to nearly explode but to fly onto Hoffman's frame and reinforce the points stressed by electromagnetic forces. "If I were him," the steamborg continued, as the coil at the end of one claw lowered itself onto a hunter's muzzle and kept on closing, "I'd've kept the mechanical attendant instead. It's quieter." At that Hoffman turned away from Ramos and Joss, still dreamy-slow. He looked at Langston. He looked at the healthy hunter and the mangled one. He looked at the child, and then started to reach into a pocket. "I poured naptha into his stupid clockwork dolly! Right into the oil ports!" she shrieked, and yes, the child squealed almost like a gremlin. Hoffman stopped. "Child," he said, and paused to hunt for nearly every word, "the attendant will need to be oiled and greased again. It will be out of order for almost a full day." She flung out another challenge, but a spreading beaming smile ruined the effect. "And you'll hafta take me along instead!" Ramos looked back and forth between them. Maybe the Guild did not turn a blind eye, so much as never have eyes to be opened at all. At least in this case. "Hoffman. You should never have gone into the field without your attendant. That child you're putting in danger of her life, how old is she, eight?" "Eleven!" "...'She'?" "--Quiet. Both of you." He indulged in resting his forehead in both hands for a moment before continuing. "Langston. Stop destroying those constructs. You are going to escort Hoffman, his watcher, and whatever may be left of those hunters, directly back to Malifaux City. Joss. Collect the child and bring her along with our arachnids." "Destroy the constructs, don't destroy the constructs--make up your mind!" "She's going to run for it the moment she gets the chance, boss." "Quiet, both of you." "NOT gonna--" Joss raised his axe and pointed it straight out at Hoffman. She cut her rant short and stomped over to them. Ramos collected his reformed crew with a gesture and sent them walking on a longer route back to the city, but stayed back for a minute. "A word, Hoffman. NEVER go out again without someone else in the crew to intervene between you and that child. I've granted you the steamborg for now, but find one of your own." "Yes. That child does like to hear," a pause while he filed and retrieved new information, "herself talk. I don't think Langston will enjoy it either." "Don't question it. Just do it."

The good news is that Guild Wave Two arsenal deck covers both Hoffman and Lucius. The indifferent news is that the 'expansion' you referred to is probably Crossroads, which is the Wave 2 fluff and stats only, no rules. What I consider bad news is that you seem to be slinking off to Outcasts instead.

Oh thank goodness. I only found the change background feature today and thought I had broken something. *the Malifaux Child hides pieces of the mechanical attendant. again.*

Thanks for the reference but can you give the name of the story too please? It's quite enough to do that demo with the regular spiders if your players can do enough engineery smack-talk. Adding one or more of these can only help. And yes, extra bonus points if we can please have both the possible weapons. At this point my only question is where to paint on the knot-and-rectangle motif I want...

I use a set of dice, one over every construct's card. It has the melee stat. This serves me twice. I do not have to keep flipping over the card every darn time to read the back side until the attack actually hits and since only one construct on my side is a natural Melee 7, the power loop is easy to pick out. Our less sophisticated system for keeping track of activation is turning the card 90 degrees once the model has used its turn. In related news, how do you afford to run two guardians? What are you trying to do, two separate areas to bog down the enemy? That reminds me that I have Litko Netrunner tokens for 'revelation' which are clear eyes with circuitboard like etching. I will find a use for them at some point I am sure.

It's a gremlin access port. Arcanists already know it's just a matter of time before anything they make will fall into swampy hands, and they're strong believers in ease of use. GREMLINS?!?! Forget those stupid greenskin gobs, they're too stupid to figure out which end of a machine goes up! I want a ridable spidiework!

Is. . . Is that a ladder on the back? such that a small child could climb up there an' ride around on it?

The peacekeeper would have been a reservoir had the fight not gone against them, but it had been the first one to be addled. Now it and the hunter lying against its side twitched, and static sparked between their plates nowhere near the channels set aside for grounding electrical attacks. The mechanical attendant sat itself next to the hunter's oil ports and hooked itself in-- "'Scuse me please," --and the child leaned in to hold it steady as the oil tainted with brilliance, though now diluted, also started to circulate through the smaller construct. "I have work to do. Go prattle to the austringer." "He wouldn't get up. He said he was onna vision quest now. An'...there's people lurking around again an' they aren't talkin' to themselves like the last bunch. Up the hill, behind the cars on the siding, see?" A watcher unfolded from the wagon and sent itself into the air. She twisted her head to watch it fly yet held the mechanical attendant down when it too began to twitch, and almost wrenched itself free from the hunter. "...Yes. Too many, with three of ours unfit to fight." He detached the hunter, which stood although it wobbled; she set the attendant down and held onto its tiny hand while it tried to fall over. "Let go of it. It's a loss..." She did, and it did. The child snatched it up from the ground and handed the construct up, unfolded, to Hoffman. He disassembled it and concealed the pieces in various pockets. Hesitated. Took a few pieces back out and handed them down to the child. "Hide these. "You should have stayed in the workshop where it was safe. I am ordering you back to the workshop. Now. It's part of your punishment." She shook her head, no, but stuffed one of the mechanical attendant's parts into her bib pocket. "Stand off as far as you can without alerting them. Take the watcher and the other hunter and run for help. Do what you can, understand? Do what you can." And she had. It had been easy to pop open the access panels for both constructs and tweak the gear ratios, just like he was doing a deceptive distance away. And to hide an extra piece of mechanical attendant inside each. One construct shot out to the north, the other to the east, but she didn't follow either. He did not say she had to be the one to run for the help. So she watched as the band of monks swarmed and kicked to the ground the staggering hunter...the guardian... And then the knowledge of how she'd upgraded the constructs went dark. Monks were creeping up on the watcher, with nets in their hands. Well. The child bit her lip and marched right up to the point where they were bound to overtake it. Picked out the one who looked like he was in charge. Dug in her pockets and found the little jack-knives every street cousin carried. Closed her eyes and thought as hard as she could about what it had looked like, when the first monk fell down shrieking... The attack angle was perfect, for a grown man with a blowtorch. From a child with daggers, it shot past the side of the sensei's leg, useless. "You do not keep your temper, child," he responded, and slapped her backwards and down from the hilltop. Far away, behind them all, the accelerated hunter kept running.

Unless you flipped a red joker for damage, I cannot even work out how Guild had that many models that close together. Were you playing against a Neverborn crew?

Holy Calculus for the masses! but this is the kind of discussion I was hoping to find. With numbers. Thank you both very much for flagging the mistakes I could not spot.

This time wagon pulling duties fell to the mechanical attendant. This was just as well though, for the child was turning aside to kick every single pebble, stick, weed, and trash pile they passed. "Didya hear," she griped, for the fifth time, "didya hear what he called our clockworks???!!?" "I have not heard of many things." The austringer had run out of soothing words some time ago. Trying to get her to complain to Hoffman instead had only worked once. And the abomination was no help whatsoever when it came to talk. But maybe another tactic would work. "I have not heard of how you came to polish constructs for the Guild. I have not heard of why your hair has turned that strange color." "Umm." She kicked another dead weed out of place but not quite as hard. "That's kinda the same story..." Oh, thankful day, it was working. "Tell it, then." "Abner told Tawnee an' she told me, someone was grabbin' blonde kids off the street. They'd just be gone. Tawnee was scared. So I had a great idea! I said cousin let's go find someplace with lots of ink and we'll dye your hair. We're all street cousins. Not real ones. So Tawnee popped the lock an' we got into the workshop an'..." The child sighed a happy sigh. "They're so awesome. Clockworks. All rows of them just shining and clean and they don't ever hafta eat almost-certainly-rat-kabobs for dinner..." Curiosity got the better of him. "And they didn't attack you for trespassing?" She shrugged. "I don't get it. He was there--" she nodded toward the front of their little company, "--but he was asleep standin' up I think. Can you even do that? Anyway I said c'mon cousin to Tawnee an' the clockworks all turned to look an' then he kinda mumbled something about yes they would be cousins an' all the clockworks went back in place. I felt it. Clockworks feel different when he's runnin' them. They sorta...buzz. Like bees. "So me an' Tawnee found some ink an' I dyed her hair but then she spilled the rest. She's got the shakes. So I went lookin' for another bottle. An' I read the label an' it was perfect. Mama always used to say I tested her tolerance--wow somethin' needs oil!" They both flinched at the sudden, strangled, whining noises. A more familiar series of clacks also started up, as Hoffman activated his magnets and slid past them, down the line from guardian to attendant to whining abomination. Metal passed from hand to hand, and the abomination quieted as he turned the shining scrap over and over. Hoffman slid back up the line without a word to either of them. "...Anyway," she added, after several seconds of blessed silence, "that's why my hair's purplybluey. An' he woke up properly 'round then an' Tawnee ran but the clockworks caught me. So I gotta polish clockworks for the workshop until I pay back the bottles. But I get a lunch pail every day!" "It still seems a strange thing that you are trusted with Guild constructs, child," he murmured, and glanced back at Ryle. "That is not a usual punishment for crimes against them." That set her off again. "That's not a real crime! You know what's a real crime?!?!? Callin' nice clean steam-powered constructs battery-operated, that's what's a real crime!!! How come we didn't kick his butt for that?!?!?!" "They were only sparring, child. Why else would Ramos not step into the fray and use all his influence against us? Why else would Hoffman have the guardian fight to scatter and not to kill?" "I DON'T CARE!" The child kicked an ant heap. It was going to be a long walk back to the workshop.

The question of what to stock came up a few weeks ago in Popular crew boxes. I very much like Dirial's answer. Those are boxes that will work as crews AND minis that look interesting to people who might not play. Now I went in the other direction and asked my local henchman for something that was not creepy. Partly for personal reasons and partly for being the face of my game store if I became the one to pick up this game. *boos the Neverborn very loudly, and looks back at the Rezzers and that near miss, but boos regardless* And I asked for complicated. And I did not say clockwork, but now I think he heard it earlier and filed that one away for reference. So lemme just say, you're all doin' it wrong as far as constructs go, stoppit or be disassembled. (I pay a mercenary tax in order to get an Outcast girl model on the table with a Guild crew, but I am Ok with that.)

Guardian gives Defensive +2( to Df) and not Df+2. Its the second time I see this and this may be misleading to people. I'll say that's confusing, I was running it the other way, but then again I just started... *trots down to the FAQ and clarifications*

I'm not sure about the pullmyfinger crew list. I borrowed the Mechanical Rider card off of the Arcanist player last game night and it had just about everything except M&SU, so I thought. And it does not have mobile toolkit either which just makes me very sad. Do I need to go find FAQ-errata?

If Bengt ever comes back we can let him know we found a use for EQ rangers. Wake the Dead fodder! Oh yes, I was not just a gnome, I was a neato necro gnomie girl. Noisy, cheerful, noisy, in love with all things clockwork and/or undead, gnoisy, I swear that was a typo, childish, and loud. The cause of the Frostfell '06 quest, the filter that lets people turn other people's pets' speech off (I may or may not have overused the voice graft spell around deserving jerkwads), the toggle that turns off spellcasting subtlety separate from all the other special abilities (subtlety is for people who are not me). The one who'd make a friend in raid, and when he died, helpfully raise him as a zombie and send it into the battle, then let friend know he was still being useful in the fight. (Or, when friend was a cranky old ranger, that he was being useful at last. I mourned for weeks when he dropped the game for real life.) And yet there was one thing which didn't go with her character. God help you if you were part of the raid and somehow stopped me from Doing My Job, whatever it was that raid. Sometimes Penguining was My Job and sometimes it was doing damage and sometimes it was crowd control, but I got livid when some other person blocked me. Now a necro's actual raiding Job is to pile on lots of single target spell damage that accumulates over time. I could do that and enjoy it, but any chance to do something else, I took it. Slow and mesmerize undead? Did it. Blast something until it turned undead and then charm it in the brief tick of its undeadishness? Did it just to get a clockwork pet. Tank while wearing weak spellcaster's robes? Did it. (Did I mention that subtlety was for other people, yet?) Work on the puzzle of the raid mechanics themselves instead of killing? Did it. I started to write down before what I did for single player games...and then laughed and showed myself out of the thread. But now I have discovered spoiler boxes. I think I have worked out what she would do for three, maybe four factions. . . Oh yeah I forgot something weird but maybe important. When I run with this character. . .I cannot shuffle! I have been practicing and can now slowly get the card corners together most of the time. But when I let my mouth run, kaboom, it's arcane fate cards everywhichwhere, every time, I'm lucky the tables have raised edges to catch the explosion.

I was reading some older Iron Quills. Is there a rule that says you must use original characters and not touch the fluff of official characters?