Dinosaur Cowboys - Tabletop Skirmish Game | A skirmish game where prehistoric dinosaurs meet the new wild west of 2285.

Giant Siberian crater pits

March 1, 2015 — Dinosaur Cowboy

Wow pretty cool to think something like this can happen in the middle of Siberia without people knowing. Also interesting how more have appeared and scientists seem out on the cause. I like this idea though: “sudden release of natural gas that had been stored in the permafrost but was kept under pressure by the weight of the pingo.”

I post this because it’s pretty close to the fun little backstory/history I made for Dinosaur Cowboys. Except of course that I use Yellowstone in Wyoming and the geyser eruption. But the idea that huge changes to the Earth can happen is the same. Heck if I had more winter terrain maybe I would have centered the game in Russia :)

Article: http://siberiantimes.com/science/casestudy/news/now-two-new-large-holes-appear-in-siberia/

Anyway the above image might make its way into the rulebook eventually (in sepia tones), since it looks exactly how I imagine the post-eruption Old Faithful geyser to look.

Posted in Brainstorm. Tags: Brainstorm, Dinosaur Cowboys, Siberia. Leave a Comment »

Three new painted minis (a record?!) and some exciting new terrain!

February 25, 2015 — Dinosaur Cowboy

Well if you’ve been following this blog for a while, you might know I’m a bit exhausted of painting. I did a ton of mini painting as a kid, then kind of burned out on it, and now only do the odd character figure. So I’m excited to say I have THREE new minis to show you, all fully based, painted, and sprayed. That must be a new record for minis shown at once on here, right?!

The Neotechnoist
Before you look at this first miniature, I want to confess something. When I made the Neotechnoist allegiance I had a lot of imagery in my mind, and some of that was from Games Workshop’s Necromunda faction called the Van Saar. They are basically high tech nobles with super cool suits and laser weaponry. I’ve have this mini for a while, since I bought a few Necromunda figures off Ebay a long while back. But I finally sat down and painted him.
I used one of my favorite new paints that is basically a clear sparkle/shimmer that can be added to any other color. In this case I added it to an (already) sparkly blue to get what I call “Crest Blue” (like the toothpaste!). I used this color for his undersuit, and then copper for the raised plates. Pretty standard weapon (black, gold, green) and wiring/cabling of a nice washed green. One thoughtful touch is his backpack has a few squares on it, which I painted to represent a charging level (red to green).
Anyway a picture is worth a thousand words, so here’s the first mini, the de-facto Neotechnoist:

(And before you ask, yes the little bum plates are sculpted on…it was the 80s!)

Samurai Jack
Next up is, well, what I can best describe as a samurai with a shotgun (who I’m calling Samurai Jack for now). I got this figure, um, maybe 15 years ago? I had spray painted him gold for whatever reason, and so he sat for the last decade and beyond. He’s a cool and unique mini though, so I thought it was time to finally paint him. I have a painting night with friends to thank for motivation for this one, as I painted the entire mini while hanging out hunched over a table with other painters.
Anyway first of all I went for a nice and classic scheme, which is purple + green with some bright gold to tie him together and make him look pretty noble. There are some pretty cool touches as well, like the central chest plate being a yin yang and the “kill scratches” on his shotgun. And I actually painted the Japanese kanji for “strength” on his sword sheath. Definitely happy with the result! I haven’t done kanji work since I wrote “Hyena” on the back of a Battlemech for Battletech about 7 years ago (I should post a picture of that!)

Also you might have noticed the strange egg ball shapes on his base. What could they be? Well it’s actually trick from the oddest of places: my mom! Normally moms are great for saying “That looks good dear!” but coming up with a genius hobby idea is even better. In this case the eggs are unground black pepper glued onto the stand (in this case mostly unpainted). Really has a great texture with the lines, and the size is perfect. If no one told you it was pepper you’d probably just think it was some cool “green stuff” sculpting.

Mountie Duster
And finally is another Games Workshop mini, of course not even remotely recent (screw those prices!). Best I can tell this guy is a Rogue Trader (ie: Warhammer 40,000 first edition) era mini, some kind of Imperial settler or colonist. Either way he basically looks like a farmer Han Solo, and certainly has a dated look to his sculpting (such as his bulgy jacket and squat stature). Great pistol though, and I decided to paint him like an RCMP / Mountie, which just semeed to fit for some reason. So that meant a blue stripe on the pants and a red jacket. His shirt, while not a wild color, turned out nicely with the copper buttons.
I also like his base, which is sort of snowy/ashy looking like Canada is in Dinosaur Cowboys.
Unfortunately I didn’t have as much luck with the pictures for him (also he has an annoying piece of fluff stuck to his hat), but I can guarantee you’ll see him again in a battle report soon.

The New Crew

The Terrain!
I recently did some overtime at work, and my wife and I decided to spend some of the extra income on fun stuff. So I headed to my local hobby shop and browsed around for an hour. Oh man I love good hobby stores. I ended up with some new paints, but more importantly some new terrain!
Anyway I have been extremely pleased with Pegasus Hobbies in the past, since I bought pre-painted barrels and crates (image here) from them in the past.
Now I bought their pre-painted fence set and stone wall set. The fence set is so thematic and fitting to this game that I might go back and pick up another! Definitely going to be a dinosaur corral in the future. The walls are great as well, especially if I ever do some fantasy gaming again in the future. All I need now is the oil barrel set and I’m golden.

(Funnily enough this is actually a pretty good picture of the Mountie Duster…)

Next up are two resin pieces from a company called Novus Terrain. The first is a really cool looking propane tank (“Exploding Crates” feature in the game much?!) and the second is a nice sci-fi looking ruined building. Both of these will require some painting, but I figure a bit of spraypaint and highlighting the details should do it.

I mean just look how cool the camera shots will be when someone is sniping from the building with a Lever-Action Rifle!

(For once my old trusted camera really came through on this shot, look at that sick autofocus)

Upcoming Battle Report
Obviously three minis and new terrain means a battle report is necessary to try it all out! I had actually hoped to play tonight, but finishing up the bases and protective coating everything took longer than I expected.
But I’m thinking Samurai Jack is some kind of bandit raider near the Canadian border, and the Mountie is dispatched (with his Neotechnoist hireling) to stop the problem. Walls and fences will be involved just because! I won’t use the resin terrain yet since I want to paint it before the tabletop debut. Anyway pretty exciting times!
I still have probably 12-15 minis I’ve dogeared for Dinosaur Cowboys, so I’ll slowly work through those. And no offense to my friends at the painting night, but I don’t know how they can paint rank and file troops the same color scheme for 80+ minis. I’d blow my brains out (or just stop halfway through). Even having to do consistent bases would be a drag, since as you can see I had quite the variety in my recent works. Anyway I think I’m pretty much going to stick to single character models, be they for Dinosaur Cowboys or some RPG or whatever. Just way easier to think up your own paint scheme, inject some spice (like yin yangs, power meters, etc.), and end up with a diverse crew of people.

Posted in Images. Tags: Dinosaur Cowboys, Images, Pegasus Hobbies, Terrain. Leave a Comment »

Imaginative art from Simon Stalenhag

February 22, 2015 — Dinosaur Cowboy

There are a couple of dinosaur related pieces that the artist Simon Stalenhag has done, as well as some really imaginative robot related work. All in all a nice dark style with moody forests and the suggestion of tense situations. All the images below came from his website, where you can visit and view more:

http://www.simonstalenhag.se/

Instead of flooding the main blog page with huge pictures, click the link below to see the rest that I chose from his full collection.

Click to view more pictures…

Posted in Images. Tags: Dinosaur Cowboys, Images, Simon Stalenhag. Leave a Comment »

Battle Report: Get to the Flapper!

February 10, 2015 — Dinosaur Cowboy

First of all, how has it been over 6 months since my last post?! Well, after the Battle to Seattle campaign and v2.5 release I took a bit of a breather from Dinosaur Cowboys. Then before you know it Christmas came around. And then here we are in 2015. Like I mentioned in my last post my wife and I had a kid, so that’s also been a big factor. Also getting into the computer game Euro Truck Simulator 2 (of all games?!) and back into Awesomenauts also took some time. Regardless my apologies for the lack of posts here.

But I finaaaaally took the time to sit down and play Dinosaur Cowboys yesterday, which I’ve been meaning to do for quite a while. I used a single 3’x4′ board covered with a lot of terrain, as well as some real-life fossils that I collected when I was a teenager. The Flapper area was designed to look like a small landing pad/airport with crates and a wagon nearby.

There aren’t a ton of pictures or notes because I ended up playing with my wife, so there was less time to catalog every turn.

Deployment and Objective
First of all for the sake of simplicity no Features were used. The Objective was “Escort”, where a Civilian has to basically traverse the board and escape. The Deployment was “Layered” to give the impression of fighting through a series of enemy lines (with the unspoken exception that the Civilian would be deployed in the further region from their escape area).
To add a bit of narrative flavor I figured the Civilian is an Archaeologist who found a rare fossil in South Dakota. Before he could return to the nearest city with his find the Black Hill Raiders descended on him and took him prisoner. Now the Raiders are trying to move him to a Flapper (aka the Arnold Schwarzenegger “Get to the ~~chopper~~ Flapper!”) to escape the area, return to their hideout, and ransom the fossil (and Civilian) to the highest bidder. Local homesteaders the Birkshire Family get wind of this plot and assemble to stop the kidnapping. So a fun little twist on what’s normally “good guys escorting through bad guys”. Remember that Flappers are Pterodactyl replacements for airplanes in Dinosaur Cowboys.

Posses
Now the posses involved might sound familiar, and that’s because they are pulled directly from the 9-page Quickdraw Rules. Both posses have $1,000 and 100 IP, so pretty standard. The Black Hill Raiders use a Raptor and focus on melee, so the Layered deployment really helped them. The Birkshire Family have quite a few powerful guns like an Ultra Repeater, 500kW Walker Revolver (when explained to my wife she said “That seems like it does a lot of hits”), etc. So the match up should be interesting. I played the Raiders and my wife played the Birkshire Family.

You can get the PDFs here:

Setup and A Few Pictures
The game lasted 5 turns.
The Layered deploy REALLY made a mess of everything. There were some possible “Shot in the Back” moments right from the get-go, due to later groups ending up behind enemies.

For the Black Hill Raiders, Betty One-Eye (Necromunda Escher Juve figure) and The Blade (Dark Sun Mul figure) deployed far to the north of the Flapper, with their Civilian nearby. The plan is to use the mix of melee and firepower to escort the Civilian and distract enemies as they went. Opposite them from the Birkshire Family is Brother Jerrid (preacher figure) and the trusty Ducky mount Drake.
The final deployment zone belonging to the Black Hill Raiders consisted of Maynard Dereus, the shotgun wielding leader (Necromunda Ratskin Shaman figure). Behind him is Malice, the Raptor dinosaur. I had wanted to use the Papo “alternate” paint scheme for this dinosaur, but I think it got bent in the storage bin as it wasn’t standing up properly.
And the last deployment zone for the Birkshire Family, which included the Flapper, had Mama Hanna (Warhammer 40,000 Schaeffer’s Last Chancers figure) with her Ultra Repeater on a hill, and nearby Papa Jonas (bartender figure) blocking the east flank.

Here you can see a few views of the deployment:

From left to right: View from the southern Flapper end of the table, focus on the middle deployment zones, high level view looking west (you can see how everyone ended up pretty much on one flank).

I can’t speak for the Birkshire Family, but I know my plan with the Black Hill Raiders was to split my enemies up. So the Raptor would move south towards the Flapper zone to lock down and distract foes there (classic dinosaur move really), while Maynard would flank into the northern split of Birkshire Family. The Civilian would Hustle every turn in a desperate attempt to stay in cover and not get killed.

Here are a few more pictures of deployment, since like I said once the dice started rolling the photos stopped coming.

On the left you can see the northern deploy, with the Civilian visible (he’s the Prospector looking fellow in the blue hat). Notice how close the Ducky is…could get ugly right away.
On the right is the Flapper “end zone”, with a few supply crates and a nearby wagon. For the purposes of this game the Flapper and wagon dinosaur are just scenery and not something you interact with.

If you’re into fossils, well, here are some zoomed in shots of a few. They make great, thematic terrain pieces, just a bit drab in color (maybe they need a gloss spray). In general they vary from nice cover pieces to full on line-of-sight blocking hunks o’ rock.

And finally some cinematic shots, first of the Black Hill Raiders leader Maynard overlooking the battlefield from his perch. Then a shot of Mama Hanna awaiting her foes in the Flapper area.

After Action Report
As for the game itself, Birkshire started by Charging the Ducky into melee with Betty One-Eye, thankfully avoiding the Civilian for now. The Blade counter-Charged into Brother Jerrid, who was nearby on the hill. Of course he then promptly got blasted backwards when Brother Jerrid did “Fan the Hammer” with his 500kW Walker Revolver, followed by a Speed Reload. Maynard had a terrific Saber weapon, so in the interest of utilizing that as soon as possible he climbed down the cliff and moved towards the Ducky. Meanwhile the Civilian ran forward as much as possible. On the backline the Raptor moved towards Papa Jonas but couldn’t quite reach him and didn’t want to risk a Charge. Mama Hanna fired at the Raptor to begin whittling down his Hitpoints.

Turn 2 saw the start of some long dinosaur combats. The Ducky did consistent, but LOW damage to Betty One-Eye, while she alternated between pistol fire and using her Flail depending on what the best odds were. Meanwhile the Raptor Charged at Papa Jonas, but ended up missing nearly all of his 1A-5D attacks through the course of the game. The fact that Mama Hanna used “Get Up!” on Papa Jonas meant he survived the initial Charge and then stayed in combat to futilely try to use his Scattergun.
First blood went to The Blade, who Charged in again and managed to kill Brother Jerrid before being shot down by Mama Hanna in turn. A worthwhile trade as the Civilian had a nearly unobstructed run to the Flapper now, with just Mama Hanna standing in the way.

Turn 3 was much of the same, with the Civilian taking a shot from Mama Hanna. But his substantial 14 HP pool meant more than a few Ultra Repeater hits would be needed. Eventually Maynard Charged into the back of the Ducky, and the pain started…like really, really started. The Saber hits at 3A-6D, with +1 Attack on Charge, so you can imagine how long the Ducky lasted. He basically never cleared Panic and took 11 HP of damage on the first Charge. Unfortunately the Black Hills Raider player (me, haha) didn’t use the “Berserker” Trait for a glorious 6A-6D attack (which likely would have one-shot the Ducky, combined with the existing damage from Betty One-Eye).

Turn 4 saw the Raptor and Papa again fail to hit each other. Papa unfortunately needed a Reload on his pistol fairly early on in the fight, otherwise he could do more reliably done damage that way instead of a risky 1A-5D Scattergun shot hitting on 8+. Luckily the Raptor is hitting on 8+ as well. The Civilian is within a turn of the Flapper now, but took another shot from Mama Hanna on the way and is down to 5 HP. As expected the Ducky didn’t last another turn against Maynard’s wrath, freeing up the two Black Hill characters to move towards the Flapper area.

Turn 5 wrapped up some of the attacks. After killing the Ducky last turn, Maynard had moved south, and this turn could move again and Charge at Mama Hanna. The successful Charge dropped her like a sack of bricks. This left Papa Jonas alive, and the Civilian one Activation away from the Flapper. Summoning his courage the Birkshire leader left combat with the Raptor (who failed to Snap Attack, which would have killed Papa), and angled his line of fire to get one last shot on the Civilian.
Annnnnnd promptly missed! Because he is the Leader he can’t “Yeehaw!” himself, so with that, the Civilian activated, moved to the Flapper, and the game was over. Victory to the Black Hill Raiders!
Here you can see the final, desperate shot of Papa Jonas as the Civilian rounds the hill towards the Flapper.

What’s Next?
Great fun all around! With deployment and rules explaining the game still only took about an hour. As you know I’m so happy with the state of the Dinosaur Cowboy rules. I do have some very minor tweaks (this is literally one of my TODO items: – Fix capitalization in Quickdraw rules for “100kw” instead of “kW”), but otherwise it’s all good.
I won’t make any promises of getting another game in on this table, or doing the Lego town I mentioned in my last post. Instead I’ll just say hopefully I talk to you again soon!

Posted in Game Sessions. Tags: Battle Report, Dinosaur Cowboys, Game Sessions. Leave a Comment »

Lego town mixed with normal terrain

September 5, 2014 — Dinosaur Cowboy

March 2015 Update: I finally played out this battle report (albeit with a slightly different Lego table). Take a look at the Thermopolis Outpost Raid with Lego!

Been a long while since my last post! I had a kid, so that’s definitely shifted my focus elsewhere :) As life starts to settle back down I’m hoping to get back into tabletop gaming.

In the meantime I’ve noticed my Lego Lone Ranger post gets a lot of hits from searches. So I figured it would be fun to eventually try a battle report using the Quickdraw posses, but in a Lego town and with Lego minifigs.

Here’s the table I setup to get a feel for how viable the idea is, complete with a dinosaur towing a Lego cart, a jail cell at the end of the road, some rooftop planks to climb between buildings, and various Lego chests scattered around the map (which I’ll use as some kind of Crate feature in the game):

Posted in Brainstorm, Images. Tags: Brainstorm, Dinosaur Cowboys, Images, Lego, Minifig. 4 Comments »

v2.5 Release with oodles of new weapons

July 2, 2014 — Dinosaur Cowboy

Remember how the last release was the fastest update ever? Well I’m going to have to guess v2.5 is the slowest. After the Battle to Seattle campaign wrapped up I was pretty much out of energy. Summer had just started as well, so a week delay turned into a month and before you know it here we are in July. If you have been following the bleeding edge version of the rules there shouldn’t be any surprises here.

Without further ado: Dinosaur Cowboys Rulebook v2.5

Anyway v2.5 is quite a milestone release because I added a TON of weapons. There are now plenty of fun options for pistols (Six-Shooters, Volcanic, Walker, Peacemaker) to suit any playstyle. Rifles have been tweaked and balanced and expanded. Shotguns are actually viable now. Repeaters have an “end game” version. There are lots of new specialty weapons too (like the LeDuc Revolver). Melee weapons have been completely redone so any type of Attack-Damage pattern you can imagine is available.
There were numerous tweaks and fixes from the experience of running a 4 person campaign. I also took some of the knowledge gained from the quickstart rules and applied it back to the core rulebook, such as actually explaining and demonstrating a statline before talking about it.

All in all I’m really happy with this version, even if it took far too long to get that last 1% done.

I’ll probably go back into quiet mode for a while here though. Lots going on outside of tabletop games, so it can be tough to find the time. I am of course still hoping to post battle reports and the like. I’d especially like to build a few Lego buildings and play a game of Dinosaur Cowboys using Lego minifigs. That and use some of the new dinosaurs in greater depth. I have a few miniatures I’m in the process of painting as well that I’d like to get a game in with eventually.

Anyway here are the specific changes around this edition:
– Tons of new weapons and special abilities
– Got rid of the old D4/D8/D10 usage which was JUST for Dinosaur panic. Now D6 or D12 ONLY is used, with modifiers where necessary
– Updated component picture to not have old dice, and also show more miniatures
– Added a new Statistics Overview section to give an idea of stats before we talk about them
– Added an example weapon to the start of Combat to give some context
– Default turn limit changed from 5 to 6
– “Explosion” special ability now does half damage to mounted characters
– Changed Wound/Injury table so that a roll of 1-1 is Bad Luck now, instead of having to re-roll 1s
– Buffed “Lend a Hand”, so HP transfer is done in a 1:1 ratio
– Added a +1 bonus to a Bravery Test roll while Mounted, to stop riders from being a huge weak link
– Changed dinosaur passenger size to Small 1, Medium 2, Large 3, Extra-Large 5 (up from 4)
– Updated Swimmer/Flyer notes so that Extra-Large dinos take 5 slots
– Changed Swimmer breeds to match actual length of dinosaurs, so larger versions are used for ferries compared to smaller “sloop” versions
– Moved where the Elevation rule is since it applies to both range/close
– Changed Movement attack modifier to be for All, and only apply if target moved 2″+
– Changed base distances to start at 0 instead of 1, for example Six-Shooter Short Distance is now 0-6″
– Added a ‘Who’ column to Traits, to specifically state whether a Human, Dinosaur, or Both can use a Trait
– Clarified that selling/replacing a dinosaur doesn’t refund training costs
– Reorganized Campaign section, added a note about Gentleman’s Agreements, and about two types of campaigns
– Armor changed to have Speed Penalty starting at +3 DEF instead of +4
– Eagle Eye is now an Active Trait, Clear Sight now has 1 Stage only
– Changed Pushed/Pulled to not affect dinosaurs in close combat
– Merged “Night” into “Sunset”, which also now includes a “Dusk” option
– Added Step totals, for example Step 1/6, 2/6, to give the reader an idea of how much they have left

Saloon Updates:
– Mirrored rule updates
– Added “Private Save” feature that will prevent a posse from being loaded in the Recent Posse List. Useful for campaigns with secret information
– Added a Number of Players link beside the Campaign Mode checkbox, which allows your PDF posse to have modified free Hitpoints for games with larger number of players

Posted in Rules. Tags: Dinosaur Cowboys, Rules, v2.5. Leave a Comment »

Finally took new components shots

July 2, 2014 — Dinosaur Cowboy

Well this was a long, long time coming (far too long actually) but I finally sat down and took new component shots for the “What is Needed to Play” section of the rulebook. To be honest this was literally the only TODO holding me back from releasing v2.5. So I’m going to do a once over of the rulebook and then publish it today.
Anyway I needed to take a new component shot because the old one had D4s, D8s, and D10s, which v2.5 removes the need for (thankfully).

I think I’m going to go with the big picture above (although I’ll probably retouch the color slightly). The other two options were with different figures involved. I like the one with Sarah Love, but I find her stand a bit too bright (the red ring) and it draws the eye away from the center of the picture. I also like the one with Crazy Rhodes and his dual submachineguns, but I think the Preacher Pike mini is a bit closer to an old west feel.

Posted in Images. Tags: Components, Dinosaur Cowboys, Images. Leave a Comment »

As you exit through The Wall…

May 27, 2014 — Dinosaur Cowboy

Photo from Interfacelift

Perhaps you are a Neotechnoist noble grappling over The Wall to see the world outside…
Perhaps you are a Bandit mercenary hired to guard a caravan of gold and silver from the mines outside…
Perhaps you are a Duster bounty hunter waiting for your mark outside…
Perhaps you are a Savage convict having just escaped Haven to the outside…

Either way, I think this picture captures what I imagine some of the area directly outside The Wall around Haven would look like. You can see the trees (jungle I assume ;) ) bleeding slowly into the gritty desert.
In actuality the picture is at Zion’s Canyon in southern Utah, which in the DC universe of 2285 would probably be juuuuuuust on the border of the scorching desert that is too hot to live.

Still a neat one!

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Battle to Seattle – Wrap Up

April 15, 2014 — Dinosaur Cowboy

Well the very fun and lengthy Battle to Seattle campaign ended this Saturday, with a rather grand finale. In case you missed the campaign you can read the saga through the BTS tag.

Basically though I ran a campaign for my three friends, wherein they fought from the southern deserts to the re-emerged city of Seattle, hoping to unlock the fabled secrets rumored to be in the Space Needle.
In the end the fluff surrounding the Space Needle was:
As the eruption was happening and dinosaurs were emerging, teams of scientists hoped to hide away their vast stores of knowledge in various secure structures around the country. The Space Needle was deemed a suitable location because of it’s safe location, resilience to damage, and height over the dinosaurs.
So when you three entered the top of the tower, instead of finding a bunch of old world weapons and armor, you instead found books, CDs, and old rusted computers. Who knows if your three leaders would have fought for this, or considered it junk, or allied to decipher the remains.
However given enough time and effort, most of the information and knowledge could be recovered. Perhaps even leading to the emergence of a new fifth allegiance: Old World, a people who follow democracy, have advanced medical and scientific knowledge, and use robots and other strange technology to do the fighting for them.

Posses
The three players involved were: Dustbowl Dusters, Dustin Tails, and New Haven Vigilantes.
Because we used the official campaign rules these posses were able to grow and develop through the game, from basic 100 IP/$1,000 gangs to 300 IP/$3,000 veterans. Here is a fun little chart showing their IP growth:

In the end the involved posses looked like this:

Game List
We played through an intro game, and then 10 games involving different locations along the western coast of the US. Sometimes the players were against each other in a free for all, or in two separate 1vs1 games where I played an NPC posse against one of them, or in a big 3vs1 coop. In total these were the games and locations we played:

Feb 6: Intro game (unrelated to campaign)
Feb 13: Radio Tower. Dustbowl Dusters won by objective vs New Haven Vigilantes and Dustin Tails.
Feb 20: Death Valley. NPCs won against New Haven Vigilantes and Dustin Tails.
Feb 22: Pahrump bonus game. All three won against NPCs.
Mar 6: Lake Tahoe. Dustin Tails won vs NPCs. New Haven Vigilantes and Dustbowl Dusters tied (amazingly enough).
Mar 13: Lassen Volcano/Redwoods. New Haven Vigilantes won vs guest Rob NPC at Redwoods. Dustin Tails won against NPCs at Lassen.
Mar 20: Crater Lake/Coos Bay Swimmers. Dustbowl Dusters won vs guest Cheryl NPC. Dustin Tails won against New Haven Vigilantes.
Mar 27: Dunes Park/Warm Springs. New Haven Vigilantes won vs Alligator NPC. Dustin Tails won vs Dustbowl Dusters at Warm Springs.
Apr 3: Tillamook/Columbia River. Dustin Tails won vs New Haven Vigilantes at Tillamook train yard (with no kills to either side!). Dustbowl Dusters won vs guest Paul NPC at Columbia river.
Apr 10: Lewis Military Base. Robotic NPCs won vs all three (beep boop beep).
Apr 12: Space Needle finale. Markus lost big time!

Thoughts
Well this campaign was a ton of fun. I’m glad I could rope in three friends to dedicate this much time to playing a game I designed. Very nice of them to indulge me like this. We played pretty much every Thursday for two months or so. Having a consistent game was nice, and I think the ruleset held up well. Plus the campaign finally motivated me to make my 6’x4′ table overlay (split into two 3’x4′ pieces), so that we could have two simultaneous 1vs1 games running.

We did have a brief hiccup around weapons a few weeks in. Every posse had focused on long range weaponry, which made the game play a lot differently than I would have liked, and nullified various fun posse builds. So rifles were toned down. I took that opportunity to do a big revamp of the weapons, which will be coming soon in the v2.5 release of the rules.

The only other problem I found was the weapon list is geared towards mid-tier posses, in the sense of $1k-$2k or so. Once you are past $2,000 the “top tier” weapon choices boil down to 1 per category (for example 1 repeater, 1 shotgun, etc.). This meant that there were a lot of Lawstar Repeaters :) The other issue was the Dustin Tails posse seemed to win a ton of their games. I’m trying to decide and analyze whether that was posse choice, player skill, enemy builds, or something broken or unbalanced in the rules. If it’s the last one we have a problem, otherwise I think we’re okay.

Otherwise I can’t complain. Everyone grasped the rules quickly and learned the intricacies and strategies as time went on. Introducing guest players to the system also seemed to go well. All in all I’m happy with the state of the rules, and I think a long term campaign like this was great for putting them to the test.
I do think having a “Gentleman’s Agreement” helped keep everyone happy, since even agreeing to stop at Defense 4 still caused a bit of tension. I can’t imagine how things would have been if anyone managed Defense 7.

From here we’ll be switching our weekly game sessions to a new campaign (probably Star Wars: Edge of the Empire RPG from Fantasy Flight games). So besides finalizing v2.5 (just need to retake the component photo and do a couple more tweaks), I’ll be a bit quieter in terms of Dinosaur Cowboys. But I hope to get back to (somewhat) regular battle reports after the next campaign.

Posted in Campaign. Tags: Battle to Seattle, Campaign, Dinosaur Cowboys. Leave a Comment »

Battle to Seattle – Finale at the Space Needle

April 12, 2014 — Dinosaur Cowboy

And so begins the grand finale of the Battle to Seattle campaign. The fight from the southern deserts north to Seattle was long and tough for all posses involved. I’ll post a wrap up entry a little bit later with some stats and overall info. For now the focus is purely on the finale game.

First of all this game differed because we set aside an entire Saturday to play it, instead of our traditional Thursday night game. This meant I could get pretty elaborate with the setup. The make the game feel truly epic I broke the finale down into three phases, or sub-stages. Although we ended up not playing the (admittedly short and not hugely needed) third stage.

Markus Graves
So far I don’t think I’ve hugely mentioned the fluff that went along with the campaign. Besides the general goal of reaching the Space Needle (and hopefully unlocking old world secrets within), the players were introduced to Markus Graves during the last few games. First of all they saw his massive posse, called the Six Grave Gang, on the Swimmer coastal ferry. They briefly met and talked to him in the saloon at the Warm Springs Indian Reserve town. And they had a chance to attack his wagon stealing parts from the Lewis Military Base (although a powerful Shield blocked the attempt).
The story behind Markus Graves is he has a debilitating, unknown disease. The disease already wasted away his wife and five children to nothing. Markus buried them himself (thus the name “Six Grave Gang”) before setting off to the re-emerged city of Seattle. His hope was to find a cure, or way to prevent the disease from taking his own life.
What this meant in game terms was the finale focused on Markus Graves and his various gang members.

Final Player Posses
First of all every player posse was boosted to 300 IP and $3,000, and all Wounds/Injuries were healed. So everyone started on an even footing. Here are the final rosters for everyone involved:

Stage 1
The first stage was a free-for-all, with me controlling an NPC posse (equal to the players). This posse was named the Six Grave Gang Scout Force (PDF roster).
The table was setup to look like a somewhat flooded Seattle, with the Space Needle represented by an upturned bowl in the middle. For a while I was tempted to get a giant 4 foot tall laser cut 3D Space Needle, but decided against the expense. Instead we had a miniature Lego Space Needle which got the point across well enough :) I included the overgrown parking lot from the actual Space Needle, as well as a few rivers that now criss crossed the city.
Although the whole 6’x4′ table was setup, for the first stage we played on a 4’x4′ section centered around the Space Needle. This was to ensure that the four corners (where we would deploy) were equal distance from each other, to give players motivation to attack any direction instead of naturally matching up against their closest opponent. Anyway like I said the deployment was Corner, in a 6″ square.
The objective was Capture the Space Needle, with the player having the most entities near the bowl in the middle at the end of the game being declared the winner of this stage. Initially I had set a 7 Turn limit, but bumped this up to 8 Turns. We had the possibility for a Turn 9 if we rolled 9+ on a D12 at the end of Turn 8, since variable turn length works well for capture games.
Any player entity that was taken out of action was placed face down on the table, instead of removed. The reason for this would be revealed in Stage 2.
As expected this was a very fun game. There were lots of initial shoot outs and skirmishes from all four corners, before a slow but steady push to the middle.

Stage 2
After a little BBQ dinner we started in on the second stage. In this game reinforcements lead by Markus Graves showed up. All the fallen player entities were restored to full Hitpoints, which meant standing them up from being face down (as talked about in the first stage). This made for a very organic deployment since the player entities basically started where they had ended up by the last turn of stage 1. To be fair they were given a single Movement Phase to reposition themselves, which I saw as a mad scramble to confront the new reinforcements. In addition the players agreed on a temporary truce to fight off the much larger Six Grave Gang force.
Then we played out a 3vs1 coop style game, with me controlling four posses that totaled very close to the max IP and ND of the three players. We didn’t use a turn limit, and the objective was simply “kill everything”. The Six Grave Gang reinforcements showed up along the two short table edges, sandwiching the players in the middle.
As well Markus himself eventually emerged, wearing some kind of strange powered medical suit that seemed to be keeping him alive. In game terms this meant he was extremely challenging to kill, regenerating a ton of Hitpoints per turn as well as having great base stats. Another big surprise for the players was the Papo Brachiosaurus toy that I bought! What an imposing size and weight. Everyone was excited when I put the big dino down on the table. The dinosaur had a special Shield (stolen from the Robots at the Lewis Military Base) which made him a focal point for attacks.

The NPC posses involved were:

Initially the players thought they were doomed, and I can understand why as the massive numbers of enemies were deployed. But the melee posse backing the Longneck tended to die quickly to superior firepower. The generic posses did well, but couldn’t compete overall against player posses that had been painstakingly tuned over weeks of play. Eventually the Longneck was brought down, and the focus switched to Markus. He circled the tower, trying to burn and blast anyone alive, until eventually he was the only survivor left, surrounded by many foes. He went down shooting though, and then an Auto Shotgun blast to the back finally finished him off.
In the end of the players won. Like I said I had planned a third stage, where the Leaders of each posse fought each other indoors at the top of the Space Needle. But because we didn’t have a turn limit for this stage it ended up going quite late (1am or so), so we just called it a night after the big coop ending.

Anyway I had a great time with the Battle to Seattle campaign, and all the players and guest players seemed to enjoy themselves as well. Like I said I’ll write a quick wrap up entry separate from this one with my thoughts on the campaign, state of the rules, etc. If you read and followed this series from start to finish I thank you, and hope the campaign inspired you to craft your own Dinosaur Cowboy narrative adventure.

Posted in Campaign. Tags: Battle to Seattle, Campaign, Dinosaur Cowboys, Finale. 2 Comments »

Battle to Seattle – Lewis Military Base

April 10, 2014 — Dinosaur Cowboy

This week was the last normal game before the Battle to Seattle finale. Initially I had planned for the players to choose between Mount St. Helen’s or Lewis Military Base, but eventually decided the setup for Lewis Military Base was too fun to be ignored. So I somewhat railroaded all the players to Lewis Military Base by having Mount St Helen’s erupt again. Why did I want everyone to go to the base? Because…ROBOTS. I imagined the base as having a bunch of old world autonomous war machines rambling around. They would start quite impressive, but eventually their weapons would degrade more and more. What this meant was some more custom rules for the robots, including some Shield rules.
As for the robots themselves, this gave me a perfect opportunity to bust out my old Battletech Mech collection, painted in what I call my “Triad of the Sun” scheme. Nice and bright, just like most of the paint schemes I like.
Each robot would have a weight class (Light/Medium/Heavy), and a command Mech (um, robot) that was slightly better. Destroying the command Mech would shutdown the Shields of the subordinate robots. The weapons carried by the robots were rethemed top tier weapons, with a slight boost. For example the PPC was 6A-4D, much like the Lawstar Repeater (6A-3D). The UAC was like an Auto Shotgun, and so on. These weapons would degrade as the battle went on, so each turn the re-roll value would go up by 1. So on Turn 2 any rolls of 1 OR 2 would count for a reload. Up to a max of 4, which meant by the end the robot weapons were really shorting out.
In terms of the Shields they basically acted like “saving rolls”, with a set target number on a set number of dice. For example 3D12, 8+ (noted as 3D8+…confusing I know). In this case when the robot was hit they would roll 3D12. Any roll of 8+ would cancel out one of the incoming attack dice. This meant low Attack weapons were less useful (such as 1A-6D, since a single save would cancel the whole attack). In practice this made the robots super tough to kill.
In addition the robots were able to allocate activations a bit differently than normal. Instead of a traditional 1 activation per entity, the robots had a “pool” of activations (represented by the green D6s seen in the pictures). Up to 2 activations could be given to a single robot, although that meant another robot wouldn’t get to activate that turn.
You can see the skeleton of these rules here: Robots Rules. Anyone familiar with Battletech should recognize some classic names and weapons, as well as many of the Mechs from the pictures.

Of course with this many rules involved the objective was simple: kill everything, don’t die. The three posses teamed up in a co-op style game. Overall the focus was just to have a wild and different Dinosaur Cowboys game before the big finale. Also no long term penalties were given to the players, instead they were all boosted to 300 IP and $3,000 at the end of the battle (to finally be on level footing for the final game).

For the terrain setup we used a great fortress piece my friend made (and was actually used in the finale for our last non-DC campaign). This was perfect to represent the entrance to the military base.

Posse rosters at the start of the game:

Unfortunately for humanity (and the posses involved) they couldn’t stop the tide of machines and were defeated. They deployed well, using a denied flank to force half the robots to shuffle slowly across the board. Then they fought the half in range, and did quite well against them. But by the time the remaining flank had caught up the humans were on the ropes and didn’t have the Hitpoints or weaponry left to stop the heavier robots.

Posted in Campaign. Tags: Battle to Seattle, Battletech, Campaign, Dinosaur Cowboys, Mech. Leave a Comment »

Battle to Seattle – Columbia River and Tillamook

April 3, 2014 — Dinosaur Cowboy

This week saw some great table setups, if I do say so myself. Also fun locations, since I love Tillamook in real life (they have a great cheese factory, and are situated in a nice coastal town). We had a new guest player as well which is always enjoyable.

Player posse rosters at the start of the game:

Columbia River
The matchup was Dustbowl Dusters against The Ferryman Slingers (NPC posse) played by the guest, who fought at the Columbia River. Both posses had the goal to cross the river using a ferry (or desperately swimming [and probably drowning]). The ferry made for a perfect bottleneck and most of the action happened aboard it. In the end Dustbowl Dusters were able to triumph against the NPCs (narrowly), but a few mistakes or different choices on either side could have swung the balance the other way. The NPC player skillfully blocked the ferry landing with their big Triceratops, which made escaping to the other side a bit tough for the Dustbowl Dusters.
You can see the NPC posse roster here: The Ferryman Slingers Roster PDF. The other option for their posse choice was “Troubled Youth”, a bunch of Neotechnoists who modeled themselves after movie characters from the 20th and 21st century. For the sake of completeness you can see that posse roster here: Troubled Youth Roster PDF.

Tillamook
On the other side of the table the Dustin Tails posse fought the New Haven Vigilantes at the old Tillamook train yard. The player running the New Haven Vigilantes graciously lent me some of his train set, which really made the table pop and gave a unique setup to the game. Their objective was to capture the train, so there was a bit of a mad rush forward followed by tactical shooting to hold the location. Of course to add some drama the barrels lining the tracks were Explosive, meaning they could be shot to damage nearby entities. In the end the Dustin Tails posse won by objective, and amazingly enough there were NO kills on either side (I think that’s a first for a game of Dinosaur Cowboys!).

Posted in Campaign. Tags: Battle to Seattle, Campaign, Dinosaur Cowboys, Tillamook. Leave a Comment »

Battle to Seattle – Dunes Park and Warm Springs

March 27, 2014 — Dinosaur Cowboy

Apologies for the gap between the last report and this one. We finished the Battle to Seattle campaign, and then I sort of just took a break from all things Dinosaur Cowboys. But I’m back now and will be uploading the rest of the reports today (with the retroactive dates correct).

Anyway this week had split locations of Dunes Park (which the New Haven Vigilantes went to) and Warm Springs Indian Reserve (which Dustin Tails and Dustbowl Dusters would be at).

Unfortunately I didn’t get any pictures of Warm Springs, but I basically setup a ruined town with a road running through it. The posses had their leaders start in a bar, have a couple turns of bar fighting (complete with broken bottles and bar stools), and then the fight spilled out into the street. The fun part was we did a “Scattered” deployment (to represent all the different members wandering around the town). Combined with the dense terrain and simple objective (“Shoot Out”, aka kill everyone) made for an interesting game. Eventually the Dustin Tails posse was victorious.

On the other table at Dunes Park the New Haven Vigilantes got to fight a “boss monster”, aka a giant alligator toy I bought from a craft store a few days before the game. I wrote up some custom rules for the Giant Alligator, including a ton of different special attacks and abilities (like “Tail Swipe”, “Acid Breath”, etc.). Another fun ability was that the alligator could send out the young (modeled on the back of the toy) like “missiles”, that would seek out and bite targets. In addition the alligator could swallow targets, and then the victim would have to fight their way free from inside the alligator (which was mapped out using a square grid, haha). The alligator had a ton of Hitpoints, and also had “directional” Defense so that hitting from the front was harder than shooting the alligator in the side or back. The alligator was also so huge that it would crash through terrain as it moved, meaning trees and other vegetation it passed over was removed.
You can download the single page rules for the Giant Alligator here: Giant Alligator rules PDF.

The game ended up fairly thematic with the New Haven Vigilantes pouring fire into the alligator for many desperate turns. A doctor in a nearby cabin would revive any fallen posse members, so they had a few “waves” of humans to throw against the alligator. Eventually the posse were able to wear down the alligator and kill it.

Posted in Campaign. Tags: Battle to Seattle, Campaign, Dinosaur Cowboys, Giant Alligator. Leave a Comment »

A rough and fun naval supplement for Dinosaur Cowboys

March 24, 2014 — Dinosaur Cowboy

For the Coos Bay campaign battle I knew I wanted to have the posses fight each other from the back of Swimmers. For those that aren’t familiar, traditional boats and ferries aren’t used in Dinosaur Cowboys. Instead in the spirit of the theme giant ferries and ship decks are strapped to the back of various dinosaurs, such as a ferry on a Thalassomedon or Mosasaurus, whereas a smaller sloop would be on a Nothosaurus.

Soooo you kind of end up with a ship deck, but in your imagination it’s on the back of a dinosaur. In terms of game mechanics that makes the boat MUCH more maneuverable since you can go backwards without momentum, cross small islands (since the dino can clamber across), etc.

Mockup of a Swimmer provided by Nathan, one of the campaign players

In terms of the rules I mapped out decks for the Sloop and Skiff (which can be launched from the Sloop). The actual passengers ferries would be much larger. You can see the layout of these to the right, or in the rules themselves.

Otherwise the rules provide a framework for moving the ship, using various stations on board (like going “Below Decks” to heal, firing Swivel Guns and Cannons, etc.). There are also rules for boarding via boarding planks or grappling hooks. Also for swimming in deep water, and everything else necessary to add boats to a standard game of Dinosaur Cowboys.

In terms of balance and tweaks, we’ve only played the rules once, but they seemed to work well. The biggest complaint was that there wasn’t much incentive to fire a Cannon. So I’d consider tweaking those to Reload None (instead of Auto), giving it a bigger arc, maybe a different damage scheme (like 1D12 Attacks, D6 Damage), etc.

Download the Swimmer Naval Rules PDF for Dinosaur Cowboys

Anyway the rules are fairly one off so I don’t think I’ll revisit them again. I’ve been loosely brainstorming a new naval game in the back of my mind so this was somewhat an outlet for that. Plus it’s fun to have a unique battle every now and then!

Posted in Brainstorm, Rules. Tags: Brainstorm, Dinosaur Cowboys, Naval, Rules, Supplement, Swimmers. Leave a Comment »

Battle to Seattle – Coos Bay Boats and Crater Lake

March 21, 2014 — Dinosaur Cowboy

Two quite fun games yesterday!

On one side was Coos Bay, which used the newly roughed out “naval rules” for fighting aboard a Swimmer dinosaur. The match up was New Haven Vigilantes against Dustin Tails.
The other table was Crater Lake, with a guest player using Rhinebeck Herders against the returned Dustbowl Dusters.

Both sides were on the hunt for metal scrap. At Crater Lake they were looking for old meteorite to give to a crazy hermit/prospector who had a metal working shop in his house and would upgrade a weapon for the winner. They deployed in their boats.
At Coos Bay there was rough iron on various islands that could be brought to a merchant in town to also make upgrades. They deployed using the Layered deploy, which made for some early chaos and Shot in the Back bonuses.
In the case of upgrades everyone could basically choose a Weapon Special Ability, with a couple removed for balance issues (for example “Seeking” would be overpowered on a normal weapon). In the end everyone, without fail, went with “Hail of Shots”, which allows 1-reroll per attack. This was spread across various weapons in each posse.

In terms of the games I was able to get more pictures since I was just being referee and not actually playing, so that’s a nice change of pace. The games seemed to go well, with Dustbowl Dusters barely squeaking out a win against the NPCs, by having 7 metal compared to 6. In the process though they had 3 members taken out of action, and ALL three took Wounds. Still no Injuries yet at least! On the other side Dustin Tails won against New Haven Vigilantes both in metal and in kills.

Next week New Haven Vigilantes will finally get to fight an NPC posse, in this case at Dunes Park along the coast. The fluff rumors heard were “a weird sighting of a weird dinosaur”, so that’ll be fun to see what happens. And then Dustin Tails and Dustbowl Dusters will be facing off at the Warm Springs Indian Reserve, which they’ve heard is a semi-ruined town that still does some business (aka the closest thing to civilization in a while).

Anyway I’ll do a separate post with the naval rule supplement. In the mean time enjoy the usual smattering of pictures! I split them by table again:

Combined