Login Tabletalk RPG Series: Gundam Senki

Heh heh. So this is a Japanese RPG book, called a TRPG for 'tabletalk', as 'RPG' in Japanese is used almost exclusively for the videogame type. 

This here is a special one. This is the official MS Gundam RPG, using R. Talsorian Games Mekton Z rules. RTG, for those that don't know, was the company behind Cyberpunk 2020, my very favorite RPG. Mekton Z (pronounced 'zeta'), and thus Gundam Senki here, use the same system, Interlok.

Very cool. Not sure I'd have gotten it new, listed at ¥4800 in 1999) but my copy ran less than a quarter of that - and it still has the hex maps and fold-up counters!
 
So, the book is in Japanese of course, and rather difficult language (political, military, and gaming terms abound), but I now have official write-ups of the characters and mecha from the year one war! See, there's Amuro!

The book itself is about B4 sized and a very Japanese dust-jacketed softback. 336 pages, 123 pages of setting, 50 of rules, and the balance of NPC and mecha stats!

Dust Tactics Ideas

So Amazon Japan sells a number of Dust Tactics products. I've ordered a bunch... it's pretty reasonable and perhaps I can get some gaming happening eventually.

Another benefit is the extreme cheapness of Tamiya 1/48 models here. I've snagged a number of them so far. They are assembled into modules, but I haven't finished them, as I'm waiting to secure some decent paint for that. I do not like Japanese acrylic paints. At all. So until I'm rolling in Vallejo, I'm going to delay final assembly to ease the job of painting.

Anyway, in putting the Type 82E together I had this great idea for a 4-door, 3 axel variant. I snapped a pick of the box side art and Gimped up a couple quick sketches.  I will have to revisit this idea latter, with a couple more of the kits.



I also put an M8 Greyhound together... I left off the fenders, which was common among French operated units. I think it completely changes the look of the vehicle... leaner, meaner, more modern. I'd like to mate a MCW Hot Dog turret to it when I can get my hands on a spare one. Think I'll call it a Hellhound.

I have to decide as well on a paint scheme for the Axis. I'm tempted to do 3-color camo schemes on the German equipment, which is more accurate, but Panzer grey is pretty stereotypical. I guess I have some time to think.

Alarm für Anton Zwölf

It's been a busy month - not much gaming or painting in September.  Getting ready for a big move and a promotion at work.  I did pick up an XBox 360 and a couple games this week though, and I've been playing Autobahn Polizei a lot.

I'm thinking that it would make a fun table top game, and would go well with all of the Siku and Majorette cars I have collected over the years - not to mention the Need For Speed Mega Bloks.  The game is based on Alarm für Cobra 11, a comedy/action/drama from German TV network RTL. Essentially it is equal parts Starsky & Hutch, CHiPs, and CSI combined with the kind of explosive car chases you might find in a Michael Bay movie. It's not particularly complicated: Two autobahn police detectives (yes highway patrol "detectives") chase and investigate the crimes of bad guys intent on causing great harm, resulting in gratuitous automotive destruction.  In a recent episode terrorists stole a truckload of Botox in order to poison the city's water supply (Botox is derived from botulism), and the main characters alone went through three cars in stopping the plot.


Car action is a genre that I particularly am drawn to.  But one that is a bit hard to do on the table top.  Speed Rally is a great game for Speed Racer type races, but lacks the RPG aspects needed for a crime-fighting campaign.  A few years back I did do some Death Race-type highway combat based on Savage Worlds chase rules. I think it would make a good start point, but that means I need some vehicle stats - and for this genre, generic vehicle types just won't do.

Kriegstagebuch 001: Sunday Night Firefight

One of the really appealing aspects of Cyberpunk 2020 is highly visual nature of combat. To be sure combat is gritty and dangerous - but also very descriptive. With two of my players unavailable last night, I ran the other two through a couple CP2020 combats. We whipped up characters using the Friday Night Firefight quick generation rules from the 2013 boxed set, and armed and armored them using the quick and dirty expendables chart in the 2020 core book.

PCs:
Chris - armed with a HK MP2013 10mm submachine gun and wearing a heavy armored jacket.
Jon - armed with a Sternmeyer Type 35 11mm heavy handgun and also wearing a heavy armored jacket.

NPC:
Fred - armed with an FN-RAL 7.62mm battle rifle and wearing medium armored jacket.

The set up was random. Fred was positioned on the east sidewalk of a city avenue, about two storefronts north of the corner with the cross street. Chris and Jon are 20m south-west, they are crossing the cross street on the other side of the avenue, about 4m from the north-west curb. Neither group is in cover when initiative is called.

Fred gets the drop and emptied the RAL's 30rd magazine at the two, at a range of 20m. Nine rounds find targets, five on Jon and four on Chris. The first round is absorbed by Jon's jacket, but the next round causes a serious wound to Jon's unarmored right leg. The following three rounds all compromise the jacket's kevlar weave and drill into Jon's torso. Jon falls to the pavement stunned with potentially mortal wounds. Chris is hit in the left leg, right arm, and twice in the torso. The leg wound is minor. The hit to the right arm penetrates the jackets kevlar layers but inflicts minor damage. The two torso hits are more serious - both penetrate and inflict serious founds. Despite these critical wounds, Chris is able to return fire with a long burst from the HK. Fred is still in the open and takes eight 10mm slugs. The first round hits Fred right in the noggin - his skull ruptures like a ripe watermelon - instantly fatal. The next round binds up in the armor over Fred's torso, the third strikes the femoral in his left thigh, followed by a round that traumatically amputates the leg above the knee. Two more rounds drill into the left leg, followed by one to the right and a final hit to the bloody stump of the left thigh.

3.2 seconds had elapsed.

Originally I'd planned to have two gunmen, but seeing the extreme havoc that the battle rifle caused I settled on one. Barney did show up for a later bar fight. Fred was taken right out and Barney, though unable to cause any significant damage to either Chris or Jon, was able to absorb a great many hits before being KO'd. I think we went about 6 rounds in the hand-to-hand... that's a bit less than 20 seconds.

Chris seemed to enjoy the system - Jon not as much. Me - I loved it - it's been years since I ran Interlock and I forgot how detailed and deadly it was. Skill sets need to be reigned in or it will be a bloody meat parade. Both shooters hit at rather high hit ratios - Fred with 30% and Chris with 25%.  Both were world class shooters (top 10%) and I was not using the 2013 rule for coolness under fire.  With some reigning in of 9 and 10 level skills, supplanting a 2d6 roll for the 1d10, and the coolness under fire rules (essentially a COOL save modified by the number of firefights you've been in) - hit ratios should drop to a more reasonable 15-25% or so.

Economies of Scale

I don't particularly care about what size cars you use with your games - but I've gotten a lot of crap over my "tiny cars," so here I present some justification for my choice.

Bases
I don't base on 5mm rounds or GW-type plastic bases. I think it makes everyone look like they are standing on a kerb.  Instead I use 1" fender washers (I actually have about a thousand black oxidized steel washers I use), and occasionally 1.5mm acrylic bases (for motorcycles and horses).  These keep the mini closest to the table top and blend away far better to my eye than the 5mm rounds.

Ground Scale

In my games 1 inch equals 5 feet. That puts my ground scale at 1/60th.  It also means that this NewRay Fiat 500 is over 16 feet long and 7 and a half feet wide.  That is a lot of movement required to round a subcompact car. Of course ground scale is easily changed and almost always slightly out of alignment with miniature scale.

Miniature Dimensions
28mm minis are poorly proportioned. By that I mean they are ridiculously wide. The biggest argument I hear for 1/43rd cars is that it looks like the minis can get in side widthwise. That is true. However I never put my minis in my cars - but they very often stand near them. So for me - height is the important factor.

28mm is a pretty inaccurate descriptor of miniature scale.  Ideally the "X"mm refers to the eye height of a standing miniature - eye height is used to avoid confusion from hair, helmets or other headwear.  Grabbing a couple EM4 Future Wars minis, it seems that they run to just about 28mm at eye level.  Grabbing a few TAG, Artizan, Foundry and Copplestone minis (in upright standing poses) shows that most measure between 28-29mm at the eye.  Taking that 28.5mm as an average and comparing it to reality - the average American male is 69.5" or 1765mm.  Normal drawing proportions of a male body is 8 heads with the eyes located in the middle of the skull at 7.5 heads height.  However the minis tend much more toward 6 heads in height... the Suit from EM4 (middle below) is 5.8 heads tall with the eyes at 5.3 heads height.  If we assume he is of average height that puts the eyes at 63.5" or 1612mm.  1612/28=57.6 giving a miniature scale (based on height of the sculpt) of about 1/57.

As I said before minis are particularly wide (not to mention 5.5 to 6 heads tall) and elevated on a base - boosting eye height by ~2mm or 7%; So I choose to scale up my vehicles about 7% to compensate. In effect that means that I lower the average height of my minis to about 5' 5", but this is replaced by the slight mound of pavement or earth they are standing on.... I can deal with that. I also use larger scale cars for very small vehicles - my Mini is actually about 1/52 and the Willys Jeep is 1/53... conversely I drop to 1:60 scale on big things like helicopters. 

In the end I have minis that can see over the roofs of sedans, and are about the same height as normal (read: no elevation kit) SUVs. It also means that my minis can even look in the side windows of an Iveco Daily or Mercedes Sprinter van - without stepping up on the kerb.

28mm Vehicles

Perhaps the most divisive issue in miniature gaming is that of vehicle scale. One camp swears by 1/43 scale diecasts, the other by 1/55 scale.  Personally I'm a 1/55 guy. I'll tell you why.

1/43 scale vehicles are just ridiculously huge.  No one, of average height,  should risk being hit in the side of the helmet by the sideview mirror of a sedan.  I have some 1/43s but they were to support my Honourable Lead Boiler Suit 1/48 Ultra Moderns - a line that is no longer supported.  Cheap 1/43 diecasts are less common than they used to be, and most of them vary significantly in scale from 1/48 to 1/32 (1/32 is plastic army men size BTW).  It also shouldn't be a 20ft movement to cross from the left fender to the right.

Hot Wheels put out a load of 1/50 scale diecasts over the last decade.  "1/50" was more of a label than an accurate scale - they were made to fit the package (my Rat Rods '52 Beetle is closer to 1/43, and the DropStars Maybach is about 1/55, with most everything else somewhere in between).  They were mostly muscle cars, all of them pimped out, but they tended to be exaggerated in width making them a pretty match for many larger 28mm minis. Yes I said larger 28s. Few 28s are actually 28mm, most modern lines are in the 32mm+ range.  Anyway Hot Wheels abandoned mid scale diecasts (Rat rods, G Machines, DropStars) a couple years ago and, with the Hot Wheels collectors' market, they've become rather pricey.

I discovered Siku, a German brand of diecast car, at the Village Vanguard store in Kanazawa about a decade ago.  The nominal scale is 1/55, with some slight variation due to package space (but far less than with Hot Wheels or Matchbox).  1/55 matches my minis very well.  Most sedans came up to mid chest and SUVs were just short enough for the tall guys to look over.  I prefer Foundry Street Violence, Copplestone Castings, Artizan, The Assault Group, and EM4s (ex-Grenadier) Future Wars minis.  These manufacturers make up most of my miniature purchases and all of them mix very well. They are also rather small compared to newer "28s" like Corvus Belli, Victory Force, Mantic, Dust Tactics, et cetera.  Scale creep.  Since my minis tend to be closer to 28mm at eye level, and I base on washers not GW plastic bases, the 1/55 scale vehicles look great beside them. Yes the minis are a bit broad, but height-wise they look great. I'd rather have them look a little crowded in the car than dwarfed by it on the table.

I've discovered over time a number of other 1/55 scale cars, older Majorettes, Matchbox and Hot Wheels casts of sub-compacts, and a number of "1/64" scale Jada releases. I'm not sure why Jada calls them 1/64 - they are much closer to 1/55 - marketing towards collectors I suppose.  I started picking up a few cars here and there that looked right.  Then Battle Machines came out and I got all of them except the rigs.  A little small (1/58 or so) but close enough.  Then came Hero Patrol.

Since the majority of my vehicles are German Siku's or French Majorettes, I was sorely in need of US police cars.  I found a supply of Corgi Crown Victorias in Chicago Police livery in 1/55 and cleaned the store out. But they numbered only six, and are nigh impossible to find on the intertubes.  Then, last year, at WalMart, of all places, I found Jada's Hero Patrol line.  Chevy Impalas, Chevy Tahoes, and Dodge Charger police cars measuring just a shade smaller than 1/55 - and less than $3 a piece. I bought dozens.  A second wave (with Pittsburgh PD Impalas!), and now third have been released, featuring numerous department schemes and I am intent on collecting more.

Recently I discovered MegaBloks Need For Speed Action Scale vehicles in the clearance isle of Target.  Basically a Lego-type chassis with a single piece front, single piece back, two doors and a top.  Easiest building set ever - and in 1/55.  The vehicles are mostly high performance cars (as the NFS license would suggest) including Skylines, Porsche 911s and the Audi R8. The Audi R8 and McLaren MP4-12C are two I models I scooped up - the supercars make rather decent near future vehicles - and McLaren MP4-12C police cars are awesome!  The body pieces are all snapped to a standard size chassis - making for some slight variations in scale, and the body parts are tight fitting and not interchangeable (no McLaren front on a Porsche), but you can "damage" vehicles by removing pieces... if you don't mind revealing the Lego-type nubs.

In addition to civilian and police cars, I've tracked down a couple Chinese made diecast BTR-80s, two Russian army trucks, a New Ray AH-64 Apache gunship, and a couple M-48 Patton tanks (plastic army men tanks are spot on - look for older Timmee casts that are much more detailed), all in 1/55.  I've also added a pair of MotorMax Hind Ds and a few New Ray UH-60 Blackhawks in 1/60.  I find that larger helicopters can be a bit smaller scale on the table top and not look ridiculous.  I'm also looking to pick up a couple New Ray CH-46s in 1/55, and maybe their 1/60 scale Chinook.

Imagine trying to field those in 1/43 or 1/48 scale... there'd be no room for the minis to move.

Chiappa Rhino Revolvers

Below find complete stats for the Chiappa Rhino series of revolvers (featured prominently in the new Total Recall) for use in modern and near future Savage Worlds powered gaming.

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Introduced in 2009, The Chiappa Rhino series is a modern Italian revolver design from the minds of Antonio Cudazzo and Emilio Ghisoni. Ghisoni's previous work included the Mateba revolver which the Rhino shares similarities.

Like the Mateba, the Rhino's barrel is located below the revolver axis pin and fires from the lowest chamber (unlike traditional revolvers which fire from the uppermost chamber). This inverted design produces less muzzle flip as the recoil forces are more in-line with the forearm.  Of particular note is that the Rhino utilizes a striker-type hammer that is completely internal; What appears to be a conventional hammer is actually a charging lever that cocks the hammer when pulled back and then returns fully forward.

The revolver itself consists of an aluminium alloy frame with steel barrel and cylinder. The cylinder is flattened on the sides (like a hexagon with rounded corners) to further reduce the bulk of the weapon. The Rhino is available in four models of increasing barrel length: 20DS (2" barrel), 40DS (4"), 50DS (5"), and 60DS (6"). All models are available in a blued finish (Black Rhino) or a hard chrome finish (White Rhino), with a variety of grips in composite or wood.  An accessory rail is located below the muzzle on the 40DS, 50DS and 60Ds, with an additional rail located on the top of the 60DS.  All models and finishes are available chambered in .357 Magnum, 9x21mm IMI or .40 S&W. Both the .40 and 9mm versions use moon clips for loading.

CHIAPPA RHINO 20DS
Caliber: .357 Magnum
Range: 10/20/40
Damage: 2d6+1
RoF: 1
Weight: 1.5 lbs
Shots: 6 rds
Cost: $330, 6rd speedloader $9
Notes: AP 1, Double-Action, Revolver

Like all .357 revolvers, the 20DS may be loaded with .38 Special ammunition (Damage: 2d6). Also available chambered in 9x21mm IMI (using the same stats as the .357 version), and .40 S&W (Damage: 2d6). Moon clips for either version cost $5.

CHIAPPA RHINO 40DS/50DS/60DS
Caliber: .357 Magnum
Range: 12/24/48
Damage: 2d6+1
RoF: 1
Weight: 2.0 lbs
Shots: 6 rds
Cost: $390, 6rd speedloader $9
Notes: AP 1, Double-Action, Revolver

Like all .357 revolvers, the Rhino may be loaded with .38 Special ammunition (2d6 damage). The full size Rhinos are also available chambered in 9x21mm IMI and .40 S&W using the stat block above. Moon clips for either version cost $5.