Prepare for the Return of Pablo Strange!

Howdy!

We begin 2016's battle games with Dead Man's Hand, a nifty skirmish game we've talked about before on this site.  It will be a vicious fight, taking place in and around Smokefall Ridge.  The results of this campaign (and the World of Darkness rpg chronicle) will shape the future of the Territory for decades to come.

So what's all this about a strange Pablo?  A terrifying bandit roams the Territory, and the brave citizens and lawmen of that forsaken place have banded together to hunt him down and bring his posse to justice.  Check out the Dead Man's Hand section of the site!

The interesting bit of this campaign is the "bonus" rounds every month.  These will focus on narrative scenarios dovetailing with the World of Darkness games.  This is part of our "nesting" of the games this next year - which we will talk about more at a later date.

In addition, one of the first painting projects of the New Year will be to bring to life our Western miniature collection.  We've got a fine set of miniatures, and we'll be adding a few more before the season is out.  It won't take very long to finish the entire case, and we're for sure to add more Banditos to the box...Strange will have a large posse, dressed to kill!

2016 will start off with a bang - of a six-gun!

Hell Bend (Sessions 10 & 11)

These sessions were originally recorded 12/13 and 12/20/2015.

Dec. 13, 8:23pm

From the Journal of Josephine Maxwell
November 3rd, 1875

We decided to go out to Farmer O'dell's plot.  At the farm we found a pile of random half-packed objects in the floor and coins nailed to the trees.  Farmer O'dell is not there.

9:20pm

We go out to find O'dell and find him on a path toward the river.  Jakey Wales pulled a gun on him and got shot a few times.  While we stop to tend to him, Juan chased after O'dell and fought him.

Dec. 20, 5:30pm

We went back to town, with the injured Jakey Wales in the cart.  We found a place to put him so he would be safe.  The group decides to leave for Round Bend just before daybreak the next day.

November 4th, 1875

When we get to Round Bend we find a group of Native American men with a pile of the bodies from town.  Kyle Barton is with the men, and they tell us to leave after they have a conversation in spirit babble.  I argued with Barton about leaving until a blind shaman-like man came up and said maybe we could be useful and tells Barton that we are sleep-walkers.

We walk for a day's time and camp near the blood pit at Table Rock.  The group seems overly calm.  Anya and I decided that we would take a walk to see if the calm feeling would leave.  While out in the darkness we saw a large, scary creature so we hurried back to camp.

Shortly after that we all fell asleep except for Rusty Shackleford.

After we are all asleep, we find ourselves standing near the fire.  Barton says that we should go.  We go into the pit.  There was a black hole that Juan went into first.  We follow and saw a shaman chanting at the stone in the pit.

Juan mimics the man and then we were all separated from one another.  We all saw the shaman torturing a man until the man disappeared.  Then he took a stone from the place the man died.

I appeared in a different place and a man wearing a buffalo headdress painted red.  He was Wrath, and he knocked me back into a pile of dead people.  The shaman defeats him with dream animals.  Then all the bodies of the dead fell into a vortex.  At the botton of the vortex was a giant three-headed eagle as it ate the dead.  Then the shaman fought it with werewolves and captured it as well.

After the visions we had, we appeared back at the campfire.  We had a conversation about the stone, then head back to Smokefall.

We had a conversation about how the shaman was named Oderinko.  We then heard a giant thunderclap and rushed outside to find the giant eagle-monster.  We saw the clouds open up and shine on Barton and natives all around.  The things disappeared, and Bartons' eyes glowed for a moment.  He approached a wounded native on the ground, joined hands with him, then the native died.

A huge wolf-man walked from behind the barn holding a staff.  The wolf-man tossed Barton a bag of what he called "silver klaives" to us.

Galleries Redux

Astute perusal of this site would alert the reader to the fact that a few days ago, a lot of articles were gathered together under a new 'Galleries' section, accessible from the nav-bar above.  This has been a feature long requested, but we weren't sure how to implement.  There were a few considerations to keep in mind while we deliberated on this, but the end result was we put everything in there anyway.

You'll note some differences in both how things are labeled and (most notably) the variable quality of the photographs.  It's been several years since we started this and we've gone through about four cameras so far, but we obtained new equipment not long ago.  We considered starting the gallery from this point on, using the newer hi-res photos to make sure it all looked good.  In the end though, this wouldn't be right - everyone deserves to have their stuff shown, and putting it in the organization we have allows us to show a timeline of work.

The Galleries are now broken into four sections.  The first is the Terrain section, showing the terrain we've managed to catalog and eventually expanding to all past and current projects.  We've got a whole new table planned and the materials ready to go for "Grey World"!  The miniatures sections are now split between Historical, Sci-Fi and Fantasy to help categorize our seasonal games despite the rulesets we choose to use or the manufacturers we choose to purchase from.

Here's the thing - the Galleries are still seriously incomplete.  All the showcase blog articles from the last five years have been included, but what of all the stuff we've been doing that hasn't made it to the site yet?  We've done a ton of work that has yet to be photographed, mainly because we play a lot more games than we manage to catalog in this journal.  Now we'll have a showcase for the latest Gallery articles on permanent display.

We've almost perfected the process for turning out group projects in a reasonable time.  Format has been the largest concern over the last year as we buck the wargaming trends that have been in place for decades.  We've found our stride, however.  2015 will go down as a low point in blog activity for the Wargate for a lot of good reasons, all real-life related.  2016 is going to be an entirely different story, however...and we're looking forward to it with much gusto.