A Green Man of Mars

I got my Green Men from Bronze Age yesterday and got them started.  I finished one of them along with Woola.  Woola's pictures turned out terrible, he keeps washing out.  I may try to get others with the next set.  But regardless here they are.

My Journey to Mars

So despite years of hemming and hawing I began my trip to Mars the other night.  I ordered a few figures from Tin Man and a few from Bronze Age.  Along with these I got the Savage Worlds Mars books and the Savage Showdown rules as well.  Also I ordered a cool poster map of Mars that has the Modern, Victorian and Barsoom features integrated together.  It has a lot of unnamed cities and such that make it easy to work for gaming.
While I waited for shipping I started working on terrain, I haven't gotten too far yet and don't have pictures yet, hopefully they'll be there soon.   My figures from Tin Man along with my poster map arrived in a few days.

Here is the map I purchased from Mythic Images, it's a great map, a little smallish, but nice quality.



And here is the first finished figure from Tin Man Miniatures, the incomparable Dejah Thoris.  This figure is from the Tin Man line, I believe it is supposed to represent Thuvia, but I preferred her for Dejah as the other figures breasts look like Watermelons, and not in a fun way, but as in they glued watermelons too her.





I feel liker her face could use a little work, but I'm very happy with her skin tones as she's not red, but she's far from a standard flesh tone as well. 

Legend of the Sacred Sword Test Game

I almost forgot pictures.  But I did nab a couple towards the end of the second game.  Remember, early test game, hence the use of the Super Dungeon Explore figures and the really poorly drawn game tiles (I did them myself, and I'm not a very good artist)



In this picture the heroes are dispatching the final monster on the cross tile towards the top.  Due to the way the previous turn ended the monsters went first and were rather unsuccessful at attacking the Cabbit Warrior (represented by Angry Bear).  The positioning by the heroes was pretty clever as The Elven Lancer was able to attack with her long spear past the Cabbit Warrior, while the Sprite Mage was flinging spells from behind.  
Combat works very easily.  Each player cards has the stats along the left side, while weapon and armor cards have the stats on the right, which allows them to tuck under.  You roll as many dice as your weapon permits and compare the results to your characters stats.  Each success is a hit.  The enemy then rolls his Armor dice compared to his Defense stat to see how many blocks.  Remaining hits are carried over as damage.  Easy peasy.  



In this shot, the tokens near the center of the cave are actually rough terrain that was also effected by a Trap card drawn on a previous search.  Each tile has rough terrain spaces, and when heroes search for treasure they'll occasionally find terrain altering cards, in this case they found Poison Thorns which causes the next tiles rough spaces to also be filled with Poison Thorns.  In an earlier quest they had the unlikely instance of finding two different cards making the terrain cause both entanglement and sleep at the same time . . .
Angry Bear had just discovered this tile, which is why he is standing at the front, when a tile has no remaining enemies heroes are permitted to search for treasure and explore the exits to attempt to find the next location.  It's important to Explore and try and find the next tile quickly, if the heroes fail to do so within 2 full turns of the last enemy to be on the tile, all the enemies respawn.  This prevents heroes from camping and healing up too long and keeps gameplay moving at a good pace.  
2 Turns is also the magic number all status effects and such are always for a length of 2 turns unless healed before that.  The tokens that will be included are double sided Color/Gray, at the end of a turn where you have a status effect you flip it from color to gray, then all gray tokens are removed the following turn, it makes it super easy to remember how long an effect has been present.  

If you have any questions or comments, please let me know.  I'll try to do a more details game turn later on.

Legend of the Sacred Sword Concepts

Just a couple of the concept art pieces for Legend of the Sacred Sword.





You can follow Legend of the Sacred Sword on Facebook for the best updates.
https://www.facebook.com/LegendOfTheSacredSword

News

So let's face it, I am pretty terrible blogger, I get wrapped up in things and forget to update the blog.  So here is the state of my gaming world.

Legend of the Sacred Sword is going along at an OK pace.  I'd like to be faster, but I am waiting for outside resources, so that can't happen. 

Chibi Crawl is simply awaiting Tom's health to improve so we can have some beta sets printed and shipped out for people to test.

The Asian Chibi Crawl is currently taking a break as I was beating my head off a wall on it.

Combat Armor Mecha Miniatures is something new.  Due to more odd and lucky circumstances than are supposed to happen in quick order I will be kickstarting a small line of mecha miniatures hopefully next month once I get some art in.  These figures will be anime styled and 1/285th scale (Between 35-45mm tall) and multipart, all the joints will use the exact same sized ball and socket joins, meaning parts can be swapped between models.  Mechs will come as a torso, legs, right arm, left arm, head, and shoulder mounted accessories.  I am currently having art developed just for this project and awaiting the arrival, I am also waiting to hear back from one sculptor, though I have contacted 2 others who are interested in the work.  Presuming I get the line art back in decent order, I am going to estimate launching in about a month, possibly less. 

So there is the world of my gaming stuff.  Hopefully I'll get some previews of Combat Armor in the near future to get some hype built up. 

Chibi Crawl - Final Card Beta

Alright folks, we're in the home stretch for Chibi Crawl and I want to make sure everything appears to be in order.  I started a separate thread to help cut back on any lingering confusion from the development portion.  

The dungeon cards are new, the idea behind these is that you can optionally draw one at the beginning of the game, they'll have special rules that alter the game play in some way.  

Please review the game cards, look for any spelling or grammar errors, also keep your eyes peeled for oddities, if it doesn't make sense, let's fix it now.
https://drive.google.com/#folders/0B_dGQQhS2y0vVkhYSVJQUld2WGs

Here is a current version of the rules.  I intend to keep the rules in beta until the cards are released and in your hands for a little while.  This is so that any minor balance tweaks can be done when I have a wider base of people playing.  
https://docs.google.com/document/...jZMVoyKMDEQxnUO71WVgM5-JN6Io/edit

Here is the card backer.  Thoughts?  If I need to tweak it, I want to do it now.  Reasonably I expect many people to sleeve your cards so you may not care too much, but not everyone will do so.


Finally, I have 3 or 4 empty card slots left.  I'm taking thoughts, these can be either new dungeon themes, new event cards, or objectives that do not require graphics.  I could potentially run some duplicate cards as well, so if you think I need multiples of any events or such, let me know.

Please read over the cards and such, and let me know if you see anything that needs changed.  I will note these cards are a bit different than the cards shown in the other thread (I revised a bunch of the treasures to limit armor buildup, it was possible to get four items that all gave ARM bonuses and it was ridiculous)

Thanks for all the help so far, and hopefully you guys enjoy the final game!

Sneak Peak at a far future project

So with Chibi Crawl being almost entirely out the door, I'm looking at my project list trying to decide what I want to work on next.  My wife has been really pushing me to just work on something that makes me happy and not to worry too much about the money or anything else.

So I've begun my next project.  I am not yet ready to divulge much on it yet, largely as there is simply so much work to do.  I have hired an artist though, and will be looking for one to two more.  If you are an artist, especially one who likes fantasy anime and is willing to illustrate items, treasures, map tiles and perhaps some characters or monsters, please send me an email with some sample illustrations to thefacelessking at gmail.com (forgive the simple spam filter)  For me art is such an integral portion of any game world that is imperative for me to get it right up front.  Also it will be one of the components I struggle the most with financially so I need to break everything down into waves, so I can pay a little at a time.

But what I have to show you are prototyped tiles.  I illustrated these myself, so they are not the highest quality.  I intend to replace them all with professionally illustrated tiles in the future (which I'll also want an artist for, see the art is gonna kill me)










Stay tuned I'll probably leak some real art in the future.  I am looking to try and start Beta testing late this summer, perhaps early fall, and presuming no major hiccups I'd like to have the game finished by Q2 2014.  I'll be hand building prototypes and mailing them to qualified groups.

If you are interested in working with me in any of the capacities above, please contact me.
(thefacelessking at gmail.com) Subject: LoSS - Artist/Tester