Apocalypticum playtest, trying out vehicle rules

Last week we had our second playtest session for Apocalypticum, the forthcoming post-apocalyptic ruleset from Ganesha Games. Feedback from the game creator after our initial session helped us fine-tune our expectations for this game. We ended up devising a 3-player scenario — due to a snowy Chicago evening that stymied some gamers' travel plans.

The game started with a biker gang (using the Red Vultures stats from the rulebook; strangely there were no motorcycles on the table, so the gang must have walked in) guarding a collection of parked vehicles in the wastes outside Black Rain City. Presumably the vehicles' drivers were at a secret meeting and had left their armored cars and trucks under a close guard.

And that's a good thing, because two more gangs — KGB agents and Ruin Raiders — were approaching the impromptu parking lot from opposite sides of the table. Victory went to the first gang that could successfully start a car and drive it off the table. Here's the table near the start of the game. The vehicles are in the center and the two invading gangs are approaching from the left and right.


Karl played the biker gang in the center of the table, while Jon played the KGB team and I handled the Ruin Raiders.

Our opening moves saw Karl attempting to defend the vehicles by splitting his forces to engage both encroaching squads. Here my raiders take up positions behind a makeshift barricade to fire on the biker gang.


A melee quickly developed as the bikers moved closer to the raiders. What would have been a killing shot turned into a flub as the lead biker rolled a malfunction, causing his rusty pistol to break during the heat of the battle! The token next to him denotes his busted gun.

Across the table, Karl had a difficult time stopping the ceaseless advance of the KGB agents. After several rounds of ineffectual shooting (this became a theme for the night, alas) Jon realized he needed to go for the victory conditions and try to start up a vehicle. I tried to pace him by sending my raiders after the rusted vehicles parked on the battlefield.


In the Apocalypticum rules, vehicles are pretty much just scenario objectives on the battlefield. You can try to start 'em up, but you must roll a 6 on a d6. We modified that for this scenario to be a 5 or 6 on a d6, but we still found that not a single vehicle worked — so we further modified the scenario to say that the final vehicle, after all others had been tried, would be functional. In practice this meant that we tried the first 4 vehicles, to no avail, and then a mad dash began for the final, working vehicle.


(Sidenote: Black rain, a weather event that featured prominently into our previous battle report, came and went in the space of a single turn in this scenario, and it didn't have much of an effect on the game.)

Anyway, as the game approached its conclusion, my raiders desperately tried to stop Jon's KGB men from escaping in the last functioning vehicle, but we had spent too much time fighting off Karl's bikers. The communists started up the truck and rumbled off toward their side of the table — but some lucky shots from the bikers and raiders took out both tires on the vehicle, sending it skidding to a halt.

We called the game after this point. It was definitely a draw — Jon's KGB guys had claimed the functioning vehicle, but the combined shooting of Karl's bikers and my ruin raiders had stopped his escape.

Afterward we took stock of the game and discussed the rules. Here's something crazy — not a single figure was killed in this game! We each finished the game with the exact same number of guys that we started the game with. Where is the bloodshed and carnage? We unanimously agreed that Apocalypticum is just not deadly enough. No one could gain the upper hand because the combat stats were all compressed into a pretty narrow range of values. Guns that confer a +1 or +2 bonus to shooters didn't give us the sort of "outright death" results that should have come from a fast, furious gun battle in a post-apocalyptic car park.

I'm sure once the game is published it will have a much more detailed armory with heavy weapons, ray guns and other high-tech items to help increase the violence. I also understand that Apocalypticum is a campaign-oriented game, and in a campaign you don't always want your guys to die. But in this game everything felt extremely underpowered.

The vehicle rules worked OK, although they should almost certainly be modified for scenarios that require vehicles to be driven. We very nearly didn't find a single functioning vehicle on the battlefield. Here's the final shot of the game, showing Jon's KGB agents aboard a wastelands truck as they made their escape.


Despite the lack of carnage, we agreed that we really liked how the game played. It just needs a bit more brutality to increase the body count and make games more decisive.

— Patrick, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

Miniatures you've never seen: High Command sci-fi

Here at Chicago Skirmish Wargames, we're big proponents of 28mm scale tabletop wargaming — on a budget. As well as buying from affordable outlets like Mega Minis, EM4 and Denizen, we also acquire lots of figures from companies or model lines that are now out of production. This occasional series of posts will dig deeper into the great lines of OOP miniatures that we've discovered in bargain bins, swap meets, auctions, and the other seedy locales where miniatures are traded.

Today's miniatures you've never seen: High Command sci-fi from Folio Works

This shrink-card of miniatures was offered to me by a friend at Bartertown who knows of my fondness for odd sci-fi minis. These are High Command HC 3/2 Protectorate Officers.


It's marked at DM14.90, which I assume is Deutschmarks. This pack has been on quite a journey over the past 20 years — from England, to Germany and the USA! The rear of the card has neat pictorial instructions on how to attach the weapons to their miniatures, as well as details about the date (1991) and country of origin (England).


From what I've been able to gather, Folio Works was a relatively short-lived company started by two ex-Games Workshop employees. Birthed in the early 90s, it was gone before Rogue Trader gave way to 2nd edition Warhammer 40,000. They produced a Fantasy Warlord fantasy line and a High Command sci-fi line.

Though short-lived, the figures compare well to similar early-90s miniatures and were notable for including separate metal weapons for each pack of figures, a feature that wasn't very common those days. The High Command line had figures similar to GW's Space Marines and Imperial Guard, as well as sci-fi Ratmen and Lizardmen. Some of the fantasy figures are still rumored to be produced today by other companies. Click here for more information about Folio Works and their figure lines. (EDIT: Just a few hours after this post went live, we received word that UK-based Kennington Figures still produces most of the fantasy and sci-fi figures from this line! Thanks Mike!)

As mentioned above the figures themselves compare favorably to their contemporaries. These
Protectorate Officers seem like pretty blatant compatible-with-GW-figures aimed at the 40k market.


Clearly the two figures on the right are exactly the same figure with a coat sculpted over the one on the far right. This adding or subtracting of detail to make one sculpt go further was a fairly common practice in the past, as anyone who has collected Necromunda figures will attest.


They scale fairly well with current Games Workshop offerings. When the soles of the feet are aligned, the swordsman is the same height as the GW plastic Cadian Imperial Guardsman (converted with a Pig Iron head), and the other is slightly shorter. Of course, the sculpting isn't quite up to the standards of today's generation of miniatures.


The gun sprue is nice, featuring some pretty clear copies of a GW laspistol and autopistol, along with a third gun that is somewhere between an SMG and a bolter. I imagine that hobbyists wishing to use these figures for GW games might toss out the weapons sprue altogether and just use GW weapons.


All in all, I'm pretty pleased with these figs. They'll probably be painted up as commissars when I get around to completing my Imperial Guard platoon composed entirely of Demonblade Shockforce Troopers (now sold by MegaMinis).

Coincidentally, researching these figs led to the discovery of the origin of a couple of sci-fi Ratmen that I had recieved a while back. Apparently the critters below are Ratten from High Command, though I can't tell which pack they belong to.




So there you have it: Folio Works' High Command miniatures, a long-lost line of figures from the golden-olden days of Rogue Trader. Good luck and good hunting for these figs — and if anyone has a few more Protectorate or Ratten figures they don't need, I may be willing to take them off your hands...

— Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member

Playtesting Apocalypticum, the forthcoming ruleset by Ganesha Games

Last week our club had the pleasure of playtesting a draft version of the upcoming Apocalypticum ruleset by Ganesha Games.

Apocalypticum is a post-apocalyptic game, essentially a modified version of Ganesha's Mutants and Death Ray Guns title, which is itself inspired by Song of Blades & Heroes, our club's favorite fantasy skirmish game. So you can see how Apocalypticum seems tailor-made for a game group such as ours.

Mutants and Death Ray Guns seems inspired by a Gamma World-type vision of the post apocalypse, with robots, mutant plants and other wierdness. Apocalypticum, on the other hand, is a darker, grittier setting like those imagined in films like The Road Warrior, The Road, The Book of Eli, The Stand and others, where it's mostly desperate bands of humans fighting each other for survival.

It's worth noting that Apocalypticum's force lists are designed specifically around the post-apocalyptic miniatures produced by Lead Adventure, though forces can be custom built as well.

Here are the forces used in our playtest.

Ruin Raiders, painted by me


Tunnel Cutthroats, painted by Patrick


We used a 4x4 layout featuring a burned out city with trenches running through it from a long-forgotten war.


The game scenario involved two computer terminals in the center grey building and right black building. The team would have to reach a terminal, open the computer and then download 10 bits of information (a d6 roll at the beginning of each successive turn indicated how much info was retrieved).

My opponent, Tim, and I both went after the computer in the middle of the board with our opening moves. This picture shows Tim closing in on the front of the ruined multi-level building housing a computer core.


A few lucky activation rolls and I was quickly at the computer and had it open. Here's my one gang member who in the process of downloading data while the rest of the group moves off to defend the building.


Tim came head on to the building, but we found that Apocalypticum's rules for opening doors made it quite difficult for his gang to enter the building.


Sending my gangers up to higher levels, my leader then tossed a frag grenade down on Tim's Cutthroats. The grenade didn't do much, but it did send a few of his raiders scrambling back over the side of the trench.


A few rounds of fire between the forces on the roof and those on the ground resulted in no casualties.


Tim tried again to breach the door, this time with a group effort, but was unsuccessful. The rules for forcing doors are really tough! Must be all the skulls.


My raider at the console grabbed enough data to complete the necessary 10 bits and win the game. The leader rejoices.



Here are a few observations about the game and the rules. Some of these notes will make more sense to those familiar with Song of Blades and Heroes (SBH), Mutants and Death Ray Guns, and other Ganesha Games products.

• Black Rain — Apocalypticum takes place in a very specific setting: Black Rain City, a radiation-soaked, ruined urban metropolis inspired by any number of crumbling Eastern European cities. As a result of the apocalypse, black storm clouds hover over the city most of the time, periodically disgorging toxic sludge onto the terrain below. When the rules call for it, Black Rain appears or disappears every time a player rolls two failures in activation and passes the play to the other player, called a turnover. The phenomenon causes a -1 penalty to shooting and makes weapons more likely to break. While it didn't seem to have a huge effect on shooting, Black Rain came and went 5 times throughout the game.
  
  
• Lethality in combat — Our game was not very lethal, and none of our characters was knocked out of action. Most of the characters had relatively low combat scores which were enhanced by the weapons we were using. Bonuses from terrain and hard cover on the tabletop negated most of the weapons' bonuses — and since terrain was plentiful in our game, we had lots of knocked down or recoiling characters, but no outright kills. In SBH, which is mostly focused on D&D-style melee combat, characters that are knocked down don't tend to survive very long. In a shooting-focused game like Apocalypticum, it's much harder to finish off a character who has been injured. Other clubmates who played the game earlier that evening tried other tactics, such as stepping out of cover to gain a better line of sight on enemies — something we didn't do, as all our characters were shooting at each other from buildings and trenches.
  
  
• Turnovers — Between the two of us, Tim and I rolled a lot of double failures when activating our gangs. Most of our characters were more difficult to activate compared to our fantasy warbands in SBH, making failures more frequent. The turnovers did slow gameplay a bit, and caused the Black Rain to come and go frequently throughout the evening.
  
  
• Abstracted weapons — In the playtest draft we received, there were only a handful of firearms listed, and all were prone to jamming or breaking. I liked this aspect of the rules, as it enhances the scavenged post-apocalyptic tone, where everything is held together by rusty nails and a prayer.

Overall, I enjoyed this game immensely. It feels like a ruleset that is focused more on scenarios than kill-em-all battles, and terrain is very important to survivability. I also like the fact that the rules are based on Mutants and Death Ray Guns, and not Ganesha's modern-combat ruleset Flying Lead.

Flying Lead was not a bad game, but it had far more granularity in its approach to firearms, and there were many more variables in terms of shooting modifiers and results of firing. I prefer the more streamlined Mutants/Apocalypticum approach. That said, there are an impressive number of special rules in this game that really can make a character unique. For this game, we used stock characters from the book, but I look forward to making our own custom characters in the future.

Our next trial for the game comes in two weeks, when we will hopefully be able to try out some of the vehicle rules. Check back for more updates!

— Karl, Chicago Skirmish Wargames club member