Category Archives: Conventions

Convention reports & photo-essays.

Conventions, Gaslands, Historicals, Science Fiction

Photos from Trumpeter Salute 2024

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Last month was the annual Trumpeter Salute convention in Vancouver, BC. Usually right around the same time as the big Salute, this one is decidely smaller but still fun. It runs over the whole weekend rather than just one day, with one slot Friday night, 3 slots on Saturday and 1 big one on Sunday.

Friday

This year I ran other Under Alien Suns game in the Friday slot, this time using both my scifi and hellscape terrain. It was a lot of fun – we had 5 players and the usual set of hilarious moments. One player managed to roll a natural 1 on two different healing checks, dealing out 1 damage instead of healing. And my brother’s PC was bit the zombies but only died in the doorway to the exit, bottling up the PCs

Besieged players, fighting off zombies
As the players escape the zombies into the alien cave
The alien cave, looking in
Trying to escape the alien cave

Saturday

In the morning we played Roman on Roman naval violence with papercraft and small figures. Romans won, Romans lost, it was a good day for everybody but the Romans. As is our tradition, Brian and I played opposite each other – him playing the defenders and me the attackers.

Ship cards
Enemy fleet with their transports
Lead attacking ships close in
The first of many boarding actions
Yet more boarding actions
Just so many boarding actions
The end came for the defenders, with all transports boarded

Midday Brian and I played a nominally cooperative WW2 Italian partisan game – we all played different factions of partisans – both Brian and I picked flavours of communists, which are as opposed as you can get in a coop game. In the end, luck had my team closest to the scientist we had to get off. And the Nazis were rather crap, so in the end the partisans got to engage in their favourite activity – shooting at each other, which mostly meant everybody shooting me and nearly taking on the scientist before I got him off the table.

Entering the building with the scientist
Dispatching the guards
The final guards succumb
Waiting for the Nazis
Fleeing the scene under fire from my own side

The evening I played some Canvas Eagles, always a good game. This year I played with Troy Tony Chard’s 1/144 planes, which are very hard to photograph well, so did get some good photos.

During the day I managed to get a few shots of some random games at various points.

There were horses
Morning viking game – run by my local club
Morning viking game 2 – run by my local club
Battletech grinder
Demo game of Close Quarters Battles
Another demo game of Close Quarters Battles
Full Thrust
It was Russia and it was cold
Pod racing
15mm scifi
15mm scifi 2
15mm scifi 3
Afternoon viking game
Afternoon viking game 2

Sunday

Last year I ran a pickup Gaslands game, which was a lot of fun, so this year I decided to formalize that. We ended up with 8 players and had a brawl to the death with 2 spec cars each (HMG front & either napalm or mines back). The winner was a car initially piloted by myself, then Brian’s daughter E (she of double jump last year) and then E’s aunt – who smartly drove away from the carnage at the end.

Don’t drop a mine and wipeout
First of the jump takers
Glorious slide
2nd and last of the jump takers
Jumping through the fire
Fire is a contagious disease
E’s 2nd car fails to make its own jump
E’s first car slides around the mine for a hit
Walls are to be avoided
The end hit as the two foreground cars took each other out, as E’s 2nd car drives away with the win

All in all, another fun convention and thanks to the organizers again.

Conventions, Gaslands, Historicals, Science Fiction

Photos from Trumpeter Salute 2023

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Brian and I (plus friends) attended Trumpeter Salute 2023 last weekend. No, not the UK one, the smaller one in Vancouver, Canada. We all had a great deal of fun, our first major miniatures convention since 2019 – after Bottos Con, which is primarily a board game convention, in Nov of last year.

Brian already wrote up a post as well, but no photos yet there.

Under Alien Suns (working title) – Coop scifi rules under heavy development

Friday afternoon in the first slot I ran another public beta test of my under development coop scifi skirmish ruleset, Under Alien Suns (the working title). It was a great deal of fun, autonomous vehicles got used as weapons, and there were many laughs. Also lots of great feedback.

Players were fighting in New Antares – against a mixed enemy – zombies from the former townsfolk & Halite Confederation soldiers

Vikings vs Saxons – Aftermath of the Raid

There were a pair of linked games both using Ravensfeast (a free online ruleset)- one of a Viking raid and then a 2nd of the Vikings attempted to get their stolen booty home. I missed the first game, but caught the second one. Also a chance to try out my new camera – a Canon RP with my older 60mm macro lens!

It ended up being a minor Viking victory, as they got the major loot (the laden donkey) off the table, and took down both my lord and the local bishop with his

Gaslands pickup game – Death Race!

As we were late getting back to the main hall after dinner on Saturday, we ended up running the first of a pair of pickup Gaslands games. This death race ended up with the leaders taking each other out and the person in last place at the start claiming victory.

But the most glorious moment was the double jump – jump, slide, spin, jump again. Amazing to watch

Operation Sea Lion – Bolt Action

Sunday is one big slot, but we ended up having time to play a pair of games. First up, a four-table Operation Sea Lion, the start of a larger Bolt Action Campaign. On our table, it is a very minor German victory, as we cheeseweasled some troops off at the end.

It all started badly, however, as the Brits took out 1/3 of our force on turn 1 and we failed our prepatory bombardment roll. But our crowning glory was storming the ruined house held only by Dad’s Army types, who inflicted huge casualties, but we did more.

One last Gaslands game – Flag Tag

We had one last Gaslands game – Flag Tag. Team red vs the other colours, which also happened to be the younger players, including a friend’s son, against the older players (Brian, Martin and Tony).

All in all, twas fun but you never get enough photos. I did also have a participatory art project this year – I asked players to graffiti my buildings for my scifi terrain. Photos of those shortly and thanks to all that participated, I got some great stuff.

Til next year!

Update! Martin has uploaded his photos to flickr – he played many of the same games as Brian and I and even has shots of Brian’s boat game – something apparently Brian himself failed to get

Martin’s Flickr Album

Trumpeter Salute 2023
Conventions, Gaslands, Historicals, WW2 Naval

Trumpeter Salute 2023 Done and Dusted

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My first gaming weekend since 2019 has come and gone and it was good. And as is often the case, I took far too few photos, including exactly none during my own game!

Friday evening Corey ran the sci-fi co-op game based on Sellswords he’s mentioned here a few times, while I played a mid-war What a Tanker game and traded my Sherman for a MkIV panzer.

Saturday morning I got a sturdy crew of Norsemen wiped out to a man by Saxons who were somewhat offended that we’d looted and burned the local monastery.

Saturday afternoon I ran a Coastal Patrol game, four German schnellboote attacking a British coastal convoy defended by a Hunt-class Destroyer Escort and a couple of plucky trawlers. The Hunt crippled one of the S-boats but then got shattered by a pair of torpedoes, and the big ocean-going freighter the Brits where shepherding down the coast also ate a pair of German torps before the S-boats roared off into the night.

Saturday evening we wound up doing a scratch game of Gaslands for eight players, a gloriously chaotic Death Race with lots of wrecks and some amazing driving – both amazingly bad and amazingly good!

Sunday morning I defended the shores of England from the German’s Operation Sealion, which was interesting (I’m not the biggest fan of Bolt Action, it’s a very cartoony rule set…), and then because we had time to kill before we headed off to the ferry, we ran another Gaslands game, this time a Flag Tag game for six players. Explosions, mayhem, and lunatic driving ensued!

I think I have a few photos on my phone, will pull them out. It’s been a weird and complicated week since then, hence the delay in this after-action post!

UPDATE: Corey has added some pictures here

Conventions, Fantasy, Gaslands, Historicals, Misc, Science Fiction, Terrain, WW2 Naval

2020 In Review

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Well, that was quite a year, wasn’t it?

No conventions, no in-person gaming at all for a good part of the year thanks to our local COVID precautions, and yet things still got painted, finished, and even played with.

Before COVID (Remember That?)

village
Low over the coastline, approaching the village. Click for larger.

We started the year damp and cold off the 1/1200 coasts of England with a lot of naval gaming and scenery for that, then we were briefly visited by a very strange bartender indeed and got a few games of tiny ships done in-person.

narthoks finished, front
Narthoks all finished except for basing. Go on, tell the bartender your troubles! Click for larger.

The Weird Begins…

March was when it all went weird. The high point of my own gaming year, Trumpeter Salute over in Vancouver, was cancelled on less than two weeks notice, work-from-home started abruptly, and all sorts of other things went very, very sideways. I did spend some of the money I’d have ordinarily have spent on other things on orders from Bad Squiddo and Forge of Ice, two tiny one-person companies I’ve been meaning to order from for many years now, so that part was nice, but the fact that March/April/May 2020 have fewer blog entries here, combined, than I made in January indicates how off-kilter everything was!

The end of May did see the modification of our local COVID restrictions so that we could have “pods” of up to six or so people, so my brother and a friend resumed gaming most Sundays, starting up a Frostgrave campaign that eventually morphed into a fantasy-flavoured Pulp Alley campaign.

start of game
Start of the game. My chaps centre foreground, Sean’s ogre ladies top left, Corey’s mousling bravos top right. Click for larger.

COVID Bubble Gaming

June and July saw something like a normal posting pace resume here as I cranked out a bunch of fun quick fantasy scenery to add to our Forestgrave tables including a standing stone and a big tree. There were also a few impossibly tiny planes as a diversion from fantasy!

Tiny, tiny 1/1200 RAF and Luftwaffe airplanes to trouble boats not quite as tiny.

August saw a return to naval stuff and small scale scenery, and September saw the arrival of Gaslands on the scene, which has provided much pandemic diversion since!

Mad mushroom jungles for properly fantastical fantasy gaming!

The Bubble Bursts…

The last quarter of 2020 saw tightening of our local COVID restrictions and the end of even limited in-person gaming, but before that we did get to see some mad mushroom jungle terrain and some other weird fantasy terrain before we finally turned to that most 2020 of communication solutions, online webcam conferencing, for a Gaslands gaming fix.

Gaslands by webcam, via OBS and Discord.

So, that was our 2020 here at the Warbard! A weird, stressful, very strange year but here’s hoping that sometime before the end of 2021 we’re back to in-person gaming, conventions, and something vaguely like pre-pandemic normality.

In the meantime, wear a mask, keep an eye on how soon you can get your COVID vaccine, try to get some hobby time in if your situation allows, and stay safe. Happy New Year, I guess!

Asides, Conventions

Interesting Times

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Well. One minute I was too busy getting ready for a local SCA event mid-March and then Trumpeter Salute 2020 in mid-April to blog about what I was doing… and then the real world intervenes rather abruptly and rudely.

Painting and terrain building hasn’t stopped although it has slowed down. We’re safe and well enough, the cat is enjoying having people around to sit on much more of the day than she’s used to thanks to work from home, and I promise I’ll get actual content up here shortly.

I’ve got some more ships for 1/1200 WW2 coastal naval, some fun stuff for my 28mm fantasy-ECW project, and I’m probably going to be building up a Frostgrave fantasy skirmish warband, because why not?

Stay well, stay safe, do that physical distancing thing, and try not to let work from home drive you insane.

Conventions, English Civil War/Thirty Years War, Fantasy

The Trumpeter Salute 2019 Haul

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Trumpeter Salute 2019 has come and gone. This was the first Trumpeter in many years where I didn’t run a game which felt kind of strange, but that did leave more time for other people’s games!

It was also the kick in the butt I apparently needed to devote a bit more time to gaming, after most of a year (two?) of basically doing squat except watch my gaming stuff gather dust.

Among the things I bought at Trumpeter was a pack of Frostgrave Wizards in plastic. I’ve been musing for a while now about mixing up 17th Century English Civil War/Thirty Year’s War figures with magic and fantasy stuff of some sort, and while a lot of things like wands or wizard’s staffs would be easy enough to add to figures with wire and putty, a couple of sprues of ready-made bits seemed like a good plan.

The Trumpeter Salute 2019 haul. First three Warlord/Frostgrave magic users on the left, new frogs on the right, chevaux in the foreground. Click, as usual, for larger.

It turns out the Warlord plastic ECW figures and the North Star plastic Frostgrave figures are pretty much perfectly compatible. Very similar heights and proportions, and heads and hands similarly scaled. The arms are jointed identically at the shoulders on both, too, although the heads & necks are separate on the Frostgrave figures but integral to the bodies on the Warlord stuff, so if/when I want to start doing headswaps I’ll need to do some surgery.

I also got a pack of four “Frogs with French rifles” from Pulp Figures, to give my Cthulhoid fishmen/frogmen forces some actual firepower. I’m not sure if these will be sold via Pulp Figures or Crucible Crush, but they’re awesome!

Finally, I picked up a pack of Renedra’s Chevaux de Frise for more barricades to scatter around – perfect for some of the Pikeman’s Lament scenarios that call for a line of barricades or a barricaded village. The pack contains a pair of sprue frames that will give me about 18″ or so of chevaux de frise all told.

First three magic users! See text for details, click for larger.

I whipped up the first three “weird ECW” magic users already. On the left is one of the regular Warlord cavalry figures with an arm and hip pouch from the Frostgrave wizards; centre is a Warlord firelock body with both arms from Frostgrave (usable as a religiously-inspired figure in straight historical games too), and on the right is a body from the Warlord infantry command sprue with arms from the same sprue and a wizard’s staff from the Frostgrave set.

I’ve got a whole bunch of photos still on my camera from the actual Trumpeter Salute show; I’ll try and get them edited and uploaded this coming weekend.

Conventions

Back From Trumpeter Salute 2018

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It was an excellent weekend.

I was under-prepared for my Pulp Alley games but managed to get enough done to pull them off. The table, at least, looked awesome as I’d been distracted from other prep by the building of many new buildings.

Eight players each running a full ten point League is really too many bodies around the table and too many figures on the table, but it was glorious chaotic fun. The geese won.

Lots of other good games, and of course the meetings with all the folks I usually only see once a year at each successive Trumpeter Salute.

I actually have some great photos; I’ll get them off my phone over the next couple of days and posted here, along with a more coherent narrative!

For now, sleep!

Conventions, English Civil War/Thirty Years War, Reviews, Terrain

The Trumpeter Salute 2017 Loot Haul!

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I managed to escape from Trumpeter Salute 2017 at the start of April without buying a single actual figure, but I brought home a batch of scenery bits and pieces and some reading material, at least.

The haul from Trumpeter Salute 2017 all laid out. Click for larger.

It helped my wallet that Bob Murch of Pulp Figures wasn’t there, and neither was Uncle Mike of Uncle Mike’s Worldwide/Strange Aeons. The excellent folks of Imperial Hobbies did help lighten my wallet and bulk up my luggage a bit, at least, although winning a pair of their $20 gift certificates in the very generously supplied door prizes offset the wallet-lightening a good bit!

The centerpiece of my acquisitions are the Pikeman’s Lament rules from Osprey, to finally put my long-neglected English Civil War/Thirty Year’s War figures to use and get them some time on the table! Related to that I snagged Issue #87 of Wargames, Soldiers, and Strategy, their ECW special, which has some great articles including an excellent building how-to by Tony Harwood that I’m going to be doing my own version of sometime soon.

The rest of my Trumpeter Salute acquisitions were scenery, almost all from 4Ground. Short & Gated Stone Wall Sections, Weathered Picket Fencing, two packages of 25mm bases, and finally Renedra’s Palisade Fencing package to round out the set.

I’ll be doing proper review articles on the 4Ground and Renedra fences & walls sometime soon; those posts are already being drafted.

Conventions, Pulp

Trumpeter Salute 2017 Photos

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I headed over to Vancouver for my annual pilgrimage to Trumpeter Salute again at the very end of March. My girlfriend and I decided to tie it in with a road trip the week before to visit my folks a few hours inland from Vancouver and her folks up on the Sunshine Coast just north of Vancouver, which had the affect of making sure I was tired even before Trumpeter weekend started!

Regardless, it was a great show. I’ve been going for eight or nine years now, with one or two gaps, and there’s a number of folks I only ever see at the Trumpeter Salute show every year that I look forward to reconnecting with and seeing what spectacular gaming projects they’ve been up to.

This year we started off on Friday night with some 15mm WW2 Eastern Front action, leading a German mix company to a really marginal victory against the Russians. No photos of that, unfortunately, which is especially sad as Troy runs a spectacular looking game and each vehicle and infantry stand is a tiny work of art!

Saturday morning we started off by borrowing Martin’s son’s Star Wars Lego collection to run a good sized Star Wars Lego Battle of Hoth, complete with AT-AT, snowspeeder, and a fierce Bantha! Luke in his snowspeeder managed to bring down the AT-AT, but when he went back out to rescue the pinned-down Wookie squad, Darth Vader managed to capture him (and Han!) in the middle of the snowfields.

Star Wars Lego FUBAR

Saturday afternoon we ran a 1980s air war scenario based on the Iran-Iraq War. The Iranians had all American fighters, including the F-14 Tomcats the Shah had purchased before the Revolution, and the Iraqi Air Force had then-new MIG-25 Foxbat fighters, straight from the USSR. Unfortunately for the Iraqis, Iranian luck and high tech American missles meant it rained Foxbats and parachutes into the Persian Gulf all afternoon!

Iran Iraq Air War

Meanwhile, this spectacular Vimy Ridge game was being put on by the White Rock Gamers.

Vimy Ridge

Sunday I ran a Pulp Alley game with six players. There were three groups of fishmen, a Miskatonic University research team, a team of human cultists, and a mad scientist all competing to find or recover a lost Treasure of Dagon! Lots of action and pulp hiliarity ensued, ending in the cult leader blasting multiple other characters with terrible occult power and preventing the recovery of the Treasure.

Fishmen vs Lunatics

There are a bunch more photos – 18 in all – over in my Trumpeter Salute 2017 album on Flickr. Enjoy!

Conventions, Fantasy, Galleries, Infinity, Science Fiction

LANtasy 2017 Photos!

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Our local “big” convention, LANtasy, was a couple weeks ago now. I participated in the Blood Bowl & Infinity tournaments all weekend, and my Infinity terrain made up two of the four tables in the Infinity tourney. We’d hoped for more players and had originally reserved space for up to eight Infinity tables, but six players was it. I managed to come dead last, by a fairly good margin, including conceding one game at the bottom of the second turn (of three) but they were good games on good tables!

I brought my Lizardman team, the Handbag Factory (they’re crocodile figures, hence the joke name) to the Blood Bowl tourney and did nearly as badly, including one game where I got six lizards including my Kroxigor killed and didn’t injure a single orc…

Some photos – see captions for details.

Trumpeter Salute 2017 was last weekend in Vancouver and was a lot of fun. Lots of different games, a chance to see folks I only ever see at Trumpeter, and I ran a Pulp Alley game that was a blast and greatly enjoyed by all six players. I haven’t processed the photos from that yet, so I’ll do another post this weekend about that show.