Thanksgiving Turkey Pterodactyl Hunt

A few years back, Ed Texiera at Two Hour Wargames made a Turkey Hunt freebie download scenario, and I've played on many Thanksgiving days.  This year, I decided to up the ante with a Larger than Life - Lost World dino safari.  I may have gotten one or two fine points of the rules wrong, but the story played out in a way that really satisfied my sense of humor.

Looking through their stores for something suitable as a Thanksgiving meal, Mohl exclaimed, "Dammit!   The supply ship's late!"  Deters didn't even look up from the Competitive Violence League game he was watching on holo.  "What's unusual about that?  They're late 9 out of 10 cycles.  Fleet's just a bunch of REMFs."  Mohl and Deters had been stuck at the communications relay on Fenris, also known as "Jurassic World", for seven very tedious cycles now.  Mohl hadn't ever had the most patience; Deters had noted that it was definitely time for Mohl to rotate to Santraginus IV for some R&R.  Mohl sighed, "It's Thanksgiving - I want turkey!  A huge fucking turkey!"  Deters powered off the holovid, stood to face Mohl and grinned.  "We can get our own huge turkey.  They fly over this place all the time."  Mohl's face brightened with understanding, "I'll get the SAWs and ammo".

Like most other games from THW, the table is divided into nine sectors.  I put the communications station in sector 9, and rolled to randomly generate the other sectors' terrain.  In the interest of speed, each sector got pretty much one feature, a stand of trees or a bush, to represent it's terrain type.  I also randomly located three PEFs (Possible Enemy Forces) to represent possible dinosaurs to be encountered during the hunt.  Mother Superior is a PEF in sector six, just "North" of the commo station; The Ringmaster is in sector three and Slappy the Clown is in sector one.  A good practice for THW games, I pre-loaded the PEFs as the Pterodactyls, a Stegosaurus and to spice things up, a pack of Velociraptors.

Turn 1: Dinosaurs activate first.  Mother Superior passed two dice on the movement table, sending her directly at the hunters.  Being troopers, our heroes took the most direct path; straight at Mother Superior, who resolved into a pack of three Velociraptors.  Here's where the Dice Gawdz display their sense of humor - both groups passed zero dice on the In Sight tests, meaning the troopers halted and the Raptors moved away.  I decided to interpret this as "nobody saw nuthin' ", and headed the raptors towards the center of the table.

 End of Turn 1 - Ringmaster and Slappy are moving towards the hunters and the Velociraptors are stalking the PEFs.  The hunters are just out of the photo to the left.

Turn 2 - Hunters activate first and head towards the table center.  Ringmaster doesn't move, the Raptors move to investigate Ringmaster (I believe that technically, Ringmaster should have been resolved by the Raptors' location, but chose not to) and Slappy heads straight at the hunters, and resolves as "just a case of nerves".

Turn 3 - Dinos activate, hunters don't.  Ringmaster comes into view and the Dice Gawdz smiled - the PEF resolved as the Pterodactyls.  Both hunters passed the In Sight test and fired, wounding one and killing another!  The Velociraptors are tracking the Pterodactyls, but don't come into visual range this turn.

End of Turn 3, the kill falls from flight while the flock flies away.

Turn 4 - Hunters activate first and move to collect their kill.  On the dramatic side, the raptors activate and move into view, triggering an In Sight test.  Both sides pass 2 dice, so the hunters fire and all three dinos are wounded plus one's enraged which is really bad news for the hunters. Raptors charge and the hunters, now the hunted, take the Being Charged test, passing 1 die so they Snap Fire.

End of Turn 4 - the Dice Gawdz have smiled upon our heroes, as their snap fire (they're using SAWs) caused four wounds onto three dinos with only one wound remaining each.

Four nervous activation rolls later, the troopers get their "Fucking Huge Thanksgiving Turkey" back to the commo station.

Trash Bash

This weekend's plans got kinda messed up, so I dug into a box of "bits" and managed this.

I bought Oingo Boingo's anthology as a download years ago, and these CDs served me well, but they've died of abuse.  I overlapped them, traced the "half moon" with a sharpie, and they Terrain Gawdz smiled, because I managed to cut the CD with a pair of 30 year old Fiskars without breaking anything (much).

I built up the "shore" with hot melt and grabbed some stones from near my house to somewhat hide the seam.  A small, irregularly cut piece of cardstock is glued over the center hole of the uncut CD.


After all the hot melt "shoreline" was cooled, I spray primered the discs, glued the rocks on and smeared some black craft paint in the "water" area.

I enjoy using the sponge painting "faux finish" technique used by interior decorators when I paint stone; this time I tried it with dark blue and turquoise paints.  Since most of my modeling stuff is currently in storage, I improvised a sponge by rolling up a piece of paper towel.

It worked well enough.

Here I've just sloppily slapped some green paint to tell me where to glue flock.

While slapping on the green paint, I impulsively decided the larger rocks needed to have a spring bubbling up from between them.  Maybe the Fountain of Youth, or more likely, a Xanth Love Spring.  Anyway, the rocks were making the piece too heavy for the CDs, so I broke a piece of bark off a tree in the yard, and what came off was big enough to break into two pieces.  I prefer using tree bark instead of real rocks.  Better texture and immeasurably lighter.

I bought those aquarium plants for 88 cents at Walmart a zillion years ago and decided to finally justify the purchase.

Once the bark was glued in place, I squirted a bunch of hot melt into the gap formed by the stones and bark, and teased it a little into ripples.

Oops.  I should've painted the stones first, but hot melt usually dries with a milky color and I planned on painting the "water" anyway.

The stones got a "wash" of black craft paint thinned a lot with water, then some quickie drybrushing with a pale gray.  The hot melt "waterfall" got a little bit of a dark blue wash - dark blue paint thinned more than ink.  I tried to lightly brush some white "foam" onto the water, but the blue wash wasn't yet dry and I got this "Bob Ross Happy Accident".  Another happy accident was that the bark I "harvested" had some tiny bits of lichen on it, so I picked them out with some bright green paint.

Here's where I managed to wait for the paint to dry before adding white highlights.

I cut the bottoms off the plants so they'd appear to be partially submerged, but were still too tall for my liking and I ended up cutting groups of "branches" off and gluing those as smaller plants.

Here's some of the plants glued in place with some green paint on the lower halves to hide the plastic shine, and a half-assed, still wet flocking job I'll finish tomorrow after the PVA dries.