I Was in Search of a Story, and for My Sins, They Gave Me One

After only four or five years and two versions, I finally got around to playing 5150: Urban Renewal.  The following is true in the sense that I fudged no dice rolls...

Lunchtime, New Hope City Pub & Rec district.

"Hey Jerry, do you suppose Mercury Jones is her real name?"

Jerry replied while staring at traffic out the front of the news van, "It doesn't make any difference, Pavel.  She's a hotshot lawyer with big-time connections; she can call herself the Queen of Sheba for all anybody cares.  All that matters is whether her information is real.  The bar should be up on the next corner."

"Relax Jerry, I've been there before", said Pavel as he parked the Galactic News Service mobile broadcast van in front of The Drunken Clam.  As he turned off the vehicle, a sleek, black sports car turned through the intersection and parked across the street.  As Jerry Rivers, the ace GNS investigative reporter, and Pavel Datsyuk, his broadcast engineer, walked toward the building entrance, a well-dressed woman and a large man emerged from the vehicle and began walking towards the same destination.

Jerry lead Pavel into the bar as two uniformed NHCPD officers, Reed and Malloy, were settling their bill with The Samurai.  Pavel greeted the warrior / bartender / chef / optometerist loudly, "Hey John!  How's it going?"

To Jerry, the Samurai's response sounded like a Razorback Growler gargling razor blades, but Pavel seemed to understand, or at least fake it well.  "John says today's special is Ameglion Major Cow, but it's frozen, not fresh", as he led Jerry to a table near the back.

 A moment later, the same woman and man Jerry had seen outside entered the restaurant.  After a quick scan of the dining area revealed only Jerry and Pavel, the large man's grim expression broke into a broad grin, "Johnny!  My man!  What it is!"

The Samurai's reply sounded something like a cheerfully drunken wombat happily fighting a garbage disposal as he set four Pilsner glasses of Golden Monkey on Jerry and Pavel's table, while the newcomers approached.  Jerry began to remark that nobody had ordered the drinks when both Pavel and the large man each raised a glass, turned to the Samurai, shouted, "Sun Wukong!" in unison and took deep drinks of the dark, amber beer

The woman smiled warmly to Jerry and said, "I'm Mercury Jones and this is my associate John Slade.  You look older in holo-cast", as she seated herself while the others followed suit.

Jerry took a drink and looked into Mercury's eye, "So, what's this story you want me to look into?"

"What do you know about Prosperity Corporation and Green?"

"Enough franchises have opened up here in NHC that they opened a processing facility.  So what?"

"Do you know the ingredients?"

"I don't cover business or science human interest stories, why don't you -

Mercury cut Jerry off mid-sentence, "That's what they want you to think.  Haven't you wondered why that new facility is so secretive about their raw materials and waste?  Has anybody at all noticed that the Black Jack abductions began right when Prosperity opened their facility?

"

The Faces of New Hope City

I've been collecting, building and painting odds and ends for a few years with the intent of a Two Hour Wargames 5150: New Hope City campaign series.  This morning I pulled out most of what I've finished; I'm overdue to get this going.  

This started as a shopping center for All Things Zombie, but I just never was all that into the Night of the Living Dead and it's reboots.

S-Mart is 22" X 28" and can be the entire scenario.

I'm still getting around to stocking this with Binford tools, especially chainsaws.

Foree Electric was my first project making paper terrain on a computer to cut, fold and glue.  The building started life as a Starship Troopers base game box lid and I did almost nothing to disguise that.

The Drunken Clam and Mike's Hardware were actually made from leftover material when I made S-Mart.

Soylent Industries is inspired a little by the movie and a lot by the scenario from Irrational Number Line Games

Jerry Rivers, Investigative Reporter, Hank the Cameraman and Pavel the Engineer are from the West Wind 'Nam series.  Paulie & Joey Baggadonetz are Hasselfree Legends of Gogol figures.




The moment I first saw Hasselfree's Maddog I knew he'd be a Street Preacher.  I don't remember where, when or from whom I acquired the platinum haired, leather clad young lady.  Beach Babe Libby shall be playing the recurring role of Trophy Wife.  The photojournalist is from the same 'Nam set as the TV crew; this fellow just screams, "Dennis Hopper" to me.  Mr. Belushi will likely be the proprietor of every establishment in NHC.  Roland the Headless Thompson Gunner started life as a Bolt Action Chindit given to me by my best friend, Scott.


I don't know of a scenario in which Those Meddling Kids aren't appropriate, useful and fun.

Armorcast's Big City PD were specifically bought for the Soylent Green scenario, but are just darn useful all the time.


Old Warzone Imperial Wolfbanes were going to play the part of mercenaries until I found these Foundry Urban Violence mercs in a bargain bin.  I've painted them so that they can reasonably be a SWAT team when required.

I picked up these Star Wars Battle Droids along with a dozen Trade Federation droids for $0.25 each and I like them as Symon better than the idea of fully human appearing, "Data" androids.

Some concerned citizens who've formed a highly proactive neighborhood watch.

Ghost of Karl Marx: “They took that bullshit seriously?”

Salem, Massachusetts

The Sisters of Gaea’s Sickle Collective, a witches’ coven and political action committee operating in the New England region held a seance in order to receive guidance from Karl Marx regarding the outcome of the Presidential election.  Gathered together in an amorphous, non-binary, gluten-free mass of bodies which they described as, “organic”, the participants used a copy of the US Constitution as kindling to light a sacrificial effigy of Ronald Reagan sprinkled profusely with a mixture of medical marijuana and bath salts in order to summon the spirit of the deceased political philosopher.

After several minutes of the group chanting the mantra, “we are the 99%”, a ghostly apparition coalesced into the appearance of the famed, Father of Socialism in a cloud of vapor which smelled of nitromethane, CLP, burning rubber and spent gunpowder.  Greeting the adoring women by loudly shouting, “Hey ladies!  Show me your tits!”, the German lawyer displayed visible disappointment at discovering that the summoning group was seeking his wisdom in enacting The Communist Manifesto worldwide.

Dressed in an Article 15, “Zero Fucks Given” t-shirt and carrying an ever-full Ranger Up, “Whiskey and Bad Decisions” glass of Jack Daniels, the 19th century dilettante addressed the crowd, emphasizing his words by gesturing drunkenly with a Kaila Cummings custom knife.

“Are you people fucking with me?”, he asked incredulously, “Have you no comprehension of satire?  That whole Manifesto thing was a prank I played on John Keynes”.

Members of the collective attempted to explain the attempts made at creating a socialist utopia by illustrating the USSR, China, Myanmar, Vietnam, Cambodia, Cuba and Venezuela, to which Marx replied, “bullshit!” and then vanished.

The Fishing Trip

While fishing at a secluded pond during sunset, I began to hear soft, droning, wooden flutes in the nearby woods. Dismissing it as my overactive imagination playing while my mind wandered, I continued to cast and tease my lure, but the slow, somber sounds grew. Not in volume or intensity, but in the number of musical voices contributing to the insistent, quiet chord, the likes of which I’d never before heard or imagined. I reeled in my bait, hastily packed my gear and unsteadily made my way up the trail I’d walked many times, yet this trek was saturated with a continuously growing feeling of reverence and fear. The sunlight had faded and the new moon offered no illumination, yet my eyes perceived an unearthly glow ahead of me, growing at a nearly imperceptibly slow rate. Trembling, my legs strode a few more steps up the gentle slope before I became paralyzed by the majesty of one tree. I’d never before paid any attention to the ordinary looking trees along this trail, but tonight, one shone with a regal brilliance in the center of hundreds of tiny, softly glowing entities weaving through the still air when I realized that the countless flutes were indeed also these miniscule, inexplicable spirits, swirling about the luminescent pine. Smothering in simultaneous awe and dread, a compulsion from somewhere within me enabled me to capture this solitary image before terror propelled me to my car, leaving behind the fishing tackle. I frantically dove into the driver’s seat; mercifully the car started and I somehow fled home without crashing from the panic in which I’d become engulfed.

Alien Abduction Mothership

So I was in a funny mood yesterday morning, fired up Powerpoint, and drew this.  Last night after work, I printed, cut and glued it.  This is the result of the second attempt, and the artwork is a little cartoony, so I'm calling it a prototype.  Saucer crew is Flying Frog Martians.  Abductees are Bobby Jackson's Thugz, and Reaper's Bonzo because... Evil Clown.

Life's too short to not play an alien abduction game, and especially to proxy the alien saucer.

THW Name the Alien Contest

She's Got It... Venus

Not all that long ago, Evil Eli and I were talking about how to get people to buy into a game so we'd have more opponents and / or allies.  During this conversation, he looks at me and says, "the most important thing to get people to come to your table is awesome terrain".

Rewind to 1997.  I'm hanging out at my parent's house with my Daughter 2.0®, when my good friend Valpurgius calls me.  Actually, at that time he wasn't Valpurgius yet, that's coming up.

Anyway, he says to me, "you should come over to [the new comic & games shop just three miles from my parent's house, now long out of business], my friend Steve is running game demos".

"What's a game demo?", I asked ignorantly, which turns out to be blissfully.

"If you play a game he'll give you some miniatures, come over here".

"I'm with Daughter 2.0® right now".

"Bring her along, they have comics and toys".

"Okay, fine".  <click>.  Yes, back then we were still on landlines, and the phones went <click> when you hung them up.  True story.

So we drive five minutes (yes, there was a time back in history when you could drive somewhere in Atlanta in five minutes) over to the game store, and are underwhelmed by the sight before us.  A couple racks of comics, a small display with blister packs of miniatures I'd never seen, that said, "WARHAMMER" on them, whatever that was, and to one side a table with a few model railroad trees, chunks of that white styrofoam they use to make coolers (it probably was once a cooler) poorly painted to presumably represent rocks, and a handful of unpainted, funny looking miniature guys with guns.  Standing nearby was Not Yet Valpurgius, a very bored, stereotypical comic book shop clerk, and a grumpy looking, paunchy, balding man who was then enthusiastically introduced to me as Steve.  That is to say, NYV was enthusiastic, Steve grunted while the expression on his face indicated painful chronic constipation.

"So where's the game?", I asked, still blissfully ignorant of wargames.

"THIS is the game, it's called WARZONE, and Steve's going to give you a demo", NYV explained with the same look he's had on his face every time he's had a hidden agenda since the first time Dixie, his charming smartass of a mother, caught him sneaking cookies when he was five.

"Okay...", I said while dubiously eyeing the table full of model railroad refuse.

Steve suddenly gained some minor command of language, and asked NYV, "this is the guy who's going to run demos?", inexplicably seeming to indicate me.

That's when I realized the look on NYV's face was because his hand was in MY cookie jar.

Giving my, "good friend" a, "we're going to talk later" look, I asked Steve, "so how do we play this game?"

"you're those guys there in the corner, and you have to kill this big robot before he kills you".

"It's just like D&D, but different", was the brilliant insight offered by NYV, agent provocateur.

Daughter 2.0® was still holding my hand and announced, "I have to go potty", in the grand tradition of every six year old girl ever.  NYV siezed this opportunity to gain as much geography as possible between him and me by generously leading his Goddaughter to the back of the store, which also left me standing at this table of stuff with Svengali Steve, who says, "first we roll for initiative"...

 A few months later, I had run a significant number of demos at several area stores, having collected and painted miniatures representing Capitol Corporation and the Demnogonis and Muwajie factions of the Dark Legion, and was hanging out at The War Room, the greatest gaming store in the history of both games and stores, when Valpurgius (yes, by now he's Valpurgius and I'm Martian Banshee) announces, "we're invited to run demos and a tournament at Dragon Con".

"Tournament?  Isn't Dragon Con comic books?"  Yes, I was that ignorant.

Okay... cutting to the point now.  Inspired and tutored by Dave the Firstborn Canuck and Evil Inside Dave, the local Chronopia demo team, the best demo team I've ever heard of, we knew we had to raise the bar on terrain.  Yesterday, seventeen years later, I hosted an episode of, "This Old Terrain", in which I ressurected the remains of the Venusian jungle battlefield I had made for that convention, and which turned out to be my introduction into letting my creativity loose.  After over ten years of being stored in plastic grocery bags and moved more times than I care to recall, I brought it back nearly to it's original condition.

 

The pieces, mostly broken, having been sorted.

First to be mended were the banyan trees, mostly because they have the most readily identifiable components.

Next was the Crunchberry Tree forest, because this collection of hacked up artificial flowers is the most memorable, though not my favorite, feature of the terrain set.

The Magnolia seed pods are the only remnants of my Martian Desert terrain, and will now take the place of the long-lost Venusian Blue Spruce trees.  I like these because not only did I acquire them by picking them up for free from under a magnolia tree, the "pod" appearance at this scale inspires me to use them as a "natural hazard, malicious flora" adding an seldom used feature to my games.

Last up are the Oak Leaf palm trees, which also used to see a lot of duty when I was gaming Vietnam.

The set stretched out on a 3ft X 6ft table ready for Bugs to explore the Pleistocene era of Sol III.