The Ride - Scene 2: Leaving Town

<< Scene 1: Opening Scene

Leaving Town

Lieutenant Christophe found Sergent Josué checking the privates' job of packing supplies for the journey, and asked "How soon before we're ready?"  Without looking up, Josué replied that everything would be prepared once he'd secured one last item from possibly making noise.  Stanley and Oliver, the two privates, looked on silently, their faces a mix of apprehension and determination.  After a moment, the Sergent stood to attention, saluted, and said "All is secure, Mon Lieutenant".  Christophe replied "Good, let's go" and lead his tiny unit towards the garrison exit.

The Legion at the west end and the PEFs at the east end.

Leaving the garrison and entering town proper was an unnerving experience.  Old, familiar streets now had an aspect of menace - Christophe wondered what Vichy spy or band of thugs lurked around every corner.

Turn 1 - Legion exits the garrison and the PEFs all advance.

Knowing that shepherds kept their herds of goats among the treeline north of the city overnight, Christophe reasoned that any threat would be detected by the animals.

Turn 2 - PEFs fail to activate.

Turn 3 - PEFs still don't activate, the Legion swings wide to avoid two of the PEFs.

Turn 4 - The legion gets into the woods while the PEF's dice refused to cooperate.  Turn 5 saw both sides sit immobile.

Coming to a gap in the treeline, the Legionnaires were hesitant, being unsure as to whether something lurked in the bushes ahead.  Knowing that they needed to make good time, Christophe decided that the need for rapid movement outweighed the possible danger in the bushes.

Some gaming trivia:  My dice have both a tremendous love of the dramatic, and a deep hatred of me.  Figuring that if I can get past this one PEF (please let it be nothing) the game's in the bag.  Naturally, my dice had other plans.

Crossing the open ground, noise and motion erupted from the bushes in the form of three of the Raisouli's men - mounted and charging the Legionnaires.

Turn 6 - Hoping the PEF would be "just a case of nerves", the Legion emerges from the woods and gets a nasty surprise.

As quickly as Lieutenant Christophe could give two orders, "Fire!" and "Retreat!", the Legionnaires acted in unison.  Two of the three Berber horsemen went down even as the soldiers sought shelter from the charge.  The third Berber chose to press the attack regardless, but four fixed bayonets brought him down.

The initial Test of Wills saw the active Legionnaires fire while the inactive Berbers charged.

A horseman is formidable, but not so much when facing four bayonets.

Short of breath, Christophe was relieved to find that his soldiers were all unharmed.  This relief was short lived as figures emerged from the shadows, but came back quickly when the new potential threat was merely merchants and the journey was renewed.

Turn 7 - the PEFs close in while the Legion fails to activate.  Luckily, the PEFs resolved as civillians and "just a case of nerves".

The Ride - Introduction and Opening Scene

I'm currently at my Dad's place near Ocala, Florida, and 99 percent of my gaming stuff is up in Athens, Georgia, so my gaming has been nearly non-existent.  I did bring my French Foreign Legion and Berbers with me, and found some spare time.

I've been fascinated with the USMC legend of Billy Port's Ride ever since reading Warning of War by James Brady nearly twenty years ago, so that's the inspiration for this little campaign.  USMC legend has it that back in 1941, Captain William Port was tasked with retrieving Marines scattered across much of China because the 4th Marine Regiment was pulling out of the Shanghai legation before the Japanese got there.

Due to the minis and terrain I have with me, this campaign will be the story of Lieutenant Christophe of the Legion Etrange retrieving Legionnaires scattered across French West Africa because the Berbers are being encouraged by Deutsch Afrika Corps and the Vichy French to kill or capture them.  This is entirely fictional, so real world geography, especially distance, will be gleefully ignored, as will historical troop types and strength.  This is all about the story.

Because this is a solo campaign, I'm going to use the combat system from Two Hour Wargames' Colonial Adventures 2e and the campaign system from Larger than Life 2e, because that seems to tell the story the best way.  Both games are now owned / sold by Rebel Miniatures. 

Leiutenant Christophe, Sergent Josué, a Corporel bugler and a Legionnaire, in front of an "in process" terrain project.

My starting troops:

Leiutenant Christophe, Rep 5, Logical
Sergent Josué, Rep 4, Nerves of Steel
Private Oliver, Rep 4, Unlucky
Private Stanley, Rep 4, Resilient

Opening Scene

The afternoon was hot, just like every other day in Dakar.  The sea breeze was mostly blocked by the garrison walls; tiny eddies of air stirred dust as Christophe purposefully crossed the sandy courtyard filled with Legionnaires packing gear and supplies for the sea journey north, away from Vichy territory.  Pausing briefly to ensure his uniform was correct and free of dust, he entered Colonel Donall's office.

"Leiutenant Christophe reporting as ordered Mon Colonel!"

Colonel Donall returned the Leiutenant's crisp salute while thinking to himself, "yes, Christophe is both precise and a patriot.  He's the right man for this dirty, difficult job", then he spoke aloud.

"As you know Leuitenant, the armistice with the Hun has divided France.  We of Free France are but islands in the midst of a sea of Vichy, and to survive we must consolidate ourselves for mutual support.  To that end, our purpose as officers is to bring together Legionnaires scattered across the continent, and you're the best I have at such a task.

Your mission is to gather those Legionnaires scattered across the desert and deliver a cohesive fighting force to the Free French garrison at Tangier.  Do so by speed and stealth; avoid contact as much as possible and keep careful note of enemy activities.  With a bit of luck, I'll be waiting there for your arrival.

I've instructed Sergent Josué to accompany you along with two Privates.  He's chosen Stanley and Oliver.  You need to leave tonight under the cover of darkness, avoiding Vichy observation.  Your first destination is the trade mission at Nouakchott.  From there, travel north via the caravan route to the legation at Marrakesh and then quietly seek out any Legionnaires near Fes who've avoided the Vichy and the Raisouli.  After that, report to Tangier with your force."

Scene 2 - Leaving Town >> 

Go on, Take the Honey and Run

I like 5150: New Hope City PI, but there's an aspect about 5150:NHC that leaves me wanting more.  It's an excellent system, but it assumes that there's always a witness or security camera whenever a crime's committed.  Being mischievous, I like the idea of avoiding, defeating or intimidating witnesses to get away with a crime, so I'm adapting NHCPI to a more detailed way of committing crimes instead of solving them.  Here's a blatant tribute to Mad Max as an opener...

Billy Joe, a Ganger, wanders into Dust Lump, an agricultural trading post town about 50 kilometers outside New Hope City.  The first PEF resolves as two Ordinary Joes, who I'm calling Elmer, a farmer, and Bobbie Sue, a farmer's daughter.  Being under the effect of Party Favors, Billy Joe's Talk the Talk doesn't go well, and Elmer punches him in the face.

Naturally, Billy Joe's reaction was to shoot Elmer, getting an Obviously Dead result.  I referred back to a somewhat modified version of Flock of Seagulls mechanic from Haven, Bobbie Sue's reaction to the shooting is to freeze.

Billy Joe grabs Bobbie Sue and stuffs her into Elmer's vehicle and begins running.  The other two PEFs resolve as Just a Case of Nerves.

Billy Mack, a LEO, respond and a chase begins.

Being lazy, I used the Canoe Chase mechanics from Long Rifle.  After three turns, Billy Joe loses Billy Mack, getting away for now, but possibly not forever. 

I'll be flipping between NHCPI and my criminal adaptation as Billy Mack investigates Billy Joe as he avoids arrest.

Elmer is an old RAFM Cult of Cthulu gangster, Bobbie Sue by Hasselfree Miniatures, and Billy Joe is an old Warzone Imperial Wolfbane Commando, now available at Prince August.

Fairly Cheap, Fairly Generic - Meditteranian / Caribbean Buildings

I've recently re-connected with an old friend who re-introduced me to the Colonial Period of the late 1800s - early 1900s, especially as interpreted by films such as The Wind and the Lion, Shout at the Devil, 55 Days at Peking and Lawrence of Arabia.  This has triggered some prodigious (for me) painting, and led me to inventing a (possibly) new terrain building technique using the canvas laminated hard boards so often used in Jr. High and High School art classes.  These boards worked pretty well for me because one side is not only textured, it's primed with Gesso.

I got lucky, and found these 50% off at the first store I visited.

My miniatures are 25mm Old Glory Berbers for Colonials and 28mm Freebooter's Fate used for fantasy Pirates.  The boards I found on sale are 4"X6" (103mm X 154mm) and 8"X10" (206mm X 255mm), scaling roughly to 20'X'30 and 40'X50', plenty big enough for my project.  The cardboard is about 3mm thick, translating to roughly 4 - 6 inches, also very good for my scale.

I tried this as an "easier to obtain in the US" variant of the cork sub flooring material used so often by Matakishi in his amazing buildings.  The hardboard is about almost as stiff as MDF and much easier to cut with a razor or X-Acto knife.

Here's the tools I used, plus a hot glue gun as my adhesive of choice.

 Here's the steps I took through the first paints applied.

Two 4x6 boards yielded me these four walls and the roof pieces below.

The last piece got chopped up to make the "peaked roof" portions of the side walls.

A bit of hot melt secured the four walls.

A piece of 100lb card stock scored and folded serving as the "chassis" of the tile roof.

I work part-time teaching industrial technology, and one of the classes I wrote recently is on making corrugated board and boxes, which taught me that the corrugated center is "glued" to the outer sides with vegetable starch.  Running the board under warm tap water dissolves the starch, making the process of peeling the outsides off the corrugated piece a relatively easy way to obtain the "terra cotta roof tiles" so often seen in Spanish influenced architecture.

A box flap cut by scissors with some lines spaced 15mm apart.

After soaking the board sides with warm tap water, I let it sit about 10 minutes and it was pretty easy to peel the outsides off the corrugated center.

After the paper is mostly dry, any bits of the outsides can be easily removed by lifting it with the point of a pencil and then pulling with fingers.

After peeling off one side, I cut the board along the drawn lines with scissors, then I peeled off the remaining "outside" and left the pieces to completely dry.

The separated and dried pieces aren't perfectly flat, but that doesn't matter.

After I hot melt glued the strips to the roof card stock, I trimmed the edges to my desired size.

Here, I've glued on the "upper walls" to fit the main walls.  Two pieces of scrap cardstock keep the roof aligned and a third, folded piece keeps the roof edges straight.

Here's the fully "tiled" roof sitting on the building walls before painting.

I "washed" the walls with very thinned down craft paint about the color of dark sand.  I covered the "tiles" with a dark red craft paint and hastily brushed on some orange craft paint "highlights".  

As I plan on building about five more of these in various configurations, I'll leave details such as covering visible bits of the blue board backing or gluing down "loose" roof tiles until all or most of the buildings have at least the base paints on them.

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.