More Battletech Terrain - Kurita Weapons Depot

Hi everyone,

It's now February, 3039 in our campaign.  The team (which hasn't yet decided on a name for itself) has taken a job working for House Davion's equivalent of the CIA -- the Department of Military Intelligence, MI-4.

Here is a quick post with more of our work on terrain.  And, here is a quick link to our prior posting:  Terrain Update
 

The team has taken an assignment working for House Davion's Department of Military Intelligence MI-4:  Covert Operations Division (known as the "Stealthy Foxes")

The Mission:

• Receive intel on the location in the McComb system of a House Kurita weapons and ammunition depot.
• Assault the depot - overcome opposing forces.
• With control of the depot, ensure neither the weapons nor ammo are available to House Kurita forces - i.e., take these off the market.
• Payment:  since there can be no traceable connection to House Davion, the payment is modest -- but the team will receive 100% salvage rights including rights to captured munitions and equipment.

So, with this in mind, we knew we would need some terrain to make the attack more fun.  Here's what we came up with:

• Could we build a walled structure?  If so, that would make an assault more fun - and make the scenario more interesting visually.

We got to work on what to use to build our walled structure.

• Use recycled packaging plastic for wall pieces
• Use medicine bottles for corner columns
• Use magnetic joints to allow for flexible set-up [we might use these again in the future!]

Scrounging up four medicine bottles - we had three small ones and one medium sized one.  Figured that would be OK because we could mount more things on the larger one.

 Here are our four medicine bottles -- nothing fancy :)

Next we marked the positions where we could add magnets to the medicine bottles.  

Was a bit tricky to mark the bottles at 90 degree angles.  Managed to find a triangle square ruler which worked.  Note the darned-slippery plastic which would not stick to superglue!

Note:  the plastic of medicine bottles does *NOT* stick well to superglue.  Even when we roughed up the surface, the superglue was poorly bonded.  We had tried superglue first - but had to re-glue all of the magnets with epoxy [you'll certainly notice our epoxy blobs on the final pieces].

We then used the trusty band-saw to cut our recycled plastic into wall pieces.  We had learned on some prior efforts that if you cut the lip off the bottom of medicine bottles (to make the shape more clean) you also destroy the structural integrity of the bottle.  So, for the sake of time, we kept that structure and simply put a notch in the wall pieces.

Wall pieces are ready!

Then, with the magnets glued to the bottles, we needed some steel on the wall pieces.  We carved a slot out of the ends of the plastic and epoxy'ed nails in there.

Mounted nails to the ends of the wall pieces with epoxy

Then, we roughed up the plastic.  The cool thing is that it is made with a honey-comb internal structure.  Looks like it just might be some ferro-crete material!!  So, we sanded it down to make that internal part show a little bit.  We also sanded through in spots to create battle damage.  [After all, McComb is a border world - and has seen Kurita - Davion action at many points in the past.]

Sanded on the wall pieces to make them look worn and battle-damaged

Then, we added some camo-type painting -- aiming for a city pattern.  And, it seemed a bit plain after that, so we 3D printed a House Kurita banner with the one available on Thingiverse.

Here's our finished product:

Our finished walls with battle damage and Kurita banner.  Used some structures from Game Kastle Mountain View for the building inside.  We certainly need to have something ready for that which isn't blue (next time....)

General take-aways:

• The magnets worked.  They are a little bit small - but do hold up the walls.
• The medicine bottles look like medicine bottles.  *We have some work to do there!*
• The camo-painting was fun.  We need a better set of patterns for doing this.
• We need to do something to cover our epoxy blobs.
• And, it would be fun to have a gate of some sort.

And, lastly, the battle damage was a good idea!

 Lance member Buckaroo (a.k.a. Bob Bobson) fires on the Kurita strong-hold with his Centurion!

Battletech - Terrain Update

Hi everyone,

Recently we've started up a Battletech campaign (earlier posting about that).  And, we've been working on how to have fun terrain (earlier posting with terrain thoughts).

We've seen some nice responses to our earlier write-up that 3D printed terrain is a fun way to go.  That certainly does sound good.  In the meanwhile, we are posting a quick update after our first session using the HeroScapes terrain.

Some thoughts:

- It was really cool to create 3D structures.  We chose to put the "bad guys" for our campaign in a cave fortress with a turret gun for defense.

Here you can see our Heroscapes 3D set-up on our battlemat.  It was nice that we could slide the Heroscapes around and reposition during the session -- when we figured out that it would be better for the players to view things from the other 180 degree perspective.

- The turret gun was a nice balancing element.  As the GM we could choose it's armor level to help to ensure sufficient challenge for the team.

We used a tank as a "jury rigged" turret -- mounted on a pedestal of stone and structure.  The players could have attacked the structure if they had chosen - but instead attacked the turret until the large laser on the tank suffered a critical hit and was out of action.

- The transition from the HeroScapes to the smaller-scale battlemat was annoying.  The players put up with it - but it was not idea.  Going to think about how to do this better.  Do feel that if we had turned the battlemat by 90 degrees (so that it better aligned with the 60-degree orientation we had selected for the Heroscapes tiles, things would have been better.

- Oh - and how cool that with the 3D structures we created, our team's Crab pilot backed his way into a crevace -- just like a real life marine crab -- so that nobody could get behind him -- and so that his pincers were facing outward!!

The 'mechs up on top of the hill (Centurion and Wolverine) are attacking the turret -- their assignment was to take it down!  Down below the team's Dervish and Crab are tackling a Trebuchet and Cicada.  And, please note the fun position of the crab in the rock crevice!!

- We used the thin green Heroscapes tiles for trees.  This worked pretty well, and it was easy to place the trees quickly in a fun way.  Thinking we may need some to be either lighter green - or maybe more splotchy to signify level 1 versus level 2 trees. 

- Lastly, our painting has made the larger Heroscapes tiles difficult to get apart.  Planning to sand on those a little bit so that they are just a little bit more loosely fitting.

We'll post further updates.  In our next session we're going to use the fortress walls we built -- so that the team can assault a House Kurita weapons depot.

Battletech terrain - new thoughts

Hi everyone,

Following up on our work to support the Battletech campaign we've kicked off (link to that blog post) -- we have had some new thoughts on Battletech terrain and wanted to share those - and also how things are shaping up :)

1) We do like the *BIG* battle-mat with smaller hexes.

 Have enjoyed using the big battle mat which has smaller hexes.

• The big battle-mat with the smaller hexes is nice because a) it's really fast to set up (i.e., you un-roll it!); b) you can write on it with over-head projector markers; c) it creates a sense of very long range.
• The down side is that it isn't pretty to look at -- going to have to think about ways to add color and terrain to it.
• When it creates a very long range sense, it allows for our *lance members* who like to fire from long range to have a drop zone which is outside of enemy firing range.  When we use the cardboard maps which come with the table top game (which do look cool) -- then we have to use quite a few of them to create that same effect.
• We are thinking that what we may do is use the Heroscape tiles in the center of the battle mat -- and have a bit of a discontinuity in scale.  Outside the Heroscape tiles - you're on battle mat scale ("super long range") and you count and move with the smaller battle mat hexes.  Once inside the Heroscape tile space -- the tiles are larger and the more details throes of combat come into sharper focus.

2) Pink foam terrain was fun - but lots of work to make

Here is our first set of pink foam 3-D structures to use with the standard box set maps.

• We had played a session to introduce Battletech to several friends - and decided to take the time to create pink foam structures to match the cardboard box-set terrain.  [Here's a link to our write-up about making that:  Preparing for an Intro Level Battletech Session - With Terrain]

• It was a lot of fun to have terrain which matched those cardboard map sheets.  And, we even made a HUGE one to use with the map which came with one of the expansions.

Here's a battle we run where we used our little pink-foam mountains and our really big pink-foam mountain.  It is fun when there are such steep angles to consider.  Brings up the question of whether or not to use the Pythagorean Theorem!!

• But, these are a lot of work to create.  And, you can't really change them much once you have created them.  And, (especially in the case of the huge one) they are not convenient to store when the game is over!!

3) Excited about Heroscapes hex tiles!  ...Is it Hero Scapes?  Or Heroscapes?  Either way they are cool :)

• We've been watching these on eBay for a long time - but they've always seemed a bit expensive.  Then, this past weekend we managed to get a set of them at the swap meet at our Mountain View Game Kastle store!

 The big huge trees are a little bit goofy - but the hexagon pieces are very cool!

• We realized that they were a bit rough (a little bit too bright?) in terms of colors - so have been working on painting them.

The unpainted ones are the bright colored ones toward the bottom of the photo.  We started by priming them all brown - then added some sand and green colors.  More work to do....

• Here's a quick look at them so far, with 'Mechs in operation.

Here are our painted Hero Scapes so far.  Think we'll do some dry brushing and add some other effects to the brownish look we have going so far....

4) Going to try mounting 3D printed structures and trees on to Hero Scapes tiles

• Over the past couple of years we've 3D printed some structures from Thingiverse which were tagged as Battletech scale.  The only issue is that it's pretty easy to scoot them around on the board by accident.  Thinking that we could mount these to those really flat tiles (maybe the red ones) which were part of the tub of Heroscapes.

Here's a nuclear power plant we printed up.  This is one of the things we could mount onto a set of 3-4 of the flat Heroscape hexes.

This turbine was one of the first things we ever 3D printed.  It looks cool - but it slides around very easily.  Prime candidate for mounted on the hexes.

Kicking off a Battletech Campaign

Hi everyone,

After enjoying a fun Starfinder campaign with several friends, we've decided to kick off a Battletech RPG Campaign.

But, after having played Battletech RPG for a while here and there (mostly trying the tabletop rules along with the Mechwarrior 2.0 RPG rules), we've decided to roll some innovations into our RPG sessions:

1) Make the RPG like the new computer game

We have been wondering if we can make our RPG sessions more like the computer game by Harebrained Schemes ??  Seems a worth goal!

• Several of us in the campaign are *really* enjoying the new turn-based Battletech game created by Harebrained Schemes http://battletechgame.com/  And, there are several rules and order-of-play mechanisms in the HBS version which we would like to try to emulate in our table-top RPG sessions.

2) Use 3039 - border of House Kurita and House Davion

• It sort of came about somewhat through discussion.  We didn't want the classic Clans vs. Inner Sphere battles -- but we did want the chance of some 3050 technology entering into our sessions.

• Our thinking is that we can always have 3050 type things showing up here and there (as highly prized items or mechs) as prototypes which are under test.

3) Have fun with terrain

• We've learned over time that this makes RPG sessions much more fun.  Easier to visualize the crazy things which could happen if there are fun terrain models.

• In the past we've used made pink foam pieces to match our terrain maps.  Going forward going to try to do better than even that.

4) Use Obsidian Portal for game tracking and forums and such

Here's a quick example of our Obsidian Portal page - with one of our characters - Bob Bobson - call-sign "Buckaroo".

• Heard about this from our friend Mr. J -- who uses it for his D&D sessions.  After a little bit of practice, it is extremely handy!  https://www.obsidianportal.com/

• It's already been lots of fun to include character back-stories there - along with NPCs.  Going to take a little bit of practice, but feel this will help all of us to keep track better.

• Had previously been using Google Docs or Google Slides for this in Starfinder.  This seems like an easier method :)

5) Create mechanisms to make the table top turn-based experience faster and more aligned with story telling.  Have some ideas on this already :)

• We had seen how some people have used a d6 to mark walking, running or jumping of 'Mechs.  Not sure whether this is a new idea or an old idea - but we are thinking to mark the points of "evasion" with the d6's.

• Also, one of our players proposed that we figure out a way to make all dice rolling simultaneous.  We think we may have this sorted out!!

We'll post more soon on how it is going!