Pulp Alley gets Medieval on your @ss

Mark and I played our second game of Pulp Alley, Wars of the Roses style. A dispute over a borderline sees the Percies and the Nevilles square off.

Scruffy scottish mercenaries move in. 

Photo quality (and some of the scenery) was a bit iffy, sorry!

We liked that the game felt different to standard Pulp Alley. A major part of this is that not everyone is toting a missile weapon, so melee becomes a much more significant factor. This introduces extra tactical challenges: you need to think carefully about where to place your archers, how you move to avoid shooting.

Mark's billman is feeling a little lonely.

Mark's leader is swarmed by the gang of mercenaries. 

They went down like flies, but took him with them!

We're using a number of the settings from Pulp Leagues,with a few little modifications here and there.

• Gritty. No character rolls over d8. This keeps characters more in the realms of realism. It also means your crummy foot soldiers have a better chance of rolling the knights.
• Heartless. If you down a character, you can discard a card to remove them from play. The knife through the visor here. We're playing you can only do it in a brawl, and if you haven't gone down yourself.
• Primitive. Or half of it. You can't run and shoot.

A few other mods.

• Crossbows may only shoot once per turn.
• Some Fortune cards are removed from the deck.
• Some abilities are not available (bursts, etc. No holy hand grenades here!) For the moment, we're outlawing the use of Armoured. That may seem strange, but we feel that it will make it too tough to kill the big characters.

In sum, we liked it quite a lot. We liked the differences from vanilla Pulp Alley: it felt medieval-ish. Also, the setting will provide lots of fodder for the crafty multi-player scenarios we love!

Expect to see plenty more of this coming your way.

2016 in review

Another year done: largely a good one for me on the hobby front. Definite highlight: running my first substantial campaign. The Sinastras IV campaign saw eleven games, with some truly memorable ones among them: last stands, 'dungeon' crawls, and ultimately a grand betrayal.

Another highlight was running Pulp Alley at the revived Briscon. I do enjoy showing off the game and the stuff that I work on.

Pulp Alley was, once again, the most played game for me. Twenty-six games, playing 1930s pulp, gothic sci fi, Cthulhu, superheroes and even Wars of the Roses!

There wasn't a lot else: four games of To the Strongest and two games of Force on Force.

Blogging was up and down this year: the motivation really lagged in the second half of the year. But an average of one post a week is fairly solid.

Painting: least to most.

A couple of Battlefront Germans.

A couple of Grumpy Indonesians (for To the Strongest).

Three Khurasan Vikings (To the Strongest again).

A trio of Pulp Figures - the Nazis are coming!

An array of bits for medieval horror.

I had grand ideas for this using Pulp Alley, but it never really got off the ground. Bought much more than I painted. However, I picked up many Mordheim sculpts that I have loved and wanted for a long time!

Perry Wars of the Roses.

And, once more, a solid array of sci fi bits.

Obviously driven by the needs of the campaign, but more and more, this is what I enjoy doing.

And the pile of shame: stuff purchased but not painted.

Definitely not one of the highlights of 2016. I bought into a couple of new projects (Wars of the Roses and Mordheim-ish stuff), plus the usual ooh-shiny syndrome, mainly for sci fi. If I can resist the lure of new projects next year, maybe I'll have a chance of painting more than I purchase.

What's in store for 2017? As always, we shall wait and see. Ideas at the moment:

• It looks like we could be doing a Pulp Alley Wars of the Roses campaign at the club, so expect to see more of this.
• A couple of mates are talking a 15mm Normandy campaign (thus the two Germans above).
• The sci fi will definitely keep happening - so many miniatures to paint and ideas bubbling away!
• I painted quite a bit of Russian Civil War in 2014, but it never really got traction. The main issue, I think, was rules. Tried Red Actions, which are good rules, but a bit slow-moving for what I'm looking for. But I picked up Osprey's The Men Who Would Be Kings, thinking it might be adaptable. A month later, I found someone else on the web who'd done exactly the same thing, so this might have some legs!

Well, if you've read that far, happy new year!

2015 in review

So that's 2015. One hundred and one painted miniatures (plus scenery). Nineteen games. Sixty four blog posts. I started posting to the blog New Year's Day, and I'm happy I'm still at it.

Here's the painted stuff: smallest to largest amount.

One solitary warrior monk (Northstar).

Two Gripping Beast knights.

Vikings (Khurasan Miniatures).

Three figures, a hill and ocean views for Pulp Alley.

A stand of Napoleonic Austrians (AB).

A unit of byzantine kavallarioi (Old Glory).

Some FIW Provincials (Galloping Major).

Reds for the Russian Civil War (Peter Pig).

And a decent array of goodies for Pulp 40k!

And here's the pile of shame - purchased but not painted for the year. I'd really like this to be a lot smaller next year.

2015 was, like 2014, the year of Pulp Alley in terms of games played.

• Pulp Alley - fourteen games
• Red Actions - two
• Force on Force - one
• Lion Rampant - one
• Muskets & Tomahawks - one

2016? I expect to see a lot more Pulp Alley - painting and playing. I think I'll have a couple of Pulp 40k campaigns on the go, and it's an easy game to pull out at the club as well. Besides that, I'll see what the kids end up wanting to play - they do tend to hop from one thing to another.

Happy new year to you all!

John de Warrene

John de Warrene (1231-1304) was the 6th Earl of Surrey. During the Second Barons' War he fought for the king against the baronial forces. However, in the lead up to the war he changed allegiances twice - supporting the king, then the barons before finally switching back to the king. Just the kind of character to entrust with part of your army!

 The earl hails from Gripping Beast.

Latest Painting

I'm a slooooooow painter, here's the last couple of weeks' work.

A knight for Lion Rampant. I'm doing a retinue for the Second Baron's War. This is Humphrey de Bohun, Earl of Hereford.

The rampant lions were a serious pain to paint. Most were done more than once. They look passable from a distance.

The figure is from Gripping Beast.

A sea captain for Pulp Alley. The face didn't come out quite as I'd hoped. More shrew than siren! Any ideas for a name?

She's from the Pulp Figures Captains Courageous pack.

And lastly, a Provincial for the French Indians Wars. Galloping Major is responsible for this one.