I did manage to take my Necron army out to a not-quite-local game store last Thursday night and lose to some Tau.  (Well, mostly Kroot and some Rail Guns but there were a few Tau mixed in as well.)  I’m still figuring a few things out but gave some of the new figures a good shakedown.  I still want to play with a few more of the troop choices.  Due to the size of the game (1250 points) I wasn’t able to play the Deathmarks.  I want to field some wraiths as well.  Heck, I may even dust off the Flayed Ones I never used and see what they are like under the new edition.  Wife needs the car this Thursday night so I won’t be playing this week, which is fine since I think we’ll be doing the Detachment 7 RPG that night anyway.

I need to get back in the swing of regularly hitting the keyboard to get some writing done.  I tend to want to carve out massive six or eight hour blocks on weekends rather than trying to do one hour blocks every day.  Slow and steady wins the race, right?  I mean if I only write a thousand words a day at the end of a month I’d have 30,000 words, right?

Saw John Carter on Friday and it was Awesome!  I very much enjoyed it.  I downloaded all the books on my kindle but have not read any of them; waiting to see the movie first.  Now I want to dive into the books and see what they are like.  I read that the movie “bombed”, with about 30 million domestic and 70 million foreign against costs of 250 million.  I find it a bit boggling that a movie that made 100 million on opening weekend world-wide will not turn a profit; especially with the “long tail” of DVD and digital sales. I may take the wife to go see it since she was not with me on Friday.

I watched season 1 of A Game of Thrones last week also.  In a word; awesome.  I found it really did a great job of following the books, and can’t wait for season 2.  Not sure if I’ll add HBO to my FIOS plan so I can watch it or just wait for the DVD like I did with season 1.  Oh, and on The Walking Dead they are all still too stupid to live.  I swear, even Shane went all squooshy after killing the prisoner and couldn’t bring himself to kill Rick so he could get with his wife and adopt that kid that likes to wander off on his own during the zombie apocalypse. I mean, they have been living at this farm for what, like a month? Only *NOW* do they start checking the fence and boarding up the windows.  So naturally, the woods is now crawling with zombies since no one the whole show has ever heard of a silencer or has any clue how to cobble together the means to make on.  (Clue, a simple cardboard tube stuff with steel wool will make a passable silencer out of stuff you can find at any grocery store.  Let alone what you can make from the contents of a hardware store!) So next week we get to see a hoard attack the farm. I’d put money on “Token Black Guy” getting eaten since he’s barely had a line worth saying since he cut his arm on the freeway. I don’t know why I keep watching, but I do.  They truly are “The Walking Dead”.  (Oh, and Dale died in a much cooler way in the comic book!)

Over at RPGNow/DriveThru the annual GM’s Day sale is going on.  We thre our hat in the ring and are offering a 25% discount on all our products.  Sales are good, but I haven’t noticed a massive spike or anything.  I did wake up yesterday to find ten new ratings of various products; all one-star!  Naturally, no reviews just ratings.  What are you gonna do?

Over the weekend I started putting together a bunch of Necron figures I got for Christmas.  I dusted off my old army and put together a unit of Deathmarks, Immortals and a Command Barge.  I am in the process of building the Ghost Arc as well.  I may go out Thursday night and see if I can play a game at one of the local stores.  I haven’t played a game of 40K in a few years, and frankly I’d like to get back into actually gaming.  Since moving up here to Boston, I haven’t gotten out as much as I’d like, and hitting the local gaming circuit sounds like a fun way to get involved.  I stopped by Battle Grounds in Abbington last week for the heck of it and I found a copy of Campaign Overlay: Fantasy Firearms on the shelf!  That was pretty cool.  They are running a 40K tournament on the 24th but I already have plans that day.  Maybe the next one.

Chris Field sent over a new release, I’ll get that up later today so look for it soon.

A quick review of the Navy SEAL movie Act of Valor.  I checked it out last week when it came out and it was perfect inspiration for the Detachment 7 RPG I’m running. As a movie it was simply OK at times and awesome at others.  The acting was nothing to write home about and frankly I found a lot of the “emotion building” scenes to be ham fisted which, coupled with the stilted non-actors made them fall quite flat.  Parts of the movie did indeed feel like watching a live action version of Call of Duty, even down to the FPS camera view.  In most of the instances it was OK and did give you a feel for the danger at hand.  In one scene your following the POV of a SEAL when another shadowy form appears in the hall in front of you and is almost a “friendly fire” incident.  I think that scene was really well done. The Jason-Bourne Camera-shake-documentary style worked in most cases but in one scene we are seeing two CIA agents in an apartment or hotel room talking and the shakey-cam follows one of them out onto the balcony and it really took me out of the moment.  Save that for the action scenes and fire fights. The technical aspects of the film were great.  I for one really enjoyed seeing a movie that involved “actors” who actually knew how to use the guns they carried around. I am so used to watching gun handling in movies and thinking “You’re Doing It Wrong!” that it was refreshing to see one that made me think “Huh. I’m Doing It Wrong.” Worth seeing?  Yes, I’d say so.  Inspiring for a modern military RPG? Absofrikkin-lutely!  Heavy handed, spread it on with a trowel join-the-Navy unapologetic propaganda?  Yes.  The last few lines of the movie were a bit over-the-top even for a military hawk, pro 2nd amendment, Libertarian like myself.

We then jumped back to the CIA operatives who had captured two of the fleeing couriers in Pakistan.  They landed at FOB Hammer in Jalalibad with their two prisoners and set about interrogating them.  Instead of letting the captured terrorists know they were being held by Americans, they instead made them think they were captured by the Pakistani ISI.  This led the bad guys to say it was all a misunderstanding and they dropped the name of a General in the Pakistani army to get the “misunderstanding” sorted out.  Naturally, it was the same general the PC’s had observed on site at the OBL compound minutes after the raid!  They gleaned from the prisoners that this General and others within the Pakistani military and intelligence agencies were actively helping senior Al Queda leadership.  They also learned about a small village in the tribal region where much of their message traffic ultimately ended up, and suspect it might be where another senior Al Queda leader is making his base.

The PC’s were ordered to draw up raid plans and given a task force of Army Rangers to help carry it out.  With areal images captured by drones they started planning theoperation.  A sniper element and a raid element will insert early and trek in on foot so they are in position when the remaining troops deploy via helicopter.  They will seize the main building just outside the town where they terrorists are believed to be, and cut off re-enforcement from the town with more troops and circling gunships.  We ended the session there as it was close to midnight.  The next session will play out the actual raid.

I’ve been working over the Savage Worlds rules relating to modern weapons and have made a few tweaks. I had the GE Mini-guns mounted on the choppers originally doing 3d8 damage, but instead changed it to 6d4.  I really liked doing it that way better since there was a significantly higher chance of rolling the maximum number (4 in this case, a 25% chance) so that you got to roll again and have it “Blow Up”.  I rolled it both ways and the 6d4 consistently had several dice “Blow Up” resulting in an overall higher number.  I think it captures the feel of thousands and thousands of rounds of incoming fire pretty well in the Savage Worlds setting. Will get to use them in combat next session, and am looking forward to it.  Another thing I added was a +1 bonus to hit when using a “tricked out” rifle that incorporates the latest widgets like picatinny rail system, vertical fore-grip, laser/flashlight, adjustable stocks and whatever else gets slapped onto a “Tacti-cool” rifle now days. It gives people using these accessories a good bonus to hit without getting bogged down in the details of exactly what gets added.  Scopes give a +1 at anything from Medium range out, and a red dot or Eotech holographic sight gives +1 at short to med range.  So if you co-witness a magnifier you end up with a +1 at any range.

I did a quick scan of the mass combat rules and I don’t find them terribly helpful for a Modern setting.  They seem designed more for mass combat in a fantasy setting with troops clashing on the field of battle.  So I made up several “units” in the combat tracker with ten men in each, some for the Rangers and others for the Taliban or Tribal Guards.

In the name of “research” I’m going to see Act of Valor tonight.  I’ll drop my wife off at one of her friends house so they can get all crafty making scrap books or something, and I’ll settle in with some popcorn and goobers to watch the Navy Seal version of Top Gun. I’ll post a review and let you know what I thought of it, but I’m not expecting too much based on the reviews I’ve already read.

Oh, and Look for a new release later today from Chris Field that melds two of his best selling lines; Fursona and Balck Tokyo!

We started with our group of PC’s playing members of a Navy SEAL platoon inbound on a Ghost Hawk helo to Abbatabad where they took part in the raid on OBL’s compound.  They were on the helicopter that “crash” landed, but undeterred followed the mission orders and secured several of the out-buildings while taking prisoner or killing several guards.  )No, they didn’t get to shoot Osama Bin Laden.) After the compound was secured, they assisted in gathering intel, and discovered an escape tunnel leading out of the compound.  They investigated but found no trace of anyone having used it recently.  (With a full platoon of SEAL’s landing on your house all at once, it’s not hard to see why no one escaped!)  The Chinook landed a few minutes later and extracted the soldiers, several prisoners, a ton of seized computers, drives and printed material as well as the rapidly cooling body of the raids objective.

Then I had the PC’s load up their CIA Spook characters where we found them in a safe house overlooking the Abbatabad compound the SEAL’s had just vacated. They had been part of the team watching the comings and goings at the mysterious compound for a number of weeks leading up to the raid.  Now they were on over-watch, in case Pakistani military or police units managed to respond in force before the raid team ex-filtrated. A car packed with SemTex was conveniently placed where it could be detonated to block vehicle access, and  the Spooks manned a Barrett .50 ready to put rounds into the engine block of any car approaching the compound.  But the raid went off without much of a hitch,  (Not counting one burning stealth helicopter, that is.) so the Spooks didn’t have to enter the fight.

In the aftermath of the raid, they noted a high ranking Pakistani General who led one of the training battalions at the nearby military college arrive on scene and take over, issuing orders and directing activity.  He was clearly furious at the turn of events, but was he furious because he knew who lived there, or simply because the US had landed a military raid in his back yard?

One of the other over-watch spotters got on the radio to inform the Spooks that two of the men seen coming and going on a regular basis from the compound had seen the aftermath and commotion, and appeared to be packing hurriedly and preparing to bug out! The PC’s were detailed off to follow the targets (Rabbit 1 & 2).  Several hours later they men entered a slum in Islamabad and the PC’s had to peel off to avoid being detected.  They quickly secured more appropriate transportation so as not to stand out too much and reconned the slum to find out where the two men were.  Once they found them, they put a GPS tracking unit on the duo’s truck and radioed in for further instructions.  They were ordered to wait until the men left the slum, and to seize them for rendition if possible, but to make sure that they never arrived at their final destination. One way or the other, they were to disappear.

A quick planning session followed and a flawlessly executed snatch and grab ensued.  The judicious use of a stolen car, a tazer and a stun gun ensured the men were taken alive.  The prisoners were hustled off to meet some nearby assets with a large truck and the PC’s and prisoners were flown out on a cargo plane within the hour to parts unknown.  End of session.

We started about 10:00pm EST and ended just after midnight.  The next session a week from now will start off with their intel analysis characters picking up several of the threads after the raid and the abduction of the two couriers.  The overall success of the raid will lead to a green light for an expansion of the mission scope for the Asymetric Warfare Group, which will create Detachment 7 to facilitate their mission and bring the several groups of PC’s characters together under one organization.  More details about the Asymetric Warfare Group and Detachment 7 later!