Shocking Tales Of Madness and... Cardboard?!?
Posted: Wed Feb 05, 2014 6:19 pm
***Note: This has been posted on the Yog-Sothoth board before***
*** I hope this is the right place to post this, it more a project presentation than a strict review but of course it also serves to give insight into the Strange Aeons miniature skirmish game ***
Hello everybody,
I just found this nice forum and as a first post, I'd like to present you a little project of mine that I started last year. I made a similar thread back then on the Lead Adventure Game forum which I frequent, so I'm basically just gonna copy and paste my project report from the original thread to this one.
What is this about, anyway (the TL;DR version)?
There's this tabletop skirmish game called Strange Aeons, published by Uncle Mike's Worldwide, a small publisher from Canada. Players control a small team of Investigators as part of a secret government organization that goes by the name of "Threshold", seeing as these agents stand at the threashold of our reality and it's their job to ensure no eldritch abominations cross it over into our world.
The other player is called the Lurker, he or she controls the evil forces that try to resurrect ancient gods, blasphemous monsters or just a band of madmen that wreak havok in the countryside.
Between sessions, the Threshold player can buy new equipment for his characters and possibly incerase their stats, so there's an RPG aspect to it all.
The game has seen a couple of expansions in different formats, and while it is no direct adaption of the Cthulhu Mythos, it is basically Lovecraft's workd without any specific names. Most monsters a clear copies of the ones we know from HPL's stories, the game is set in the 1920s (but could be played in any other era too), and the overall concept has that Mythos vibe to it, what with the evil cults bent on world domination (or destruction), ancient horrors, and a small team of investigators trying to hold off the encroaching darkness while being constantly at risk of losing their sanity (yes, the game has a (in)sanity mechanic).
For those interested, here are some misc links:
The original LAF thread
http://www.lead-adventure.de/index.php?topic=43781.45
The "beta" version of this project
The%20]http://www.lead-adventure.de/index.php?topic=40649.0
Main thread for my other cardboard projects
Main%20thread%20for%20my%20other%20cardboard%20projects%20]http://www.lead-adventure.de/index.php?topic=40650.0[/url]
So much about the game, here's what I did to bring it to the table:
***
After three days and countless sheets of paper and cardboard, I can finally present you my Strange Aeons project. It all started one year ago when I first found out about Strange Aeons and I started building some cardboard Standees. As you can see on the photos below, the first version of the Standees are immediately recognizable, having integral bases and no outline. It wasn't until one week ago when I actually got the Strange Aeons rulebook and started on this project in earnest.
The Standees, aside from those old ones (no pun intended) made from sprites from the computer game Blood, were made possible with the help of Anatoli and some other dude I forgot the name of
However, the biggest part was building terrain. I had the "Battlefield in a box" approach in mind when starting this project: All elements should fit in a small box. That means larger features like buildings have to be collapsible and everything will be made of paper/cardboard so they fit stylistically with each other and with the Standees, and so they can just be carelessly thrown into their storage box after play without worrying about paint scratches or parts breaking.
I decided I wanted to have three terrain types for Strange Aeons: Forest, Graveyard and Farmland.
The Forest
The Forest was the easiest to make because I already had the terrain tiles from my All Things Zombie project.This time, however, I didn't just want printed-on trees and cabins, so I had to actually build those. What I ended up with were trees, bushes and hedges from World Works Games' excellent Hinterland Forest set, logs from Dave Gaffam (they have a 25% summer sale over at RPG.now!) and a cabin I made using TLX templates with custom textures.
This should give a nice selection of terrain I can fill a 2x3 table with easily, providing models with different types of cover.
Game aids
Browsing through the rulebook, I noticed that a player would have to keep a copy of the weapons master list (and extra item, spell etc. lists) ready because weapon and other item stats had no place on the force sheets. So what I did was make my own equipment cards with all info provided; this way whenever a certain item is present the player just has to put it in front of him, no need to look anything up or have more than neccessary on the table.
I made cards for all weapons and extra items, as well as counters for map pieces, ancient and evil tomes, and scrolls, and mounted them to heavy cardboard after printing them on glossy photo paper.
Here's my little cemetery
The set is of course Wildwood Grove, an older set from WWG still available in their "Vault" line of classic products and highly recommended for Strange Aeons paper scenery!
The small crypt is made in the Terrain LinX style with custom textures from Blood.
The larger one looks actually more like a chapel from it's size and is part of the set. It is collapsible too.
I use the graves as grave markers or normal scenery. The tombstones can be detached.
The monolith can also be used as scenery or as a scenario-specific monument.
The fences were the result of pure chance when I scrounged through my old print-outs of WWG scenery and found two sheets of transparent Wildwood Grove fences in them. I cut them to TLX 6" specs and made some more posts for them, and some free-standing bases.
***
More pictures to come.
*** I hope this is the right place to post this, it more a project presentation than a strict review but of course it also serves to give insight into the Strange Aeons miniature skirmish game ***
Hello everybody,
I just found this nice forum and as a first post, I'd like to present you a little project of mine that I started last year. I made a similar thread back then on the Lead Adventure Game forum which I frequent, so I'm basically just gonna copy and paste my project report from the original thread to this one.
What is this about, anyway (the TL;DR version)?
There's this tabletop skirmish game called Strange Aeons, published by Uncle Mike's Worldwide, a small publisher from Canada. Players control a small team of Investigators as part of a secret government organization that goes by the name of "Threshold", seeing as these agents stand at the threashold of our reality and it's their job to ensure no eldritch abominations cross it over into our world.
The other player is called the Lurker, he or she controls the evil forces that try to resurrect ancient gods, blasphemous monsters or just a band of madmen that wreak havok in the countryside.
Between sessions, the Threshold player can buy new equipment for his characters and possibly incerase their stats, so there's an RPG aspect to it all.
The game has seen a couple of expansions in different formats, and while it is no direct adaption of the Cthulhu Mythos, it is basically Lovecraft's workd without any specific names. Most monsters a clear copies of the ones we know from HPL's stories, the game is set in the 1920s (but could be played in any other era too), and the overall concept has that Mythos vibe to it, what with the evil cults bent on world domination (or destruction), ancient horrors, and a small team of investigators trying to hold off the encroaching darkness while being constantly at risk of losing their sanity (yes, the game has a (in)sanity mechanic).
For those interested, here are some misc links:
The original LAF thread
http://www.lead-adventure.de/index.php?topic=43781.45
The "beta" version of this project
The%20]http://www.lead-adventure.de/index.php?topic=40649.0
Main thread for my other cardboard projects
Main%20thread%20for%20my%20other%20cardboard%20projects%20]http://www.lead-adventure.de/index.php?topic=40650.0[/url]
So much about the game, here's what I did to bring it to the table:
***
After three days and countless sheets of paper and cardboard, I can finally present you my Strange Aeons project. It all started one year ago when I first found out about Strange Aeons and I started building some cardboard Standees. As you can see on the photos below, the first version of the Standees are immediately recognizable, having integral bases and no outline. It wasn't until one week ago when I actually got the Strange Aeons rulebook and started on this project in earnest.
The Standees, aside from those old ones (no pun intended) made from sprites from the computer game Blood, were made possible with the help of Anatoli and some other dude I forgot the name of
However, the biggest part was building terrain. I had the "Battlefield in a box" approach in mind when starting this project: All elements should fit in a small box. That means larger features like buildings have to be collapsible and everything will be made of paper/cardboard so they fit stylistically with each other and with the Standees, and so they can just be carelessly thrown into their storage box after play without worrying about paint scratches or parts breaking.
I decided I wanted to have three terrain types for Strange Aeons: Forest, Graveyard and Farmland.
The Forest
The Forest was the easiest to make because I already had the terrain tiles from my All Things Zombie project.This time, however, I didn't just want printed-on trees and cabins, so I had to actually build those. What I ended up with were trees, bushes and hedges from World Works Games' excellent Hinterland Forest set, logs from Dave Gaffam (they have a 25% summer sale over at RPG.now!) and a cabin I made using TLX templates with custom textures.
This should give a nice selection of terrain I can fill a 2x3 table with easily, providing models with different types of cover.
Game aids
Browsing through the rulebook, I noticed that a player would have to keep a copy of the weapons master list (and extra item, spell etc. lists) ready because weapon and other item stats had no place on the force sheets. So what I did was make my own equipment cards with all info provided; this way whenever a certain item is present the player just has to put it in front of him, no need to look anything up or have more than neccessary on the table.
I made cards for all weapons and extra items, as well as counters for map pieces, ancient and evil tomes, and scrolls, and mounted them to heavy cardboard after printing them on glossy photo paper.
Here's my little cemetery
The set is of course Wildwood Grove, an older set from WWG still available in their "Vault" line of classic products and highly recommended for Strange Aeons paper scenery!
The small crypt is made in the Terrain LinX style with custom textures from Blood.
The larger one looks actually more like a chapel from it's size and is part of the set. It is collapsible too.
I use the graves as grave markers or normal scenery. The tombstones can be detached.
The monolith can also be used as scenery or as a scenario-specific monument.
The fences were the result of pure chance when I scrounged through my old print-outs of WWG scenery and found two sheets of transparent Wildwood Grove fences in them. I cut them to TLX 6" specs and made some more posts for them, and some free-standing bases.
***
More pictures to come.