Sunday, June 28, 2015

Update in Chaos (6-28-15)

Hello. As was hinted at on the War Journal podcast, I am currently dealing with a crisis that is affecting my progress here. I do not want to go into the details at this time. What I can say is that the issue is mentally draining for me and it directly influence Chaos Magic in several ways. I currently do not have a proper place to assemble and/or paint models at my home. I am also hesitant to carry a lot of items out of my home. This means I can't play Warhammer unless I'm playing with someone else army. Flames of War and Battletech is not an issue because I mostly play with other people models. That said my crisis doesn't look like it will end anytime soon and I can not allow it to paralysis me any longer. I figure this will be a good time to update the progress of my current projects.

Warhammer - To my surprise I have already found people willing to help me finish the Border Prince Campaign storyline. Sadly it will be a while before we can get to games because I don't have access to my army and I wanted to start my own campaign first. In the meantime I will be working on the backlog of the Border Prince storyline and the Border Prince Page. I won't give a timeline for when they will come out since I have a horrible track record of sticking to those dates. I will say the storyline piece that I skipped should be out soonish and the Border Prince Page will be right afterwards.

I am still working on the design of the campaign I will run myself. I have shown my rough ideas to my potential players and they seem happy with the direction I am taking the campaign. I have temporary named the campaign "Dragon's Fall." One of my ideas for the campaign is to have every army possess 3 different special rules. After I come up with a list of unique rules I plan to go to the Warhammer community for help balancing that list of rules. Of course this is probably not a good time as the World of Warhammer is in a upheaval over the new edition. Personally I've decided to avoid the rumor mill and wait until the new edition is out before I decide to what to do on this aspect of my hobby. Just hope I can get help with my rules during this chaos. Besides the rules, I need to polish the random ideas I have for the storyline behind Dragon's Fall itself and the army I will be playing in it. If all goes well, I will be publishing the introduction of Dragon's Fall shortly after I catchup on the Border Prince Campaign. Lastly, I want to create my own map that will be in the style of the Border Prince map. However the map is one of the last things on my list of priorities so I will not be starting on it until most of everything else I mention in this section is done.

Flames of War - The War Journal podcast is going strong. Last week we release our 10th episode and since we have started we have only missed one week due to technical difficulties. I am proud of the work we have put into the podcast. The next project we plan to do is a video battle report. So that we have as little proxying as possible we are waiting until I finish assembling my two Whirlwinds and the Jagdtiger. For gaming purposes the Whirlwinds are actually done (finished the second one yesterday morning). Both still needs a little more work before I can prime and paint them. After the battle report we need to look into doing a mini campaign. A few months ago I started designing a campaign I named "Call of Calamity." I wrote down my initial ideas but I have not gone back to the campaign since. Probably the reason for this is that my vision for Call of Calamity is way more ambitions than what we are able to handle at the moment. Instead I am going to design a much smaller campaign so we can get it off the ground as soon as possible. As much as I like stories, I do not think this campaign will have one. I think just getting something more long term to play and to be able to test part of the Call of Calamity system is more important than story.

Shadowrun: Crossfire - My Shadowrun: Crossfire show is an example of my imagination and excitement running away with themselves. This was a project I should have stopped and thought about before writing about it here. Do not get me wrong. I still think the idea of a Crossfire show has merit. However in my excitement I failed or ignored two issues a Crossfire show would bring up. First it doesn't fit the direction I am trying to take Chaos Magic in. This blog is very different today from how I imagine it would be when I first started it. I have change the image and direction of Chaos Magic many times but two core elements have always remained the same. And that is miniature gaming and story telling related to miniature gaming. Once Chaos Magic is much larger I can see it branching into other gaming fields. Shadowrun: Crossfire has nothing to do with miniatures and given that Chaos Magic currently does not have a lot of material related to its core element, I feel its a little premature to add an non core project to Chaos Magic at this time. The second issue is that I eventually realize how I wanted to do the show was going to require a lot more work than I initially thought. I figured at first all that would be required is to record us playing the game and then doing some minor editing. That changed when I decided to only used images from the cards instead of a live video. The reason for this was that I wanted to make sure it would be easier for the viewer to understand what was going on. This lead to the need of having limited animation ... And so on. I do not have the skills to do this and I know from my experience with the War Journal podcast there will be a lot of headaches before I would get it right. For a side project this amount to way too much work. At least for now. I do have future miniature plans that would require similar skills as the Crossfire show. Whether that means I will be coming back to Crossfire sooner to practice those skills or later after mastering them I am not sure. What I can say is that I have a lot on my plate at the moment and Shadowrun: Crossfire is not a top priority for right now.

Other - There are many other projects I have ideas for and many other games I want to play. BattleTech, Relic Knights, Horde and more. For many of these games I am at the mercy of friends of when I can play and its up to them to develop campaign like events. For my other projects I need to put them on the back burner for now. Warhammer and Flames of War is where I am putting my focus on at the moment. Of course I am the type of person that switching focus often but I think this time I can stay on target until I am able to finish some loose ends.

Tuesday, June 2, 2015

The Banners of Xizamiron

The demon Xizamiron's army was not one unified force in the Border Prince. Instead it was a patchwork of war bands working together for their own goals. The biggest of these war bands was Vanacyr's army before Xizamiron took command of it. Since the Border Prince region was so large, Vanacyr (under order's from Xizamiron) split up the army into smaller forces called banners. Some of the banners were mostly made up of one war band or another. In many ways each of the banners has their own story to tell.

Pandemonium - Xizamiron personal banner whose members he had hand picked himself. And he picked a little of everything the army has to offer. Many speculated that Xizamiron made his choices because he wanted as much variety as possible. Others think it was because he wanted his banner to be a mini version of the entire force. Other more sinisterly think it was so he could keep an eye on every faction in the army. The truth was that Xizamiron did not care who was in his banner and he solely picked members randomly.

Vanacyr's Blade - Every member of Vanacyr's war band was extremely loyal to her. Nevertheless she had an inner circle of followers whom loyalty went beyond the norm. This inner circle was called Vanacyr's Blade and nearly every non-members goals was to get promoted to it. Vanacyr's Blade had two parts; guards and students. The highest skilled warriors in the army were assign to the Vanacyr's Blade to serve as Vanacyr's personal bodyguards. The group rarely leaves her side. The other part of the Vanacyr's Blade were her sorcerous students. Vanacyr has numerous mages studying under her. They practically worship Vanacyr and her lessons. The Vanacyr's Blade banner was mainly composed of Vanacyr herself, the remain bodyguards Xizamiron didn't take with him and about half of her students. It was rounded out with a few of her 'basic' troops from her original army and some of the monsters Xizamiron subjugated.

Sun of Corruption - This banner is nearly entirely made up from a single war band, one that Vanacyr's people almost attacked on sight. That was because at a distance these warriors resemble holy knights. It would be easy to confused them with knights from famous holy orders ... at a distance. Up close there was no doubt these warriors were empowered by Chaos. They rode horses that rotted the land with every step. The stronger warriors glowed with a divine radiates. A light that withers planet life. Vanacyr has no idea who these warriors were nor why they are willing to help as they immediately join without concern for payment. She had the feeling the Cabal had already arrange some kind of deal with these strange warriors. They kept to themselves and refuse to talk about their history. Vanacyr never pressed the issued. She had more urgent concerns and if these warriors do back stab her later, she was fine dealing with them then. In the meantime she put the remaining warriors into a single banner and called them 'Sun of Corruption'.

Nature's Curse - To be updated later

Chaos Black - To be updated later

Blood Rage - Berserkers! These blood thristy fanatical warriors were hard to control and nearly every war band had a contingent of them. There was even a war band made up entirely of berserkers. Most berserkers ranged from distrusting magic to out right hatred of it. Considering that the army was commanded by sorcerers caused the berserkers to be even more violet and uncontrollable than normal. Vanacyr decided to put most of the berserkers in one banner and let them go off cause as much destruction as they want. She figured this would undoubtedly cause trouble down the line but at least she doesn't have to deal with them immediately.

Rage of the Dragon - To be updated later

Darker than Chaos - To be updated later