Cast. New map for cast. Story now is a necromancer has returned, and is amassing armies by sending creatures to corrupt the locals of the land. The Heroes have to stop them.

Cast/Gyr. Thinking back on my map troubles, there's a part of me that wants to revert back to depicting the hex sides because of convention. Most wargames, especially wargames of that vintage, didn't do anything fancy like mark the verities only. So I'm considering other solutions.

Game 4. Wow!

Grunge. Game 3. Placing the HQ after Mogoth allows you to make interesting setups and deployments.

Grunge. Game 2

Grunge. Gave up, printed a new set and mounted counters to cardboard so they're easier to grab.

Someday I want to make a version of Battletech that has the detail of classic but the speed of Alpha Strike. Firezone: annihilator is that engine but I haven't pushed it out to the public yet.

Grunge. Patch updates just before I need to get the kids up. A few things tucked in that I was thinking about yesterday. One thing I eliminated was attacks flipping a unit before it's destroyed. I didn't even use this rule when I tested the game yesterday, so it's one hit one kill.

Grunge. Getting ahead of myself here, but I have thoughts on where the small backstory of Grunge will end with a third installment.

Went back to Patreon for an update! A lowdown and thought process on the vintage postcard games I've been cooking up this past week. www.patreon.com/posts/postca...

More thoughts... some of these things would work okay on the Andoril map where you get more space, more units But I want this engine to work with -this- map. I want to get a tight experience here first, so that Andoril feels epic by comparison.

So I can bring the experience of Ogre down to like, five minutes (not accounting for trying to grab the paper pieces). Perfect. Now comes balance and trying to fix issues.

Second try, no missiles.

Grunge. Before I get too excited about Andoril, the engine needs testing.... ...in the shadow of the OG.

Thinking about what the blowup on this would be I actually thought up a reduction to the concept. So Hyperlane is gonna get a blowup, and the postcard scale is going down a step in ambition. Calling it Send. You'll be an explorer.

Grunge. Game updated!

Had to put away the workstation to save it from little hands. In the meantime typing rules ... Combat and stacking rules for Cast/Gyr. Look good? (I'm gonna reel back the term for the green game back to Cast, so that'll be the engine name going forward).

Grunge, Andoril. Vaiar forces.

Grunge, Andoril. Working on the army of Mogoth's operators, calling them the Urungs. As I work these I'll also be back-porting some of these convention changes back into Grunge.

I've got red and I got green but I wanted to know what the blue game would be for these vintage games. A thought popped into my head this morning, illustrated it. Might be the one, might not. Got more with Grunge and Cast/Gyr to do, then I have some other things to take care of too.

Getting late, kiddo won't go to bed. Grunge. Next step for this (After polishes to base Grunge) Andoril. The Vaiar take a stand in the last city.

Gyr. All the armies and generic forces of the world without any duplicates. They won't all be active at the same time and won't be the only thing you'll have to use, but it's a general picture of what each nation can bring to the fight if they're good.

If it wasn't obvious at this point Gyr has outpaced Cast, so I'll probably distill the mechanics of the larger cousin to the lesser and present that as a postcard.

Gyr. One of men's strengths in this world is how disciplined they are. The armies may not engage in psychological warfare, but they are protected against it, so even when exhausted or encamping after use you can't rout them that way.

Gyr. Tenga and Veena are halfling kingdoms. Assuming you win them over, the best you get are slow-moving militias more suited for weak defense. Gyr is sorta turning out to be a little like Lotr with the vibe I want to accomplish.

Gyr. Another minor bit of storytelling. As maritime forces Verid and Nabora have marines, but the the Verid ones are dwarves. The special power for Marine movement is in two different spots. Need to decide if you can't attack that value or if it's 0.

Gyr. One of the joys of game design sometimes is storytelling in the details. The dwarf kingdom of Egliss has Goblins in it's employ. Whats more, the Goblin army is actually good at conducting spirit (psychological) war against enemies and can't be attacked that way when exhausted.

Gyr. The forces and demons of Thogbad are assembling. One mechanic at use in this game will be that you exhaust a unit to move a group. So to move a troop of heroes or an army, you need to exhaust a character to guide them or they'll be too exhausted to fight when they arrive.

Gyr. Trying to look at exhausted/evil uses of Green and black. Thinking evil might be all green and Black is the exhausted side.

Now some of the fun parts. Donar is a nation with primarily humans but some Orks too. Getting them means you get Ork shock troops to oppose the army. Maybe some Ork heroes too.

Gyr. Map is looking like this, shields to link to nations you could recruit. Also if you zoom in, the symbols beneath each town tell you the kinds of creatures that live there.

Let's try this again Nation borders reading ok?

Well this isn't cool, images I'm uploading turn out black. Can't really microblog about art when all I'm posting are black images :(

Cast/Gyr. This read okay? Trying to approach the vintage work with only like, white paper, black ink, and a green plate. It's a bit of a challenge because something like Divine Right uses color to mark territories of the nations but that's not gonna fly here.

One of the reasons I love tabletop and physical gaming is because it doesn't do crap like this. And if it did, there's scissors and tape to easily do something about it.

Trying to decide between two roll mechanics: 1. Roll x dice, success is no of 5-6 results > target value. 2. Roll x dice, success is total > target value.

Cast. Spells! With an ability like this you can't use the character for that attribute (Fighting in this case) but you can activate them to do that thing.

Cast. All this read okay? Thinking ahead to a big version of this which will ape Divine Right.

Cast. Since I'm having fun with these faux 70s postcard games, I got a fantasy adventure thing cooking up too. Calling it Cast. Grunge's one color was red, Cast will be green. Like Captains, roll the value to try getting successes to overcome challenges.

Grunge. Calling it done! It's up on Itch.io too. I've long said one of the problems with SJG Ogre is that it doesn't get with the times and be simpler. Grunge is an attempt to act on that criticism. Scaled for a 4x6 postcard.

Grunge has a title card now!

Grunge. This look understandable to you guys?

Here's a very specific niche wish... Wanting a seamless texture version of this ancient forest texture that seemed to be on every wargame map in the 70s.

Grunge. Wondering if the hex-side obstacles are reading ok...

Grunge. Still sick but this is rolling along. Found a brush to replicate an old illustrator brush I was using to simulate ink lines creeping into the tooth of the paper. It's gonna look similar to what Ogre originally did but with a more modern play.

Well, that's done. After some sleep maybe I can finish up the stress relief diversion project I started as a side and pitch it into postcards from the front at the last minute.

9' outside, snowing, working into the night on portfolio stuff. Rocking out to music. youtu.be/f3hwJp3Ph4k?...

Thought process is like this: Me: Man, Ldom full color maps are gonna be brutal to print. Maybe I should go for a heavy ink 1970s vibe on my next thing. Brain: yeah something grungy with tanks. Like Ogre. Brain: Hey, can you do Ogre on a postcard? Me: *Sighs* Postcards from the front has 8 days left

Man, you guys are gonna get a lot of neat finds from me as I put together my portfolio. I do some neat stuff. Here's a player mat I made ages ago for Star Trek the deck building game's TOS version. Never got it actually printed because I've never had money.

Sometime I gotta get back to The Sneaks War / Last Days of Man because there's some good stuff in here. Co-op 1-4 players. The Sneaks War technically has an 8.4 on the geek, though only from 4 ratings.