Original image from Stewart Crowley’s “Terran Trade Authority” series w/ Prisma Gothic filter.
Casey Garske’s “Voidfighter” is out and I’ve just had a chance to play. I enjoyed my first game with these rules and looking forward to the next. In support of my next out I’ve quickly refined my Space Werido QRS in support of Voidfighter.
Finally a few snaps from our first game. There are some lovely custom cards prepared by my good friend, sadly they were not enough to save my brave rebels, none of us escaped the fist of the Emperor Jeff. 😦
Update 14 September
An online gaming buddy has asked if we could play Voidfighter online, sure why not. Here are a few snaps of an Owlbear Rodeo session I whipped up this afternoon. The ships are from FASA’s Renegade Legion: Interceptor.
Filtered original by Jack Kamen, Weird Science Cover
SPAce…. WEirdOoos…
Our group has gotten ahold of Space Weirdos, an indie sci-fi skirmish game by Casey Garske. This is a tight little 16 page booklet, designed for custom warbands with low model counts.
There is a good deal of nuance tied up in these rules, and after my first play it was pretty clear that I needed a simplified reference during play.
My first effort was a literal cut and paste from the rulebook itself. While useful there were organizational changes I still wanted to make.
Next Generation
With a few games under our belts, I’ve bitten the bullet and worked up a one page QRS that suits my needs perfectly. You can grab the file here.
Filtered work by Jordan Penalva, cover for Gordon Dickson’s “Dorsai” when published by Ace.
I’ve been interested in Stargrave and while I have plenty of painted miniatures I have zero inspiration to create a crew, even less desire to puzzle over 52 powers, stat mods and what not. I want my friends to be empowered to start playing whenever we gather, not be blocked by record keeping before we even start.
Inspired by online RPG character generators (e.g. save vs total party kill) I’ve built a Google Sheet that randomly generates a Stargrave Captain & First Officer quickly. It produces things like…
There is a good deal of error checking here, but there could be a few bugs lurking especially on the 4th & 3rd powers for the Captain & First Officers respectively. I’ll continue to fine tune that section, but the tool works well enough for the stated objective.
Thank you to the Reddit user u/5eret who compiled the power list, that was my data set for this project. Without your work my task would have been much more difficult.
I have also done a 1st edition Frostgrave grimoire generator, which you can find here. It is an Excel document but you should be able to use it with Google Sheets or Open Office.
For those not familiar with To the Strongest – it is a British rule set published in 2015 – covering ancient through medieval wargaming. This game is a played on a grid, uses playing cards instead of dice, and very well suited to Table Top Simulator.
I’ve played a bit of To the Strongest on the physical tabletop, struggled with some of the basic concepts, and wrestled with army lists that assume some basic knowledge of the rules. All difficult points when learning a game. Settling into the 1066 tournament with group of seasoned players was a challenge. Falling back on my go to strategy of creating reference materials I refined the quick reference sheet for clarity & made reference materials out of the army lists themselves.
Have pulled together an introduction to virtual wargaming with To the Strongest using Tabletop Simulator: TTS on TTS. Hope it will inspire some to try miniature wargaming in a virtual space.
Update – March 21
Recently I recorded an actual play session. This might be a good way to learn how to play or at least gain an understanding of the game mechanics
Update January 29
Have updated my QRS, cleaning up the evade section and the “advance & throw” along with “fire & retire” being restricted to Light Units.
Update April 9
Have updated my TTS QRS to support Even Stronger v12. Also removes the unit type specific details from the melee and shooting modifiers. Instead those modifiers moved to the Streamline TTS unit summary, preferring that such modifiers be included in an army list rather than QRS.
In my hobby today I use so much tech, it’s like I was born and raised in Silicon Valley or something. Desktop publishing was the boon of the 90s while teetering on the edge of the always connected internet age. Now digital is everywhere, it is everything, it is the tools I use daily – you probably do too.
One of my favorite aspects of RPGs are deeply nested random tables which create a staggering array of combinations while yielding unexpected results. The best of these can take a good deal of dice rolling, note taking, and inspired interpretation. Not really a tool that can be used “in game”, but that all changes when we go digital.
Behold the power of: =index(Lookup!Y3:Y32,match(RANDBETWEEN(1,30),Lookup!$K3:$K32,0))
What is this strange gibberish you say? Simply the logical power of a digital array (spread sheet) that provides instantaneous lookup against random entry (dice rolls) from a given table.
Want to know something special about a city – push a button:
Maybe you need an NPC for that city – push a button:
Or maybe you have favorite tables you’d like to convert to a digital solution, for instant generation from nearly anywhere. Here’s a Google Sheet sample that you can study and build your own thing. Doesn’t make sense? Ping me and I’ll walk you through it, we’ll record a video of that and post it here.
Ever wonder what treasures are hidden away in the hoard of the Halfling Master? Dig into this blog for news, ideas, reviews, and other in depth information about anything surrounding the OSR, TTRPGs, and Miniatures hobbies. No piece of loot is too small or insignificant to be explored.
On the Tabletop 