Monsters abound: a review of Devilry Afoot co-op horror gunpowder skirmish

We love a good coop skirmish game, playing a lot of Sellswords & Spellslingers and dabbling in quite a few other games. And we both love gunpowder fantasy, so the mixture of the two, with a horror twist in Devilry Afoot was too good to pass up.

What is Devilry Afoot? Let’s let the author introduce it:

Devilry Afoot (2024) is a folk horror monster-hunting handbook for tabletop skirmishes.

Set during the 16th and 17th century Wars of Religion, Devilry Afoot pits flawed human heroes, controlled by one or more players, against the creatures of the night whose actions are randomly determined by the game’s easy-to-use mechanics.

Designed for solo and co-operative play, the RPG-lite character customisation, scenario driven narratives, and unpredictable monsters combine to ensure that no two games are ever the same.

Wargames Vault description

We played two scenarios: The Dance Macabre and Wolves in Sheep’s Clothing. Both were brutally hard, starting off deceptively easy. All in all, the whole two games took about 3 hours, including creating characters.

Dance Macabre

Your goal is to stop a graveyard from spawning revenants, of which only a single one starts on the table (but many more spawn in quickly). As this was our first game, we only took 3 characters (1 each).

We quickly learned that although only two monsters started on the board, bad dice luck in 1st turn by Sean had his follower run off from being scared by the spectre & his character does nothing with poor activation rolls.

The objective was simple enough, get a character into the graveyard, say scripture 3 times. But given new revenants spawned on a 1, 2 or 3 on their movement or fight rolls, we were quickly swarmed under. One after another of us went down, until only Sean was standing, and then it was over.

We decided to roll Out of Action rolls anyway, with both Sean and Brian rolling under 3 – dead – and me rolling barely better – a 4 – for Scholar Smthye to acquire a leg injury.

Wolf in Sheep’s Clothing

Our second game we took a bit more muscle – 2 character each (for 6 characters), with Sean and Brian both bringing followers. Here the werewolves appear in a pack of innocents on turn one.

Werewolves were a bit counter-intuitive (turn from werewolves to human to attack, etc). We also had a 3rd werewolf join us – each character has a secret and one of Sean’s had bitten by a werewolf. Which activates if you roll double 1s on their activation. Sean dutifully did so, continuing his dice luck and it appeared right in the back, naturally.

We also had a character run off from the monster’s intimidate check, ironically my Goodwife Smthye who had a bonus to not running away.

Overall thoughts

Overall we all quite like it. Definitely will play again – here’s a few more detailed thoughts:

Good

What did we like?

  • Activation system was quite fun – randomness as you draw chits out of a bag for monsters, innocents, & PCs, but PCs still require an activation roll like Sellswords or SOBAH to actually do something
  • Monster and game flavour was great – it really captured the feel of the late medieval/early renaissance ignorance of the world and fear of “things that go bump in the night”
  • The period flavour of “Cite Scripture” as a PC action, which repels monsters, and the fact that most monsters will (randomly) do things other than mindlessly run forward to attack means that it can be more than just a pure brawl, which is always great.
  • A permanent injury table is always fun. We have just started playing Mordheim, which has a similar rule. For us, we had two deaths, but my Scholar Smthye gave me a great roleplaying hook for my 2nd character, as his leg injury meant clearly his wife needed to follow along and make sure he didn’t get up to trouble in his foolishness
  • Small board size – only 2’x2′ allows focused gameplay and means less terrain to build
  • Small model count – similarly, it had a very small model count. We had less than 10 figures in the first game, and less than 20 in the second. Makes getting into it quite easy.

Change?

  • Cards instead of chits – rather than drawing from a bag, flipping over cards is faster. Plus you can do some amazing period-style activation cards with illustrated pictures of the monsters

What about Sellwords & Spellslingers?

Could you retrofit Sellswords to use this? Absolutely – switch secrets to negative traits, double monster stats to create a DL, add monster activation rules. The cards would require more work, but that is doable. I may do this at some point, but let’s see.

Final thoughts

Would we recommend? Yes, 100%. It is a good price (~ $10 CAD). Pick it up today at Wargames Vault.

The Workbench This Weekend, 23 July 2024

This weekend I have mostly been raising the dead! A while ago Corey and I split two boxes of Northstar Oathmark skeletons and revenants and I’ve finally got all of mine assembled. We’d previously split another box of skeletons, so this gives me a good size horde of angry undead and when combined with Corey’s (eventual) horde it will grow to truly terrifying size!

The Oathmark plastic figures are nicely proportioned, clean sculpts, and clean casts. I mixed some GW skull box and Frostgrave extras into a few figures for variety, and then used some leftover bits to create more weird undead constructs!

Three regular skeletons and a necromantic construct mixing two Oathmark skeleton bodies, a bunch of limbs, and some GW skull box skullz.
First five revenants, all straight from the Oathmark box.
The large necromatic construct in all it’s weird shambling multi-limbed glory! I don’t have particular rules in mind for this thing, I just wanted to build something cool and weird. We’ll house-rule it once it hits the table.
Necromatic construct from another side.
Left, a necromatic totem of some sort – broken weapons and skulls. The other two bases I’m calling “scuttlers” – little necromatic constructs of spare limbs and skulls. Scouts and messengers for an undead force, maybe? Weird little dungeon nuisances? Both?
An in-progress photo of the horde, before finishing the last couple sprues of skeletons and revenants or the scuttlers. The ghoul is a Games Workshop freebie from earlier this year, and really quite a cool little figure.
The final horde!

Total score is thirteen skeletons (surely a lucky number for the undead!), fifteen revenants, five scuttlers, one large necromatic construct, one ghoul, and one necromatic totem/midden terrain piece or objective. And enough leftover bits to make more scuttlers and more totems, if I want.

Finishing up the bases with greenstuff is next, then primer and paint. I did up the previous batch of skeletons in a fairly simple paint scheme which I’ll be copying for these skeletons, and I’ll do something similar but not quite identical for the revenants – thinking they need some purple or green to set them off against the black/red/bronze theme of the skeletons.

After that I clearly need a necromancer and his immediate entourage to command this horde! No concrete plans for that yet but we shall see…

The Queen of the Waste

The Queen is the largest Gaslands vehicle I’ve done so far and by far the most complex conversion I’ve done for the game!

She started life as a city busy of some sort, sourced I think from Ali Express by Corey, sat around in his stash for a while, then became mine when I volunteered to make something cool to terrorize our Gaslands games with! She’s true-scale to Matchbox/Hot Wheels cars, so very close to six inches long now that I’ve finished a full post-apoc war bus conversion job.

Death in the Dungeon – a quick review for a quick game

Looking for something new to try, Sean and I played a little competitive dungeon crawling in the form of Death in the Dungeon, a quick-play zine-format brawler from Crushpop Creations that came out a few years ago. We both quite enjoyed our 3 quick games over 2 hours, but both felt it needed a bit more.

The game is quite small – only 34 pages that are 5.5″ by 8.5″ in size – so by its nature cannot cover a lot of game. But you get the basics – your PCs have a few stats – Movement, Toughness, Armour and Damage. With 6 races, 6 classes, 3 types of armour and 7 weapons, plus a dozen spells, there is definitely room for tactical variety here.

Stats are based on a d4 through d12 dice system – with the core mechanic of being Power Level (from Class ) vs Toughness (from Armour). Ties go in the attackers favour, which was different (and quite deadly for me, as it happened). Initiative uses a pooled dice of the active PCs Power Level to determine, which was quite a clever mechanic.

Our first game we built to 75 gold and I fielded 3 characters to Sean’s 2 – I had a Human Knight, an Orc Barbarian and a Human Sorcerer (who had no weapons or armour, this was bad). Sean had a Knight and a Barbarian. And he destroyed me in two different games – one a straight fight and one with endless skeletons spawning.

Many, many skeletons kept my team busy with Sean eventually did for it, one member at a time.

Our third game I managed to win, mostly by taking a pair of long-bow equipped mouselings running as Dwarves and a Dwarf barbarian. Ranged without cover is almost always deadly and in this game it was too.

Overall, it was a fun little game. But it really doesn’t lend itself well to just two people playing – there just wasn’t enough chaos. Both Sean and I felt that with 3 or 4, that would have felt right. Given the time it took to run a game, even doubling this to 1 hour was totally doable.

One key challenge with the small page count is the lack of clarity you have. For example, my initial sorcerer had no weapons or armour. Was this a legal build? Can you drink a potion or loot during combat?

Would we play this again? Maybe if we had more people. The quick setup and play time means a game can be done in very little time, even if you don’t know the rules.

You can get Death in the Dungeon from Wargames Vault for $2.99 USD. It has a number of expansions as well, which I have the free ones.

Build Something 2024: The Painting Process

Well, round 1 of the Build Something Competition is done and I have been beat, badly. The vote wasn’t even close. Ouch. Anyway, at least I have a pretty building for my table.

With me out, means I can share some process photos and discussion here. I ended up painting and gluing the building together pieces by piece – paint some, glue some, paint some, just because of the way I needed to paint the inside.

First thing I did was assemble the upper back section (with the walkway) as a separate piece and then paint the inside of it. I also added mud/spackle to cover the 3D printing texture on the lower section and painted the concrete floor (with a few cracks added with an exacto blade).

After that, I added the inside graffiti to both the lower walls and the upper section. After I had added them, I glued the two pieces together and then added some mud/spackle to cover the gaps and then roughly painted it grey. I wasn’t overly worried, as I knew that I was going to be badly painting the inside white again (to partially cover up the graffiti, as if somebody was working to renovate the building).

Assembled back with spackle/mud covering the gap between the foam upper parts and the 3D printed lower bits.

Then I rusted up the hangers and doors. For this I sponged on paint quite thickly – mostly Burnt Umber but some Burnt Sienna and Raw Sienna for accents. This is what gives these the bumpy texture. I would note that the grey paint was not fully dry under the tape here, so I ended up pulling off a fair amount and needing to repaint it. Oops.

After that, I glued the front panels on and then the lower walkway (which touched both the back walls and the front walls). You can see the interior has been painted white at this point.

Gluing in the lower walkway, with the inside now painted white.

Once those were done, I cleaned up the front where the joins were to make the grey tones more consistent. I then masked off the green sections and the upper ghost lettering.

The lettering was over-sprayed with Golden’s Shading Grey, a semi-transparent grey that was amazing for darkening things subtly. I pulled off the letters, which were cut out of Oracal mask on my Silhouette, in a random order, spraying a bit more of the shading grey over the whole area each time.

The last bits I didn’t get any photos of, but this is the “draw the rest of the owl” directions:

The green lower sections I added blue stuff to mask off the damaged sections where the exposed rebar was and then sprayed the lower area, hangers and the doors with chipping medium, and then all three with a random mixture of greens roughly mixed in the airbrush. To chip it I used three methods – light sanding, using tape to pull off random sections and water with a brush. If you use water with a brush, you get lighter sections. I ended up putting an undercoat of white on the doors after I tried just straight green, but that wasn’t covering the rust well.

Lastly, I glued in the windows after painting them separately, painted the exposed rebar and then weathered with oil paints. Overall, the painting felt a bit rushed and I should have taken more time. I also missed a bunch of small details that I’d like to get back to.

And voila! The final product:

Z1 Design’s Precinct 187 Kickstarter 7 years later

7 years ago, at the beginning of my 3D printing journey, I backed a now partially-failed Kickstarter called Precinct 187 from Z1 Design. A few years later the designer and his company stopped responding to messages and as of 2024 have apparently vanished off the internet, save their FB page. At the time, I didn’t even own a 3D printer – I bought the Ender 2 a few months later. Ironically, I’ve actually only ever fully printed a single building from this range – the Blackhollow Pub (not even really part of it – it was a free addon to sell the next kickstarter – Black Hallows Town’s Folk that I never backed).

A few years ago, the creator, Jon, shut down posting in the Z1 group too, which stayed dormant until today and apparently he deleted his FB account, so that meant the group was admin-less. And so a random group member became admin today.

Given Z1 Facebook group is back again, I wondered just how much of the Kickstarter had actually been delivered. Hence this blog post.

Delivered Files

As far as I can tell, here is what was delivered.

Core

  • Town/City Hall
  • Fire House
  • Mel’s Diner
  • Tenement
  • Big Joe’s Donuts
  • L Train
  • Construction Site

Stretch Goals

  • Billboards
  • Block Z (I’m missing these files) Received from a kind soul
  • Car Park
  • Cinema
  • City Bank
  • Docklands
  • Docklands Building
  • Docklands Fish Boat
  • Docklands Coastguard Boat (I’m missing these files) Received from a kind soul
  • East Coast Shopping Mall (appears half complete)
  • Factory
  • Gun Store (received)
  • Hotel Empire
  • Mini Mart
  • Pawn Shop
  • Police Station
  • Prison
  • Restaurant/Bar
  • Road Tiles
  • Subway
  • Staircases
  • Street Furniture
  • Street Barricades
  • Water Towers

Stretch Goals & Addons – Not Delivered

To my accounting, here is what wasn’t delivered (I’ll update this if others can correct me)

  • Wonder World
  • Block Z This was delivered, I just didn’t get it (now received from kind soul)
  • Police Station Cell Block & Compound
  • Post Apocalypic Add-ons
  • Road Markings
  • Prison Bus
  • Security Truck
  • Roberts Fish Merchants
  • East Coast Shopping Mall this might have been partially done
  • Subway Station This was delivered, I just didn’t get it (now received from kind soul)

Black Hollow freebies

  • Blacksmiths Shop
  • Tavern
  • Stables

What I’ve printed

Well, in 7 years, not much. The Tavern and a few copies of the dumpster. In a way, you can say that this Kickstarter started my digital pile of shame opportunity.

EDIT: I forgot – I printed the donut at 200% size for a Gaslands jump ring

Did you back the Kickstarter?

Curious what others who backed the Kickstarter thought. Are they happy? Are they missing files as well? I’m happy to help other lost souls with instructions and some of their missing files (within reason, need to be able to prove you actually backed it)

Conclusion

I’m sad this project didn’t finish, as although I’ve never printed the buildings, I have them if we ever seriously get back into moderns. And I feel it would do well today – the buildings were well designed, had clear instructions and would have been perfect for things like Marvel Crisis Protocol.

Anyway, will close by giving a plug to one of my favourite creators, Corvus Games Terrain, who make many similar buildings including an awesome elevated rail (below). And no, that’s not a sponsored or affiliate link, I just like his stuff.

Photos from Trumpeter Salute 2024

Last month was the annual Trumpeter Salute convention in Vancouver, BC. Usually right around the same time as the big Salute, this one is decidely smaller but still fun. It runs over the whole weekend rather than just one day, with one slot Friday night, 3 slots on Saturday and 1 big one on Sunday.

Friday

This year I ran other Under Alien Suns game in the Friday slot, this time using both my scifi and hellscape terrain. It was a lot of fun – we had 5 players and the usual set of hilarious moments. One player managed to roll a natural 1 on two different healing checks, dealing out 1 damage instead of healing. And my brother’s PC was bit the zombies but only died in the doorway to the exit, bottling up the PCs

Saturday

In the morning we played Roman on Roman naval violence with papercraft and small figures. Romans won, Romans lost, it was a good day for everybody but the Romans. As is our tradition, Brian and I played opposite each other – him playing the defenders and me the attackers.

Midday Brian and I played a nominally cooperative WW2 Italian partisan game – we all played different factions of partisans – both Brian and I picked flavours of communists, which are as opposed as you can get in a coop game. In the end, luck had my team closest to the scientist we had to get off. And the Nazis were rather crap, so in the end the partisans got to engage in their favourite activity – shooting at each other, which mostly meant everybody shooting me and nearly taking on the scientist before I got him off the table.

The evening I played some Canvas Eagles, always a good game. This year I played with Troy Tony Chard’s 1/144 planes, which are very hard to photograph well, so did get some good photos.

During the day I managed to get a few shots of some random games at various points.

Sunday

Last year I ran a pickup Gaslands game, which was a lot of fun, so this year I decided to formalize that. We ended up with 8 players and had a brawl to the death with 2 spec cars each (HMG front & either napalm or mines back). The winner was a car initially piloted by myself, then Brian’s daughter E (she of double jump last year) and then E’s aunt – who smartly drove away from the carnage at the end.

All in all, another fun convention and thanks to the organizers again.

Build Something is done for 2024 & I finished!

Another year keeps marching on and Build Something 2024 has come to an end and unlike nearly every prior year, I actually finished this year! No pictures of the painted model yet due to the rules, but here are some updates on the construction.

Overall, I managed to only get the warehouse done of the whole set I planned – will have to do the actual landing pad later. But I was happy with where I ended up with the warehouse.

For the warehouse, I ended up with a more “ruined 20th century concrete” vibe than I initially planned, largely because of the design of the windows – rectangular with thin frame pieces.

With that, I switched out a lot of my concept and leaned more heavily into that look. Here’s a few pieces of inspiration I pulled from the internet:

I then decided on a heavy, old-style large doors, with a small door that roughly followed the inspiration above. Both were modelled in FreeCAD and then printed on my Ender 5. The large doors…

…and the small door. I first did a test with it printed flat to the bed, which worked. Once I designed the door itself, I tried it vertical. That failed, so I switched back to horizontal and printed it at 0.12 layer height. The white you see on the final image a piece of styrene rod which acts as the hinge.

After the doors were printed, I moved onto the interior walkway, which by pure accident ended up being perfect height for a figure to shoot out of. I really didn’t plan that at all, but it was awesome. There are two levels of walkway – one at 3″ where the small door opens and the main walkway at 4″.

And then onto the windows. I ended up printing them twice – the first round I didn’t think were thick enough, so I ended up printing them a second time at double the thickness. I decided to keep the first round windows and used them as external frames, to which I glued clear PETG and styrene too to make broken and boarded up windows.

And with all those pieces, the design was basically done! I decided to assemble as a I painted, so this is the final shot before painting:

All the final pieces of the building, not yet assembled.

Onwards to painting, which I can’t show you yet, but here’s a photo of my photo setup. Good photos needs lots of light, so I did just that.

Other photos and notes on my forum thread and voting will start fairly soon on the Build Something Competition subforum here.

Still Around, I Promise!

Been doing gaming fairly regularly, had a good weekend at Trumpter Salute 2024 in Vancouver early in March, but apparently haven’t managed to blog a thing in ages.

Here, have a chill painting video in lieu of original content.

Bunch of stuff in progress including a gloriously over the top Gaslands war-bus based on a city busy chassis, which I have been taking a bunch of progress photos of and will try to assemble into a gallery here to show off sometime soon.

Speaking of Gaslands, and somewhat time-sensitive as the Kickstarter closes in 3 days, Fogou Models are running a KS for various Gaslands-scale scenery items. These aren’t STLs but actually physical cast resin pieces. Rad Trax Toy Car Scale Terrain on Kickstarter. The items will likely be available on Fogou’s webstore post-KS, useful for those of us who (say) just had to cough up a home insurance deductible after a plumbing leak and are a bit short on cash…

Note to self, remember you have a blog, dude.

Build Something 2024: A starport

I’ve had various (ed: poor) success with building things competitions in the past. I’ve singularly failed to finish a single one I’ve entered, even the Build Something Small and Encounter Terrain 10×10, both of which were small things. So the natural thing to do was to organize the next round of Building Something Competition (BSC) on Lead Adventure!

If you’re not familiar with BSC, it is a friendly competition on the Lead Adventure Forum, running for more than a decade. Both Brian and I have entered at various times, he’s even finished something:

Concepts

I wasn’t sure what I wanted to build this year – either a spaceport or a vertical mill thing for my hellscape terrain. As you can probably gather from the title, I decided on a spaceport. I’ve been doodling a few different options for a little bit, starting with one giant 12″x18″ piece, but nothing was really gelling for me.

So I decided to try a few different layouts in FreeCAD, see what I liked. I found this cardboard tube from something paper that I wanted to use as the main upright. And I knew I wanted a 9″x9″ building for the main warehouse building. I initially tried a single larger building on a 12″x12″ base, but that didn’t work either. I also tried the landing pad on a big 12″x12″ base. I also didn’t like that

So I decided to split it into multiple bases, the building and starport each on one. And I knew I needed a way to have pads lift up into the sky, so I decided on magnets and printed pads. That is what the orange vertical pieces are – holders for either magnets or metal strips. Those pads will land on a yet another 6″x”6 base.

Printing things!

I’ve been fighting off some sort of stomach issue for the past few weeks, so progress has been slow, but I finally have printed pieces ready to show at least. But first, a whole lot of failures. I needed to find out if I’d measured the tube correctly (which I hadn’t) and then I decided to use an empty pill bottle as a fuel tank to add on. So several failed prints for those look like this:

And finally, the printed pieces (mostly). I haven’t been able to print the holder fully successfully yet, but that is next to go on the printer again tonight. But I have the borders at least done – base, starport base, landing pad base and fuel tank.

You can find all the current entries on the Lead Adventure Forum BSC subforum, including my own.

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