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A photo of our dining table with a Warhammer Quest game set up on it. There's lots of cards and dice everywhere, and in middle are a bunch of variously-shaped tiles connected together that look like the inside of a set of buildings. There's four hero miniatures at the right (one heavily-armoured warrior woman with a sword, a vampire hunter with a long leather coat and a big hat, a steampunk dwarf, and a priest with a rich red robe and a big staff) plus four groups of hostile miniatures at various points on the board (three zombies, three skeletons, three bat swarms, and a very large Mongolian-dress zombie thing with a huge axe).

We had @wobin over for #WarhammerQuest and a barbecue today! The Warhammer Quest journey type was "Scavenge" so we could get some gear and currency to level up, it was a similar kind of deal to the others where the map is pre-made, but oh my god I don't think I've EVER seen as poor rolling as @wobin had today. At one point he spent all four of his activation dice making attacks without hitting a single thing, and that was rolling the equivalent of a 3+. 😫 I think he made one single attack successfully, and ended up getting wailed upon by a Kosargi Night Guard which mean he had three grevious wound counters and so had to rely on one activation dice and whatever spare Destiny dice we had left. In the previous game we'd upgraded his character with a piece of equipment that let him attempt to recover wounds on a 4+ instead of a 5+, and literally every single role he made for this he failed. We had @yayKM roll two of them, and she made one success and failed the other. Thankfully, nobody ended up dying and we did actually get a good stash of stuff and have some good upgrades for the next game, but oh man.

Posted on 1 October 2023, 22:25

A screenshot taken from person-level at the entrance of Akila City, during the night. It's got a very wild west sort of feel to it, the ground is dirt and the buildings are cobbled together out of a combination of wood and futuristic-looking metal. It's not very well lit and the lights are quite yellow-coloured. In the centre of the frame is an imposing-looking multi-storey mostly built out of stone, with more yellow lights lighting it up from below.

A wide-angle screenshot taken from above the other end of Akila City at sunrise right before the sun is visible above the horizon. There's a solid wall running around a set of closely-packed metal buildings that look a bit more futuristic than in the previous screenshot, but they're still decidedly not pristine and clean. There's some wispy clouds in the sky and mountains in the distance, and a very yellow glow from where the sun is about to rise.

Another wide-angle screenshot of the main bar in Akila City. It's all rough wooden tables and stone walls, with a set of wooden stairs at the right going up to a second level. A handful of patrons are sitting around, the bartender is behind the bar, and suspending from the ceiling is the skeleton of an ashta, a huge predator native to the planet.

Almost 24 hours into Starfield so far and I'm still enjoying the hell out of it. I know I keep harping on about it, but the amount of detail and care in the environments is so good, it feels like a fully-realised world that you want to spend a bunch of time in. Most of my recent time has been spent in Akila City doing various side-quests and helping out the Freestar Rangers.

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Posted on 30 September 2023, 18:49

A screenshot from Starfield of the sunrise over, uh, one of the districts (I forget which one it was) on Jemison in the Alpha Centauri system. It's taken looking over an open public plaza with trees and people walking around, and there's tall, sleek, futuristic buildings as well.

Another screenshot, this one is also Jemison but it's inside The Well which is an underground almost slum. Everything made of metal and it's all brown and industrial-looking, with lots of exposed pipes, girders, and mesh everywhere.

Another screenshot, this one is inside the main control room of the space station "The Eye" that's orbiting Jemison. The room is round and stark white, with rows of "NASA punk"-looking consoles with displays and buttons on them. The roof is clear glass looking out into space where you can see the stars.

Man, I'm enjoying Starfield so much. Tonight was spent mostly wandering around The Well on Alpha Centauri helping figure out what was causing brownouts, and chatting to Denis and Dr. Charlie in Cydonia on Mars (wonderful lines and voice acting for both of them), I didn't even do much of main quest things but I thoroughly enjoyed myself nonetheless. The amount of detail Bethesda put into this game is wonderful, as an example there's a café/not-quite food bank place in The Well, and if you go through the back there's the kitchen with all the things you'd expect to see in there, then upstairs is the living quarters where there's all sorts of stuff scattered around like someone actually LIVES there, there's even a bathroom and everything. The whole thing just feels _lived in_ and it's so good.

screenshot gaming xbox starfield

Posted on 11 September 2023, 23:29

A selfie, I guess, of my character in Starfield. She has dark brown skin and brown eyes and has faint crows feet around the eyes. She has multiple piercings in ears, and her hair is completely shaved up the sides but the top is a big mop of black hair. She looks pretty much exactly like Naomi Nagata from the TV show "The Expanse".

And speaking of Starfield, dear LORD can you spend a lot of time in the character creator! As always I made a Black woman, you can't tell from this shot but I went with the heavy/muscular side of things for the body type, but as soon as I came across that haircut I was like "Oh, I've just made Naomi Nagata." 😅

screenshot gaming xbox starfield

Posted on 9 September 2023, 22:02

A photo of a game of Warhammer 40,000: Kill Team. The board looks like the metal of the inside of an ancient steampunk starship, and the terrain is a bunch of walls all connected together in the same steampunk style to form number of interconnecting rooms. On the left are my forces, the hulking and putrid Death Guard in large military green amour with all sorts of tentacles and demon faces coming out of the armour. Facing them on the other side of the board are the military arm of the Imperial Church, the women warriors of the Adeptus Sororitas. Five of them are heavily armoured in black armour with striking white hair and big guns, and the other five are basically not armoured at all and wielding HUGE chainswords like complete maniacs.

A close-up photo looking down a long corridor from just above my Death Guard Champion, the leader of my team. He has horns growing out of his shoulder pads and has a plasma pistol and a massive powerfist. At the other end of the corridor are two of the black-armoured warrior women and two of the Sisters Repentia with the huge chainswords.

Post-work Kill Team in the office again! This time we went back to the Compendium teams, Death Guard versus Adeptus Sororitas with a fireteam of Sisters Repentia. I lost 15-11, but almost entirely due to forgetting about my damn TacOps. 🙄 It likely would have been at least a draw had I remembered them, if not an outright win. That being said, player of the match definitely goes to my leader who faced down this entire corridor of Sisters and ended up killing ALL of them. He was down to 1 wound left in the very last turn, and was let down by some extremely poor rolling on my part and ended up getting killed contesting an objective.

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Posted on 6 September 2023, 20:36

A close-up of the final fight of the game. A steampunk-looking dwarf with an axe and a harpoon gun thing is facing off through a doorway against three skeleton warriors and a massive lumbering ogre with a cloak and Mongolian-style fur hat and a HUGE axe. Behind the dwarf is an armoured human warrior with a sword and a priest with a rich red robe and black hood and a big staff.

Our Warhammer Quest adventures continued tonight, and HOO BOY was this one rough, mostly due to having an absolute SHOCKER on the dice rolling! We played a "Deliverance" journey type, the story is that there's an evil all-consuming spell, the Suffocating Gravetide, wandering the streets that you need to outrun, and you need to warn the citizens of Ulfenkarn as you go so they can get inside and stay safe. The token that represents the Gravetide moves along one board section at a time and you need to stay in front of it or else you take two damage, and the board section that it was previously is destroyed along with any hostiles. The board itself isn't laid out ahead of time unlike the other journeys, instead you build it as you go by pulling from a deck and putting the appropriate tile down that's shown on the card along with any hostiles. There's a "Nightfall" token that moves along a track, and if you've taken enough turns and it gets to the end, all of the enemies are empowered and are significantly nastier (it represents night falling and all the undead becoming more powerful). We got fucked on that twice by rolling on the event table at the end of the turn and ending up on the "Move the Nightfall token one further space" and ended up having to fight the empowered hostiles much earlier than we otherwise should have, and we also had two "You don't get any Destiny dice at the start of next turn" results too (the Destiny dice are a pool of extra dice that the heroes can use in addition to their normal activation dice). The "Warn the citizens" bit is an action that requires an activation dice result of 6 so if you've rolled really poorly you might not be able to do it that turn, and to be successful in the mission requires eight warnings. Ordinarily this wouldn't have been too bad, but as I mentioned before we had just dreadful rolls for like everything. As an example, @yayKM rolled five dice that would require a roll of 3+ to be successful attacks, and only succeeded on one of them. There were also multiple really bad rolls on defence AND attempting to heal wounds, to the point that we weren't entirely sure we were going to succeed in the mission without everyone being taken out of action. As it was, we made it by the skin of our teeth, of @yayKM's two heroes one had taken three grievous wounds (out of a maximum of four before you're out of action) and the other had two, and one of my heroes also had two grievous wound counters as well. We had a final fight where we needed to get past a group of hostiles, and JUST BARELY made it by having @yayKM's extremely witchhunter manage to just limp into the final board section and trigger the last warning we needed to end the game. And just as a final "Fuck you", the roll on the very final event table at the end was dreadful too and all the heroes had to discard their treasure cards.

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Posted on 2 September 2023, 22:28

Kill Team tonight, my Voidscarred versus the Elucidian Starstriders. I lost yet again, 13-10, though in my defence I'd never actually played against the Starstriders before so didn't have a handle on what they were like and boy do they have some unpleasant tricks. I also keep underestimating just how far stuff can move in a given turn and so fucked up the positioning of my troops on more than one occasion, and as per usual I completely forgot about all their equipment.

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Posted on 30 August 2023, 20:32

We had @wobin over today for a game of Warhammer Quest and it was excellent fun! @yayKM and I had previously planned to do a Deliverance journey type for our next game since if you're successful it reduces the fear level of the populace of Ulfenkarn (if it hits 10, you lose, and we were currently at 7), but we hadn't actually done that other journey type before and for introducing @wobin to the game we figured it'd be easier just to do a Hunt since that was what we'd played all the previous games so far and were familiar with it. All the characters levelled up which means they get some additional traits, but it also means the hostiles we face next game are more numerous too!

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Posted on 27 August 2023, 18:07

Back on my Forza Horizon 5 bullshit again! I'd forgotten I bought the rally expansion and man is it fun to blast around this rally-spec Peugeot 207 without any of the usual breaking lines on and instead just getting the instructions from your co-pilot ("hard left", "medium right into hairpin right", that sort of thing). On asphalt it's pretty much glued to the road and even on dirt it handles extremely nicely.

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Posted on 19 August 2023, 21:29

A close-up taken from my behind my dwarf hero, who is dressed in very steampunk-looking armour and has a big axe and a steampunk harpoon gun. Facing him through the doorway into the next tile are three zombies and another three skeleton warriors all standing right next to each other.

We played our second game of Warhammer Quest this afternoon! Another success, though it was looking a bit dicey at one point. The journey type we were playing was a "Hunt" where you need to kill ten hostile champions before you can finish it, but very thematically the zombies have no champion-type miniature in their groups so they just serve to slow you down. Play of the game went to my dwarf who single-handedly decimated a horde of hostiles (you'll have to excuse the lack of fully-painted miniatures because I ran out of the painted ones and had to resort to the half-painted ones I'd been working on earlier in the day). Once you achieve the completion condition for whatever journey type you're playing, you need to retreat to the extraction point and once your heroes are all there, THAT is when the game ends. Today we had a classic movie feel because one of the last hostiles to spawn was one of the really nasty boss types, we ended up being able to avoid fighting him but it was a rush to the extraction point before he caught up with us!

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Posted on 6 August 2023, 20:01