Bringing Back The Borg

"We are the Borg, lower your shields and surrender your ships, we will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own, your culture will adapt to service us. Resistance is futile."

The Borg: perhaps the scariest enemy every created in Star Trek, and certainly the breakout hit of Star Trek: The Next Generation.  After the first attempt to create a recurring foe for the second Star Trek series, the Ferengi, ended up creating a comedic race rather than the desired threatening species the writers managed to pull a real rabbit out of their hat.

However, I was very nervous about using the Borg in my Star Trek game and put off their debut until our fourth block of gaming.  I was quick enough to use the Klingons, Romulans, Q, Cardassians and Bajorans - as well as more obscure races like the Husnock and Iconians - but the Borg were something I didn't want to run into. 

Because the Borg... have problems.

Musket, Fife and Drum

Twenty Chaos Dwarfs ready for war.

I finally finished up my Chaos Dwarf Blunderbuss unit last night, with some drybrushing of the bases and highlighting of the armour.  As I write this a layer of varnish is drying on them.  Above you'll see all twenty massed together.

My First 7th Ed Battle Report

An arctic battlefield for our 7th Ed debut

My chum Dave found himself wife- and daughter-less for a couple of days, so invited me along to play 7th Ed for the first time.  Although I own an e-copy of the rules I had yet to play it - and Dave hadn't until this same day where he played his first game that afternoon, so we were very much learning as we went.

The big changes I wanted to try out included the amendments to the psychic phase, which have added more of a sub-game to how psychic powers work; the new Unbound Army rules which allow you to skip some army-building requirements albeit at a small cost; and the new Maelstrom of War missions, which have random objectives that vary as the game goes on.  In the end neither of us made Unbound armies but the other two new ideas would be tried out.

Double the basic missions to choose from!  We rolled Contact Lost, Maelstrom of War mission #2.

So we sat down with 1000 points of troops, Dave's hardcopy of the rules and print-outs of a 7th Ed summary to play a wee game

A Question Of Governance - What is The Federation?

To Combine Our Efforts To Accomplish These Aims

When one is running an RPG in an established universe, you find yourselves having to invent or expand bits and pieces of background.  There are some things which don't come up in a TV show or book or what have you either because they are not relevant to the story or because they never occurred to the author - but when a player asks an awkward question, you must come up with an answer.

For example, when we played our Dune game, how communication between planets worked was questioned - can we use some sort of "interstellar radio"?  The original Frank Herbert books don't mention this explicitly, but we inferred from the other technology present that they do not and instead couriers must deliver communiques between the nobility.  We could just have easilly hypothesised a quasi-telepathic network between planets allowing instantaneous transmission, though .  (And indeed the "House" prequel books by Herbert Jnr/Anderson say the former is true while also showing someone developing the latter.)

The following question, therefore, is one which I am pondering for our Star Trek game: What exactly is the Federation, anyway? The exact nature of this organization is pretty hazy considering there's been over 540 hours of Trek put to film - not counting the various deutero- and non-canonical sources like comics, novels, computer games, role-playing supplements and the like.  Every series has main characters representing the Federation, yet quite how this grouping of planets operates and how tightly bound it is is something we can only infer from various, sometimes conflicting sources.

So, naturally, I'm going to try and unconflict 'em.

Whatever Happened To Those Chaos Dwarfs, Anyway?

The work of Hieronymus Bosch - proof you don't need to stay in the 20th century for RPG ideas.

 So, them thar Chaos Dwarfs of mine.  I've done a little bit more on them since you last saw them, although to be honest I've struggled to keep up much work on them.  I keep meaning to fix it at weekends and then on any given weekend something always seems to come up.

Still, less excuses more pictures, right?