Time and TiDe wait for no one

Thought this would be a good time to chat about timings and the wonderful world of Drowned Earth.

Time is something few of us ever have quite enough of but at the same time entirely too much. What we need is the right sort of time.

Recently I’ve had very little in the way of gaming time, life in general now means a night of weekend free to roll dice and talk shit is a lot trickier than it used to be. (Not that this is a moan life before hobby is just a fact)

But it a have time for (frankly nonsense) blog posts like this gem.

Demo the demo

Hey it’s been a while since the last post and a while since the one before that. This is completely my fault and I will be having a proper talking to myself about my poor performance at my next review...

This time I’m going to talk a bit about demoing, not how to do it well just how I like to approach it.

Firstly there is no one right way to demo as with most things it comes down to finding your own style and playing to your strengths. For example I can talk enthusiastically about pretty much anything but I’m terrible at facts and figures. So when I demo I’m more “oh oh try this thing it’s cool” and less “this works like that’s and you’ll take this for when that happens”

Ho ho ho merry Planters

So it's planters season in the world of The Drowned Earth, which is a thing that happens... okay I've slightly out the loop and have done little to no work to help this month long Wayfarer lead push of the game, Miss a dinosaur ate my homework I swear. (in all honesty life has been a tiny bit hectic of late).
In an effort to address the balance slightly while I scramble around trying to find a free couple of hours to run anything before the month is over, I thought I would do a run down of what Planters Season is and what's happening.

In game Planter's season is somewhere between a harvest festival and easter. The farmers have worked the fields, and now that the monsoons have passed adventurers can skip off into the jungle looking for treasure and dinosaur eggs, maybe chocolate too I'm unsure if that plant survived the floods.

Sunk but not lost.

So some of you may have seen that earlier this month I was supposed to running a Drowned Earth tournament at my FLGS Dark Sphere. You may also have noticed that this never actually happened.

It was a bit gutting but these things happen, seems the date didn't work for everyone and the game scene locally might not be at that point yet where people are looking for tournaments. We will get there hopefully, a few more local players and a few more small local events like leagues and demo nights we should be heading in the right direction.

Unfortunately I've not been able to do much of anything in the world of Ulaya as we've been in the middle of the school holidays so I've been jumping between covering time off at work, spending time with my kids, and if I'm lucky stopping to catch my breath. I've not even managed any painting in the last few weeks, but hopefully that will change soon.

Putting the art in Artefacters

My first crew is now fully painted. Which means I can now put them on the table without that little voice inside my head screaming “paint your shit”. 

I’ll admit that I’m a bit of a paint... not snob we’ll say enthusiast. If I’m going to use models I want them to be painted, and I’ll happily build a list based on what’s painted instead of what’s most useful. 
This is partly because because I’m a lot better at painting than I am at gaming (this isn’t saying much I’m terrible at gaming) also because I really enjoy painting, that’s my hobby and rolling dice is just a bonus.

Now I try not to inflict my own hobby hang ups on to other players, if you like to paint then paint but I’ll always encourage painting especially at events. (This is a whole different argument that I’ve had many times).

T Wreaks slow grow.

So in the strong gaming tradition of picking up a new system the locals decided that a slow grow would be a good place to start.
I'm always keen on a slow grow as it encourages painting and playing new people which I'm slightly better at then actually playing games.

There is an official league which I believe is currently being fine tuned by the TDE team but I decided to run my own. Partly because its fun to put something together and partly because if someone asks me a question about the rules I can make something up then change it to fit, which saves me loads of time reading an official pack.

Courier crisis

So I got to sit down for my first proper game of TDE yesterday. We were both a bit nervous and had to fumble around here and there but fun was had.

Okay me and local player and all round nice guy James headed along to Dark Sphere Shepherds Bush for a 100point game. Luckily DS have a huge trove of terrain so after I collected up all the plants and trees and they set up a bunch of multi-storey buildings we had a table. The mat was a bit on the dry side but we just called anything tarmac as water. (Problem solvers)

We had our crews set as the starter box 100pts crews I was running my (almost painted) Artefacters and James ran his Militia.

Dino-Might

Now is my chance to do something that I rarely get to do as an adult and that is talk about dinosaurs. I'm fairly excited about this because as we all agree dinosaurs are cool.

Currently TDE has five types of Sors, each with a different feel and use. For those that don't know in TDE you can hire dinos to your crew without restriction, they can run around can cause trouble but they can't take interact actions or benefit from any in faction bonuses.  This works as a great balance so that you be a dino heavy as you like but it will hurt you during the scenario if you go to far.

So what sors do you have to choose from?

Learn by doing

So I’m pleased to say that my first (hopefully not my last) The Drowned Earth event was a success!
("Event" might be over stating things but it's my blog so event is what we’re calling it.) What we had was an informal meet up and intro session punctuated by me shouting out encouragement.

I’ll start from the beginning just in case you fancy doing something similar.

Okay so I had some cool models and a basic (very basic) grasp of the rules, add to this a general over excitement and a drive to make others just as excited I decided that if there wasn’t a ready supply of players I would have to hunt some down.

Is paint water restricted movement?

 So you have you're lovely new models rattling about in a box, but you want to use them to fight dinosaurs the shallow of a pond so you'll need to get them ready.

Now I'm far from an expert painter (far from an expert anything to be honest) but I can give you a rough guide for how to take your models from bits of metal to a single lump of colourful metal.

First thing you need to do is clean and build the models, by clean I mean take off any flash (excess material left over from casting) tackle the mold lines (lines where to cast molds met). For this you'll want some tools, I normally have a Stanley knife, a pair of clippers, and a small file. The general idea is to cut or scrap off any flash, smooth down any line with the back of the knife or the file.  Both of these things can be as thorough or brief as you wish. the cleaner the model the better end result but if you don't get everyone it's not the end of the world (well it is in game but that was years ago) just make sure you take care of any excess material around where parts join as you'll want to get a got fit later on.

Getting started.

So you're thinking about starting The Drowned Earth? Me too, what a coincidence. Let's take a look at what you'll need to get started.

Now me, I would always start with lovely shiny new models but let's pretend to be logical and start with the rules?

You have two options for the rulebook either a free pdf (here) which has all the rules. Or you have the very pretty hardback rulebook (here) Which has the rules along with all the fluff and character details Its a bit over £30 but that's a fair price for a shiny book. I don't have the actual book (yet) because I picked it up then put it back down while at Salute and I was kicking myself about it all the way home.

Ignorance is bliss.

Welcome to TiDE the largely uninformed, over excited, and generally immature blog which will follow my adventures in The Drowned Earth. (Feels like it needs a “dun dun duuuun”)

When I say uninformed I honestly mean it. My current experience with the system can be boiled down to: saw at Salute, thought that gorilla has a tiny lizard friend? Here’s my money.

This was followed by a growing excitement about the game as I found out more about it through the tested method of lazy google and YouTube browsing while I should be working.