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?