Der erste yituTALK ist noch nicht´mal Zuende - Und schon ´nen weiteren am Wickel.
Nach Faszination Mortheim sollten meine Stammblogleser wissen das ich von der Idee eines Skimish-Tabletops im Freundeskreis begeistert bin.
Grund genug mich in der Szene umzuschauen. Dabei habe ich einen dieser Blogger, Cianty, schon seit einer Weile in der BlogRoll. Ich fand im Web 2 deutschsprachige Blogger (Cianty und Tom), die aber, so wie der WAR-Blogger Zizlak, die Blogs in englischer Sprache führen. Daher - um einen größeren Kreis an Lesern anzusprechen, baten Sie um ein englisches Interview. Schon IRRE, drei GERMANS führen ´nen englisches Interview.
Well...
Have fun to READ - und so
Yitu
Cianty, could you please write a short introduction of yourself and "Border Town Burning"?
I am 25 years old and live in Bremen. I will finish my diploma thesis by the end of this year and then I?ll move to Berlin, where I hope to find a new gaming group. Border Town Border Town Burning is a supplement for the Mordheim tabletop game, that I wrote with a couple of friends.
I started wargaming in 1998 with a Beastman army for Warhammer, which had just been released as an individual Chaos army. Warhammer was a cool new experience for me, but constantly losing against missile heavy Empire or Dwarf armies quickly dampened my enthusiasm. When Mordheim was released one year later, I was immediately hooked. Winning a battle is not everything there as you are more focussed on the overall development of your warband.
Gaining experience, earning money and avoiding serious injuries counts more than a mere win and you can end up being better off than your opponent even if you lost the preceding battle. Inspired by the other alternate settings for Mordheim ? Lustria and Khemri ? me and my group started working on a Chaos Wastes/Cathayan setting, which was basically a collection of house rules we used, such as a homebrewed warband for Marauders of Chaos, which was never done officially. It then evolved into something bigger when Stuart Cresswell contacted me and joined the project. It now is a full-fledged Mordheim supplement providing not only an alternate setting but additional campaign rules and more.
Tom, how did you meet Cianty? Did you find him on the Web?
Despite our frequent online interactions, Cianty and I haven?t had a chance to meet ?in real life? yet. But this is a thing we will be able to remedy in the not so distant future, as there will be the 3rd Boring Mordheim Meeting organised by Cianty, that I would like to attend.
War ja fast KLAR... die Generation MO... nur noch via Web. Kicher... Ich sollte mal NIX sagen.
Meine Freunde Leben auch alle auf der Welt verstreut...
Cianty, your blog and wargames buildings are very impressive...
Finde das sogar ein wenig UNTERTRIEBEN. Schaut nur...
...da würde Harrys Ao-Lai-Herz vor Freude hüpfen, oder Ghanur? ...und hier...
...und hier Treffen Chaostypen auf Ciantys Cathay-Monks...
...und zum Schluß ein Bild von Ciantys Truppe:
Wer mehr sehen möchte soll den Surftipps am ENDE des Interviews folgen!
Players who don’t have the Mordheim starter box with all paper buildings, how are they supposed to get houses, ruines etc. Or in other words, how can I, as an example, produce/buy etc. buildings? Any quick solution? (Every player has 3-5 models, but enough houses?)
Oh, thank you! That’s a tough question, though. First of all, I think it’s not that bad, if you don’t have the lousy paper buildings from the original box, because they look horrible. They are great for starting off quickly and getting some games of Mordheim in. But once you are sure you like the game and want to play a longer campaign, you should really start assembling a proper gaming table. The time and money you save from not having to buy and paint an entire army can then be spent on an awesome gaming board.
The standard scenery for Mordheim consists of ruined buildings of course. For Border Town Burning, which is set in the North-east of the Warhammer world, you would need forest section and snow-clad pieces instead. And if you were playing in Lustria, you would need jungle scenery. It really depends on which setting you want to play in so you should decide on that first. Maybe you already have some buildings from Warhammer or you want to play pirates skirmish too, such as Legends of the High Seas from Warhammer Historical, then you could reuse the terrain for that as well. In general, medieval fantasy buildings probably have the best multiuse.
The fastest way of getting buildings is, of course, purchasing them. There are some great manufacturers of resin buildings out there such as Forge World or Pardulon. The recently founded company Tabletop World produces incredible resin pieces and I will be using their products for my current project. However, a full table of high quality terrain becomes expensive rather quickly. And self-built terrain does not necessarily look worse than purchased resin houses. You can see some awesome scratch-built scenery on Tom’s Boring Mordheim Forum as well as on the Gidian-Gelände Forum. Wolfgang’s Mordheim table is the standard example for an incredible scratch-built Mordheim table but there is more stuff out there. The effort you have to spend on such buildings depends on the results you want to achieve. Just as you cannot paint a miniature to a Golden Demon standard in one or two hours, you cannot expect to build a house in one hour.
Schaut Euch einfach diese Ecke hier an... und die HIER...
Wenn Ihr dann wieder Augen für dieses Interview habt... Ich warte auf Euch.
But the more experience you have, the quicker you can achieve satisfying results. It depends on your practice and expectations you have. Tom can tell you more about scratch-building houses as his Mordheim table is fully self-made.
Die Alternativen:
Mordheim-Platte bei ebay für 1.000 Euro, der Verkäufer bietet auch div. Mordheim-Warbands für "ab 1 Euro" an. Darunter leckere Amazonen-Schnitten - Mjam.
Oder...
Tom: I think there is nothing wrong with cardboard buildings or with buying buildings if you need scenery quickly and have the bucks. However for me there is a lot of joy in making things myself and I get a kick out of being able to design my own buildings and knowing that they are virtually free of cost.
The most important part of the hobby for me is painting and modelling, and so I personally have always enjoyed building scenery myself, rather than buying it. Of course, there is no quick fix for beautiful urban scenery. The only way is to invest a lot of time.
However, there are a few “shortcuts” that will allow you to get buildings on the table in a reasonable amount of time.
A) Never make “just one” building at a time. For regular sized houses for example, I try to always build 2 or 3 at a time. It is considerably more economic to use the waiting time that one building needs to dry to assemble the other. This may sound fairly obvious, but surprisingly few people actually do it. Be bold and go for it. After all, you have a table to fill!
B ) Synchronise steps: Finish all similar steps for buildings before moving onto the next. E.g. cut out all walls, for all buildings in one go then proceed to glueing all the buildings. That way you avoid having to go “back”. It requires a little discipline but also helps working faster, because you are not forced to multi-task. Of course, this makes the activity a little more mechanic, but again, it speeds things up.
C) My buildings are usually a “skeleton” of foamcore (see below) with a cardboard/balsa roof (if any), on a foamcore/wooden base and primed with white wall paint (and subsequent black acrylic spray).
D) Technique: Learn to drybrush! Painting buildings is much easier than painting miniatures. Get a few large brushes (5mm to 3cm) and practice drybrushing a little if you are not familiar with it already. You can usually paint 99% of a building with the drybrusing technique. The good news: it’s fast and looks great on scenery.
E) Technique: Stippling. That comes in very handy when you want to create facades with chipping paint. Use any old rush for that (preferably one that has already completely lost its tip).
F) Technique: for both drybrushing and stippling, the golden rule is, don’t be shy. Go for it. If you are not entirely sure of the colour you picked, use a dark tone that you can easily build on. Just make sure you have wiped off 80% of the paint and your brush is 200% dry before drybrushing. For ANY painting technique, do it in layers, and use at least 3 different shades, making sure that each new layer lets some of the previous shine through here and there. E.g. when drybrusing, grow more and more gentle with each layer. Lastly, when drybrushing, I like to brush in as many directions as possible to avoid ugly “smears”. That means that I brush a few strokes horizontally, then vertically and then diagonally. Always making sure I am burshing “against” the relief to avoid paint getting into the recesses (that’s what you want to avoid at all costs!)
G) Colours: when drybrushing, build your colours up gradually. Usually 3 shades are enough. But more is better. Don’t hesitate to experiment with colours a little. Eg. I like to start stone walls with a heavy brown drybrush, and then blend in grey gradually. Stone is not “just grey”. And it’s the same with virtually any part of a building.
H) Materials: I like to use foamcore (like most people) for walls. It’s basically a cardboard/foam/cardboard sandwitch plate, that is available in hobby, paper and home improvement stores. Once you have identified a source for that stuff (not the easiest part in my opinion) you are basically set to go.
I) Materials: Cereal packets. Easy to obtain, this is my favourite source of cardboard for roof and floor tiles.
J)Materials: Balsa wood. A must for ANY medieval building. I use it to make window frames, floors, furniture… If you don’t have any Balsa wood, go buy some NOW.
K) Materials: Glue. The ideal thing is white wood glue. “Holzleim” in german. Also often called PVA (Poly Vinyl Acetat) Glue or something similar. Forget super-glue, unless you are glueing on small detail like door knobs.
L)Materials: Sand. I like to sand corners and cracks. It gives stone floors a more realistic look.
M) Materials: White interior paint. The regular stuff used for walls inside buildings. The colour doesn’t really matter. In fact, I guess getting black interior would be even better since you then save time and money on the black primer. Why apply this to the assembled building? I find it gives the walls texture, some hardness and it protects the foamcore from degradation by most acrylic sprays.
Despite all, you will need to be a little patient. Scenery other than tables, heaps of rubble do take time. But rest assured, it will pay off in the end.
Cianty, the BTB-Rulebook is a 100% fan production, right?
Yes, it was developed by me and my gaming group at first. Then Chris de la Rosa from the old Mordheim forum joined the project and helped me with proof-reading and some stuff. My group then took a longer break for wargaming so nothing happened with BTB. Then Stuart Cresswell contacted me and asked me to join the Nemesis Crown development team who were doing a Mordheim supplement based on the Warhammer summer campaign of that name. My contributions to that were very small from a rules perspective, what I did was layout the rules for a proper PDF release.
After that, me and Stu worked on the BTB supplement again until it was completed, running parallel BTB campaigns; me here in Bremen, GER, at my place, him at the GW store in Poole, UK.
Cianty, when I take a look to the BTB-Rulebook, then I have a deep feeling to be 20 years younger again. At this time I had several pnp-rulebooks, dozens of copies of charactersheets etc.(I have all this stuff nowadays stored in a bookshelf in my old Kinderzimmer.) Do you plan a Book-On-Demand-Service or an eBook-Version (without the background-pictures for readability)?
There were several requests about whether the BTB supplement will be available as a properly bound book and this just came up again last week-end, when I hosted a small Mordheim Meeting with members of Tom’s Boring Mordheim Forum. Well, Mordheim, Warhammer and everything related to it belongs to Games Workshop and we couldn’t sell the book. Maybe we will properly print off a few copies soon but that would be for personal use only and not openly available. We are on very good terms with Games Workshop currently and we don’t want to risk that. Besides, the project was always intended as ‘by the fans, for the fans’, anyway. We just wrote down the rules that we enjoyed in our campaigns and really only want to allow other gamers to benefit from that.
We don’t want to sell that.
Cianty, your Idea, to start a campaign which leads to a story... a little bit like my WHFB-“Karottenkrieg”... seems to be a very good combination of battle and story. (Pointing to Story-Wahrnehmung in Warhammer - und Anderswo, Entscheidungen und Konsequenzen and Timesink vs. Storytelling - oder warum ich trotzdem WARhammer spiele) How do you came to this?
Mordheim beautifully encourages campaign play with the character development and the equipment options. But after some time you really ask yourself: what am I working towards? What can I achieve? The Mordheim background is full of tales of fame and fortune and we were missing this in the rules. There were no campaign objectives that you could try to achieve so we came up with some, interwove them with the exploration charts, random happenings and scenarios and ended up with a sort of narrative non-linear campaign system, that doesn’t require a Game Master.
Did you had a model?
You mean for the story-line? No, we just came with something including Chaos Marauders and the Cathayan defenders because that was obvious from the setting. We then added more objectives for the other common warbands from Mordheim so that in the end you have a variety of parties who all contribute to the basic story. Of course, these objectives have to be in line with the character of the respective races and warbands, such as Orcs or Skaven. You can’t just have Skaven defend the Cathayan peasants against the marauding hordes of Chaos.
My Karottenkrieg-campaign follows a story of “breadcrumb” from a carote-field to the "Desert of Nagash" and further to the deep jungle south of Khemri. A goblin shaman found on this dwarfen carote field a source of magic power. Something directed him to the south. In fact this field was part of a huge battlefield in the past of khemri. Did you think that I can modify the cathay-BTB-ruleset to fit to the Karottenkrieg?
The campaign system is pretty complex and designed specifically for the setting. It makes use of the various rules sections such random happenings, exploration charts, etc. If you want to have different objectives, then you will need different factors that further your individual objective. You can easily take the campaign system with the objectives but you have to redesign all the factors and also adjust them to your setting, such as Khemri. The story-line you mentioned is just one perspective of many. In a campaign there are numerous warbands and each has its own objective, experiencing the events from their own perspective, driven by its own motivations. You need objective rules for each involved side and then make them all work together and interact.
It took us over a year just to figure out how to do this alone.
OK. Will slightly modify your System…
Cianty, you attended a BTB-Meeting in Bremen a few days ago. Any further plans to gather some BTB fans here in Germany?
The “Boring Mordheim Meeting” is wonderful kind of tradition on Tom’s Boring Mordheim Forum. Last year, Tom invited us to come to his place in Vienna and this year there already was a meeting in Amsterdam earlier this year. Unfortunately I couldn’t make it to either. Then a few months ago, a member had the idea of holding a meeting at my place and I agreed. Of course, I had to present my Border Town Burning scenery and play some of the scenarios from the book with the guys. At the end of the year I will be moving to Berlin so I will have to see how strong the Mordheim community is there and if I can find some people who want to play BTB instead of regular Mordheim. At the very least, I hope to hold another ‘Boring Meeting’ there and meet some of the guys from the forum again, and finally, meet Tom as well.
Soviel dazu... Zurück zur deutschen Sprache. Danke an Cianty und Tom für die vielen Infos. Ich denke da schlagen jetzt ein paar Herzen höher...
- Border Town Burning-Website
- Toms (Boring) Border Town Burining-Forum
- Toms Blog
- Ciantys BlogDas wars dann für HEUTE.
"Ich komme wieder, keine Frage..."
(Wer hat das Zitat erkannt?)Yitu
PS: Morgen gibt´s ´nen Interview mit Markus Heitz zu Vampiren.
Video des Tages: golem.de hat ein Bericht zu "1 Jahr Warhammer Online" mit einem Video:
Yitu
Kleiner Nachtrag - Focke im Bunkerfoum:
Wieder einer "Infiziert..."