Troublemakers prototype. It's been a busy summer and I've been jumping from project to project based on time, weather, and availability. I was working on a bunch of Broken Contract scenery projects and the custom boards for a few of the Kickstarter Backers but it just got too hot in the attic to work up there, so I moved on to the painted models for those same backers, and took up temporary painting residence in our living room. We've also had a lot of visitors and a few short trips of our own to go on. My partner, Lisa, and I, went out to Cincinnati, Ohio to visit our friend Jami. Jami requested we bring Broken Contract and Troublemakers with us because she wanted to try both of them. Troublemakers was a project that had been sitting for a while untouched so it was a little thrilling to crack it out and play it with fresh eyes. Our Harlow, illustrated by Blutt.  The Genesis of Troublemakers I lived in Chicago from 2006-2014. During my time there I would see...

One of the things that narrative wargamers want is the ability to create their own characters so that they can develop their own storylines and rivalries. We want to encourage this sort of game play and engagement so a while back I had created and posted very basic character creation rules. A lot has transpired since then and it was time to update them to make the most of all the cards available to you now. While revisiting character creation I thought it was about time I added a point system to allow for the "matched play" that a lot of wargamers are used to. This is a very open system but it still creates a functional structure for gamers of all stripes. It is still in the playtesting stages so feedback is welcomed and encouraged! -Nick Creating Characters and Assembling a Crew Every Broken Contract Supplement comes with Characters to play, but you might want to create your own story lines, scenarios, and Characters. Creating your own Characters can be very rewarding...

AdeptiCon 2016 Broken Contract Background and Rulebooks. For AdeptiCon 2016 I produced a very short run of Broken Contract Rule and Background books. I don't want anyone who didn't attend feeling left out on the contents so I've collected the files and uploaded them to Dropbox, along with a PDF file handy for printing out your own Character Dashboards and chits so you can get up and playing with the models and cards in your possession. I did deliberately omit the covers of both books for home printing. If you would like to see the covers added, let me know and I will do so. Broken Contract Background Book Broken Contract Playtest Rules 3-31-16 Broken Contract Character Dashboard and Chits NEW! Broken Contract Character and Crew Creation Rules NEW 5/28/16! Broken Contract Act: Escape Route What is in the Broken Contract Background Book? The Broken Contract Background Book is an overview of the FerrumSky setting. In a way, much of it is a collection of ess...

Going over the Actions and Interruptions play cards as I set up the scenario. Photo: Nathan Wenig Back in July I sat down with my buddy Nathan and play tested a couple of scenarios at his home. He seemed to really enjoy himself and it had been a while since I had done any playtesting so I was looking at the game with fresh eyes. We talked about how the games went and my mind started cranking on his feedback and feedback I had gotten in May/June from a playtesting group in Spain headed up by @Robh, one of the Kickstarter backers. My brain was processing various changes I wanted to make and I was excited to dive back into the ruleset and start making tweaks. A short while later Nate started pushing for me to run an event at Realm of the Dragon in Wauwatosa, WI . I happily said, "Yes!" Passing out the new Character Dashboards designed by Sam Alcarez. Photo: Nathan Wenig During the weeks before the event I set up an event on MeetUp.com and let my new semi-regul...

Greetings! If you're a first time visitor or someone who's been following the series, thank you for reading. My apologies to anyone who came looking on Sunday for the latest scenery post and found none. It was a busy and stressful weekend so I fell off schedule. That being said, we're back on track with our Sun/Wed schedule, so here it goes. As might be expected, this one is very picture heavy.    This is where we left off with the freight elevator car in Making Mine Scenery X . As promised, I worked on detailing it out. Today we'll add some additional rails/bumpers, signage, and the elevator control box which is where we are going to start.   The sunlight was so strong you can't see the hole I drilled, but I had cut a piece of StripeStyrene tube about 3/16" (about the width of 3 pieces of 1/16" rod, pictured next to it. The idea was to create a lever by gluing the rod in the hole I drilled. Here's a shot of the rod gluing in ...

Foreboding! Dust hung heavy in the air. With a fleeting moment's reprieve from the Prods they saw their holy grail. Across the chasm was a sealed off tunnel that they believed would ultimately lead them out of the mines and into the Bonelands. But first they had to cross the chasm and find a way through those panels. That's when they heard the approaching shouts coming towards them. The Prods were catching up. Well that isn't very pretty is it? Last time we saw the chasm it looked like this (built in Making Mine Scenery Part III and Making Mine Scenery Part IV ). With the piece completed I then followed all of the painting steps in Making Mine Scenery Part I and Making Mine Scenery Part II . Those painting stages transformed that messy looking board section into what we see in the the next photo. That's more like it! I wanted the chasm to be an undetermined depth so I chose to paint it Citadel Chaos Black. I popped out the girders and drybrushed ...

Callea’s coughing was a regular fixture in the mines. She never could afford a breather and they aren’t standard issue. Instead, she wore a damp bandana over her mouth while she worked. She labored hard, pickaxe in hand, pausing to violently cough here and there. When she worked it through she just swung harder to keep pace with the other miners. She never wanted to be perceived as weak or lesser than despite her illness. Today the coughing fit started and it wouldn’t stop. Worrying about quotas, Overseer Billins told her to get back to work, an impossible request. Kollis dropped his shovel to go to her aid. That’s when he saw the blood staining her hands and mouth. Still she coughed. Then she choked. Overseer Billins was yelling for Kollis to get back to work, and Callea was on the ground, eyes vacant, blood dribbling from her mouth. He didn’t think. Kollis scooped her up and put her into the ore cart she was filling and he started pushing toward the exit. The words “Stand Down!” echo...

Solo play testing from last Thursday to feel out if the scenario would work, and actually visualize how it will play. This is an approximation of the board sections for 'Get Kellerman'. The black rectangle would be a giant fan, the grey rectangle is a freight elevator, and a couple of those tunnels will end in rubble/active mining area. In my mind, scenarios are what keep a game varied and interesting. Games like Necromunda and Zombicide, though very different games, got a lot of their personality from an ever changing play environment defined by the scenarios themselves. With that in mind, I knew that linking the scenarios to create an ongoing narrative would be one of the defining characteristics of Broken Contract, but that would only be of value if the scenarios themselves were varied, interesting, and thematic. Thus far, I've play tested a half dozen different scenarios drawing off of the general narrative and the constraints of how I envision the mines. The init...

Will Blood analyzing the board, probably relating the events to some obscure peroid in history, or just wanting gratuitous violence to ensue. He's a complex man. Preparing for AdeptiCon had pushed Broken Contract to the backseat for about a month. Art was being worked on and editing was still happening as I commuted on the train, but there was no time for play testing with myself and many of my play testers immersed in AdeptiCon related projects. Regardless, I brought all of my Broken Contract stuff with me to AdeptiCon in case anyone asked to try it out. A few people did ask, but with the fervor of everything else going I kept my play testing gear up in my room most of the time. On Saturday, however, there was some downtime and Dave Koszka from my old home town of Buffalo, NY asked to give it a go. I was lucky enough to have an hour or so to meet up with him right after his dinner break on Saturday so we sat down to give it a whirl. I gave him the option of trying an already...

Concept art by Sam Alcarez. Some tweaks and they would make a great Breaker. They're in some sort of nether realm between Breaker and Security Officer with that baton. Perhaps its stolen? When I envisioned the eventual kick off to Broken Contract and the type of boxed game I wanted to strive for it to be, I was really targeting the Zombicide model. They ran a Kickstarter for this large 12"x12" square box packed full of high quality game tiles, miniatures, and cards. I've studied both of their Kickstarters (and the games themselves) in depth and they really had a lot of the art development done and miniature sculpts in hand. Much of the development was done and they just needed capital to cover manufacturing to launch Season 1. I, on the other hand, have the game mechanics pretty well set and have stumbled upon sketch artists engaged in "realizing the dream," willing to work in hope of some form eventual reward - but I don't have money to pay sculpto...

We're still working to define the look of the Security Officers in Broken Contract. Sam has come up with a variety of looks and we're trying to nail down the one that both defines them and makes them interesting for others to eventually paint figures of and play in the game. I happened to notice that Sam has been using consistent posing while we've worked on the look, so I came up with the idea of making paper dolls of his art so that I could combine elements and find what works together. Standing in FedEx Office I printed out his art and then broke out the scissors and got cutting.and pasting. This was a new piece of art Sam provided to me after the last blog post. The goal was to define a much more fascist looking Security Officer. He looks like a loyal boot boy for sure with his high boots, high collar, fitted uniform, and clean cut hair. I was concerned he didn't look rugged enough though, with the horrible working conditions and disparity. Also, the diagonal s...

Security Officer concept art by Sam Alcarez. The other day I had a great meeting with Sam Alcarez, the new artist working on Broken Contract. One of the most important parts of developing a game like Broken Contract is defining the look and feel of the game. There are so many ways to depict security forces in the future, and they can go to differing extremes. You can go for completely tooled up, heavily armored cops with the greatest in technological advancements like Robo-Cop, some sort of mech, or just a heavily armored "super soldier" sort of look. Then there is the other extreme, like the stripped down, lightly armored but precisely uniform fascist looking peace keepers in The Hunger Games. Of course, in a sci-fi western like Broken Contract you can envision any manner of "space cowboy." So there is a huge variety of looks and feels we could go for. Katniss being led away by peace keepers in one of The Hunger Games movies. Its the future but they aren...