In less than a week we will be running our next Kickstarter. This one is to fund the manufacture and expansion of our Breaker range of miniatures. If you've been following Breaker Press for a while, you've probably seen images of some of these sculpts appear over the last year and a half (yes, the gears grind slowly at Breaker Press). It is finally time to send them to the caster, but we need your help. Female Breaker Gen-Mod. We are starting things off with the two Gen-Mods that we've been sitting on for quite some time. These will be the basis for the Kickstarter campaign. The campaign is going to start small - we just need to raise enough money to cast and ship these two models. Male Breaker Gen-Mod. If the campaign goes well, the Stretch Goals will be determined by you, the community. The first Survey went up and the first Stretch Goal will be for the female Breaker Crew Leader. Female Breaker Crew Leader. Hopefully, we can work our way through all...

I have a lot of friends doing a lot of cool stuff. One of those friends has a project that is currently on Kickstarter. It is called  Ruin & Conquest  and it is a system-agnostic campaign setting for whatever fantasy RPG you love. Brinton Williams has thrown his heart and soul into this tome and has gathered a whole host of top notch analog artists to bring his vision to gritty black ink on white paper. Go over to Kickstarter and check it out . The funding push will end on Friday October 26th, so don't sleep on it. Also, it looks like his Facebook group could use a boost too, so if you're on Facebook go Like Ruin & Conquest there . I've never met Jason at Thunderchild Miniatures , but we both ran our first Kickstarters simultaneously a few years back and I have been following his work ever since. He is dedicated to his craft, that is for sure. His next Kickstarter launches this weekend, on Saturday October 20th. This time around he is releasing a miniature bo...

Breaker Childern - Art by Filip Dudek The Children of FerrumSky  Childbirth is strictly manipulated by the corporations. A spike in births can devastate the supplies on the colony ships or within the colonies themselves, or at least that is the statement continuously fed to the Tracted. Those who wish to bring new life into the world have two options. One is to increase their workload in order to pay for the additional resources needed to provide even the most basic provisions to the child. The other is to enter the Gen-Mod program. The child will be given up to the orphanages at birth, but a couple can bring new life into the world at limited expense to themselves. The children raised by their families are put to work as soon as they are able to lift or carry objects. During feeding times the children bring buckets of food and water to the work sites, and more children carry the buckets of waste away. When a child is old enough to swing a pick or sift rocks, they will often be...

At AdeptiCon we debuted three new releases and they are available on the Breaker Press webstore now! Broken Contract The Day-to-Day Starter Box This Starter Box is a revised and reimagined version of last year's starter box. The box we brought out to the world through Kickstarter last year contained a lot of stuff, but in retrospect may have been a touch overwhelming to new players. The focus then was on creating a sandbox for players who wanted to create their own characters and crews, but it was too much stuff to make a smooth introduction. The Day-to-Day Starter Box seeks to resolve that by adding our Introductory Episode Book, The Day-to-Day and keeping the cards and models strictly to those on the sample crew rosters included in the book. The three scenarios are meant to guide the players through progressively more involved Acts, composing a mini-campaign called an Episode.  The Day-to-Day Starter Box is the perfect introduction to the miniature game, ...

Art by Filip Dudek We've been holding back on the next Kickstarter while we cache some new assets to work with, both in the way of sculpts and art. Money is most often the thing that slows down progress, but artist, sculptor, and even my own availability can all affect progress. While we've been accumulating those assets, Hal, Aaron, and I have had talks about what we want to be the focus of the next Kickstarter, and we came to the conclusion that filling out the range of the Breakers is a good starting point, and depending on how that goes, we'll do the same with Black Squadron, and the other factions that are present in the mines: the Knife Syndicate and FerrumSky Loyalists. Art by Filip Dudek How do we determine what is missing from the range? After careful consideration, we want the range for each Faction to include a multi-part male and female model for each of: Child, Teen, Adult, Leader, and Gen-Mod. Additionally, each range would benefit from about 5 easy ...

Chris from Slow Death Games/Wild in the Streets isn't going to be able to make it to AdeptiCon this year so the Breaker Press Games booth is going to be running Wild in the Streets demos in addition to our yearly introduction to Broken Contract . This means that I'm going to need suitable scenery to use for demo purposes, as well as for photos used in Tooth Chipper Fanzine . With that in mind, I looked around the internet in search of buildings that fit my vision of the hip neighborhoods I've frequented around the country as my old bands toured. Everywhere I looked, the modern buildings I was most drawn to were all from the TT Combat City Scenics line. I looked at their entire range, and even though their old theatre, comic book store, and music shop all seemed like automatic selections, I needed to get the most bang and flexibility for my buck, so I ordered their Take Away set online, which is meant to be a stripmall with 3 restaurants in it. Eagerly, I waited f...

(Editor's Note: People have been asking about Drugs used in the FerrumSky Mines for a while. It just so happens that in February of 2016 I jotted down the names of six different drugs and possible game effects. A year and 1 month later, I've crafted explanations and tweaked the effects of what they do. Let me know what you think. -Nick) Common Drugs Found in the FerrumSky Mines Meeting the daily quotas set by the FerrumSky would be a difficult, if not impossible task, were it not for those willing to upset the delicate chemical balance within their own bodies. Work enhancing drugs are often used by the most fervent Loyalists, but even the average miner might find cause to extend their efficiency for the day for some goal outside themselves. Perhaps they have a child to care for, or a friend on their crew who is injured and they feel the need to compensate for. Of course there are those that just do drugs to dull the pain of their awful daily lives, or to step outside th...

Game Designer's Notebook is a series of articles discussing design decisions in progress. It's meant to discuss theory and intent, but also to get feedback on potential developments within the system. Let us know what you think here in the comments or on the  Broken Contract Playtesters Group . -Nick The most frequently asked question I had at AdeptiCon was, "where do you see the story going in the future?" and when probed most people were trying to find out "what other factions do you foresee?" This is a tricky question from a designer's perspective because we tend to have a multitude of ideas swimming in our heads but limited resources to carry them out. You don't want to finish running a demo, get someone interested in your fledgling game, and then prattle on about your ideas for "x", "y", or "z" faction and have them waiting until "z" faction comes out to get into your game, particularly when "z...

Drones are used extensively throughout the FerrumSky mines to monitor all of the work sites and barracks areas. They exist to ensure everything is functioning smoothly. Surveillance Drones are equipped with a central wide angle lense camera eye and a stereo microphone array to be the eyes and ears of the administrators situated above ground. Drone pilots sit for endless hours each day in a command center atop the mine watching and listening. The mines are an expansive space and every area cannot be directly monitored by the Prods, so the Surveillance Drones patrol and occasionally engage workers who have wandered out of bounds. In case of these circumstances they are equipped with an Arc Discharger. The Arc Discharger is identical in effect to the Arc Pistol carried by many of Black Squadron Security staff. Quietly swooping in with the Arc Discharger, a Breaker can be felled with this short ranged taser weapon while the pilot radios the nearest officer to restrain the victim. ...

Mike and Aaron running demos at AdeptiCon2016! Being a former Chicago resident and only living an hour and a half away by car in my new home of Milwaukee, AdeptiCon, as the largest miniature wargaming event in the country, is a "must attend" event. The organizers and volunteer staff are hugely accommodating and are amazingly supportive of small companies. This year, as a special treat, two friends who I hadn't seen in a decade agreed to make the trek from Buffalo, NY and San Diego, CA respectively, to help me out and run demos. I'd like to share our history briefly. Back in the late 90's I worked for GW and Mike and Aaron were my co-workers. Less than a year after starting work at GW#108 in Buffalo, NY, I was promoted to manager and these two gentlemen were two of my most prized employees because of their passion for gaming and their understanding of the mission: to build the wargaming hobby. We all left GW#108 in 2001 and over the next few years we all went...