Tag: frag

FRAG: Some Graphic Design

@vonuberwald has been helping me design logos and covers for FRAG, the retro FPS tabletop battle game.

image

The game studio logo by @vonuberwald.

image

A first mock-up of the front cover. God, did I really write ‘twitch gaming’?

Please note that the artwork above is a place holder I found on Google Image search. I have no idea who drew that picture but I love them to bits. I’ll be looking for an illustrator able to do a similiar colour cover picture at some future point.

The same cover with some WIP logo text by @vonuberwald

Below are some more pictures from the FRAG rule book. None of the artwork is official, all of it dates back to when I wanted to make my home brew look nice for my friends.[[MORE]]

image
image
image

Some of the text is still being gone over, as the story has been altered quite heavily since the first draft (i.e, it’s actually a setting now, not just some text blurbs to give me excuse for me to bang converted miniatures together).

February Painting

More miniatures.

Doomguy is from Klukva Miniatures. Very clean resin casting, quite easy to paint.

The two ‘Elite Guard’ Nazi ladies are from Thrilling Tales’ She-Wolf characters pack. The models had a lot of flash but they’re old school in design and quite fun to paint.

Caleb and Corzo are from Wargames Foundry and their cowboy line – one of the only lines that has a cowboy wearing a poncho. There are plenty of good Calebs out there, but they’re all part of bundles, and none of those bundles have a passable Corzo in them.

Stuff I’ve Been Painting

 – Nazi Supersoldier on the left is from Dust Tactics, a convention exclusive so I’m told. Dust fans pls don’t REEE at me for ripping him off his exclusive base. I’m not sure how to use him in Konflikt 47 but in FRAG he’ll be an Uber-Mutant personality.

 – YOU HAVE TAKEN THE LEAD is a Warzone Capitol Airborne Ranger with the shoulder logos filed off.

– Waffen-SS Officer is made by Warlord Games. He’s wearing a late war spring pattern jacket over a dark grey uniform. He will be seeing use in Bolt Action, Konflikt 47 and FRAG as a platoon leader.

 – Nayla Erdogan is a former New Ottoman officer turned mercenary star ship officer (actually it’s a figure from the Infinity RPG miniatures range, but a buddy mentioned that it looked like one of his characters from a space setting he’s been talking about).

Ranger was tricky and I made a lot of mistakes. Getting the yellow right was hard. Quake Champions has such muddy colours most yellow paint is too bright. After an attempt at mixing darker yellows and dry brushing the breastplate I had to go back and give him a dark ink wash around the curves of the armour. The shoulder pads also didn’t look right when I tried to give them a worn metallic edge; I guess my mind sees reddish brown and just thinks ‘leather’.

He was also supposed be holding the dire orb but I was halfway through priming him before I noticed that I forgot to green stuff his hand. I really can’t explain how that happened.

Painting Germans for Bolt Action / Konflikt 47 / FRAG

I started a Bolt Action & Konflikt 47 army on the weekend and the first models are coming off the assembly line. I’ll be running mechanized Waffen-SS with veteran troops and SdKz251′s for everybody.Konflikt 47 is Warlord Games and Clockwork Goblin’s “Weird War” gaming system descended from their historical WW2 game Bolt Action. The non-weird stuff doubles as a fairly effective late war historical army.

Of course since FRAG includes a faction inspired by Wolfenstein 3D and Rise of the Triad, these gents will also be great for testing out the team weapon rules.

FRAG Update

I’m still writing a miniatures game. In fact all of the actual rules are in place, I just need to finalize the vehicle rules and the stuff that’s going in the ‘expansion pack’. Everything after that is balance tweaks and points cost adjustments.
FRAG is a tabletop battle game that adapts 90s FPS games into a nominally 28mm (actually scale neutral) mass combat system where armies of combatants clash in huge engagements.

Let’s have a look at how the factions of FRAG have turned out:

The Lost Battalion – An army of dimension jumping bad asses founded by the damned survivors of a Hellish incursion. Elite troops, very mobile, devastating heavy weapons.

Hell – The baddies from Doom. More demons inspired by other sources will appear in the expansion. Large hordes, strong characters, lots of spells. Character have a lot of options with bionics, spells, and hellish upgrades.

The Sidhe – A non-human race of mystical adventurers and knightly orders, dedicated to fighting demons. Hard to pin down in melee and able to use a variety of sneaky gadgets (including a Tome of Power analogue).

The New Order – Regular humans that fight alongside super-science and necromancy. They come from an alternate reality where European fascists made a pact with “the endless dark”. Weak regular troops but powerful special options.Nazi zombies are DLC only, sorry.

Earth Defense Force – Earth is backwards and repressive compared to the newly independent colonies, but it outnumbers them millions to one. The EDF are the people in charge of keeping it safe. They need to carefully deploy heavy weapon teams to get the most out of their firepower.

SHAMAN – A rogue AI turned bio-mechanical horror. Mixture of System Shock / Quake 2 influence. Most SHAMAN troops have a chance to self-resurrect. Can take special packs of screaming Kamikaze.

Personalities – Various ‘hero’ characters for use with certain armies.
Various characters based on popular mods like High Noon Drifter and Project MSX, also Shadow Warrior, Duke Nukem 3D, DUSK, Chasm: The Rift, the Doom movie, Doom 4 and Id Software’s D&D campaign.

Currently working on
 – Vehicle Rules
 – Better scenario rules (optional rolling for mission types, not just extermination missions)
 – More equipment (weird rocket weapons for the New Order, better artillery and air strike rules for the EDF)
– More Personalities
– Indoors skirmish system (working prototype)

Stuff being considered
  – Whether to add more elite units to the Sidhe and SHAMAN lists
  – Mini-Factions and sub-factions like Kage Corp (corporate samurai!), the Church of the Old Blood (cultists!), the Colonial Union (the high tech space humans), and a skeleton themed Hell faction
 – Balance issues
 – Rules readability

FRAG Update – Faction Five

FRAG is a tabletop game about mass battles in a universe inspired by 90s FPS games. This update concerns a new faction, development of lore, and a small piece on future plans.

The EDF Are Back
After a short time on the cutting room floor, the Earth Defence Force made it back into FRAG. Development was interesting in that a lot of unique ideas were tried but ultimately taken out. Psychic powers, robot ninjas, freeze rays, an Imperial Guard-esque order system, all things that were taken away. Despite some cyberpunk influences, the EDF remain an army of Poor Bloody Infantry.

This brings the current factions up to five:
 – The Lost Battalion, MIA space marines too angry to die or be corrupted. Doom with some other influences. Their units include marines, drones, power armoured cyborgs and the blood-crazed Slayers.
 – Hell. Represents the standard Doom enemy roster although the cybernetic upgrades and Hell magic lists enable some extra stuff.
 – The Sidhe. An agile faction inspired by Raven Software’s games. Warriors, wizards, giant stone golems, and weapons that summon flesh-eating ghosts.
– The New Order. Evil humans from a universe where Germany, Italy, and Spain won the Second World War. A very varied army where squishy soldiers fight alongside mutants, cyborgs, and necromancers.
– The EDF. The basic humans. Slower, squishier, and less flashy than the Lost Battalion or the New Order, they’re Earth’s soldiers and police with some commando and armoured support. They can take a lot of support equipment and their elite soldiers can receive cybernetic augmentation.

Lore & Game Origins
This game started off as a passion project to keep my mind off work. I added some little story details for each army as I wrote their lists, but these were not intended to be taken seriously. Recently though, I’ve found bits of the story lines coming together nicely.

There’s some lore developing as I add little blurbs to each unit profile, involving an oppressive Earth, rebel space colonies, the rise and fall of different ruling castes of Hell, and the possibility that the New Order aren’t really from a ‘Nazi victory’ alt-Earth…

If any proper lore gets written, it won’t be from the perspective of the marines, but probably some kind of Mulder & Scully duo that pick through everyone else’s mess. Just to highlight the absolute absurdity of a world of 90s FPS tropes.

Future Plans & Cut Content
I’d like to finish up the faction list with a sixth faction I’m currently calling SHAMAN. A robot / cyborg faction with a strong Quake 2 / System Shock 2 vibes, currently named after the evil AI mentioned in Doom Community Chest 4′s rather fantastic Interstellar Sickness / Shaman’s Device maps.

SHAMAN will feature cyborgs resembling SS2′s hybrids / Quake 2′s light troopers, backed up by walking tanks, and some units will have a self-revive mechanic similar to the old “We’ll Be Back” save from Warhammer 40k.

After the cyborg faction is done, the game will enter a new phase of balancing, tweaking and polish.

There are expansion plans, but I don’t want to get ahead of myself. Maybe work will kick my ass and everything will get put on hold. Maybe nobody else will care about this pet project and I’ll shelve it to try other interests. Maybe I’ll actually be able to play test and publish this thing and it’ll all  work out great. Who knows?

Expansion plans are: unique personalities, vehicle rules, enhanced army options / variant army lists, and an expansion for interior close quarter combat.

Currently, this is envisioned as three supplements: one book with personalities and new units, another with armoured vehicles and advanced rules (air strikes, teleportation, etc), and a third book much later with rules for interior combats / sci-fi dungeon crawls much closer to the source material (as opposed to the large scale open battles currently represented).

Variant lists including Hell cultists, demonic sorcerers, and rebel humans are being considered, plus new equipment and abilities like wacky missile launchers and tunneling enemies. There’s a huge Lovecraft inspired army list mostly finished but cut from the main rules because it became too bloated. I’m currently not sure if the “Children of the Old Ones” will have their own stream-lined list in an expansion or if they’ll be chopped up and split between the other lists.

Maybe it’ll depend on where the lore takes me.

FRAG: Poor Bloody Infantry

I wrote part of a new army list for FRAG, the Earth Defence Force, but ended up shelving it.

Intended to represent the generic soldiers who are inevitably slaughtered before a game begins, they were meant for the sort of people who love playing the Imperial Guard in 40k. The poor bloody infantry, outmatched but determined that the superhuman invaders can piss right off.

At first I wrote some Duke3D inspired gimmick special weapons for them but decided that it didn’t really fit the theme of bloody minded cannon fodder. The second idea, having them plant lots of debuffs on enemies before going in for the kill, also proved to be too much paperwork that just didn’t gel with the fast and fluid nature of the rules. Finally, just giving them a generic equipment list so that anyone can use their generic sci-fi miniatures proved boring and conflicted with the fluff of the space marines (who get way cooler stuff).

Whilst I could have fixed these things, in the end I moved the EDF work into the “Cut Content” section of the rulebook where they’ll probably stay.

I love the idea of basic humans fighting back these superhuman opponents, but if you want basic soldiers struggling to move and fire heavy weapons, just take a New Order army full of basic soldiers.

FRAG: The New Order Lore

I wrote some new fluff for FRAG’s evil human faction.

The New Order
The accessible dimensions are strange and varied places. Rarely, Humans or human-like creatures may live in these dimensions but their societies are alien to the inhabitants of Earth. Colonial scientists believed that there simply were no ‘alternate Earths’. This changed after the discovery of the New Order during the Battle of New Angeles.

When they were first encountered the New Order were believed to be a militant cult taking advantage of Hell’s invasion. The truth was far more sinister. In reality the New Order were humans from an alternate Earth, newly arrived with the goal of subverting and eventually conquering the Earth government.

Little information about the New Order is known for sure. They are believed to come from a parallel Earth where the Second World War was won by an alternate incarnation of the Axis Powers called the European Triad. In this timeline the Triad achieved total dominance using mysterious technological and occult methods. Following on from their total victory over the Allies, the European Triad became the New Order and began to explore alternate dimensions through a mysterious technique involving “the Dark Sun”.

The Dark War
Unlike all other dimensions visited, current information about the New Order’s home world suggests that it is a true ‘alternate Earth’. Investigators have yet to identify a point of divergence, but by the early 1940s the world had started to majorly diverge. An alternate version of the Axis Powers, composed of Germany, Italy, and Spain, uncovered a cache of ultra-technological weaponry and used it to conquer the world. The circumstances surrounding this discovery are shrouded in mystery, even to members of the New Order.

It’s possible that variations in the timeline may stretch much further back than initially believed, with alternate rulers and ancient orders of warlocks hinted at by captured New Order operatives, but the Earth Defence Force does not possess the technology needed to infiltrate the New Order’s home world yet.

Like Hell itself, time appears to flow differently in the New Order’s home dimension. In their universe, the year is believed to be some time in the mid to late 20th century.

Get Psyched
Members of the Lost Battalion first encountered the New Order during the Battle of New Angeles. The Order had attacked several Earth Defence Force positions, but was wiped out by a counter attack by the Lost Battalion’s marines. While the Lost had little interest in searching the ruined outpost, EDF investigators arriving after the battle were able to piece together some information about the inter-dimensional interlopers.

Since then, the Earth Defence Force and the New Order have clashed a few times. The current goal of the Order appears to be theft – they hope to steal the secrets of Earth’s interstellar flight and demonic research. They also have an interest in the mystical, and target arcane dimensions as well.