Saturday 17 April 2021

FREE SCENARIO - DON´T OPEN THAT DOOR

A new free scenario for Fear of the Dark skirmish wargame is now available for free to all of you.



The characters are called by a friend, Jeremy Hikes, known to be an experienced "book hunter".

Very used to walk libraries and antique dealers waiting to get a book of dark arts for almost nothing and resell it for a fortune.

Jeremy has bought a really interesting book... 

Interesting enough to call the characters and show it to them, as it contains very important information. 

But there is a problem, someone else wants that book, and it is the kind of person you don´t want to have as an enemy...


This is the starting point for this thrilling new scenario, this is the first one but it´s not going to be the last, as I´m working in a short campaign that will also be available for free.

To get this free scenario, just visit your Wargamevault.com profile, and in the Fear of the Dark folder (created when you bought the game) you´ll see that a new file has been added, you just have to download it for free.

This scenario is the way I have to tell you: 

THANKS A LOT FOR SUPPORTING THIS PROJECT.


Tuesday 13 April 2021

SCENARIOS

In this section you will find new scenarios created for Fear of the Dark. 

Here you will find a detailed description of the scenario and the idea is making them available for free to players who have the rulebook. 

How does that work? 

I will make scenarios, and post them in Wargamevault TOGETHER with the rulebook, so that the people who bought the book just have to go to their Wargamevault profile and download again the Fear of the Dark ruleset, and the new scenario will download FOR FREE together with the rulebook.

Of course, if somebody buys the rulebook in a future, the scenarios will be downloaded for free together with the ruleset.

I hope you like the game and the intention is to give players more chances to play.

Four free scenarios and one campaign have been added:


- Don´t open that door.  The characters are called by a friend, Jeremy Hikes, known to be an experienced "book hunter who has bought a very interesting book that contains very important information. But there may be someone else looking for the book...


- Mother´s love. While driving through a mountain road, they see a woman dressed in white with the hands and face covered in blood. She is in a shoulder of the road looking straight at the characters. Suddenly she runs towards them in the middle of the road screaming...


- Til death do us part. This is a story about love... true love... Love can drive you crazy, and you do crazy things for love... It seems that love and madness go always together...

What would you dare to do for love?


- Little Red Riding HoodThe idea of Little Red Riding Hood came while reading a bedtime story to my children and the plot may sound familiar:

"Officer, what we know about the case is that a young girl was going through the woods to her grandmother's house carrying a basket with a piece of cake... Next thing we know is that she was found dead as if a beast had slayed her... 

It sounds familiar, isn't it, officer? 

Well, to make things even more strange as It was raining she was wearing a cape with a hood... 

Do you guess which colour was it? 

Red... Of course...

So, officer... Are we looking for the Big bad wolf?"


- Sons of the New Moon. This is a campaign that will take your investigators to their limits: a writer is missing while he was making a research for a new book, a horror novel about a long time disappeared esoteric cult. everything seems like he has discovered something... something wicked.

Will they dicover the writer´s whereabout?

Will they make it alive?

Will they find what happened with the Sons of the New Moon?


GENERAL ARTICLES

In this section you will find articles related to wargaming. They will cover different aspects of this hobby and are made to help wargamers.

The subjects dealt in the posts are quite different one from the other, but all of them will be helpful or at least I will try to make them a good read.

This section will grow as I add more articles to the blog, I hope you find them useful.




- Low cost wargaming. Wargames have always been seen as an expensive hobby. You have to buy a lot of miniatures, buy paint bottles, buy a lot of terrain, buy a mat... and that gets even worse when we deal with solo wargamers that have to buy everything by themselves. In this post I will try to give some hints on how to make a nice gaming board the cheapest possible way.


- Solo wargaming. This post is about solo players: why do we play solo, what tools do we need to do it, apart from a long list of solo rulebooks available. You may want to start playing solo, or you are just interested in this way of wargaming, anyway I hope you find this post interesting.


- Cars, scales and wargames. This post deals with a problem that every wargamer finds sometime. Vehicles are a part of the terrain or are used in games, but it seems that the vehicles never have the correct size: they may be huge, or tiny, or the only ones that seem to fit your miniatures are really expensive. I will try to give some advice on how to get a nice motor pool. 


- Papercraft buildings and terrain. Papercraft is cheap. Papercraft is nice. Papercraft can be stored taking almost no space at all... So, why is papercraft so underestimated? Let´s try to answer that in this post. Maybe I change your mind and you start collecting papercraft terrain.


- Wargaming INSIDE buildings. To play Fear of the Dark scenarios I always wanted to play inside buildings: Haunted houses, crypts, museums, dark dungeons, old libraries... And I wanted to take those places to Fear of the Dark scenarios.  


- Movies inspired in H.P. Lovecraft Mythos. I want to make a list of the movies I believe that are based on his works or that they deserve to be seen as a Fear of the Dark player or a Call of Cthulhu GM.



BATTLE REPORTS

In this section we will find the battle reports available. You may have a look at them to take an exampleon how to make the scenarios or just to enjoy.

Although spoiling the scenarios will try to be avoided, keep in mind that relevant information on the plot of the scenario may be revealed.



- A cabin in the woods. Our heroes go to a secluded cabin deep in the woods where a man was killed two days ago in strange circunstances. Will they discover what happened? or will they die trying? This battle report was made to explain how some of the rules work (activation, combat, movement...).


- Dont open that door. Our heroes are trapped in a secluded town in the mountains, monsters seem to be behind every corner ready to atack, and the only way to expel those onsters from our world is finding a man who has the key to do it.


- Last train. A weird ww2 Fear of the Dark scenario. As if war wasn't bad enough, monsters are wandering a devastated Europe. Fight Nazis, fight monsters. Stay alive. 


- Night raid. A new weird ww2 Fear of the Dark scenario. We follow our heroes in a stealth night raid to destroy an experimental light tank. With an insight on how the scenario was created and played. 


SUPPORT MATERIAL

In this section you will find free support material created for Fear of the Dark. The material available will grow as the game develops.

I hope you find it useful!


- Weapon Cards. This is a set of cards that detail weapons (range, damage...) so that you know clearly which character is equipped with each weapon and you have all the weapon details at hand. 



- Detailed battle report. This battle report was made to explain how some of the rules work (activation, combat, movement...). It may solve some doubts on the rules.


- Back of the cards, as may people asked for the back of the cards not to be white, I made them with the cover of the rulebook.




Saturday 10 April 2021

PAPERCRAFT BUILDINGS AND TERRAIN IN 28MM

Quite a few times I have been asked about the buildings I use when playing Fear of the Dark , and I think they deserve their own post... 


When I started with the idea of ​​playing skirmish wargames alone and at home, I had several problems, the buildings I wanted to use as terrain (resin, 3D, mdf, plastic ...) were expensive and occupy a lot of space. Think that we are dealing with solo wargamers, and most of them have to store their miniatures and terrain at home.

"They were expensive" ... Many of you will think that they are not expensive for the quality and detail they offer, but of course, if we think that I play alone, the cost in mdf (for example) of a city that fills a 90x90 game board, being the only one who pays for all the buildings becomes too expensive... 
And if we talk about making several settings... Well, that´s quite a lot of money... 

"they occupy a lot of space"... Buildings to represent a city on a 90x90 game board occupy quite a lot, and we are not talking about shelves or boxes in a club, we are talking about a house where I live with my wife and two little boys...  for example...

So in my search for a solution I found cardboard buildings, they are cheap and if I could find a way to store them without occupying much space they would be my best option.










Most papercraft buildings are designed to be made and stay that way glued, being impossible to fold them without breaking them, and then the buildings, although being cheap, they take the same room as a resin or mdf one.

As I didn´t find buildings that could be folded flat I chose to design them myself so that they could be folded and could be stored without occupying a lot. 

Based on papercraft buildings from companies such as worldworks games, fat dragon games and Z-war one boardgame, I "re-designed" the buildings so that they could be folded, separating walls and roof. 




I made a few houses printed in A3 on 200 grms paper, look at the result, and see how those houses look once glued and how much space they take once they they stored... 
In the last photo you have an example game board with these houses.








Apart from that small town I wanted to have a city setting, and I wanted the roofs to be playable, so they needed a flat surface.
Once again, using models that I bought from companies that sell them online to make building models that can´t be folded I modified them.

Here we see how it is folded and how we assemble it, in the last photo, with minis and some terrain. 







There will be people who think that the idea of using papercraft is not good, but for me it is ...

Why? Well, because the cost is the cheapest I have found, I can make many houses of different settings and most important, it allows me to keep everything in a single box...

I usually use recycled boxes (I have many of the same) with the measures 38x28x10 cm, to give you an idea it is like an A3 but 10 cm high.



Inside those boxes I can put an entire city and still I have plenty of spare room. Everything you see in the second photo is in that box (buildings, streets, lampposts, trash cans ...), and as you can see, there is plenty of room left.



In the box in which I put the middle east town, I had so much spare space that I put all the palm trees, small terrain pieces, figures ...




And maybe you think that this system works with simple structures, because another kind of structures would be more difficult to fold. Well, this is the las terrain piece that I made myself from a Dave Graffam model.



All the buildings you see in this pictures are modified versions of products you can buy online, so I'm going to make a small list of the best companies I have found:

Worldworks games, has plenty of houses and buildings for several settings (medieval/fantasy, modern, far west, scifi...)

Fat Dragon games (nice selection of medieval/fantasy and modern/20´s buildings)

Stoetzel models (several modern/20´s buildings and houses)

Dave Graffam (fantasy/medieval houses)

This options are really cheap (think around 1-4$ for a big building you can print as much as you want) but there are other FREE options that you may consider as well:

Zwarone is a really good zombie boardgame that is worth to be considered for zombie apocalypse games, and in their web page they offer to download for free a set of several houses that have a really good quality (I use many of them when I play).

Papermau is a webpage full of free papercraft, you can spend a whole afternoon checking this webpage to find real treasures. It has a good search engine to look for what you need (try house, boat, egyptian temple... for example).

There are many more companies, but these ones listed above have the highest quality/lowest price that I have found, and apart from such a huge amount of buildings, they have mats, scatter terrain, bridges and almost anything you may need for your wargaming table. 

Well, I hope I have satisfied your curiosity, and as always, I hope to encourage you to play alone...

Don't let terrain and scenery be a problem...

Friday 2 April 2021

FEAR OF THE DARK AAR BATTLE REPORT 2

Testing (once and again) another new scenario that will be available as soon as I get my PC back (it's being repaired).

As always happens with Fear of the Dark scenarios, I'll try not to spoil the story, so, I'm going to make an AAR but skipping/changing some of the details of the scenario as I would like you to play and enjoy it... 

This is a tense scenario that may seem quite easy but it may become a death trap easily in just a couple of turns. 

Don't give anything for granted and enjoy... 


Our group of characters face a hell of a problem when they find themselves in a small town where everything seems to be wrong. 

Our warband is in that small town looking for a man that is trapped there, scary and dangerous monsters seem to be behind every corner and that man knows how to send those creatures back to hell, but he is unable to do it alone. 



Our characters have to find that person and help him to cast a spell to make all those monsters disappear and send them back to the hell they came from. 

Don't think this is going to be easy... 




This is going to be the gaming table, in which we will place 4 Points of Interest and 1d5+1 monsters. We will place a "main" building (I placed a church) in one corner, and we will deploy our warband right in the opposite corner. 



My hero and his two allies have to check the Points of Interest until they find the man they are looking for.

As they move towards the Points of Interest, some creatures appear suddenly and go straight to them. 









Our characters move forward killing some creatures, they think that this is going to be an easy adventure when everything goes wrong and more monsters keep appearing from some nearby streets. 



And when our warband was thinking that things were turning difficult, they hear some gunfire and they see the man they are looking for fighting a few monsters more.



They fight the creatures that appear from everywhere, and one of the allies is wounded, but she heals herself as she has the First Aid skill. The rest is surrounded by those same monsters that try to kill them. 








Fighting their way through the creatures, they finally get close to the man, leaving a trail of blood and dead monsters. 

There was a moment that I had four characters (the three members of my warband and the man they had to find) fighting nine creatures... That was quite a big activation deck. 




And once beside that man, they can help him to cast a spell to defeat the creatures, making it alive from the small town that almost becomes a death trap.


Wow, that was close... Playing the scenario several times gives me an idea on how to balance the enemy forces because although it is quite random, as an average I'm happy on how it finally works. 

It will be available for free but I have to wait until my computer is repaired. 

I hope you enjoy it.