Category Archives: Mechanics

Wolves Without Borders

With Leks having turned a corner in his journey into the Bracia Wilków brotherhood, it’s a good time to roll up some of the story and mechanical considerations that have gone into this arc (and that have informed the on-screen appearances of Filip and his pack throughout the campaign).

First things first: I don’t know if the Venn diagram of Steelshod fandom and this campaign encompasses anyone but me. Even if no one else is positioned to catch this, though, I’d be remiss and unethical if I didn’t acknowledge the massive influence of /u/MostlyReadRarelyPost’s epic campaign log and, more specifically, his setting’s Ulfskennar. My vision for the Bracia Wilków has always hinged on that work. Not incidentally, if any of my three loyal readers are looking for a deep, sweeping fantasy campaign log into which to delve, just… go to /r/MostlyWrites and start chewing. I hope your chair is comfortable.

Continue reading →

Two Ticks to Midnight

Explaining a screen shot I included in yesterday’s post:

A few months and sessions ago, I decided to steal a page from Powered by the Apocalypse mechanics. With the Challenge Tracker module for Forge, I’ve added PbtA-style progress clocks to some of the party’s major infrastructure projects in Ponikla:

Every 10 shifts of work from a project leader (i.e., a PC with some general competence in the appropriate skill or the Logistician specialty) generates one skill check. Each success fills one segment of the outer (green) ring. Each 1, however, whether natural or pushed, fills one segment of the inner (red) ring, representing breakage, wasted materials, and other problems.

When the outer ring fills, the project is complete. When the inner ring fills, the project fails and must be restarted from scratch.

Generally, inner segments are equal to 1/2 the number of outer segments. I determine the number of outer segments by GM fiat and discussion with the table, as warranted.

Farmville

I recently received a reader question regarding the systems I use in Kaserne on the Borderlands for tracking the agricultural and infrastructure projects that the Ponikla PCs are undertaking. I was about to write something, but the topic sounded like something I might have written already. A bit of sniffing around my own internet backtrail led me to a three-year-old post on Kato’s forum. In the interest of having a backup, I’ve replicated the original post here.

Continue reading →

Defending the Baltic Approaches

I made a couple of false starts at this release, but I’m now in a place where I can comfortably consider it out the door. After a couple of weekends of unhealthy hyperfocus in GIMP, the end product (for now) of my thoughts on Eagle Leader‘s under-served Luftwaffe is available.

AIRBALTAP, my first fan-made expansion, includes:

  • 16 West German and Danish pilot cards
  • 3 event cards
  • 3 squadron asset cards
  • stats for the West German Alpha Jet light strike fighter and AS.34 Kormoran anti-shipping missile
  • a new campaign, Able Archer Baltic (1983)

The campaign requires the use of the target cards from Expansion 8: JASDF and assumes you have Expansion 1: Luftwaffe and RAF.

It’s currently at a playtest draft version 0.5, which you can download from my main DVG resources page.

Eagle Leader Pilot Builder Worksheet

One of my ongoing projects over the past couple of months has been to reverse-engineer the design formula that DVG uses to build and balance pilots for the Air Leader series of games. The first step was to spreadsheet every printed pilot card in the Eagle Leader run, which was a non-trivial but oddly-relaxing data entry project.

Then the analysis started. That was considerably less relaxing.

I still haven’t isolated the formula that DVG actually uses (and I have, at times, had serious doubts that it actually exists, or that they follow their own math if it does exist). But I do have a ~85% solution that I’m considering “good enough for now.”

If you’re one of the 0.3 of my readers who are interested, you can get it on my main DVG resources page.

Composite Squadron II

After having an inordinate amount of fun with Eagle Leader despite its editing and playtesting issues (thank the gods for an active and mostly-helpful boardgamegeek.com community), I broke down and picked up the full run of Fulcrum Leader. Despite some lingering misgivings about playing the default bad guys from my childhood (and, arguably, again from 2014 forward), I’m finding it an equally-enjoyable play experience – and arguably better-designed than its cousin.

As my regular readers may anticipate, I’ve built out a random squadron generator here.

Composite Squadron

I recently acquired a copy of Dan Verssen Games’ long-delayed Eagle Leader solo wargame. I am trying to remain firm in my resolve to not play it until I finish my current North Atlantic WWIII grand campaign of Spruance Leader. However, a four-hour power outage on Saturday did give me some enforced tech-free time, part of which I used to punch out and sort the absolutely ridiculous amount of counters that are typical of DVG Leader-series games.

That, predictably, got me engaged in thinking about the game more, so I sat down that night and spent another three hours branching the code and data set of my earlier Hornet Leader random squadron generator to build one for Eagle Leader. Both are linked from the DVG games landing page of the main site.

Launch the Alert-Five Hornets

I’ve been wanting to get Hornet Leader out again, having yet to finish a campaign of it. In lieu of actually, you know, playing the damn thing, I spent a few hours today coding some JQuery to generate a random squadron, as per the optional rule for doing just that sort of thing.

I have a few other thoughts on tools for DVG’s other solo wargames, so the new landing page (which links the aforementioned Hornet Leader generator) is here.