BRUTICUS ACHIEVED

So I was diagnosed with epilepsy yesterday. Yay.

In happier news I also got hold of Swindle, after a scary few days when I feared he had sold out. Here he is, not alongside his 2001 incarnation, because I've somehow lost him. Oh well.

I was a bit concerned about the vehicle mode as it looked a bit blocky and unrealistic in pictures, but it looks much better in person.

And here's the team, in all their nowhere-near-in-scale glory:

And at long last, their combined form... BRUTICUS.

The combination sequence is quite fiddly, and even after doing it I have no idea how Blast Off and Vortex "broke" in half to form the arms or how I'm supposed to reconnect them, but the end result is very impressive. And huge. I'm not sure where I'm going to put him now.

Again, there will be no comparison with his 2001 incarnation as he'd be missing a leg, but here's his 2001 head alongside his 2026 head, for fun.

BRUTICUS THE FOURTH

I went to the Transformers shop in London yesterday.

In mostly unrelated news, it was my birthday on the 10th, and I got the new version of Onslaught, and the fourth part of Bruticus. Here he is with his 2001 version:

The original Onslaught was one of the first Transformers I owned as a boy; he may have even been the second, after Optimus Prime, so I've always had a fondness for him.

There's a little bit of a wonky transformation with the arms, and I'm not fond of the "false" transformation of the gun turret -- there's a second, smaller turret hidden within Onslaught, while the trailer gets put aside to form Bruticus' torso and legs -- but overall he's a very handsome robot.

One more to go before Bruticus is complete!

Interview With a Vampire

I bumped into Kieron Gillen at Dragonmeet once but he looked busy so I didn't say hello.

Anyway, he's been running through his 101 favourite role-playing games and the most recent instalment has a story about a WFRP3 game in which the players did one of those silly facepalm things players do sometimes, and it reminded me of something that happened when I was running Horror on the Orient Express for Call of Cthulhu in 1998ish.

Spoilers for HotOE follow!

There is a vampire in the campaign, a horrible, withered thing called Fenalik. He is encountered early on but then stalks the investigators for much of the rest of the campaign, including boarding the Orient Express itself. At this point in the campaign Fenalik has lost all patience and confronts them on the train, but he is subject to some classic vampire weakness, such as not entering a home uninvited, and since the investigators' cabin counts as a home for this purpose, he cannot enter.

At first Fenalik is all charm and persuasion and tries to convince the player-characters to let him in, but they are having none of it. Once they realise that Fenalik is powerless to reach them they start getting a bit cocky, taunting the monster.

Fenalik is ancient and proud and wretched and does not take this at all well. He loses his temper and starts threatening the investigators with all sorts of horrible fates. Oh, the brutal, terrible things he will do to them while they live, and probably to their corpses too, once their living has concluded to his satisfaction. The players are finding this hilarious, of course, and continue goading him. They are also trapped in their cabin, but they're not thinking about that right now; they are too high on adrenaline.

The vampire is in a frenzy now, desperate and seething, and promises that he will tear them all into bloody, tiny, pieces.

One player, buzzing, says something along the lines of "Oh yeah? Just come in and try it."

There's a pause. A dreadful, heavy pause.

I wish I could say it was me being dramatic but it was more that I was working it out at roughly the same pace my players were.

A bit faster perhaps, as I could see their jaws dropping and their eyes going like saucers just as I started to describe the cabin door exploding into splinters and a furious vampire springing into the room...

As it happens only one character was killed in the fight that followed, but they were all a bit less overconfident after that.

The Egyptian (Danger) Zone

Stuart and I played my Danger Zone mission -- for Stargrave and similar skirmish wargames -- last week. Stuart's summary is here and I have nothing to add, but I did want to highlight the table a bit more.

We played at Dice Saloon and we arrived to a box of terrain pre-selected for us. It was a box of Ancient Egypt themed stuff, with a tinge of horror and was quite an impressive set so we decided to use it, making the assumption that this mission's planet was the home to a lost civilisation of Space Egyptians. Perhaps the Danger Zones were the result of ancient tech left behind by those ancient folk.

We also nabbed a box of cyberpunk terrain just to sci-fi the table up a bit. And now, pictures!

The table as a whole. The large hill towards the centre would see most of the combat, as we shall see.

My favourite piece. There's a hint of trypophobia to it. (EDIT: I am told it's from Dark Fantastic Mills!)

Fateweaver Duu'ey investigates some local architecture.

The early stages of The Battle for the Hill™.

These dog thing statues were cool, too.

Later on in the The Battle for the Hill™, as it got a lot more messy.

As far as I know, this stuff was all home-made, so thank you to the unknown builder for donating it to Dice Saloon for oiks like me to throw tiny men at it!