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Not sure what I'd ever use her for (might be kind of cool as a bright-eyed level 1 adventurer who eventually gets upgraded to a more impressive mini as she levels up). Anyway...definitely not a bad sculpt. Enjoy.

Vanguard: Boarding Actions in the Fifth Frontier War A miniatures game featuring exciting boarding actions in the universe of the Traveller RPG, with Imperial Marines battling Zhodani. Campaign FAQ Updates 0 Comments 12 Community Back this project Saved About Greetings fellow Travellers, and welcome to the Vanguard: Boarding Actions in the Fifth Frontier War Kickstarter project! This is a project we have been wanting to do for Traveller for a long time now, and we need your help to bring it to light... Vanguard: Boarding Actions in the Fifth Frontier War is a brand new miniatures game depicting vicious shipboard clashes between Imperial Marines and Zhodani Commandos during one of the mightiest conflicts to occur in Charted Space - the Fifth Frontier War. This game includes everything you need to engage in these close quarter battles, including full colour deluxe game boards, strategy cards, vital and never-before-seen background covering the Imperium and Zhodani Consulate, and two complete forces ready to fight! Inside the Box The Vanguard: Boarding Actions in the Fifth Frontier War box set contains: 16 Imperial Marines 16 Zhodani Commandos, including 2 Warbots Full-colour 64 page Rulebook (download sample pages right HERE!) 40 Unit and Strategy Cards 6 Deluxe Gameboards (11.7 x 16.5 inches each) Thick cardstock counters to mark Wounds, Entry Points, Barricades and Objectives. Free-standing Iris Valves, in both open and closed configurations. Keep an eye on our Updates, as we will have plenty more previews of the rules, miniatures, and a full battle report of one of the missions! Playing the Game We have created a rules set that is very easy to get to grips with (you will have the basic rules memorised within a few minutes of playing) and yet mirrors the core rules of the Traveller RPG closely. All actions, for example, are accomplished by succeeding in an appropriate check (such as a Gun Combat check to shoot an enemy or Computers check to hack a sealed door). Play begins by selecting a ship to board, such as a Destroyer, Cruiser, or (gulp!) Battleship, and then both players build appropriate forces to attack or defend the vessel. This could be as small as a platoon or an entire company, depending on the type of ship being assaulted. An initial breach scenario is played and, from there, players will proceed through several scenarios as the two forces battle one another, culminating in either the attacking force reaching a critical objective, such as the power plant or bridge, or the defenders throwing their enemies off the ship altogether! This campaign-style of game means players have to be careful as to which forces they commit and when, marshalling their best troops for the most important fights. To complicate matters, both players will acquire Strategy Cards that will allow them to wrong foot their enemy - like turning off the ship's artificial gravity or explosively venting the atmosphere, exposing everyone to the void! Stretch Goals The Vanguard: Boarding Actions in the Fifth Frontier War box set contains everything you need to play these exciting battles on the tabletop - but we have the opportunity to give you more for your money and further expand this corner of the Traveller universe. Taken on the Run If we reach a total of £60,000, we will include a printed short story written by fan-favourite Martin Dougherty. Taken on the Run begins during the first few minutes of the Fifth Frontier War and will take you through a dangerous boarding action from the point of view of the Imperial Marines. The Aslan We do not want the Imperials and Zhodani to have all the fun! If we reach a total of £80,000, we will add both the rules and 16 miniatures for the powerful Aslan, a warrior race who will look forward to boarding the largest enemy warships. The Aslan lack the sophisticated armour of the Imperium, but more than make up for that with lethal weaponry, a penchant for close combat, and sheer predatory ferocity! The Vargr Often derided as mere corsairs and pirates, the Vargr have a lot to prove. If we reach a total of £100,000, we will add both the rules and 16 miniatures for a Vargr raiding force. While not known as mighty warriors, the Vargr are exceedingly good at what they do, and many a starship has fallen to their cunning tactics. Multi-Deck Battles If we reach a total of £110,000, we will add rules to combine two or more sets of Vanguard: Boarding Actions in the Fifth Frontier War so you can launch multi-deck assaults upon a warship and really keep the defenders on their toes! After More Traveller? Traveller is one of the oldest Roleplaying Games still around, and it has built up a massive amount of background lore. You can explore this universe by adding any of the following to your pledge, simply by increasing the amount you have pledged by the appropriate amount (no need to increase your pledge level, just the pledge amount!). These items will be dispatched to you post free after the surveys for the Kickstarter have been sent out, or when they are available, whichever is soonest. Traveller Starter Set (everything you need to start playing the Traveller RPG): £50 The Element Class Cruisers Ship Builder's Blueprints (explore the inner workings of an Imperial warship): £50 The Pirates of Drinax (a massive sandbox campaign to throw you into the Traveller universe): £70 Ties to the RPG? One question we have already been asked is whether you can take Travellers from the RPG and use them in Vanguard... We will not be producing 'adventurer' miniatures at this time, but we will be taking steps to ensure miniatures produced for future games are compatible with Vanguard. However, if you already have some suitable miniatures, it is an easy step to import them into Vanguard, as the important skills will translate across directly. After that, it is just a matter of worrying about the equipment. If you have characters you would like to see in Vanguard, drop us a line in the comments and we will go through them, walking you through the process to convert them! Risks and challenges We have always delivered on our Kickstarter projects and if you were to ask one of our previous backers of, say, the new Paranoia or previous Traveller project Element Cruisers Blueprints box set, we believe you would hear that the quality of our Kickstarter projects is always worth it. That said, we have taken steps to ensure Vanguard does not overrun its projected completion date. For a start, while tweaks will continue throughout the Kickstarter process, all Imperial and Zhodani miniatures are complete (you can see painted prototypes above!), the game boards are finished, and the core rules written and undergoing continual playtests. For the production of both the box set and miniatures, we are using a factory that we have used many times in the past, including the recent Traveller box sets, Paranoia supplements, and (a blast from the past!) the award-winning Starship Troopers miniatures game. This company is highly reliable and consistently produces good work on time. Mongoose Publishing announced the start date of the KS for their Traveller 28mm skirmish game as Nov 14th. http://blog.mongoosepublishing.co.uk/?m=201811

Dylan Blackzorn looked around at the engine room with an annoyed expression on his face. The raiders had caused a hell of a mess in there. A fair amount of damage, too from the looks of things. He signaled for the others with him to follow his lead; they needed to be sure there weren't any surprises waiting for them before they got to work bringing the various systems back online. He flexed his fingers inside the energy glove on his left hand. In addition to being a great asset in the hand to hand combat they'd had to engage in with the raiders, it was also a powerful tool. With it, he'd be able to engage with the ship's engineering computer and ascertain what repairs were going to be necessary, as well as to dramatically shorten the time those repairs would take. Time to get to it, he thought. The sooner they were out of this sector, the better. He really does have a face, and it looks pretty decent in person....sigh. I'll have to go back and try to make it stand out a little more.

I have a soft spot for Traveller deck plans, and this set reminds me of the old Azhanti High Lightning box set which was incredibly useful. About Welcome to the Element family of cruisers, one of the mainstays of the Imperial Navy and a common sight throughout the Third Imperium and beyond. This Kickstarter project is to create a brand new box set for the Traveller roleplaying game, detailing the three main classes of cruiser within the Element cruiser family, together with 10 massive double-sided blueprints that will allow you walk through each deck of the ships as if you were there... You can download preview PDFs showing some of the content right here: Excerpt from Handbook Fore Section Blueprint The Element Cruiser Ship Builder's Blueprints box set will contain: Ten gigantic (28" x 40") two-sided, full colour blueprints, laying out every deck of the ship. One full colour, 64 page book covering the three main cruisers of the Element family, along with full High Guard game rules and optional ship equipment. Serving On Board A Cruiser We have done deck plans for every ship covered in this edition of Traveller, but we have seen a chance to really knock the ball out of the park and 'super detail' one of the largest ships in the Imperial Navy. Each blueprint has been meticulously worked upon, and includes revisions and optional equipment, allowing you to tailor your own Element cruiser to specific mission roles. The accompanying book sets the scene for cruisers and how they are used in Charted Space in general and the Imperial Navy in particular, then follows the design process of the Element family, from initial navy specification to maiden voyage. The Element cruisers have a highly flexible 'pod' system that allows them to be configured for specific mission roles, and we have covered them in this book - from the 'standard' missile pod fit most commonly used on these ships, to long-ranged strike craft, light carriers, troop transports, and orbital assault ships, all are possible with the Element cruisers and have been included. This has necessitated the introduction of an expansion to High Guard, detailing the new ship options now available. However, this box set is about more than the hardware, and the duties of each individual crew member are examined, along with their integration into the full complement of the ship, commanding officers and security access. We have gone into a lot of detail with these ships, in the handbook as well as the blueprints themselves!

I cleaned up my painting space this weekend, which made it much more inviting: So, with my significant other off on a business trip early this morning, there was little to keep me from queuing up the podcasts and painting as long as I could stand it. I finished a couple of vintage TSR Star Frontiers ships, for generic SF usage: In the vintage SF line, I also did a simple paint scheme on two Grenadier Traveller Imperial Marines, acquired fairly recently from eBay: I had these two Airfix Robin Hood figures started at Thanksgiving. According to the Plastic Soldier Review, these figures were originally released in 1964. While the mold has been in production fairly recently, I noted, from the color of the plastic, that these two are ones that have been in my possession since time immemorial (i.e., sometime around 1972-4), which is a long time to wait to be painted: These Caesar 1/72 elves are a command stand for my fantasy mass battles using Hordes of the Things rules: They’ve been waiting a while, too. My younger son made the gonfalon for me, topped by an earring we found in the parking lot at the ice rink. He retired from skating in 2012, and I’m glad the muses were finally with me today on this project. 10 figures, 8 from primer out...

So I hear Paizo's got this new game, Starfinder, up and coming. And I am not sure what to think. Pathfinder filled a need; I tried 4th Edition D&D, and did not much care for the radical changes after several years of 3.5. Pathfinder was just an extension of the d20 system, and worked well as a generic fantasy game ... that, as splatbook after splatbook and so forth, grew steadily less generic. Still a fine game, although it begins to show signs of splatcreak*, as the sheer amount of rules pile up. Makes sense they'd want to expand their base of gaming; a one-game company is vulnerable to changes in the market, and D&D has finally gotten its head on straight. Time to seek out new life and civilizations... if only to stay competitive. But I dunno. First science fiction RPG I ever played was Traveller, which did an amazing job of distilling the basics down to three little booklets in a box, which seems to be how things were done, then. We had combat, we had spaceships, we had computers, find a ship, find a crew, find a job, keep flying. It worked. (I will not discuss Gamma World or Metamorphosis Alpha; while I enjoyed 'em, these were more postapocalyptic and less space opera, and this is hard enough to keep on track as it is). Another game, Space Opera, was interesting and fun, although waaaay too in love with its rulesset; as I recall, you could burn a whole gaming session just creating a character. Which I guess was a little better than Traveller, where you could accidentally get killed before your character entered PLAY, but Space Opera's extra crunchy rules were a bit much, even for the times. I enjoyed Star Frontiers, once TSR finally got off their duffs and designed a neat space opera setting, although I took it kinda personally that they did not include a starship design or purchase system, or for that matter much of any information about space travel other than "buy a ticket." What, Traveller could do it, but you can't? They were up front enough, though, about the fact that they'd be out with a separate boxed set that would include the starship rules... eventually. And they did. Aaaand that's where we take a sharp left, because Star Frontiers was the last generic science fiction space opera I ever played. FASA quickly came out with a licensed Star Trek game, set during the TOS era, because that's all we had back then; Next Generation was still years away. Still remember the one adventure we played as Klingon officers, who wound up blowing up the ship due to a complex web of backstabbery... but I digress. Not long after that, they also came out with a licensed Doctor Who game, which preoccupied us for a while, as there were a hell of a lot of VHS tapes to track down to keep up with the setting! It did have the advantage of spreading across all TIME, as well as space... although we took a break when West End Games's Star Wars came out, because to a nerd-child of the seventies, the history of mankind breaks down into pre-SW and post-SW. After all, you never saw any Planet Of The Apes RPGs, did you? Hell, I still have a copy of Leading Edge's Aliens RPG around here somewhere; it was fun, albeit rather sketchy, as it was based entirely on the two movies in the Alien franchise as of 1988... had plenty of information about Weyland-Yutani, the Space Marines, the Aliens... and nearly nothing else... Which brings us to now. As I said above, Pathfinder filled a need. But there are a great many licensed science fiction games now. Firefly is still going strong. A new Star Wars game still circulates, albeit unsupported due to licensing. A new Star Trek game is in the works, assuming its maker ever gets it out of playtesting, and the current Doctor Who game still seems to be selling. Is there a place now for a generic science fiction setting? Will it appeal to people who've never tried Pathfinder? Or does the current market favor established licensed science fiction settings where one can watch a movie or three and get an idea INSTANTLY about the world and how it works? Opinions? Ideas? Rants?

Okay, So the crew is back together for a new campaign. The guy running chose Traveller. So I need a new fig. My guy was 7 terms navy, with a frozen watch mishap and a bad aging roll in the 5th term. Taking hits to Str, Dex and End. He muster out a Capt, age 42. I see him with a cane or leg braces from the frozen watch incident, military bearing but not necessarily in uniform. Any Ideas for a fig would be great, if its from a line other than Reaper that would be fine with me, but Reaper is always my go to fig producer.