funded Reaper Bones 5: Enthusiasm and Commentary thread

[TGP]

2 minutes ago, YronimosW said:

Bones V Chronoscope is an improvement over Bones IV's entry, but it seems like there's a higher level that they can get to, with just a little concession to storytelling and focus.

 

Chronoscope (the whole line) has always reminded me of the old TV show Time Tunnel. I have no idea how to make a storyline or game out of that notion, but there’s a concept for you. 

[YronimosW]

53 minutes ago, ksbsnowowl said:

I doubt there is one.  But many "intro starter sets" (such as the 3rd edition D&D Basic Game, and I'm sure the 5e one is similar) have a set of mis-matched dice of several different colors.  It's very handy when you are teaching someone completely new to the game.  Telling them "roll the orange die" is a lot easier than saying "roll the d8 for your longsword damage" ...and they stare confused for 10 seconds, then pick up the wrong one anyway, because they aren't familiar enough with the "weird dice" enough to recognize the dice type by shape.

 

Here's an illustration from the 3.5 DMG, for example:

 

The three different 3rd Edition "Beginner"/"Starter" boxed sets included dice of different colours like this, as did a couple of the 2nd Edition-era experiments with translating Basic and/or Advanced D&D into a boardgame-style package with standup counters, maps, etc. included.

 

Things changed between editions, but the 3rd/3.5 edition Beginner Set standards seem to have been:

• a black D4
• a red D6
• a blue D8
• a green D10 (and sometimes a ten-sided purple "D100" to go with it)
• a yellow D12
• an orange D20

 

I don't think that matches Sophie's dice, but I guess the idea is basically similar, and perhaps Sophie's dice match something a little more old-school (she has been using them for centuries!)

 

It might also reflect the fact that Sophie's been collecting the dice over all that time, assembling the set by picking out the most lucky example of each die over time and across a wide selection of dice - her final set wouldn't need to match colours, they need only be the luckiest dice she's owned!

 

 

 

 

[StarFyre]

The cosmic/Cthulhu monsters and prehistoric fit well into fantasy though.  

 

While chronoscope , from how most figures look, do not.  

 

What surprises me though, they can be used for RIFTS and other Palladium games. So not sure why they wouldn't be useful there.  I thought lots played rifts.

 

I still feel kinda unsettled and sad. Not as many bigger d&d stand in monsters as the dragons took up a lot of slots and they prob won't tell us what the hidden spots were, incase any were there.

 

I think now, my most anticipated to work on are:

 

Bronze golem

Eye of the deep

Storm giant

 

Sanjay

[YronimosW]

3 minutes ago, TGP said:

 

Chronoscope (the whole line) has always reminded me of the old TV show Time Tunnel. I have no idea how to make a storyline or game out of that notion, but there’s a concept for you. 

 

There's a bit of that to "generic fantasy", too, with what we've inherited as generic fantasy actually being a hodge-podge assembly of thousands of years of mythology from assorted cultures, filtered through a post-Victorian revival of fairy tales into an early version of modern fantasy at the hands of authors as diverse as C.S. Lewis, Tolkien, George MacDonald, Mervyn Peake, and Lord Dunsany, and then translated through pulp authors like Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, and Edgar Rice Burroughs with all their weird interests and ideas, before being inherited in turn by Fritz Leiber, David Eddings, Jack Vance, etc., and exploding into a popular genre in its own right, then getting mixed with medieval European wargaming by way of Chainmail/D&D, picking up Gothic Horror influences by way of Universal Horror movies and Dark Shadows, then getting filtered through a bunch of D&D clones, before getting handed off to the video game, collectible card game, and collectible miniatures hobbies to have assorted other influences blended in.  There's not a lot of obvious things that Greek mythology, Tolkien's Anglo-Saxon folklore-meets Christian Philosophy, Dunsany's mysticism, Howard and Lovecraft's different re-interpretations of New Age/Atlantean Theosophy, Burroughs' planetary romances, D&D's "Ravenloft" setting, etc. all have in common, but it's all the same genre now, in a very loose sense....

 

Just like Reaper's fantasy offerings seem to benefit from the more tightly-themed Expansions (like Greek Odyssey, Dreadmere, Dark Reach, Daimyo, Brinewind, etc.) that narrow down the scope a bit and explores within fantasy subgenres with an eye toward encounter- and setting-building, I think Chronoscope can do much the same with its time-travel/dimension-hopping/sci-fi/pulp/kitchen-sink approach, with an eye toward encounter- and setting-building and exploration within different subgenres of sci-fi and pulp.  The loose weird western, steampunk, mythos, IMEF/Novacorop, Zombie Apocalypse, and other themes seen in past Kickstarters are a good start, but Reaper's fantasy offerings have done a better job on building on that start, IMHO.  (YMMV!)

 

 

[YronimosW]

32 minutes ago, StarFyre said:

The cosmic/Cthulhu monsters and prehistoric fit well into fantasy though.  

 

While chronoscope , from how most figures look, do not.  

 

What surprises me though, they can be used for RIFTS and other Palladium games. So not sure why they wouldn't be useful there.  I thought lots played rifts.

...

 

Some of the Chronoscope figures would be difficult to translate to what has become "generic fantasy" - the pulp/Weird World War figures or the gaslight/'20s/pulp Mythos investigators, for example, would be a hard sell to fantasy gamers, as would anything involving gunpowder (even though the gunpowder era overlapped a great deal of the later medieval-to-Renaissance-to-early-Victorian eras that "generic medieval European fantasy" loosely includes by way of the ubiquitous pirates and gothic horror monsters!), and sci-fi (in spite of the previously-mentioned overlap with Burroughs' dying Mars setting, and in spite of the blend of swords-and-scifi that was popular in the '80s through Dune, Star Wars, Masters of the Universe, and low-budget fantasy including Krull and Yor: Hunter from the Future, not to mention the D&D "in space!" spinoff Spelljammer...)  Steampunk's brand of fantasy has similarly been hard to sell to fantasy gamers, in spite of 3rd Edition D&D embracing it in at least small doses, and Eberron's premise evidently built around it.

 

However, I wouldn't count Chronoscope's steampunk, pulp-scifi, and superhero leanings completely out of "generic medieval European fantasy":  at least part of the fantasy crowed have embraced warforged and various iron and other metal golems, for example (which are, at their heart, scifi robots translated into fantasy with a simple "a wizard did it!" backstory), a pulp version of pirates from the Renaissance era and beyond have been more or less welcomed into fantasy (at least as long as they check their blackpowder guns and cannon in at the door!), and, after all, Conan the Barbarian (like Tarzan and John Carter, for example) was one of the original pulp Superheroes! 

 

It's tricky and you've got to work through a LOT of resistance to fantasy by "generic medieval European fantasy" fans, but even today it is still possible to produce Chronoscope pulp, sci-fi, steampunk, and superhero content that can be embraced by fantasy gamers, under the right circumstances!

Edited November 3, 2019 by YronimosW

[Tordelback]

1 hour ago, turbocooler said:

 

Nope, I have a 5e starter set and have given many away for gifts to help others get started.  They are all the same color the color just happens to be random.  For example, all red, all blue, all white.  I have at least in my experience never seen a 5e starter with mixed dice.  The different colors does not bother me but I like the solid colors so I as a DM I know which belong to which player.

Hmmm, my 1983 Basic D&D (Purple Box) came with multi-coloured dice, including I think Sophie's crayon-numbered d20. The Expert set of the same era came with all-blue. I far preferred the earlier (I think) blue d20, green d12, red d10, yellow d8 and orange d4 (which I couldn't work out how to read).

[buglips*the*goblin]

1 hour ago, Evilbookworm said:

Lastly, can someone let me in on the joke for buglips? 

 

As @Doug Sundseth put it, the short answer is "shenanigans".  I got very active in the very first Bones kickstarter and made some short comics with G.I. Joe figures about how Cobra Commander was using the kickstarter to acquire minions.  This amused Gene Van Horne, one of Reaper's sculptors, so he drew my avatar and we became friends.  After the kickstarter there were a lot of new people here who had never painted before, so I made a thread to encourage people to just paint, have fun, and not worry about it too much - the basic premise being that I have no idea what I'm doing, let's see how it turns out.  That thread turned out to have more legs than I thought it would, and years later was still bringing fresh people into the hobby.  

 

Kaladrax was the biggest model of Bones I, due to a measurement error, so to show that it wasn't so scary I said I could do it in a week with whatever brushes I had on hand, which turned out to be Size 0, and that birthed the "Goblin Challenge" (paint a big thing in a week with a tiny brush).  That led, in turn, to Reaperbryan challenging me to do the same with the Even Bigger Thing of Bones II, which was Dragons Don't Share.  When I asked what my prize would be, he jokingly said one of his shoes.  Once I completed the task, we held him to his word and he mailed me his sneaker - thus giving me possession of the rarest Reaper trophy of all!  (I still have it)

 

The community grew a lot, so I don't get around as much as I'd like to, but I still try to encourage people to join the hobby and have fun.  When Reaper started doing Reaper Live, I took the opportunity to have a little fun when Ron jokingly ribbed Ed about his old sculpts and mailed in "I (heart) Ed Sculpts" T-shirts I had made up.  @Ludo joined in to make it a Hobby Hijinks thing for Reapercon, I made ribbons to give out for anyone who entered an Ed sculpt into the contest, and a whole bunch of great people bought their own Ed shirts and made it into something pretty epic.  

 

There's probably a lot more stoopid crap I've been into that I've forgotten.  But anyway, any chance I spot to have some fun, boost Reaper, and drag people along I try to make the most of it.  Without knowing the history of how "Buglips" came about, it must look like a pretty random addition - but really this has been slowly getting to this point for a number of years, and would never have gotten there if not for a lot of people - not least of whom is the inimitable Gene Van Horne (buy some of his sculpts, they're amazing).  

 

Sorry for the boring novella, but that's pretty much how that figure wound up in the catalog.

 

Welcome to the board, and the hobby too if that's a fresh bit of fun you've got yourself into, and I hope you have so much fun you practically explode with fun!  Which I imagine to be something like a blowfish pinata stuffed full of smiley emojis.  

 

That's... a bit terrifying, now that I've said it.  

Edited November 3, 2019 by buglips*the*goblin

[Rob Dean]

54 minutes ago, YronimosW said:

 

I don't think that matches Sophie's dice, but I guess the idea is basically similar, and perhaps Sophie's dice match something a little more old-school (she has been using them for centuries!)

 

So, back at the dawn of time, polyhedrals were hard to find, and TSR sold them along with the LBB rules.  They all came from some science supplier, and all had the same color set: yellow d4, pink d6, green d8, blue d12, and white d20. The d10 as we know it today was still years in the future...

 

Of my first set, I still have the 4,8, and 12:

 

 

A little worse for the wear, to be sure.  I don’t recall when we started seeing other dice..

[WhiteWulfe]

Wound up upping my pledge to $50 in the last hour.  Going to be a looooooot more put in during pledge manager phase.  Would have gone higher initially, but didn't have much extra in the hobbying budget to do such out of the initial gate.  The truly fun part is definitely going to be figuring out what to get, and if it's all affordable ^_^;;;

[redambrosia]

I’m glad to see I’m not the only one who wants an obscene amount of minis from this KS. My total want list is north of $1200 usd. Haven’t added it all up yet though. 
 

There’s just so much fun stuff!

[Darsc Zacal]

I haven’t started my list yet but I know it’s going to be big. 
I’ll have to list by priority.

[Sirithiliel]

I am in for $300 for the list I posted a few pages back

 

The only things I might add is Brine terrain and catfolk, unless they add some really cool monsters in the pledge manager

[criticalhit]

4 minutes ago, Sirithiliel said:

I am in for $300 for the list I posted a few pages back

 

The only things I might add is Brine terrain and catfolk, unless they add some really cool monsters in the pledge manager

 

Do new miniatures get added after the Kickstarter has ended? Is that something that has happened?

[Sirithiliel]

Just now, criticalhit said:

 

Do new miniatures get added after the Kickstarter has ended? Is that something that has happened?

 

Sometimes. Last Kickstarter a few things were added after the Kickstarter had ended

[YronimosW]

Thank you so much for the "boring novellas" full of history - @Rob Dean and @buglips*the*goblin - I, for one, enjoy that sort of lore, and I can't be the only one!

Spoiler

 

I slipped into the hobby a bit later in the '80s, but even by then, I don't remember ever seeing the matching sets of dice that seem to be available everywhere now.  I remember going to the FLGS/nerd-store (it was actually dedicated more to model railroading, those old Revell etc. hard plastic military and sports car model kits, and comic books, with gaming stuff as an afterthought), and on the checkout counter near the door they'd have these apothecary jars with openings at the sides, like the ones they used to sell gumballs from, full of random dice, and we'd bring in a fist full of pocket change and buy a couple of the coolest-looking dice in the jar, and just build or own set of dice that way - it never occurred to any of us to build a matching set, since none of the dice really matched.

 

Shopping for minis back then was similar for me:  there would be a rotating rack of odd minis on blister-cards (usually the RAFM Call of Cthulhu stuff), and a small wall rack behind it of traditional fantasy minis in blister-cards (Ral Partha and whatever else was popular at the time), but those were usually too expensive for us except for the rare treat - on the check-out-counter next to the dice, there would be these trays - like silverware organizers - full of loose minis, usually missing hands or whatever but sometimes with nothing more wrong with them than a bent sword and lack of packaging, which would be affordable at a few cents each.  That shop was pretty far out of our way - at some point we got hold of a Ral Partha mail-order catalog, and would just save up money and order a bunch of those once a year.  The minis were lead back ten, and weighed a lot - I think a lot of folks miss all that weight, but I'm pretty sure my group would have loved the innovation of Bones plastic minis at the time!  (Plastic HeroQuest and Warhammer stuff was surely a "thing" back then and I remember being confused by the boxed "Blood Bowl" sets shelved at the end of the bargain comic book aisle across from the weird foreign military model kits from Japan, Poland, Ukraine, etc., but I never saw plastic fantasy minis like that until I saw HeroQuest and The New Dungeon! for the first time in the 1990s....)

 

Anyway, sorry for the off-topic diversion down memory lane, but it's fun to remember that sort of thing.

 

 

There's a bit of that old-school gaming fun to Sophie's Dice - I'm really digging it!

 

Yes:  Reaper has added minis to the Pledge Mangler after the Kickstarter ended in the past.  There doesn't seem to be any guarantee they will, and there doesn't seem to be any rhyme or reason to whether anything gets added - this seems to be a matter of in part how close a last-minute stretch goal was to being released, how much extra funds were raised during the Kickstarter that could be spent on one or two final molds, what last-minute concepts were up the artists/sculptors' sleeve at the end of the Kickstarter, how much money gets added through the Pledge Manager, whether or not the Stars are Right, etc.

 

Apparently Reaper said they may add Sophie and possibly those henchmen that were teased near the end, depending on those sorts of esoteric factors....

Edited November 3, 2019 by YronimosW