I’ve managed to accumulate quite a few character miniatures for Star Trek in the last year, and still have a few left to paint. In my quest to find a good way to transport them to and from games, I settled on cases designed for Essential Oils. Initially I was using some smaller cases, but then I decided to try a larger one, so I ordered one from Amazon that looked good. Clicking on the small picture below, which is an Affiliate link for me, will take you to the one I bought if you are interested.
The first thing I have to say is that none of the photos adequately show how sparkly this thing is. My first reaction when I opened up the package and pulled it out was “Holy crap, I’m going to need my sunglasses to use this thing!” I happened to have a spare Starfleet emblem hanging around, so I glued that onto the lid just to give it a bit of a Star Trek feel and to detract a little from shine.
The inside has 112 slots that are just the right width for the round bases that the Modiphius Star Trek Adventures miniatures come with, and most of the other miniatures that I’ve picked up as well.
Of course, there always have to be a few that just don’t cooperate, which I stuck in the back row. The ones with square bases generally fit okay upside down, but there was one dancer with her arms spread out that just wasn’t going to fit other than lying flat.
I used the case as is a few times, but found a couple of problems. First, the foam with the holes wasn’t attached to the bottom of the case, so it tended to lift and some of the smaller miniatures would disappear underneath. Secondly, there is quite a bit of space in the lid, enough that if I carried the case by the handle, many of the miniatures would come out of their cozy little cubbies.
I used a glue gun to stick the foam to the bottom of the case, then glued the sides to the case as well for good measure. Then I cut out some “Pure Foam Cushion” slightly wider than the lid so it would fit snugly as I didn’t want to glue that part in.
I think that will be enough to keep the minis in place, I’ll see how it goes next time I cart them off to a games session.
I attended FallCon 32 this year as a guest host running Star Trek Adventures by Modiphius Games as part of the RGP Alliance group. Despite living in Calgary my whole life and being into gaming since high school, I have never attended FallCon before. Partially that’s because it’s main focus is on board games and I’ve always been more interested in Roleplaying Games, which they have just added in the last couple of years. Also, I was just never that interested in going to conventions of any sort.
Friday was the first night of FallCon, I didn’t have anything booked to do that night but I thought I would go down and check out the layout, figure out where my assigned table for my Saturday and Sunday games was, and pick up a couple more items from Galaxy Gaming Gear to add to my collection of wood miniatures and terrain, which I’m a big fan of.
Things didn’t get off to a great start as I got stuck in a traffic jam on Glenmore Trail, it turned out there was an accident just before the turnoff to Crowchild, completely blocking one lane.
It took over 30 minutes to get onto Crowchild, which normally only takes around 10 minutes. But, after that it was pretty smooth sailing down to SAIT where FallCon was taking place. It was set up in the big gyms there and covered the whole area. The greeter in the kilt at the door is named Brent, which was pretty easy for me to remember. Despite having a lot of people there, the space is so large that I didn’t really feel crowded.
Vic Ster, the organizer for our RPG Alliance group was running a “Rocket Age” game Friday night so I swung by her table to say hello. Everyone was having a great time. It’s basically a pulp era Sci Fi game in the flavour of the old Buck Rogers/ Flash Gordon serials.
I then spent a little time just wandering around, looking at a few of the games that were set up, played a round on the Artimis Space Simulator that the U.S.S. King Edward StarFleet group had set up, picked up my Galaxy Gaming Gear items from Jeff Carefoot, having a good chat with him as usual including a discussion about Rolemaster, HARP, and a few other things around the games by Iron Crown Enterprises, which I had done some work for in the past, and have a separate website devoted to, ICE Webring.
I didn’t hang around for too long, as I wanted to be there early on Saturday, and wanted to assemble my new minis to use in my game on Saturday.
Traffic was much better on Saturday, and the snow had started but wasn’t really bad yet. I got there by about 10:00 A.M. and helped Vic look after our community table.
Posted by Vic Ster on Saturday, September 28, 2019
The community table was interesting, we were right next to the check in and check out table for the Games Library so we had a lot of traffic going by. Vic also had extra Rocket candies and small water pistols from her Rocket Age game as give away’s so I think that drew in some people as well. We were promoting the RPG Alliance Convention that is coming up on October 20th. We also talked about the games that members of our group were running at FallCon, and about the X-Card, which is a tool developed by John Stravropoulos for ensuring everyone at a game table feels safe, respected and having fun. I may do an additional post on it and similar tools and my thoughts on them, it is an interesting topic.. Most people were quite interested in it and there was only one person who expressed that he “thought it was a stupid idea and would never use it at his table.” He then went off on a tangent about how “Stan Lee would be rolling in grave if he knew what some of the comics were doing with Spiderman these days”. It was a very strange conversation, and one of the hazards of putting yourself in a position where anyone can come up and talk to you. I felt like “X-Carding” him, but I figured he wouldn’t appreciate the irony in that 🙂
Front and Back of the X-Cards
At 2:00 pm, I ran my first session for Star Trek, using the “Signals” adventure that comes with the Quickstart Rules. I ended up with a full crew of six people and it went really well. It ran just short of the four hours allocated to me, and everyone had a good time. No one in the group had played the game before but caught onto the rules quickly and seemed to like the system. And, as usual, I forgot to get many pictures of my game, but I did get a couple:
I hung around for a little while after my game, which ended at 6:00 pm, but didn’t stay too late as my voice was shot after talking all day and trying to project to the whole table for four hours, and I knew I needed to be back on Sunday to do it again 🙂
Fortunately it didn’t snow as much overnight as I had feared it might, so I didn’t have any problems getting there Sunday morning. I made it in by 10:00 which gave me an hour to get set up. I didn’t actually have anyone signed up for my 11:00 session, so I wasn’t sure if it was going to go or not. Fortunately, Vic had been talking to a couple at the Community table that thought it sounded interesting, so she came over with them and decided to take a break herself and play as well. It was the same adventure as the day before, but with only three people, and a decision to not get sidetracked by one of the possible encounters, the game went faster. It also helped that Vic was familiar with the game system and was able to help out with explaining the mechanics and available choices. And, I remembered to take a more photos this time, including some of my Galaxy Gear Sci Fi crew member minis. I now have three sets and have done them up in red, yellow and blue shirts.
After the game, I spent another hour and half chatting with people, packing up the community booth, and of course, buying a game 🙂
Overall, I had a really good time. I’m always a little nervous going into these sorts of things, but so far I’ve been enjoying them. I think I will consider restricting myself to only running one game instead of two at future events, but we’ll see. The RPG Alliance Con is still coming up, but it’s only a single day, and I’m only running one game and playing in another so I’m looking forward to that. It’s also the event that I attended last year that got me into doing all the gaming that I’ve done in the past year and introduced me to a great new group of people. Speaking of which, to finish things off, here are a few photos of the games some of those members of our group ran at FallCon and will be running at RPG Alliance Con. Chis was running Star Wars, then the Expanse (which I didn’t get photos of). Keith was running Conan, and had fantastic props as usual.
Those that have met me a few times have realized that I have a certain preference in Tee Shirts. In fact, complete strangers have been know to stop and comment on them. What can I say? I like big mugs, I cannot lie :).
Aside from the pictures on the shirts, they are also wide enough across in the shoulders and long enough to fit me comfortable, and are of a good weight.
And, giving away my secret, I get them through Clothing Monster. I go mainly for the wildlife shirts, but if you like dogs, they have a shirt for just about every breed imaginable.
So here is an incomplete selection of my shirts, I’ll add more photos as I get them. Enjoy 🙂
It’s my first YouTube interview. I’m Game Master for a Star Trek Adventures session, “The Tribble with Klingons” at this year’s RPG Alliance Convention. It’s an adventure I put together that takes place immediately after the Star Trek Animated Series episode “More Tribbles, More Troubles”
The small but mighty USS Locksley crew has been requested by Capt. Kirk to track Capt Koloth’s new D7 battleship which attacked the Enterprise with a new stasis weapon mere hours ago. Tribbles were used to thwart the attack, more information on Koloth’s next destination and the weapon is wanted.
I will be attending FallCon for the first time this year, and I’ll be running a couple sessions for the Star Trek Adventures Roleplaying Game from Modiphius as part of the RPG Alliance group.
I’ll be running a Starter Adventure with Pregenerated characters, so no previous experience is necessary. My games run on Saturday September 28th from 2 pm until 6 pm and on Sunday September 29th from 11 am until 6 pm.
The adventure I’ll be running is “Signals“: A month ago, Starfleet picked up an unusual alien signal emanating from the Seku system, deep inside the Carina Nebula. The runabout Susquehanna was initially dispatched to investigate, but the crew failed to report and is presumed lost. Starfleet must investigate the source of the signal and locate the missing runabout.
The RPG Alliance group is running several other games as well, such as Conan, Star Wars, Rocket Age, and The Expanse. We’ll also have a Community Booth where you can stop by and ask us any questions you may have.
Check out the RPG Alliance Fallcon page for additional details and descriptions of the games being run.
A series of photos of the painting I did on the Modiphius Star Trek Adventures Next Generation Bridge Crew and the Star Trek Next Generation Away Team miniature sets, with a few other minis in the background of some shots.
I recently volunteered to run a couple sessions of the Star Trek Adventures Roleplaying game at the Calgary Expo. I suspect the reaction of some of my family and friends was probably along the lines of “How the hell did that happen?”
For those that don’t know me that well, I would describe myself as a sociable introvert. I don’t generally like crowds, and I seldom initiate conversations with people I don’t know, but once I’ve been introduced to someone, if we find we have something in common, then I can be somewhat talkative and sociable.
So, how did I end up at the Calgary Expo running games for complete strangers?
I picked these miniatures up a couple years ago from Hasselfree Miniatures while looking for Battlestar Galactica characters. It has been more years than I care to figure out since I last painted any character miniatures, and I didn’t want to start right off the bat with the expensive sets of Modiphius Star Trek Adventures minis. I’m quite happy with how they turned out.
I recently ran the first adventure in the three adventure mini campaign from the the Star Trek Adventures Starter Set from Modiphius Entertainment. Overall we had a good time playing through it and it worked quite well. Here are a few random observations and questions that came up along the way. I’ve also tried to avoid any major spoilers for the adventure.
The first thing I noticed is that the Starter Set comes with five pregenerated Player Characters and one Ship. The Quickstart Guide which is available for free on the Modiphius website has the same five pregenerated PCs plus one additional one, the Denobulan Science Officer.
This is a follow-up/companion article to my “Corsec Bases and Rods with tweaks” posting that I did back in November of 2015. I’ll repeat the first three paragraphs from that posting and then go on to show in more detail both the standard way that the system can be used and then add some additional information on some of the tweaks I described in the earlier post.
Over the years I’ve tried out several different types of stands and bases for my miniatures, but I think I’ve finally settled on the using the Omni-Stand system from Corsec Engineering. What I like about it is that it is very versatile, especially when combined with a few accessories from a fine tool store like Lee Valley.
There are three main parts to the Omni-Stand system, the base, the supporting rod, and the mount, all of which are interchangable, which means you can use the same miniature for multiple games and just swap out the base, going from a round base with 30 degree firing arcs for something like Full Thrust, to square bases customized for use with the X-Wing Miniatures Game.
