A quixotic lurch into 15mm Mutants and Death Ray Guns

After having a lot of fun with MDRG recently, my thoughts turned to 15mm. Why? Well, I've got lots of 15mm fantasy and sci-fi figures lying about, but I've rarely made huge advances with them before getting drawn back into 28mm, with all of its kitbashing and conversion potential.

It might seem mad to duplicate a set of miniatures in a smaller scale while you're still working on their larger equivalents. And it is! But it's a lot of fun too. This repurposed Copplestone barbarian makes a fine blue-skinned mutant, I think, and I have lots of other fantasy figures that will work perfectly in some glowing wasteland or other.

Meanwhile, I've long observed that a lot of 28mm terrain works just fine with 15mm. Small shacks in one scale are big shacks in another, and a surprising number of doors work just fine for both scales. 

One of the things that's stopped me painting more 15mm in the past is just that I run out of enthusiasm for the slightly more mechanical painting that's required and return to the creative freedoms of the bigger scale. 

But a small-warband game like MDRG, with perhaps just four or five figures a side, allows forces to be put together very quickly. And there's built-in variety with the various mutant types, so there's no need for any boring repeats (often a problem with 15mm forces). 

I've got various 'true 25' Ral Partha creatures lined up for this project, along with some 1/72 beasties from Dark Alliance and Caesar. With some nice, cartoony colour schemes, I think there's plenty of scope for fun.

Mutants and Death Ray Guns: a mini-campaign!

I got six games of MDRG in over the weekend, including a four-game mini-campaign with three players. Work pressures meant that most of the new scenery wasn't quite finished, but it did the job. 

We rustled giant bugs, encountered the Wretched, mutant crabmen and an outlaw hyena man:

Bounty hunters turned up now and then as 'wandering monsters':

The toad-rider and his leader swept all before them, winning every game they played.

 

A winged mutant and her warband

This is the third full warband I've completed for Mutants and Death Ray Guns. It's a mixed warband: one mutant, one human, one android, one robot and one mutant animal.

The leader is a Reaper Bones demon I've had for a while. As the random profile came up with Flying and Telekinetic Disarm, the wings and pose of this figure fitted the bill. The blue skin gives her a touch of the X-Men, I think.

If I'd had more time, I might have swapped the trident out for something more modern. But perhaps the campaign will throw up a gun or something, in which case, she'd be easy to convert. She'll do for now in any case!

 

A Mutants and Death Ray Guns warbands in progress

I'm well into my third warband for Mutants and Death Ray Guns. This lot have an android (a straight-up Stargrave automaton), a robot (from some board game), a mutated wolf (see last post) and a human champion (more or less a straight build from Frostgrave Cultists 3). There's also a flying mutant leader to come - I'm hoping to finish her today.

In the background are some of the shanty-town-style buildings I've been putting together for this project. My aim here is to get lots of things that look OK done rather than making them particularly detailed or convincing. My attempts to corral or bribe the kids into making lots have so far borne only limited fruit ...

 

A mutant ... wolf? Hyena? Aardwolf?

 The first of a new gang for Mutants and Death Ray Guns: a mutant 'wolf' - although it looks a bit more like some sort of hyena.

Toad rider

This fishy fellow is the final member of the first mutant gang for my forthcoming Mutants and Death Ray Guns campaign. He's kitbashed from five different kits and mounted on a green-stuff saddle on a Reaper Bones toad.

He gives his gang some much-needed mobility, given that they're saddled with a leader with Short Move and another character with Slow. The toad rider is Mounted and so can carry a passenger. He's Amphibious too, which could help with manoeuvres. 

Here's the whole gang:

 

More mutants!

Here's the core of an Mutants and Death Ray Guns warband: a heavily armed mutant leader with a sonic gun and a power weapon (the latter rolled up by his green four-legged comrade that I posted earlier, who lost the ability to use it with the Bestial mutation), impaired by Short Move and blessed with Savage; the peg-legged lady with the flamethrower (Slow Move and Difficult Target); and a goat-faced chap with Danger Sense and Energy Adaptation.

With the green guy, that's four out of the five-strong band done; I hope to complete their mounted colleague today or tomorrow.

 

"A shattered visage lies ..."

This is an objective or piece of scatter terrain for Mutants and Death Ray Guns, made from a cheap plastic Halloween skull from Hobbycraft.

It could be a downed drone (Zardoz style) or the head of a giant robot. 

Doubtless, brave looters could find valuable power cells or even weapons within ...

But is it entirely deactivated?

 

Another mutant

This lady is the latest mutant for my forthcoming Mutants and Death Ray Guns campaign - part of the same warband as the four-legged green beastie I posted a couple of weeks ago. 

Her randomly rolled profile is Q4, C3, Slow, Difficult Target, Flamethrower.

She's pretty much a straight build from the Stargrave female crew set, with the exception of her left leg. To represent the Slow trait, I opted for a peg leg, cut from a gun barrel. I also added a meat cleaver with other bits and bobs from the latest Frostgrave cultists set, to justify her combat oomph (C3 for a mutant rather than the customary human C2). 

 

A human 'purity squad'

One of the features of Mutants and Death Ray Guns is that you get certain benefits and drawbacks from fielding a squad that consists entirely of humans, mutants or robot-types. Human 'purity squads' get extra equipment but fewer troops; in a game set up for five-strong squads, they get only four characters to start with. 

This is a purity squad made with the Nemesis the Warlock strip from 2000 AD in mind and especially its villain, the Arch-Bigot Torquemada and his human supremacists. The red capirotes (from the first Frostgrave cultists set) are a nod to that.

The squad is for a forthcoming one-day MDRG campaign; it's one of the better-armed ones that I've rolled up, in that every member has a firearm (one rolled two laser pistols but opted to share). So they should prove fairly formidable villains.

 

A very old mutant

For my current Mutants and Death Ray Guns project, I'm awarding myself bonus points for whenever I can repurpose an old fantasy miniature as a mutant. This Citadel cyclops from the Fiend Factory range was an ideal candidate; he's only slightly large by modern standards and fits on a 30mm base. And of course, his one eye sets him up nicely as some sort of post-apocalyptic badlands baddie. 

He was great fun to paint - and pretty quick. Blue skin seems to be a sort of mark of the comic-book mutant in 2000 AD and the like, so that was an obvious choice. 

I'm planning on repurposing the hill giant from the same range in much the same way. 

 Mutants and Death Ray Guns often requires figures with only primitive weaponry, so finding fantasy figures that can fit in without conversion is a fun side-project that should provide a roster of replacements to reinforce depleted ranks between games. 

Some more Mutants and Death Ray Guns

Work's been hellishly busy lately, but I managed to squeeze in another game of Mutants and Death Ray Guns last night - and to make some progress on the various warbands I've been kitbashing for a big session next month.

This carnivorous plant from Reaper Bones isn't quite finished, but I thought it was good enough for the table, and it played a useful part as an NPC threat. 

I increasingly thing that MDRG is the finest expression of the Song of Blades and Heroes engine; its additional reloading actions and scope for non-combat actions (climbing, smashing down doors, figuring out artefacts) means that the SoBH action economy really comes into its own. And the simple campaign system is great. 

One thing I foresee adding some spice to multiplayer games in October is the fact that only the last band standing on the battlefield gets the chance to tend to their wounded and loot the bodies of the slain. As a lot of scenario objectives are going to be unrelated to that (e.g. carry off plunder or kill an outlaw), I can imagine various situations where the 'winner' wants to get off the table quick and the 'losers' are keen to fight things out for scavengers' rights. 

I managed to get a bit of kitbashing done yesterday too, so there will be some interesting painting in the weeks ahead:

A kitbashed mutant for Mutants and Death Ray Guns

Here's the first of my kitbashed mutants for the forthcoming MDRG campaign. He's made from a GW orc head on a Reaper Bones hellcat body, with a bit of green stuff around the mane. 

This guy's randomly generated profile was this Q4, C3, Bestial (entailing Long Move), Stealth, Powered Hand Weapon. His bestial nature meant that he surrendered the power weapon to the warband's leader as he can't use it.

 

Back to Mutants and Death Ray Guns

I've been playing Ganesha Games' Mutants and Death Ray Guns (MDRG) for well over a decade - with the kids and with friends. But I've never played it properly: that is, I've never used the random-generation tables to create the sorts of motley gangs and warbands that the game is designed for, and I've never used the campaign system.

That is changing, though. I've got a gaming day with some friends next month. In the past couple of years, we've played quite a bit of Mordheim and a fair bit of Frostgrave. And we've all played quite a bit of Song of Blades and Heroes and/or MDRG over the years. So actually playing MDRG as it was intended seems the obvious thing to do. 

I played a sample game last night with my son, and we've decided to keep that going as a mini-campaign. The core Song of Blades engine is just so well designed: as my son said, "it always just feels more tactical". The activation decisions and push-your-luck risk/reward balance are tremendous features: there's very rarely a 'right' think to do. Instead, you have a range of cautious choices, some riskier ones and the opportunity to roll all three activation dice and go for something bold.

The game is very fast-moving compared with most skirmish rulesets: no fiddling with measuring tapes and very few rules that aren't immediately absorbed, so that the rulebook seldom needs to be consulted. When played with randomly generated forces, there's much less firepower than in the points-based games we used to play. And that really works well: it becomes a game of sneaking, stealing and ambushing rather than a shootfest.

I've rolled up a whole lot of random warbands for the October event and have started on some kitbashing to match the fruits of the dice:

This is a complete starting warband (a flying mutant leader with psychic powers; a savage human champion; an android with an RPG; a robot; and a mutated wolf):