November 2019 – Twisted Pinnacle

On Sunday 17th November 2019 I had the pleasure alongside the rest of the Dales Wargames Club of hosting our latest 7TV event.

Titled the 7TV Open University, this event was a follow up to the games day we held earlier in the year and was again held at the Whitworth Centre in Darley Dale near Matlock in Derbyshire. The focus was once more on narrative play rather than competition, with an additional aim of getting new players into the game.

I wanted to make the event beginner friendly in order to spread the joy of 7TV as far and wide as possible. For the first event earlier in the year we really didn’t have any overarching theme and I was keen to address this for our second outing. Therefore I came up with a theme of the ‘7TV Open University’ which would encompass both the scenarios we’d play through on the day in addition to the focus on new players.

To get new players into the action as quickly and easily as possible I created a number of pre-built casts for new players to pick from. Cast size was set at 40 ratings for the event and for what I referred to as the ‘pick and play’ casts on the day I stuck to profiles from the core 7TV 2nd Edition ‘Inch High Spy Fi’ set. These also happen to be the same profiles that can be obtained from Crooked Dice as a free download and are also available within the casting agency application. This was a concious decision to demonstrate to new players how much fun can be had ‘out of the box’ with 7TV.

Eight ‘pick and play’ casts were created and I’ll be writing about each of these in future articles. Basically it was a case of matching what painted miniatures I had in my collection against the core profiles and using a bit of imagination. And it was a lot of fun. Heres the list of casts:

Department XS (‘Excess’)
The Guru and the Spacemen
Knight Industries 3000
The Tuetonic Order of Luna
United Nations Alien Countermeasures Force
The Revengers
Cobra
The Cult of Fu Manchu

After a sudden surge of interest in the few days leading up to the event, I had my fingers crossed that I had casts for budding new players. That also meant we had to get at least seven tables setup on the day. I was able to dip into the clubs scenery collection as well as my own and we ended up with an eclectic mix of setups including a V2 launch site, a woodland area with mysterious stone circle, a dockside loading area, a cobbled townscape and a couple of post apocalypse wastelands.

A couple of attendees also brought along tables, including Simon Quinton and his excellent PA diner and highway. Thankfully as well, there were enough sets of cards and templates and tokens to go around.

So, what about the scenarios (or more correctly in 7TV parlance, the episodes)? To tie in with the university theme I came up with a narrative that had the studio obtaining a government grant for educational programming. This was then immediately diverted into their adventure series and as bonuses for their top stars with the producers then having to work the system to avoid getting closed down by the government regulators.

Using the basic scenarios from the 7TV Spy-fi set I added some extra narrative tweaks. This introduced events that included shoehorning famous scientists into the episode (guest starring as themselves) or potentially having to deliver public services messages at the expense of action sequences.

In future articles I’ll go into a bit more detail around how the episodes were setup and how they worked, as well as making them available for others who might want to try them out.

While not a tournament in any way, the kind offer of prizes from Karl at Crooked Dice and Wayne at Wargames Illustrated meant that we did need to find a couple of ways of measuring some degree of success on the day. In addition to the usual ‘most sporting player’ (aka ‘best director’), we also had on offer a prize for most victory points accumalted and a wooden spoon for biggest margin of defeat.

I was busy moving between tables and didn’t get to see much of the action over and above helping out with rules and scenario queries (and taking lots of photos). However a few of the attendees have kindly written up reports of the action on the day and you can find these here:

The day itself went really well. It was extremely tiring but very satisfying experience and I’d like to take the opportunity to thank everyone who turned up and especially the veterans who helped guide the new players through their first games. All in all there were a lot laughs had, which is really what it is all about isn’t it?

We are going to do it all again in 2020 with a 7TV Apocalypse day scheduled for Sunday 5th April with the working title of ‘White Line Nightmares!”. In the meantime the club have agreed to run a couple of participation games at upcoming shows (more on that soon), but I’m also really looking forward to actually getting a game or two in myself. First up in January is another event at Board in Brum in Walsall which promises to be great, with the now annual Wargames Illustrated event scheduled for the summer.

In amongst all this good stuff Crooked Dice are also (at the time of writing) running another Kickstarter campaign to fund a new set of ‘flashy’ retro sci-fi figures. It’s a good time to be a 7TV fan!

Purchased as an integral part of the ‘secret base’ I have been planning as a 7TV table for some time now, I purchased the excellent Blotz modular 28mm scale MDF kit of a generic submarine back in the summer.

Having spent my holiday hobby time back in the summer building the kit (which can be broken down into various sections and therefore configured in a number of ways), I recently went back and finished the painting. It’s worth noting that the model could double as many different sorts of sub on the table top from World War 2 U boats to more modern types. One of the sections contains a set of missle tubes (which you would probably drop if using this for WW2), likewise the section which mounts a deck gun is probably specific to an earlier era boat.

I wanted to maintain the generic nature and usability of the model across different time periods and games in the way I painted it too. A black undercoat was applied using matt black primer from a spray can, followed by a dark grey spray and this was then sealed using a top coat spray (the currently incredibly hard to find in the UK Testors Dullcote).

Next up were decals. Again I wanted to keep it generic, but the more I looked at the painted model the more I felt it deserved some extra treatment with the decals in order to break up the monotony of black. I’ve got lots of decal sheets left over from my long since departed Dust Tactics collection, many of which were generic warning signs and symbols, which would do nicely to a certain degree. However I then came across a set of Soviet decals for Dust with some nice big red stars that would really stand out. These were applied over a gloss varnish and then sealed again with the same before another dullcote layer.

The final step was to apply some airbrush highlighting using some lighter grey from the Vallejo Air range. (I’ve purposely left the deck gun off at the moment as I wasn’t happy with the build, I’m planning on maybe looking to 3D printing for a replacement.)

At some point in the future I will go back and add some weathering, but at present I’m happy to get this to the table.