Warhammer 40,000: Ooarai Girls Academy

"We're lucky the school's on a carrier ship."
- Girls und Panzer 1

Vincent van Gogh: Still life (Vase with twelve sunflowers), 1888

**

As my opponents seemed to quite like the idea of tanks, the obvious thing to add to our Imperial army was a Leman Russ battle tank. I wanted to do something a little bit different for the model, though, and this is what I ended up with:

The model is a Panzer IV ausf. D from Warlord Games, and it's excellent; admittedly there were a couple of unsightly lumps of resin, but they were fairly easy to remove, and maybe I don't entirely know what to do with almost any of the metal doohickeys, but I think overall the model is very good and definitely worth its price.

Accompanying the tank is in the image above is a Gestapo officer from Warlord's delightful Guarding the Chateau set, i.e. Herr Flick of the Ordo Hereticus.

I'll admit that the reason I chose a Pz.IV for our Leman Russ was Girls und Panzer. Seeing as how I've done my master's thesis on tanks, I was vaguely aware that it existed, and I encountered the full absurdity of the manga when buying a goon a tank-related present. So when browsing 1/56 scale tanks online, I ended up buying the Pz.IV ausf. D that the protagonists use in their tankery exercises in the first manga.

Of course, one thing leads to another. I originally intended to have just a single Leman Russ named Ooarai Girls Academy. However, because it would be advantageous from a rules standpoint to field an entire spearhead detachment of tanks, it seems like it might be a decent idea to collect three more Ooarai tanks, one of them an HQ tank. So I googled for a female tank commander miniature - only to find that something called Company B sells not only Ooarai decals but also anime tank commanders. So obviously I ordered some.

Here's the Ooarai Girls Academy Panzer IV, then, with proper markings and everything:

The running gear was painted Vallejo Gunmetal Grey, and given a wash of Smoke and Black Glaze. The hull color is German Grey.

**

One of the most delightful and senseless absurdities of Girls und Panzer is that for some reason that completely escapes me, all of the tankery high schools are based on aircraft carriers. With Japanese entertainment, I find one just has to accept some things. This does, however, make a Warhammer 40,000 conversion remarkably easy from a fluff standpoint. Clearly the 40k Ooarai Girls Academy is an arm of the Schola Progenium that trains orphan girls into Imperial Guard tank crews on a giant starship. It makes as much sense as anything else.

Because the Ooarai tanks will eventually form their own detachment, they'll benefit from a regimental doctrine. Clearly the best doctrine for a detachment of Leman Russes is Tallarn. So if anyone finds 28mm models of Japanese schoolgirls dressed like they're in the Afrika Korps, let me know!

Char B1 bis

This Warlord Char B1 bis represents the Public Morals Committee tank. As it's the obvious candidate to be a Commissar Tank if someone wants to field one at some point, it needed a commander from Company B; I assembled this as a French tank in all other respects, but accommodating the commander in the turret required the German hatch as opposed to the original French cupola.

Here's the finished article with a Commissar tank stripe.

Pz.38(t) ausf. B

Next up: the student council tank, a Pz.38(t) from Warlord. For 40k purposes, I want this to be the HQ tank. Because a Tank Commander has a BS of 3+, it seems compulsory to take sponson weapons here, but they really interfere with the Girls und Panzer aesthetic. The solution? Magnets.

Those are plasma cannons from the Sentinel kit; they look a little big on an actual 28mm vehicle, but then everything smaller would just look like a plasma gun.

Here's the unpainted tank without plasma cannons:

And here with.

I think it painted up all right.

And the plasma guns are delightfully easy to attach and detach.

This is such a cute little tank!

M3 Lee

Finally, the volleyball team. Compared to the other tanks, the M3 is the size of a house.

**

I had also ordered a Renault FT 17 from Warlord ages ago, and as part of this project, I painted it up in Ooarai colors as well.

Finally, since we were buying World War II vehicles, how could we resist a Salamander Recon Tank from the Imperial Armor index, represented by a Warlord Games Sd.kfz 222, i.e. Lieutenant Grüber's little tank from 'Allo 'Allo.

**

I've said this before, but I'll say it again: I really like Warlord vehicles! These little tanks were a lot of fun to paint.

Let's Play Marvel Champions: the Card Game

In August, Fantasy Flight announced the upcoming Marvel Champions: the Card Game, a Marvel-themed co-operative living card game. Frankly, it sounds exactly like the Lord of the Rings LCG that we've spent quite some time with, except with only one hero. Clearly we had to try it.

**

To get the obvious part out of the way: yes, it is very much like the Lord of the Rings LCG, and will be immediately recognizable to anyone who's played the current crop of living card games, or indeed Magic: the Gathering, where all the basic mechanics are from. Each player controls a hero, who has a thwart (willpower in LotR), attack and defense stats, as well as hit points (a lot of them!).

There are some clever bits, though. Each hero has an alter ego, who has no combat stats, but instead has a different ability and a recovery stat, which they can use to restore hit points. What the villain in the scenario does depends on which form your hero is in: if you're a hero, the villain attacks you; if you're your alter ego, the villain advances their scheme. It's quite clever and gives the players a lot of control over how the game proceeds.

Each player also has a deck of 40-50 cards, which includes 15 hero-specific cards. In time-honored card game fashion, these basically consist of allies, attachments and events. Each deck can only include cards from one aspect (color/sphere) and basic (colorless/neutral) cards, so with just the core set, deckbuilding consists of choosing a hero and an aspect.

The only real twist is that you pay for cards by discarding other cards for resources. Each card has one or more resource icons in the bottom left corner, showing what kind of resources it produces, and there are resource cards specifically meant to be discarded for resources. Because you replenish your hand at the end of every turn, there's a real incentive to do as much as you can every turn, which suits the theme of the game very well.

Another fun thing is something FFG did in Arkham Horror, which is that each hero comes with their own unique weakness: both an obligation card that's shuffled into the encounter deck, and an individual nemesis and associated encounter cards that can be summoned into play by the encounter deck.

I love that one of the core set heroes is She-Hulk, by the way. As you can see, the cards are nice to look at and quite functional. The visuals throughout are in the contemporary Marvel comics style, with surprisingly few nods to the cinematic universe. It's interesting, for instance, that even though the Captain Marvel movie was a big deal, Yon-Rogg is definitely not Jude Law!

**

We got stuck in with the recommended tutorial decks, i.e. Spider-Man Justice and Captain Marvel Aggression facing Rhino. Another key difference to the other LCGs is that instead of us trying to accumulate progress on a quest, we're trying to stop the villain from accomplishing his aims. I suppose this speaks to how superheroes are generally reactionary, but maybe that's a topic for another day. In this case, Rhino is trying to break out of prison, and we're trying to stop him.

In this case, it's mostly a simple enough matter of beating up on Rhino until we reduce him to 0 hit points, while stopping him from gathering too much threat on the main scheme (quest). We focused on the beating up part; when some minions turned up, I got to play a card with a picture of a raccoon on it.

There are four different kinds of resources in the game, but you don't need a resource match to play your cards. However, as the raccoon card shows, sometimes you get benefits from using a specific kind of resource for a certain card.

Finally, after some surprisingly devastating Swinging Web Kicks, Captain Marvel took Rhino out with an Energy Channel, and we were victorious.

A second attempt with the Captain Marvel Leadership and Iron Man Aggression ended up with my Captain Marvel eliminated from play, but she bought enough time for Iron Man to gather his gazillion tech upgrades and beat the crap out of Rhino.

Back in the Lord of the Rings card game, my partner plays a mono-Tactics deck with a heavy emphasis on attachments, based on Boromir and Legolas beating everyone up. Oddly enough, it's apparently a very short step from that to an Aggression deck with a heavy emphasis on attachments, based on Iron Man beating everyone up. Who knew?

I also tried my Captain Marvel deck solo, and enjoyed the experience. Solo play in the Lord of the Rings card game is quite different to multiplayer, because it's so much easier to control the pace of the game. Here, that's so much easier overall that the difference doesn't feel nearly as big, but I found solo Marvel to also be quite good fun. It was very rewarding to finally knock out Rhino with a maxed-out Energy Channel!

After the first scenario, we tried the second one, where instead of a straight-up fight to beat up Rhino, you get... a straight-up fight to beat up Klaw.

I'll be honest: the first two scenarios play out exactly the same way, and that was a bit disappointing.

**

With potentially the entire Marvel universe to play with, it's not like this game is ever going to run out of material. As a household of Marvel aficionados, naturally we have lots of opinions on who needs to be included in the game as it expands. I mean seeing as how there's already a raccoon card, they're clearly going to do the Guardians of the Galaxy at some point, so I very much want Nebula and Valkyrie heroes. And obviously Nikki. Ally cards we need include Jessica Biel's character from Blade: Trinity. In fact, I'm holding out for a Blade-themed deluxe expansion or whatever they're going to call the box sets.

My list of heroes we absolutely need to see in the game:

Dazzler
Karma
Domino
Moondragon
Wildstreak
Vendetta
Death's Head
Misha from the Warheads

Although to be fair I guess I might have to accept Misha as an ally. And finally, of course, my favorite Marvel character of all time: Motormouth. I will be very disappointed if we don't get a Motormouth hero pack!

**

So we've had fun with the core set! There's a couple of things I'm a bit leery about, though, in comparison to Fantasy Flight's earlier LCGs. We've been told we're getting hero packs, villain packs and story boxes; the first will include a new hero and a ready-to-play deck, the second has a new villain and some scenarios, and the story boxes will presumably have some of everything. So whereas with the Lord of the Rings you'd buy an adventure pack and get a hero, a pile of player cards and a quest to play, now we have to pay double (on top of a considerably more expensive core set!). Okay, we get more cards, but that leads to my other question: how is deckbuilding going to work?

While it's definitely a good thing that the core set comes with four playable decks (unlike, say, the Arkham one), restricting each deck to a single aspect means there's no deckbuilding to be done with the core set. In the announcement of the Captain America hero pack, we were told that that hero pack will come with 15 Captain America cards, 17 Leadership cards and eight basic cards, plus a new card for each other aspect. That's not exactly a lot in terms of deckbuilding. If the Cap deck is playable right out of the box, I guess some of the basic cards have to be at least functional reprints? The resource cards, for instance. So for a Leadership player, there's the 17 new cards and maybe something new in neutral; everybody else is getting three copies of one new card. This isn't exactly going to be a fast-growing cardpool.

I get that not everyone likes deckbuilding, but hell, I do. I'm fondly recalling the Lord of the Rings core set, with which you could build all kinds of decks by mixing two or even three spheres. I'm kinda bummed that it looks like it's going to be quite a while until I get to do any proper Marvel deckbuilding.

The other thing that feels a little bit disappointing is that so far, the core set scenarios have felt very similar. We have to stop the villain from gathering enough threat to win, and do enough damage to them to beat them up. And that's it. If all the quests are going to be like this, then I'm afraid this is going to get kinda old pretty fast.

**

So, a verdict. Marvel Champions feels promising, and we've enjoyed playing it. Would we recommend dropping 70€ on a copy? Frankly, not really. At this point so much depends on where the game goes. Hero and villain packs will apparently be dropping throughout next year, and for me at least, whether the game is worth playing or not is really going to depend on whether they take both deckbuilding and the villain decks in new and interesting directions or not. Overall, we feel cautiously positive - but let's see.

Let's Play Munchkin Warhammer 40,000

The original Munchkin card game came out in 2001, and it's inexplicably taken them eighteen years to get around to doing Munchkin Warhammer 40,000. We never got into Munchkin back in the day, but I bought the July 2019 issue of White Dwarf to get the Blood Ravens rules, and it came with a card for Munchkin 40k. Now, since it would be silly to own just one Munchkin card, we decided this would be a good time to take the plunge and get Munchkin 40k.

**

As you can see from the example card above, Munchkin 40k gets it: this is Munchkin humor in 40k grimdark, and it just works. Below is the beginning of our first game, in the prosaic surroundings of our kitchen table. The Munchkin Warhammer 40,000 box comes with 168 cards, which makes entirely adequate door and treasure decks, and a board and little cardboard standies for everyone. The board is used purely to mark which level everyone is on and where to put the cards, so it's theoretically totally unnecessary, but we liked it.

In case you don't know how Munchkin works, it's very simple: each player represents a tabletop role-playing game player who is, well, a munchkin; someone who completely ignores the plot and role-playing aspects of the game in order to make the best character possible and "win". Hence, the objective in Munchkin is to be the first to reach level 10 by killing monsters. To get there, you amass equipment of all kinds to help kill monsters - and stop other people from winning first! It's not particularly well balanced, and often devolves into an intense king-killing exercise where everyone piles onto the leader; and all that is exactly the point. It's why it's called Munchkin. It's a bit too heavy to be a party game, but not nearly heavy enough to be a Very Serious Game either - and far too tongue-in-cheek for that as well. In my opinion, Munchkin has a very particular niche of its own, and a lot of the criticism it gets comes from people who seem to think it should be something other than what it is.

To get back to Munchkin 40,000, this iteration switches things up a bit: we're no longer role-playing a dungeon crawl, but rather we're tabletop wargaming. Classes and races are out in favor of armies and vehicles, and some of the cards reference miniature gaming rather than role-playing; for instance, you can drop an enemy's level by playing Unpainted on it, or even worse, Proxied.

Below is the end of our first game. I won playing an Ork with a Lychguard Wraithscythe, Radium Pistol and Chosen Helmet, riding the Auric Aquilas. I won by playing both Purge Yourself from Imperial Records and Pilgrimage to Holy Terra, and defeating a C'tan while defeating my opponent's attempt to make me lose a level with Left Your Terrain at Home.

For our second game, we all somewhat hilariously started as Necrons, but later, erm, evolved; thanks to the Alliance card, I found myself playing both Necrons and Tyranids. The amount of grenades being thrown into the fight below demonstrates, I think, that we were getting the hang of this Munchkin thing.

After a long while spent with all of us at level 9, eventually my fellow Necron managed to find a monster in the door deck and, despite our best efforts, defeat it to win the game.

We had a great time playing Munchkin Warhammer 40,000. Thematically, it's a perfect match: 40k "grimdark" has always been a bit silly, and the writing and John Kovalic's art capture that silliness wonderfully. Our second game got a bit intense, and yeah, I can kinda see how people who played waaay too much Munchkin back in the day got burned out on it, but we very much enjoyed ourselves.

**

The really scary thing about Munchkin is that it appeals to the collector in me. Ordinarily, I wouldn't be interested in owning multiple versions of the same game, but with Munchkin, the thing is that you can combine them. All of them, that is. So once we'd tried 40k Munchkin, clearly the thing to do was get another set. Seeing as how we've all been pretty diehard Marvel fans since the previous millenium, the obvious choice was Munchkin Marvel.

As you may be able to tell, we also got a blister pack. It is excellent.

Also, we found a copy of Fairy Dust Dice at our friendly local gaming store, and my partner loved them, so now we're also playing with a four-card Fairy deck.

The first thing you notice with Munchkin Marvel is that it takes itself a lot more seriously than 40k Munchkin. Here, everyone starts with a Role card that tells you what kind of SHIELD agent you are; each even comes with a little bonus applicable in certain situations. In addition to equipment, we can also have allies and be affiliated to a Marvel universe organization like the Avengers. Below is a picture toward the end of our first game, when I got Cryogenically Frozen and had to miss a turn, so I had plenty of time to get the camera out!

As you can see, even the art is much more serious! The cards are pretty succesful thematically; we did get a kick out of having stuff like different Iron Man armors and Captain America's shield, and even Infinity Gems, flying around, and fighting various Marvel bad guys. The presentation seems to be mostly geared toward the current Marvel cinematic universe, but the art is from the comics.

Below is the end of our game: our fellow operative, definitely a Hydra double agent, deployed a Life Model Decoy to defeat the Kingpin and make it to level 10.

Overall, Munchkin Marvel is fun to play, but thematically it's in a slightly awkward spot between being a serious Marvel game and proper Munchkin comedy. Crucially, Marvel lacks the meta level that's so important to Munchkin; you just can't have a card like Left Your Terrain at Home in Marvel! Also, I don't really think the Role cards add much to the experience, and I've come to dislike making players pick from a strict gender binary. Even in a household of fairly hardcore Marvel fans, we thought Munchkin 40k was just much more fun, and more Munchkin.

**

Later, we got the opportunity to try a five-player game with the Faith and Firepower expansion. I started out as a Necron with a power sword and a Fairy Duster, as you do. One particular complaint I have with Munchkin 40k is that although I regard the Necrons as an innovation, I've now played as one so many times that I'm about this close to buying the codex and a Start Collecting Necrons box.

Faith and Firepower adds a little over a hundred cards; you can see the size of the door and treasure decks in the picture above. Most importantly, there are two new armies, the Sisters of Battle and the Tau, both of which we felt were good additions to the game, and a whlle bunch of stuff for everyone to use.

Five-player Munchkin turned out to be pleasantly chaotic. We had a bit of a moment when a player threatened to get too far ahead by fighting a Snotling. The Snotling, however, turned out to be a holographic projection, and what they actually ended up fighting was a Fairy Scary Heretical Grimdark Undead Mean Machine Angel, with his dial set all the way to 4.

The chaos lasted for something like three hours, until everyone's joint efforts were no longer enough to stop a Tyranid-Sisters of Battle alliance storming to victory in their Leman Russ.

If Munchkin 40k was good with three players, it's absolutely excellent with five.

**

We're definitely going to try the Cosmic Chaos expansion and see if that makes Muchkin Marvel a bit more interesting, but what I think seems to be the best bet at this point is to keep playing Munchkin 40k, but add the Marvel cards to it. It's worth noting that the Marvel set is a particularly good candidate for this since none of the cards have any use restrictions! And since we've got kind of a comic book vibe going, there's also Munchkin Turtles. Mixing multiple sets of course means we'll also be interested in Cheat with Both Hands... You see where this is going. We're going to need some kind of card holders.

Our introduction to Munchkin has been great fun so far, and I would very much recommend Munchkin Warhammer 40,000 to anybody who's even a little bit into 40k and interested in Munchkin. So far, it seems like a perfect match. Also get the Judge Dredd expansion while you're at it, it's easily worth the price and, seeing as how Games Workshop stole most of Warhammer 40,000 from 2000 AD in the first place, very thematically appropriate. Another expansion that goes nicely with 40k is Space Ships. But just the base game itself is excellent fun. If you missed the Munchkin craze the first time around like we did, give Munchkin Warhammer 40,000 a shot. I think you'll find it's worth it.

Let's Play Star Wars: the Card Game

Back in 2017, we celebrated the fourth of May by getting a copy of Star Wars: the Card Game, but with everything that's been going on, it's taken me this long to get around to blogging about it. The game, of course, has been discontinued since, but I'm not letting that stop me.

Magali Villeneuve: Princess Leia

**

A post shared by Michael Halila (@michaelhalila) on May 4, 2017 at 3:01pm PDT

Way back when we first bought the Lord of the Rings LCG, we also immediately bought the Dead Marshes adventure pack, because my partner insisted on Boromir. This time, it was my turn, so we bought Jump to Lightspeed for Arden Lyn, the Sith antagonist of the unforgettable Masters of Teräs Käsi.

I'm not sure I can adequately explain to a native English speaker how surreal and fantastically hilarious Teräs Käsi is. Supposedly a Star Wars martial art, it was apparently named by someone taking an English-Finnish dictionary and looking up the words for steel and hand. Never mind that "steel hand" in Finnish would be a compound word and therefore spelled teräskäsi, and that would still sound kinda lame. More than that, though, the name "Masters of Teräs Käsi" is somehow so amazingly ludicrous that when I first saw it, I flatly refused to believe that such a game could possibly exist. Surely, I reasoned, this must be some bizarre joke. Reading an actual review of the game momentarily convinced me that it was real, but I promptly forgot it, no doubt because my brain dismissed it as completely absurd - meaning that I was stunned when I encountered it again after almost a decade. So once I learned that Arden Lyn was included in the Star Wars card game, how was I supposed to build a Dark Side deck without her?

One of the perennial hot-button issues of Finnish politics is whether and how much compulsory Swedish should be taught in our schools. Whatever the broader picture, for the purposes of this topic I'm delighted that we're a nation of bilingual illiterates, because it means that in addition to enjoying Teräs Käsi, we can also marvel at Hustru fönster, which is as ungrammatical and barely any less hysterical. I hope to one day see the card.

Finally, in the process of looking up those Wookiepedia links, I was reminded - I had mercifully forgotten this - that there is also a Teräs Käsi stance called "Förräderi". At this point, I feel quite comfortable in saying, on behalf of the Nordic countries, can you just fucking stop already.

**

Since it was the fourth of May, we had to try a game. I picked the Sith starter deck, and my partner used the Jedi deck.

Since it was our first game ever, we misplayed some things and had barely the slightest idea of what we were doing. We had a lot of fun, though! A particular highlight of our game was C-3PO's rampage through Coruscant. I had initially drawn the Heart of the Empire objective, and it looked like it might be a fun idea to try playing it.

Despite these extra resources, I ended up heavily outnumbered, so I used Varys There Is No Escape to wipe the board. Next turn, my partner played C3PO, and finding no units on my side, attacked Coruscant with him. Now, C3PO has no damage icons, but since there were no defenders, he did one unopposed damage to Coruscant. So imagine, if you like, C3PO wandering around Coruscant, somehow doing 10% of the damage the rebels needed to wrest it from the Empire - because I eventually lost by losing Coruscant.

**

While we were getting into the game last summer, Fantasy Flight announced the last adventure chapter Force pack cycle and its first instalment, Allies of Necessity. Since it featured Jyn Erso (a name straight out of the Knights of the Old Republic name generator) and my partner was a big fan of Rogue One, we had to get it. I was intrigued to notice there was also a dark side lady, a Doctor Aphra.

To find out who she was, I read her epynomous comic, and liked it enough to also get the Darth Vader comic it was a spinoff of. I highly recommend both! I find I very much enjoy Kieron Gillen's work: he writes an excellent Vader, and like the Dark Lord of the Sith himself, his stories move at a deliberate and purposeful pace, so far from the breathless rush that I find too many contemporary comics are consumed with.

Anyway, with both Jyn Erso and Doctor Aphra on board, we'll be getting into deckbuilding. That works very differently in Star Wars compared to the other Fantasy Flight LCGs: instead of selecting individual cards for your deck, you pick objectives, each of which comes with five preset player cards. This means there are less choices, but arguably they're far more significant ones: instead of agonizing over whether to have two or three copies of a single card in your deck, you're picking card sets and figuring how they're going to interact with each other. I think this was a good idea, and it wouldn't necessarily go amiss in other LCGs.

**

Finally, a verdict: this was a fun enough game and it seems a real shame if Fantasy Flight doesn't follow it up with another Star Wars LCG. A co-operative Star Wars card game made to anything even remotely like the Lord of the Rings LCG standard would frankly be amazing. We can always hope?

Rogue Trader: Star-Lord alternate career rank

Obviously this is a parody, we have no rights to anything, you know.


Required Career: Any.
Alternate Rank: Rank 2 or Higher (10,000 xp)
Other Requirements: Charm, Fel 30+
Traits: Characters selecting this Alternate Rank receive the Ravager Implants trait.

Star-Lord Advances Prerequisites in italics

Awareness +10 200xp Awareness
Barter 200xp
Blather 200xp
Carouse 100xp
Charm +10 200xp
Charm +20 300xp Charm +10
Deceive +10 200xp Deceive
Evaluate 200xp
Forbidden Lore (Archeotech) 200xp
Performer (Dancer) 100xp
Pilot (Personal) 200xp
Pilot (Personal) +10 200xp Pilot (Personal)
Pilot (Personal) +20 200xp Pilot (Personal) +10
Search 200xp
Security 200xp
Silent Move 200xp
Sleight of Hand 200xp
Tech-use 200xp
Trade: Archeologist 200xp

Gunslinger 500xp Two-Weapon Wielder (Ballistic)
Hard Target 300xp Performer (Dancer)
Hotshot Pilot 500xp Pilot (Personal)
Peer (Underworld) 200xp
Pistol Weapon Training (Universal) 300xp
Two-Weapon Wielder (Ballistic) 300xp BS 35, Agility 35

Void Accustomed 200xp Pilot (Personal)
"I'm Distracting You" 500xp Charm +20, Performer (Dancer)

**

Ravager Implants

The character is equipped with arcane archeotech implants that allow them to function in the yawning void. When the implants are deployed (counts as a Free Action), the character is immune to the effects of vacuum, cold and radiation as if they had the Machine trait, and can freely move in zero-g and vacuum environments using the Pilot (Personal) skill.

Void Accustomed

As the Void Born starting trait (core rulebook, p. 19): immune to space travel sickness, zero- or low-gravity environments not considered difficult terrain.

"I'm distracting you"

Once per combat or similar conflict situation (GM'd discretion), at the beginning of a round, the character may make an opposed Challenging +0 Charm or Performer (Dancer) test versus the highest enemy Willpower score as a Reaction. If the character succeeds, they win Initiative that round and all enemies act last. In addition, all enemies suffer a -10 to their actions that round, increased by -10 for each degree of success. If the character fails the test, count their Initiative as zero for that round. At the GM's discretion, enemies with the Machine trait may be immune to this Talent.

The man who created one of the most kickass female characters ever has passed away

Last Wednesday I lost yet another piece of my childhood. Peter O'Donnell passed away aged 80.

I can't do justice to him right now. I know he was an old, ill man but... damn.



Sure, Modesty Blaise is a pulp heroine but she is a well-rounded believable character... well, okay, her skills are incredible but she is still a human being, and I love her. I've loved her since I was a kid and read Taste for Death. The first English language novel I ever read was I, Lucifer. I hunted the used books stores for the books and the comics. (Now, thanks to Amazon.com and eBay, I've managed to collect all of the 13 novels & short story collections, but am still working on the comics.)

Even the historical romances (more like adventure stories) O'Donnell wrote under the pseudonym Madeleine Brent are much more feminist than many of their like, and this from a British man who was born in 1920. I had been reading them for years before I found out they were written by him. (Yes, I'm old. This was before Wikipedia.)

Thank you for giving us the stories I can read over and over again, Mr O'Donnell. Thank you for giving us characters whose fates still make me laugh and cry (I might never forgive you for Cobra Trap, though, you old bastard).

Rest in peace.



Modesty: "No villains, no victims, no blood sweat and tears... We'll take a little break, Willie love, just you and me."

Willie: "Best bit of it all, Princess."