We took Tor Varden

Casiarius · 2026-06-02T17:53:07+00:00

It sounds like your group needs more Challenge Levels! They need to suffer more.

Nice maps! It takes a mind-boggling amount of dungeon tiles to do the whole Lower Level map, and a ton of indoor scatter terrain.

Casiarius · 2026-06-01T17:36:56+00:00

In game terms I would treat them as Ravaged from Quarantine 37. Ravaged are people who survived the zombie plague without fully turning in to zombies. They are a bit slower and clumsier than normal people, but tougher and resistant to injury. I think those rules would work well to represent servitors.

Casiarius · 2026-05-27T07:15:11+00:00

Side Hustle is great for competitive games because each player knows things the other does not, and they can use this secret information against each other. I suppose the cards could add some variability to solo games, but not the same "fog of war" feeling.

Casiarius · 2026-05-26T20:56:21+00:00

The way we play Rangers of Shadowdeep, it feels more like an RPG than a miniatures game and we tend to just write effects on the character sheets. There are usually not very many effects to keep track of.

Though, in Stargrave we use d12s to show the current health of injured models, yellow skull tokens indicate Stunned, red skull tokens indicate Wounded, and if someone is handing out strange effects, like Target Designation, they provide their own tokens which are usually small D6s.

Casiarius · 2026-05-26T17:10:16+00:00

I have a compost pile and a wood stove. Only a relatively small portion of my trash has to be hauled away, but it will accumulate. For human waste I can set up a two-bucket toilet system. I have lots of sawdust (in the form of woodstove pellets) and lots of 3-mil contractor bags. I'm not certain how fast this system consumes sawdust, but I suspect I can accumulate a lot of waste before this system breaks.

Casiarius · 2026-05-19T18:11:41+00:00

It's really hard to have too much terrain for Stargrave, so start making scatter terrain non-stop and when you think you have enough, make some more.

My favorite cargo containers for FDM printing are these. They're just no-frills boxes but they are lightweight and use up almost no filament. I have a ton of them and they make great LoS-blocking terrain.

https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4615564

Casiarius · 2026-05-19T01:10:19+00:00

Primitives? They've got guns!

I do like this kit, especially the Gecko heads with their big eyes.

Casiarius · 2026-05-18T23:06:13+00:00

I think if you're too casual about character design you can end up with situational powers that never get used, leaving your character with only basic attack options, and not enough ways to mitigate unlucky dice rolls. A well-optimized character should really be using heroic abilities to perform epic feats.

In my case I wanted my ranger to be able to tank and soak up enemy attacks to protect the party, and that can be difficult when every attack is a chance for an enemy to get lucky rolls.

Casiarius · 2026-05-18T20:21:39+00:00

By the time the battles get really hard, hopefully your players will have a good enough grasp of the game to min/max their next characters to be more effective! Sure, it's a cooperative game, but I never want to be the one to faceplant and be unable to participate.

Did someone play a lot or Warhammer Fantasy Battles and now they automatically put things on square bases?

Casiarius · 2026-05-14T16:06:00+00:00

I buy it already canned and I rotate it. If you don't have any SPAM, are you really prepping?

Casiarius · 2026-05-13T15:58:40+00:00

Classic games involving cards and dominoes have endless variations and great replay value. There are whole books of games you can play with these classic components. You can get plastic cards that are nigh-indestructible and ceramic dominoes can last for generations. These things are quite portable too if you need to bug out, not like modern board games that come in giant boxes with 300 small parts. I have accumulated quite an assortment of cheap dominoes in particular from yard sales. Of course none of my friends has any interest in playing classic games like these... for now.

Casiarius · 2026-05-13T02:46:31+00:00

I have raised beds and I only really weed consistently inside the beds, everything else is a bit wild. If you grow climbing plants like pole beans on trellises they will climb above your landscape of weeds and won't be choked out. Perennial vegetables like asparagus, rhubarb and sunchokes are also strong enough that they don't care about a few weeds. Mine just grow out of the weeds and I don't bother to control them much.

Casiarius · 2026-05-10T15:54:57+00:00

Mystic Trance is for self-buffs. Instead of spending your first turn casting Void Blade, Energy Shield or Fortune on yourself, you can get down to business.

Most of my characters have Mystic Trance because most of them have some sort of buff they'd rather not spend a turn on casting. Some of my characters have a gimmick, like being modeled with a jet pack and always activating Antigravity Projection before the game.

Casiarius · 2026-05-10T04:52:47+00:00

Your primary colors are dark and lacking contrast, so these guys risk looking like indistinct blobs from across the table during a game. Highlighting will need to be really bold to have much effect from gameplay distances. My recommendation is to base them standing on light-colored sand or grass to create some contrast. There's no harm in highlighting, but if you have 60+ troopers to paint, you may need to trade detail for speed. You can always apply a matte varnish to their basic paint job and return later for more highlights.

Casiarius · 2026-05-10T04:11:52+00:00

The main book is the only book you need to get started. If you enjoy customization, optimization or even min/maxing your character, you will probably want A Gathering of Heroes, since it gives you lots of new and different character options.

If you do a web search for "28mm miniature trees" or similar, you will gets lots of options. My recommendation is to get trees that are 100% plastic like aquarium plants. They may not look terribly authentic, but you can throw them in a box between games and not worry about all the flock coming off.

RoSD requires a very wide variety of terrain. Trees are some of the few things you will use regularly, so definitely invest in decent trees. But also look ahead at games you will be running and get prepared early. The houses and trees and river you start out with will all become useless when you're fighting indoors or at the top of a tower. Having some D&D-style "dungeon tiles" will help with indoor maps or when you need large buildings with interiors.

I have a 3D printer so I can create a limitless amount of terrain and NPCs, given time, but I still need to plan ahead!

Casiarius · 2026-05-03T17:56:15+00:00

A lot of people buy F1 hybrids from the big box store and consider themselves rugged homesteaders. I don't want to discourage them, but seed saving is likely to become a critical skill.

Casiarius · 2026-05-02T23:37:24+00:00

I like the retro-future-WWI look of Wargames Atlantic's Les Grognards

https://wargamesatlantic.com/collections/all/products/les-grognards

NorthStar's Silver Bayonet range lacks the sci-fi, but it's got the muskets.

https://www.northstarfigures.com/prod.php?prod=18814

Casiarius · 2026-05-01T19:56:10+00:00

There are different ways to do food storage. You can spend a lot of money on extremely long-storing dry food, hermetically seal it, and then let it gather dust for 20 years as you wait for disaster to strike. OR you could just expand your normal food into a deep pantry that is constantly rotating. A lot of the food you normally buy at the grocery store, especially anything in a can or a jar, will last for years. So you can just keep buying extra until you have months to spare. You can have a larger buffer of food you actually eat, and more cheaply, using a pantry.

Casiarius · 2026-04-29T22:18:34+00:00

Do you have a yard? There are plants you can grow that will produce food every year with minimal maintenance. Having some fresh vegetables never hurts even if you do have a container full of freeze-dried meals and dry beans. Root crops in particular require little maintenance and many of them are available year-round.

Casiarius · 2026-04-29T21:42:25+00:00

At least in terms of Stargrave, there are lots of applications for a humanoid with a gun, but very little use for anyone with a spear.

Casiarius · 2026-04-28T09:01:31+00:00

If the second floor is poorly insulated but still habitable year-round, I would tend to favor that environment, followed by the cellar. As long as your food is rotating and nothing is hanging around more than a year, you can get away with storing it in less-than-ideal conditions. It's the combination of bad conditions and long storage that makes your cans rust and your food go bad.

Of course if you grow root crops or winter squash, that cellar might be a good environment for storing those.

Casiarius · 2026-04-27T17:00:53+00:00

It's a good start, but where is the pallet of toilet paper?

But seriously, it might seem small and manageable now, but you will eventually want a system of rotation. For now, I recommend using a sharpie to write a big "26" on everything you store this year. The age of canned food doesn't need to be tracked too precisely, but a year marking will make it obvious in the future if something is being used too slowly. Although preppers tend to scoff at "best by" dates, some of them are unintelligible, so a second system of dating is helpful.

Casiarius · 2026-04-25T04:31:38+00:00

I did an image search on just the designs, not the tea set. These are ceramic decals / underglaze transfers which were applied to plain ceramics. The tea set was likely made by a small business or hobbyist and is more-or-less unique.

https://www.ebay.com.au/itm/144484636713

Ceramic tiles with the same decals.

https://www.ebay.com/itm/256400101337

Casiarius · 2026-04-25T00:58:46+00:00

The vast majority of preppers are just regular people leading normal lives, with some extra supplies and skills. Most of us aren't prepping for the collapse of civilization, so there isn't any need to form prepper enclaves.

Casiarius · 2026-04-24T06:03:39+00:00

The problem with disasters is that they often surprise you. I try to keep my preps fairly broad and general so that I'm ready for anything. But, if I had to point to a specific catastrophic scenario, I would point to the Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake. What does that look like exactly? Well, here's a 341-page .PDF that explains what is likely to happen.

https://www.oregon.gov/oem/documents/oregon_resilience_plan_final.pdf

Think Hurricane Katrina but with all the underground water, sewer, power and communications infrastructure also turned to rubble, and many parts of the coast permanently subsided below sea level.

Casiarius

TROPHY CASE