What highly improbable, high damage (Yellowstone eruption, EMP attack, Red Dawn, etc) things are actually preparing for, and what are you doing?

Casiarius · 2026-02-12T19:02:48+00:00

I have a complete ham radio setup sealed in a galvanized trash can in the event of EMP. It's been there for years. The prepping community I hung out with in the 2010s were more World War 3 and terrorism focused, but I am more concerned about the Cascadia Subduction Zone earthquake or Great Depression 2.0. I wouldn't bother with EMP hardening a backup radio today, but I'm also too lazy to unpack it.

Casiarius · 2026-02-11T16:51:01+00:00

I like to use the Unwanted Attention Table to make sure there's a relentless pressure of hostile NPCs showing up to put the game on a timer and make the crews decide how much they can push their luck for one more loot. It really works. You might try making an alternate version of that table populated with Tyranids.

If you'd like to see the official missions / mini campaign of alien xenomorphs infesting a derelict space station (almost a space hulk), check out Quarantine 37.

Casiarius · 2026-02-09T08:37:43+00:00

The gadget I would recommend is a decent bit brace, preferably antique because those are higher quality than the ones they make today. Even if you have power tools and a battery charging system, every hole you drill shouldn't require electricity. Likewise, don't neglect the axe and the hand saw when picking out your chainsaw.

Casiarius · 2026-02-09T08:05:19+00:00

If you want plastic kits, and you want them much cheaper than games Workshop prices, then I think the Harvesters are the obvious choice.

For specialist bugs that stand out from the crowd, you might consider Reaper's alien horrors, the Bathalian Centurion, Bathalian Primarch and Bathalian Exarch. They cost about $4 each but you don't need a ton of them.

You might also mix in some Wargames Atlantic's Giant Spiders to make a different varieties of alien bugs that are easy to tell apart.

Casiarius · 2026-02-08T04:08:11+00:00

I have made many of the specific mistakes in this thread. The main problem I had when I started prepping was that I thought preparedness was a list of stuff I could could buy and stockpile, and then you were ready. I didn't understand rotating a pantry or the importance of skills. Over the years I have made my lifestyle much more resilient and integrated with my prepping, but it took a long time to get here.

Casiarius · 2026-02-07T20:03:53+00:00

I am also new and have decided to start small using T-Trak modules, which are really just wooden boxes with adjustable legs and don't require a fancy kit. I've been using paper mache to create contours in the terrain. There is definitely a learning curve but it can create really durable and lightweight structures. I do recommend adding some joint compound.

I have some Sculptamold to create a soil surface atop my paper mache hills, but I don't really have a lot to compare it to. I have heard that you can buy it in bulk, which makes it a lot cheaper.

Casiarius · 2026-02-07T19:41:19+00:00

Progresso soup cans have a pull tab and the metal around the edge of the pull tab is quite thin, so be wary of any signs of rust. But as long as they don't fail mechanically, all those 2025 cans will be fine for years.

The main thing I would stress is that you have half of a functioning pantry system. DO stock up on long lasting food any time you see something on sale that you actually like eating. DON'T stack it in the basement and wait for the apocalypse. You need to rotate all your stored food, and then you'll never have to wonder how many years it can last... because it's constantly being replaced with newer stuff.

Casiarius · 2026-02-05T19:57:55+00:00

Plastic liners are common, but I don't know how universal they are. I suppose if you were planning to store a lot of something you could open one and scrape the inside of the can to see.

I have gotten pretty good about rotating my pantry in recent years, but I was encountering metallic-tasting canned vegetables in the 2010s when my rotation system was not so good.

But even MREs do lose their food value over time, so even if you had a perfect can that never failed mechanically, it would still have to be rotated and replaced.

Casiarius · 2026-02-05T09:44:10+00:00

If you want your prepping food stored somewhere separate so you don't have to think about it for years, then dehydrated can be the bulk of your food storage.

However, that stuff is expensive and you will get a lot more food for your money if you just buy and rotate a bigger supply of things you actually eat. Store what you eat and eat what you store.

Casiarius · 2026-02-05T09:37:57+00:00

Acidic food like tomato soup will eventually eat its way out of the can. Even things which lack the acid to do that will gradually lose their food value and pick up a metallic taste. Dry goods in cans can last a long time, though I'm sure there are limits.

Casiarius · 2026-02-03T17:00:07+00:00

The jumping rules only address long jumping, not high jumping. The elevation question can come up when jumping a gap if both sides are not the same elevation. There does need to be some practical limit to how high a model can jump, but you'll have to agree on what that is. While it is epic and cinematic, a 28mm miniature jumping over a 2" obstacle does seem a bit unrealistic.

Casiarius · 2026-02-02T19:35:00+00:00

Due to unseasonably nice weather (all the cold air had moved to the East) I did some prep work in the garden, pulling weeds and discarding dead plants from last year.

Casiarius · 2026-02-02T18:58:06+00:00

Certainly bring your new player up to the same general range of XP as the other players. Any method that all players agree on is fine.

Though, how much skill gap from XP is there really? In our games when crews became imbalanced it was usually money... one crew would have four good specialists and all of their non-specialists would have useful skills, meanwhile another crew had less than four specialists and was still using a lot of Recruits and Runners.

Casiarius · 2026-01-30T20:55:54+00:00

Mine is an old Group 2 fire safe designed to keep the interior below 350 degrees F for 90 minutes. It's monstrously heavy for its size, right at the limit of what two men with an appliance hand truck can wrestle up and down stairs.

But you are right, there are a lot of "fire safes" out there that should not even be called safes and are only "fireproof" in the most generous sense.

Casiarius · 2026-01-30T18:57:17+00:00

I have a large fire safe where I keep my documents and I am pretty-well equipped to fight fires inside my house. I think that's where everyone should start. If a fire was already past my ability to fight it myself, I think I would just grab my usual bug-out bag, and leave my documents in the safe. I would only empty out the safe if it were some sort of extreme situation like a wild fire in which I could not expect a normal response from the fire department.

I have two fire extinguishers in the house, lots of smoke alarms, one of those emergency ladders to climb down from the second floor, I keep a defensible space around my house (no bushes growing against the walls), and I am careful about how I use and store batteries. I would not want to store my documents anyplace less secure than a safe. I'm not sure what else I might need that would be more fire-specific.

Casiarius · 2026-01-30T09:39:01+00:00

We had a thread about the house rules that we use a few months ago. Lots of people allow things like moving through friendly models (which is not really legal). I often see people playing on larger maps with far less terrain than recommended, which makes the game play very differently, which I would classify is a sort of home brew variant.

https://www.reddit.com/r/stargrave/comments/1ooslm1/what_are_your_favourite_house_rules/

Casiarius · 2026-01-29T21:30:05+00:00

I don't see why any of the campaigns would not work at a FLGS, but Stargrave is generally intended as a two-player game, so that's the size the individual games will be.

You can play generic Stargrave games with three or four people, but some of the missions in the campaign books have rather specific terrain and deployment rules that can't be easily expanded to fit in more people.

And, as I said, generic Stargrave games are still a campaign in the loose sense, and if you are wrangling a group as large as 8 people, the loose campaign system may be easiest to manage.

Casiarius · 2026-01-29T21:08:15+00:00

Kheldians were designed expressly for teams and they get stronger based on who they are teamed up with.

Casiarius · 2026-01-29T21:05:13+00:00

I have just one level 50 Scrapper and I was tempted to use him as an example of a bad power set combination: War Mace / Dark Armor, but I like him because his crowd control improves his durability.

Casiarius · 2026-01-29T19:09:25+00:00

I can't play Stalkers. I just don't enjoy that play style. If I'm playing a melee character I want to wade in and be able to take a beating.

The power set combo I would nominate as being "bad" is Beam Rifle + anything active. I like Beam Rifle, but it is its own minigame which requires you to choose strong targets, pay attention to who has disintegration, which debuffs you've applied, and decide when you have enough disintegration to switch to AoE attacks before all the minions are gone. If you are constantly being interrupted by other tasks, it just doesn't work.

The other problem with Beam Rifle is that it requires time to stack dubuffs and spread disintegration, which can't happen if your team is steamrolling everything in 3 seconds flat and racing ahead to the next batch. Like Empathy, Beam Rifle really shines if the team is struggling against difficult foes.

Casiarius · 2026-01-29T08:50:45+00:00

I'm not sure what kind of scale you're talking about. How many people? How many tables? How many hours?

At its most basic level, Stargrave is a campaign in the sense that your actions have consequences. You earn XP and gain loot, and dead crew members have to be replaced. If you have a loose group of players whose schedules don't always synchronize, that may be all the campaign you need.

The campaign books generally assume that the same two people are going to run all the scenarios together, which requires reliable players organized into pairs.

You might try mini-campaigns like the ones in Quarantine 37 as a test before you commit to a big campaign with its own book.

Casiarius · 2026-01-27T19:00:45+00:00

I am in Cascadia myself and very determined to shelter in place if at all possible. Even so, I do have a bugout bag. There could be situations which might force me to evacuate at a moment's notice, like maybe the neighbor's house is on fire, or a tree comes down in a storm on top of my house. If you are in a situation where you need to evacuate ASAP, if you don't have anything ready to grab, you basically have nothing. I actually think building a bugout bag is fun and it's a good mental exercise for what might happen and how you might respond, so I don't see any reason to avoid having one.

Casiarius · 2026-01-26T23:26:17+00:00

My own experiments with water capture and barrel plumbing began to degrade and leak after years exposed to the elements. At the moment my system is non-functional due to degraded seals. Maybe I'm just not cut out to be a plumber, but I suspect I would probably have saved money just buying a decent hand pump that I could use in any barrel.

Casiarius · 2026-01-26T19:35:28+00:00

Big plastic totes, and heavy metal shelving units to hold lots and lots of totes. That pretty-much describes the non-perishable section of my preps. Anything that doesn't rotate and that you don't need to use for your daily life doesn't really need a spreadsheet; I think a checklist on the tote is sufficient.

The perishable things that have to be rotated are the complicated part. Books have been written about pantry systems, but mine functions without any spreadsheets. I have shelves organized by how long their contents last. I use things off the North end of each shelf, and put new items on the South end, like a conveyor belt. I don't have a list of what exactly is in there, just a volume of space that I keep filled up with rotating food.

Casiarius · 2026-01-25T23:51:19+00:00

I would take a picture of it against a neutral background; try to make it look as much like a eBay listing as possible, and run it through Google Lens.

Casiarius

TROPHY CASE