Precinct Omega

Interrogation Room - Painted

Not a lot ot say about this, except that I broke out the airbrush, which I'm slowly getting to grips with. Nearly ready to commit to a more expensive airbrush and a better-quality, tanked compressor.

So here's the whole Interrogation room. I wanted a sort of "institutional green" and it came out a littler more "military green" than I intended, but I'll take it. I printed off a page or two of generic ...

Interrogation Room - Build Guide (Take 1)

In the course of the Operation KURGAN campaign, the player(s) will eventually need to extract a prisoner from hostile custody. Who the prisoner is would be a bit of a spoiler and, in fact, it represents a critical moment in the plot and the end of the second act. But, critical to the mission, is the presence, in the centre of the playing space, of a 12"x12" interrogation room. The heroes must make their way to the room, access the room, deal with the interrogators within, ex...

Cover Sketch Update!

Hi, folks.

The post yesterday about the cover art wasn't actually supposed to post at all. I had a bit of a struggle with the Patreon mobile app, which isn't the first time.

Here's the sketch so far. I'm still working on it, while I wait to hear if David is still available, but this gives you a sense of where it's going.

Intentionally a bit less sci-fi, although I want to add some more "t...

Cover art sketch

The cover art sketch follows the broad pattern of previous covers. In this case, we have a soldier from MASC, the Mars Assistance & Support Command, front and centre. Either side of him is a Spook, armed with a fazer, and an Expeditionary Journalist (XJay) with a camera drone. Behind them you can see the towering ruins of a city state and protest signs. Beyond the acid rain and smog, outlined in the darkness, looms a shadowy figure with his back to the audience who is critical to the plot...

Some new rules for KURGAN

In case it still needs to be said, I stand with Ukraine and desperately hope that peace, a full withdrawal of Russian forces and payment of reparations and the repatriation of captured soldiers and kidnapped civilians comes soon.

However, from a wargaming perspect - both for the purposes of recreational and professional wargaming - the evolution of the ground war in Ukraine has been fascinating and it has been instructional to see old assumptions about things like the role of new media,...

KURGAN Week! - Bal Anub Update

So, as those of you on the Discord may have noticed, I'm on holiday all week and it's time to push to get KURGAN finished. That is, finish the writing, finish the last few missions that are still a bit skeletal in structure, playtest the campaign a couple of times, lay out the pages and photography and commission the cover art from David Sondered.

However, I'm not going to punish myself. This is a holiday. I still intend to spend time chilling out and doing some other stuff. But the boo...

Zero Dark: Smog Experimental Rules

Operation KURGAN will take players into the refugee-choked and flooded streets of NuSingapore, the last Pacific city more or less intact after the terrible impact of the Ammit impact.

I've recently been pondering the rules for darkness in the original Zero Dark rulebook and feeling like they, whilst straightforward, failed to really capture the sense of dread and uncertainty a...

Op KURGAN Crowd Proof of Concept

Those of you who've been hanging around patiently for Operation KURGAN to drop, will be pleased to know that it inches ever-closer to release. But you may also be interested to know that developing a book like this isn't just a matter of sitting down and writing some rules.

If you've been with me since the early days, when Horizon Wars: Midnight Dark was called MechaWar will know that I have been obsessed with making miniatures wargaming as accessible as possi...

Good Game #3 - Full Spectrum Dominance

Full Spectrum Dominance is one of those games that just kind of came out of nowhere. One day, under his online handle of The Lazy Forger, Giacomo Pantalone started posting picture of his amazing 6mm scifi terrain and a few early designs for mechs and tanks and, suddenly there was Full Spectrum Dominance the wargame and everyone was talking about it.

Well, not everyone, certainly. This is still a 6mm sci-fi combined arms battle game. There are only going to be so m...

Good Game? #2 - BLKOUT

I first stumbled across Enemy Spotted Studios back in around 2019. I can’t remember exactly how I ended up on their website, but I think it was from an Instagram post of one of their minis and I found myself exploring and, as a result, bought a few of their early minis: digitally rendered and 3d printed in resin. They were great but, it turned out, a little too large for my needs at closer to 35mm than the 28mm of most of my collection, so they languished in my display cabinet.

Still,...

More Op KURGAN Photography

Way back, when I was still developing Horizon Wars: Zero Dark for the first time, I wrote to GameMat.eu to ask if they would be OK with be featuring their mat designs in the mission briefings I was writing for the game and, on the off-chance, if they could possibly spare one or two to help in the photography.

They responded by sending me six mats, and two complete sets of terrain: one 2025-03-28 09:00:05 +0000 UTC View Post

Good Game? #1 - Trench Crusade

I have been trying to ignore Trench Crusade for the last several months, but it’s getting more difficult as it seems to pop up on every social media feed I have (and I have many) and now I’m getting back to social gaming it even seems to be making an impact on my local wargaming scene with a few enthusiastic early adopters.

So instead of ignoring it, I thought it was time to get back in the saddle and take a look at several games that have done a good job of carving th...

Good Game?

Hey, folks. I'm still hard at work and there will be an uptick in post drops over the next couple of months to reflect some of what I've been doing, but I thought it would be fun to tease a new series of articles I'm working on.

Ideally, I will carve out the time for these to be turned into podcasts and/or video essays, but so that they don't get lost entirely, I'm going to share them all, here, first, as essays for you guys to read. They'll be fairly lengthy, but I hope this will repre...

Operation Kurgan: Early Photography

Just to wet your whistle, here are some early photography set-ups for Operation Kurgan, featuring miniatures from Heresy Miniatures, Enemy Spotted Studios and White Dragon Miniatures.

I'm working frantically on getting enough civilian miniatures painted for the CIVPOP and I'm going to have a Patreon-exclusive tutorial on making crowds for CIVPOP up in the next few weeks.

On a Mission from God...

...or possibly Glod.

Anyway, I've been moderately surprised by how many people showed a real interest in the Millennium supplement, which got me thinking about custom missions to add to the book, which led to me having a bit of a splurge on new missions. My studio is better set up for playtesting than it's ever been (unless you're my opponent, in which case you'll be confused as hell, because it's everything, everywhere, all at once) so I'm making some really good progress...

Product: Zero Dark Millennium

As I hinted at last week, I was looking at doing more work on ZD: Millennium after being inspired by the Kill Team Adeptus Arbites squad that I'm working on. When inspiration hits, you have to roll with it, I find, so I did a full review and re-write of the v0.11 edition to release this v0.2 edition, now with deminhumans! The gracile, runtlings and robusti are now yours to add to your teams.

Patrons at Elite and above can access this for free. For everyone el...

Zero Dark: Millennium

Zero Dark: Millennium is an on-going project to offer an alternative, grimdark gothic sci-fi setting for tabletop games of Horizon Wars: Zero Dark . It is not an attempt to exactly replicate anyone else's game or setting, but rather to open the door to the use of a range of grimdark sci-fi miniatures to use in Horizon Wars: Zero Dark that might otherwise be out of balance with the game's hard(ish) near(ish) future setting. This is a way to use your miniatures from companies like Wargames Atlan...

The Dark Roots of Precinct Omega

There's a handful of folks who know the true, dark origins of Precinct Omega and I thought it might be fun to tell the (honestly, rather dull) story in the context of something much more interesting.

Precinct Omega began in the deserts of Oman in late 2001, when I had some precious downtime and rare access to the internet (courtesy of a central satellite link) and used it to see what people were doing with the new (3rd) edition of Warhammer 40,000 and found myself in the A...

Zero Dark: Millennium Beta 0.2

Zero Dark: Millennium is a supplement for the Horizon Wars: Zero Dark skirmish game that pushes the narrative setting a thousand years further into the future than any Horizon Wars game has gone before. This is a time when the human galaxy is crumbling, technology developed with the help of the long-vanished artilects is barely understood, and humanity is facing strange changes under the eldritch influence of the Eleven Dimensions. True power lies in the hands of the sodalities - institutions d...

Happy New Year!

It's 2025.

As far as my 12-year-old self is concerned, we are now living in the future. He anticipated it being either a glorious digital utopia or a smoking, post-apocalyptic wasteland. But if history has taught us anything, it's that the impetus required for extraordinary change is always greater than we expect.

And the subject of extraordinary change is very apt for a post on New Year's Day, when even the most cynical of us is inclined to take stock of the last 365 days and ant...

BLKOUT review

Progress on new Horizon Wars content is slow and tortuous. Building and painting new minis and terrain for photography takes its time and I'm trying to get some decent playtesting of the missions and campaing in over the next few months to ensure it's as tight as I can make it.Meanwhile, though, as I was painting a lot of minis from Enemy Spotted Studios, I thought I'd give their main game, 2024-11-28 15:05:06 +0000 UTC View Post

Unboxing Killwager

I bought another batch from Enemy Spotted Studio's Killwager range, which I specifically prefer to the BLKOUT stuff, because it feels a bit more grounded.

This batch was specifically bought with Operation Kurgan's photography in mind, which I hope to get started in November to begin finishing the layout in January. So expect to see a lot of this stuff in that.

Anyway, check out this Patreon-exclusive video unboxing. The lighting's not great, but I'll do bette...

Zero Dark: Combat Bows

Some of you may have noticed that I recently painted a new mini. This one:

 In case you're not aware, this is a Ninja from Corvus Belli's Infinity the Game. It's a real classic of miniatures design. But, as I was working on a few Infinity minis, I got to pondering the fact that not only do I personally own a few scifi or modern minis equipped with some sort of bow, but that there are a b...

The Shocker!

...is not that I am, in fact, alive and still working, but a new Weapons upgrade I'm testing for Operation Kurgan.

I'm refining the CIVPOP rules, for more missions that involve trying to deal with an enemy using civilians as cover. Heroes will have to work hard to work out who their targets are and then take them down without accidentally letting innocents get caught in the crossfire.

Not coincidentally, I'm painting up some new civilian minis and sourcing more.

Any...

[Podcast] News #56 - Asmodee ditches X-Wing

Here's a link to the Podbean episode for free members. Paid members have an embedded audio through Patreon as well as exclusive sight of the script for those who prefer to read their content rather than listen to it.

[Podcast] News #56 - Asmodee has ditched X-Wing - What is going on over there?

Script Follows>>

In my last show about Steamforged Games, I playfully suggested that Steamforged’s private equity investors might see Asmodee as their possible exit strategy. Practically as the words left my mouth, though, news broke that Asmodee’s parent company, Embracer Group, was splitting up operations and making thousands of employees redundant in the face of a $2bn dollar investment failure.

And if that wasn’t all bad enough, miniatures wargamer...

SPOILER - Is BPRE a Libertarian PsyOp?

As mentioned on the Discord, I'd like the opinion of Mech-level backers on this analysis of Echelon Software and the background and associations of its main creative mind, Jon Chang, the priniciple driver behind Black Powder Red Earth.

***

I’ve got into this habit of giving my videos titles that are questions that I try to answer, because it helps to focus my attention when I’m writing and also serves the all-powerful algorithm. And yes, I do regret the alarmis...

SFG/Warmachine Video is live on YouTube

Phew! Finally got the animation finished, so now I can go and record the Asmodee video...

Yay.

Robey Rants about... Sci-Fi Masks

Quickly: yes, I have written a script about Asmodee and X-Wing. I will be recording it as soon as I can. Also, I've not yet finished animating the vid eo for the SFG script. I forgot how long that s*** takes! I need to come up with a simpler way of doing this...

Anyway, my rant. Some of you have heard some of my rants over the years (battlefield taxis being my most famous), but I thought I should collect some of my thoughts in occasional posts on the Patreon blog. They may eventually es...

Killwager/BLKOUT Miniatures - First Look

A little Patreon-exclusive video to take a look at the Killwager minis I recently ordered. I also got 4 civilians, but they're much less interesting.

However, I thought I'd also tell you all that, although I am looking at the BLKOUT rules, I specifically bought these minis to feature in the photography for Zero Dark: Operation Kurgan, but you'll hear me mention in this video that I have previously bought minis from Enemy Spotted Studios, before they ...