Merry Christmas!

Merry Christmas to you and yours! It’s been a great year for Dinosaur Cowboys since I got the final rules out, had tons of fan interest, wrote a bit of fiction for the game, and generally really enjoyed making this game.

To add a little Christmas-y feel to your games here is “The Spirit of Christmas” posse lead by Santa himself. They have a bunch of special rules and are meant for a fun, light game. You could match them with a single posse or team up with your friends and try out two vs one.

Posse: The Spirit of Christmas
This posse bends and breaks all kinds of rules, but that’s the fun of customizing! I’ve added and re-themed a bunch of weapons and equipment and fit in a whole slew of Santa’s “reindeer” (Thickskull’s in this case). Think of it as a chance to fight multiple dinosaurs at once!
For matching this posse with standard posses use 200 IP, $2,200, and 6 Traits. If you want to make the fight easier use $2,500 and 8 Traits.

Santa Claus
Leader, MV 5, AR 4, RMC 6, MMC 8, BRV 12*, HP 14, Lucky, Get Up!, Escape. Heavy Repeater, 400kW Six-Shooter, Santa's Suit**, Santa's Bag***

* = Santa never needs to take Bravery Tests.
** = Santa’s Suit is equivalent to Dinohide Armor (+3 AR), and also reduces incoming damage by 1 (to a minimum of 1).
*** = Santa’s Bag is full of surprises. At the start of each Activation roll a D6 and check below to see what Santa grabbed from his bag. On the Activation it was drawn Santa can choose to use each Grenade, if he does they are treated per the standard rules. Santa’s Bag never has to be Reloaded.
1-2: Stun Grenade
3-4: Tangle Grenade
5-6: Boom Grenade

Elf
MV 8*, AR 1, RMC 7, MMC 7, BRV 8, HP 10, Whirlwind, Sneaky**. Candy Cane***

* = Elf likes to hop around with his jingly shoes. Elf ignores all Difficult Terrain, treating everything as flat plains with no Movement penalty. Elf cannot be Slowed or Stopped.
** = Elf can deploy anywhere on the board after everyone else has setup. The only restriction is he cannot start within 8″ of an enemy.
*** = Candy Cane is a 5A-3D Small Melee weapon that causes Slowed on hit.

Rudolph the Red Nose Monoclonius
Horned Dinosaur, Medium size, MV 7, PMV D8, AR 1, MMC 6, DIS 8, HP 18, 4A-2D, Shake it Off, Red Horn*

* = Rudolph’s glowing red horn blinds enemies trying to shoot at him. Treat ranged attacks against Rudolph as In Cover (-1 damage) all the time.

Dasher and Dancer
Thickskull Dinosaur, Small size, MV 7, PMV D8, AR 1, MMC 7, DIS 7, HP 18, 4A-2D, Onslaught, Lifelong Mounts*

* = If Dasher or Dancer are within 8″ of Santa they gain +1 MV and +1 AR.

Scenario: On a Wintery Night
A special posse deserves a special scenario. In this case a gang of citizens have stumbled across Santa as he delivers gifts. For any number of reasons a fight breaks out (perhaps the citizens were greedy and wanted to take the presents, or Santa wanted to remain secret, or his mounts got spooked and confusion ensued, etc.).
If you have access to winter terrain all the better. Otherwise maybe buy some cheap fake snow from a craft’s store and shower your usual table with it. Some small (1cm wide) fake presents would be perfect for some of the objectives.

Setup
- Use a 4′ by 4′ table if possible. Cover it with terrain, including any tacky Christmas ornaments, model houses, snow, etc. you can dig up.
- Place Presents as outlined below. These were dropped by Santa accidentally.
- Deploy The Spirit of Christmas posse first, 8″ from any table corner (not edge).
- Deploy any opposing posses next, 8″ from the table corner opposite The Spirit of Christmas.

Presents
- Get one Present objective per entity facing The Spirit of Christmas posse. For example if I had a leader, two members, and a dinosaur I would have 4 Presents. Randomly place the Presents on the table, most easily achieved by rolling 4D12 for X and Y coordinates (for example if 18 and 4 is rolled place the Present 18″ from the left table edge and 4″ from the top table edge).
Only entities from the non-Santa posse can interact with Presents. To open a Present simply Move adjacent to it and roll a D6 on the table below:

1: Surprise! - The Present explodes! 2" Explosion, 1 Damage.
2: Eggnog - The opener stumbles 6" in a random direction. This does not provoke Snap Attacks and can't move them off the table.
3: Candy Cane - Can be thrown once. 2A-8D, 2" Explosion, 1-18" Medium range.
4: Been a Good Boy - Instantly improve a weapon of the opener's choice by +1D.
5: Gingerbread - Can be used like an IRP. Add +5 MV and -2 RMC and -2 MMC until the end of the Activation it was used on.
6: Warm Cider - Can be used like an IRP. Instantly restores ALL Hitpoints.

Victory
Win by defeating The Spirit of Christmas!

Nazi Dinosaurs in “Jurassic Reich”

More Genre Mixing!
Well I’m diverging a bit from the dinosaur and cowboy cross-genre, but dinosaurs and Nazis still kind of relates, they just use an MP40 instead of a six-shooter.
It looks like one of the more well known Nazi Dinosaur efforts is Jurassic Reich. There doesn’t seem to be a defined set of rules for their tabletop efforts, instead the main claim to fame are purchasable miniatures of Nazis riding dinosaurs. Eureka Miniatures handles the figures, and have a good variety including some flying units. I could see picking up one or two for a themed posse of WW2 fanatics, or even just plain guys with helmets and guns.

Anyways there is a great battle report brimming with pictures at the Little Wars blog (likely named after a very old tabletop ruleset by HG Wells). They have a few other posts too.

---

What’s Been Happening Recently
As for Dinosaur Cowboys news there isn’t much shaking, as I said would happen once I finalized the rules. I did host a game for two friends between The Sunset Riders and The Death Snakes, in which The Sunset Riders barely pulled out a victory. There was plenty of melee and positioning and sniping, and overall it was fun for them to try. They liked the unit-by-unit activation and tactical feel to the game, which is good news to me.
I do have pictures from another battle report, so I’ll have to upload those and flesh out the notes sometime soon.
Over my Christmas vacation I’m going to try to paint a cowboy figure or two so that I have something that resembles the background a little bit more than my handful of 40k discards, haha.
Anyways here’s a look at the “Across the Street” battle report I’ll hopefully post in full soon:

New Jurassic Park video game

A month ago Telltale Games released a new Jurassic Park adventure game with a totally not catchy title. They call it Jurassic Park: The Game. Yeah, that’s easy to search the internet for…

Anyways I gave the game a shot, just because I felt obligated from a Dinosaur Cowboys point of view. The game is really not my style, and I’d best describe it as “light adventure”. Keep that in mind.
Basically to succeed at various scenes you have to press a key/mouse combo in a certain order. For example if you are falling down a slope you press Enter right as you reach a tree branch and your character will grab on. Similarly you repeatedly press Spacebar to back away from a menacing dinosaur. Don’t misunderstand me though, you don’t have a bunch of arbitrary actions you can perform, the game basically prompts you to press different keys as the scene progresses. If you fail enough times you might die or “lose” the scene, otherwise the story might branch a tiny bit.
There are also some basic dialog options with characters, plus some fun non-key combo scenes (like searching for a Triceratops with binoculars). You can also search around scenes at some point, for example to look into the trees to get more info, or examine footprints, etc. But in general there is only a single “correct” path to take, so the investigation is really just time filler.
In general though I think the game is better suited to children or people who really love Jurassic Park. The story is interesting since it basically happens parallel to the first movie, ie: you hear references to “the fancy paleontologists who came in to the park” (aka the characters from the movie), but you play a mercenary more focused on recovering the dinosaur embryos.
I haven’t gotten that far into the game because it didn’t really entice me to keep playing. The scenes can be frustrating sometimes as you try over and over to get the timing right, and each time you fail you’re forced to sit through the same cinematic.
The graphics are alright and have a unique half-cartoony style that is evident from any of the screenshots with people in them.
I’d say the game has come a long way from early adventure titles like Hugo’s House of Horrors, but it still fails to get me excited to keep playing.

Anyways yeah, still waiting for someone to remake Red Dead Redemption or Call of Juarez but with Dinosaurs. Until then the market for dinosaur games is rather light. Jurassic Park: The Game does try a new approach, but it’s not the approach for me. There is always Dino D-Day though, haha.

Another comic humor break

From Perry Bible Fellowship comics, who have some great oddball humor.

New Horned Dinosaur discovered

First the planet Kepler 22b is discovered, and now a new dinosaur Spinops sternbergorum (pictured right) was found in Alberta, Canada. Some basic info about it:

“The Spinops was a smaller cousin to the Triceratops and lived 76 million years ago.
It was a plant-eater with a distinctive horn projecting from the top of its nose and a bony neck frill with two spikes protruding backwards and two hooks curving forwards.”

Pretty interesting, and who knows maybe there will be a Papo toy in a few years. I wonder how many other finds have been ignored as “rubbish” and are just waiting to be revisited?

Fan Battle Report: Keep to the Left

I have a terrific fan battle report here from Ross on the Post Apocalyptic Wargames Forum. He has a ton of awesome ruined terrain which I showed a bit of before. Anyways on to his writeup and pictures of “Keep to the Left”:

---

The Claynation Syndicate (me) – Jefferson, Eustas, Toppy, Megs, in front of Fluffy

Lords of the Wasteland (her) – George, Frances, Buckley, Don, in front of Spot

The Lords of the Wasteland call out to the Claynation Syndicate, telling them to get off the road.

The Syndicate’s response is in the negative and contained words not repeatable here.

The Syndicate march forward menacingly.

The Lords break formation and approach, Spot rushes towards Fluffy intent on a big meal!

Spot charges in taking a big chunk from Fluffy. From cover of ruined and rusted cars Megs unloads his shotgun critically hitting the T-Rex for 15pts of damage.
George shoots at long range and misses while Frances criticaly hits Toppy for a whole 2pts of damage!
Fluffy bumps Spot for 6pts of damage.

Fluffy and Spot score wounds on each other while Megs unloads his shotgun into Spot, again criticaly hitting it, this time finishing it off!!
Frances barely scratches Fluffy while Eustas steps forward Fanning the Hammer killing Frances. Beside him Jefferson Fans the Hammer at Don only clipping him for minimum damage. Toppy makes the trio of Syndicate men but only fires normaly at Don, clipping him once and jamming his weapon in the process.
The leader of the Lords steps in with murderous intentions Fanning the Hammer critically hitting and killing Toppy.

Buckley shoots at Fluffy at long range but can’t get past the wounded dino’s armour.
Megs pegs George for 10pts of damage causing him to break while Don Fans the Hammer at Eustas missing. The others hop from foot to foot busily reloading.

Fluffy charges Buckley, Buckley receives 6pts of damage from the Onslaught.
Smuggly, Megs walks upto Don, and from point blank range… misses! Calmly standing there amid the hail of bullets, Don Fans the Hammer at Megs blowing him away. Jefferson walks forward Fanning the Hammer shooting George in the back taking him out.
Eustas wildliy Fans the Hammer at Don for a small amount of damage.

Buckley fires at Fluffy but just jams his gun as Fluffy bounds forward again to minimumly wound Buckley.
The other all hastily reload their weapons.

Jefferson activates first, shooting and killing Don.
In an act of defiance, Buckley punches Fluffy in the nose critically hitting for 2pts of damage.
Stunned by the hit on the nose Fluffy manages to miss with his attackes.
From the side, Eustas picks off Buckley finishing the fight.

---

Many thanks to Ross for trying the game out. He had two questions afterwards that I thought I’d re-post here:

Q: With the Move RMC penaltity, does the model count as having moved if its movement was the last round or the current round?
A: The Move RMC penalty should only apply in the CURRENT turn. The idea was it forces a person to choose their Activations wisely, since you can “get the drop” on a tough target and Activate before it moves and have an easier time hitting it.

Q: Charging, is the charge range 1d6″ or Movement + 1d6″?
A: For Charging you can perform a normal Move in your Movement Phase, then the Charge itself in the Action Phase. The Charge is just D6″, so you were playing it correctly. Remember you can only Charge from 2-6″ away, so it’s meant to be a gamble and tradeoff of risking not reaching combat or getting the bonus Attack.

Related GURPS sourcebooks

Some of you might be familiar with GURPS, which is definitely a backronym meaning Generic Universal RolePlaying System. Basically a general RPG ruleset to handle any era or genre.

So of course there are GURPS books to support Dinosaurs. In fact, they have three of them! They are Dinosaurs, Ice Age, and Lands Out of Time. All of them feel very 1980s, but then again most of GURPS does.

GURPS – Dinosaurs
The best of the three books, in my opinion. It’s also the longest at 130 pages, and is thick with “scientifically accurate” data of various dinosaurs and prehistoric creatures (as much so as a book from 1996 can be). The bestiary is organized by time period, so you have the Paleozoic era, Triassic, etc. There is a bit about cavemen as well, so it basically nullifies the GURPS – Ice Age book. If you were to pick up one of the PDFs this would be the one. The creatures and details inside would work well for someone running a campaign game of Dinosaur Cowboys since you could throw a lot more than the generic dinosaur types listed in the core rulebook.

GURPS – Ice Age
This book focuses more on prehistoric humanity, aka cavemen. There is a good bestiary section that has some non-dinosaur prehistoric enemies like Cave Lions, giant bears, mammoths, etc. The cover art is quaint and fun, and the interior is 66 pages long.

GURPS – Lands Out of Time
The newest of the sourcebook called Lands Out of Time is probably the closest to Dinosaur Cowboys as it focuses on human-dinosaur interaction. It’s only 43 pages though and a little light on art, and I think was mainly released to have some support for their later editions of GURPS.

Variant Rule: Dual Wielding

I decided to add a new official Variant Rule for Dual Wielding, as such:

Dual Wield: Two identical Small melee or ranged weapons can be dual wielded, which uses the same statistics with a +1 Attack bonus.

So yeah, a character could have two 80kW Six-Shooters and would use 5A-0D instead of 4A-0D, or similarly two Brass Knuckles at 3A-3D instead of 2A-3D. Simple and flavorful, and an excuse to post a wicked Clint Eastwood picture, plus you can technically have a character with two Sawed Off Shotguns. Just saying…