Zoraida, the Hag

Okay, so yesterday I talked about Lilith. Today I’m going to talk about everyone’s favorite creepy old woman – Saddlebags! Er… I mean… Zoraida, the Hag. When I first started playing Neverborn, she was the master I wanted to use the most. Lilith was fairly straight forward, and everything I had heard said that Pandora was absolutely amazing. Zoraida seemed like the biggest challenge. And I was right. I’ve gotten a few tricks down with her, but there is so much untapped potential.



Zoraida’s a crazy broad who lives in the swamps. She makes voodoo dolls and tells peoples’ fortunes. She knows how to manipulate fate and make sure things happen to turn out how she likes. She gives people the evil eye too. Not sure what that means, but it says so in the book.

So just what does she do? Well, she’s primarily a spellcaster, but none of her spells do any damage on their own. She’s all about control and limiting your opponent’s options while maximizing your own. With some luck she can do a fair amount of damage (I’ve won with her by using her in melee before), but that’s not her primary goal.

Let’s talk about her movement first. She’s slow as all get out (only 3”) and she can’t charge, so she’s not going to be breaking any speed records. However, she has a (0) ability called Raven that turns her into a… well… raven. It lets her fly and walk 10” per action, but once she uses it, she can’t attack or cast spells until the end phase when she turns back into a real woman.

For offensive capabilities, she uses the hair pins she has to jab people. She’s not that good at hitting, and if she does hit, it won’t do much damage (1/2/5), but they do cause Poison: 2 to their target, so your enemy will start bleeding out. Also, they have the Maim trigger. If she triggers a hit, she gets a (+) damage flip. An easier way to grab that useful severe damage.

Defensively, she’s sitting pretty on a solid 5 defense. Okay, you’re right, that sucks. But she has a couple of abilities that will help her out. One of them is a trigger that cues off a Mask. If she’s hit for moderate or severe damage, whatever hit her can’t attack her again this round. Okay, that’s decent. But her really cool ability is called Proper Manners. Any attack against her that wasn’t channeled or focused gets a (-) flip. That means no cheating to hit her! Of course there are plenty of models out there with paired weapons, so that ability sometimes does absolutely nothing. Fortunately she has 10 wounds, so she won’t be dying to a stiff breeze. Also, to face off against those pesky mental attacks, she clocks in at the highest willpower in the game with 10. Not easy to pull one over on her.

So far she’s not stacking up too well. But like I said, she’s a spellcaster, and that’s where we should look for her strengths. She’s a Casting Expert, so she can use one additional action to cast a spell per turn, and she’s got 5 interesting ones. She has Crystal Ball, a (0) spell that lets her look at the top three cards of either player’s fate deck and return them to the top in any order. It’s tough to cast, needing a 10 of Masks, but can be useful to see when you should take what actions. She has three (1) spells: Bewitch (target model cannot play control cards until the end of the turn), Repulsive (all models within 6” of her are pushed away from her until they are 6” away from her) and Obey (target model makes a single action or charge). Obey is her bread and butter, at least how I play her, so I’ll talk about that in a minute. Her final spell is Hex (which needs a 9 of Masks) and makes target non-Master model lose one talent or spell until the Hag is removed from the game. I don’t tend to use this spell that much because it’s hard to cast and requires so many action points. But I think I should start using it more early and just locking down an annoying ability off someone.

Back to Obey… this is the spell that makes me really like Zoraida. She can use it to either have an opposing model start screwing things up (like having an opposing model hand a treasure off to my adjacent model or by having an opposing model shoot the person standing next to him in the face), or it can be used to give one of my own models a pseudo-reactivation. I’ve used it many-a-time with my Mature Nephilims, letting them come in with Obey and smack something, and then activate the Nephilim to let him smack three more times. Ouch! Obey can only be cast once per turn, but that means if you try to cast it and fail to meet the target number, you haven’t cast it yet and can try again. But be careful, if you succeed in the target number but the opponent resists, you’ve still successfully cast it and can’t try again.

Now I know I mentioned a few spells that Zoraida has that require high cards, and usually you won’t have that many to play. Fortunately she’s got an ability called Bayou Two-Step that lets her, once per turn, play a card off the top of the discard pile instead of the top of the deck. So if you cheat with a really high Mask to trigger Hex, you can turn around and use that same card to trigger Crystal Ball. Not bad! Or if you’re attacking and cheat a Red Joker to hit, you can immediately use the Red Joker for damage too. Nice!

Okay, so what other random abilities does she have? First off, she has power over the weak-willed. Those with a WP of 4 or less can join her crew as though they were Outcasts. I haven’t tried this yet, but there are a few models I’d like to give a whirl. Nurses from the Ressurectionists, and Papa Loco from the Guild are two. Secondly, at the end of the game, she moves 4” before the VPs are tallied. This means she can slide onto an objective if she ends the game close to one. A nice way to quickly turn the tide at the very end. Won’t matter every game, but at some point, if you don’t forget it, it will save you.

The last ability she has is another of her signatures: create a voodoo doll. Most of the other masters have to pay for their totems, but Zoraida can create one for two actions. When she makes it, she picks a model in LOS. From now on, while she’s close to the voodoo doll, she can target that model regardless of range and LOS, and she gets a (+) flip on casting and damage flips against it. The voodoo doll, meanwhile, can cast any of her (1) spells, so that’s another opportunity to cast Obey (Obey can be cast once per turn PER CASTER, so even if Zoraida successfully casts it, the voodoo doll can still do the same). Also, at the end of every turn, the target the voodoo doll is attached to is filled to 2 poison tokens. So every time that model activates, it’s taking two damage. Sweet!

That’s essentially what Zoraida does. My usual tactics with her have been to put the voodoo doll out on something I want dead quick and let the poison work. Meanwhile, my big hitter will jump up front and Zoraida will obey it until its target is dead. By that point I hope to have enough of an advantage that I’ll win the game. If necessary, Zoraida herself gets into combat and tries to jab things with her needles, but that’s not always necessary. I’d like to use more of her control spells (Hex and Bewitch, for example), but I’m not quite there yet. Soon…

Painted Tots

Monday night, Dan came by and taught me his (patent-pending) method of quickly painting models and making them come out half-way decent. We used one of my sets of Terror Tots as the basis for the painting, and here you'll see the results. Sadly the backdrop is a bit dark to show up all the colors well, but if you enlarge the pictures, you may get a better sense. Overall, all three models were finished in the span of a single episode of Alias, so not too shabby. I'm going to try the techniques on a few other models just to get some color on them, though I'll still be working with others to get my centerpiece models painted up. I want them to look better than I can do.

Nothing Like the Originals

I don't really have anything to add. But this is an awesome photo. Han Solo, Darth Vader, Chewie, Leia, Luke and R2-D2, back before things got so screwed up.

Lilith, Mother of Monsters

I’ve been playing Malifaux for a little while now and probably have a dozen games under my belt by now. It’s been something of a miniatures gaming renaissance for me. Between this game and Firestorm Armada, I have been enjoying pulling out minis and playing games again in a way I haven’t really enjoyed in years.

I’m not really here to talk about that right now, though. I’ve posted before about my feelings regarding Warmachine, so I’d head back to that thread if you’re interested in my thoughts about that. Instead, I’m here to talk about my chosen faction and, more specifically, one of the models in it.

Neverborn seem to fit my style of play very well and let me switch from being the good guys to being one of the bad guys (though with Legion of Everblight and Dindrenzi joining that pack, my bad guys are starting to outnumber my good guys of Cygnar and Eldar). The Neverborn are the stuff of nightmares and corruption. They have hosts of demons to make up the bulk of their army, but their magic is far more subtle. Lacking any spells that can actually do direct amounts of damage, they rely on manipulating their enemy into hurting themselves or putting themselves in jeopardy. Rather than blasting an enemy with an ice storm, the Neverborn may force an enemy to stab himself with his sword, or turn and shoot his partner in the head. They are very fast and very deadly, but have a significant lack of any ranged weaponry. To fight, these guys have to move cautiously through cover and engage fast.

There are three masters in Neverborn at the moment: Lilith, Pandora and Zoraida. The most straight-forward of these three is Lilith, and that’s who I’ll talk about first. If I feel like it, later I’ll come back and talk about the other two.



Lilith is the mother of the brood of strong demons in the faction. She was the first Neverborn to be recognized as something more than just a mindless brute. Play-wise, she’s as simple to understand as you can get with the Neverborn. See that massive sword she carries? She tries to stick that in the enemy.

She’s Fast, so she’s always getting three actions, and with her speed of 6”, she can cover half the board in a single turn’s movement. That lets her move fast and grab cover to keep her safer from enemy attacks. Combine that with her Defense of 8 (highest in the game) and she’s not that easy to strike. Additionally, if you miss her in melee, she can make it even harder for that model to hit her again and the shadows of Malifaux fold around her and conceal her.

Flipping around to combat, she’s going to be swinging at 2” reach with a solid 3/4/6 greatsword (so she gets a (+) flip on damage). She’s got a 7 to attack with already and if she hits with a second Mask, she can start cycling her hand. Often, she wants to get up in the face of the most deadly thing out there (preferably deadly with magic or ranged so she can keep him occupied). Then, if the foe tries to back away, she has the ability to actually damage them if they fail the disengage check. I had a game where I managed to move all the way into Rasputina’s melee range (she’s a powerful magic user who had just killed the entire rest of my army). Unable to cast her powerful magics now, she tried to escape my reach and after two failed checks, Rasputina was cut in two and dead.

She has several other abilities, including Black Blood, so she’ll be hurting people that hurt her, Rush of Magic, so she can cycle her hand even faster every turn, and Master of Malifaux, an ability that lets her ignore the terrain penalties for moving through rough terrain and lets her draw LOS ignoring cover. She can Companion a Nephilim near her as her (0) action, or, more often, she can gain a Blood Token after she kills a nearby enemy. Those she uses to feed her brood and have them mature into tougher monsters. She can ditch Soulstones for Blood Counters, which is horribly inefficient, but could help in a pinch, and she can use two actions to use her great sword to attack everyone around her.

For spells, she has four, but I rarely use them. Most times I want to use her actions to get her up the field faster. She has a Defense debuff that prevents models within 3” of her from charging as well, but from that close, usually I want to be chopping things with my sword already. She can cause everyone within 12” of her to slide 2” in a chosen direction. This spell I’ve only used in one game, but it saved me as I was able to move a number of people off the objective terrain at the end of the turn and win the game because of it. She can create a small forest which I do often early to give myself more cover heading in, but then I just leave it there. Finally, she has a spell that requires a 9 of Masks or better, but allows her to pick two models (she can be one of the targets) and switch their places. Not a bad way to bring an enemy over to you, or bring yourself to an enemy.

She’s a pretty straight-forward master. Usually I pack her up with a few other Nephilim to keep pressure on my enemy. When they’re looking towards one of them, I sneak her in the back and beat the tar out of a couple of guys. She can kill with ease and is pretty hard to take down, but she struggles against massed foes. Also, concentrated attacks can, and often do, bring her down. I like that she’s a melee monster who’s biggest asset is her speed and her ability to appear from directions you weren’t necessarily expecting. Makes for a little more fun than a basic beat-stick. But she’s the simplest of the Neverborn masters to understand, and next time we’ll talk about something a little more complicated…

Home Stretch

Tonight kicks off the first of the final four episodes of LOST. I'll be a little vague with details because I know a lot of readers of my blog don't watch LOST and I don't want to spoil them too much. If you're one of those readers, I suggest you stop reading now. There are a lot of mysteries to LOST and I don't want you to have any revealed this way.

So we're to the people who are watching the show now? Good.

As I said, we're coming down to the last four episodes. I have a lot of thoughts about how the season is going so far, but rather than focusing on that right now, I thought it might be fun to look back at some of the other seasons and put them in order as far as how much I enjoyed them.

Season Five - This is one of my favorite seasons of any television show out there. Starting out strong with the time flashes and side-effects of moving the Island before things are finally steadied and Locke finds himself on a journey back home. Meanwhile, the Oceanic Six are dealing with their return while Ben tries to get them all back together to head back. The acting by Ben, Sawyer and Locke were all top-notch. There was finally some measure of peace for some of the best characters in the show (before Kate shows up and screws it all up again... who likes her anyway?) and... Faraday's story, LeFlur, Ben and Locke... this season was non-stop awesome straight through. Just thinking about it makes me want to see it again. Very tight.


Season One - The season that started it all. From the beginning shot of Jack's opening eye, then the fading in sound of screams and terror, to Jack's first view of the crashed plane, I was hooked. For the next ten minutes, we caught glimpses of almost all the main characters we'd grow to know over the next year as they moved around in the crash wreckage. Some in shock and unable to really function, others immediately jumping to help others. When it's finally over and as many people as possible are saved, the weight of what just happened starts to dawn on them. This episode had a bunch of mysteries that held true for seasons later, and some which still bear relevance today. Watching the first season again makes you realize how far these characters have come. Boone's episode still leaves me with chills. The season also introduced Danielle Russou, who I maintain is the most tragic character in the entire series (the only one close might be Faraday). Getting to know these characters through flashbacks and realizing that not everything is as it seems - every episode was a new mystery. Good times.

Season Four - During the writer's strike, this season had to be cut by a good number of episodes and what resulted may not have been the initial vision, but it was still fantastic. Picking up where the previous season left off, this episode introduced a new set of characters, but unlike Niki and Paulo, they were introduced well and were compelling characters. Watching the split of the two factions - Locke's and Jack's - it was great to watch the actions they were doing on the island and then the long-term effects of them play out in the flashforwards. Seeing Ben beaten but unbroken was great and watching his return to relevancy after what happened in Season Three was fantastic and a testament to the character.

Season Three - The last handful of episodes were fantastic, and the first two thirds were immensely pointless. It had one of my favorite episodes of all time, the finale of the season. The twist of the flashback, Charlie and Desmond in the Hydra, Jack's conversation with Ben... all fantastic moments. But weigh those against the terrible first part of the season with the cages and the Eko with the bear, etc., and I have trouble putting this season above the likes of 4, 5 and 1. Plus, this season had Niki and Paulo. Nobody likes them. On the flip side, it introduced Juliet. I think the weird love-triangle/square/whatever they tried to do with Kate, Juliet, Jack and Sawyer was pretty lame, but fortunately it didn't go anywhere.

Season Two - The season started out pretty well dealing with the discovery of what was in the hatch and finding Desmond inside, and had some awesome episodes in between (Henry Gale, Eko and Locke, Sawyer and the guns, introducing the Others), but overall, when I finished watching the season, I had to wonder what the point was. The big focus of the season was irrelevant by the end. The new characters were gone by the end. What did we just spend all this time on? I feel like this season was when the writers didn't realize how big LOST was going to be and were struggling to figure out what was going on. The series didn't find its feet again until midway through season three, which is about when they announced that the show would have a set number of episodes and would end after season six. Once they got something to work towards, they were just fine. Took a while to get there is all.

So what do you all think? How do you rank the seasons? And where do you think season six is going to end up in the list? Right now I have it between seasons one and four, but we'll see if it rises or falls in the next few weeks.

Hat Trick

For the third post in a row, I'm going to mention zombies. Every red-blooded male considers what might happen in the event of a zombie uprising. It may be a passing thought, or it may be a full-fledged day-dream. But for this guy, it became a massive (and well-thought-out) plan. I can't imagine someone coming up with a better 15-step plan to survive and thrive in the zombie apocalypse.

I Am Legend (the book)

When I'm getting ready for a long drive, usually I like to have a book set up on my iPod. Music is fun, but tends to get a little mindless. Books keep me engaged and awake throughout the whole trip. This weekend I was making the short jaunt up to my brother's place, but I thought it would be nice to have a new book. After my post about zombies, I figured I wanted a horror or supernatural book of some kind. My first thought was to try the Dresdon Files series, but when I pulled up the first book of it, it was $20! Not really interested in spending that much. Dejected, I putzed around until I saw the poster for I Am Legend somewhere online. I decided to pick up the book, since I knew it was based on a book. Popped it in, it wasn't too expensive, and I downloaded it.

Written in 1954 by Richard Matheson, it was a pretty quick book, finishing out in about 5 hours. I had never seen the Will Smith movie, nor Omega Man, nor Last Man on Earth, so I didn't really know anything about it other than it was post-apocalyptic and involved vampires (or zombies, depending on who you asked).

The book was really solid, obviously relying heavily on the strength of the main character, Robert Neville, since most of the time he's alone and dealing with his thoughts. It opens talking about his repetitive days - waking up, repairing the damage done to his house by the vampire attacks the previous night, and then, depending on the day, working on other projects. Making wooden stakes, gathering supplies, or heading out into the city to seek out vampires and kill them. In daylight, they go dormant and he finds as many as he can and puts a stake through them. Then, when it gets close to nightfall, he heads home and stays in his house until the next morning.

The vampires know where he is, but he's done a lot to make his house secure. As the book goes on, it explains why the vampires are choosing certain tactics over others, and leaves me satisfied that in the world constructed, he could actually survive.

Eventually after several fits of depression and particularly bad drunk nights, he decides to try to learn about the vampire and how everything happened. There are flashback hints as to what was happening during the time just leading up to the outbreak of vampirism, and throughout the story, clues are scattered that you can put together to come to your own conclusions.

I don't want to tell too much in case anyone wants to read it for themselves, but I have to say I really enjoyed it. I was a little worried early on that dealing with Robert's mind for five hours would become tedious, but the author keeps it fresh and while you can watch him going slowly insane and slowly losing his humanity, Robert's thoughts are always interesting and I kept wanting to know what he'd do next. If you're interested in a quick read that gives a new perspective on the whole vampire/zombie thing, give this one a try.