Falling Skies

When this show was first announced, I had a passing interest in it.  That is to say I immediately thought, “That would be cool” and then another more rational voice in my head said, “No, you only want it to be cool.”

I mean, what’s not to like about the concept?  If you’re me, at least.  Post-apocolyptic.  A mystery about what happened and why.  Follows the survivors and deals largely with their survival.  I know there are a lot of shows out there now that seem to be post-disaster shows.  With Walking Dead already in my queue, I figured I’d pass on this one.

Jump to a couple weeks ago when the fourth season of Breaking Bad came out on DVD (my favorite show currently running) and I headed up to Best Buy to grab a copy.  While I was there, I passed by the first season of Falling Skies and it was on sale, so I figured I’d pick it up too.  My wife and I put it on the side and watched through Breaking Bad, but then we picked up Falling Skies.

The first show started a bit differently than I expected.  I thought the show would be kinda like an extended Independence Day or V – we would see the aliens arrive, watch them launch their attack, etc.  But instead they summed all of that up in the first minute or two with a voice-over.  All that stuff didn’t matter to the show.  Or rather it mattered, but it wasn’t the focus.  Instead we were eight months later where the survivors of the attacks were trying to do something.  Fight back, or just survive.

The setting started in Boston with a bunch of soldiers in the 2nd Massachusetts.  But they weren’t all soldiers.  A lot of them were civilians that were now serving alongside the military.  And then there were just the civilians that were staying near the military for protection.  Things were going poorly in Boston, and the army had to split into smaller groups to flee the city.  So straight away we had a hundred soldiers leading two hundred civilians out of Boston trying to avoid the aliens and the like.

Characters came in fast, from the civilian doctor, to the history professor-turned-soldier.  The head of the military stuck the history professor with the captain of the 2nd Mass in order to give someone to watch over the civilians.  Evidently the captain had a more military bend of mind and sometimes saw the civilians as a detriment.

As the story grew, the focus was primarily on the characters.  The writing was surprisingly good, sometimes taking a good amount of time to focus on small conversations that really don’t do much to advance the plot, but really get into the feeling of being a survivor.  What do you talk about when the world is completely changed?

I know there are some complaints about the show.  It’s not strong on action.  The show slows down a bit at times because it focuses on the characters more than the plot.  For me, those are all strengths.  Like another show I recently reviewed, Jericho, the best part of the story isn’t the plot and mystery as much as it is watching the characters involved react to what’s happening.

The second season just started recently.  The wife and I have to rush through the first to get caught up.

The Stench of Defeat

On Tuesday night I headed out to the game store to grab some Malifaux games.  Most times, I have nothing planned and just grab games where I can.  Last night, though, I had two games lined up.

GAME ONE – aRAMOS (SLAZ)

The first was against Slaz, our local Archanist player.  I hadn’t played him since early this year when I was playing Ressers a lot.  He had beaten me with aRamos and I wanted to get a rematch against him.  So I set my Neverborn aside and dusted off my Ressers once more for a McMourning vs. aRamos rematch!

I took the Avatar this time – he wasn’t an option last time I faced aRamos, and since I had Line in the Sand, I opted for a trio of Night Terrors and the Dead Rider.  He took a fairly standard aRamos list, and kept Johan as a bodyguard.  I rarely face Johan, so I was a little fuzzy on what he did, but I figured he shouldn’t be a big issue.

Things started going poorly for me as I managed to flip a Black Joker on McMourning’s first turn as he tried to kill off the Canine Remains.  I ended up killing both of them, but shorted myself some bodyparts doing it.  Everything else was looking good though as my Night Terrors and Dead Rider were flipping my dynamite markers.

On turn two, my Dead Rider grabbed one of his Large SPAs and yanked him back to the edge of the board to kill him, and my bats were circling around away from the fighting.  I brought McMourning forward and summoned a Flesh Construct to face off against Ramos, hopefully putting a few wounds in him before he manifested.  Here’s where my lack of understanding of Johan came in.  Johan pasted the Flesh Construct in three hits.  Damn.  aRamos manifested.

I got the initiative on turn three and was holding a decent hand, so I decided to send McMourning after aRamos.  I used Scalpel Sling and Slaz cheated in a moderate Tome, then stoned for a severe putting his defense pretty high.  Still, I felt I had a good shot.  I tossed a 13 and stoned, needing a 6, and missed.  So McMourning could not actually attack anything more.  Instead, he booked it onto Slaz’s side of the board, hopefully positioning himself so that Slaz couldn’t come after me without risking the Turf War.  My Dead Rider, meanwhile, finished off one Large SPA and was moving in on a second.  My bats surrounded McMourning to cut off his positioning so aRamos would have a harder time landing a Leap near enough to attack.

Turn four did not go much better.  McMourning landed his first hit on aRamos for 6 wounds (prevented to 5) but missed after that.  aRamos summoned two new Large SPAs after the Dead Rider killed the other one and was flipping dynamite.  aRamos, the bugs and Johan took turns whacking McMourning, but he managed to survive the turn.

Turn five saw McMourning try to hit aRamos again, but another moderate Tome plus a 13 on the stone this time pushed the attack out of my range.  Needing a 7 on my stone, I again flipped too low and wasn’t able to attack anymore.  My bats weren’t accomplishing anything, so I drained two of them for Soulstones to try to keep McMourning alive, but he bit it after some concentrated attacks.  He moved most of his crew towards my side of the board, holding one Large SPA back to break my Breakthrough.

Turn six, my Dead Rider launched himself at the Large SPA, killing him and moving into his deployment zone, but by then, the four dynamite markers I had flipped were being flipped back and he was on my side of the board with enough people to get two points for Turf War.  The game ended and I lost, 2-4.

GAME TWO – PANDORA (BILL)

The second game was against Bill.  He told me he was going to play Neverborn last week, and I was planning on taking Neverborn too, but then he put up a bit of a stink, so I acquiesced and switched to Ressers.  Then I made the mistake of telling him who I was taking after we flipped Strategies (I had Reconnoiter so I went with Kirai – I was hoping to get a McMourning-friendly strategy), and he put Dreamer down and picked up Pandora instead.

The game went predictably for Pandora vs. Kirai.  Pandora got to Kirai without much trouble (high model count gave a lot of models to bounce off of with Pacify), killed off all the Seishin with her pricking them, then was able to target Kirai with enough stuff that her own Pitiful kept hurting her.

I was able to get my Insidious Madness up near Pandora a couple turns with the (-) WP flip, but even with that, Pandora was often outflipping my crew as they tried to target her.

I started with one Shikome and summoned a second on turn one.  The first one was going after Lelu, and the second one spent the first turn targeting the Doppelganger as its Prey.  I was able to get to Lelu, but he ran the Doppelganger away and Lilitu was able to hold the Shikome down.  I never really had the opportunity to swirl it away because I was under pressure from Coppelius the whole time.

Overall, not a lot fell my way.  Bill had a really solid crew to counter mine, and mine did not have much that could directly deal with his outside the Insidious Madness, and that hurt my crew just as much as his.  By the end of turn six, he had wiped my whole crew and maxed out his points, giving him a 8-0 victory over me.

So at the end of the day, I lost two in a row.  Rough night for me.   I had to go back home and let my wife know that it was the stench of defeat she was smelling on me.  She told me I had to sleep on the couch that night.

But I’ve already challenged Slaz to another aRamos match.  I have yet to beat that guy, and I’m convinced that prize is just in reach.  Looking forward to the re-rematch… 

Where Do We Go From Here?

I am something of a gaming whore.  I didn’t used to be.  Used to be that when I started up a game, I would pick a particular faction and stick with it throughout.  In Warmachine, this was Cygnar.  I didn’t care how bad people said they were – I liked the way they looked and I played them a ton.  When Hordes came out, I thought dragons and ice elves sounded cool, so I picked them.  Turned out that they had the opposite problem as Cygnar.  People did not say they sucked – they said they were too good.

When I started up Malifaux, I decided I liked the look of all the Neverborn masters, so that’s what I went with, and I stuck with them for a good while.  Then for some reason I bought Marcus.  I think I was ready to try something new and I already had Silurids and Waldgeists.  Soon thereafter, book 2 came out and I dropped Marcus in favor of the Dreamer and getting back to my original faction.  Then I got bored again and tried something new: the Viktorias and the Freikorps.  All this was in preparation for Hamelin coming out so I could play Outcasts.

Then I decided to plunge into Ressers and see what they were all about.  Now I have nearly as many Ressers as I do Neverborn.  This year I have split games almost evenly between my Ressers and Neverborn.  Recently my Neverborn have started to overtake my Ressers, but the first quarter of the year saw me playing Ressers about five times as often as Neverborn.

Now we’re moving in to another era…

I just haven’t figured out quite what it is yet.

I had it all figured out before.  I love Lucius and really want to get a crew for him out on the table.  I figured I’d just pick up a little bit of Guild – just Lady Justice and Lucius – and give them a whirl.  It would give me a nice way to mix things up from time to time.

But then they went ahead and announced that there would be yet another faction coming out: the Ten Thunders.  Nothing much has been announced for them yet, so I can’t really say whether I’m going to grab them yet.

But all this put my Guild construction to a halt.  I have to wait until I know more.  Do I go Guild, or do I go Ten Thunders?  Or heck… do I go both?

The Beginning of the End

Maybe it's not quite that dramatic, thought Bill may come to call it that before too long.

If you're not the one listener and you enjoy Malifaux, I encourage you to head over to the Gamers Lounge and take a listen to Episode #56.  Two new hosts have joined Bill in his rambling antics.  Alright, I'll spoil the surprise.  It's none other than Second Generation Awesome Dan and myself!  Hope you enjoy...

Jericho

My wife and I enjoy finding a good television series and watching it through more than we do watching movies.  Movies can be fun and all, but we enjoy the lengthy stories that play out over a season – sometimes more – of television.

I was flipping through Netflicks last month and happened upon a show I had never seen and never heard of, but there was a mushroom cloud on the promotional picture, and that drew my eye.  I read a little more about it – it certainly did sound like a post-apocalyptic show – so I decided to watch the first episode of Jericho.

The show centers around a small Midwest town, Jericho, and starts off working with the people within.  You meet the mayor and his wife.  They have two sons, one of whom is married and stayed in town.  The other has just returned home after being away for 5 years.  He’s just stopping in town long enough to pick up his inheritance and then hit the road again.

He had left behind his best friend who seems to have no idea where he was.  He meets up with his ex-girlfriend who now is engaged to another man.  That guy is flying back into town that night.  Slowly the cast of characters expands as you meet the Sheriff, other deputies, the political opponent for the mayor.  You meet the doctor, a teacher, the bartender.  The town starts to come together with how people all fit together.

And then as the president is giving an address to Congress, all the televisions black out.  And off in the distance, a mushroom cloud begins to rise.

From there, the story takes a drastic turn.  The woman who was going to pick up her fiancé from the airport now has to figure out what to do about him.  Neighbors start turning on each other as they become frightened by the darkness and the threat of gas and food shortages.  The mayor has to reclaim control over his city.  Scouting parties have to be sent out to find people outside the town who might be in trouble.

And the town has to slowly start to rebuild.  Find ways to get power.  Deal with the fallout from the bomb.  Get communication with the outside world to find out just what happened.

Slowly the scope of the story expands, starting with the very isolated and cut-off town of Jericho and as they learn more, we learn more about the world and about the past.  Groups come to prey off Jericho’s supplies, and Jericho must find ways to get more supplies themselves.  Help comes from people they may not have turned to prior to the explosions.

Laura and I watched through the first season and then finished off the short 7-episode second season.  It’s another casualty of the networks.  A good show ending long before it should have.  But they had enough warning to tie up some of the loose ends, and leave the story with a good, if not wholly satisfying, conclusion.

If you’re a fan of post-apocalyptic stories, I’d urge you to give this one a try.  I don’t want to talk too much about where Laura and I were hoping they story would progress during the second season and beyond because like so many post-apocalyptic stories, it’s the exploration that is so interesting.  I urge you to take a look at it.  It’s only 29 episodes, so it’s not a huge investment.  For my wife and I, it was very worth it.

Resurrectionists in Fact ARE Good

I started out as a Neverborn player when I first started playing the game, and used them almost entirely for a long while.  A local player was selling off some of his Ressers and I figured it could be a fun new crew to expand into.  I picked up Nicodem and McMourning, then expanded into Kirai and Seamus.  Avatar Seamus was actually the model that made me want to pick up my Resser experiment last year and since then I have bought and painted almost the entire line.

Then people started complaining that Ressers were the worst faction in the game.  That kinda surprised me – Resser tend to do very well in our local meta, though that may be because the player who uses them most, Second Generation Awesome Dan, is a very good player.  I had always just assumed that the Ressers were the second or third best faction because they always seemed to be winning.

So I went through the different masters, trying out each of them, and doing fairly well with all of them.  Some more than others, of course, but some fit my playstyle better than others.

My first master that I got all painted up was McMourning.  I had always had trouble against him when Dan was playing him, and I loved his model.  So I got him out on the table, took some lessons from Dan, bought the Rouge Necromancy when it was released, and started playing him.  I hit a few difficulties early as I was trying to learn a whole new faction, but I found overall he was not that far a walk from how I used Lilith.  He was fast and did a lot of melee attacking.  On the surface he’d seem to diverge because he’s not teleporting his models around, but he’s summoning new ones into place, so that’s pretty similar.

McMourning quickly became my favorite of the Resser masters, which is no surprise because Lilith is one of my favorite Neverborn masters.  They can put on a lot of pressure and force your opponent to play your game.  Now that Adam was released, I’m having even more fun manifesting McMourning and dropping a massive beast of a monster in play too.

I tried Nicodem next.  It was at this point that the forums were starting to leak with people hating Ressers, but I still paid them no mind.  I mean, the forums often have crazies that spout their hate for this model or that crew, and I figured since it was relatively isolated at the time, it was probably just more of that.  I put Nicodem on the table expecting to do very well with him straight out the gates.  I had seen Dan use him a lot and he used him VERY well.  Until Ressers became the hot topic, I had always assumed it was known that Nicodem was the second best Resser master.

But I didn’t get him.  I struggled with trying to figure out how he works.  I tried using his Vultures.  I figured from my Warmachine days, I would understand using Arc Nodes well, but something felt off using them here.  I would put up my buffs only to have Perdita Spellbreaker everything away.  I couldn’t bring up zombies and buff people at the same time.  I could never figure out what model I needed to summon when I was summoning.  In short, I failed at Nicodem.  I still won more than I lost, but he just wasn’t clicking.

I remember talking to Dan long before I started playing Ressers.  Back when we only had the first book, we were talking about the different masters for our chosen factions.  Dan hated Nicodem early on.  He just ran into difficulty after difficulty.  But then, after long months of work, something finally clicked with him and Nicodem became an unstoppable powerhouse.  Nicodem launched to become Dan’s favorite of the Resser masters, and I always fear when he comes on the table.

During this whole time, I had my wife painting up my Kirai group.  Finally, she was ready to go, and I put her on the table.  The first game I played against Dan, the only player at the time who knew Kirai inside and out, with him playing Colette.  We tied, 8-8.  I played again with her, and again, and again, and never lost.  She is, without a doubt, one of the top two masters in the game.  There’s pretty much nothing she can’t do.

Kirai, for me, was like a fast burn.   She hit the tables, won the games, and quickly got shelved in favor of other crews.  It was too easy with her – I didn’t like not having a challenge or having to think my way out of problems.  I liked her overall style – summoning spirits, moving Ikiryo, and swapping pieces around.  But she was far too good at all of it and it was not fun to play her.

Finally, I reached the model I wanted to play since the beginning: Avatar Seamus.  I say “Avatar” because I never wanted to bother playing Seamus without his Avatar.  He was my most frequent opposing master at the time, and he never impressed me.  But the Avatar – now that looked fun.

He felt more like my Nicodem experience, except that he actually did start clicking with me.  I was able to put a hurting on my opponent’s crew with Seamus’ gun and his minions, then manifest and beat the tar out of everyone who was left.  It felt great!

But by now there was full-fledged Resser hatred going on the forums.

“The only way to win is to use Von Schill!”  I have my Resser and Outcast cards separated and completely forgot that Von Schill was an option until that was pointed out on the forums.  I still haven’t pulled him in.

“Night Terrors are really a Dreamer option!”  I have played the Dreamer more than any of my Resser masters, and have used Night Terrors far more with Ressers.  Yes, the Dreamer can take them, but so can all the Resser masters, and just because the Dreamer can use them doesn’t mean we can’t.  And they’re so good for Ressers!

“Corpse Counters are too unreliable with all the non-living crews out there!”  That’s absolutely true, but to rely on summoning models with the Ressers as your only… heck, even your main trick… has never worked for me.  Rather than trying to force it to work, I’ve learned that all the masters have plenty more to offer, and if I get a single summon off in a game (except Kirai, but her resources for summoning are far easier to replenish), I’m usually doing just fine.

The minion choices in Ressers, especially at the 4 stone level, are simply great.  I find myself switching to Neverborn and, with the exception of models like the twins and Stitched (and Tuco might be joining them), I find myself missing the choices that Ressers bring to the table.

The outrage against the Ressers disappoints me a bit because I look around and see that they’re clearly not a bad faction.  They can and have won quite often.  Our local players love and respect Ressers when they hit the table.  They’re a challenge with a ton of playstyles that can really mess with an opponent.  They are not without their faults, though every faction can find them.  I think they have some of the worst Faction-specific schemes available.  I think their Special Forces choice is subpar.  I think that Seamus especially gets unnecessarily hosed with his starting Soulstone cache.  As a primarily NB player, I sympathize with the fact that one of the themes of the crew – terrifying – doesn’t work on majority of the board anymore.  But they have plenty of good too.  Would be wonderful if the more vocal people on the forums would stop spouting the hate for Ressers.  All it’s doing it making it become “common knowledge” that Ressers suck when in fact that’s not the case.