Wednesday, June 5, 2019

Rangers of Shadow Deep

A kingdom stands on the brink of destruction, as the vast realm called the Shadow Deep slowly swallows everything in its path. As the army fights to contain the tide of evil creatures teeming up out of the black clouds, the kingdom’s best soldiers, the rangers, must venture down into the shadows to gather information, rescue prisoners, and ambush enemy supply lines. It is a desperate fight against overwhelming odds, but every little victory brings another day of hope.

If you are not familiar with Rangers of Shadow Deep, its another game by Joseph A. McCullough, the author of Frostgrave. It uses a very similar system to Frostgrave, but has one major distinction; namely RoSD is designed to be played in a co-op or solo form. The few times I've played Frostgrave, I thought it was great, and as my blog shows, I love painting models for it too. Plus, the idea of both solo and co-op play is very enticing. Almost all of my free time is after my kids go to bed, which really limits my gaming time because who wants to start a game of warhammer at 10 pm? So being able to play on my own sounds great. Plus, co-op play is also a great concept for teaching those kids to game. I know from my own experiences learning card games that learning against an adult can be very discouraging since you are almost never going to win (also, my father counts cards!). Co-op would eliminate that issue all together. Instead, I can teach them to play in a way that they can still get to feel the joy of victory. 


The giant rats of Shadow Deep
Additionally, I had been slowly working on a solo play extension of Warhammer Quest: Silver Tower to cover traditional wargames, and particularly my Ottersricht setting, but progress was not moving at anything remotely resembling a reasonable pace. So, I'm going to slot RoSD in to take that place. One thing solo rules do require lots of though, is flora and fauna. Well, mostly just fauna. Joseph McCullough included a few scenarios in the main book and has since released a few more, so I thought I'd get started on paining up things to represent the beasties from those scenarios that I don't already have.


Spiders of the Shadow Deep
There were three types of fauna I needed in bulk; in addition to a few random single monsters I have to paint up. The first two are giant rats and giant spiders. In this case, the rats are from Lead Adventure Miniatures and I ordered the spiders from a bits seller as they came from the Warhammer Arachnarok kit.


Swamp Zombie test model
RoSD also has two classes of zombies, regular zombies and swamp zombies. Anyone familiar with this blog will know that I have plenty of regular zombies. However, I am also (very slowly) working on a swamp based undead army, so I thought I would futz around and make a test model for the swamp zombies. I'm mostly happy with him, and painted him very similar to the Heroquest Fimir I showed off previously, but with some minor changes (In fact, he was actually done first, and the Fimir represent an improvement on him). However, I did decide to do a few things differently in the future too.

Anyway, if you haven't already checked it out, click the link above and go buy a copy of RoSD, it's pretty great.
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9 comments:

  1. SkullyJune 5, 2019 at 3:08 PM

    Wonderful stuff! Makes me want to try out RoSD!

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    1. AndrewJune 5, 2019 at 3:09 PM

      If you like frostgrave, you'll like this!

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  2. SuberJune 5, 2019 at 5:58 PM

    I'm tempted, I'm really tempted, please share your thoughts on the game :D

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    1. AndrewJune 5, 2019 at 6:02 PM

      It's really similar to frostgrave if you've played that. One of my long term plans is to convert the Frostgrave spells for this and basically use it for solo AoS games.

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  3. Michal DwarfCryptJune 6, 2019 at 1:54 AM

    Excellent stuff Andrew!

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  4. RossJune 7, 2019 at 7:10 AM

    Awesome stuff as always. Are there a lot of monsters that could be recycled from Frostgrave in Rangers? I've got a pretty extensive bestiary for that (with snowy bases though, but I'm sure I could make that work, I just don't know the setting yet).

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    1. AndrewJune 7, 2019 at 7:33 AM

      They're is a lot of overlap in the bestiary, although RoSD had a few things not in frostgrave. Of the top of my head, they're mostly critters though. In addition to rats and spiders there are giant flies and vultures.

      The snow bases would be fine though. The setting is generally more forested, but I'm sure it snows there too 😂

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    2. RossJune 7, 2019 at 8:56 AM

      Nice one, cheers. Tbh I wish I'd just gone with more generic bases in the first place, but I was pretty much balls deep in Frostgrave for a while, so that was never an option! Looking forward to more of your Rangers stuff to motivate me to pull the trigger on it myself.

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    3. AndrewJune 7, 2019 at 8:59 AM

      Because of the overlap with most of the creatures, I think the only things I've got left to do are the flies, a vulture, and a giant worm. And, unfortunately, my hobby ADD had distracted me at the moment so I'm not sure when I'll get around to finishing them 😂

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