This month I launched my first useful vibe-coded app to the outside world. Dystopian Builder, which I talk about more here is currently a list builder for Armoured Clash. This was built mostly with Codex, some Claude Code, and took a few weeks of on and off work and exhausting my token budget. I’m very happy with how it came out and adding new features for now, with plans to add Dystopian Wars list building support once it’s in a good state for Armoured Clash. I’ve made a number of VTTs with the same tools but have not felt any had the polish to release, but now I feel like I’m in that position with this app, and I do have some VTT plans for later this summer.

What I Ran

Mothership - Daedalus Station & the Rimspace Racing League

This is a combo space station setting/adventure, and it’s pretty good. I think the station itself is great, lots of good locations, could maybe use a few more plot hook type details, but overall I liked it. The adventure itself is solid, I love that it has four possible answers and the GM picks before the game, I think you could combine a bit of this with Carved from Brindlewood and have players decide what the real threat is. The adventure falls down a little in that it doesn’t really tie into the racing league. It’s thematically tied to the league but the races have no real bearing on it which feels like a missed opportunity. I also feel like it needs a few pages dedicated to the players joining the league.

My favorite bit is without a doubt the shop on the station - Pockets of the Post-Living. A creepy store run by a creepy guy who sells stuff scavenged off corpses. In addition to the written text I gave his shop a wall of keys, he doesn’t know what they’re for, but hey, not all of them are sticky!

I think one thing I have learned across Mothership is that I prefer space adventure to space horror. Mothership has a lot of good space adventure modules but I think I’ll be trying them in another system.

Dungeon Crawl Classics - Chanters in the Dark

I ran the first session of Chanters in the Dark. This was a follow-up to Sailors on the Starless Sea. Chanters was written as a direct follow-up to SotSS and I think it works well in that regard. At time of writing I’ve run a second session in July and have a final one scheduled and I think what stands out to me in the module is how well the city in it hangs together as a place. A weird, depressing place, but a place. I think key to that is that it has several things going on and a few layers. It’s an ancient city no longer inhabited by its original inhabitants. There are the beastmen who are connected to the SotSS beastmen but much more chill. There is the addictive fungus. And there are the titular chanters and whatever is going on with them.

The start to our session went a bit off-script as I didn’t introduce the beastmen before a player got off the initial beach which ended up really delaying the “these beastmen don’t want to fight” lesson which is key to the adventure. I tried to hint at this a number of ways, but eventually needed someone to knock on the door of the PC’s house to lore dump. This is written into the module but I think would have worked better with some more beastmen interactions beforehand.

What I Played

Mythic Bastionland

We played our first Mythic Bastionland session. I’ve really been looking forward to this, it’s an amazing book and I was looking forward to seeing how it plays out. My character is the Mask Knight and I like having random character generation but my notes would be:

1. Let players pick some equipment or roll for it.
2. The math on stats is fine but the math for Guard which is sorta your health pool is a single d6. This is dumb and bad and the designers should feel bad. OD&D relying on a single die for level 1 hit dice is something we accept as part of the genre. It’s not great, but it also has a mechanism to correct the issue, you keep getting to roll those dice when you level up. Mythic Bastionland does not have that. You can get more Guard but it’s not reliable and everyone advances one point at a turn. I’ll not get more into why this math is bad but it’s weird that they made attributes d12+d6 (good distribution!) but guard is a single roll for your character.

Anyway, everything else is very cool. We’re on something of an intro quest and have found a cool, weird cursed forest and we cut the session right as we started combat over a cursed banquet.

Dungeons & Dragons 5.5E

We played our first game of a linked series of sessions. The GM is running 3 groups in the same world, one is the primary party. Our party was intended as a 2-shot but has become a 3-shot. The final session will be PvP with the main party. I don’t want to say much before that session but will make a few broad comments. First, this is my first 5E in years, and yeah, this system sucks and I’m actively pissed off this is the default RPG for people to find. It teaches everyone the bad habits and isn’t good for any style of play. That said, I’m really enjoying this adventure being set in the Forgotten Realms, I have a huge amount of nostalgia for the setting and it feels quite nice to visit it again.

Warmaster

This was my second game of Warmaster ever, and the first one was years ago so it was in large part a learning game. This was also to prepare for an event I’m running this fall which involves a lot of Warmaster. I borrowed my friend’s Skaven and faced off against his Chaos Dwarves.

Warmaster is a strange beast, it really does not feel like other GW games. By and large it’s one of the least complicated games GW has made, but it also has a lot of things that just don’t have parallels in other games from GW. Units often don’t get a chance to activate, they can be stranded in a corner, you measure in centimeters, everything hits on a 4+.

But it is a good game, the interplay of heroes and units is certainly very interesting and it requires advanced planning, especially with Skaven who have orders limited to 20cm.

The game itself was really a story of rats losing combat. I got a good charge off on my turn one, and won the first round of combat, but then tied or lost the second round on my turn which left my center unit very exposed, and that is more or less how combats went for the game. Dwarves have a lot of 4+ saves and I was on 5s or 6s and continually losing or tying combat because of that, and both are pretty punishing letting your opponent set the pace.

I did not use my shooting well, but it can be hard to do in this game due to movement issues, short range, and line of sight. We played a mission with 4 objectives and one of my mistakes was not leaving a unit to camp on one objective, and in Warmaster it can be quite hard to get a unit to an objective after you’ve moved past it. If I’d done that it would have been a fairly close loss, but as things stood my army broke and I was pretty far behind on objectives.

Rangers of Shadowdeep

For our event this fall we’re going to be running players through Rangers of Shadowdeep missions and needed to give the system a look to start planning those. I and the other GMs for the event played on the Tabletop Simulator mod and it’s pretty good and worked well. The gameplay is the same basics as Frostgrave which I think is a good core. The very first mission is somewhat laughably easy, which makes some sense as a tutorial but also isn’t the best for gameplay.

The biggest lesson from playing is how important the companion system is for the game. It changed our approach to how we’ll handle characters and companions and also showed that GMed games of RoSD are probably going to work best with 2 or 3 PCs, and their companions.

What I Hobbied

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Another month with very scattered hobby progress. I did a bit on far too many 40k armies, the only one I made real progress on was Orks where I started but didn’t finish a Morkanaut and Gorkanaut. For the fall event I got another batch of 28mm goblins finished and a number of Warmaster units.

I also painted a ton of Dungeons and Lasers cave terrain. I enjoyed painting this and it was very quick and easy. I primed it grey, they did a drybrush of a lighter green, and the final step was an all-over Payne’s grey oil wash, followed by more limited brown and green oil washes. With all of these I didn’t wait for the wash to fully dry, I wiped most of it away with paper towel after a few minutes, I find this works very well and is something that makes sense when painting this much stuff.

I’ve also been working to assemble some Enlightened for Armoured Clash, they’re the coolest looking faction in my book and I’m excited to paint them. Assembling Armoured Clash figures is not my favorite, they really need to get the mold lines under control and just in general building these models is time consuming and not a ton of fun.

Lastly, I’ve been thinking about Necromunda again, and painted a couple models, as seen above being a 3d print, the second an Archon fantasy model with a sword-swap. After painting these I also assembled an Ash Waste Nomads gang which I think I’ll start painting and might use for my first campaign of the new edition.

What I Read

Brutal Kunnin - Mike Brooks

I listened to this on Audible (great audio book, no notes), and I enjoyed it a lot. This was the first “ork-driven” 40k novel where the primary character is an ork and I’m really glad they’re going in this direction. Orks are fun and more 40k novels lean into that. And without a doubt my favorite part of this novel is there are dozens of little moments that made me smile and say “heh, that sounds about right.” Most of those are the ork characters wondering why the hummies are so weird, but there are also some similar good moments with Mechanicus characters, who also feature heavily. That would also be my biggest complaint, it’s really half ork book, half Admech book, and I like both halves but would have liked more ork focus.

What I Bought

Warhammer 40k: Armageddon

The new edition called me and I picked up the new set. I’ve built the ork models and outside of the Dakkarig they went together beautifully, and all the models look great. Orks are something I want to get in game-ready state fairly soon so I’ll work on painting some this summer.

Imperium Maledictum Inquisition Guides Collectors Edition

Picked these up, I like the Maledictum line a lot, and waffled for a fairly long while on if I wanted the collector’s editions or not. I don’t really understand the Cubicle 7 CE line. Some are very nice books with faux-leather covers and other special treatments. Others are a different cover in a slipcase box. This falls into the later category and I don’t think is worth the large premium over the base edition, but I’m glad I picked it up. I’ve been kicking around a few 40k RPG ideas and this will help.

Coming Up Next Month

It’s a few days into July and I’ve played a DCC session, have another scheduled soon. Then there is another Mothership game, two D&D sessions, some Warmaster, maybe some Legions Imperialis, and I’d like to get a game of 40k 11th edition in before too long.