One year ago I resumed painting miniatures after a hiatus of over a decade, thanks chiefly to the acquisition of the second edition of Mansions of Madness. While on vacation in Australia I was searching for a game to play with my family and friends, and some dim forgotten memory of playing the first edition sparked a search for a copy of the game in the game stores of Sydney. I visited my old haunts, and found that the second edition of the game would be coming soon, but sadly not in time to play with my family before I had to go back to Japan. With the spark of interest firmly lit, however, I returned to Japan, ordered the game online, and resolved to play it the following year when I returned.
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| Playing Mansions of Madness in Australia. |
The acquisition of MoM sparked a cascade of events which led me back to my old hobby. Unimpressed by the grey dullness of the enclosed miniatures I resolved to fully paint them all before I returned to Australia. In December 2016 I saw people at the Japanese International Gamers Guild (JIGG) playing HeroQuest, which is one of the titles directly responsible for my foray into miniature gaming. This led to me scouring the net for figures, which led me to Raging Heroes, which then led me to Deadzone and a slew of other Mantic products. Deadzone, The Walking Dead and Mars Attacks! are all digressions touched off by my decision to buy and paint the second edition of Mansions of Madness.
One year later the rest of my Warhammer miniatures are on route to Japan, having been dug out of storage from my father-in-law's garage. I own a bunch of new miniature games from Mantic, and have expanded my collection to include science fiction. I've resuscitated my Flames of War British Eight Army, as well as a Dark Angels Warhammer 40K army, neither of which have seen battle on the table top. More importantly though, I have finished enough of the MoM figures to be able to play the game with my friends and family using only painted miniatures. It's a consolation to think that I achieved my original goal, despite the digressions and distractions along the way. Our gaming group has successfully completed eight out of the first nine scenarios available on the app, to varying degrees of success. Hopefully by next year there will be a slew of new scenarios to bring back to Oz. In fact, I've resolved never to play MoM except with my family in Australia. Several years ago we made a pact to only watch Game of Thrones together as a group, and we've held true to that for the most part. I'm making a similar pact to myself with MoM. At the time of writing I have four scenarios reserved for our next session - five actually, since they have never played the very first scenario, Cycle of Eternity - and by the time I go back I'm banking on Fantasy Flight games to have released a couple more.
I've been toying with the idea of making my own scenarios using an app called Valkyrie, and if I do get around to doing that I will try to play test anything I make at JIGG. I added some house campaign rules in our last play session in August without telling the guys that they were my own creation. My sister and I have a weird DM and player relationship stemming from our youth. She viewed anything I made with suspicion and a critical eye, and would frequently challenge decisions, plot points and rules I made when we played D&D, HeroQuest and Warhammer Quest as kids (I was always the evil overlord). Tell her it's an official rule, though, and she'll accept it without question. Anyway, from my point of view, the house rules which allowed the characters to grow in power between scenarios worked really well. The rule was simply that a character could add one point to any characteristic if they did not die or go insane, even if they did not achieve the "best" endings in each scenario. It created a hook for the players to care about the investigators, and I might explore this idea in home brewed scenarios. I would like to make a campaign of my own, but I'd better to start off slow and get to grips with the Valkyrie app first before I begin making grandiose plans which I can't achieve. For now the only things left on my MoM checklist is to acquire the Streets of Arkham expansion, and get to work painting the included miniatures in time for my next trip home in August next year. If I'm really industrious I might be able to bring some home brewed scenarios. I just won't tell my sister I made them.
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