Hi Folks,

I finally got this done. :)

ECC XIV AAR

After spending a ton of time getting minis painted and terrain built,
decals printed, etc., we were finally off to the ECC.  We headed out
of Pittsburgh around 11:45 with Yerin driving and Jonathan in the back
seat.  We only hit a little snow on the way for maybe 15-20 minutes, so
the ride was relatively uneventful.

We arrived around 5:30ish and had some dinner, checked in and dragged
our stuff to our room.  After getting everything squared away, it
was time to play.

Yerin and I showed up to play Jerry Han's Stargate SG-1 Project Amaratu.

We started with 5 Taure players conducting wargames.  There were two
asteroid fields on either flank of the board, near the center.  Yerin had
a Deadalus class ship while I had an Achilles.  The other three Taure
players also had Deadaluses (Deadali?  Deadelan?).  We charged toward
each other and launched high tech paintball equivalents for a few turns,
with both mine and Yerin's speeds going up to 30. I like to fly fast.

Just as we passed through the other Taure formation a group of Goa'uld
ships popped in.  Now here we were with our fleet separated into two
elements, one going the wrong way, and all of our weapons locked out
because of the wargames.  But we had another problem.  Yerin and I were
doing 30 and our team-mates were basically hanging out to dry against
the Guoa'uld.

Time to turn!  It quickly became clear as we started to swing around that
we were not going to make it around without going off of the table
(can't come back) or hitting the asteroids.  Things were not looking good.

Yerin came up with a masterful plan for her ship.  If she did it just
right, she should be able to skirt just between the asteroid field and
the edge of the table!  Sadly, she slowed down just at hair too much
and her base passed into an asteroid base by about a bananometer.
Jerry let her roll to see if she could squeeze by, but she needed a 6
and only got a 3.  Ships hitting asteroids with a velocity of 22 go
"Boom!"

Now it was my turn.  My ship was not as maneuverbale, and was was going
to go off.  I figured that since it was an SG-1 game, there would likely
be some heroic characters aboard.  Especially since I named my ship
Chau-Vah Tealc.  I spoke with Jerry and he let me try to pull off,
essentially, a bootlegger turn.  Instead of using my 3 points to turn,
I wanted to use 6!  Jerry let me do it, but it cost me half of my
engine and 3 turns of FireCon "issues".  Essentially, if I used a FireCon
for any of the next three turns, I had to make a die roll.  6s were... bad.

I did fire over the next two turns, but managed to not roll any 6s. :)

However, despite our heroic efforts, we had lost 1 ship to a rock, and as
the other three were essentially on their own, the Taure had simply been
too badly damaged to have a chance of pulling off a vicotry.

It was a very fun game, and I was very happy to have played.

Sleep time!

Saturday morning came, and after a quick breakfast we headed to the
game room.  Yerin was kind enough to set up the Bad Idea Games table
while I set up the terrain for FMA Bug Hunt.  Three squads of intrepid
Assault Marines were given their objectives and the game began.  The
Marines had to choose 3 objectives of the 5 available - they elected to
obtain a sample from an alien crate, perform an analysis of one of the
xeno pods scattereda round the place, and to hold he homing teleporter
so that they could get the objectives out.

I'll let the players decide on whether to provide details of the game.
The marines managed a minor victory, holding the telep[ort homer for
long enough to port out 3 marines, one carrying an objective.

The guys seemed to have fun, and I had a blast running it.

In the afternoon, I was going to run a second session, but no one
had signed up, so I went and played in Indy's FT game, Tizon Skies.
This was an FTP meets Traveller battle.  The Sword Wolrds were being
invaded by the Imperium.  I took a squadron of 3 alien ships allied
to the Sword Worlds and entered on turn 2.  My little squadron of
2 DDs and 1 CR took out an LC, a DD, and did some major damage to
another Imperial CR.  Not bad for the loss of 1 DD on my part.

All of the the other ships used vector movement, but I used cinematic
'cause I had some kind of alien drives.  Fun game.

Dinner break!  Yay!

Saturday evening I played in another Jerry Han FT game - Stargate SG-1:
Project Amaterasu.  In this one, I got to play an Antlantean ship that was
undamaged, but had ALL systems down, sitting in the middle of an asteroid
field. There was one Tauri ship defending it, and there were 3 or 4 more Tauri
ships coming in to help protect it while my Prize Crew of SG teams (or
someone) fixed things and got it out of there.  The only objective for me was
to survive/escape. Interstingly, the enemy (wraiths) who had set the ship
there as a trojan horse to lure the Tauri into battle, had no idea that my
group was on the ship repairing things.

The Wriath ships jumped in on turn 1.  I *think* there were 3 "bigger than a
frakkin' mountain" ships, and 2 more "bigger than them!" ships.  The 3 smaller
ships came in advancing on my left flank, while the two huge ships came on one
down the middle and one down the right flank.  Carl Scheu took his ship
forward fast up the left flank to fend off the 3 smaller vessels only to learn
that they had about  a zillion fighters on them.  The rules and weapons
systems had been tweaked to better reflect the SG verse.  Short version: Carls
missiles were eaten by figthers, then his ship was eaten by capitol weapons
fire and more fighter attacks. Carl was out of the game somewhere around turn
2 or 3. :(

Meanwhile the Tauri ship in the center slowly started moving forward through
the asteroids to hold the Wraiths at bay while the remaining 2 Tauri ships
moved towards the asteroid on my right flank.

I started work on repair rolls and did NOTHING on the first turn.  Within a
few turns, however, I had thrust restored, shields up, 1 FireCon and had found
and expunged a trap on the drone launchers (essentially, there was a virus in
the linkage that would have cause the power core to shut down if I had
attempted to fire any drones).  Finally, I also got a drone launcher restored,
but I did not have many drones available.  Turns out that I wouldnt' need
many.

There was a bunch of firing that I was not really involved in, but 1 of the
lighter ships was destroyed, then with her Wraith Fighters either moved off to
attack my ship or otherwise destroyed, the 2 Tauri ships on the right flank
nailed Yerin's ship with a pile of missiles and vaporized it.

In the center, I was being swarmed by wraith fighters and hey, look at that,
even if my ship had been fully repaired, it had NO FIGHTER DEFENSE!  Luckily
for me a pile of F-302s were sent to rip the wraith fighters to shreds.  The
fighters did manage to punch through about a quarter of my ablative shielding
before they were all cleaned up.

The larger ship in the center continue to go after us and exchanged some fire
with the center Tauri ship.  Then my drone launcher came on.  Huh, look at
that.  Drones are like missiles with a range of 36mu, do 1D6 damage, and
cannot be intercepted by fighters, PDS, ADFS, or pretty much anything else.
Oh, and I did I mention that they ignore shields and armor? (Jerry, *what*
were you thinking!?) Yeah, fired 6 of them at the central Wraith ship, and
after it had been hammerd a bit by the Tauri ship, my drones 'et 20 hull from
it's soft interior.  Unhappy times for Adrian, though he remained a good sport
about it through the bitter end.

It was another fun game, if a bit off balance.  I had a lot of fun trying to
get the badly broken Atlantean ship up and active before it could be
destroyed.  Heh, and I named it the Prince Namor. :)

Sleep again!

Up for a quick breakfast (Yerin wasn't feeling well, so Jonathan and I went to
the buffet in the hotel, which was both reasonable and reasonabley priced)
then hit the gaming tables.

I had never played Steve Jackson's Frag before, and in fact, had never
heard of it.

It's worth looking up on the web and maybe buying, if nothing else,
for the cards.

Essentially it's a miniatures version of a typical first person shooter -
Doom, Halo deathmatches, etc.  You have a character that you buy some stats
for so that folks can have some differentiation, then you pop in on a map, run
around, pick up guns and equipment at "power up spots", and kill each other.
When you die, you leave all of your gear laying there for someone else to pick
up, and you respawn to start it all over again.

Turned into an FMA game, it was super easy to learn and great fun.  I think I
won the first 2 games and Damond (I think) won the third one.  Much to my
surprise, my guy was only fragged once in all that time.  Martin Connell was
simply incapable of making a die roll to save his life (and he didn't do
that!).  Steve Barosi kept being saved in one game by other players killing
the guys that were going to kill him.  All fun.

Chars had a bunch of stats - move speed, accuracy, armor, health, maybe one
more that I'm forgetting.  My trade off choice was to have very high accuracy,
meaning that I could a) fire multiple times per turn, b) get a nice, big
firing die, and c) get nice long range bands.  I gave up speed, managing to
have a move of only 4 or 2d4 for combat moves.  Despite my movement handicap,
I managed to mostly pull of what I wanted.  In 3 games I think I only combat
moved less than 4 spaces 2 or 3 times, and rolled 7s or 8s for combat moves
VERY frequently.

Ugly Bob was fun to play and I'd do it again.

After the game, I cleaned up my vendor table (and thanks to all of you who
purchased or ordered decals!) and then started feeling kind of sickly.  Sadly,
I had contracted the dreaded ECC XIV Kochte Plague.  Now someonee on the
mailing list posited that such beasts and plagues have to incubate for about a
week before activating and having symptoms appear.  Well, that's true of
colds, but NOT of viruses.  My fiancee is a Physicians Assistant and she
verified that viruses can transfer and start symptoms in 24-48 hours.  I saw
Indy Friday night. He was still pretty sick, and thus still shedding viri.  By
Sunday afternoon I wanted to die.

Missed the better part of a week of work, and still feel pretty crappy.

The plague was the only downside to an otherwise excellent ECC for me!

Oh yeah, one last thing.  I took first place with a little mini that I had
made and entered into the 6mm category.  The mini is multi-functional.  In
25/28mm it is a robotic recon drone.  In 15mm it's a MALP.  In 6mm it's an
automated recovery vehicle.  I have to have the arm/claw recast as my original
was too thin, but likely within 2 months I'll have them available for sale.
Why did it win in the 6mm category?  Easy, it was the only entry! And it
almost took 2nd place as a bunch of folks didn't enter a 1st place entry....
:D

Thanks all for a great ECC!

John