Historicon 2017

Ok, I think I've finally gotten my head on somewhat straight enough to finally make a decision about Historicon 2017. I'm going to take Agent Peggy Carter and members of the SSR down to Fredericksburg in July to stop the evil forces of HYDRA from using stolen Stark technology to try to rule the world. No pressure, right?!

This keeps me right in the wheelhouse of my favorite time period in history - I absolutely love the 30's and 40's! All my favorite movies are from this era, as are all my favorite actors. I think I'm going to make the narrative occur stateside as this will also allow me to use all my pulp era figures. This will give both the figures and board that retro look I'm after too. We'll see I guess - there are a lot of ways to go with this.

I was a bit late to the Agent Carter TV show, as I usually am with these things, though I did have both seasons recorded on my DVR - which of course I lost when my DVR broke last summer without watching a single episode! Anyway, Blu-rays of season 1 and 2 have since been purchased and I've been pretty much obsessed since watching that first episode.

What this now will do unfortunately is put my Jonny Quest campaign on hiatus for about 6 months; because as of now, until the end of July, I will be focused on pretty much nothing but Agent Carter and HYDRA.

As well as learning the rules to Crooked Dice's 7TV. I think this is going to be the perfect rules set for this type of game, and I'm almost ready just to give a quick playtest of the rules once I find a friend - just kidding :) I'll make my son be the guinea pig. Besides, he's got to help me with this at Historicon anyway; I'm paying for his admission, hotel, and food - he owes me!

I've already been brainstorming and working on a general 'must have' list for the board. I was going to do a James Bond spy-fi game initially so I bought the 'World of James Bond' book that has some fantastic cut-away drawings of the different villains lairs a few weeks ago to get some inspiration for the board - and in usual Ivor fashion changed my mind to Agent Carter :) But I think a Bond game will definitely be in the future at some point; this board is going to easily be able to be used that type of game.

I'm a huge sucker for these kinds of cut-away books because I love to see how things work together. I have several Star Wars, as well as an Indiana Jones book like this one that are just fantastic.

This book only cost me $4.00 total off of Amazon, $3.99 is what the shipping was! It was easy to get some initial ideas for the board with just one quick flip through the book. Once I got the magnifying glass out though, that's when the ideas really started flowing!

I've already started to muck about with some possible layout ideas for the board. I'm definitely going to use my 4Ground hotel complex as the "front" for the underground research facility. This part of the table with all the buildings will be raised about 5 inches above the underground facility to show that it is above the complex, hiding the evil that is below.

I found a bunch of boxes of Jakob's old Lego's (which I now know how we're going to pay for college in the fall - there has to be about a million dollars worth of Lego's in all the boxes) and figured I'd use those to play around with to get some different ideas for room placement - this will allow me to move, gauge different heights of areas, and switch stuff around much easier than on the sketch pad.

Some must haves for the research facility - there will be the main control/computer area (gray), an area with some cloning tanks (green), an office area (blue), the computer bank room, a minions room, a catwalk around the perimeter, an elevator from the main house down to the facility, an elevator for equipment in the carriage house, a secret tunnel from the well into the facility, and then generators placed in the middle of the entire complex. I'm even kicking around the idea of a dock for a boat or maybe a submarine. Hopefully I can come up with more ideas as I actually move and place things around on the board.

Story wise I'm not sure yet if I'm going to do an alternate timeline or what, but I think Red Skull has to be in the game. This is a Heroclix I grabbed off of Ebay. A bit taller than the rest of my 28mm figures, but I think it will work out with no real problems.

I also bought an obscene amount of these data and computer banks from Cooked Dice. I'm not even going to tell you how many I have to build lol!

The bulk of the research facility is going to be built with Hirst Arts sci-fi molds. I got an absolutely incredible deal on 12 molds off of Ebay, paying just over half of retail on them and not even having to pay for shipping. Honestly, I feel pretty dirty about it - I could easily resell them all right now and make a big profit.

Merlin's Magic plaster is on it's way and I'm super excited to give this casting thing a go again - I'd done some rock casting for a train I built Jakob when he was small, as well as using those same molds to make islands for the old Wiz Kids Pirates of the Spanish Main tabletop game we used to play when he was little too, but it has been years since I've done it.

I also used a 50% off coupon to buy this paper cutter from Michael's. Another super sweet money saving deal - I've already started to use it on cutting styrene for that elevator in the main house that will descend down to the underground level. This is going to give me perfectly straight cuts as well as making it much faster to build something.

Lots still to do in the next week - I've got until the end of the month to register for the PEL for Historicon and I was even debating on doing another game - sort of a prequel to this game. Basically it would be the beginning of Captain America where Schmidt stole the Tesseract from that church, but instead stealing the Stark technology. I have everything already built to play that kind of scenario; the 4Ground church, German bad guys, resistance fighters, plus all sorts of other damaged buildings that could work. It would be neat to run a continuing story game over the course of the convention, but I have a pretty small car so I better just focus on my initial idea!

As always, thanks for looking!

Ivor