So I had a lot of time on my hands this long, rainy weekend. After my fossil hunting expeditions detailed in my last post, I decided it was time to hunt the real thing.
Again I tried a mash-up of rules. I like Saurian Safari but don't really have the table space the rules are designed for. I also recently purchased a copy of Ganesha's Ice Age hunting rules Paeleo Diet, which has an animal activation system I like. (I generally like activation systems with a push-your-luck element.) So I shortened the movement and weapon range distances in Saurian Safari to better accommodate a 3'x3' playing area but used Paeleo Diet's activation system and animal reaction charts.
Those red plastic pieces are dinosaur footprints I salvaged from a Dinosaur Monopoly game. They represented dinosaur spoor. Every time one of my hunters made contact with a footprint, I would roll on a percentage table to determine whether a dinosaur appeared in a random spot (No closer than 10 inches from any hunter, 5 inches for small dinosaurs like raptors). There was a 60 percent chance no dinosaur would appear. I also rolled for encounters every time a hunter had two failures during activation. After little wandering, my hunters encountered their first dino: A Shunosaurus (Safari model that is actually a very close size fit for 28mm humans.) I started to make my way to the dino when another character got two failures, leading another encounter roll resulting in a Parasaurolopus peaking out from behind some trees.
Two herbivores: No problem. But right afterward another hunter got two failures, meaning I had to roll another encounter roll. The result: 99 percent, leading to the rarest dinosaur of them all:
Yes, a T. rex. I wasn't sure if I was really lucky or unlucky because I needed to roll a 99 or 100 to get one. Fortunately he spawned reasonably far away from my hunters, but not so far he was out of gun range.
Any cubes you see are for tracking wounds and bullets. Anyway, after a couple missed shots my hunters started to make progress and wounded the rex.
In the end, my hunters bought rexy down. That said, it didn't really feel like a fair fight. If you are careful with Paeleo Diet's activation system and play it safe, the animals will barely move. (Basically you can role up to three dice. Two dice are one color and animals activate only a result of 1. The third die--if you use it--is a different color and animals activate on 1-3.) The system works for primitive hunting but modern weapons seem give your hunters an unsporting advantage. Next time I may try something like the system in Ganesha's Advanced Song of Blades and Heroes, where characters can have different activation numbers and failures give the animals a chance to activate. Anyway, after I shot the T. rex I let the other dinosaurs go, because it was getting late.
Still had time for a trophy shot.
Jennifer's large eyes are definitely a reaction of the horrors she has seen and not my lousy painting skills.
paints the prototypes for the Eureka Amazon Army.
