I've posted about my blog before but decided to make a single thread where I can post updates. Anyway, here is my contribution, a custom, to the unofficial Tannhauser month. The first link is a teaser story while the second link is the actual custom card and character sheets. I recommend that you read the teaser first since it was written to precede the bio.

Page 1

Page 2

Preview of the Card

Also, as I've changed the blog's template to a new dynamic template, please let me know if you encounter any problems with the page. Of course, feedback or questions about my customs are always welcome too!

BADASS! Thanks for sharing, I sadly didn't know about your blog- adding it to my feeds =)

I've posted some background information on Section XIII (mentioned in Kane's bio) to my blog as well as photos of Christopher Kane and some of my other Weird War figures. Next up will probably be a preview of my Tannhauser Companion, a resource similar to the Mythopoeia though organized in a sourcebook format. You may see a bonus token for Harbringer in the near future as well, if I can hobble the art together =P

Section XIII - Iscariot

Photos from the War

Wow! That look´s great!

Love your blog, and your custom work!

Thanks for the comments! Please let me know if any of you give Kane a try, even if you do have to use a proxy figure for now. Also, I've posted a preview of my Tannhauser Companion on my blog. The actual document will be higher resolution - these are just sample pages: Link .

It's really looking good, I hope that later you can help make that other project we talked about just as impressive.

Nice to see my maps too.

Wow- just wow. I am so jealous of you guys and your ability to make things look so good!

Thanks for the comments, guys.

Miah999 said:

Yeah, your maps were awesome! They work really well against the paper background, so I did not have to photoshop them either... just the way I like it! Anyway, thanks again for letting me use them!

I have gone ahead and posted Tannhauser: The Companion as it currently stands. The Companion is a work in progress, so while all the current background information is included, the file may not be consistently fancy. Non-official additions such as the further reading list are very much incomplete, but hopefully you can forgive that. Also, I want to give a HUGE thanks to Miah and Doc for their posts which helped me to compile the Shogunate background information! Click the picture below to go to my blog page, or click here for the actual Companion. Please be aware the file is large!

OH, FYI: The Tannhauser Companion includes information from both the 1st and 2nd Edition of Tannhauser. I never got around to labels for which is which, so be aware there maybe some odder entries because of it. Also, there were entries that reference our world. In several cases, I wanted to include extra information while keeping the official background clear. In these cases, the information from real life is color coded with red text.

A really good work.

First and foremost: I love the "they shall die for this" token. If you want I can add your character to my "Tannhauser Online" (also posted on miah's blog)

Also the idea of a vatican faction is really appealing, I envision certain bonuses to anything supernatural (zorka, asteros, Itami, half the reich faction...).

I've seen the manga as well. Nice ideas for a faction there... I am not usually very fond of customs because they might affect the balance (I'd rather "refluff" existing official characters or tokens to create a factionthan creating new rules from scratch) that way game balance would be somewhat guaranteed.

My ideas for a Section XIII faction:

Hero 1: Combat Mr Kane

Hero 2: Support/Leader Torquemada: A priest with looks like a spanish inquisitor much like Irina in the matriarchy (with liturgies that have pluses for the faction and minuses for anything supernatural), initiative bonuses in the command package

Hero 3: Special: Iscariot, a supernatural beast chained and bund by the section, (fight evil with evil) with some special abilities...

Trooper: only one kind of trooper (simpler!) Swiss guard special agent. A swiss guard badass with a lance that does more damage to anything supernatural (or carrying a supernatural device such as bonus tokens), and the special token swiss army knife (might work like wolf's special item "jack of all trades" but with only 1 pick instead of 2)

Moebius wrote: If you want I can add your character to my "Tannhauser Online"

Sure. It might give people a chance to try the character. Can you just include a credit to me and a link to my blog somewhere? Thanks!

Moebius wrote: I've seen the manga as well.

Cool! Someone else familiar with Hellsing =)

Moebius wrote: I am not usually very fond of customs because they might affect the balance...

I enjoy customs because they allow me to add my own flavor to the game, so simply modifying existing background would not be as fun for me. That said, I agree that balance is important. I generally try my best to make my customs fit within the parameters of the game I'm designing for, so I hope people can easily add them to their games. I may not always be successful, but I am open to feedback and can make corrections if other people feel they are warranted =)

Moebius wrote: My ideas for a Section XIII faction...

Cool. As I try to create both a cohesive background and rules, I work from general themes and then add in the details as I go. For the supernatural, one of my approaches is to give some of my customs special ways to Shake Off wounds to represent their special resistances or healing. My holy weapons prevent those figures from Shaking Off any wounds. In my opinion, its a simple, thematic way to handle that aspect of the game, though it may require some prior agreement amongst players to determine which official figures they consider to be vulnerable to these weapons.

I also have a couple of new token types. Afflictions are tokens which are moved onto enemy character sheets and have negative effects on the models. They may represent the effects of a curse or poison, for instance. I like the Afflictions because it allows me to have a consistent way to handle those effects. For instance, my Holy Water item can be used to heal a single wound or to remove an Affliction. It cannot heal as much as a First Aid Kit but is more versatile. I also have Supplications (prayers) as a token type, though those do not have any specific rules associated with them at the moment.

Moebius wrote: Leader / Support Hero

I also have some plans for further Vatican heroes. One of them is a Leader / Partial Support character, so he is similar to the character you had in mind though my character is a little more combat oriented. Father Vandeleur is Section XIII's most proficient agent, a warrior priest who wields a blessed flail and bears the armor of his convictions. The figure I use for him is Kreoss from Warmachine:

My third Section XIII hero will probably use the Magdalena figure from Heroclix, though I'm not sure yet what I'll do with her. Maybe an ex-Blutsturm agent who switched sides. I may make an Inquisitor character later on as well, but he would be a later addition. I have not yet found a figure to use for the Vatican troopers, so I have not given them much thought.

Moebius wrote: Iscariot, a supernatural beast chained and bound by the Section.

My other Section XIII characters will be closer to the priests from the manga in that they are more close-minded and will not work with demons, not even Hellboy. Allowing Kane to join them was already a big step, and is about as far as they will go. Also, I do like the "fire with fire" angle for the Vatican except... Alucard exists in my world and he fulfills that role already, albeit for the Royal Kingdom's Hellsing organization. Actually, what I may do (if I can find a suitable figure) is create a bound Angel, a messenger sent from Heaven, betrayed by darker elements within the Vatican who now manipulate that Angel for their own ends...

Yess! I've been waiting for your compendium since you mentioned it =)

Just finished fliping through it, it's really nice. I'll be stealing as much as possiable for my current project. : )

I see you are leaning heavily in the Helsing theme, I wouldnt like to be too be restricted by it as the universes are very different and I would be worried about how it fita altogether with the tannhauser universe and you know more about that unniverse than any of use (ur the kepper of the knowledge!)

The vampire agent certainly has appeal and the bound angel would be really, really cool, although I cant think of a figure yet ... I am looking forward to see your custom faction but the further away it gets from the standard the less it will be used (In my experience).

Ill look for some useful swiss guards minis (in exchange I want that swiss army knife token ;-)

Meanwhile here you have some ideas for minis... GO SECTION XIII GO!

Moebius said:

My Vatican customs are not really restricted by the Manga. I use the Section XIII organization, but all of the characters are my own creations. You could easily take the references to Section XIII out and they would still work thematically. The idea of Paladins are not unique to the Helsing world. Of course, the Alucard character will be based on the one from the manga, but he is not part of the Vatican, so it should not be a problem for those who want to use my Vatican customs.

Moebius said:

Well, one of the reasons I created the Tannhauser Companion was to help me fit my customs into the world. For Section XIII, its pretty easy because the organization is a secret entity within the Vatican.

Moebius said:

In my experience with other games, very few people use customs anyway. Tannhauser already has a small fan base. There is also quite a bit of work needed to actually use a custom since you need to find the figure and create the tokens and cards. As a result of those factors, I do not expect many people to use any customs (mine or otherwise) at all, no matter how well they fit the world or how well they play.

Also, its hard to define "standard" in a weird war game. I personally think my Vatican subfaction fits the Tannhauser world better than a Minotaur or lost son of Atlantis do, even though those two are from FFG / TOY. Anyway, one of the nice parts about customs is that people can pick and choose what they like. If a person wants to use some of my characters but not others, they are certainly free to do so =)

I did a full Vatican Faction many years back now, if you look on my profile and click on "posts written by miah999" you'll find a lot about them on the last two or three pages. Your welcom to borrow what ever you want.

But it was not well recieved and so I left it a little un finished.

Rhydderch said:

That is so true, I think that with the "online" I created there is actually more chance for them to see the light. I comment on them because I do plan to try them :-)

I agree completely with you on the weird backgrounds, with hoss it is easy to ignore his background and think of him as a younger (and healthier) Hermann and with Asteros... well I dont like his background at all and IMHO he does not fit, thats why I created an alternate fluff for him (keeping the rules intact, as a kind of big armour, I talked to doc savage to post it in his blog and as soon as I finish polishing it (got to choose a figure) he will post it.

As I said you know the tannhauser world better than most (certainly better than I do) what I meant was more on a general sense, better to fit the fluff than to fit the manga :-)

Also from a balance perspective neither hoss nor Asteros are the most balanced guys... in too many game references I read about reich, the final sentence reads "Reich won, Hoss was the last man standing", not to talk about asteros, with the stamina package in the two games i tried him after a few turns we dindt ever bother to use the overwatc on him, it would be a waste of good ammo...he is too powerful to be an option.

There is another thread on the fan base, but I think this is a wonderful and underrated game and I agree with most in wanting it to be more widespread, thanks topeople like miah, you or doc savage... that is still possible. :-)

Rhydderch said:

About the companion, its a nice reading, but you should review some of the Hoss lines, there are duplicate text there and get yourself a map, since Porto Seguro is nowhere near the red dot on the map =)

Thanks for making it.

Otar said:

Some of the lines maybe repeated because they were repeated from the web backgrounds or in the small booklets. Mizu, for instance, has several duplicate lines because of that. I'll need to fix those up later.

Otar said:

I like them :-) Had I known I would have included them in the second release of tannhauser online... I uploaded it yesterday...

Wow! It's cool, skeletons are as simple as wonderfull idea. I figure they're used like Voivodes.