Malifool's Campaign of Carnage Report - Part 1

#MCC

After the huge success of last year's 4M event created by Mike Marshall (@oldmanmyke), MCC was an event that got almost the entire UK Malifaux community excited and clawing for a ticket.

MCC felt very much like Christmas, an event I knew was coming but that almost felt like it never really would, only just the weekend prior did it dawn on me that it was really going to happen.

Tickets had been bought well before, with Aaron unfortunately having to sell his on due to a huge family event appearing, though even with that loss all the different cool and exciting things this campaign weekend would mean did have me excited, very much like a kid at Christmas would be.

For those unaware, MCC is like it's title suggests, not a tournament but a wacky campaign weekend.

Essentially 3 days of forty gamers and the excellent judges/organisers meeting, socialising, gaming and having an awesome time.

MCC would not be your standard Malifaux by any means and I will get into that a lot more throughout this report.

Needless to say with the unanimous praise the previous year had with 4M I was certain this event would be great and, spoilers, it was. 

Lastly, before I delve deep into this report:

Thank You

Thank you, to everybody who was at MCC, there will be a lot of name drops throughout this report and I would like to say now that if you didn't get a mention I apologise, forty plus people is a lot, I'm pretty sure there were at least a dozen people I didn't even get to chat to but everyone I met, spoke to, got introduced to, everyone was very pleasant.

MCC had a huge amount of great things going for it, but the top one was the great social aspect and the practically perfect atmosphere.

A sneaky snap of Mei Feng and her friend before the snow hit.

Preparation - Painting

Just like I did with my Canterfaux tournament report, I thought it would definitely be worthwhile sharing the things that were happening on the way up to the event, as for me especially with so few events under my belt an event starts way before it's actual weekend.

One of the many different things about MCC's format was that the event wasn't fixed faction and it wasn't fixed single master but the way it worked was prior to the event each player had to select three Masters they wanted to play and submit them.

Three Masters, didn't matter from what faction (dual ones had to pick), no restrictions on which could go together just simply your three masters of choice.

Gaming wise the choice of masters would affect a few things over the weekend, the soulstones you would bring for your team (more on that later) and the chances of masters getting "captured" and taken out of the campaign.

Capturing Masters was something we were told about early on, scheme wise where normally A Line in the Sand is the default, MCC would have Take Prisoner (always selecting master), this would mean something a little more permanent during the course of the weekend.

Masters each being characters would mean that it didn't have to be you personally getting your master captured, if another player did, even if the faction they selected was different, that Master would be in jail.

Overall this meant popular masters could turn out to be a bad choice, something at the event which became quickly apparent, but again more on that later.

Now I did have a fair few months to prepare but painting is definitely not one of my favourite parts of the hobby.

As I discussed on Malifools I find in a way it's an emotional investment of sorts, I have to be very up for it, if I am then I do enjoy it and get a lot done, if I'm not, I get distracted, work slow and produce bad stuff.

This meant that although taking a mixture of factions would be more interesting I decided to go with stuff that I knew I could get done in time, and that was my main three masters who are all Arcanists:

• Mei Feng
• Marcus
• Ramos

The other obvious advantage to this is getting stuff done for one master meant it would be useful for the other two in most circumstances.

On a personal level I felt picking these three masters would be good too as, everyone expects me to take Mei Feng, Ramos is someone I have wrote about very early on and Marcus the beastmaster, I thought it would be nice for people to see my #ToMB progress in real life.

The other thought was I wanted to take masters I was familiar with, I knew this event wasn't particularly competitive if at all but I did want to show a level of competence, especially in a timed environment.

A WIP snap I took with the 3 Masters stood side by side.

For those that are interested and really for me he was as big a part of this trip as anything, Jan did actually mix factions a little with what he had:

• Wong
• Som'er
• Dreamer

I mention Jan at this point because both him and I had a fair bit of painting to do but also had got a lot of what we were taking to MCC done from Canterfaux.

Also I hope that Jan will be writing a short guest post about his MCC journey.
He does cover it on both @chasing_bacon and the fantastic new podcast "The Tabletop Project" over at @lost_lighthouse.

Post Canterfaux I still didn't actually have a crew painted, for those that don't remember I took Mei Feng but thanks to her missing foot I had to borrow that model off of Aaron.

Also Canterfaux had no actual painting requirements although I aimed to get the crew done.

This meant though that I would be going from zero fully painted crews to three.

In a sense the idea of that was exciting which did help push me a lot.

A quick snap of Ramos and his crew box minus some arachnids.

With the summer hitting hard, the days being very hot I found myself even less enthused to do painting, this wasn't helpful.

When I did get stuff out to paint, I found my concentration was shot, this may have been the heat but I believe it was a whole mixture of things, either way what this meant was simple base coats and washes "slapping it on" I could handle but doing details, highlights and the like, it wasn't happening.

I had no preconception that I could win best painted but I did still feel an element of pride and hoped that I wouldn't have to turn up with "3 colour minimum".

Knowing that the minimum may be all I get a chance to do, combined with some solid advice about planning your painting schedule from my good friend Gary Hennessey of http://thelostlighthouse.com/ I felt a bit more prepared.

Now Gary's plan wasn't perfect for me, but it got me thinking and I decided to write a quick spreadsheet that had a list of the models I would want to take and some painting stages.

• Built
• Primed
• Base Coated
• Tabletop (before basing)
• Highlights
• "Finished"
• Basing

Tabletop was added in as soon as I realised how my painting was going, I wanted as many boxes ticked as possible but the priority was to get the list up to "tabletop" and if that was all done I'd have a nice long day of covering myself in bicarbonate of soda.

The quotation marks around finished are there because I know I'd want to go back to some things later, even now.

The list of models was something like this:

• Mei Feng
• Kang
• Emberling
• 3 Rail Workers
• 3 Metal Gamin
• Rail Golem
• Willie
• Marcus
• Myranda
• Jackalope
• Razorspine Rattler
• Sabertooth Cerberus
• Rogue Necromancy
• Dawn Serpent
• Night Terrors
• Ramos
• Joss
• Brass Arachnid
• Electric Creation
• Howard Langston
• Lots of Steam Arachnids (I forgot swarms)
• Arcane Effigy
• Mechanical Rider
• 3 Ice Gamin
• 3 Fire Gamin

A good portion of that list was already done, the first thing was to finish painting Marcus. I had the Claw and Fang box set painted for a while bar the master himself, he was practically finished so didn't take much time to get to an acceptable tabletop standard, but one I want to go back to in the future for sure.

Ramos' crew was also mostly done for Canterfaux bar again, the master himself.

He was a miniature I started working on early and  was one that made me quickly realise that something was effecting my painting.

I don't think I am in any way particularly good at painting, but I do know the standard I can hit and with Victor it was not it.

The Electric Creation got an extremely quick job and the Arachnids were simply dry brushed and washed.

The future for them is to look a lot more like a battered version of the Portal (video game) turrets with the same "crappy" damaged and flakey white my Howard Langston has.

Mechanical Rider was a model I did not look forward to painting but even with the Errata making it a tiny bit worse, it's one of the best things I can take.

I love the horse on the model but a thing I'm sure most people wouldn't agree with me on is that the rider looks flat an awkward.

I was super glad to see the art reveal of the future Mechrider I can tell you!

The plan was dry brush, wash, block out some stuff on the rider and do the fire somewhat "properly" to look OK on the table. I feel it went alright.

The same thing was done to the Brass Arachnid and similarly I felt the finished model is fine.

The Night Terrors had a quick "faces and bases" style job where I gave them glowy eyes and a little detail on the face of each of them, but the rest was mostly just dry brushing and washes.

My Ice Gamin where done in a very simple way, just some extremely watered down teal colours into recesses and covered back with a white over brush. I'm actually pleased with how they came out considering they took minutes. They remind me of old school Iceman from X-Men.

Mei Feng and a selection of things including #MechriderPoo

In the end I still couldn't find part of my broken Rail Golem, abandoning it completely would've been a plan but there would be an achievement over the MCC weekend (trust me, I'll get to the achievements later) to use a crew of just Foundry models.

50ss would mean that having Willie and/or the Rail Golem painted would help.

With Aaron not coming to MCC I was a little sad but it did give me some painting relief as he allowed me to borrow some toys.

Willie and the Rail Golem were there, as was a Soulstone miner and Fire Gamin, which originally I did want to get done myself.

Only thing left was Gyarados, my Dawn Serpent.

I tried to paint this properly on the Thursday after a lot of snow basing and I failed.

I've had some compliments and the model is fine, but I know it is untidy and not to the standard I am sure I can hit, still, the list was done just in time.

Last second cramming for the win.

That's right, I never learnt anything from school and college where I mostly did the same.

Preparation - Achievements 

Preparation is probably not the right word, but a reason I made sure I packed and borrowed certain figures was that I may have needed them to score particular Achievements.

I will elaborate on the achievements themselves when we get to the Saturday part of the report, but simply put the main way of scoring tournament points over the MCC weekend was not going to be winning games but fulfilling strange goals akin to Xbox Achievements/Playstation Trophies.

Kill 3 Guild Minions.

Play against Gremlins.

These are examples of the simple ones, but there were plenty which were far more funny and interesting.

Model wise I knew I needed to bring certain bits with me for the "Master Achievements" where each master had their own set of 5 achievements to go with the 50 generic ones.

Mei Feng had one named "Me & my boys" where I needed to field a crew containing only Foundry models.

This meant grabbing the Rail Golem and Willie off of Aaron was essential.

Marcus in a similar vein had "Not quite Noah" where he must hire a model from every faction in the game.

Unfortunately I didn't have my own Gremlin bits, I guess I could kindly ask Jan to borrow Gracie.

Neverborn is something I didn't have. However as a side note I was kindly offered by multiple people over the weekend.

Marcus and a selection of Beastie friends.

Preparation - Camping

The last bit of preparation, which was mostly done on the Thursday night/Friday morning was getting stuff ready to camp.
Usually it's cheap hotels for events but Mike had allowed the attendees to camp in his garden which was announced quite a while before and was genuinely a little exciting.
With a good 30ish people camping this meant there would almost be a mini festival feel, or at the very least would mean everyone would be gathered together at most points.

What did I need?

• Tent.
• Sleeping bag, well I had an instant bed.
• Malifaux models.
• Malifaux stuff.
• Couple of board games for the evenings (Blueprints and Pandemic).
• Torches, it's grimdark "up north".
• Drink! (Perro Locos, Amaretto, stealing Jan's stuff)
• Fridge, that's right, no one likes warm cider and whatever.

Not very exciting but possibly worth mentioning?

OK probably not.

One funny thing that did happen was the last thing I went to do before leaving the house was fill the fridge/cool box with drinks.
A problem arose though as my amaretto was frozen into position.
I physically could not remove it from the fridge. I tugged, the fridge creaked and I decided brute force would just end up it tears, either with a smashed bottle or a broken fridge I'd have to explain to someone.
Instead I used Science to aid me or more simply, hot water poured near the bottle to make the ice melt a bit.
Science!

End of Part 1

Painted models, things thought about and camping stuff ready, we end the smooth tease that is Part 1.

Come back for Part 2, the Friday where MCC still technically won't have started*.

Hooray

*However there are mostly other people there, games played and maybe some Malifaux talk.