I impulsively signed up for the 1490 Doom tournament at NOVA Open 2025 and powered through painting these sculpts from Skullforge Studios to use in it. I had an excellent time – it’s a very fun game and the Buer Games gang are very cool people. I strongly recommend checking it out.

A few months later I got a bug up my butt to paint up a little display board for them because I’m so pleased with how they came out.

I took the week off for NOVA Open this year, like I normally do. I didn’t go, of course, but I did spent a bit of it grinding out some terrain for it.

This is the scaffolding that comes from their tidy little Meerbridge starter:

And I printed off their keep over the weeks immediately following NOVA last year. Finally got it painted.

If anyone’s curious: this was fall off a log easy to do. Moss green rattlecan primer, grey craft paints drybrushed on, GW Celestra Grey drybrushed, metal bits picked out and lightly drybrushed, then oil washes.

Wow, it looks like I haven’t posted to this sucker in over a year: yikes! (Looks like the last thing I worked on here is a half-written “NOVA Open 2025 Plans” post. Yikes!)

I’d like to blame increased activity on BlueSky (there’s nothing more dangerous too healthy blogging than social media; it’s a disease on humanity), and that’s definitely true, but also I got clever with the configuration of the site and managed to lock myself out of it every time I had just a few minutes to try to post something. I think I’m past that.

I don’t know that I’ll be typing much here but I did just upload almost every single lightbox photo I’ve taken since the Raveners I posted about back in Aug ’25, so we’ll have to see if can find my way to vomiting out some photodump posts.

Back in :checks notes: early January, I made the following series of comments:

[Lunar] would be better if it were Dead Man’s Hand… in Space

Cowboys on the Moon:
– DMH rules
– Every weapon gets a piercing/bludgeoning stat.
– Piercing weapons work as is
– Bludgeoning weapons get a different table: get a distance in cm they push the target back but can’t do anything but confer Under Fire Markers. Oh, and mass effects the table.
– Done?

Dead Moon’s Hand

Dead Man’s Hand remains what I want out of any game that isn’t Infinity: rippingly fast to play, interesting enough to play a lot, every decision meaningful but not weighty enough to introduce analysis paralysis.

Lunar is neat, but… far too fiddly for me to love.

Then, in late February, I saw a Wargames Illustrated video where they reskinned Dead Man’s Hand for Medieval period (calling it “Dead Man’s Sword”). They tweaked the rules “as little as possible” to do so and it looked like it worked really well.

That was my motivation to finally get Dead Moon’s Hand written up. So, here it is!

Dead Moon’s Hand

I’ve playtested it a couple of times, and I think it works pretty well! It’s a lot of fun, moves quickly and yeah: decisions are meaningful.

It’s as much core Dead Man’s Hand as possible: I think the biggest change is pushing and close combat – shooting results might look like the biggest change, but it’s an unpacking of the existing DMH approach to weapons having different sets of results.