The Buildings: Part 1

It appears I need at least three buildings of varied size.  My first thought was to place an order with Grand Manner.  Their stuff is really beautiful in the pictures on the website. 

Taking a look at their prices, I realized that I might have to break up the order a bit.  Two smaller building one month, one larger building the next.  It's not that I can't order things all at once, but it keeps my hyper-acquisitive nature in check to keep my monthly figure sprees to $80 or less.

I packed a few small buildings into the virtual cart and went to check out.  Forty pounds for two small buildings was tolerable.  It was all fine until I hit the checkout.  With shipping to continental Europe, the total hit 64 pounds.  Then I modified it to ship to my American post office box.  And then it hit 72.  That put the cost of those two fist-sized building at more than $100.  Ouch.  Nice though I'm sure the buildings are, it'll be a cold day in hell before I pay $50US to have a few small chunks of resin dropped at my doorstep.

On to Plan B.  I went back and forth between lasercut MDF and finding an alternate source for resin scenery.  I wanted my buildings to look similar, so it was one or the other.  Nothing I had seen had rivaled Grand Manner's pieces, and while waffling I discovered the Norman keep by Grand Manner.  Not only was it a really cool structure, but the price was surprisingly reasonable.  I could justify it as a centerpiece.  So resin it was. 

And then I put the whole project on hold for several months.  Coming back to the project was marked by two linked discoveries. The first was that Grand Manner had purged their catalog,  including the keep. 

I also discovered Gripping Beast resin buildings.  They're well-molded with crisp detail and few bubbles.  Where they do fall down slightly is in lacking a base or a removable roof.  On the other hand, they're really reasonable priced.  The three buildings I ordered ranged in price between 5 and 10GBP, with the total for the three being only 18GBP.  The nucleus of my little village for less than 20 more than made up for having to fab the bases. 

Gripping Beast's shipping was really fast and reasonably priced.  A week after ordering, a grim-faced postal worker was dropping the box on my front steps.

Thoughts on the Rulebooks

I know this has been hashed out several times before, but I don't know if the Studio Tomahawk folks realize how off-putting the rulebooks are to people. 

I know, I know, their value is in the rules themselves, not the actual book, and I'm genuinely impressed by the rules.  So there's that.

But $40 for a slim paperback is all sorts of ridiculous.  Twenty for the pamphlets that are the expansions seems downright reasonable.  Battle boards be damned, it still feels like a bum deal.  People have compared them to the cost of GW rulebooks, which is patently ridiculous.  First, GW pricing shouldn't be your frame of reference.  Ever.  Second, GW rulebooks are giant glossy art books.  They're monstrosities of shiny, over-designed eye candy. 

I caught a podcast with one of the publishers who talked about how the price was based on the initial assumption that they wouldn't sell very many copies.  Same thing with the $20 dice sets.  The success of the game surprised them and that's why were constantly out of stock of books and dice in the first year.  

That makes sense, but why not publish a shiny new updated version?  

The German version of the rulebook and expansion just recently came out from Stronghold Terrain and it's everything the original should have been.  It's hardcover with  additional pages being filled out by errata, the mercenaries, and new pictures.  Oh, and it's under 33 Euro.  Ouch.

German SAGA fans have it even better when it comes to the expansions.  All the factions, Skraelings and Steppe Nomads included, are in this hardbound book.  Granted, it's just under 40 Euro for the book, but that's still cheaper than the $60US one would pay for the less complete, flimsy English version.

Sure, there's the Crescent and Cross rulebook, which is hardbound and $50, but to twist the knife further, the German version is under 38 Euro.  Go figure.  

Yes, the books are on my shopping list, even if my German sucks.  

So that's my little rant.  As far as rule sets go, SAGA is still great and I recommend it all the time, especially to my gamer colleagues who insist on complaining to me about the cost of GW products and yet continue to spend hundreds on them.