Starting a Brushfire with Emily Fontana from On the Lamb Games at GTS 2012

On the Lamb Games exhibited at the recent 2012 GAMA Trade Show highlighting their Brushfire skirmish wargame and its accompanying miniatures. I questioned Emily Fontana briefly about Brushfire and the upcoming RPG release Historia Rodentia.

Brushfire Parody Skirmish Game

Badger At-Claw

CG: So I’m here with Emily…
OtLG: From On the Lamb Games. We do Brushfire which is a historical parody skirmish game. All of our factions are based on historical armies, but they’re populated by the indigenous species. So we have Napoleonic French with badgers, weasels, and moles. Spanish conquistatorial mice, and British bulldogs. It’s a very tongue in cheek skirmish game, about 10 to 20 models on either side. All of our starters have about 4 to 6 models in them, with quick start rules, and dice for $35. The rulebook is $25. It has 8 factions in it. All of the units have their base sizes listed so players can easily proxy out models before they purchase. Along with campaign rules, siege rules, and a little bit of role-playing rules in there.
CG: Now who’s primarily interested, who’s your audience?
OtLG: Miniature gamers, 13 to 40s. Same sort of folks who might be playing WarmaHordes, might be playing Malifaux. We’ve had a lot of variety in our customer base so far.
CG: So they’re attracted to steampunk.
OtLG: Yes. Folks who like steampunk. Folks who grew up on stuff like the Disney afternoon cartoons, “Chip and Dale Rescue Rangers” and what not. And people who love making fun of history.
CG: How many furries?
OtLG: We don’t know. We haven’t really seen that much.
CG: And what about, there’s a game called Ironclaw?
OtLG: We are familiar with the game Ironclaw; we are not associated with Ironclaw.
CG: Sure, but people could buy your miniatures and use them for their PCs.
OtLG: Yeah, they could use it for Ironclaw, for Gama World, D&D, or our own role-playing game that Mongoose Publishing is releasing in May.

The Brushfire RPG: Historia Rodentia

Image courtesy of On the Lamb Games

CG: Tell me more about that.
OtLG: It uses the Legends system which is based around the old RuneQuest system that Mongoose previously had released. It comes out from them in May. Pre-orders are now up for that through all their standard distribution channels. And we’ve actually started working on a second book for that as well. The first book will cover 4 of the factions from Brushfire along with about 21 of the species that are in those factions and changes a lot of the rules from Legends to deal with the fact that we don’t have magic in our setting. So we add a lot more political intrigue and a bit of other special abilities that are very close to what you would see in the miniatures game.
CG: Now what’s your favorite miniature so far?
OtLG: So far I’ve really liked the Badger At-Claw, but I keep staring at our green here of Amamimoto the Ronin which is a rabbit samurai based on Miyamoto Musashi and I’m looking forward to that being casted so I can get it painted up.
CG: But not based on Usagi Yojimbo?
OtLG: Well, Usagi Yojimbo was also based around Miyamoto Musashi and the coincidence of being a rabbit has nothing to do with Usagi Yojimbo whatsoever.
CG: I like the bear traps here.
OtLG: That’s our Weasel Trapper for the Aquitar faction which is based around Napoleonic French, so they’re a bit of like French fur traders that you’d see in Quebec and whatnot.
CG: And what are the capybaras?
OtLG: They are from our Mare-Civitas faction and are based around Spanish/Italian conquistadors and the colonies they had in South America, so we gave them capybaras which are from South America. Gave them a nice conquistatorial feel to it and still kept a bit of the native feel to them as well.
CG: The largest rodent, right?
OtLG: Yeah, noble King of Rodents.
CG: Have you started getting into rodents even more?
OtLG: A little bit. We’ve got a lot of mice, a lot of rats and hamsters, but we also do badgers, weasels, cats, dogs.

CG: More about the RPG, how does it play?
OtLG: It’s a d100 system. You generally want to role low. It’s based around the RuneQuest system. It’s a very-easy-to-die-in system. Damage really hurts when you take it, so you want to try to dance your way around in combat. And like I said, while RuneQuest has magic, Brushfire does not, so we added in a political system, an exemplar system that allows you to take NPC comrades around to fight and expand your party into being basically a small warband or army. And then we added in our tactical actions and heroic actions in as well from the miniatures game.
CG: Great. Thank you!
OtLG: Thank you!