I just got home from HonorCon in North Carolina. I had a good time. It was a great bunch of folks, and it is always fun to hang out with David Weber. It was also good to spend time with authors like Marko Kloos, Mark Wandrey, and Chris Kennedy. I also got to drop by the Baen offices to see a bunch of the people who I have worked with for years, but who I’ve never met in person before.

This year’s charity was http://savinggracek9s.com/index.html  which gets rescue dogs, teams them up with vets who’ve got PTSD, and gets them trained as service dogs. Even though HonorCon only has like 500 people, they raised around $11,000! That’s crazy good.

One of the things I did for the charity was to donate a game, as in Saturday night, I’d run six people through an MHI game session. I used the MHI Savage Worlds rules that we’ll be kick starting next month. Since people bid for a spot, I wanted to make sure I gave them a good time. I pregenerated a bunch of stat blocks creating different character archetypes with different advantages/disadvantages beforehand, and on Saturday night the players picked one, and they became the MHI newbie class of 2017.

And of course, they got drafted for a super easy guard duty job way out in Montana, because the excavator had seen a little, probably not very dangerous, critter. Dorcus gave this cake walk assignment to five talented newbies and an orc, and then surprisingly they wanted to ask Melvin for help gathering intel (a bad roll on monster knowledge resulted in one of the PCs trying to be kind and diplomatic with the internet troll). Then they raided the armory, and flew to Montana to pick up their rental cars.

Then things got really interesting when they stopped at a gas station in the middle of nowhere (a random die result indicated that it was their orc who really needed to go to the bathroom super bad). So some of them are gassing up and scrapping bugs off the window. Others are buying snacks and talking to Glenda the proprietor, while Ollie the Orc is in a stall. Only in the stall next to him is a guy who takes a phone call (humans are gross and annoying). Only the call turns out to be from his boss, Lucinda Hood, high priestess of the Church of the Temporary Mortal Condition, and he explains that they are almost at the site, and not to worry because they brought the heavy artillery. She says that they need to hurry, because every cult in the country is going to be converging on this spot to try and claim the artifact that just got dug up…

When the Ollie the Orc realizes that this dude works for the people who burned Skippy’s village, it is on! He pulls his pants up, kicks in the guy’s stall door (the cultist’s final words were OH SHIT!) and stabs him in the forehead (Ollie’s super orc power is throwing things, like knives, axes, hand grenades, etc.)

The bang and death scream is when the hunters inside the convenience store realize they left their orc unattended in public… And now they’re thinking Ollie just murdered some dude and they’re all going to go to prison.

Only at this same point outside, a big old cargo van has pulled up to the gas pumps too, and when some seedy looking types get out, the hunters outside get a whiff of decay coming from the back of the van.

So then the cultists who were inside buying snacks and sodas hear the crash, they go for their guns. Including the lady who came out of the girl’s bathroom and hosed the place down with a subgun. Hilarity ensued.

The Hunters outside realized something was wrong when they heard gunfire, promptly followed by the front window shattering and a cultist falling out dead on the sidewalk. So at this point, the Hunter (our McGyver) eyeballing the suspicious guy realize they are on different teams, and as the cultist goes for his gun, our guy sprays him with the gas nozzle.

Which is when the big hideous stitched together automaton made out of various farm animals and old pets, roars, and crawls out the back of the van. (it had a horse head, and a German Shepherd stuck to the back side, which kept barking the whole time). And all hell breaks loose.

One of the things I did at the beginning while people were making up their character’s backstories is get what kind of monster was their first initial encounter with the supernatural. So if they came across that same kind of monster again, they had to do a spirit roll. Pass, and they rise to the occasion (with bonuses! Take that evil!). Fail, and choke (as in they are shaken, and freeze on the spot).

Our Doc is the other Hunter outside, and when she hears something huge fall out the back of the van, she grabs the gas hose, and bravely runs around the back to soak it and set it on fire… Only to see it is a hideous undead thingy (which was, unfortunately, her first monster experience, and she flubbed her spirit roll) so she freezes (with the gas still squirting everywhere). The gibbering madness splashes over to squish her with its big meaty hooves.

It was about then the PCs realized the whole fire thing probably ain’t for the best, since both of their vehicles (and all of their big guns, armor, and explosives) are parked there too.

There was another bad guy in a parked car, taking a nap in the back seat, while all this is going on. So he wakes up, and being a cultist, promptly starts shooting at everybody. But our martial artist went out the back, flanked around the side, and kicked the living crap out of the dude (we named him Nap Time). And he finished by tossing Nap Time into the kill switch to shut off the pump, so if they did set things on fire, at least they wouldn’t blow up a big chunk of Montana.

Our brawler and our negotiator are shooting cultists left and right, and then start shooting the big scary thing. Only handguns are barely scratching the paint on this floppy thing. The orc caps the female cultist with a hatchet. Our doc spends a bennie, makes a run for it, gets in one of the rental trucks, throws it in reverse, and rams the monster. Then the orc comes out and plants a hatchet right in the horse head and puts it down.

Two of the cultists are wounded, but survive (Nap Time and Neck Tat), so they get questioned. (it turns out the client lied about the size of the problem, and in actuality the excavation was of ancient Indian artifacts. When one of the local workers took a picture of a golden goat demon idol they found on Facebook(!) various cultists saw it (and hit Like!) and then promptly scrambled their forces to steal this nefarious goody.

Poor Glenda gets her phone taken away before she can call the cops. The bodies are thrown in a big pile inside the van and parked around back. They call Dorcas for advice (which when she discovers that our morally ambivalent Hunters have kind of just casually offed Neck Tat) she helpfully explains that they should leave that part out of their report they give to the MCB.

The guy who the orc stabbed to death on the toilet still has his phone, and there have been five missed calls since events kicked off. So they call Lucinda Hood back and put her on speaker phone. And also call the MCB office in Boise at the same time, and they tell the agent that he is in a conference call with MHI and Secret Enemy #1 (and the poor junior MCB agent thinks the whole thing is a silly prank, because nothing ever happens in his region, and the agent is really sick and tired of his buddies screwing with him, says “Not funny, guys” and promptly hangs up).

So they taunt Lucinda (who it turns out is Labor Party, not a Tory, and doesn’t give a damn about the Queen, thank you very much) and I really can’t do a British accent to save my life. Only Lucinda tells them that they are basically screwed, because she just heard that another rival cult has sent a Servitor to claim the golden goat, and it is going to eat their souls. Have a nice day, bye bye.

Okay… Whew. All that was just the first encounter.

I don’t have time to write it all, but it got way harder after that, and we ended up with our heroes being hunted through the forest in the dark, by a thing that is like if Cthulu and the Predator had a baby. Since it was a one off stand alone game, I fully expected to kill most, if not all of the party. BUT they did something so cinematic and awesome that it totally had to work (Rule of Cool is Rule #1) And I don’t want to say what it was, because the move will probably end up in a book someday because I could write the shit out of it.

Luckily after they beat the Servitor, saved Snuffy the Grad Student, and got the golden goat to the MCB, they remembered to disable the IED booby trap the McGyver had put on the idol just in case the cultists got it. (because for a second there I was thinking it would have been hilarious when the MCB chopper was flying away and everybody was all like Yay, We Saved the Day, for there to be a giant fireball in the sky as the MCB opened the bag. Like WHOOPS) 😀

The game was a whole lot of fun, and more importantly it raised money for a good cause.

Here is the official announcement: https://www.gallantknightgames.com/gallant-knight-games-to-produce-monster-hunter/

This has been in the works for a while. I believe the Kickstarter will be launching next month. I’ll even be running a charity game of the new MHI RPG at HonorCon at the end of the month.

We did an MHI RPG a few years ago using Hero System rules. It did well, and we created a beautiful book, but the biggest downside of Hero System is that it is extremely crunchy and is one of the tougher RPGs to learn. Savage Worlds is designed to be easy to learn, fast to play, and fun. So my goal here is that more of my fans who aren’t regular gamers will be able to get into it.

And if you are not a gamer, this book is going to be filled with fluffy info about the MHI universe, the existing characters, and the monsters. Plus all new artwork.

Jacob Wilcox at Rocky Mountain Reloading approached me a while ago about doing 9mm bullets for reloading purposes with the MHI logo on them. I agreed, but wanted my share of the proceeds on these to go to charity. So we picked the Houston Food Bank http://www.houstonfoodbank.org/ As of this morning I’ve sent the food bank $2142 so far, and the 9mm bullets are still selling.

The bullets are available here.

And I’m excited to announce because of popular demand, RMR teamed up with American Reserve Munitions to offer loaded cartridges with the MHI bullets ready to shoot. These are available now.

Jack Wylder designed the packaging. The 124 grain 9mm is our official anti-gnome ammunition. (just for kicks and giggles we will be adding other specific monsters in the future. Collect them all) 😀

If you’ve got any specific technical questions about the bullets or loaded ammo, you need to address them to the companies manufacturing them. I can’t really help you there.

There are plans for .45, but they are working on that now.

The new Predator: If it Bleeds anthology comes out this week.

I got to write about a group of samurai fighting the “Oni of Aokigahara”. It came out pretty awesome. I got to do a few fun, interesting things, and I love writing samurai drama. My story is called Three Sparks.

So I have now officially written in the Aliens and Predators universes. Now I just need to write something official about the Terminator and I will own the 1980s!

Last week I took the Precision Rifle 1 Class from JP Enterprises, held at their Blue Steel Ranch in Logan, New Mexico.

http://bluesteelranch.co/

The purpose of this class was to learn more about long range shooting. Because most of my rifle shooting background was 3gun competition, I’m reliably accurate at 200-300 yard targets, and though I’d hit targets at 500 to 600, that was really inconsistent, and I wasn’t very good at it. I’d tossed lead at 1000 yard targets for kicks and giggles, but had no idea what I was doing, and couldn’t hit anything at those kinds of ranges.

The PR1 class is all about learning to hit longer range targets, all the way out to 1000.

The further out you get, the more you have to hold over for elevation, and the more wind pushes your bullet around. There is a science to long range shooting that most shooters never learn. A regular .308 drops like 35 feet at that range, and it takes a while for the bullet to get there, with wind shoving it around the whole time. PR1 teaches you how to assess and account for these things. Gun folks call long range shooting “weaponized math” for a reason.

JP Enterprises is manufacturer of high end, top tier, rifles. They built a custom gun for my Monster Hunter series (the Cazador) so they invited me out to their training center so I could learn how to really shoot it. As a novelist when I do any sort of training, half the time I’m learning stuff to help myself improve, and the rest of the time I’m picking up cool stuff for characters to know to make them more interesting. So I’m a sucker for this kind of thing. Then I plugged the class which caused a bunch of my readers to sign up too, and that was fun.

Blue Steel Ranch is in Logan, New Mexico. It’s a couple hours from an airport if you fly in (you can ship your ammo right to the ranch to be waiting for you there). I drove 13 hours down from Utah with my friend Dave, listening to Dresden Files audiobooks. They put you in pairs, so I would work as Dave’s spotter while he shot, and he would spot for me. There are hotels in Logan, but the ranch also has a bunk house you can stay in.

The instructors were excellent. The lead was Brian Whalen, former Army Special Forces and a sniper instructor. He really knew his stuff, and was able to convey it in a way that the students could actually retain and absorb it. Plus, since the classroom portion could be dry, Brian kept it entertaining. Then there was Dave and Aaron, assisting, and both of them were extremely knowledgeable. (and because we had multiple Daves, my spotter was Beard Dave, and the instructor was Big Dave, because he was a former Marine and SWAT cop who pumps a lot of iron).

I’ve taught a lot of CCW and basic pistol classes, so I’m opinionated on what makes a good shooting instructor. Part of it is getting the information across in a manner that students can absorb it, but they’ve also got to be able to read the room and tell when people are lost or not. When actually shooting they need to be able to watch a student and diagnose their issues. Then it isn’t enough to just talk, a good instructor has to be able to demonstrate on demand that they can actually perform the skills they’re telling you about.

These guys were all solid.

Instructor to student ratio was good too. I believe there were 12 students, but since we worked in teams, that meant for all the actual long range shooting portions there were 6 shooting, 6 spotting, so it worked out to one instructor on 2 shooters at any given time.

The class goes for 3 days. The first day is mostly classroom, going over equipment, ballistics, range, wind, etc, followed by going to the range to get good zeros and to adjust equipment as necessary. The classroom stuff is like drinking from a fire hose of information.

I’ve been shooting rifles for most of my life, but I learned more about how to get a reliable, consistent prone that afternoon than the rest combined. I’d just never thought about it before. It was flop down and go. The instructors helped me out, and my group sizes shrank.

Also, sand socks… Holy moly, what a difference. I’d never used one before. It’s a little bag you use in your support hand while prone, placed under the rear of your stock. Night and day difference in comfort and consistency.

A lot of us managed to screw up our equipment somehow. Bipods and scopes were adjusted. Stocks were changed. For me, I had just gotten a new suppressor, and didn’t realize that there was oil in the threads from the factory, so couldn’t figure out why I would start shooting a good group, only to have my zero start to vertically string. Brian diagnosed the problem, I degreased and cleaned the threads. It was good. But then decided that I was really going to torque that thing on there to make sure, and managed to twist my float tube to the side in the process. I swear, I was like Lenny petting the bunny this class. Once that was fixed I got a good zero and was ready for the next day.

On the equipment, if you are going to take the PR1 class, don’t hesitate to contact the instructors beforehand and ask them questions. I wish I would have. It would have saved me some time and frustration working with gear that wasn’t quite right.

The second day started out with checking our zeros and testing cold bore shots. Then we used ballistic software to build range cards. Being able to have all your data right at hand is absolutely vital, so once you know the range of your target you can dial in your drop and wind without having to mess around.

Then it was off to the range to try and hit targets from 400 to 1000. This was where all that class room rubber hit the road. While one of you was on the rifle, your partner would try to read wind and spot impacts. Then an instructor was watching as well, providing corrections and feedback. Judging the wind is the hardest thing of all, because it could be going ten miles an hour left at the target, but thirteen miles an hour at a 30% angle before that. It was the first time since college I had to think about cosines!

But we did it. We worked those targets. It was awesome. I’m pretty sure I giggled when hit the 1000 for the first time. (we’ll find out, that was all recorded and will air on an episode of Shooting Gallery on the Outdoor Channel).  Hitting a thousand is rewarding. There is also a 1,300 yard one if anybody is feeling ambitious. A couple of our guys hit that one.

The rest of the second day was spent shooting, reviewing, correcting, and improving.

Then the third day it got challenging, and the class headed out to the desert to shoot from a rim across a valley filled with targets. This is where you’ll be thankful you brought knee and elbow pads, because all of the shooting positions are improvised. The hardest part wasn’t hitting the targets, it was finding them (and they went over some really helpful tricks for scanning) and then keeping sight of them while you get into a position solid enough to actually hit them.

To give you an idea, in one position there were six targets from 500-800 yards. I was having a hell of a time because it turns out my back/neck is super inflexible, so I was really struggling with what the instructor referred to as “shit sandwich prone”. For this part my regular old Harris bipod didn’t have enough adjustment to get the right angle, so I was laying on my backpack to get my body up high enough. This was killing my neck, which made everything else start to quiver, so it was like as soon as I got into position a clock started, and when it ran out, I wasn’t going to hit anything.

But with Dave and Brian spotting and telling me wind, I’d find them, adjust the range, adjust for the wind value given, and boom. If they saw the impact of the miss, I’d adjust accordingly. (I love my Horus reticle now). It took me several minutes to find and hit all of those, and I’ll tell you, I felt like a total bad ass when I finally got that last one.

So then right after that, to demonstrate how this stuff could be done by a pro, Brian shot that same array, with Aaron spotting, and cleaned the six of them in thirty five seconds without a single miss. Yeah… Wow. That’s humbling. I think I need to come back for PR2.

Shooting on the rim was educational. You could have targets at approximately the same distance, but with a hundred yards between them, and the wind value for the two of them would be different. I felt pretty good about how I performed a few times, but then I totally screwed the pooch on one set. I spent too much time in a crappy position looking in the wrong place. Then I hit the ones that I could see, but I simply couldn’t find the last ones. But in the process I learned a lot about my weaknesses and what I need to work on for next time.

PR1 was a blast. I feel far more confident about my ability to hit long range targets. I recommend it to anybody who wants to learn about long range shooting. I look forward to taking their PR2 intermediate class in the future.

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EDIT: to add, I forgot to explain the reference to Shooting Gallery. The first two days of this PR1 class were filmed, and will air on an episode of Shooting Gallery on Outdoor Channel sometime next season. Because I’ve been a regular on Gun Stories for the last couple seasons they thought it would be fun to do an episode of me taking this class. I’ll post when I have the air dates.