Red Beast

 

I've no idea what this mini is supposed to represent. All I know about it is that I've had it for maybe 35 years, and have finally got around to slapping some paint on it.

Big Hag

 

I need a big mutated giantess for an upcoming AD&D session, so I went hunting through my collected STLs to see what I could find. This is one of Duncan Louca's older sculpts, one of a set of three hags — the Bloate Hag, whatever that may be.

I printed her on my Ender 3 at 250% scaling, so she's now 115mm tall. Hopefully big enough to frighten the second-level PCs a bit. 

Buffalo

I've been tinkering in Blender again, this time building a Brewster Buffalo, ostensibly for my theoretical 15mm WWII Burmese British army that I haven't really made a start on at all.

It's available at https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/mojobob_hoochyman_brewster_buffalo_1_144 

The Buffalo in British service had a largely undeserved bad reputation, but its failures were mainly because the RAF overloaded and underpowered it. The Finns and Dutch both used lighter, more powerful versions of the same aircraft with considerable success.

This is a 1:144 scale model, intended for wargaming, not display, so I've included panel lines and ribs on the fabric-covered control surfaces on the upper sides only. It has a 3mm hole in the fuselage bottom for a flight stand. 

I've started painting an earlier iteration of the model, printed on my Ender 3. This one comes from a time before I added any panel detail at all, when I thought I could just paint in any panel lines I needed. Which I could do, I guess.

I doubt that I'll bother finishing it; I'll just print a new one and paint that instead. 

 Coupla days later....

I did eventually finish it to a usable state.

I haven't done any panel lining or weathering at all (yet). In truth, my heart sinks at the prospect of drawing on all those thin, straight lines.

 

 

 Next day....

 I've added some panel lines with a black 0.05mm Copic Multiliner.

I think a warm grey liner would have been a better option, but I don't have one to hand. 

Oldhammer Schmoldhammer

 

Way back in the distant Pleistocene, when I was but a youth, I was very snobbish about the cartoonishness of Warhammer minis. I was into serious historical medieval wargaming, not this trivial fantasy stuff, and for my actual fantasy roleplaying miniatures I preferred them as "historical" as possible.

However, in my dotage I've really come around to what is now referred to as the "Oldhammer" aesthetic.

It's a pity that I don't often have the enthusiasm to sit down and paint minis for hours at a time any more, or else I'd probably be collecting and painting them right now. They're pretty cool.

Kennon James

 

I've recently discovered an artist by the name of Kennon James (link leads to Facebook, sorry about that) who does old-school FRPG art that really appeals to me.

I just saw a front-and-back drawing he did of a classic massively-thewed barbarian, and it appealed to me enough that I turned it into a standee for use on the tabletop.

This piece of his really suits this use, being not overly detailed or fussy, but very clearly delineated.

I hope he does more of this sort of thing, because I'm becoming more and more engaged with the idea of using card standees for tabletop play, both RPG and wargames, rather than lovingly painted 3d models. Not least because the effort involved in getting them on to the tabletop is relatively trivial.

Aid to DMing Laziness

 

There aren't any random encounter tables in the AD&D2e core books, as there once were in, for example, the AD&D1e Monster Manual II.

However somebody, and I don't know who that somebody is, put together a whole bunch of tables from a whole bunch of AD&D2e sources:

• Monstrous Manual
• Forgotten Realms Appendix
• Fiend Folio Appendix
• Monstrous Compendiums, volumes 1-4

I think, though I don't remember for sure, that I grabbed the PDF via Dragonsfoot*. But maybe somewhere else; I don't know.

 The main issue with this excellent piece of work is that it included no Table of Contents, or page numbers, so a bit of page-flipping was necessary to find anything.

I laboriously copied and pasted the whole thing, column by column, from the PDF into LibreOffice, and applied styles to everything so that a ToC could be generated. 

Then I printed it in 16-page signatures, stitched it together, and gave it a simple wraparound card cover, itself covered in my home-made book-cloth. In the process, I gave it a classy ribbon bookmark and a cover graphic I whipped up in CorelDraw, printed and laminated, and glued to the front.

'Tis a small thing, but mine own. Sort of. 

 

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* I did get it from Dragonsfoot. From here, in fact: https://www.dragonsfoot.org/php4/archive.php?sectioninit=SE&fileid=400

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Very Late Paradigm Shift

 

When I first started playing AD&D, back in '81 when I first went to university, we all had a lot of time on our hands. We could play as often and as long as we liked, and as a result our campaigns tended to be very long-lasting and wide-ranging.

What it has taken me an unreasonably long time to come to terms with is that that situation no longer applies. people have lives and obligations and things to do besides playing D&D. 

Even with a schedule of only playing face-to-face once a fortnight, it's not unusual that somebody won't be able to make it from one session to the next.

What this means for me, as the DM, is that I can't really expect to be able to run an extended story-arc campaign any more. Any adventure I present pretty much has to be capable of resolution, one way or another, within two or three hours of play. 

That's a bit limiting of course, but it's not an insuperable creative challenge. It just means that we can't indulge in any sort of leisurely build-up to the action, and because the length of time between sessions might be long, any foreshadowing may well be forgotten and wasted by the time it becomes relevant.

Essentially, what it means is that we're going to have to play in an episodic ST:TOS framework, not a series-long ST:DS9 story arc milieu.

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On a side-note, apparently D&D (et.al.) is taking off in retirement homes across the USA. It's proving to be excellent for providing a social focus and engagement for retirees who would otherwise risk isolation, as well as being excellent for cognitive maintenance.

I imagine it would also be good for actually running a game, since unless somebody has died in their sleep, you can probably rely on them actually being there. Which is by no means certain or even likely out in the real world.

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Addendum: I bought a second copy of the AD&D2e PHB softcover reprint from DriveThreuRPG, since it seems we need more than one at the table, and everybody else is too goddam cheap to get one of their own.

I have a copy of the 1989 edition hardback, but the page numbers are all different to the fancy-schmancy 1995 "black book" edition, which I prefer. I have an original one of those too, but for the hurley-burley of the tabletop I prefer to have something that's basically expendable. 

Giant Bat Monster

 

This is a 3d printed giant bat critter that I picked up somewhere, quite a while ago, and printed on my Mars Pro.

It sat on my workbench unpainted for a long time, years in fact, until I finally decided to get it out of the way and slapped some speed-paint and inks on to it, and gave it a cardboard base to protect its delicate foot-claws. 

I'm not as impressed by the speed-paints as some seem to be. They're okay, as far as they go, but I don't know that they're any better than Ye Olde Inke-Washe. 

 Here's Sergeant Measureby with his trusty Spear of 5mm Increments to demonstrate how big this critter is. 

Big enough to be fairly fearsome, I would think. 

More Italian Artillery

 

Another Italian 75mm, this time painted up for Europe or Russia.

Exactly the same model and figures as last time, with just a different colour scheme. 

The Size of Money

 

In one of our ancient D&D sessions, it actually became relevant exactly what size were the coins the characters were carrying. Thanks to the internet, and especially to the miraculous Wolfram Alpha, I can now give a categorical answer to that age-old question.

The assumed weight of coin in AD&D2e is 50 to the pound, which means that any coin, regardless of its metal, weighs 9.07 grams. With that information, and knowing the density of the three primary metals for coinage (gold, silver, and copper), Wolfram Alpha gives us the respective diameters for cylinders 2mm high (or thick, if you prefer) of 17.3279mm, 23.421mm, and 25.419mm respectively.

So, there you are. That's how big your coins are.

Italian 75mm Howitzer (15mm)

 

Finished (more or less) the Battlefront 15mm WWII Italian 75mm howitzer base I've been using as a learning exercise for myself.

Overall, I'm fairly happy with it. And I've figured out a few things that will make building future ones a bit smoother. 

Shells for bases

 

I made some artillery bits to populate some of my 15mm artillery bases, to give them a bit more of a lived-in look.

The STLs are available at 

https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/mojobob_hoochyman_howitzer_shells_15mm_ for a couple of bucks.

They're specifically modelled as WWII Italian 75m howitzer shells, but they're pretty generic and could stand in for a whole bunch of short-case one-piece ammunition variants.

There are three sizes of ready-ammo stacks in the set, plus an array of individual shells, plus one of expended empty cases.

The gun and 15mm minis shown here are from Battlefront. 

Space Weirdos

 

I just nabbed this from https://www.wargamevault.com/en/product/359157/space-weirdos for a measly five bucks.

Space Weirdos is a fairly simple little sci-fi skirmish game, designed to be used with 4-10 minis a side.

It will give me an excuse to break out my old 15mm space opera figures, or else my 28mm OkumArts paper minis.

It plays on a 2x2' or 3x3' board, so nice and compact, and the scatter terrain can be any old bits of junk, whatever is lying around. I guess, if playing with 15mm minis, all the inch units could be translated directly to centimetres, which would make it even more compact.

Measuring is just done with a 5" stick, so very simple. 

I occasionally fancy a spot of sci-fi blasting, but games like Warty-Kay are far too hugeous for me to be bothered with, whereas this is pretty bare-bones stuff. The rules booklet is only 16 pages, which is pretty manageable.

 

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There is also this expansion, fan-submitted stuff (all proceeds to charity) which I haven't yet looked at.

https://www.wargamevault.com/en/product/540844/space-weirdos-weird-millenium 

It's also only five bucks, and I may well grab it after trying out the base rules first. We shall see.

Flak 36-38 88mm (15mm)

 

This is the 3d printed 15mm Flak 36-38 88mm gun that I've been working on the last couple of days.

The crew are all Command Decision 15mm metals. 

Overall I'm reasonably happy with it, except that the groundwork is a bit garish. I might hit it with the airbrush and see if I can tone it down a bit. 

 A bit later...

The groundwork is now definitely less gaudy, but I don't know that it's really any improvement.

Ah well, never mind. 

88s In The Offing

 

This is a Flak 36-38 88mm in 15mm scale (1:100) that I FDM printed a few years ago. Dragged it out of the junk pile, since I want a couple of 88s for certain reasons.

From a distance, it looks roughly like a Flak 36, but any closer than about two metres away it looks like absolute rubbish. So I think I'll reprint it in resin, which should be less pants. I hope.

I'll take the opportunity to separate the gun shield off from the mesh and thin it down a bit.

 Next day...

To nobody's surprise, I'm sure, the resin print is a bajillion times better than the old FDM. The modified, thinned-down shield is much better, and looks a bit less like it's made from a chunk of armour plate from the Tirpitz.

At the moment the gun shield is just sitting in place. I'll glue it down permanently when it comes time for basing the thing. 

 A bit later...

The gun has its initial base paint applied, and I've glued the cruciform chassis to an MDF disc with a bit of basing dirt on it.

I've also added a Command Decision crewmen on one of the seats. 

I'll be giving the gun a 3-colour camo paint job. I was considering putting the crewman in an Italian motley of European and tropical uniform, but I think I'll probably just do him in overall field grey for maximum flexibility.

There are more crew figures yet to be painted and mounted on the base, and more ground flocking to do. 

Germanic Test Painting

I've been trying to find a set of pre-mixed paints that I'm satisfied with for painting my 15mm WWII German foot-sloggers and artillerymen. They've almost always turned out too dark, sometimes too light.

This bloke, a Command Decision 15mm artilleryman with a binocular rangefinder, I base-coated in Vallejo ModelColor 759 German Tank Crew, and then dry-brushed (or moist-brushed really) fairly heavily with 886 Grey Green. I added an overall wash of Citadel Agrax Earthshade (my favourite), which darkened everything a tad, and then came back in with 886 again for the highlights.

This method gives me a field grey that I'm satisfied with. I know that German field grey is a vague and uncertain colour anyway, but I do want something that looks good to me.

I could have done the base coat in 830 German Field Grey, which is tonally similar to 759, but warmer. Once the wash has gone on, I doubt that it would make much difference.
 

DTRPG Loot

 

These just arrived for me today from DriveThruRPG.

They took about a week to get here, much faster than used to be the case, as DTRPG now has PoD resources being fulfilled from Australia rather than the USA — also quite a lot cheaper in postage, as the US postal service charges an arm and a leg and your firstborn child to deliver anything outside the continental USA.

Neither of these volumes is really essential for my needs, and I really bought them on a whim. I've been interested in the Dark Sun milieu for many years now, and although I'm highly unlikely to run a DS campaign, it's nice to have a copy of my own. And as for the Undermountain book: who doesn't want more megadungeons? My only regret is that the first volume, the prequel to this sequel, isn't available as a PoD hard-copy. 

Old Gun

 

This is a WWII German 105mm LeFH howitzer, 15mm (1:100), 3d printed quite a long time ago and finally finished off.

The crew are a mixture of Peter Pig metals and 3d printed, and the base is a honking great big fender washer. The big washer may have been a mistake; it adds a lot of weight to the group, and it may imperil the figures a bit under the mashing of great sausage-fingers.

The gun is a later model, with pressed-steel wheels and a muzzle brake, but painted in Dunkelgrau for pre-1943 service. After then they would have been in Dunkelgelb, and most likely in a three-colour camo scheme. 

As far as actual wargaming goes, it's largely pointless, as guns like this are almost always going to be off-table. Never mind though. 

Smooth, like a baby's bottom

 

Here are a pair of FDM-printed 15mm (1:100) Hummels. (They're the models I was sure I had already printed but could not find, and then I found them after I printed another one.)

• The one on the right has been primed, but otherwise it's just as it came off the printer.
• The one on the left has had its big side plates smoothed — I gave them a rough scrub down with a sanding stick so all the peaks of the ridges are at a consistent height, then painted on some UV resin to fill in the valleys, cured it and fine-sanded the surface.

Models like this, with very large flat areas, really suffer from the FDM layering process. Fortunately it is fixable, but though the process isn't enormously arduous, it's not something that I'd want to have to do all the time. It starts getting pretty fiddly on smaller panels or in more constricted areas, so I'd stick to the most obvious panels, the ones on which the layering ridges stand out most to the eye.

Unfortunately, a side effect of this smoothing process is the loss of any shallow surface detail — you can see that the smoothed one on the left has lost the vertical seam in the middle of the plate, and the canopy eyes along the top edge. The seam can be pretty easily re-engraved, but I don't think I'll bother with recreating the eyes. 

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A bit later on...

I've begun the painting process, and I think the extra effort of smoothing those big side plates is well worth while.

Elsewhere, where there are lumps and bumps and details to distract the eye, it's not so necessary. 

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And even later on...

All done, with a couple of crewmen added.

It ended up a bit filthier than I intended, but never mind. 

Dark Sun (AD&D2e)

 

I've been indulging my curiosity about this TSR-era AD&D2e campaign setting from back in the day. It was originally published in 1991, and it was later updated in 2010 for use with D&D4e (shudder). WotC have stated that they have no intention of adapting it for 5e, due to its "problematic" elements.

I've known about it for a very long time, but I've never actually looked at it in any detail. So I got a PDF from DriveThruRPG and took a flick through it, and watched a video about its development on th'YooToobs.

From what I see of the original AD&D release, it looks like a very interesting setting, and I may well steal bits and pieces from it. However, I'm unlikely to ever run a dedicated Dark Sun campaign, for two reasons: 

1. It's pretty fucking bleak and depressing. It's like they said to themselves "lets make a new D&D world, but make everything absolutely awful" 
2. And also, I doubt very much that our roleplaying group would enjoy it very much. They humoured me for a while with a brief Call of Cthulhu campaign, but then indicated that they would prefer not to repeat the experience. 

Dark Sun has a lot going for it; it's a magnificent piece of world-building. But it's not a setting that encourages being very heroic. 

Enamel Washes

 

I've been trying out a couple of AK Interactive's enamel washes/colours.

They have the advantage that you don't have to mix any colours, so there's easier consistency, but otherwise I don't see any benefit over old-school oil washes (oil paint thinned with white spirit), which are both cheaper and more flexible. Plus, the AK enamels' working time is less than with an oil wash. 

I doubt that I'll be using the two that I have very much, and I won't be buying any more. 

Marder 1 (Lorraine)

 

I started work on this model, a German WWII Marder 1, quite some time ago. But then I forgot all about it, until I happened upon the beginnings of the project a few days ago, and finished it off. Working on the digital file zoomed in all the time, it was easy to lose track of how small these vehicles were.

I've put the STLs online at https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/mojobob_hoochyman_marder_1_lorraine_ 

I did a test-print this evening, which was mostly okay, though there are a couple of things that I think might need attention.

 

The main issue is the gun shield:  printing at the angle I did meant that it was lying pretty flat to the platen, and I got some delamination and distortion at the corners. I think it might be best to detach it and print it as a separate component.

Nashorn Crew

 

I like to include some crew figures in my little 15mm (1:100) model tanks, both to give a sense of scale, and also so that it doesn't look like a bunch of autonomous robot machines tootling about on the wargames table.

I think the Nashorn actually had a crew of about six, but any more than these two in the fighting compartment would be unfeasibly crowded, so these guys are symbolic of the crew rather than actually representative of it as a whole. 

I kitbashed these figures from a bunch of others. The main bodies came from 3dBreed, but things like hats and helmets and shells and so forth I made myself and added to the cut-up original figures. They were printed on my Mars Pro resin printer.

Arrrr, me hearties!

 

I've been kitbashing some STLs from various sources to create some crewmen for my German SPGs, and printing far more than I need.

Which is a good thing, because the print failure rate has been pretty high, and in every case it's because one of the legs hasn't printed, leaving the figure with an amputation at the knee or hip.

Yesterdays lot, a variety of figures, rendered me about 50% usable figures. Today I did a whole platen of duplicates of just one figure, and that returned 13 out of 20 fully-formed little men. I've been, if anything, over-supporting the prints, and there seems to be no rhyme or reason to where on the platen the failures occur.

I don't really know enough about resin printers to know for sure what's what, but I guess I'll try replacing the FEP and re-leveling the machine. It's a pain, but it might work.

Nashorn #2

 

Nashorn No.2

This is another model I printed quite a while ago on my Ender 3. Compared with similar prints from my Mars Pro, the FDM layer lines stand out like dogs' balls.

I've painted this one in a three-colour scheme suitable for  Kursk or Normandy or Bagration or later. 

I have to do some crew for it, as I do for the earlier Nashorn and the Hummel I completed recently. 

Hummel (15mm)

 

This is a 1:100 (15mm) model of the German 150mm SPG Hummel (Bumblebee), a 15cm gun-howitzer mounted on a PzIV chassis.

I've painted this one for North Africa, but it would also do for Italy. 

I still have to do some crewmen for it (and for some other models as well), and they're in the pipeline. 

Hummel WiP

NOTE: photos will be displayed from newest to oldest.

 

 

 

 

 

 

5) Initial dry-brushing, plus an oil-wash and some streaking.

4) I'm painting the Hummel for North Africa and/or Italy.

Primed in dark brown, then a base coat of VMA Yellow Brown, and panel-shaded with VMA Camo Brown.

3) Primed overall dark brown. This is a 50/50 mix of red-brown and olive-green Vallejo Surface Primer.

2) Printing did not go entirely smoothly.

The body and superstructure both printed on my Mars Pro in resin without issues, but the running gear component absolutely would not work, even with several changes of position and orientation.

I ended up having to print them on my Ender 3 in PLA, and in fact they're not too bad.

1) Ages ago, I took someone's existing Hummel model (I think it was Zac Kuvalich, though I'm not sure) and split it up for ease of printing.

However, I don't think I ever actually printed it, which surprises me. I've looked all over the place, but I can't find a printed model anywhere, so that's my printing task for today.

Nashorn

 

I've been rummaging in amongst a bunch of stuff that I 3d printed ages ago and never got around to painting, and one of them is this 1:100 (15mm) WWII German Nashorn SPAT, also called Hornisse. It was a very potent anti-tank weapon, with the long L71 88mm, but it had a real glass jaw, with very light armour. It was intended for long-range sniping rather than mixing it up with other armoured vehicles.

 I'm not sure who originally designed this model, though I think it might have been Zac Kuvalich (TigerAce1945 on Thingiverse). I took his model and cut it up into several components to ease printing, but not until after I printed this one, which was printed in one piece on my Ender 3 FDM machine.

I've painted this one in a scheme that would be suitable for Italy. 

ADDENDUM

 At about the same time I did the Nashorn, I also cut up the accompanying Hummel model.

I thought I had printed it, but having looked all over the place, I haven't been able to find it, so I guess not.

 Now I've done some initial printing, and the body and superstructure both printed fine, but the running gear components need a bit of tweaking.

 I printed the body and superstructure just fine on my resin printer, but I absolutely could not get the running gear components to print successfully on that machine. So I had to do them on my FDM Ender 3, and though not as crisp as the resin, I think they'll do fine.

Assembled and primed