End Of The Week - Hurrumpff

It's been a good week. It really has. I now have a lasting, and damaging image of one of my fellow RPG player's characters as being a combination of father Dougal and Cardinal Richelieu's most ineffective musketeer. This has nothing to do with the fact that he put my halfling character in a papoose, whilst trying to find a three legged goblin, in a sewer and tripping over causing my character to land face first in a dead dwarfs crotch. 

Then I made a rookie mistake. I let my daughter write a birthday card for her friend. This took forever, making us late. Having written the card, she realised that she had written the wrong name in it. With only a petrol station on the way, the cards have cost nearly as much as the present.

Still, she had fun dressing up as a dragon. This makes me concerned that she might become a larper. I have done a bit of larping. So I know what it's like. Especially after the game ends for the night. Which is what worries me.

But I digress. This is a figure painting blog. Sleep When I'm Lead right? Or was it Lead Reckoning?Which is a problem as I haven't done anything like as much as I had planned. I am pretty close to where I said wanted to be but I was under promising with a view to over delivering. The first fix is done and I am part of the way through snagging. Some highlighting is still outstanding as is the base colouring on the dismounted figures. It's not like it's as miss is as good as a mile. It progress so it's all good and I can catch up next week. There was some progress with terrain and I had some actual fun gaming. It is possible to brew up a Sherman Firefly with a Panther at 1" range. Seriously if I had gotten any closer I would have bent my barrel but at least I wasn't shot in the arse. I would have been able to do a 180 and line up for the next one but we ran out of time. I also managed to glue together the first batch of 12 minis for the Atomfall ish project and buy a vortex mixer.

There has been some friction with getting the riders primed. I used to have a priming rod and some new style g dub pots with wires stuck out of them, specifically for the purpose. I haven't been able to find either. So I have had to come up with an alternative.

So next week. First I will finish what I have started. Always a good first step. I will then put together at least another eight plastic minis for Atomfall ish. Maybe a few more but not so many that it gets in the way. Sort the bases, prime them, and paint twenty of them. My head tells me not to make another twenty eight so I have stuff for next week, as this will probably take forever. I might order the latest Stargrave offering but I might hold off till Phalanx.

If I get ahead I will look at some terrain. The hexes are calling to me. I now have the deeper hexes for tunnels and trenches. Do I will start with a few test pieces. Precious little daddy daughter time for a fortnight so I will make what I can of it. Hopefully I'm in a place to meet up with a much loved old friend. Times passing, maybe I am getting old, but it feels like they don't make friends like that anymore.

D&D Why I Love To Hate It

Setting aside Airfix figures, my first real gaming passion was role playing. I got started with Tunnels and Trolls. I have a lot of love for that game but I recognise that it isn't really the best game on the market and that over time it has become even less like the first choice. Great for solo play but then so was Fighting Fantasy. Even then there were better games.

I moved on to Basic D&D and quite liked it. It was a better game. I played a few games of AD&D and then kind of forgot about it until 3e. I didn't really want to play D&D even then. We had been playing Harn, which is a system I really love. Harn was a series of experiences that I loved and even made me cry. Then Butch brow beat the DM into converting the characters into 3e. I cried again when I figured out that my somewhat flawed but courageous holy warrior would have to become a paladin. I mean a paladin. It's just not me. Lawful Good, well it's just crazy.

So this became the norm for a few years. Roleplaying was just not as fun anymore. Three big books later and I was really done. Then 3.5e came along and then a load more money went out the door. It didn't really improve the game, it just changed it. Too much detail in the rules lead do what I called "real life lag" as the rules lawyers got into it with the DM. Most of which was Butch trying to get his own way. It very quickly ceased to be fun.

4e came along and somebody else tried to talk me into it. This justs seemed to take some of the ideas of magic, tapping abilities and the like. I never ran the game as I just could not wrap myself around the ideas. I got persuaded to play a Warlord. This meant that most of the time it was better for me to give another character an extra action than do something myself. This is just not worth playing.

I cannot comment on 5e as I never played it. I was bored before I even started. This would have been the fourth set of books in ten years or so. D&D just seems to be so wrapped up in itself. In fairness this is not the worst abuse of the fan base, I am looking at you GW. That said, most contemporary RPGs require a significantly lower cash outlay to get into the game.

Modern D&D has a number of backgrounds but they are just absurd. It moved away from sort of the classic high fantasy races to those that were created just to make the races look different. As a figure painter I like to have figures for the characters and it is only comparatively recently that this was actually possible. They seem to tinker for the sake of tinkering. This allows them to charge the players even more money.

Probably it's just me. D&D has the same number of players as Columbia has people (that's 50 million). I see the game being played by a particular type of player. They are less about the story and more about the ability to kill  every mother f{}%ker in the room. It makes the game less for for the few of us who love the story. 

Yet this is the game people want to play. Even now there are far better games to play.

Elemental

Although my painting plans for the week are almost complete, I decided to finish off another project piece. I am pretty sure I got this large . elemental about three years ago. It's a Reaper Bones model. I am not sure I would pay for something like this in metal as it probably isn't going to get a lot of use but for a good chunk under £10/$10 I thought it was worth while.

It has been sat around, primed and on a textured for about two years so it is probably about time I got around to it. There is a fairly simple paint job. Primed light grey and painted a mid blue. You can't really tell the mid blue is there after heavy blue wash. If I was doing it again I probably would put the original base colour down and just use the wash. Lower down the model and in some of the crevices but mostly on the bas I put on a heavy green wash. You can just about tell if you look hard enough.  Then there is an old GW paint, Ice Blue for a highlight. It really needed something to bring out the details and finally a white high, highlight.

Early One Morning - End Of The Week, Well Almost

I work up early this morning and have been painting RPG and wargames miniatures since well before dawn. Getting up that early is unusual for me, let alone getting anything done. In terms of painting minis this is getting on for the most productive period of my life. If I could keep this rate up I could have a thousand figures done by the end of the year. Roughly the same output for the last three years. I think even my lead mountain would have run out by then.

Almost there

In terms of output, total number of figures and terrain, this is going to be a new record week. I have a little detailing on the skin to do on the Home Guard, do a highlight on the weapons and I need to paint a cigarette on one of them. Then they will be done. The cultists need much the same but there is much less of that to do. There are a few "more characterful" figures to do but they are mostly done.

I guess I have picked easy figures to paint this week although I hadn't figured on them being this easy. Now I am wondering what to do next. There appears to be no immediate chance of me getting any priming done because of the weather. Too cold or too wet for a while at least.

So far this week I have already done some scenery for my Monday night game and I have worked on some smaller pieces of scenery as the background project

End Or Start Of The Week

This has not been my most productive week of miniature painting. It's still Easter weekend so I am calling this the end and start of the week and my habit is to review the week.

I only managed to get four figures finished from last week's roster. This fell short of my usual target of five figures. Given that I am repainting an titivating some figures I had much higher expectations. That said it has been an exceptionally crap week. Stuff has been going on this week and it's not been good. It's also a bad anniversary for me which has caused me to have an almost total lack of focus. Still there is a chance that I can catch up this week as a lot of the other figures I started are pretty close to being finished. The New Cruelty is not happy.

Assuming that I am going to get somewhere with these figures, there is another bunch of figures to do. Whilst I was having a sort out the other week I came across a bunch of mutants which I think are Mongoose Miniatures Judge Dread Muties. These were done well over a decade ago and are pretty bad, hence the picture being at a bit of a distance. These should improve quite nicely.

On the health front I have managed a 5k run this week. Not my fastest performance ever but I managed it. The second one I have managed since taking my health a bit more seriously. After all that I can safely say that I am the lightest I have been this decade. So on balance I have managed to get through the week.

There Was A Reason For This Post

I remember waking up with a really good idea for a post this morning. I should have written it down. The day has worked out quite well and I think I am getting closer to my eventual painting goal for the week. At close of play today I am pretty relaxed about there being almost no half painted figures on the workbench. Oddly, I am less relaxed because I have no clear plan for the next project. This morning I spent a bit of time trying to figure out what to do next. Having gone through all the figure storage draws I have, I drew a complete blank.

Despite saying I was going to finish everything off before starting something else I have found another three figures to paint. Both had kind of been started but almost nothing had been done. They did get finished very quickly although they were easy paint jobs really. To be honest I am not sure if they spoke to me or I just had some spare paint that suited them so I started them.

I am wracking my brains for what to do next so I went back on the blog to look for my annual The Plan post from last year yesterday. This is turning into a somewhat frugal year for me. So no new figures and all I see are figures that I want to buy.

So the current plan is I have some more of these old Grenadier (now Mirliton) tribal figures to re-paint. I did think about striping them but I am never sure that this is a good idea having had a couple of very bad (read costly and psychically painful) experiences with stripping figures so I have stick with the repaints. My plan for the was originally for the Fallout  game. The game has a number of tribal groupings which are essentially native American on origin but not exclusively so. These figures give a nice evocation of that. The plan had been to get some Apache figures from Artizan. I already have a few of them but wanted to do a bit of conversion as well to make them look more the part. Another game I have worked on was a game set in a post-apocalyptic London called Underground and these figures would be perfect for that. Maybe Titansgrave as well.

This all got me back to one of my biggest problems at the moment, admittedly it's a first world problem. I don't have the time for it and I don't have any regular people to play with. Most of my inspiration comes from playing console and PC games and, thanks the the missus, my console has been disconnected since November. My head is constantly flowing with ideas for games and they all want to come out but there is currently no outlet for it.

Maybe I should get back to Fallout or some form of post-apocalypse gaming. Over the years I has really been my first love. Fantasy RPG is good and I like my Viking Game  but it's the events after a disaster that make my RPG mojo let loose.

So, after a little bit of using the blog as therapy, maybe I will get back to dealing with the apocalypse then.

Back To Work

The stated goal of the week is to have a workbench clearout. Anything that is part painted is fair game. Let's face it, if it's on the bench it's also fair game. Hopefully the five dark age figures I am working on will be at the top of the list for completion. So starting as I mean to go on.

I got this Reaper Bones figure last year. Although it's kind of a demon, in my game it is a big fire giant. There are plenty of smaller demons and even a larger demon in the collection so I was tempted to do him as something else but he really does look demonic so I guess not. Although there is some paint on the details, the skin tone is mainly ink. I found a mix of red and orange gave a nice looking and solid colour. There is also a bit of purple in then for shading and more on the scaly back.

So the dark age figures have been tinkered with but they were not exactly the only thing I have looked at today. I have attended to a few details but they are not substantially closer to being finished than they were before.

Summerland - The RPG That Got Away From Me.

A while back I did a list of the best RPGs that I have played. This had the emphasis on the word "played". There was one game that has fascinated me since it came out called Summerland. It was a great narrative game. This made it a difficult thing for me to get my players involved in. Most like a good narrative but they don't like playing games that are not heavy with stats. So this became a game I loved but could not play. If anything I became a bit of a fanboy about it. I spent some time trying to recreate it with Savage Worlds but never quite got there.

The premise is that the world has suffered an apocalypse called "The Event". Somehow it was caused by nature itself called The Sea Of Leaves which appeared overnight. One day people woke up and the world was a forest. The forest emitted a strange siren like summoning known as The Call that called people into the woods permanently changing them. Most ended up subject to it and were effectively lost forever. Some became a darker version of themselves and some were twisted into something else altogether. Even those not taken by it straight away were vulnerable and almost anyone staying in the forest too long was taken by it. Those with a survived found that it was possible to resist The Call if they had a strong human connection.

A few were able to resist The Call. Their past history was always full of traumas and this in some way makes them immune and they can travel through the forests. There is still danger for them but The Call is not as strong. However, their traumas and the nature of the world mean that they can never stay anywhere for long assuming that their mental or emotional traumas were not by themselves enough to cause people to drive them out. The people of the world call the Drifters and they wander from settlement to settlement trying to find a way to heal themselves. This is the role of the PCs.

This is a world full of dangers. Settlements are always a place of risk and reward. There are often people within communities who are far more damaged than the players. Other drifters pose all sorts of mundane dangers to the players. Then there are The Lost, those that have succumbed to The Call and The Wild who have lost their grip on reality and become completely feral. The world is also populated by a variety of unusual and unnatural animals which have become twisted by the ramifications of The Event. Darker still are the spirits and the ghosts that inhabit what is left behind.

As backgrounds go Summerland is fairly lightweight. Whilst there is an incredible amount of ideas within the game, it is very much open to how a GM wants to run it. When and where the game takes place is pretty much down to the person running it. Likewise, what you take

So why am I bringing this up now? Well a second edition is up on Kickstarter and I am just loving the idea. It has been converted to the Open D6, the system of the original Star Wars game. Having given the game a system more amenable to players, I can now run a game of it. There are a lot of ideas floating around in my head and it would appear the designer is about to release a lot of Kickstarter freebies along with it.

The Work (In Pogress) Continues

When I got up this morning I decided that I was going to paint ten of the old Grenadier (now Mirliton) trooper figures. Nice simple figures with an almost standard uniform that even if I do give certain aspects of it a camouflage pattern, should be done by the end of the week.

 Then I picked up the two D&D mimic figures I picked up last week. Then I thought what the hell, I'll do these first. So I did. When you have a small number of essentially similar figures, they are quick and easy to do so I just got on with them. I guess each of them took about an hour to an hour and a half to finish. In the round, and certainly on the tabletop, the look pretty good.

When they were done I went back to the troopers. They have progressed a little bit. All the boots, equipment and uniform are finished. To be honest I haven't made up my mind what I am going to do with the armour and helmet yet although I have an idea (does anyone remember Aliens). Given that a lot of what I am doing is vaguely desert, I think I will go for something like MTP/Multicam. I do like the Copplestone vibe.

These figures have all sorts of potential uses for me. Aside from the standard sci-fi, 2300, Stargrunt, Titansgrave Tomorrow's War ad Traveller, I can see a use for them in other genres. The armour would look pretty good for combat armour for Fallout. They have planned uses in some post apocalypse stuff as well. Maybe even as soldiers in a super hero game.

This is more for my benefit so I can go back and remember what colours I used if I decide to do any more

End Of The Week (That Was) - Good News/Bad News

This has not been a bad week all round on the painting front. Along the way I have managed to get  ten sci-fi dwarf figures painted to a reasonably good tabletop standard. To my amazement this only took about three days.

The plan after that had been to finish off the chaos cultists I have for Titansgrave and any number of post-apocalyptic projects which might become a Scrappers game. The figures had already been put together but the bases needed flocking and the figures themselves needed priming. So with this done they were ready to paint. Then the real world got in the way in the form of my other half developing a bad back and the cat being ill. This has delayed me for a bit. Although I have managed to get some painting done today the cat has again taken my seat.

So with the week that comes I have the chaos cultists to finish. I have made a good start on these already so I am confident that this will be done by mid week (assuming the cat does not get in the way). If things go my way there are another half dozen space dwarves to finish off. Next weekend I am away at funeral so I doubt much will get finished if I have to leave it until then so I won't aim to over achieve.

After that I have the miniatures for Star Saga to do. These arrived the other day and I guess I will get round to posting some pictures of them in due time. All the Star Saga stuff will form part of the X-Com and Titansgrave projects so are probably going to get pushed to the top of the list. There are also some old Grenadier (now Mirliton) troopers which I have been tinkering with, Basically another background project to be painted any time I have some paint I don't want to go to waste.

Next week I am going to start do some RPGing again on Monday night. It's Rogue Trader, not my prefered game (well I have never played it so I am open minded about it). At least it will get me back into the swing of things. I am hoping to get back to FabLab at least on Thursday.

So the New Cruelty is satisfied. I have hit my painting target. I have hit all my exercise goals every day and a bit more besides. I have even managed a game this week. Well done me.

Writing Your Own RPG Background Or All Is Vanity

I have been working on what I have called the Viking Game for about five years now even though in my head it's called Northmen. I made a couple of key decisions back when I started the project and I have pretty much stuck with them. The world expands but the central idea does not. Some of this expansion has been down to ideas that I have had and some is down to the figures that I have or have painted during the process.

In the past I have gone as far as writing my own rules so that I could make the world I wanted. These days I more or less stick with the Savage Worlds rules. It's simple and generic enough that it is easy for the players to follow and for me to run. One fairly basic rulebook does all you need it to. If you want a bit more flavour then there are other books to buy but none are major pieces of work. What the game does do is encourage you to use other backgrounds inspired by rules and media that you like as well as creating your own.

This is where the vanity bit comes in.

The game started as a bit of a cobble. I took some inspiration from elsewhere. Computer games, books, regular fantasy, films and RPGs. the only ideas I took from anywhere became section headings but I was clear with myself right from the beginning that I wanted it to be all my own work. You never know, I might get round to publishing it. What I really wanted was a pdf I could give to the players with all the rules in it right from the get go. This kind of happened but having a complete document starting to delay things so I thought I would start with what I had. This was a bit of a mistake but it was one I was prepared to live with.

Over time though I ran into a problem. What I had was great but I just kept tinkering with the book. At the front of the document is a table of contents. This has been a big waste of time as I keep adding things in and deciding that the sections need to go in a different order.

So after a year of cursing my judgement I decided to bite the bullet today. As a way of getting out of painting, I thought I would just get on and chop it into bits.

The core rules haven't changed significantly in well over a year but the background has. There were basically two bits to the background as I saw it. The world (or worlds, all nine of them plus a few extras), the town in which the game was based, it's surrounding region, the kingdom it's part of and then the other peoples of the world. the second part is the sagas and legends for the world. These have now become two separate books.

I like to tinker but in this game it is really about adding  more new bits. The details of the town already amount to about four pages. I expect to extend this so I have allowed space for about a page and a half of extra writing. For the time being I will fill this space up with a few pictures. There is supposed to be a map but there are supposed to be a number of maps. Originally I had planned to put all the maps in an appendix but this is more faff when it comes to rewriting the contents so I will add the map at the end of the section.

The region the town is in is called the Symark. This has had a similar amount of work as the town. Again I can see that this was going to get expanded in the future so I have allowed more space for this and for the map at the end. Early on I did a rough map and then I spent some more time on a more details map. Integrating it into a world map (chunking up) proved to be all but impossible. Starting with a world map, which is at this point not totally fixed, is a better idea. The region fits into the world much better.

The myths is the second big part of what I have been doing. Mostly I trying to ape the myths although I am not averse to taking some myths and bending them to fit into my needs. To my mind at the heart of every good fantasy story and rog scenario is a piece of history or a myth. As I have played about with the world in the game, the myths need to reflect the changes in that world. All of the scenario elements I have planned are also rooted in myths, even some that might take a long time to happen. The build up can be important.

This all plays to my ego. I want to be a good GM and for the players to have "fun" in the worlds I create. As a place to start I want them to have a firm base in the documents I provide. Rather than have a major piece of rambling work, it better to reduce it down into books or supplements. People, even the author, can get their heads around it better.

End Of The Week - Well The Week That Was

After what has been a fairly brisk week I thought it was time to put up some pictures of last week's work. 11 orcs for Titansgrave or maybe Shadowrun.

What Makes A Good RPG Background

Backgrounds for RPGs are something I think about a lot. As a player and a referee I believe it is a strong background that makes a good RPG. The question I keeping asking myself is what then makes a good background.

The first thing that struck me when I started thinking about this was interconnectivity. A game needs all of it's background parts to connect. If the players are going along a linear scenario they support material needs to fit what the players are doing. In fantasy games there shouldn't be a lot of background information in the form of something like a gazetteer. Information was passed by word of mouth. Bards and skalds pass on local news, they know what is going on and where things are. Most importantly in history, bard and skalds pass on the legends of the culture.

Myths, legends and lore about gods would be a strong influence on the population even if there is little to back them up. In a world where gods manifest themselves and the warriors of legend have only been dead for a generation, their impact would be even greater. Most people would know the stories of the gods or saints during the middle ages. Such stories would be recounted by fathers to sons and from priests to their flocks. Just having a list of gods and their areas of interest is good but games like D&D don't venture much further unless you buy another book. In reality, stories of gods show that they are much more complicated that most people consider them to be.

Maps play an important part in most games. It is something that the players and the GM use as a storytelling prop as well as gauge how far the players have to travel to get where they want to be. A number of GMs that I know spend a lot of effort on a map. Whilst this is laudable it would unlikely to have happened in reality. Maps were few and far between and typically highly inaccurate. If the players have anything at all it would probably be little more than a rapidly drawn sketch. In the game I am working on at the moment, I have a number of maps in mind. The game is set in the London Underground. The Tube map is iconic. Every station has multiple copies and many diaries have a copy of the map in them. The trouble is, in a post apocalyptic game, such maps are massively out of date. The Tube map is symbolic. The gaps between stations have nothing to do with actual distance. Accurate maps are few an far between and are not available to the public. Then there are post ruin maps. These are made by the survivors. This means that inaccuracies are going to be everywhere whilst perhaps being more realistic that the symbolic maps.

Players need a good reason for their characters to work together. They need something that ties them together as individuals in the real world. Whatever goes on in the game has to mirror, in part at least, what the players see as the view of the real world. I think this in one of the reasons why evil campaigns don't work so well. Whilst I have been in purely military campaigns there are plenty of players to whom this does not really appeal. Following a dogmatic chain of command's orders can be hard to take. Playing rebels is much more fun for players than playing government forces.

The Opposing Forces

Conflict is the driving force behind most games. This is why games are called Dungeons & Dragons, Tunnels & Trolls, Villains & Vigilantes and Mercenaries, Spies & Private Eyes and not Accountants & Academics. Right now the only real conflict I am interested in is Man vs Flu.

The RPG I was going to start running again (using Savage Worlds) involves fighting the army of a Necromancer (assuming they don't go off at a tangent). This means that I need a bad guy and his allies as well as a force for the good guys. There are no end of fighting types in the boxes upon boxes of figures I posses.

Big Nobs At The From The Battle Of Hastings

I might be a bit light on cavalry but I doubt this will be a problem as armies tended to be cavalry light if they had any at all. The bad guys, being an undead army, will be mostly skeletons and zombies with a few extras. I might need a few more but I think I have enough. There are a few skeletal cavalry still it bit form in a draw on my desk. I might get round to making them up. I need a few character type figures for the bad guys. The good guys should be easier. I'll still need a few banner men. The heroes will be whatever the characters pick. In the round, these should be easier to get ready. Either way, there should be enough figures to get some testing done later in the week.

eBay has been good to me again, if you can call it that. I have managed to get The Road To Woodbury expansion for The Walking Dead: All Out War for a good price. This will give me a chance to practice the rules and more importantly a chance to have some more figures to paint for Zomtober. Zombie games have been a big thing for me for years. I haven't run a game in ages and I am feeling the urge to run one at the moment.

Winter Is Here

I've been away all week so I have spent some of my day today catching up with the TV I have missed. Not least of which is Games of Thrones. Despite it being a short series it has been an eventful one. Baelish is dead. This is a good and bad thing. It's about time but the character is too good to kill off.

What I have been doing with the time I have had this week has all been about the Viking game. GOT does not give me direct inspiration. My game is something where I could take many ideas and make them work. What it does give me is ideas for staging.

Lord of the Rings has a good strong narrative. There is a reason why it is the best selling fantasy novel of all time. To give players a better experience, you have to give them plenty of options. In LOTR you are going to fight the forces of sauron. If you don't fight, the evil wins.

Winter is here but what happened to autumn. That's the British weather for you.

In GOT it is arguable that you must take up arms to fight the army of evil. To me is seems that there are more options. You can nail your colours to many masts and even flee. You are still going to end up in the same place, your path there is however far from direct.

In terms of running an RPG it gives you cause to think. History has a knock on effect on the present. In my game I am trying to create some form of history, It doesn't need to be too detailed. What it does need to do is explain the present and what is going to happen in the future.

Why are you enemies your enemies? Who did what to whom and when and why? I look at what I am doing and it is easy to figure out why the Vikings are not popular. They are traders and everyone needs trade so I guess they pick where to trade and where to raid. Within their own culture their are rivalries. Vikings probably loved their feuding like everybody else. Then there are external forces, monsters, weather and gods to name but a few.

So I have tried to come up with something of a timeline. I haven't put dates on any of them because I think these are the kind of details that get you bogged down. So there are recent events, events sinec your children were born, when you were children when your grandfather was alive and going all the way back before the times of legend.

Players need a place in the world. Preferable that place should be unpleasant enough that they have some motivation. It may be oppression, imprisonment, some external force or just the desire for a slightly wealthier lifestyle.

Closer Than Expected

The holiday is looming so time is running out to finish the week's target. With a bit of luck and dedication I will probably get to the five figures per week. ALong with the rats being finished I am more or less up to date. If I get the time I may even make it to ten but I am much less certain about that. What I am seeing is that the week I get back I should make ten. This would leave me on target. Some days I really do think this is turning into Bridget Jones diary. Anyway, here are the clerics that are nearing completion.

Over the last few days I have been looking around for  a few ideas for projects. The Viking game has a major villain called Vetis Bane. I know it's not very Norse but it sounds really good. What I have lacked was a suitable figure for it. Whilst there are a few figures that would probably do the trick, my specific needs are a bit more complicated. What i wanted to do was create a range of figures something along the lines of the mummy in The Mummy. There needs to be stages of decay. Fully intact, a little zombified and skeletal. The plan had been to find a model to convert. So far the figures I have seen would be too difficult to convert. They have goods or are gripping onto something. Then I realised the answer has been staring me in the face for well over a year.

This is a Frostgrave Cultist frame from Northstar. If I take the right body from the frame along with skeletal and zombie arms and a human head and arms from elsewhere (not sure about the head)  but the arms can probably come from the soldiers sprue.

Maybe this is a project for when I get back.

End Of The Week And Stuff

This week has been more about getting stuff done than painting. My neck is killing me so painting has not been much fun and it has been a bit easier to do the other things. So all basing, gluing, varnishing and priming. There has even been the putting stuff away in boxes that will only get opened once or twice a year. In my head I am using what could laughable be call the British summer to use sprays outside. Even then the house still smells of propellant. Over the weekend I had hoped to go to a show and maybe pick up some foam trays to store figures but this wasn't going to happen.

Now I have a few days of grace. There is a bit more finishing off to do. To be honest, there are now some many projects on the go it might take me till the end of the year to finish them. My fucos (that was a joke) is far from clear. I am on holiday in a week so I have a little time to catch up but I am happy doing the scut work which is usually my biggest downfall so I am making the most of it.

With the next week looking like I might catch up on what The New Cruelty dicates, what I have started already and maybe a few new figure should see me get to my target. Then I'm on holiday so I doubt anything will get done.

Anyway, here are some of the figures I have put into long term storage today. Ex Harlequin now Black Tree Designs I think. No they are not Skaven they, are Ver men.

Really not sure why I got round to painting these figures now. Some have been sat around half painted for over a decade. I ordered some more when I got some High (I mean Dark) Elves last year. They so don't fit into any game I am planning at the moment. Although, that said, I could see a conversion job to sci-fi post apocalypse quite easily.

Earth Elementals

Just a quick little post, Some work has just been finished off on the smaller one by Northstar. Orange is apparently the new black. The larger one is a reaper bones crystal golem I think This has a few more bits lined up for the base as there is acres on unused space there. I like this model a lot and might get another one and actually paint it as a crystal golem/elemental.

Of Elves And Dwarves

It is starting to look like I am not going to get my five figures done this week and if I do it will be only by the skin of my teeth. Instead I have been prepping figures. De-flashing, putting them on bases along with some sand and covering them with primer. The plan is to get a load of figures ready for the next month or so of painting. What I went looking for was some elves.

Everything I paint for fantasy games has a focus on the dark age, well almost everything. After yesterday's post I got to thinking about what Norse elves and dwarves look like. Dwarves I guess are easy. They are just stubby, heavily bearded northmen. In Norse mythology there are two types of elves, light and dark. There isn't too much to be said about them anywhere. Black elves might even be dwarves.

Elves of all kinds are rare. Other than light elves being "luminous" and black elves being "blacker than pitch" and them being a little bit god-like (at least associated with the Aesir), the sagas have little to say about them. You have to look for wider germanic mythology for any more details. This makes it clear that they are human-like. In this era it becomes clear that elves are just as likely to shag you (and have children with humans) or make you, or your animals, sick. The early middle age era gives them an association with alchemy.

So no blond hair, pointy ears, associations with bows and longswords and a haughty attitude. Damn you Tolkien. Basically I have nothing to go on. There good elves and bad elves. If there is any difference it's going to be down to a style of miniature and a paint job.

As part of what I am doing with the figures I am looking for another project. One thing I don't have is much on the way of elves. There are probably about twenty wood elves in the collection. These I guess will do well enough for light elves although I might get around to doing something about that.

The black elves (and I use the word black rather than dark because I don't want D+D cookie cutter elves, all that pale skin, white hair and spider riding) I was going to use are the old Harlequin Miniatures which are now owned by Black Tree. High elves are just another RPG construct born out of Tolkien but the first load I got cheap on eBay. But I was still struggling with a paint scheme. I looked up dark elf miniatures and most seem to have a like like a cross between angst ridden teen/goth (black and purple) with a little bit of bondage gear (corset and thigh length boots). Or all in all not very Norse.

As the search continued I found a picture of the dark elves from Thor: A Dark World. This was a really stupid idea but given the picture this might be a bit of a give away.. By the fourth or fifth picture it started to sound more like a good idea. Basically black with some bright metallic stuff going on (well I am not really sure what to call it, it's like a silver with a sepia wash). I was thinking about using black as the skin tone (black as pitch) but I thought that might not look so good when painted. If I painted by High Elves like this, it might just work.

This is what angst ridden teenagers should look like, in my head anyway

I might do a bit more thinking about the dwarves but I have loads of these already. Maybe that is tomorrow's topic.

Best Roleplaying Experiences

I have spent a huge amount of my live either playing or plotting RPGs. My experience is that some games are most definitely better than others. Over time, I have decided that games that have a more streamlined ruleset with a simple mechanism works best. It has ended up with a list of five games, this is not an arbitrary figure, it is just happened that there were five of them.

Traveller was the third set of rules that I purchased. I have started with Tunnels and Troll and moved on to D+D (rather than AD+D) but I was always a sci-fi buff. Then I started to see Traveller in the games shops I went in and I quickly found this was something I wanted to get into. This was my go to game as a GM for almost all of my early gaming experiences and it still has a pull on me today. Over the  years it is the game I am probably most invested in, in terms of money and playing time. It has a random generation system for characters which is still, to my mind, one of the best systems ever and certainly the best around at the time. It favoured skills over stats which was hugely different to the other games at the time. The gaming mechanism, roll 2d6 and get above 7 (or 8 depending on the ref), subject to skill and situational modifiers. It was well supported and the game is still played in an essentially similar format today and has plenty of online support. Whilst I have run this game a lot, it was the campaign that Jim ran in his version of Traveller in a coherent campaign that has gone of for decades that was the best. My experiences of the newer versions of the game have not been good but this is largely down to the GM not the system.

Harn or Harnmaster is one of the few fantasy games on my list. The world is essentially very medieval. Elements of low fantasy are part of the everyday world (with magic and religion having detailed separate books) with higher fantasy elements beyond the fringes of society. Again it a random character generation system although you have some choices. The referee can give you a bit more freedom if they like. One of the best elements of the game is the combat system. You get choices of what you do in melee and ranged combat that you don't get in most games. This gives you more of a feel for being part of the action. The mechanism for skill checks is nice and simple but can give you a variety of outcomes. This can easily be played in any variety of genres. This is a game that is still well supported on line and there are more mids for this game than any other I can think of that function much like mods on modern computer games. I ran this for a short while but it was really the GMing of Mike that got me to love this game, he turned it into something that was a bit more high fantasy that was a truly memorable game.

Conspiracy X is another game I love. Born out of The X Files TV show, it is a much darker yet more real world tabletop version of the show. Players take on the roles (usually) of  real or game created government agencies who fight supernatural and alien threats to the earth. I have always run it as a conspiracy within a conspiracy with a lot of science and supernatural elements. Although I am working my way through the second edition books, I have only ever played the first edition so my experiences only reflect that. It's a points buy system which allows for a lot of skill and ability customisation. It does leave you with a feel for the character and what has turned them into what they are. The mechanisms just use d6 (which changes in the second edition) and a simple roll modified by skills, stats and situational mods is about all you need to know as a player. You start with a choice of profession that gives you a range of skills to chose from and the ability to pull strings in certain areas. From here you can buy skills, abilities and influence. Influence affects you about to pull strings and acquire a range of equipment from light revolvers to Aurora stealth planes constructed with alien technology. The players, as group get together to spend points to set up a base and can give it a range of facilities, support staff as well as vehicles and gear. One of the coolest systems in the game was the martial arts sections. Each form comes with a range of abilities (flip, disarm, break neck, punch, kick, haymaker, killing blow for example) with more skilled fighters having the ability to create attack combos of multiple moves. Sadly this has never been a popular game and has extremely limited online support. This was a game that I got off someone else but turned into into a few long running campaigns and a few shorter ones.

Savage Worlds is my current go to RPG game and has been for about five years now. It is a simple and streamlined system which as it says, cuts out the fat and creates a fast, furious and fun system. This still allows for interesting combat and competition between characters. Character creation is simple and this allows players to get into the game quickly. There is no character classes but you do get to pick a variety of edges and in some games you get to pick a race depending on the background. Skill checks are easy enough to do with a fairly simple mechanism using different types of dice. My reasons for choosing this as my go to is that they game is multi genre and is easy to convert to just about any background. There are so many fan created background that go along with numerous in house creations. Any system can be converted over relatively easily and any TV show, film or game can quickly be turned into a background. If it has a flaw then it is that the game is so simple. Unless you are a careful GM you can run the risk of monsters being a bit samey. This game is big enough to be heavily supported online and this has a lot of fan support. I have run a few campaigns in this system. My Viking Game uses this as does the Fallout Game. I have played in a huge number of different backgrounds with other GMs and loved pretty much all of them.

Cyberpunk 2020 is another blast from the past. It's a game that I played a lot during the nineties and even now I still think about using the system. Born out of William Gibson's books and other authors of the time. It predicts a time when man and machine are completely integrated and cybernetics , if not an everyday part of life is common amongst the military and the underworld. Hacking computers whilst a human brain is directly meshed within the network is relatively commonplace. Whilst style is at the forefront of what many characters become there is a fair amount of substance to character generation. There are a range of character classes, each with their own unique abilities. There is a random element to character generation but you do get to pick and chose some elements. Although clearly based in America, there are supplements that cross the globe and even into near earth orbit and Mars. Skill checks and combat operate through a fairly simple system but there is enough meat on the bones to make it interesting. This is an older system but does not really feel that out of date although many of the issues around technology seem to have been more than a bit optimistic. Although it was fairly big at the time it has not stood the test of time despite Shadowrun (essentially the same sort of game but with orcs, elves dwarves etc) coming back for edition after edition and initially at least, not being as good a system. Whilst there is some online support for the game and a new edition, it is perhaps not as well supported as some of the other games. Cyberpunk was another one of Mike's games and a twisted turbulent campaign it was lasting several years.


If you have any suggestions (that are not D+D because I just won't believe you :)) please tell me about them.