Battle mat score!

I made what I think is a huge score today while doing my weekly shopping at Costco. I was going on a different route through the store because I wanted to pick up another 4' x 2' table for gaming. I haven't mentioned it before but I have a plan to buy these plastic tables to be able to easily set up and take down a 6' x 4' table, so i just need one more. They seem to be more manageable, and make discrete wargame size tables easier than the 6' banquet tables.

But that is not the find. As I was walking down this aisle i saw these "Clean Green" Indoor/Outdoor Area Rugs. They are 6' x 9', apparently made from recycled plastic bottles and come in Green, Tan and Gray. It had no price but I figured I'd take it up and see how much it was. Imagine my surprise when it was $19.99.

Spear and Door for size reference.

I also saw this book on the Whiskey Rebellion at our local public library and thought that I'd give it a read. I was completely ignorant of this conflict and thought it might be a fun scenario for some 18th century gaming.

Apparently I would know all about this if I watched the series Moonshiners. George Washington raised around 13,000 troops to stop the rebellion. Who knew.

I wish I could say I had more to show of my painting, but with a football game and party for my son, as well as watching the NFL playoffs this weekend I got the bare minimum done.

In a future post I'll try to show how I'm going to pull myself out of the doldrums and get back on top of my schedule.

2nd Bloggiversary Giveaway

Well, next week is the 2nd anniversary of the blog so I thought I'd give away a copy of THW's And a Bottle of Rum.

This is a game of swash buckling pirate adventures on the Spanish main.

Rules of the giveaway:

1.) Be a follower of the blog.
2.) Leave a comment as an entry to the draw.
3.) If you pimp this post and leave a link here (so I can check it) I'll give you a second entry.
4.) I will post the winner on the morning of Friday June 28th (my time).

Another point about this giveaway is this is one of the first that I've done where I actually bought the rules first myself. I mainly got this title because I liked what I saw in terms of ship battles and thought it was something I could use for my 18th century Imagi-nation project.

I will endeavor to read these and give you guys a mini review. That way I can digest it in chunks and maybe get some games in as well.

So don't be shy, come get yer hands on some pirate booty!

By Ravven78

Of Imagi-Nations, Maps and Fonts

So while I was trying to find things to fix various broken plumbing and appliances, I took a few moments to flesh out some ideas for the 18th Century Imagi-Nation project.

First off we need a map. Since I have a soft spot for hex maps I revisited the Welshpiper and revisited his hex map templates.

So a little finagling, a rotation of the brain graphic and I give you the base for Cerebria.

I'm also getting the idea for the colonial areas of Liverica and Splenia, with perhaps the Stomach and Pancreas thrown in.

I then started thinking about fonts. While looking for Autorealm fonts I found this post.


http://prometheusinaspic.blogspot.com/2012/02/fonts-for-flags.html

In the comments to this post were a couple of good link recommendations:

http://www.google.com.au/search?aq=f&gcx=w&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=18th+century+fonts

and this one, which also had a guide on how to use ligatures.

http://www.orbitals.com/self/ligature/ligature.htm

The only issue for me now is I can't figure out how to use the macros. I've never used them in word and I apparently can't use them in Open Office as the Word ones are in a different scripting language.

But I did end up downloading a few 18th Century fonts from dafont and also re-acquainted myself with abstract fonts. Speaking of which (okay it's really only tenuously related) you can find fonts similar to your favorite D & D editions here (or rather the names of fonts that are close approximations).

Precious little done on the Talomir project, I hope to fix that this weekend.

Reinforcements

Well my figure order arrived sometime last night. I've been puttering around prepping figures here and there while running errands and doing chores.

First up the Ancient Germans and Celts.

These Germanic warriors have a little flash but are much nicer than the Revell Saxons. I think that they could proxy for Vikings or Saxons. The Celts have a lot of character and detail. I haven't put them up side by side with the Italeri Celtic Cavalry but because they are different arms a size difference shouldn't be as obvious.

Next the 18th century stuff.

The Billy V set I bought is the same as what's in each of these boxes, so I may have over bought  AWI. The Indian Warriors are very nice, 16 individual poses. The Swedish Artillery looks cool, but I see now that their uniforms are totally different from the AWI stuff. I'll look more carefully at the Swedish and Russian sets from Zvezda for inafantry to match and then I have to source some more artillerymen. But should be good to get a start. I'll have some more thoughts on that project later.

I also finally mixed up some flow aid.

I poured out 30mL of distilled water and then used an old antibiotics oral dosing syringe to measure out 1.4mL of flow aid. This should make a 20/1 dilution, I think.

I've been trying to get painting but my paints are somewhat separated and may need a device such as Kasper built at WarmasterDK here.

But now I seem to have also broken my washing machine, so that's got my attention.