I've been Liebstered part 1

Well knock me down with a feather. I've just been awarded a Liebster in the latest go round of the award by the inimitable Justin Penwith of The Royalist Roundhead. It turns out I last received one back in December of 2012.

The forces of Northern Tropilium

So I'm trying to get these two Armies ready for the next Talomir campaign battle. You can read about the first two battles of the Autumn of 995, Lettum Pass and Face of the Demon. I, of course, am still scrambling to have remotely playable forces. I never learn.

The forces of Northern Tropilium are supposed to represent Later Western Rome, so I will reuse many of the figures that I used to fight the other battle with Tropilium proper. You can see them here in Final Countdown?

The Army list is:

Basing and Base coating

We've managed to keep up the pace here. On Friday I finished basing the last five Mantic Skeletons and the
14 1/72 figures I had mounted on washers.

Green Stuff - my first time

I'm not sure why I had never used green stuff before or why it had taken me so long to try it but I did so for the first time yesterday.

I should have read up on it a little more before diving in because I made just about every mistake that you can. I made way too much, it stuck to my sculpting tools and pretty much everywhere else except the figure, and it was full of my fingerprints. Oh and I also probably worked with it way past its prime in an attempt to use all that I had made.

The two resources that i found, after it was too late was Bananking and Dakka Dakka. I used some plastic sculpting tools and my fingers.

So here are the Mantic figures assembled. Some are a little fiddly and the upper bodies don't always fit the torsos so well.

I was not careful in putting them on the base, they rank up this way.

Pressure from my son

School is about to wind down here, a day and a half more to go, and my son has been on me about painting some of those Mantic figures. You may recall that Edwin King of Thoughts of a Depressive Diplomatist graciously sent him some skeletons and Orcs from the Dwarf Kings Hold line. I of course then went and scrounged up some more Orcs, Dwarves, Elves and Skeletons from some sets I found on ebay. Then I got busy, lost my mojo, etc.

Now that he doesn't really have homework and football is over, he has been asking to paint again. Thus I have been shamed by an eight year old into getting off my duff and have cleaned up all the stuff he cut off the sprue plus my 1/72 that I rushed to table for the Talomir campaign. (Which reminds me that I have another nascent project to come up with something of an award for the members of the campaign.)

Here are some pictures of the figures that mock me.

The Mantic Stuff

I think these haven't moved since I last showed them to you.

Romans and Egyptians to be used for N. Tropilium and Stygustan.

More Zvezda Roman Auxiliaries to make up units for N. Tropilium.

Sigh! Curt's entry figures in the middle of the painting desk, or as I like to call it, the altar of Chaos.

Those pesky Mongols awaiting a bath.

In the interim they have all now been washed. I will glue them up and get to basing. I'm going to let my son have carte blanche with these mantic figures and just help him with his technique. My main worry is whether I should try to fill and smooth the gaps with putty or green stuff. I think compulsion may win in the end.

I hopw to be able to show you some progress shortly.

1st RPG session in the can

Well, we sat down for a couple hours last night and played our first session of Call of Cthulhu. It went fairly well although, as I feared, I spent way too much time on things wholly unnecessary to the adventure and so was scrambling to finish up the maps for the adventure. It is a gift and a curse.

Despite not being fully prepared I think it went pretty well considering all three of us are new to the game.

So some thoughts on what I need to fix/ could be improved.

1. Figure out how to better monitor Cam Studio's recording process. - I just set it and forget it and that was a mistake as I exceeded it's max capacity for capturing video (it's 2GB). I can only record in AVI and may need to figure out something else if I can't work this out.
2. Learn more about the features of Roll20 and how to use them. - As a group we struggled at times figure out how to use the site to accomplish what we wanted. One key would be to figure out how to get a character sheet into the program.
3. Make sure to listen to the music before plunking it in the jukebox. - I was busy doing other things so let this slide. Just searching for Cthulhu and or Horror didn't work very well and the music became more of a distraction than an enhancer. Lesson learned I hope.

What worked well?

More CoC prep and Flag Football

It's been a busy week. I need to push myself to post more frequently.

The preparation for running "The Haunting" scenario for Call of Cthulhu 6th Ed. has been taking up most of my time. Apart from trying to learn how the game works I have also been learning how to use Roll20 for distance game play, re-acquaint myself with Cam Studio and Audacity for recording gaming sessions, and learning how to use VoiceMeeter and the Logitech G35 headset I bought yesterday to mix my mic and improve sound quality.

So, par for the course, I have spiraled into more and more complexity and stuff that is not directly needed to play the game. Ah well. What follows is something of a project list and some things to remind me, and possibly educate you should you be equally mad, how I set this stuff up.

***One Caveat. These are all freeware and may have some things in them that you don't want. My virus protection caught the bloatware in Cam Studio that is packaged in the installer, but not part of the program. Everything else was clean after a scan. Also beware of some of the "Download" buttons on these sites. Make sure the file being downloaded is what you wanted and not something else.***

Cam Studio:

This is a free screen video capture utility that I used way back when to make my Flag Ripple Tutorial Video, I still feel rage bubble to the surface at that douche bags comment. But I digress. It is a nifty little program that does what it says, but there are some caveats.

First off the installer tries to install a ton of bloatware(?), stuff you don't need that ha nothing to do with the program. I found that my virus protection just wouldn't let me install at first. You can either just say "I don't Agree" to each one until you get to the actual software, or you can do a custom install of only the program. I will say that having to "Agree" to each crap software is very tricky. I thought I was accepting Cam Studios terms the first time. Very sneaky.

Things I've learned so far. I needed to download the CamStudio Lossless Codec 1.5  to get it to record. It is also important to note that you have to record from the microphone and then change the input to the speakers if you want to record browser sounds or audio from you computer. You also need to set these thing every time you run the program. And finally, just record to AVI. The MP4 thing crashes the program, although it does seem to do the actual conversion. The developer himself even says to just use a conversion utility.

Call of Cthulhu prep

Well I haven't felt like blogging much of late. I'm mostly stressing about my health. I went to the rheumatologist and his bedside manner was not the greatest. Starting off by asking me why I'm there set the tone. But on a positive note he told me that not exercising was dumb and he wants to see what my blood work looks like after a few weeks of exercise. So I guess that's the silver lining.

Right! We're here about the Cthulhu!

I believe I mentioned that I was setting up a distance campaign for Call of Cthulhu 6th ed. I know 7th is around the corner but I don't seem to have access to it.

We're going to use Roll20 as the interface and I'm going to try to record it and perhaps put up the live play on my youtube account for this blog. Which reminds me, I also have meant to do some videos on my basing technique etc.

So for our first adventure we are doing "The Haunting". It comes in the free quickstart rules and in the main rule book. The quickstart version has a lot of tie ins with other printed adventures, while the main rule version has an added mythos tome. I'm trying to combine the two.

There are a ton of resources on Yog-Sothoth.com but I have added and changed a few things. I'm going to use the awesome map of Boston c. 1888 found here and supplement it with information from the Rand McNally map of 1891 found here.

I also found some interesting fonts here, the free ones are great, but $20 for all the others doesn't sound too bad. Another font from the rule book is Leonardo Hand, which can be downloaded from Dafont here.

Once I run the adventure I'll share with you the stuff that I made or found special for my running of it. I won't post it yet just in case the players wander over here.

As for music, I haven't decided if I want to go with the embedded juke box in Roll20 or if I can just play a youtube playlist in the background. I found a cool one called Musica Cthulhiana.


Any how. No painting for me yet this week. I need to get off the stick. I was supposed to be doing Chico's weekly challenge but something tells me I'm not going to make it. I also need to get on Curt's figures and my own stinking giveaway.

Time to chain myself to the painting desk.

1st Tertile progress and battle report

Since everyone does quarterly reports I thought I would be different and do the first third of the year. (That and I was too lazy to write something up at the end of March.) You can find the definition for tertile here.

So what happened hobby wise in January - April 2014?

I've played 10 games so far, an average of 2.5 per month. I need to step it up if I'm going to come anywhere near last years totals.

I painted 49 1/72 foot, 4 28mm foot, 1 1/72 vehicle and 2 fleet scale spaceships. All during the challenge and nothing for the last month or so. I can't rest on that, I need to push myself to get back to a habit of painting daily. But I'm way ahead of my 9 figures for 2013.

Blog wise, I've written 30 posts and received 16,276 page views, and not all of them searching for tits. (Although I get a disturbing amount of traffic where that is the keyword.)

I finally finished the Talomir Tales battle report I've been working on and you can read all about it here.

I feel that I some how failed to hit the mark with this one,  perhaps it effectively conveys how long the battle took. I'm still trying to emulate who I think is the master, check out Flashcove's latest here and see what you think.

And welcome to MiniMike of MiniStories. Another very talented painter who just had some really nice battle mats made. Again this is one of those blogs that you can't figure out why you haven't been following it all along.

Well have a good one, and may your 2nd tertile be an improvement upon the 1st.