Wednesday, November 26, 2014

Caught with my paints down.

Well I procrastinated again and had to play out another battle with unfinished figures. It was over quick as the forces were definitely in favor of Treyine. You can read about it here.


In addition to droppingthe ball with the Talomir project, I have lagged with a Tale of Several Gamers and the Vth Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge. I did figure out what I might paint to reach my goal of 1,000 pts. I still have a lot of work to do, bat putting it to paper makes it seem more achievable.

 Welcome to Brigadier General of Brigadier General Wargame. An interesting looking set of rules. I'm currently travelling for the holidays, but I hope to catch up with the blogs soon. Happy Thanksgiving!

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

The quest for the King's treasure!

Lords and Ladies! Please gather round and hear the daring tale of Sir Waffles and Sir Chicken as they vied for the hand of the fair Princess Gunnora.






Well, we finally wrapped it up over the school holiday yesterday. It didn't take long. Sir Waffles was generally unlucky and took a lot of damage from goblin and troll alike. Sir Chicken was generally more effective in combat. The system worked fairly well but my son didn't feel the need to gang up on things until it was a little too late. I wonder if the Tough attribute of the Trolls was too powerful. Essentially a 50% chance to shrug off damage. I also need to do a better job of tracking what dice characters and monsters are on. I did it in my head, which became a tad problematic coming back a week later. Fun was had. I think we need to use some of that treasure to hire some men at arms or a wizard. I'm also wondering if just setting out the whole dungeon is going to break the game or not. Setting it up as discovered didn't seem to add much for my son.

I used Comic Life 3 for the comic. I feel like I am getting a better feel for the interface and tried a few different things such as the curling paper captions. My photographs were all weirdly dark, so I ran them through the auto white balance in gimp. Unfortunately the figures still remained dark so I applied a rotoscope filter to all the images. It makes them a little more interesting. I'm still struggling to find good settings for quick game snapshots so that I am not interrupting game play more than I have to.

Thursday, November 6, 2014

The 5th Annual Analogue Hobbies Painting Challenge

It's heerre...


Thanks to Edwin King and Dave D for posting about it on facebook. I looked just the other day and it wasn't posted yet.

Head on over to Analogue Hobbies and check it out. It's great fun, you can shoot the shit with other hobbyists, and see some inspiring work. Ok, you don't have to participate to see it, but you get the point. It's incredibly inspiring and it got me to paint more in three months than I'd painted in 20 years, no joke. You also don't have to be a master painter, I'm certainly not. just a desire to get some figures done and the ability to follow some fairly simple rules. Hell,the only real deadlines are the end and the fortnightly challenges, which are completely optional.

So I hope to see you there, either participating or voting, for my entries of course ;-).

My post on last years challenge is my all time popular post. I thought it was because you all are just so interested in Curt's challenge until I re-read the post and saw that I had a word that rhymes with gits and two pictures of a salacious nature at the bottom. Mystery solved.

I also realize now that I should probably re-read my post challenge post to see if I can learn from my experience last year.

Tuesday, November 4, 2014

Shaking off the digital rust

Hi All,

Long time no post. The run up to Halloween and the culmination of Zom(b)orctober had me a little out of sorts. Just one of my moods I guess, but I was just struggling with trying to keep up so I took a step back. So what I have for you are a few random things that have come across my plate and, hopefully, some direction for upcoming posts.

I've been acquiring bits and bobs and hope to have some good stuff to share with you soon on terrain making and what not. Hopefully some figures and bases will be here soon as well.

I've been trying to get another Cthulhu game together but schedules are not lining up right now. One of the players is not jazzed about the Basic Role Play (BRP) Sytem that Call of Cthulhu uses, so we are going to try FATE. I ended up buying a PDF of Present Day Cthulhu Powered by FATE, by Starbright Illustrations, from DrivethruRPG. I mainly wanted to see how the FATE principles might be applied directly to a Mythos game. Perhaps I could have figured it out myself, but they have some good background and monster stats that I can use as guidelines. Hopefully I'll get my act together soon and release the 7 or so hours of audio, and slightly less video, of our sessions from the first adventure. I like the Call of Cthulhu setting but am not so married to BRP that I'm unwilling to try a different system. I do feel that perhaps part of the clunkiness of BRP is more due to my lack of experience GMing it and having not played or GMed in decades.

We did play the first half of the intro Goblinquest scenario, I hope to finish it tonight. We got a little bogged down in dice rolling, I'll give you the report thoughts in a separate post. I think it may be mainly my son's short attention span.

I also rolled up two Warhammer Orc Warbands using Erny's awesome rules, Warlord. I think these could easily be extended to all the races of Warhammer. I hope to use these warbands as a jumping off point for the Tale of Painters thing, which I need to check in on.

6 Zombies and 5 orcs is all I got done last month, so lets hope I can get rolling on painting. I am planning to start prepping in earnest as Curt's challenge tends to get announced in mid November. Last year I was woefully unprepared.

Lastly I will get back to giving opinions etc about photographing miniatures. Hopefully you can get better performance out of your setup, the juries still out as to whether or not I really have improved my photography with what I've learned. And look for the 2nd issue of Wargame Bloggers Quarterly WBQ to be released into the wild soon. If you were a member of the G+ group, you'd already have it.

Here are some random pictures of stuff you may, or may not, find interesting.

A few pickup trucks for Hugh. Closest is a Chevy Silverado, my Toyota Tacoma and I think a Ram 2500
 Hugh was asking about Pickup trucks awhile back, here are two I parked in between. The top of my cab is about 6 ft off the ground, I have the jacked up TRD suspension. The two on either side are full size pickups, mine's a 3/4 ton, and you can see they are considerably larger.

A silly book I saw on the shelf at Barnes & Noble
Oh yeah, welcome to Roy Williamson of RW's hobby blog. I could have sworn we were already following eachother. It looks like he may have lost his blog and had to restart it. Anyway welcome aboard and go check him out and follow him. You may have been before.