Tabletop Periscope Links

Just thought I'd share some links with you that I found while looking for something else.

Terra Genesis

Web Archive of Major General Tremorden Rederring

Another archived site with a template for the periscope

I first read about these in a reprint of a Donald Featherstone book. He called it a Tarr Periscope, named after Lionel Tarr.

Doing a search for that lead me to two more links:

From the Vintage Wargaming blog

The Geocities one is no good.

I did buy some business card size mirrors a few years ago and have some black foam core from another project. I hope to build one when I switch gears and work on some terrain.

Devil's Run Kickstarter, only hours left.

Hi All,

I'd been watching this one for awhile. Finally caved and signed up for it this morning.


You can find it here. I think I need to stop funding kickstarters, it's become an addiction.

American Flagg & X-Wing

Hope everyone had a good holiday weekend. We were busy but mostly around the house all weekend.

One of the things I did was dig deep in the memory banks to relocate American Flagg by Howard Chaykin. It occurs to me that this could be another dystopian future setting to recreate with miniatures.Although I'm not sure where to find the very 80's shoulder pad aesthetic.

Of course Vol 2 arrived before Vol 1, so I'm going to have to wait to get reading. 

In the boy playing games news, my little one broke out X-wing and had three or four rousing games. We then went out and bought the YT - 2400 with a Barnes & Noble 20% off coupon. I was shooting for the Millenium Falcon, but they didn't have one.

I just gave him some bare bones of fire arcs and how to read the dice and use the measuring sticks. He then set up all the ships and had fun. I thought that letting him enjoy the game was better than trying to play "by the rules". It would be nice to play together, but this way worked a lot better than the last few times we played. Hopefully we can build upon success and get in a game together.

I'm pretty deep into the Talomir battle, but I ran down the battery in the camera. We should have it wrapped up soon.

I also had a chat with Stevo and we may be inspiring each other to paint. It's probably more like him holding me accountable for painting my Orc army for Oldhammer USA. Of course I have to chat with him some more about it. But I'm putting it out there to hold my feet to the fire a little.

Potion Pilferers (Part 2): The Death of Sir Chicken.

Spoiler Alert!

If you missed any of the previous adventures of Sir Chicken you can find them at Potion Pilferers (Part1) and The Quest for the King's Treasure.

On with our tale of high adventure!

I was able to bring my son in for some dice rolling. He seemed to like it better when the fate of our heroes did not rest on his decision making. I ended up finishing it out by myself, as it had taken up space on the table for too long and was in peril of being subsumed by all the end of year stuff the kids are bringing home from school.

I resisted the temptation to use the heroic combat rule half way through, even after rolling 20 - 1 twice in one combat. In the future I will use the rule. Magic has me stumped, while it was quite useful a couple of times, Marlin was quickly turned into a liability once he had lost half his hits and half his spells. Bad luck of the draw found him with unusable spells for several turns. I'll have to chat with Stephen about the design philosophy before I totally scrap it. I feel like magic is more dangerous to the caster than it is to the opponent.

Although it was a bummer to see Sir Chicken fall, I'm going to use it as an opportunity to explore he men at arms rules, maybe even a squire. I think the evil magician, emboldened by our heroes inability to recover all the potions, may kidnap the King's daughter. Branwen the Fair.

As you can see I started to dig deep for different terms for chopping. This was a good resource, but don't click on it if you don't like sites with lots of ads.

Off to clear the table for Tereken vs. Altengard with more unfinished figures. More on that another time.

Potion Pilferers (part 1), A Knight's Quest Adventure

The game mechanics are mostly the same from the last time we played. I should have made myself a quick reference sheet o remind me of key things that come up a lot. As I showed in the comic I forgot to apply the small attribute and remembered the vicious attribute for the orcs, but then jettisoned it when they started to get the upper hand.

Losing a hit 50% of the time when you use magic seems a little harsh. So far my use of magic has not been very effective. I also need to play the monsters a little stupider. While the Imps should be shifty and try to gang up on people I think the Orcs holding back so they could lure the knights into unfavorable situations was too hard for the boy.

Sorry for the dodgy photos. I tried some  presets and they stunk. I finally settled on using manual settings and they got clearer, but only realized I needed to fiddle with the white balance on the last photo. I will also play with the EV more next. I'm always trying to strike a balance between documenting and playing. Playing usually wins out.

I hope to wrap this up this weekend, see Mad Max, and get the Talomir battle started.

Colony 87, Cardboard Warriors, and Ray's giveaway

Hi All,

I should have been posting regularly the last few days, but you know how it goes. I just wanted to clue you in on a few things that are time sensitive.

Colony 87 Kickstarter

These awesome looking Sci-Fi civilians are wrapping up today. I don't have any other Sci-Fi 28mm at the moment, unless the Space Hulk plastics count, but I plan to get a few soon for Necromunda type games.


You can find it here. As of this writing it's got less than 24hrs left to go.

Cardboard Warriors Nepal Charity Bundle

I got an email from Billiam Babble of Inked adventures the other day telling me of this great product which you can find here. A great deal on paper terrain and figures and a good cause. I'm not sure how long this one will run.

Ray's 500th blog post giveaway

You know him, you love him, Ray is having a fantastic looking giveaway that ends on the 15th. So get you submissions in here. Or don't, and let me have a better chance at winning something. Hopefully I can win something from him again, I did once before.

So a lot of stuff to look at. I have to run off to Home Depot and buy a replacement Kitchen faucet. The column on mine seized and I apparently broke it trying to lubricate the column so that I could actually turn the damn thing. I also base coated those Altengard figures. I couldn't spray because it was too windy so I had to do it all by hand. We're also still only part way through Knight's Quest. I think I lost the boy. More on that later.

What I've been doing this week

While I have been prepping some more figures for the next Talomir Tales battle I spent most of the last few days making the play bill for my son's class play.

I got the idea to use the Gerome painting after reading Red Sand Blue Sky: Heroes of the Arena (by Two Hour Wargames now out of print). I did not realize this piece was at the Phoenix Art Museum, sounds like a trip over the summer. I added the mosaic border from a cropped image, also from wikimedia commons.

I tried a few different fonts before landing on Times New Roman. It had the look I wanted, but was just too dull in plain white. I remembered seeing something about making a gold text effect. I found this one and worked pretty well except for one thing. When I did it the whole image would be gold instead of gold text on a clear background. By re-introducing the bump map layer (the white text on black background) as a layer mask of the gold text image you can achieve that.

For the cast list I was channeling the intro to I Claudius. The font is called Classical Mosaic, or Classic Mosaic. The overall background is the Mosaic filter in GIMP and then another cropped mosaic image from wikimedia. Sorry about the heavy handed blur tool, but I didn't want to show the children's names.

I don't posses any real artistic talent or design education, but I like how it turned out. I think if I were to do it over I'd make the gold text all one layer and do the effect on it all at once, instead of the four different blocks I did here.

Hopefully we can finish the game of Knight's Quest we started tonight, and I can get he figures for the Talomir battle primed up. Mother's Day may put some of these plans on hold.