Dungeon - The rematch

 Hi All,

So I teased the game of Dungeon we played last post. I ended up winning that game as the Hero, but of course I didn't take pictures. My son wanted to redeem himself after spending 4 turns in the previous game rolling 5's and 6's trying to get through a secret door on the 4th level. If you don't know, Elves discover secret doors on a 1-4 in this game. Everyone else is a 1-2.

This is the original 1980 version of the game.

The long edges of the box seem to be somewhat inclusive.

Murder hobos running around the dungeon.

This was the treasure I won after being killed by an Ogre and having to go back to the start. A +2 sword is nice, but too little too late.

My son made it back to the start with his requisite treasure. My kids wanted to argue with me that the green guy on the board was a zombie and not a troll. I told them to read the damn monster manual. Noobs!

This is my son's winning treasure. About half of it is what my hero dropped on the floor fighting that ogre.

I demand a rematch. ;)

Happy gaming everyone.

Season's Greetings

 Hi All,

Once again not a whole lot to report. I'm just trying to navigate the holidays and not gain a hundred pounds. Things are pretty good and we're visiting family so that we don't lose anymore time with loved ones. We're masking, testing and have done everything we can think of to keep our elderly relatives safe.

You may disagree, but I'm faced with the fact that I may not have many more holidays with them.

Ok, enough bummer stuff. 

Happy Holidays to you all!

While I haven't gotten much actual hobby done I have been able to get in some games and make the new composite banner displayed above. I'm not really a graphic artist, so I'm sure it's full of glaring errors to the professional eye, but I'm reasonably happy with it.

I also made a version that I ran through the comicifier for a new banner for my comics.

I decided not to do it for the blog banner because I like the clean version too.

Along with eating too much and drinking Snoop Dogg wine, we've played a few games.

We've been playing lots of Mahjong.

And we played a few games of Bears vs. Babies,  but we don't quite have the hang of it yet.

We also played Dungeon yesterday, but I forgot to take pictures.

Hopefully I can get the Battle Companies game pictures processed and into a comic soon. I might try making a video slide show out of the comic once I get it done.

Give your loved ones a hug and game like there's no tomorrow.

Junta - Family game night

 Hi All,

I'm still plugging away at the Formigny figs, but we had an opportunity to have a family game night with my daughter home for Thanksgiving.

The ladies of the house chose Junta from the selections on offer. It is definitely a product of its time, 1985 and is in the genre of games that encourage you to lie, cheat and steal your way to victory.

The ultimate goal is simple, have the most money in your swiss bank account at the end of the game. I've only ever played this game with 4 players, but it can support up to 7 and there are rules for less than 4 but with a separate mechanism to accommodate not having enough players.

The roles available for the game are: President, draws the foreign aid and proposes the budget; Generals of the 1st, 2nd and 3rd Brigades each have their own troops and barracks in the city; Air Force Commander, controls the paratroops and has access to three airstrikes; Admiral, commands the marines and can call in gunboat bombardments; and the Minister of the Interior, controls the police, has a free assassination attempt per turn and can seize the chamber of deputies to force through the budget,

8 bills are drawn from the foreign aid deck each turn. Only the President knows the denominations they drew. The president then proposes how much they will distribute to the players and the budget is voted on. If it passes you get the money, if it fails the President keeps everything. 

Players can start a coup if there is a coup excuse, like the Minister of the Interior seizing the chamber and ramming through the budget.

I believe the above picture is just after I had assassinated my daughter and taken all her money. In Junta you play a family, so you're never out of the game, you just lose cards and money in hand. My son (with the fancy beard control markers) has amassed a strange political between the Church and the Radicals. He has Christian Militia, Rioters and Student Protestors in the streets.

I'm not totally sure what all is going on here, but we had used up all the money. Bribes are placed face up on the bottom of the money stack. We called the game here.

Here is my winning account with about 43 million Pesos in it. I was lucky in my assassination attempts and caught both my daughter and son with piles of cash in their hands. Each turn you pick one of five locations for your faction leader to be. Assassins have to guess correctly where the player is in order to have a chance at success. The Secret Police always succeed, but they can only show up at the bank on alternate turns.

Anyway it was a little diversion over the holidays. A silly game that plays a little dated, but if you like backstabbing games it's got a lot of that.

Prepare to be underwhelmed - Formigny project

 Hi All,

I've been dragging me feet on many things, but I do have progress of a sort.

The gaps are all  green stuffed and I just have to put extra swords and visors on the knights.

I've also primed the first twelve archers.

I know, grey primer on grey plastic. Woo hoo! Of course I noticed one right arm I forgot to putty.

I also realized after priming these that none of these guys got swords. Perry shows a sword in the instructions, but I don't think there are enough swords for everybody. I feel like these guys would not be universally armed with swords so I'll scatter a few throughout the units as I build more. I have another 16 archer torsos cleaned.

Fantastic Legions will probably not be impressed with my progress, but it is what it is. (P.S. I'm going to try putting hyperlinks in bold since this template only shows them when they are moused over.

Anyway. Have a great Thanksgiving if you celebrate and happy hobbying.

Return of Mojo - Formigny project

 Hi All,

Well, suffice it to say I had a rough Summer and my mojo for life in general was just not there for many months.

I had been planning to do a late Hundred Years War project with Fantastic Legions and playtest some rules, but after buying a bunch a figures all this real life stuff happened and I just pretty much went into "I can accomplish one thing per day" mode. Unfortunately that one thing wasn't hobby for quite awhile.

Fast forward to a couple of weeks ago. Fantastic Legions sent me a link to putting on a game at Desert Wars in March 2022. He suggested Formigny in which two French Armies linked up to defeat an English expeditionary force and hastened the fall of English Normandy.

It has a little bit of everything. English longbows ravaging the French. French canons wreaking havoc and a final French cavalry charge. As well as the linking of two forces to combat the defending English.

So if you want to read about it there is a decent article here.

There are also a couple of interesting youtube videos about the battle. This one by Kings and Generals (23minutes) and this other one by Schwerpunkt (2.5 hours). 

So it looks like I'll be making up about 8 units, 4-5 of them bowmen.

The English leaders were:

Thomas Kyriell

By Rs-nourse - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=29263362

Matthew Gough

There is no opensource heraldry for him but a common theme is three boars or boars heads on blue or white field. 

Robert (De) Vere

By Newm30 - The Notebook of Tristram Risdon 1608-1628, James Dallas, Henry G. Porter, London 1897. p. 106., CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=76419312

Henry Norbury 

By Lobsterthermidor (talk) 14:14, 28 February 2020 (UTC) - Own work, using bull element modified from commons File:Urdorf-blazon.svg by User:Gerhard Bräunlich, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=87533580

I'm thinking of adding the coats of arms of Bayeux, Caen and Vire as well, since the garrisons were pulled from those towns to battle Jean de Bourbon the Comte de Clermont at the time.

Anyway, lots of work to do. I've been dragging my feet while Fantastic legions has been putting out some lovely units.

Hope your hobby is going well.

Paint em if you got em.

Crosman 1077 - Putting it back together.

 Hi All,

So I attempted to replace the end seal and reassemble my 1994 Crosman 1077 pellet rifle.

So here is the the Plug Assembly (1077-036) broken down into its component parts.

Showing the dirt and wear on the Piercing Pin (38A027) and the cracks in the bottom of the End Seal (38-128)

Brand new End Seal for comparison,

I then cleaned all the parts with Q-tips and 91% isopropanol. I'm sure 70% would have been fine.

Plug Assembly reassembled. Piercing Plug, Screen, Piercing Pin, End Seal, and Guide Collar.

Plug Assembly goes back in the Tube (100-017).

You want to line up the pin side with the hole,

and the tube side with the notch.

Theoretically you still have the pin in your vice grips.

You just reverse the process and push while twisting.

The Tube (1077-017), Spacer (1077-039), and Barrel Housing (1077-010) are all held in place by the Barrel Band (1077-008).

Here they are assembled. Just tight the Band Screw (1077-026).

Next fit the end of the Transfer Tube (1077-016) into the Plug Tssembly (1077-036) via the tube Bushing (1077-029).

Next, find the part you didn't know existed until you saw it fall out of the Receiver when trying to put things together. That would be the Hammer Roller Pin (106-024) under the metal arm of the Trigger Assembly (1077-033).

This next step is very important. Drop the Valve and Tube Assembly (1077-034) and Trigger Assembly (1077-033) on the floor, thus learning how to disassemble a portion of the Valve Assembly into its component parts. Realize you only have Detent (106A011, which is then called 106B011 in the list) and Detent Body (106A010) but not the Detent Spring (106A046) because of course you didn't see where that went when it hit the floor. Grab a beer.

Don't give up and eventually find said Detent Spring.

Reassemble the Valve and Tube Assembly. Now we're cooking.

Get the Receiver together with all the assemblies put back together correctly, for the third time after having springs be springy.

Insert a cylinder without the stock on to see if it leaks. It seemed to hold.

Put the stock on with the three screws, remember that the one furthest from the trigger is a bigger diameter than the other two, but by now you've pulled this thing apart so many times that's not difficult.

Find a target online or go old school and draw an X on a piece of paper. (Sorry for the gratuitous broken toe shot.)

I then went outside to try and sight it in at about 10 paces.

I got off one shot, then realized I left the Allen wrench for adjusting the site inside. I came back out, lined up my second shot, finger on the trigger and...

PFFFFT-WHOOSH!

Somehow it started leaking again. I tried some in situ adjustments of the guide collar and then had a hard time getting the cylinder to pierce. Finally I figured that maybe I just need a new piercing pin. It is, however, possible that the gun is leaking at the plug assembly and tube junction.

So I'm waiting on the new part. In the meantime the replacement 1077 arrived and my brother and I spent about an hour shooting cans and targets. It was great fun.

So the jury remains out on whether I can resuscitate this gun. I'm at the point where I don't want to spend anymore to fix it because I'm halfway to the purchase of a brand new one. I'm also running out of time. So we'll see if I have anything further to report.

Happy hobbying.

Field stripping a Crosman 1077 pellet rifle

 Hi All,

Things have been busy and hectic, so hobby has taken a little bit of a back seat of late. But nerdery knows no bounds, so I started trying to figure out why my old Crosman 1077  (you can also get it from Amazon, here) wouldn't hold a CO2 charge.

While not really into gun culture, I am an American male of a certain age and I enjoy plinking beer cans and shooting the occasional varmint.

After wasting several 12 gram cylinders I decided to try and find out if it was possible to to fix this rifle that I think I bought in 1993.

So I found the manual and the parts list and watched a few videos.

I tried the Pellgunoil hack. It didn't work. Before I could try using teflon tape my brother saw the crack in the end seal. (Part #  38-128)

So a quick search revealed that EBay was my best bet for parts if I didn't want to wait a month. I got the parts from here.

The last thing I needed was a half inch wide standard screwdriver to open up the Guide Collar (Part # 338-041) from the Piercing Plug (Part # 1077A018). I ordered that from Amazon here. In one video a guy just ground the point off of a 1/2" spade bit. But I'd rather just have the tool.

Here's the pictures.

The stock easily comes off with the three phillips (circled in red) head screwdriver. Note that the one towards the front is larger. 2mm hex screw (circled in yellow) that holds the CO2 tube to the barrel. The four screws that hold the body (reciever?) are 3 phillips (Green) and one Standard (Blue), although I had to use a standard head driver to get the last green one out. Top tip, take the scope rail off first. It holds the two halves of the gun together if you don't.

If you push the trigger down sideways you're not supposed to have the trigger spring pop out. I failed (Green Circle). The  Tube Pin (Part # 1077-031 circled red) holds the Piercing Plug in place. Just lock some vice grips on it and twist and pull.

And now you have the plug out and can really see the crack in the End Seal. The slot in the Guide Collar is about 2mm and of course my 1/2" screwdriver blade is about 2.3mm thick, so I ended up having to grind it down anyway.

And it's off. Now I just have to wait 5-7 days for my End Seals to come in.

I'll try to take better pictures of how it all goes together when I button it back up.

Happy Hobbying.

WFRP 4th Edition - Inputting your Character on Roll20

 Hi All,

As a follow on from character generation, we have a situation where we needed to put our characters onto the platform we re playing on. For our group that is Roll20. Our GM has gone ahead and purchased the system specific add ons and there is a digital character sheet involved.

To be fair, all digital character sheets have their own idiosyncrasies. Based on the system and the person who built its interpretation of the rules/ character creation process.

So I'll try to forensically rehash what I did for my character. I also helped one of our group input his, perhaps I will go over that one as well.

Alright I took a bunch of screenshots, lets see if we can make sense of this thing.

So we start on the "MAIN" page button/tab. It's a little weird in that you input values into the blue shaded cells, but not all of them. So I entered Name, Species, Class, Age, Height Hair and Eyes. I think I also input my initial characteristics. I am not totally sure, but I think we found out you had to click on the header text to activate the cell for entry. I guess it's a good way to prevent inadvertently changing your values, but it was frustrating. I think when I input my movement of 4 it calculated and filled the other two. I also input my Resilience and Fate.

Although the timing is a bit off, ie I had to go to the advanced tab for some things first, I entered Talents  and specific advanced skills. You just hit the little plus sign. If you need to delete something you need to hit the edit (pen) symbol.

Just showing the bottom of the main page.

Now we're at the "ADVANCES" page. You don't have to re-enter the top part with your name etc.  You definitely need to click on the column text to be able to put in your advances. As a Human I got 5. You also need to input your career Skills and Talents and distribute your 40(?) points or whatever it is. I can't remember at the moment.

At the bottom of the page is your Species Talents and skills. Now I thought you could play with the bonus values, like the career skills, but you cannot. You have a choice of +3 or +5 only and you get 3 of each. I also found out when I helped another player that if you click on a +3 or +5 you can't seem to remove it. Not sure why that is.

Here we are in the "COMBAT" tab. 

Your wounds are calculated for you from your stats.

Trappings, armor and weapons are all pretty self explanatory. The one weird thing is that if you wear something it's Encumbrance no longer counts. Seems odd. You of course have to wear armor and/or shield to get the armor point fields to populate. I'm not sure if I put the dagger damage in correctly or not, but I think so. Oh and wealth you just input.

Hopefully that helps if you are struggling to get your character into roll20. If you have any tips or hacks for doing it better, please let me know.

Happy hobbying.