Only good news here at SWC!

Hi All,

Not as productive as I'd like, but that's not what I want to tell you about.

First off, once I finish up with a few things I'm going to be setting up my Play By Blog/ remote wargaming thing. I had a dream about it last week so I'm going to go ahead with it.

In Kickstarter news both the Circle of Chaos and Effin Cool Oldhammer Halflings funded and it looks like Colony 87 wave 2 will be launching some time next week. Hooray. Check out Asslessman's blog, Leadplague, to see painted examples of the upcoming figures.

In thinking about more noodling with GIMP to make elements for my next Dahn Alt Rump poster I stumbled upon these two tutorials on blendenzo.com. Creating Cloth Banners and Making Good Ripped and Worn Fabric which is partially covered in the cloth banners tutorial.

Track season is in full swing, and we took a trip up to Flagstaff to compete. Despite an almost 6000 ft gain in elevation the boy did pretty well.

Gotta run, hopefully I'll have some form of hobby progress to report soon.

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.

Chronicle of Loa - 987

In the Spring of 987 the countries of the Loa peninsula made ready for war. Armies were replenished and more mages hired in Eskelin, Kurinthia Malohad, Riata and Zamba. Heroes also emerged in Eskelin, Riata and Sortium. All nations chose to keep the mercenaries they had but not hire new ones. (This is mainly because the named units were already hired and I felt like keeping track of these special companies and dove tailing with the Talomir Tales campaign was going to be an issue. I need to work out a more generic or Loa specific list.)

Eskelin and Malohad declared war on each other but Eskelin was the aggressor and invaded. Being the more mobile force Malohad easily otscouted Eskelin and won a major victory. The Eskelin Mages were wounded and for Malohad one Level 1 mage was wounded and the Level 2 mage deserted.

Spring 987

Summer 987 saw Barylistan split their forces to invade Eskelin while defending against an invasion from Zamba. Malohad took the initiative from Eskelin and invaded their northern province.

Summer 987

After a drawn out battle Malohad was victorious over Eskelin with all but one of their mages deserting or wounded. The Eskelin mages and hero were also wounded. Barylistan's invasion of Eskelin was uncontested, and Zamba was repulsed at the cost of a wound to the Barylistani mage.

In the Fall of 987 war swept across the peninsula as never before. Malohad continued its holy war against Eskelin while Kurinthia sought to reclaim its province from Barylistan who now held it. Sortium woke from its slumber to attack Demeskeen while Riata thought it would pillage Barylistan while it was occupied fighting Kurinthia. Barylistan gave up pursuing its war with Zamba to defend itself on two fronts.

Fall 987

Kurinthia defeated Barylistan and regained the province it had lost to Eskelin. One level 1 and the Level 3 mage were injured in the battle. Barylistan was more successful in holding off the invasion from Riata. One level 1 mage was injured but the hero left the service of the realm in disgust. Malohad routed the Knights of Eskelin. Both the Malohad leader and the Captain of the Black Company (Alfred Badenhorst) were wounded. And in the final battle of the season Sortium lost  a close battle in the invasion attempt of Demeskeen. The Demeskeen mage saw too much of battle and deserted but the Sortium hero was enticed to stay. In the aftermath of the battles Eskelin, Riata and Sortium sued for peace.

Winter 987

During the Winter the High King of Riata died, some say of shame, others of poison in his mead. But the spring would see Riata riven in civil war. Kurinthia decided better of war with Barylistan and sued for peace. ( I forgot that Zamba and Barylistan were technically still at war so I will recheck that and write it into the Spring turn of 988. Barylistan had seized initiative and then basically handed it back by not following up.)

In 988 I hope to expand the palytest to include the income rules and also try out some characterization of the leaders of the various nations. My record keeping is still a shambles but I'm getting it slightly under control.

Again, this is all book keeping that needs to be done in a standard  game of RRtK, the rules I'm testing have added no extra work thus far. They have only simulated combat and I think work pretty well. I'm wondering if Eskelin should call upon the faithful to help them withstand the tide of invasion from the followers of the Black Moon.

And here is a quick tutorial of how I changed the texture on the Talomir Map. Quick and dirty, how I like it.

Click for full size

Paper Counter v2.0

Hi All,

  Well since time change + insomnia = time to do projects, I've finished the counters v 2.0 using the new heraldry.

  I'm going to have some breakfast and then clear off the table and bang this one out. Could be short with the  Cavalry heavy Capalan Army.

PS - I've been informed that I need to assist with last minute grocery shopping, so it may take a little while longer.

Party over here - more heraldry sketching

Okay so I phoned it in the other day with the heraldry for Ekra. I mean come on, a yellow Fleur-de-lis on a blue field, lame!

So here is something a little better.

A little rough, but you get the idea.

The re-sizing of the gifs was quick and dirty so they are quite bad, but you get the idea. The shield is Party Sinister. Three FdL yellow on blue, Dolphin Hauriant Red on white.

That seems a tad more interesting. Wikimedia Commons category Coats of Arms by Blazon reminded me of the Party division of the shield and is a good resource if you have a vague idea and some notion of the terminology.

I also stumbled upon a link from TMP when I did a search for heraldry. It is Free Heraldry Clipart which appears to be where I got all of my stuff from. As with so many things I collect from the internet it is eventually lost in the sands of time as to where I actually found it. A great resource and even more stuff than I have on hand at present. They're all gifs, but I'll be showing you my method of tracing to turn them into beautiful vector graphics or png format.

That's all for now.

Fantasy Heraldry pt. 2 - Specific design

Now we move on to the Fantasy Heraldry specific for the project I have in mind. Namely the invasion of Capalan by Tereken in the ongoing RRtK campaign over at Talomir Tales. So, just in case you're new to Talomir, Tereken are essentially Anglo-Saxons and Capalan are Italian city states around the 15th century.

As such I have to come up with one symbol for Tereken and then as many as five, one for each original province, for Capalan. Capalan also has Brethren Mercenaries so I'll have to make a Symbol for them. Tereken seems pretty straight forward. I've already identified the colors Green and Yellow and some kind of Dragon.

Dragon or Wyvern?

Capalan...hmm. Okay we know we want some kind of Italian wars theme. Looking here (particularly Mazzacane and Palma) gave me the idea to try a base scheme to tie them together with different emblems added to differentiate. So we have Resta, who is the leader, so I'm thinking skeleton or bones since google translate tells me Resta means remains. Cosimo was one of the Medici's so I will use the six circle configuration similar to that shown here. Bertolli definitely gets an olive branch if not an outright lift of the Olive Oil companies logo, probably not since that is a bad thing to do. But I'll riff off of it. Bellissima, I had thought of making her a proxy for princess peach, but then I saw a Mermaid in my collection so I think I'll go with that. And lastly Orso, the Bear. Seems like he should have a bear on his heraldry. The only question is what kind? Rampant? I wonder if there is a sleeping bear, I'll have to investigate. As far as color scheme goes I'll have to ask Ruarigh what the hex number or name is for the border highlight on his map. It appears to be some shade of violet. Could be a problem as I'm not sure what colors complement that.

From Wikimedia Commons

The bits and pieces for Capalan

Ruarigh told me what the hex # for the CC3 color was. I'm still not sure what color to pair with the purple, I'm leaning towards yellow.

Lastly the Brethren. From the RRtK rule book we read that "The Brethren have numerous holdings in Talomir called Red Castles and are found in Ekra, Altengard and Treyine."(RRtK, p66) Now as we know from reading Talomir Tales, Ekra and the Brethren have been defeated and absorbed by Treyine. So the only independent source of Brethren left is in Altengard. That being said one could make a case for the Treyine and Ekran branches hiring out as mercenaries since they have been disbanded, and their wealth reverted to the crown, by Treyine. My original thoughts were to have a central theme for the brethren, with a device to differentiate the three nations of origin. Since Ruarigh gave them the Teutonic black cross already I may stick with that, however red is the brethrens color of choice being devotees of the Red Sun. I think a cross, with a red sun in the upper left quadrant and then a device in the middle for the country. This of course may mean that I now need to make them for Ekra, Altengard and Treyine. Oh bother.

Altengard, Ekra, Treyine and a non aligned Brethren

So I did this after more correspondence with Raurigh and Javier. Okay so I phoned in Ekra, but these are all just concept drawings.

Also thanks to Iain from the THW Yahoo group for adding a link to the meaning of Heraldry symbols, aptly named Symbolism of Heraldry. I'm not sure I like it as much as at least one of the others I found, but the information looks good. Perhaps I'll do a comparison of these symbolism sites in another post.

Also as a postscript (since it's taken me days to work out this silly post) to more links of use. Color Wiki where I searched for hex codes for these oddball colors (yes I mean you Murrey).

And looking for Plantagenet herldry I stumbled upon the gold mine that is Early Blazon.

Enjoy and if you have constructive feedback I'd love to hear it.

Fantasy Heraldry - one man's approach

When playing a fantasy campaign I like to make little heraldic icons for each nation/player. Sometimes I just go with something stock other times I try to create something new. The beauty of fantasy heraldry is that you aren't bound by convention. What follows is a walk through (or ramble) of my process and some resources I have found along the way.

I will also say that when I say heraldry I am conflating it with banners for wargaming purposes. So you want to make a banner/ heraldic symbol? What better way than to reference actual symbols. My first stop is usually Wikimedia Commons, search term Heraldry. Heraldry.ws is another good resource. For banners I like Warflag, Fanaticus, Grimsby Wargamers Society,and of course Dansk Figursspilsforening. I could go on but here are the basics.

So I now have culled through a bunch of stuff and have plenty of ideas of real or speculative designs. Next I need to think about the back ground of my Lord or nation and start throwing around the various bits that make up a heraldic device. One thing I found in researching this article is something I don't recall encountering before. There are a few sites that describe the individual meaning of the various parts of a coat of arms. The aptly named Heraldry Symbols and The Meaning Behind the Symbols - Fleur-de-lis Designs. So now I can also think about what I want to say about the individual that this CoA represents.

My method usually involves a rough sketch with colored pencils. (Please forgive my drawing, I'm a terrible artist.)

These were for my Linlandia map project.

So the since this was originally based off of a Mighty Empires campaign I was heavily influenced by Warhammer. So the Empire proxy uses the black eagle on a yellow field. The Bretonia proxy uses a yellow fleur-de-lis on a blue field. Orcs have lots of skulls, Chaos some kind of Chaos symbol. For the dwarves you need some kind of blacksmith reference and a rune, for the elves something suitably elven.

My method was to take some heraldic gifs I found out on the interwebs and use inkskape to trace them and convert them to vector images. I think I mostly made pngs because my svg file associations were weird. So by way of example, I came up with this for one of the Chaos coastal cities. I assembled the parts in GIMP, although I could have continued with Inkscape.

I kept it clear for the project

So as you can see it is chaosy with a ship to show it's status as a port. Maybe they are pirates? I don't know.

The final product made to look hand painted.

So as you can see I basically re-created the elements from my sketches using clip art. I think in this case I already had the clip art and just finagled it around.

Does this differ much from your workflow? Anyhow in the next installment I will show how I am working out  using these methods for the Talomir Tales campaign.

This week in Talomir #3

Finally fought this battle. My hopes were up one turn, then dashed the next. Read about it here.

Sample of the report.

I had given up on having the forces painted earlier in the week but never got on fighting it out, until today.

Although I am feeling better, this cough is still kicking my ass. I went back to the doctor and saw another physician at the practice who thought it might be a good idea to test me for valley fever. Apparently if you live in the Valley of the Sun, or Salt River Valley if you prefer, long enough you eventually get a fungal infection in the lungs. The results will come back in two weeks. In the meantime I've been prescribed Benzonatate pills and some codiene cough syrup. The pills seem to be helping, I forgot to take the cough syrup.

I made the report photos with GIMP again, the lighting situation was terrible so they are not the best. I do like the birdseye view though. I only really pimped the first picture, the rest were just text on an image.

Welcome to Frontline Gamer of Frontline Gamer, a lot of reviews and information about gaming. I also think his tips for blogging are really good. He certainly gets a lot of traffic.

In my next post I hope to apply Ray's blogging theory with a post that has a subject that rhymes with NOOBS.

This week in Talomir #2

Perhaps this will be the start of a series. I realized after the last post that I had a humorous acronym (TwiT) so it tickles my fancy.

I did a lot of stuff, but did not actually finish anything except the battle. You can read the report over at Talomir Tales here.

A sample of the report.

I used GIMP to do up the report this time because I wanted to "sex up" the captions a little. Since I seem unable to have nice figures or terrain I'll go to my strength, which is screwing around with GIMP.

So the settings were an 800x600 template 72ppi resolution (for web basically). I re-sized most of my shots to 45-50% to fit in this space. I used the AutoRealm Mentelin font because Ruarigh had used it and I thought it would help tie the report to the setting better.

The main trick I used was set up a transparent layer and then make various selections on it and fill that with a pattern called crinkled paper. I wanted more of a parchment look but the "old paper" script didn't seem to be working right. The workflow I hit upon in the final pictures was this:

1. Type in your text roughly where you want it in the image.
2. Use a selection tool to outline a shape encompassing your text, I ended up using the free select (lasso) although I started with rectangle select.
3. Click on the selection menu and click distort, I used the default settings. This will give you the rough edges.
4. Select a pattern from the pattern menu and either use the Bucket fill tool or drag and drop the pattern from the tool box icon.
5. Next use the fuzzy select tool (magic wand) with a high threshold (70+) to select your paper areas. If you have more than one remember to hold the shift key down to add to you selection. Note that if you don't have the threshold high enough you may get patches of unselected stuff inside you paper area. You don't want that.
6. Final step, run the Drop shadow filter on your selection to give it a little pop on the image. It is easy here to do some wired stuff with selection and put the drop shadow on the inverse of what you want. This looks weird and increases the image size. Just be fore warned because I did it a couple of times and it's annoying

There you have it.

You may have also noticed that I hand made the counters this time. This is for several reasons. First I couldn't get the figures painted up. Second there were no counters for either army in the paper armies book, and third I wanted to try out my basing size that I intend to use for the figures. This size is based off of a 3.5" x 2" business card. So cavalry, artillery get the full size. Infantry get 3.5" x 1" and then the heroes are 1" x 1" foot and 1" x 2" mounted. For this battle a 3' x 4' table was okay, but for a battle with the Treyine army I suspect I would need at least a 6' x 4' table as these base sizes are really more akin to 28mm frontages.

And on the painting front I got about 20 saxons based up and 13 vikings out of 35 or so needed for each.

I'm also still working on mixing my paints, but they may be a lost cause.

My version of Kasper's paint mixer.

I used a rotary tool bit that's supposed to hold cutting discs. Mounted it to a small Applesauce jar lid and away we go. The rotary tool was a little scary so I put it on my drill as per Kasper's original design. The jar will hold 4 paint pots but I chose to do three and hold it at an angle so the pots tumble over each other. If you get it too fast or too vertical, centrifugal force just sticks them to the side and stuff doesn't seem to mix. Hmm, maybe an orbital sander and some foam rubber would be another method.

Cheers.

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.

Making an old letter

As threatened, here is a tutorial for making an old letter. I was going to re-install my fonts, brushes and texture files but then I thought that doing it from scratch might be more useful.

So I downloaded the latest version of GIMP (2.8.2) here. And then did a search through Google Images for "old paper texture" there are also some nice links to old parchment, old book etc.

I chose to go with this one by nevermoregraphix from deviant art.

For the font, since it is a letter and not a book, I wanted to go with a handwritten style. As usual I went with dafont but most sites have all the same fonts. I slogged through many fonts in the handwritten section before I found one I had used before jacek zieba jasinski, it's okay but I just now did a search for Jefferson which is a nicer hand written font. But since I've already loaded GIMP without it, jacek will have to do.

So I've opened GIMP, I don't have it totally set up how I'd like but it's not too heavily modified from the vanilla install. I've only added some toolbox icons to make it more familiar to me. I've also taken advantage of the new single window feature. No more covering up menus inadvertently.

Alternate Flag Ripple Tutorial

If you have tried the other method and had trouble, here's a slightly quicker and easier method.

We'll start with our base flag.

Ray's Boissleau Flag

And an image of some white material that's been ruffled up.

Ray sent me this as well.

GIMP information

After a little correspondence with Ray I thought that I should perhaps give a little more info about my graphics editing software of choice, GIMP.

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is an open source graphics package that is most like Adobe Photoshop. It is totally FREE and don't let anyone tell you otherwise.

It can be found on the web at http://www.gimp.org/ and there is an online help and some tutorials there.

The add-on or modification that I use is GPS (GIMP Paint Studio), all this gives you is a lay out like I have in my video here. It also gives you some brushes and presets. The presets I personally have never really explored.

In lieu of installing GPS you might be able to configure GIMP to give you the "Display Navigation" tab in a vanilla install by following the ideas in this tutorial video here.

And a search for "gimp setup tutorial" on google yielded this useful thread from gimptalk: http://www.gimptalk.com/index.php?/topic/13002-setting-up-gimp-for-artistic-work/

And rather than make big link list I'll just direct you to a google search with the term "gimp tutorials" here.

I've been using this program for a few years (possibly 5 or 6 I'm not sure in my old age) and for me it has been worth it. The learning curve is steep but free versus $699 for photoshop, the choice is easy for me. Also photoshop is fairly complicated as well.

Lastly you can use photoshop brushes in GIMP but not some of the other things. Look to deviantart and the internet for lots of brushes and textures.

Hope this helps those in need and it is hands down my favorite graphics software.

Flag Ripple Effect - Video Tutorial

Okay, here is my first screen cast ever and my first real tutorial for GIMP. I'm trying out the techniques I referenced in the last mention of the flag ripple technique.

Aside from looking like an idiot because I can't do simple arithmetic, I think it went okay. One thing I noticed after saving it was that I forgot to check the other two boxes on the Bump Map (Invert and Tile) But I think it looks okay. I'll also note here that with the large amounts of white in the image you can't easily keep the ripple layers with a layer mode of multiply. It darkens the image too much without adding that much to the effect, in my opinion. So that is why I only bump mapped.

My attempt to upload the video directly didn't work, so it's off to Youtube. Hmm, a total upload time of 58min? (Twiddles thumbs)

Sorry if it's a little long, but you should be able to do it after watching.

Cheers. And let me know if there is anything I can explain better.

How to texture a flag (for Ray) – Part 1

Now I can't seem to find the original tutorial I was looking for, but I did find this video by Jan Kardel in German on vimeo. (Doh! Put in the link to said video.)


Lets see if my two weeks of College German in 1986 and Google translate can get the job done.


(Just a clarification. The following is what he does in the video, not what I did to make the flag ripples. Although I did use a bunch of the techniques outlined.)


Just from looking at it he is starting with a default 640 x 480 pixel image. He probably set the background as transparent and then copied the background and created a new transparent layer. So we have three layers starting from the bottom. Background (BG) – copy, which looks to have the GIMP Mascot (Wilbur?) on it; BG, which has been filled with a solid color (blue of some sort); and New Layer which is transparent and the only visible layer at the start.


Off the bat he sets the New Layer Mode to Multiply. Then uses rectangle select to select an area perpendicular to the image. Then Layer > Crop to selection, Select > None. Then Filter > Render > Clouds > Solid Noise. The settings are check all the check boxes (Randomize, Turbulent, Tilable) Detail = 5, X Size = 16, Y Size = 0.7.


We now have our striped cloud layer. Now Layer > Scale Layer to increase the size. He unlocks it and stretches it to 650 wide (10px wider than the image). He then uses the Move tool to reposition it over the image. And finally Layer > Layer to image size.


Next Filter > Blur > Motion Blur. Settings: Blur Type = Linear, Length = 256, Angle = 90.


Now we make our Color BG layer visible and Bump Map it. Filter > Map > Bump Map. Settings are Bump Map = New Layer (or whatever our stretched cloud layer was called), Map Type = Linear, check all check boxes (Compensate for darkening, Invert Bump Map, Tile Bump Map), Azimuth = 135, Elevation = 55, Depth = 22.


Next he raises the Wilbur Image and runs a Filter > Map > Displacement with settings of X = 7, Y = 7, both from our “New Layer”; Displacement Mode = Cartesian, Edge Behavior = Wrap. Then Bump Map said image. All settings the same except the elevation was reduced to 53 and the depth to 14. And then the layer mode set to screen. Then the layer was duplicated which lightened its appearance.


So here is my take, modifying the techniques slightly:

I'm off to another class field trip today. I'll post the steps to do this soon. I hope this is what Ray was looking for.