I’m off in Vancouver this weekend, so have a brief link to an older Penny Arcade comic about one possible solution for that age-old gamer problem, “My dice hate me!”.
Via Penny Arcade.
Dice Problems
Category Archives: Misc
Things miscellaneous or otherwise not neatly sorted into other categories.
All Quiet On The Warbard Front?
Quiet around here; I was away for a week earlier in December visiting family out of town, caught a rather unpleasant cold right at the end of that trip, then all the Christmas holiday disruptions landed… which means this is my only post for the entire month of December.
I’m still messing around with converting Reaper Bones figures into a Blood Bowl Goblin team. I have ten line-goblins and two trolls in progress, and need to do up the various secret weapon goblins to finish up the basic team soon! We’re doing a mid-winter mini-league starting early in January and I’ve said I’ll play goblins, which puts me on deadline to get them at least basically playable if not finished in about a week!
I’ve picked up TooFatLardies’ Chain of Command platoon-level rules recently. CoC is a WW2 platoon-level ruleset, which isn’t an era I’m interested in, but TFL’s 2014 Christmas Special includes a set of rules for melding their WW1 Mud & Blood rules with Chain of Command, and as a huge fan of M&B I’m looking forward to trying out the M&B/CoC blended rules soon.
Richard of TFL also has a spectacular set of Afghan buildings in progress on his Lard Island blog. He’s building them for the modern conflict in Afghanistan, but the architecture hasn’t changed much in decades if not centuries and the 1919 2nd Anglo-Afghan War and associated interwar Northwest Frontier conflicts are right in the same part of the world and right in my main WW1/Interwar era of interest. Tempting, that, especially as I already have most of a platoon of British in tropical gear appropriate for the NWF.
Hope everyone had a good holiday season, a satisfactory 2014, and a great New Years! Onward to 2015!
LInks of Interest, 5 Sept 2014
Just to prevent this place becoming all-Blood Bowl, all the time, some semi-random interesting links.
Over on Lead Adventure Forum, I found the information on this thread about paint add-ins, matte/gloss mediums and related substances very useful. Going to have to visit on of the good local art stores soon, I think…
I’ve also just bought new greenstuff putty finally, to replace the very, very old strip of the stuff that’s been hanging around my desk for far too long. The old stuff had the consistency of used old chewing gum and was pretty much impossible to work with; the new stuff (along with a couple of new sculpting tools!) has reminded me how much fun messing around with greenstuff is. There’s a pile of YouTube video tutorials showing basic greenstuff sculpting techniques – one I rather like is The Dizmo’s skull tutorial.
Green Stuff Industries host a good mix of basic messing-with-green-stuff tutorials, including this Sculpting Bas-Relief Flames tutorial that I want to try out sometime soon.
One final sculpting-related link, this one from Kings Miniatures on making your own simple sculpting tools from dowel and paperclip wire.
I’m off next week to northern Alberta for three to six weeks of field work, helping run a project up there, so posting might continue to be fairly light but I’m going to take some putty and sculpting stuff with me and practice the art – it should be more forgiving of hotel suite lighting than painting, which I’ve tried in hotel rooms in the past and always quit because even at a hotel room desk the light tends to be lousy…
Reaper Minis Customer Service is Awesome
Looking to assemble unique teams for Blood Bowl without spending a lot of money, I’ve been poking around the Reaper Bones collection – Reaper’s relatively new collection of injection-molded figures in a relatively soft plastic.
I ordered a couple of figures from my FLGS that seemed usable in Blood Bowl, just to check them out. I got an Ogre Chieftain, a Minotaur, and a Spirit of the Forest, intending to remove the weapons (in the case of the minotaur & ogre, at least) and use them as, respectively, an orge, minotaur and treeman in BB teams.
I’ll talk more about all three figures in future posts, but first I have to say that Reaper’s online customer service is awesome. I bought the figures Thursday and realized that evening that the Spirit of the Forest had been packed with two right arms. Friday I confirmed on the Reaper website that the Spirit is indeed supposed to actually have both a left and right arm and sent a short email off to Reaper customer service that Friday evening.
Monday morning first thing I had a short email from Reaper asking for a shipping address so they could send a replacement left arm; I replied around mid-day and that afternoon got another email saying my part would be packaged and shipped soon. Wednesday morning I got a notice (with tracking number) saying my package had left Reaper.
I’d always heard Reaper had good customer service, but because I can order Reaper figures through Curious Comics & Games here in town had never had any reason to deal directly with them. I’m happy to say the rumours are entirely true, and I’m looking forward to getting the replacement part for my Spirit of the Forest soon!
Getting Back At It!
I’m back from seven weeks of holiday in Europe, catching up on email and such, and looking to get back into gaming and terrain making.
First up is going to be new Blood Bowl sideline terrain to go along with the scoreboard/temple I built before I left; I want to build new dugouts to go along with the new scoreboard.
After that, who knows? I’ve got a lot of partially painted figures and incomplete small terrain projects floating around that I really should dust off and finish, but there’s always distractions…
It was an amazing biking holiday across Austria, Germany, Switzerland and France, but it’s nice to be home and back!
The Workbench This Week, 29 May 2014
Quick overhead snapshot of the painting bench recently. As you might have guessed from recent posts, I’ve been in a “clear the decks” sort of mood, finally finishing off a number of smallish projects that have sat around ignored and dusty for too long, some of them over a year…
Clockwise from the top left we have (deep breath…) a batch of nine Pulp Figures thugs, two-bit crooks and menacing bystanders; a quartet of Baby Crocs for fantasy football from Impact Miniatures; a lady in a blue dress obviously being held captive by a gang of terrifying savages (Pulp Figures again); three twisted and disturbing stone monoliths intended as markers for a friend’s Chaos team in Blood Bowl (previously); Phantom Ace, Pulp Girl and little Lillie Poots from Statuesque Miniatures; some extra bases I whipped up with Milliput and pennies, one of which has an unprimed cobra in a basket on it from Pulp Figures…
Central to the whole assembly in their hospital-green robes, we have six Frothing Lunatics from Statuesque. (previously…)
Across the foreground from bottom right, we have a really, really massive Warg from Reaper Miniatures, being painted up as a quasi-supernatural Terror to inflict on people in games of Pulp Alley; a dino skull and some bones being done up as Blood Bowl markers for my Lizardman/Crocodilian team; the previously-mentioned finally completed pulp-era luggage and the Kali bronze; a quartet of light deck guns from Pulp Figures suitable to arm all manner of vessel or vehicle; three more Blood Bowl markers made of Renedra plastic barrels intended for my brother’s Scotling team.
Finally, last but not least, clipped into the two wooden clothspins (useful things to keep around a hobby bench!) there’s a pair of spiked footballs from Impact Miniatures. Blood Bowl again, obviously.
This assembly is only slightly tarted up and organized for the photo, everything here really is in progress or was recently finished and it really has been getting that crowded on my painting bench the last while. It’ll be satisfying to get more stuff completely finished, into storage and more importantly, onto the table and into use!
Links of Interest, 23 April 2014
Hope everyone had a satisfactory Easter holiday, however you celebrate it. It’s a cheap chocolate and dinner with family and friends holiday for me, and I had a good weekend on both fronts, so that was all good.
Speaking of Easter, the always-fascinating Naval & Military Books is continuing their Easter Sale; 20% off across the board, even on stuff already discounted. I got some good stuff from them last year, will be skipping it this year, but their catalogs are always worth a look.
Similarly, those well-known sellers of excellent rules, Too Fat Lardies, are having a 15% off sale on their new WW2 rules, Chain of Command. I’m not a WW2 gamer, but the system comes highly recommended and and some point I wouldn’t mind picking it up to maybe do some Russian Civil War-flavoured modifications to it!
Finally, I’ve got a very small Zazzle store wherein the discerning gamer can purchase Keep Calm & Carry Dice t-shirts and posters; this grew out of a joke that made the rounds at our local gaming group a couple of years ago and kind of turned into it’s own thing! Help support this website and my gaming habit, buy yourself a Carry Dice t-shirt now!
… And We’re Back…
When you forget to renew the primary domain your entire web presence depends on, and then have to wait a weekend for the #%^#@% bank to sort your credit card out and pay for that renewal, it becomes kind of hard for people to actually view the website(s) that you have.
Anyway, things are sorted out and running again, and I’ve gotten a couple of small packages of interesting bits and pieces that I’ll write about later this week!
In the meantime, over on Lead Adventure, the always-spectacular Lead Painters League is running. Go check out all the shiny, awesome painting!
The Year of Missing Conventions…
Victoria’s GottaCon is running this weekend, and as I’ve just flown back into town from a work assignment elsewhere in the province, I’m missing the entire thing! I’d go for Sunday, but having been away for five weeks I’ve got too many errands to run and non-gaming real life to catch up on.
Worse, it looks like I’m going to be on a short turnaround and leaving town yet again for another work assignment later in March, so there’s a very good chance I’ll miss Vancouver’s excellent Trumpeter Salute convention this year, for the first time in four years. I was looking forward to doing either pulp gaming or Russian Civil War, too. There’s a great group of gamers and friends over in Vancouver, many of whom I only see at the Trumpeter show.
That aside, I am painting again, both Blood Bowl teams and other stuff. I even took paints and figures with me on my recent field assignment, and got some decent painting done in the hotel room a couple of evenings. There’s a great group of random thugs from Pulp Figures on my desk right now, and I’m going to be stripping the paint off my Amazon BB team and re-doing them from scratch because about half of them had the primer go on sort of rough. It was an old can and I was spraying on a colder than normal day; it’s the first time in years of spray priming I’ve had that sort of finish!
Two for Remembrance Day
I’ll be off to the main downtown Cenotaph for the ceremony and two minutes of silence today, but after you do your own two minutes, here’s a pair of relevant songs for today.
I first heard “Green Fields of France” at ten or fifteen years ago, after a backpacking trip through Europe that had included time at Ypres, including a walk out of town to see John McCrae’s grave. Here’s the Dropkick Murphy’s cover.
At our main cenotaph ceremony here, we always have both a Royal Canadian Navy band from nearby Esquimalt naval base and the pipes and drums of our local reserve infantry regiment, the 5th (Princess Mary’s) Canadian Scottish. If massed pipes and drums don’t make your hair stand on end, I’m afraid you have no soul. Here they are with our local symphony orchestra doing Amazing Grace.