Model Storage Sabots

 

I have a number of relatively cheap plastic storage boxes that I use for a variety of purposes, one of which is to store wargaming models.

The models can go straight into the box's compartments (I've removed the dividers from this one), but that's not completely satisfactory — the models tend to get shoved around a bit, and they can't be stacked without risking damage to the ones on the bottom.

 I made my first ones out of heavy grey card, about 2.5mm thick. The later ones are all made from 3mm MDF.

The card versions have one advantage: the PVA I use to glue them together sets quite quickly. However, cutting the thick card with a craft knife is a bit laborious.

Since I'm lucky enough to own a small table saw, cutting the MDF components is as easy as pie, and repeatable precision is simple. However, the MDF isn't as absorbent as the grey card, and as a result the PVA takes a lot longer to go off. The sabot is more solid than the card version, but for the weights involved, that's not really an issue.

It would be an ideal project for a small laser cutter, but I don't have one of those. One day maybe.

The main reason to use a system like this is that it makes the storage modular. I can secure everything for transport with chips of soft foam, and get only the items I want in and out of the box without having to disturb everything else.

AB-41 to kick off 2026

Base colour applied

Resin print from Elegoo Mars Pro

I'm starting 2026 with a model I've done before, the Italian WWII Autoblinda AB-41 armoured car. However, those earlier models were FDM printed, and painted up for the Italians in North Africa.

This time I've printed it on my resin printer, and it is intended for service with the Germans in Italy and/or the Balkans.

So far I have its basic camouflage paint applied. Getting consistent skinny lines with my airbrush is a bit of a task; the paint has to be just right or else spattering or spidering becomes unmanageable. These paints are all from Vallejo. 

 

The base colour is German Green Brown surface primer. 

That was dry-brushed with 70847 Dark Sand

 Then it was panel-shaded with 70.031 Middlestone and 70.117 Camouflage Brown.

The green disruptive stripes are 70.017 Russian Green 4BO. 

The usual Agrax Earthshade pin-washing to bring out detail, and a bit more dry-brushing.

AD&D2e DM screen redesign

I've been redesigning my DM shield so that its table contents aligns better with those presented in AD&D2e. The old one was a bit of a mish-mash of OSRIC, AD&D1e, and my house rules — this one still includes a little idiosyncratic content, but not much. Pretty much just accommodating Ascending Armour Class, really.

• I've put the PDF (approx. 4.5MB) on my Google Drive, at https://drive.google.com/file/d/12rM7SYIBZ3WpQLH4ZaTIOkmAN7M3jkAl/view?usp=sharing

I originally designed it in Serif PagePlus IX, but when Serif abandoned that software and went over wholly to the Affinity suite of vector, pixel and layout apps, they elected (for some incomprehensible reason) to devote absolutely no effort at all to creating any sort of import filters for their own old software. It caused a degree of discontent in their clientele, I can tell you.

Anyway, it's done now, and updated not only in content, but in format, so I can edit it in the new and shiny Affinity 3 software. And I've learned a bit more about how to handle the software, which is all to the good.

Until they change their minds again and abandon this one as well. 

Page 1

Page 2

Page 3

Page 4

Page 5

These last two pages are smaller, just A5, and they're intended as flyouts mounted on the folds between the main pages. If I find there's something more I want to include with the screen, I can add pretty well as many of these as I like. And, in fact, it would probably be a good idea to transfer all of Page One's content to these sub-pages, and leave the main fold-out screen at four panels — five is a bit wide for our table.

[Edit]  In fact I did that. All of the Page One info is now duplicated on these smaller flyout pages, so you can choose which ones to print.

Sub-Page 1 

Sub-Page 2

 

Sub-Page 3

Sub-Page 4

15mm Stuff for Italy

 

This is all the 15mm stuff I currently have that is suitably painted for a 15mm British force in Italy 1943-ish. It's not a lot, but it's a decent start. Now that my copy of Battlegroup: Italy has arrived, I've got them out and dusted them off.

At a pinch, I could draft in some of my North Africa kit as well, but they tend to be painted for the earlier pre-Tunisia campaigns. 

Somewhere I have some old BF "Mediterranean" British infantry, which I shall have to find and dig out. They're modelled in shirt-sleeves and BD trousers, so they look the part — in fact, if I recall correctly, they were some of BF's better offerings in metal, which were a bit.... shall we say, variable in quality. 

Staghound

Back

Front

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I've been occupying my insomnia the last couple of nights with this — it's a British armoured car, the Staghound Mk.I, from WWII, modelled in Blender in 1:100 scale.

It's not completely finished yet, as usual. There are bits that I've forgotten, like the headlights. I'll get around to it.

I've piled it up with a whole bunch of clutter, and there may well be more of that to come. 

 A bit later on...

I like to have human figures in my vehicles, both to give a sense of scale and to make them seem less like an army of autonomous robot vehicles when I'm playing at Toy Soldiers with them. 

To that end I've opened up one of the hatches and bunged a generic AFV commander in the hole. 

NOTE: I've put the STLs up online, and they are available at https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/mojobob_hoochyman_staghound_mk_i 

 

An Indeterminate Number of Days Later...

Here is concrete evidence that I am in the process of printing this model. It's my Mars Pro, printing this model.

I would have got on to it sooner, except that I had to replace the FEP after a misprinting disaster about a week ago, and I'd been putting it off due to my Chronic Procrastination Syndrome (I hear that a cure is years away).

 ...and later that day

The test print went well. No issues at all to speak of.

We see it here with both turrets, closed and open, though I only printed one hull and set of wheels. 

I've given it a brown primer coat, and I'll be painting it in the Light Mud (SCC 5) and Black scheme for Italy.  I already have a Battlefront Daimler armoured car in those colours, so I might as well continue.

 

 

 These are the Vallejo paints I'm using:

• For SCC 5 Light Mud — VMA 71.028 Sand Yellow.
  VMC 70.987 Medium Grey is a good brushable match.
• For SCC 7 Dark Olive Green — VMC 70.888 Olive Grey 

I have, in the past, used VMC 70.988 Khaki for SCC 5, and it looks okay, but in scale I think it's a touch dark, especially when washes and what-not have gone over the top. 

 

 Xmas Day

Shiny! So shiny!

 We're at an intermediate stage of painting now.

All the various bits have their base colours on, along with a few washes here and there to accentuate detail, and now I've given everything a couple of coats of gloss varnish in preparation for some oil washing.

The gloss finish helps to stop the pin washes from discolouring the underlying paint, and it will be mitigated at the end of the painting process with an overspray of matte varnish. 

 Boxing Day

All finished (probably). 

I do have a tendency to discover things I've missed, but I don't think there's too much left undone on this one. 

Next day:
I sprayed on a bit of dust, which I think helps
to tie it all together.

 

Raupenschlepper Ost 1942 - test print

Quite some time ago, I designed this model in Blender. It's a simplified version of the Raupenschlepper Ost, with the cab made from plywood instead of stamped from steel, and with a canvas roof. They went into production in 1942, with the aim of making production faster and cheaper.

But I never did actually get around to printing it. Mainly because its hollow cab would have made printing quite difficult.

Today I filled in the cab and cargo bed with a solid block, but in the cab I kept half of each of two crewmen visible, so that they could be painted in a kind of bas-relief style. It seems to have worked reasonably well, and the model printed on my Ender 3 without any issues at all (except that I initially assembled the running gear the wrong way round, and had to tear it off and re-glue it). 

It means, of course, that there's no interior detail visible, but for a gaming model that doesn't disturb me too much. 

 Several days later...

I've got it painted now, in a post-1943 colour scheme. All in all, I'm reasonably happy with how it turned out. 

Old Character Minis

 

I took some photos of some of my old character minis with my iPhone, just to see how they'd turn out. Meh. The lighting is pretty crap, but then it was all pretty ad-hoc.

From left to right: Fnord, Smirnoff, and Aedan Comarren. 

 Here's another attempt. Also pretty meh. Somehow I kept activating the iPhone's focus lock, which was annoying, and the tonal range is quite compressed. It's certainly a convenient camera to use, but I think a proper SLR is going to be more useful for this sort of thing.

And here we go with a photo taken with my Nikon D3500 on my lighting stage. The tonal range is wider, though the details are not as sharp — I can set the camera to do some pre-sharpening, but I prefer to do that sort of thing in a proper photo editing app. I don't have a macro lens for this camera, so I have to stand off a metre or so. One day, when I win Lotto, I'll get a macro lens, but until that happy day it's not a high fiscal priority.

Paper Garden Shed

 

I don't remember where I got this from, but I vaguely recall that it was part of a set of download-and-print paper buildings for Warhammer.

I printed it years ago, and found it when I was organising (hah!) my workroom, so I put it together and gave it a base. It looks like I might have intended it for 15mm gaming, not 28mm — Sergeant Measuresby  would really have to bend down to squeeze in through that door.

Three-dimensional models are all very well, but it cannot be denied that these fold-up 2d models are a lot quicker and easier to get on to the tabletop, and I think they can look pretty good too. 

Mörk Borg

 

I was given a copy of Mörk Borg for xmas by Carl.

It's graphically very interesting, though it doesn't make it immediately clear exactly what it is (it's a RPG) nor how it's played (still don't know).

I'm hoping that close examination of its grunge-magazine aesthetic will reveal its inner nature.

I do really like its presentation, even though I have no idea what's going on. 

Red Beast

 

I've no idea what this mini is supposed to represent. All I know about it is that I've had it for maybe 35 years, and have finally got around to slapping some paint on it.

Big Hag

 

I need a big mutated giantess for an upcoming AD&D session, so I went hunting through my collected STLs to see what I could find. This is one of Duncan Louca's older sculpts, one of a set of three hags — the Bloate Hag, whatever that may be.

I printed her on my Ender 3 at 250% scaling, so she's now 115mm tall. Hopefully big enough to frighten the second-level PCs a bit. 

Buffalo

I've been tinkering in Blender again, this time building a Brewster Buffalo, ostensibly for my theoretical 15mm WWII Burmese British army that I haven't really made a start on at all.

It's available at https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/mojobob_hoochyman_brewster_buffalo_1_144 

The Buffalo in British service had a largely undeserved bad reputation, but its failures were mainly because the RAF overloaded and underpowered it. The Finns and Dutch both used lighter, more powerful versions of the same aircraft with considerable success.

This is a 1:144 scale model, intended for wargaming, not display, so I've included panel lines and ribs on the fabric-covered control surfaces on the upper sides only. It has a 3mm hole in the fuselage bottom for a flight stand. 

I've started painting an earlier iteration of the model, printed on my Ender 3. This one comes from a time before I added any panel detail at all, when I thought I could just paint in any panel lines I needed. Which I could do, I guess.

I doubt that I'll bother finishing it; I'll just print a new one and paint that instead. 

 Coupla days later....

I did eventually finish it to a usable state.

I haven't done any panel lining or weathering at all (yet). In truth, my heart sinks at the prospect of drawing on all those thin, straight lines.

 

 

 Next day....

 I've added some panel lines with a black 0.05mm Copic Multiliner.

I think a warm grey liner would have been a better option, but I don't have one to hand. 

Oldhammer Schmoldhammer

 

Way back in the distant Pleistocene, when I was but a youth, I was very snobbish about the cartoonishness of Warhammer minis. I was into serious historical medieval wargaming, not this trivial fantasy stuff, and for my actual fantasy roleplaying miniatures I preferred them as "historical" as possible.

However, in my dotage I've really come around to what is now referred to as the "Oldhammer" aesthetic.

It's a pity that I don't often have the enthusiasm to sit down and paint minis for hours at a time any more, or else I'd probably be collecting and painting them right now. They're pretty cool.

Kennon James

 

I've recently discovered an artist by the name of Kennon James (link leads to Facebook, sorry about that) who does old-school FRPG art that really appeals to me.

I just saw a front-and-back drawing he did of a classic massively-thewed barbarian, and it appealed to me enough that I turned it into a standee for use on the tabletop.

This piece of his really suits this use, being not overly detailed or fussy, but very clearly delineated.

I hope he does more of this sort of thing, because I'm becoming more and more engaged with the idea of using card standees for tabletop play, both RPG and wargames, rather than lovingly painted 3d models. Not least because the effort involved in getting them on to the tabletop is relatively trivial.

Aid to DMing Laziness

 

There aren't any random encounter tables in the AD&D2e core books, as there once were in, for example, the AD&D1e Monster Manual II.

However somebody, and I don't know who that somebody is, put together a whole bunch of tables from a whole bunch of AD&D2e sources:

• Monstrous Manual
• Forgotten Realms Appendix
• Fiend Folio Appendix
• Monstrous Compendiums, volumes 1-4

I think, though I don't remember for sure, that I grabbed the PDF via Dragonsfoot*. But maybe somewhere else; I don't know.

 The main issue with this excellent piece of work is that it included no Table of Contents, or page numbers, so a bit of page-flipping was necessary to find anything.

I laboriously copied and pasted the whole thing, column by column, from the PDF into LibreOffice, and applied styles to everything so that a ToC could be generated. 

Then I printed it in 16-page signatures, stitched it together, and gave it a simple wraparound card cover, itself covered in my home-made book-cloth. In the process, I gave it a classy ribbon bookmark and a cover graphic I whipped up in CorelDraw, printed and laminated, and glued to the front.

'Tis a small thing, but mine own. Sort of. 

 

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* I did get it from Dragonsfoot. From here, in fact: https://www.dragonsfoot.org/php4/archive.php?sectioninit=SE&fileid=400

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Very Late Paradigm Shift

 

When I first started playing AD&D, back in '81 when I first went to university, we all had a lot of time on our hands. We could play as often and as long as we liked, and as a result our campaigns tended to be very long-lasting and wide-ranging.

What it has taken me an unreasonably long time to come to terms with is that that situation no longer applies. people have lives and obligations and things to do besides playing D&D. 

Even with a schedule of only playing face-to-face once a fortnight, it's not unusual that somebody won't be able to make it from one session to the next.

What this means for me, as the DM, is that I can't really expect to be able to run an extended story-arc campaign any more. Any adventure I present pretty much has to be capable of resolution, one way or another, within two or three hours of play. 

That's a bit limiting of course, but it's not an insuperable creative challenge. It just means that we can't indulge in any sort of leisurely build-up to the action, and because the length of time between sessions might be long, any foreshadowing may well be forgotten and wasted by the time it becomes relevant.

Essentially, what it means is that we're going to have to play in an episodic ST:TOS framework, not a series-long ST:DS9 story arc milieu.

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On a side-note, apparently D&D (et.al.) is taking off in retirement homes across the USA. It's proving to be excellent for providing a social focus and engagement for retirees who would otherwise risk isolation, as well as being excellent for cognitive maintenance.

I imagine it would also be good for actually running a game, since unless somebody has died in their sleep, you can probably rely on them actually being there. Which is by no means certain or even likely out in the real world.

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Addendum: I bought a second copy of the AD&D2e PHB softcover reprint from DriveThreuRPG, since it seems we need more than one at the table, and everybody else is too goddam cheap to get one of their own.

I have a copy of the 1989 edition hardback, but the page numbers are all different to the fancy-schmancy 1995 "black book" edition, which I prefer. I have an original one of those too, but for the hurley-burley of the tabletop I prefer to have something that's basically expendable. 

Giant Bat Monster

 

This is a 3d printed giant bat critter that I picked up somewhere, quite a while ago, and printed on my Mars Pro.

It sat on my workbench unpainted for a long time, years in fact, until I finally decided to get it out of the way and slapped some speed-paint and inks on to it, and gave it a cardboard base to protect its delicate foot-claws. 

I'm not as impressed by the speed-paints as some seem to be. They're okay, as far as they go, but I don't know that they're any better than Ye Olde Inke-Washe. 

 Here's Sergeant Measureby with his trusty Spear of 5mm Increments to demonstrate how big this critter is. 

Big enough to be fairly fearsome, I would think. 

More Italian Artillery

 

Another Italian 75mm, this time painted up for Europe or Russia.

Exactly the same model and figures as last time, with just a different colour scheme. 

The Size of Money

 

In one of our ancient D&D sessions, it actually became relevant exactly what size were the coins the characters were carrying. Thanks to the internet, and especially to the miraculous Wolfram Alpha, I can now give a categorical answer to that age-old question.

The assumed weight of coin in AD&D2e is 50 to the pound, which means that any coin, regardless of its metal, weighs 9.07 grams. With that information, and knowing the density of the three primary metals for coinage (gold, silver, and copper), Wolfram Alpha gives us the respective diameters for cylinders 2mm high (or thick, if you prefer) of 17.3279mm, 23.421mm, and 25.419mm respectively.

So, there you are. That's how big your coins are.

Italian 75mm Howitzer (15mm)

 

Finished (more or less) the Battlefront 15mm WWII Italian 75mm howitzer base I've been using as a learning exercise for myself.

Overall, I'm fairly happy with it. And I've figured out a few things that will make building future ones a bit smoother. 

Shells for bases

 

I made some artillery bits to populate some of my 15mm artillery bases, to give them a bit more of a lived-in look.

The STLs are available at 

https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/mojobob_hoochyman_howitzer_shells_15mm_ for a couple of bucks.

They're specifically modelled as WWII Italian 75m howitzer shells, but they're pretty generic and could stand in for a whole bunch of short-case one-piece ammunition variants.

There are three sizes of ready-ammo stacks in the set, plus an array of individual shells, plus one of expended empty cases.

The gun and 15mm minis shown here are from Battlefront.