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.