High above the Thieves' Guild on Cutpurse Row in the Snail Quarter (P/F) is where, living mostly quietly in semi-retirement, you will find Prince Fnord the Golly-Gosh Darned Nice Guy (fighter 13), and a few floors below, his hideous and intellectually stunted compatriot Smirnoff (fighter 9).
It's tragic the way they've just relaxed into getting old and fat, instead of running around trying to avoid getting killed by everything they meet.
Showing posts with label Smirnoff. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Smirnoff. Show all posts
Monday, 22 December 2014
Tuesday, 10 September 2013
Bonesium Smirnoff (and "magic wash" recipe)
I made an error using a Vallejo wash over the armour instead of the superior Citadel washes, or one of my own concoctions*. The Vallejo washes are rather gloopy; I'm not that impressed with them really.
The figure is glued to a steel washer, which is why the base is extra-thick.
=================================================
For those who are interested, the "magic wash" recipe I use is as follows:
- 1 part Klear acrylic floor polish (Future in the USA)
- 1 part Armorall blue windscreen washer detergent. This acts to break the surface tension so the wash will flow into any creases or scratches.
- 1 part water — distilled water is probably best, but Christchurch tap water is pure enough to use straight.
- Just enough Tamiya X-21 matting agent to take the shine off — quantity is by trial and error. Add it in small doses until you get a finish that is acceptable to you.
- Add ink of an appropriate colour, again in small doses until you get the strength of colour required. My most-used general-purpose colour is 50/50 sepia and black.
As I understand it, Klear (Future) may not be being produced any more. You can probably use a clear acrylic medium in its place, but I haven't tried it myself yet. The great thing about Klear is that it's very low viscosity, and self-levelling — that will probably not be the case with acrylic medium.
If you want more of a glaze than a wash, reduce the proportions of Armorall and water. In fact, you can pretty much do away with them completely.
Wednesday, 9 February 2011
AD&D Character Sheet Design
In Palmerston North, when I first started roleplaying (when I was supposed to be doing university study), we didn't have access to much in the way of official material. There was one bookshop who, for a short while, stocked a few AD&D manuals and some of those terrible TSR dice that crumbled like hard cheese, but that was about it. The first I heard of the famous "goldenrod" character sheets was just in the last few years, thanks to the internet.
What that meant was that if we wanted character sheets, we had to make our own — the sheets archived in my last post are examples of some that I designed with rotring and ruler, and photocopied at vast expense at university (if I recall correctly, it cost about 20 cents per copy — that's about a buck and a half in modern money).
The last sheet that I laid out manually (that is, by actually drawing lines and writing captions with a pen) was this one, copied at my work on to a bunch of surplus green card that somebody had bought a whole ream of and only used about five sheets. Just as an aside, I found the card excellent for character sheets; being so much sturdier than paper, it will take a lot more erasing and similar abuse, and it has enough body of its own that you're much less likely to accidentally punch through it with a pen or pencil when resting it against something yielding, like carpet or thigh.
This particular sheet is for another very old (somewhat munchkinish) character, Smirnoff the Fighter, who was immensly strong, extremely stupid, and hideously ugly. I haven't played him as a character for years, though I still employ him very occasionally as an NPC. You will observe that this design includes a bunch of stuff for Unearthed Arcana classes like the Cavalier and the Thief-Acrobat. By the time this particular sheet was made, we were using a bastardized AD&D1e/UA/2e melange.
When I got my first computer in 1990, along with a copy of CorelDraw 3, I designed this one, based largely on the green sheets above. The computer makes it very easy to keep your lines straight, your spacing even and your text legible, but in the end it's all a bit sterile. Functional though.
Note: you can grab a PDF of this sheet here; it's about 25 KB, so not a large download. Ironically, I designed the sheet just in time to stop playing AD&D — that's about when we changed everything over to the Hero System 4th Ed.
What that meant was that if we wanted character sheets, we had to make our own — the sheets archived in my last post are examples of some that I designed with rotring and ruler, and photocopied at vast expense at university (if I recall correctly, it cost about 20 cents per copy — that's about a buck and a half in modern money).
The last sheet that I laid out manually (that is, by actually drawing lines and writing captions with a pen) was this one, copied at my work on to a bunch of surplus green card that somebody had bought a whole ream of and only used about five sheets. Just as an aside, I found the card excellent for character sheets; being so much sturdier than paper, it will take a lot more erasing and similar abuse, and it has enough body of its own that you're much less likely to accidentally punch through it with a pen or pencil when resting it against something yielding, like carpet or thigh.
This particular sheet is for another very old (somewhat munchkinish) character, Smirnoff the Fighter, who was immensly strong, extremely stupid, and hideously ugly. I haven't played him as a character for years, though I still employ him very occasionally as an NPC. You will observe that this design includes a bunch of stuff for Unearthed Arcana classes like the Cavalier and the Thief-Acrobat. By the time this particular sheet was made, we were using a bastardized AD&D1e/UA/2e melange.
When I got my first computer in 1990, along with a copy of CorelDraw 3, I designed this one, based largely on the green sheets above. The computer makes it very easy to keep your lines straight, your spacing even and your text legible, but in the end it's all a bit sterile. Functional though.
Note: you can grab a PDF of this sheet here; it's about 25 KB, so not a large download. Ironically, I designed the sheet just in time to stop playing AD&D — that's about when we changed everything over to the Hero System 4th Ed.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)