Technical Experimentation

This post is by way of an experiment, trying out Picasa's "Blog This" function.

The image is one I did a while ago in Photoshop (or maybe Painter.... or both), when I was going through a many-eyed-many-tentacled-blob phase. I still like the good old M.E.M.T.B. when it comes to terrorizing parties of cocky PCs, but I haven't drawn one for a while.

Hobgoblin

This is a hobgoblin figure I got years ago and just got around to painting; I don't recall the manufacturer, but possibly Citadel or GW. It came as one of a set of three, each with identical bodies but different heads, with two bows and one spear.

The sculpting is a bit variable. The hands are very crude, while the facial features are really pretty good. It took a lot of bending to get it to hold the spear in both hands.

Project of the day

Today I made myself an ancient copper scroll case. You can never have too many ancient copper scroll cases lying about the place.

This particular ancient copper scroll case is actually made out of a couple of toilet rolls and some paint; I'd like to be able to make one out of actual copper, but my soldering skills have never been all that great. Also, I don't own a proper soldering iron, just a little thing sold as a pyrogravure.

I like to have props handy for gaming purposes, but the real reason I made this thing is so that I can take a bunch of brushes about the place in my bag without mangling them — you can see it in all its disassembled glory to the right. The Lancaster bomber is unrelated; it's a Corgi die-cast toy I bought at the Omaka aviation museum.

Pictures, as usual, may be clicked upon to gigantify them.

House rules update

I have updated my house-ruled version of the Swords & Wizardry Core Rules, incorporating such things as

• sub-class add-ons to the core classes
• d10 initiative
• 3d6 characteristic rolls
• armour and encumbrance based DEX penalties
• hit-point and CON point damage
• changed and added some spell decriptions, e.g. Feather Fall

and no doubt some other stuff that I've forgotten to mention.

In order to get the page-count down to a manageable size for stapling (68 pages) I haven't included any of the DM-specific stuff, such as monster stats or treasure/magic item descriptions.

If you feel the urge to take a look at it, you can download the PDF right here (it's about a 2 meg download) or you can go to my S&W page and poke around there.

WW1 in SPAAAAAAACE!

Click to embiggen

I can't say I'm a big fan of Games Workshop's sculpting style overall, but I do like these guys — I guess for the same reason I like the rivet-and-plate clanking land-dreadnaughts of the inter-war period. They were very quick and easy to paint once I (finally) got around to them.

I don't actually know which range these figures come from; I bought them years ago because I liked the look of them, and I've never seen any more of the same ilk locally. I imagine I could find out if I was prepared to put in twenty minutes of internet research, but frankly I can't be bothered; the price of GW figures has always been high and these days are reaching ludicrous heights, so I'm unlikely to buy any more unless I spot them in a cut-price clearance lot.

Old 15mm and modern 30mm - scale comparison

I've placed some of the 15mm figures I've been working on with some of WOTC's Star Wars plastic pre-paints to give an idea of scale. They're all sitting on my home-made stencilled 1" hex cloth (the red lines are 10" hexes, overlaid on the base hex grid to ease counting longer ranges).