Bah! Humbug!

I'm supposed to be running a game this evening, and I am feeling generally disgruntled and out of sorts. I shall have to BUCK MY GODDAM SELF UP, or else there is a distinct possibility that rocks may fall and everybody dies.

I've been waiting and waiting on a fucking timber merchant to let me have some fucking timber, and they are being fucking useless about it, so I can't get on to the fucking project I want to get on to, and I am fed up to the back fucking teeth with them. Apparently, when they tell me "Wednesday afternoon, or first thing Thursday" (after I've rung them repeatedly to find out what the fuck they're up to), what they ACTUALLY mean is "Ahahahahahahahaaaa.... yeah, fuck you".

So, bleeagh. And also, poop.

Giant Bat

Here's an old miniature of a giant bat I've had hanging around for decades, along with a 25mm Ral Partha wizard for scale.

I don't know the manufacturer of the bat; I suspect it was GW, but I can't be sure. The wings were monstrously thick, and I had to carve them down substantially just to get a thin edge. Its original base was missing, so I've mounted it on a piece of wire soldered to a steel washer.

I wanted to get its wings looking translucent and skin-like, but that proved to be beyond my powers in the time I felt the miniature warranted, and I got leathery instead. That's OK, I guess.

D&D 5e DM Screen update

I've added another couple of pages to my DM Screen, adding tables for Chases, Traps, Carousing, Crafting and Selling Magic Items, and Madness.

I don't have these two pages permanently mounted on my screen; I've just printed them double-sided and laminated, and keep them with — but not of — the screen.

The PDF is now 6 pages, and about 260 KB. You can get it here.

Wave Echo Cave

Here's the map of Wave Echo Cave I gave my players after they cleared out Cragmaw Castle, failed to save the dwarf from having his throat cut or find the dastardly evil-doer they were actually looking for, and got 25% killed by an enraged owlbear which saved the rest of them from being butchered by the remains of a depleted century of hobgoblins.

Whether or not they'll ever actually get to Wave Echo Cave is now doubtful. I seem to have gone a bit off-piste with that adventure, and now they're in Neverwinter trying to find out what's going on behind a nasty plague of zombies and things, and people not staying decently dead as they should do.

I should note that I'm not actually using Faerûn as my campaign setting, I'm using my own world that I've been playing with for a bit more than thirty years now. I've just inserted Neverwinter's bit of the Sword Coast in the north-west of my main continent where it can't do too much harm.

Pond — water terrain experiment

This is an experiment in water effects. I painted on the back of a piece of clear 1mm acrylic and then laid the groundwork on top. It doesn't display to its best in these photos, but having said that, it's not a good as I'd have liked anyway.

In this photo to the right, with some 15mm Battlefront Panzer Grenadiers, it manages to make a small, scummy pond. With the 28-30mm Essex knight below, it's more of a small, scummy puddle.

Here's a more-or-less straight-down shot. I didn't get the effect of depth I was hoping for with the back-painting, nor was the surface texture using gloss medium terribly successful.

D&D 5e DM Screen — updated

I've updated my D&D 5e DM Screen to include material from the DMG, and I also took the opportunity to fix a couple of errors that had crept into the first version. It's a fourseven-page PDF*, about a couplahunnerd KB. You can nab a copy here.

NOTE: I've taken to using the pages as a laminated flip-book set of reference sheets rather than a screen, but you can print and use it in the form that best suits you.

Here it is in use, in all its glory. I could maybe just fit another page and not quite have it falling off the edges of the table, but it would be more trouble than it's worth I think.

The fundamental structure of the thing is just box card; I've used much heavier card in the past to make other screens, but there's not really much benefit to that, or so I've found. The outside is covered with some antique Edwardian wallpaper I found in a junk shop, the inside is (of course) the laser-printed data sheets. It stands 175mm tall, so it's low enough for me to see over pretty easily. Laid out flat, it's about 1230mm long.