SdKfz 251 ambulance

 

This 15mm (1/100 scale) Hanomag SdKfz 251 half-track ambulance is a model I designed and printed some considerable time ago, but the print was a partial failure — the nose of the vehicle is distorted, and the wheels didn't print at all. I just got around to making some new wheels and gluing them in place.

I'll add it to the rest of the ambulances I've been modelling over recent years. I've got a few of them now. 

Found (again)

 

I'm in the process of re-re-re-re-reorganising my workroom, and I found some 15mm WWII figures I've been looking for for quite a while.

They're Battlefront 15mm WWII Mediterranean Brits in BD trousers and shirt-sleeves, ideal for representing troops in Italy in summer. It's quite an old set, and I don't think they're still available any more.

Plus, I found some other Brits that I didn't even know I had, and have no idea where they came from: to the left of the photo are a bunch of prone figures, some in stocking caps, and a couple of Bren gunners in berets.

In the background are some PSC 15mm kits: a "Pheasant" 17pdr on the 25pdr carriage, a Morris Quad and limber, and a Loyd carrier. I put them together some years ago, and then they got shunted to the back of the queue and eventually put away "somewhere safe".

So anyway, there's my next painting project. 

 Next day....

This is what you get when you combine ownership of a 3d printer and the attention span of a mayfly. These have been sitting in their file drawers for who knows how long, and there are more stashes all around my workroom.

I really should do something about getting one or two things finished before I make any more. (It's probably helpful that neither of my 3d printers are operating very successfully at the moment). 

Mystery Mini

 

I got this figure in a mixed lot of 15mm medievals and ancients some time back in the early(ish) 1980s.

 I'm not familiar with ancients though, and I'm not at all sure what it might be. I thought maybe a clibanophoros, but I'm really just guessing.

 I also don't know who the manufacturer was.

Adventures Dark and Deep (Lite)

 

This arrived for me today, a PoD hardback via DriveThruRPG.

Including postage, it cost me about $40 yankeebucks, so about $65 Kiwibucks.

I got it purely out of curiosity, since I'm pretty happy with running AD&D2e and don't intend to change that any time soon.

The author, Joseph Bloch, has said words to the effect that he was trying to write the game that Gary Gygax might have produced as AD&D2e if he hadn't been kicked out of TSR. How well he has succeeded I cannot really say, but it does read very much like AD&D with a few house-rules tacked on. If you're familiar with AD&D1e, there are no real surprises here, at least, none to be found on my initial reading. 

Unlike OSRIC, it doesn't attempt to hew absolutely closely to AD&D1e, but it does hew pretty close nevertheless. 

This is the "lite" version of a much heftier pair of books. The core rule book and bestiary are about 500 pages each, and they're about eighty yankeebucks each too: by the time postage is figured in they'd come to near enough to $NZ300, and my curiosity does not extend nearly that far.

This volume is 170 pages, and includes the usual bunch of stuff: character creation, spells, treasure, and monsters. Its character information tops out at 8th level, but I don't see that as a major drawback. It's complete enough that you could easily run a campaign for years with just this single volume. If you're prepared to spend the extra money for the full rules, there's a lot more stuff in there.

As I said, there aren't really any surprises here. If you want to run an AD&D campaign — because that's basically what it is — with a minimum of hardware, this will do it for you.

It's also available as a Pay-What-You-Want PDF, if you want to go even cheaper. 

Tome of Magic

 

I bought a copy of the AD&D2e Tome of Magic in PDF from DriveThruRPG. I would have preferred a PoD hard copy, but they don't offer one for this volume, and I figured that at least I could print the PDF and bind my own physical book.

For those unfamiliar with it, the Tome of Magic is just a collection of additional spells and magic items for AD&D2e, and it also expands the clerical spheres and what-have-you. 

However, the scans from which the PDF has been assembled are not great — they're rather soft, and they're washed out. I could print it, but the results wouldn't be fantastic.

I also have it in RTF format, I think from a CD-ROM that was published some time back in the Dark Ages, so I thought I would just reformat that in LibreOffice and print it that way. I wouldn't get any of the graphics, but to be frank the illustrations in the original weren't all that great anyway, and it's the information I'm primarily interested in.

So I did that, and a mighty labour it turned out to be. Maybe not a mighty labour, as such, but a labour nonetheless. 

I thought that I would do all the basic text styling in LibreOffice and then the final layout in Affinity, but Affinity's collaboration with word processor output is erratic, to say the least. It doesn't believe in LibreOffice's .ODF format at all, and it crashes instantly if I try to import .DOCX. It will accept .RTF, and it also imports all the text styles information, but doesn't actually apply it to any of the text, so I'd have to go right through the whole document and reapply styles to everything.

At that point I lost the will to live, and decided to just print straight from the LibreOffice output.

 Once that's done, the actual binding will be pretty straightforward. I've done a few books now, and I know more or less what I'm about there.

Later... (2026-05-08)

I got the loose A4 printouts assembled and bound, using some of my (not very good) home-made book-cloth. 

The binding is not great, to be honest, but it'll do the job.  I'm in the process of putting together a proper A5 layout in Affinity, including a bunch of illustrations snarfed from here and there, which I could bind properly in signatures if I can ever be bothered.

 This layout is functional, but not terribly attractive, and includes no illustrations at all. I printed it direct from my LibreOffice word-processor output.