Vickers Medium Mk.II (1:300 scale)

This is a pretty awful model from Scotia; far below their general standard, which is normally actually not too bad. It's passable as far as profile goes, but it lacks most of the detail of the running gear (I had to paint in the drive wheel from scratch) and it has an odd grain in places that suggest the master was carved out of balsa wood or something. There is serious pitting in several places, especially on the top of the turret.

All this means that my usual painting technique of base colour, dry-brush and ink-wash wouldn't work.Everything had to be painted in from scratch, and details like hatches had to be created from thin air since they didn't exist, or had the merest suggestion, on the model itself. The edges are so soft that highlights had to be painted in to make the model look anything like as boxy as the original vehicle.

Scotia micros are cheap compared with GHQ or C-in-C, but you pay for that and more with the extra work you have to do to finish them.

Note: I thought I'd put these up here before, but couldn't find them when I went looking. So, here they are (possibly again), properly tagged so they can be found again.

Steampunk Cyborg Gorilla

This is another Reaper miniature designed by Jason Wiebe — 80001: Ape-X ($US 3.99).

I think that a gorilla's skin would tend to be blacker than this, but that made it very monochromatic, so I browned it up a bit.

And here it is again, photographed from every angle, just in case you really need to know what it would look like from a rear three-quarter view.

Fly Demon

Here's another critter. It's Reaper's 77259: Fly Demon by Kevin Williams ($US 2.79 as of this writing).

I wanted a metallic effect to the blue, which I got, but the end result isn't quite as successful as I would have liked. The miniature would benefit from having its wings replaced with much thinner acetate ones, but of course that would be a lot more fragile. It could also do with a bit more detail modelled into its limbs, to bring out the insectoid articulation a bit more.

All in all, not one of my better efforts, but it will just have to do now.

It's time for some more monster-painting

It's been quite a while since I did any fantasy monster painting, so I pulled this guy out of my endless mountain of unpainted Bones miniatures. It's 77267: Kallaguk, Troll King by Jason Wiebe, and costs about four and a half yankeedolla.

Here he is with the trusty Sergeant Measureby, who tells us that sans-base, our troll king is about 50mm tall from toes to hump. He seems bigger compared to normal human figures though, being so massive.

So far I've just glued him to a big steel washer, done some zenithal shading/highlights with the airbrush, and slapped on a rough brown wash to show me where the detail is. I haven't decided yet what sort of colour scheme to use; I was originally considering crocodilian colours, but that might be a bit drab. I shall ponder some more before I get started properly.

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I've started with some ink glazes and a bit of basic dry-brushing, and it seems to be coming together quite nicely.

Now it's just a question of getting stuck into the detail, especially about the face.

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I've started giving him a bit of character, painting in the facial details. That's a mighty big tongue he's got there.

There only thing I'm not too fond of with these plastic Bones miniatures is the mould lines. They're a lot harder and more troublesome to get rid of than they are on metal figures. Still, in my view the benefits of the material far outweigh its disadvantages.

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And we're done.

Lighting Test

I've put this here for my own reference. I've added a large reflector/diffuser to my lighting stage key light, and I wanted to take some test shots with it in place.

All photos were taken at ASA 100, f8, and with the camera set to auto-exposure. All lights are 24w. cool-white "daylight" fluorescents.

The camera is a Fuji FinePix S6500fd, now getting on for about ten years old.

1. Ambient light only, approx 1.1 seconds.
2. Key light only, approx. 1/12 seconds
3. Key + left fill, approx. 1/20 seconds
4. Key + left + right fill, approx. 1/30 seconds

More magnetic basing

One of the things I've come to appreciate about thick bases for micro-scale stuff, besides the fact that it makes handling the elements very much easier, is that the thickness of the base makes it possible to apply identification information to the rear. I print out the labels on my laser printer, and glue them to the base edge with superglue gel.

This magnetic strip is about 1.6mm thick, which is just enough to display 5.5pt text. My old eyes still need glasses to read it, but it's legible. I guess if I were to bevel the rear edge of the base, it would provide more height and thus allow larger text, but this size seems OK.

These figures are GHQ's individual Afrikakorps. Apart from the expense, I do like GHQ's infantry, except for one thing: they mould things like this tripod-mounted MG34  with a filler wall beneath the barrel. I realise that it makes casting in one piece very much easier and more reliable, but I'd rather get the models as two-piece castings for assembly, and not have the ugly wall between the base and the gun barrel..

Magnetic bases for micro-scale infantry

The mortar team (on the right) are better camouflaged than I thought.
Figures are GHQ Afrika Korps individual infantry.

I like to glue tiny magnets under all my micro-scale vehicles to keep them secure on steel trays in storage and transit, and it has the dual benefit that I can quickly and easily attach them to steel bases, if basing is required.

I've struggled to find an easy way of doing the same for infantry though. I've tried mounting them on sheet metal bases and storing them on sheets of magnetic 'paper', and that does work, but metal bases that are thick enough to handle easily are too heavy to transport easily en masse.

A little while ago though, I picked up some self-adhesive magnetic strip. It's a fairly stiff, slightly soft material that cuts easily, but is firm enough to stay flat in the small pieces needed for basing micros.

The type I found is 12.5mm (½") wide, which is perfect for the basing system I use, and it's cheap too — I think this pack cost me about five bucks. Three metres of tape (one pack) will do me 150 3-5 man infantry bases, or 240 2-man teams. That's pretty good value for money.

I'm keeping my eye out for some wider stuff (20mm wide) for mounting artillery on.

I've just stuck the figures straight to the double-sided tape on one side of the magnetic strip and landscaped over the top of it — I don't know about the longevity of that solution, and it may be necessary to revisit them in the future, but for the moment it's quick and easy, and seems to be holding quite firmly.

Khaki Green #3

I thought, when I was painting the Matilda 1, that my mix of Khaki Green #3 was looking greener and less brown than it used to, and I thought that maybe the green in the mix was staining the other pigments.

However, now that I look at it again next to some older models, I see that that's not so; it's just that previously I'd always painted it with the Dark Green #4 disruptive pattern which makes it look browner by contrast.

Mike Starmer's Khaki Green #3 mix again:

• 1 part 822 (German Camo Black Brown)
• 1 part 888 (Olive Grey)
• 7 parts 921 (English Uniform)

The A13 (left) and A9 (right) are old sculpts from Battlefront; they've both since been re-mastered and considerably improved. They're also now both available as considerably cheaper injection-moulded plastic kits from Zvezda and (I think) Warlord Games Plastic Soldier Company.

Matilda 1 (1:100, Battlefront)

Battlefront sells their model of the Matilda 1 two to a blister, which suits me just fine. It is, as I've mentioned before, one of my favourite early WWII tanks, in spite of not being much good as a tank.

I strengthened the attachment of the skeletal floating running gear by pinning it through the return rollers. I left the pin-heads exposed, but they're not glaringly obvious. It's painted in Vallejo paints, using Mike Starmer's recipe for Khaki Green #3.

I bought some 1:100 scale Matildas from Peter Pig quite some time ago; here's one of them for comparison with the Battlefront offering.

Of the two, I much prefer the one from Battlefront. The detail is better, as is the silhouette of the tank; it requires less work to make presentable, and they end up costing roughly the same, so it's an easy choice to make.

Schneider CA1 (second version)

Here's the second Schneider from the box set I bought a while ago, painted in the outlined four-colour scheme that the French kept right through to WWII.

The first one can be seen here.

Card Rack of Catan

Something that always irks me, when playing Settlers of Catan (or any other game of that ilk, really) is that the card piles inevitably end up all over the place, in a complete shambles. So, to ameliorate that issue, I made this card rack.

It's carved out of an old piece of rimu. The card bays are based with some self-adhesive foam sheet.

I'm fairly pleased with the way it turned out.

Boxes of Catan

Having nothing better to do this afternoon, I made myself a little storage box for my Settlers of Catan land and sea tiles.

I'd made one for the 5-6 player expansion pieces a little while ago (you can see it in the top-left of the photo), and I thought then, as I thought this time (too late), that I probably didn't really need to go to all the trouble of making a hexagonal internal cache.

Still, it's done now, and a fancy-schmancy hexagonal hole is definitely both fancier and schmancier than a boring old rectangular one.

I'd really like a cheapish printer with a fairly flat paper path, so that I could print on to heavy card stock. Maybe one day.

I'm done.

It's finally been brought home to me, after many years of faffing about and tinkering with system after system, that nobody else is really very enthused about playing the kind of games I want to run, nor, for that matter, running the kind of games I want to play. So, I'm out.

I'm not interested in GMing any more.

Schneider CA1 (1:100 scale)

This is the Schneider CA1 in 1:100 scale, which comes in a pack of two from Battlefront. It's mostly a very simple model to build; just six pieces — the hull, two interchangeable running gear units, two machine guns, and an extension for the girder on the nose.

This last is the problematic bit. For some reason, Battlefront thought it would be a good idea to provide this as an extension to the hull moulding, to be held on by glue with the tiniest, most fragile contact point possible at its base. It would last about five minutes under normal wargame conditions. I replaced that with a piece of plastic angle strip, set into a channel carved out where the original moulded bottom part of the girder was. It's sturdier, and it looks better too, and took about five minutes.

The Hotchkiss machine-guns on this one were a bit misaligned in the mould, but they'll do. They're much better on the other model in the box. They're quite vulnerable to handling damage, but I don't know that there's a great deal that I can do about that.

A7V - finished

These are the models from my last post, now in their final form. They are, as expected, very much darker, which is good.

Battlefront's decals are a mixed bag, though tending towards the good. They're not especially well registered, which is problematic for markings like these which should have even white borders. On the other hand, they're very thin and conform well to uneven surfaces (like rivets), and the film is nice and clear and detaches easily from its carrier sheet.

A7V (WiP)

I picked up a box of Battlefront's 1:100 scale German WW1 A7V tanks when they were marked down at my friendly local comic shop, Comics Compulsion. If not for the fact that they were at a sale price, I almost certainly wouldn't have bought them, because Battlefront's stuff is just getting more and more expensive.

There are a few different colour schemes possible for the A7V. It seems like each vehicle was painted quite idiosyncratically. The exact colours used are largely a matter of speculation, but there are enough surviving WW1 German artefacts painted in multi-colour disruptive schemes to be able to make some semi-educated guesses.

Fortunately, I'm not anal enough about it to be too traumatized if it turns out I'm horribly wrong.

I decided to paint them both in the same colours, but with different application methods. The first is painted with freehand airbrush, while the second is airbrushed using blu-tak masks for a harder-edged scheme — each block of colour will be further delineated with a black line around its periphery.

They'll both end up being substantially darkened by washes and weathering, which is really why I took some photos at this stage — so that I can have a before-and-after record.

Hit Points For Spell Use

OK, here's my initial plan for hit-point costs for spell-use.

To cast any spell, it costs you (1d6 + spell level) points, which comes off your maximum hit-point total.

Note that point: off your MAXIMUM hit point total. That means that magic use may actually cost you hit-points, but more importantly, it will affect the amount to which you can be cured.

Example: you have 50 hit-points, and you cast three level 3 spells which ends up costing you a total of 20 points. That means that you now effectively have only 30 hit-points. Just like physical damage and fatigue. The difference is that if you then take another 10 points in a fight, and get some magical healing or use one or more of your healing dice, you can't heal up past 30 points — your new Hit-Point Maximum. If you use more magic, your Hit-Point Maximum will drop still further.

Note that if you've taken 10 points of normal damage (to 40hp) and then cast a spell that drops your Hit-Point Maximum to 45hp, you won't immediately lose any more hit-points. It just means that you can't be healed up to your usual 50hp.

If you then cast another spell that drops your Hit-Point Maximum to 39, you'd actually lose that hit-point, because your new Hit-Point Maximum is lower than your current hit-point total.

A spell that requires Concentration to maintain will have to be paid for again if circumstances require a Concentration check (though it doesn't require new verbal, somatic or material components to be expended). If the check fails, you won't lose any hit-points, but of course the spell effect stops.

A Long Rest will return your Hit-Point Maximum back to normal, but nothing else will (unless I make up a spell or magic item or something that will do it).

It's not all bad news though. I'm doing away with spell slots — I think the hit-point cost is limitation enough.

I'll also be designing some magic items that can be used as hit-point sinks (i.e. that can be used to power spells before you have to use up your own precious life force) — probably along the lines of ioun stones and the like — some of which can be recharged, others of which will be disposable items.

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Modification

I was thinking about what Andrew said about there being no point in ever using a lower-level casting power, apart from the miniscule difference in hp cost, and I think this might answer that:

We return to daily spell-slots as written in the rules, but they are no longer an absolute limitation; they're rather pricing bands or multiples. The casting cost increases if you exceed the number of "safe" slots available, as follows.

Let's say, for example, you have one 4th level slot, two 3rd, three 2nd and 4 1st-level slots.

• You use up your 4th-level slot, at its standard cost of 1d6+4. If you want to cast a second 4th-level spell, the casting cost rises to 2d6+8. If you want to cast yet another, it rises to 3d6+12, and so on.
• You have four 1st-level slots available, so the first four level one spells would each cost 1d6+1 to cast. The next four would cost 2d6+2, and the next four would cost 3d6+3.

Is that clear? It does mean that you'd have to go back to keeping track of how many spells you've cast at a given level, but life is a vale of woe, and man is born to suffering as the sparks fly upward.

7-TP (1:100, Battlefront)

This is the Polish 7-TP in 1:100 scale, from Battlefront. I bought it as a stand-in for the Vickers 6-ton, though in retrospect I would have been better to have got a T-26, as the Polish version has quite a different construction to the rear of the hull. Then again, the T-26 has different turrets — maybe I could mix-and-match them. Ah well, not to worry.

The highlighting looks a bit stark on this one, which is a bit of a puzzle since it's exactly the same paint I've used on other models.

Minerva (1:100, Peter Pig)

This is the Belgian Minerva armoured car. It was not the first, but it was one of the earliest armoured cars, and it was pretty primitive — pretty much just an open-topped steel box on a strengthened touring car chassis. The crew is quite exposed, especially when operating the machine gun.

The model is 1:100 (15mm) scale, from Peter Pig. The number painted on the side is there just to break up the blankness a bit; I don't really know much about the markings used on the actual vehicles. Since it's destined for Imaginaristan "Back of Beyond" skirmish gaming and not a museum diorama, that really doesn't matter a great deal.

Austin-Putilov (1:100 scale, Peter Pig)

This is the 1:100 scale Austin-Putilov armoured car from Peter Pig. I haven't yet given it any markings, because I haven't quite decided how I'm going to use it, but no doubt I'll think of something.

Catan — Robber Master

I read an interesting Catan robber variant on boardgame.geek:

The robber, rather than being a passive block on resource production, instead becomes a sneaky mercenary, diverting the resources to its dastardly master (the person who rolled the 7 or played the Soldier).

Whenever the hex's number comes up, the current master of the robber can take the resources into their own hand instead, but must first pay the robber with cards from their hand at a one-for-one ratio.

I'd suggest that the cards should have to be different resources to those being snatched, mainly because that means that the Robber Master can't just keep the robber in place in perpetuity by swapping like for like.

If the master of the robber cannot (or chooses not to) pay the robber in full, it quits in a huff and goes back to the desert.

The only additional equipment required for this variant would be a "Robber Master" token, just so that people don't forget who's benefiting from the little bastard. To which end, I have made this new card to fit in with the "Longest Road" and "Largest Army" cards. (PDF available here).

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There was another which is not so much a robber-variant as a robber-replacement:

When you roll a 7 or play a Soldier, you can swap two hex numbers. I'd modify it slightly so that if there are any unexposed numbers, they have to go first — then, when all the number tokens are exposed, you can swap them freely.

In this instance, although people with more than 7 cards would still have to discard down to half, nobody gets to steal anybody else's cards. Just screw with their resource production.

Airfix 1/48th Hurricane

I bought this kit a couple of years ago, but never got around to building it. After doing the 1:72 Bolton-Paul Defiant, I got all enthused and dug it out.

Alas, the experience was not nearly as pleasant as with the smaller-scale kit. The 1:48 Hurricane is not a bad kit by any means, but the Defiant's tooling is so good that it made me forget what normal plastic kits are like. This one has some strange peculiarities, not least in the undercarriage, which a more anal-retentive modeller than I would almost certainly rebuild from scratch. The decals are also nowhere near as good as those on the Defiant; they cracked and silvered all over the place.

Anyway, it's done now, and all I have to do is find somewhere for it to sit where it won't get busted.

Oh, and I see that I've forgotten to paint the red gun-muzzle patches. Maybe later.

Where's the Magic in Magic?

I've spent a lot of time over the years thinking about magic use in fantasy roleplaying games.

The difficulty I have, in system after system, is to make magic magical, and to make it perilous and difficult without becoming uselessly dangerous to the user.

D&D magic, if used by the book, is really rather mundane. It is virtually omnipresent; it might as well be modern or sci-fi technology. At best, it makes the game run like a superhero RPG. The latest iterations of D&D (the 4th and 5th editions) are the most egregious in this respect, with virtually every character class tossing magic around with gay abandon, but it's a feature of the system that has been building right from the beginning back in the '70s.

In the Microlite D20 version of D&D3e, there are no spell slots as such. Spells cost the character Hit-Points to cast. I don't recall the exact ratio, but it's probably 1 hp per spell level. That strikes me as a useful mechanism to control the willy-nilly flinging about of cantrips like Light and such-like.

I'm thinking of instituting a casting cost of, say, 1d6 + 1 hit-point per spell level to cast, and half that (rounded down) for each additional round of maintenance, With the large number of hit-points most characters have in 5th Edition, along with the ease and speed of recovery, I don't think it would be too onerous a price to pay, while still resulting in a noticeable diminishing of resources over time. It would make items for creating spell-like effects a lot more desirable, and perhaps magical energy reserves (like IOUN stones or something) could be added.

This does nothing much to address the mundane omnipresence of magic in D&D, but one thing at a time.

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This guy includes in his Generic Adventurer rules just the sort of thing I mean:

"No more memorisation, you know all the spells you know.
To cast a spell, lose maximum HP equal to the spell's level. Maximum as in off the top, not the total. Your total HP will reduce if you max HP drops below it. (this prevents just healing yourself to ignore the difficulty of magic and also allows magic users to not stop casting spell from fear of killing themselves)
If a spell would be unavailable to a magic user of your level (according to default Lamentations rules) it costs double. Example: A level 4 character casting a level 3 spell (not normally available until level 5) would lose 6 max HP when casting it
Your max HP recover after 8 hours rest"

Lamentations characters have far fewer hit-points than D&D5e characters, so I'd stick with the additional d6 hp on casting. I do like the idea that spell-casting wear and tear comes off the character's hit-point maximum rather than their current total. Though I'm not quite sure what he means by "allows magic users to not stop casting spell from fear of killing themselves". I also like the idea of a magic-user being able to cast spells too high for their own level by paying penalty rates, but I think that idea needs a little more attention.

Ein Volk, Ein Dungeon, Ein Fuhrer!

"The 6th Panzer Division creates a pincer encirclement here to deal with the infestation of bugbears kobolds and squid-face things, which will open our path to the Holy Grail and TOTAL WORLD DOMINATION!"

Airfix 1:72 Boulton-Paul Defiant

For the first time in years and years, I felt the urge to build a model aeroplane. As usual, I veered away from the cool 'planes, and went for a bit of a lame duck: the Boulton-Paul Defiant, from 1940.

Airfix have just released a newly-tooled model of this aeroplane, and I have to say that it's the best-engineered plastic model kit I've ever put together. Everything went together like a breeze, and the detailing is excellent for a kit of this scale.

Home-made D4

To fill some empty time today, I made myself a "brazil nut" d4 out of some pink birch and poplar dowel. It seems to be successful as a die, so I shall probably make some more. I've just eyeballed the proportions, and haven't employed any great precision in manufacture, but it seems to roll pretty randomly nevertheless.

It's about 18 x 30 mm. I wouldn't want to go any bigger than that, but it wouldn't hurt to be a bit smaller. That would make manufacturing them trickier though.

I tried out this design too, but it didn't roll as well — it had a tendency to end up lying on one of the curved sides (and thus not showing any of the pip faces), especially when rolled on a soft fabric surface.

Also, the pips are too small and indistinct for easy reading.

Not what I should be doing

There are several things I should be doing today, and none of them are painting another Zvezda 1:100 scale T-35.

However, that's what I've done.

I'm such a rebel.

Walked 25 miles through the snow, uphill both ways....

I was leafing through some really old AD&D character sheets and what-not from my university days, and recalled how liberal we thought our DM was being when he not only let us roll 4d6 (drop lowest) instead of 3d6 for our characteristics, but then even let us rearrange them a bit if we didn't have the minimum requirements to play the class we really, really wanted with the six scores we'd rolled in order.

It seems to me that we didn't usually end up with particularly shitty characters, and some of them lasted a very long time indeed (though with a certain amount of resurrection magic at hand, it has to be said). In point of fact, I think we were beating the statistical curve quite convincingly with our character generation rolls, since there seem to be few characters in the pile without at least one characteristic in the 17-18 range, though that's in part because the DM was pretty liberal with characteristic-enhancing magic items and wishes and such-like. Where the old characters differ, stat-wise, from more recent ones is that most of their characteristics were distinctly average, and some were truly bad.

In contrast, these days most people seem to deem a character pretty much unplayable unless they start with at least one 18, and having any stat under 13 is cause for great complaint and doom-saying. It irks me, somewhat.

I'm not entirely blameless, since I've allowed some pretty liberal stat-rolling methods in the past, and people have become used to being able to pick and choose from a vast pool of above-average potential characters. I need to tighten up on that a bit.

I still think that Ye Olde 3d6-In-Order is a bit savage, but I'm very tempted to go back to 3d6 rolls (instead of 4d6, drop lowest) for my Characteristic Wheel stat generation system.

The thing is, I'm not so much keen on making everyone play a raddled, crippled, hideous moron, as I am on making high characteristics a bit special. At the moment, they're not, and I think that's wrong, and a bit sad.

Functional Generic 15mm Ruin Terrain

15mm figures (Peter Pig and Battlefront) for scale.

I have, among other tools, a scroll-saw. I also have a bunch of 3mm MDF off-cuts. Combine these things, and I get some very quick and easily-built terrain pieces. This experimental corner-ruin took me about ten or fifteen minutes to cut out and glue up, and about the same to paint. A production-line system could pump out a lot of them quite rapidly.

I've built this little piece to be a generic representation of hard cover, rather than a diorama-quality model of a ruined building. I guess it would be the tabletop equivalent of the fake bunkers and what-not they build for paint-ball ranges.

I'm not particularly interested in playing "moving diorama" wargames — not that I'm actually averse to them, and if somebody else is putting in all the effort in to create the terrain, I quite enjoy them. But I myself can't really be bothered. I guess my target, as far as tabletop terrain goes, is somewhere between a completely flat board-game style, and the elaborate, carefully modelled masterpieces that other more motivated gamers like to produce and use. All my modelling efforts go into the troops and vehicles.

 Next Day:

Another day, another ruin. Two storeys of ruination this time.

'Peter Pig' WW1 German 105mm Howitzer

I lost these guys and could not find them. Then I did find them, and painted them, and here they are.

Finding these ones meant that I also found all the others that they were safely stored away with, so some time in the near(ish) future I'll also be painting some German riflemen and machine-guns, and some British machine-guns to even up the odds for the other side as well.

Terrain Flocking Test

'Low Rise' test piece with 15mm German WWII Grenadiers and sabot bases

This may not look like much, but it's been a very useful test piece. I wanted to try out something a bit more interesting than just sprinkling patches of grass flock on a terrain piece, so I got out a whole bunch of different flocks that I've bought or made in the past and started layering them.

I'm pretty happy with the look of the thing in the end; it has a lot more visual appeal than stuff I've done before, and I'll certainly stick with the layering technique for more ambitious terrain projects.

I've also included some 'sabot' bases I made in 2mm MDF on a laser-cutter, with magnetic sheet glued underneath. The bases are designed for use with the Flames of War rules — it's a system I don't much like and seldom play, so I don't want to commit to permanently basing figures for it. I've made sabots with variable numbers of holes and hole layouts so that there will be some visual variation on the table.

Here's the Test Thing against a plain background so it's easier to see.

I buy most of my flock from a local railway modellers' shop rather than from gaming suppliers. It's cheaper, much cheaper, and comes in much larger quantities. I make some from time to time (though generally it's 'dirt' flock rather than grass or foliage) out of MDF dust coloured with acrylics or watercolours. It's easy-peasy, though to be honest I'd probably get just as good results by sieving actual dirt.