You've Come A Long Way Baby

What A Difference 30 Years Makes. At least to my painting skills. Having made it to the end of the month with a post every day and a few more  besides, I think I am quite happy with my month.

I am a little all over the place with what I am painting at the moment. I don't seem to be able to focus on any one thing at the moment and i keep going down different blind alleys. Whilst I was going through some old figures the other day, I found this very old dwarf barbarian. I call it nostalgia but I am sure my dad would have a different term for it.

This is the artistic version of opening a window into my soul.

This is an old (very old) Citadel one. It would be class as some sort of giat or troll slayer now but I think this was the first time figures like this were produced. I got it at a shop in Chester which is long since gone. It is not amongst the oldest figures I own but it is one I got during the mid eighties so it is now getting on a bit.

This is probably one of the last figures I ever painted using enamel paints.  I remember thinking at the time what a good job I had done and even showed it to my parents who were suitably proud of me. We are all a little short sighted in my family and 30 megapixel cameras have a habit of revealing all the flaws including my lack of painting talent in my mid teens.

So I decided to repaint it and this is the end result. I have learned a few tips and tricks since then which will hopefully do this figure the justice it deserves. I think I have improved over the years. Although I think it looks better in the flesh. I am not so sure that I have come all that far but I think I'm doing okay. He should do as a dwarf Barbarian that will fit in with the dwarves I have done for the Skyrim game.

What do you think?

Lonesome Cowboy

So close to my goal of the month which is posting someyhing here every day, despite having some PC troubles. Only one more day to go.

Given that I am playing in a zombie game and that life expectancy in this sort of game is not what it might be, I thought it best to have a backup character. One more suited to surviving the day to day that fighting his way through a hoard of zeds.

I was looking through my unpainted lead pile and found this one which I thought would be perfect so I thought I would do a work in progress post. Because of one mistake early one,  have really struggled to get the colour on the right arm to look right so it is now on about five coats of paint.


I looked at this figure, especially the mustache, and though Sam Elliot in Tombstone. So figured he would do. He strikes me as the ideal zombie hunter but I may be able to use him in a range of other ways.

Basing Bash Draws To An End

The weekend saw me doing some inking of bases and today has seen me do a bit of dry brushing on top of that. These are what is left of the Viking/ Skyrim hoard that needed to be finished off.There are some that still weapons adding but for th most part these are all now done.

What that left me with was a base with a bit of depth of colour and pleasing to my eye. It's also given me an opportunity to look at some of the figures again and do a bit of titivation. I have bit black ink around some of the unpainted eyes as I think it gives the faces a bit more depth.

Followed by another coat of mat varnish for the figures to make them truly tabletop resilient and they are done. Nice and matt in finish and robust enough to handle even the most careless of players. They have only jyst been done so are still a little shiny.

Basing is a pet hate of mine so I am glad it is over now. That said, I am sure I'll have some more to do.

Another Monday Gone - Another Zombie Game

Had a lot of fun in Andy's zombie game again last night. We went back to the farm we went to last week to try and see if we could get a car started. With no luck. We did manage to get some more stuff done though. This time without the use of firearms.

That was me on the left. Having valiantly lead the charge, the moaning zombies got me and my character decided to take up a covering position, as it were although he did get close enough eventually to deliver a killing blow.

The guy with the Molotov at the back belongs to Jason. My character doesn't like his much as the character is more than a little bit dodgy although Jason himself is a top bloke. the character has a tendency to run off (not here obviously where he was decidedly dragging his feet). he did go off scouting later with another speedy member of the party only to find the old adage about not having to outrun the bear, just having to outrun your mate works in RPGs as it does in real life and they ran into ten rather hungry dogs. The rest of the party, after a turn or two of discussion, decided to charge in and save the day. Pity for his sake the zombies in this game don't go for brains as they wouldn't even notice him.

Copplestone Biochem Squad

Just a quick post. Having made some backwards looks over the last week, I thought I'd post something else that I have played about with recently and it's more Copplestone stuff. I got these when I was going through a post apocalyptic phase of my gaming about eight years ago. No one else seemed all that interested at the time but things change. Having looked at them again recently I really want to buy some more. I liked these models so much that I went out and got some more.

With this pack I decided to have a bit of a play about and did some conversions. There is a fifth one somewhere

Bonus - Dara O'Briain

I am going to start with a plug for the source of the idea. In the almost constant trawling of blogs that I seem to do I found Marks wargaming - anything but a one. He was talking about a picture of Dara O'Briain and how much he thought he looked like a zombie. So I took the picture (call it art not plagiarism) and zombiefied it a little.

If you happen to be viewing this and you object to this Mr O'Briain, I'll take it down. Big fan of yours by the way.

Don't Make Me Roll For Initiative - D+D Was Forty

Never say anything about this blog not having it's finger on the pulse or accuse me of ranting. That said, D+D was forty last month, apparently although no one is quite sure what the date was which amused me a little. Like the little orphan it has become (with it's father in the form of that nice Mr Gygax and mother in the form of TSR both sadly long gone) it seems to be walking up to the head of the orphanage and asking "please sir, can I have some more."

This piece of information has sent me on a trip down memory lane. It's nearly as old as I am. I have been role-playing since about 1983. So I have not quite been there from the beginning but I have been doing this for a while now. For me, it started with seeing an advert for Tunnels and Trolls in Military Modelling Magazine. I then made my dad go into a shop called Games in Liverpool to buy it for me and I can't imagine how much of a fish out of water he must have felt.  If you are reading this, thanks dad. I know you may not understand it but it has given me a lot of happiness over the years. Then came figure painting, then wargaming, then the board gaming (if you don't count Escape From Colditz and Risk) and even a bit of Larping. Over the years I have embraced my inner geek with a fair bit of gusto.

I quickly moved on from Tunnels and Trolls and D+D in favour of Traveler. This is the game that changed the way I viewed role-playing and still guides me today. I rarely play high fantasy games. I play way more sci-fi and modern games.

Whilst going through the zombies the other day, looking at tarting them up,  I found a few that were amongst the first minis I ever purchased. What a day it was when they first arrived. They have been repainted since I got them as I think my early attempts as a 14 year old, in enamel, were not all that great. Things have changed a bit since then though. I remember buying them from a couple of shops in Chester for around thirty pence each. I have rooted through eBay a few times to find stuff that I missed out on at the time and don't see any of them going for that kind of money any more.

Anyway, this was supposed to be about D+D. D+D has never been what I loved to play, it's more something I played because it's what other people wanted to do. I guess that I have to acknowledge it's place in role-playing. If it's good enough for Vin Diesel and Wil Wheaton, it should be good enough for me right? Well no, the excesses of post buy out D+D have turned a found memory into something of a living nightmare. 4th edition turned my stomach and 3 and 3.5 were not much better.

I think I feel sorry for WOTC because I can see what they were trying to do. Take the offline experience and turn it into something that can be done online. Sadly, to facilitate a failed attempt at this, they turned D+D into something that was kind of akin to Pokemon with cards you have to print out yourself and if you don't buy the program to work them out, you have to do all the maths yourself. The computer games they have produced so far and the tabletop environment that seemed to die off are nothing like role-playing as I recognise it. The trouble with computer games is that they are limited. There is almost always only two options, use the stated solution or leave the room.

Oh, maybe I should do the compliment sandwich thing now. What I did like about 4e was the way the presented scenarios. Rather than just a basic map and some stat blocks, the presentation was fantastic. Nice maps is always a bonus although I would like to see what could be done with online, printable versions of them. The really clever bit was giving the DM tactical advice about how to run a combat. I think I would go as far as saying that as a referee, 4e is one of the easiest games to run. As a player, it starts to suck from character generation on. The one campaign I played in, I played a warlord. My main option in combat was to figure out who was going to do the most damage and give them another go. Tactically the right thing to do but not the most enjoyable.

When I realised that D+D was forty years old it made me think back to the early days. Then I started thinking about how much I dislike D+D again. These days I all but refuse to play it as a game. It's not my thing anymore. maybe the next version of D+D will be more what I am looking for.

My Sunday morning in bed ends now, time to get up and clean the house and buy cat food.