Happy Boxing Day!

By now the boy has finally unwrapped his Christmas presents, so I can show you what he got without spoiling any surprises.  It's Warhammering Time!  He traded away some terrain a few years back and has been playing with ugly tan vehicles for some time.  He left them here when he went of for some colleging, which gave me the chance to sit down and spiffy them up a bit.  With these new paint jobs, he's going to be the belle of the Only War Ball.  Make sure you scroll to the bottom, that last paint job is complete aces.  Enough to bring a tear to the Emperor's own eye.

That's not great, let's zoom in a bit...

 

If you don't want to click for biggening, the left blade reads, "For Love of Suffer Not", and the right "Sic Semper Hereticus".

Turns out graffiti is half the fun of painting these things.  The Imperial Guard has the best fiction, really, just the best.

 

I actually painted up two troop carriers and two heavy tanks.

 SPOILERS!

We Brake 4 Sororitas

 

 

Oh hell yeah, that turned out better than I anticipated.  Note that the Bloody Rose is one of the Sororitas chapters, specifically the one dedicated to maximum carnage.  I had more fun painting this little gal than should be legal.

Quick Hit: Kid Stuff

The 11 year old has a little extra time on her hands this week, so she decided the miniature collection needed a few additions.  Here, a cleaner bot (left) has been interrupted by a tentacular blue alien (right).  Proud poppa is proud.

Next Generation Gaming

My daughter crafted up a full terrain set for a wargame she tells me is based on the video game, Five Nights at Freddy's.

Here I thought all those crafty little things she's been making based off of YouTube tutorials was for her Littlest Pet Shop toys.  Turns out she was busy making her own terrain and games.

D&D, The Teen Paradigm

My now fifteen year old son showed me the notes that he's drafting for the D&D campaign he is running for his friends.  It's an interesting glimpse into one creative solution designed by a player who has played the game for years, but has never cracked open a module.  He had no model on which to build, so he just sat down and started making notes in a very visual manner.  You'll have to click to make these readable.

This is the start of the campaign.  The players are tasked with helping a large city defend itself against a besieging orcish army. The double lines are the city's inner and outer walls. The king has been duped by an evil mage, and there's a dragon riding hero in the mix too.  Evidence that the king's adviser is a traitor is scattered about; hopefully the players aren't expected to find them all, but that they represent different ways to learn the truth and confront the evil mage.

The mech powered by the oblisk (sic) in the lower right hand corner ties into the second part of the campaign...

I don't know the full details here.  There are pieces of the oblisk scattered about, so there's your fetch quest.  Now we learn the evil mage from part one was serving a lich undead boss.  It looks to me like an evil lich is supplying the drow - commanded by driders (a departure from canon already, thumbs up).  There are potential allies up above that spooky magic fog in the form of a dwarf fortress.

When I asked him about the details, he said these two pages give him everything he needs to fill those in.  He doesn't know what the players are going to do, so he just wrote down a bunch of stuff to help him remember the important bigs.  ("You mean those are all mnemonics?"  "Is that what those are called?").  As for stats...he figures all he needs is a spell list for the casters, and he can make the rest up as he goes.

Harry Chapin put it best...

An Adventure 10 Years in the Making

My ten year old daughter ran her first D&D adventure yesterday using the Moldvay ruleset.  She is either a real hard case or an old softy.  The jury is still out.

Out three heroes, Father Zeke Brimstone, the mighty warrior Angel Algerbio, and thief Ezio, find themselves on the run.  Framed for the crime of stealing gold from the village of Rattenrude, a crime for which Ezio would later confess, the trio heavily pursued by pitchfork and torch wielding villagers through a deep dark forest.  Surrounded, and beset at every turn, Angel discovers a normal sized door set into the trunk of a large oak tree.

With no better option the party disappears into the door, to find themselves in a long corridor stretching off into the darkness.  Turning to spike the door shut, they find themselves trapped at the business end of a dead end corridor.  A lone villager, an old man not part of the mob, lies at their feet.

"Don't let him get you as he got me," the old man croaks with his last breath.  Ominous and prophetic words.

Ezio wastes no time turning out the old man's pockets.  No luck.

A passage to the right.  A large room with a minotaur statue and two heavy chests.  A sign above the chests, "CHOOSE ONLY ONE".  No fools, Angel and Zeke search for traps, only to find themselves standing above a series of coin sized holes.  Open the chest and spikes rip into your feet.  A job for the thief.

Ezio climbs the walls to reach the chests safely and chooses poorly.  The chest contains only a pile of desiccated small animal corpses.  The other chest?  Disappeared in a cloud of smoke.  The minotaur statue is made of copper and has dark red eyes.  Do we look at them?  No!  Back to the corridor...

A short ways on, a tile star of the richest blue.  We all jump over it, but the warrior who trips on approach and triggers...nothing!  (Later it would be revealed by a giggling DM that the star had the power to remove a curse affecting the cleric and thief.)

Another large chamber, this one with two waist-high pedestals and a lever.  With no choices, the fighter and cleric strongarm the thief into pulling the lever.  Magic darkness descends and when it lifts, the thief stands on the right pedestal and his identical twin stands on the left.  But which is the real thief?

(To add to the confusion, our DM pulled the thief's player into another room.  They played rock-paper-scissors to decide who was the real Ezio.  Then they returned to the play table.)

Accusations flew.  Tempers flared.  Fingers were pointed.  After literal minutes of confusion, Ezio the player slashes at Ezio the DM and splits the imposter's head wide open!  Which triggers a backlash against the real Ezio - a wicked slash across the forehead.  First blood for the party.  With the death of the imposter, a secret door in the rear of the room opens.

A short hall which is crossed by a wide perpendicular passage - a thick and flowing sewer.  Through the clever use of climbing rope and iron spikes, the disgusting sewage is bypassed.

A small room, two levers, two doors out, and a waist high copper statue of a frog.  When rubbed, the statue emits the spirit of the frog and warns the party, "The Master will destroy you as he destroyed me."  When queried about the levers and doors, the frogs-spirit feigns ignorance, but as Zeke moves to the right lever, it smiles in satisfaction as it disappears.

Zeke doesn't trust the frog-spirit and moves to the left lever, pulls it, and gets sprayed in the chest with acid.  No HP damage, but his armor is degraded by two points.  The doors open, and the party moves out through the one on the right.

A wide circular chamber with four wide pools, three filled with blood.  The back of the chamber dominated by a tall statue of a staff wielding half-man half-snake.  It's the Master!

"My villagers lured you into my trap, and now I will feast on your souls."  He charms the fighter for five turns.  A vicious brawl, the cleric and thief hold off their ensorcelled friend and numerous spells from the Master just long enough for Angel to shrug off the effects of the charm spell.  With her last act of slavery she slashed Zeke to the ground.  That very round, Ezio falls to a flame bolt from the Master.

One on one now, Angel goes berzerk, hammering the Master with her sword.  Again and again the blows rain down like...well, like rain.  Finally, the evil snake man succumbs to the onslaught, shrinking with each blow until Angel finally cuts the Master in half like a dollar store pinata.  He explodes, jewels bursting every which way.  Jewels that contain the souls of his most recent victims.

Misty forms slither into the corpses of Ezio and Zeke. It is their spirits - they yet live!  And still seek a solution to their unstated curses.  The party gathers up the remaining jewels and leaves by way of a doorway in the previous room.  (It was time for church, so we didn't have a chance to investigate the pools in the room.)  The party finds themselves back in the forest, a week later with the heat off.  They walk to the next village, now 65 gp and 250 xp the richer for their harrowing experience.

The Master's Dungeon Trap For Unwary Adventurers

Not bad for a first timer.  We had brutal combat.  Foreshadowing.  A wealth of traps.  Even a doppleganger.  It was obvious she drew on her own exposure to media, in fine DMing tradition. Overall the dungeon was a bit railroady, but on the whole it's a great start to her DMing career.

Never Too Early

Win their minds when they are young, and you'll have them for a lifetime...

Choosing a starting figure.

Time for flocking.

I'm really more of a historical wargamer, Dad.

Welcome to the Jungle, Take Two

A few weeks ago, you saw this jungle terrain for the boy's 40k games.  Those bases wound up going to a good friend for a birthday present, leaving the boy's table a bit sparse.  Five bucks and a bit more variety in plastic gave us some spruced up jungle terrain.  For a splash of color, we dabbed a bit of paint onto small white flowers, turning them into giant alien plants.  All told, these 8 bases took about 2 hours start to finish.  Not a bad father-son project.

Painted Devil Dog

Finally got a chance to sit down and get some paint on this card stock Warhammer 40k vehicle.  The Devil Dog is a modified Chimera that mounts a melta-cannon and big fuel tanks instead of 10 scared and about to die Guardsmen.  This one is table-quality - you can see its a bit skewed in the full-frontal picture - but it serves its purpose and keeps fifty bucks in my wallet at a time when fifty bucks is the difference between having food on the table the day before payday and not.

The boy's next request is for a Vendetta.  Before I can get to that I need to bang out some more jungle terrain for him.  We gave the old stuff away to a friend as a birthday present, so his terrain in looking a bit sparse these days.  That shouldn't take long, and it gives me a bit of time to look at the plans for the Vendetta and see what I need to make it work.

Devil Dog Needs Some Spam

God bless the wargaming community.  They've come through in a pinch once again.

First, let me explain in 40k-ese: A Devil Dog is basically a Chimera with a melta-cannon and power plant in place of a squad compartment.  It fills a Fast Attack slot and serves a dual role as anti-infantry (thanks to a blast template) and light vehicles (due to a decent Strength and AP).

I'll translate for those of you who don't speak 40k:  This is a tank that normally costs way too much money, but can also be constructed from cereal box cardboard for less than five bucks.

Once again, this is a template you can download from the files section of the Yahoo! Group dedicated to just this sort of thing.  This is a much more complicated model than the Leman Russ seen here previously.  The body has way more than six sides, so mine wound up a bit off-kilter.  The hope is that a decent camo paint job will hide a number of sins.

The main cannon was taken from a G.I. Joe knock-off vehicle.  It was a 50-cal pintle mounted gun, but I've trimmed it, flipped it, and added a second, upper barrel to trick it out as a melta-cannon.

Two Dollar Jungle Templates

At long last, the Abox clan can rumble in the jungle.  The local craft store chain is selling some sort of plastic plant doo-hickeys for about a buck, and two of them are enough to make a slew of jungle stands.  In this case, I've mounted the plants themselves on individual washers so that they can be moved out of the way for miniatures entering the woods dark and deep.

These are going into the boy's big box of Warhmmer 40K stuff, to help round out his collection.  The plants are probably a little too big for practical use with my own beloved fifteens, but those tall spindly beggers could easily be cut down to size to make three times as many tree stands.  I've got something else lined up for the One Box of sort-of-Necromunda-but-not-really.  A dozen or so tree for a buck!  Stay tuned, true believers.  Excelsior!

The Emperor Protects (painted figures more than unpainted ones)

My son received a few more Imperial Guardsmen from a friend this Christmas.  He knows that if he plays a game with them sans paint, that his old man will feel such overwhelming shame that he'll take the dang things and paint them for him.  He did it to me again when he took the new 40k rules for a test drive on New Year's Eve.  Within 10 hours, I had primer on these guys.

Again, that's his preferred paint scheme, and to be honest I just painted these up as fast as I could and still get table-top quality results.  This is hardly my best work, but it beats bare plastic, and it looks fine on the table.  The other consideration is that the boy will field upwards of fifty to sixty of these guys at a time.  For sheer spectacle, he takes the side of quantity over quality.

Anywho, six painted little mans for my little man - Merry Christmas, kiddo.

It took me about roughly 3 hours to paint the three of these guys, which is about half the time a quality job would take.  These guys are the other reason that progress slowed down over the break.  In 3 hours, you can paint a dozen 15mm figures and still have time left over to build some terrain.  Speaking of which, wait until you see the new medical bench that's just about ready for the big spaceship...

Flashback Update

Remember way back when I first posted the construction of these bunkers?

Yeah... Since I ran out of figures, I went ahead and painted them up.

No Son of Mine!

"But Dad," the boy tells me, "It's okay, everybody plays with unpainted terrain!"

"Not in this house," I bark at him.  "So long as you live under my roof, you'll play by my rules."  Which is a bold faced lie, as 40K is anything but my rules.  We'll let him slide on that one, but some things are simply non-negotiable - like using unpainted terrain.

These are the painted up craters that we built together a week or so ago.  He's off at something called, "Winner's Camp" (which I was excited about until I learned it had no relationship to tabletop gaming) learning how to be a good citizen and apply himself and work well with others by rock climbing and doing other team building exercises.  While he's gone I decided to be a good citizen and apply myself and work well with others by painting his craters for him.

Not too sure about the grassy areas on this one.  The painted grass is okay, but it just doesn't have the same visual appeal as static grass.  Unfortunately, I'm just about out of the stuff and don't have enough to finish these off properly.  They still look a whole lot more presentable than the monochrome version, though.

Lead by example, sometimes that's all a parent can do.

Kid Stuff Sixdux

The boy traded off some terrain I built for him in exchange for more figures.  Well done him.  He figures he doesn't need terrain because, in his words, "The store has terrain we can use."  No son of mine is gonna be stuck using in-store terrain.  I'm raising him better than that.

Besides, terrain building is as much fun as playing the darn games anyway.  To start bringing him up to speed, I taught him the basic techniques of found items and 'sand and glue modelling paste'.  Together we built a few craters where his Imperial Guardsmens can hunker down.

Then we grabbed a couple of empty almond cans and slapped on accoutrements until they looked like right proper bunkers.  The flanges on the side are foamcore, and the smokestack on the right is from an empty dishsoap bottle.  Those have great texture for smokestacks.  You're going to be seeing more of those soon.

All these need is some paint and flocking and he is off to a great start.

Kids Stuff Fivedux Redux

I swear this isn't turning into a Games Workshop blog.  I'm just light on lead of my own to paint, and let's face it - friends don't let friends play with unpainted miniatures.  So I painted up my son's heavy flamers for him, too.  He traded for a pair of Catachan heavies, but he's running Cadians, so a quick conversion with headswaps and adding a shoulder plate turns them into the right kind of troops.

The guy on the left's head broke off while spraying on the protective dull coat.  I glued it back on, but it settled funny, so he's got a lot more attitude now.  These guys equipment doesn't completely jive with the rest of the Cadians, but hey - these are different kinds of troopers.  They run into battle with a ten gallon jug of high explosive gel strapped to their backs.  They aren't quite right in the head.  Their equipment just reflects that.

Kids Stuff Fivedux

Last week I took the boy (13) down to the weekly games day at the local games shop for a bit of Memorial Day wargaming.  As usual, games day consisted of mainly 40K with a few tables of the flavor of the month.  Which is fine, as it gave me time to re-read up on certain sections of the D&D Rules Compendium.  The boy ran off with his friends to field a combined Imperial Guard force against...I don't know, Space Machines?  That's a thing, right?

At any rate, he wound up trading a box of Chaos Marines, a gift from a well meaning grandmother, for a whole slew of forces that he could use, including an Ogryn, a few snipers, and a couple of squads of Cadian troops.  All in all, not a bad haul.  

The downside of the evening was my realization that the boy feels no qualms about playing with unpainted lead.  None whatsoever - there wasn't a qualm in sight, and that made me feel like such a failure as a father and a wargamer.  The kid can play 40K, that I can live with, but unpainted lead?  Why couldn't he just knock up a girl or crash my car through my living room window.  Those are the sorts of bad decision making a father knows how to deal with.  This, on the other hand...I just don't know what to do.

The only thing that came to mind was to paint his figures myself.  Set a good example, you know?

D&D w/Porn Stars Challenge: Complete!

Zak S over at D&D With Porn Stars unilaterally designated today International Anklebiter Illustrator Day.  In honor of this fine day I commissioned the illustrious and illustratory Lenore (age 7) to produce two pieces of illustration, one a scene from our current Rules Compendium Campaign, and the other the requisite displacer beast.

Two characters (Pierce the fighter and Annie the Cleric) in an action
packed battle against two skeletons in a cave.  One of them is a
skeleton king wielding a magic scepter.

A displacer beast.  With a grape on its back.  That
wasn't in the original specs, but I didn't tell her
NOT to include a grape on its back, so what
can you do?

In the grand old tradition of editors everywhere, I forgot to pay her.  Then I tried to delay payment until the date of publishing, but she wouldn't have it.  I explained the cash flow problem inherent in small press publishing and in low readership blogging, but she wasn't swayed.  When I finally threatened to withhold payment until she issued an invoice on her corporate letterhead she called in her legal representation: that would be the firm of Mother, Mom, and Wife LLP.  The cost of fighting that legal battle was more than I could justify, so I grudgingly paid her, thanked her, and asked if she could do a few more pieces for me pro bono - while I'm out of money, I explained that I could get her a lot of free exposure.

She wasn't interested.  What a prima donna.