Table For Four, Take One

To make sure that the first batch of dungeon furniture would paint up right, I did a quick paint job on the big table and four benches...

Yeah...this is going to work out just fine.

Warren is In the House

Castalia House, that is.

This week over at the indy publisher's blog, soon to be the best wargame blog on this or any other net, Wargaming Wednesday With Warren.  Somehow I managed to sweet talk the editors over there into letting me in the pool during adult swim.  Now you can read a full blown review of Osprey's En Garde! rules.

After you're done, set your link feeds to check it out every Wednesday.  They've got a stable of great contributors over there who mostly talk hex-and-chit wargaming.  Cirsova in particular writes deep and intelligent posts about the complex end of wargaming that make me wish he was my next door neighbor.

2D wargaming is something I'd love to do more of, but just don't have the time for more than a quick and dirty game of Barbarian Prince or Outpost Gamma.  Heck, my copy of ASL is...come to think of it, I don't know where it is I haven't seen it in so long.  I hope one of my brothers has it stashed away somewhere.

New Yan'qui Craftsman



The dungeon just got in a big shipment from Fantasy Ikea.  Frankly, I'm doing everything I can to avoid building doors.  Still haven't found a technique that I like yet.

Sci-fi figure for scale.

Everything you see here was made with popsicle sticks and hot glue.

Click to see better detail on that table.

Well, not quite everything.  The bottles are cut off bits from a bunch of G.I. Joe knockoff action figures that have been rattling around the bits box for years.  The scrolls are cut off bits from wooden dowels.  Other than that, it's all coffee stirrers and popsicle sticks.

Some of this stuff is a bit over-sized and clunky, but dungeons are strange places.  Things should look just a little off.

Two beds, still need mattresses and pillows.  Need those wandering
monsters well rested before their big entrance.



A Wargamer Christmas - The Lead Pile Groweth

For wargamers, the past few weeks have seen all those figures you ordered from overseas over the Christmas break  start showing up in your mailbox.  For me that consists of four packs of Ral Partha's Blighthaven line, and a pack of 15mm.co.uk's skeletons and adventurers with some demi-humans for good measure.  That's a pretty good chuck of lead to add to the mountain.



Speaking of painting supplies, your humble host is going to take a stab at painting at the big boy table.  Thanks to the pernicious effects of peer pressure, as applied by the good guys over at the In The Garage Podcast, we're going to go full monty on the washes.  This is a big change from my usual method of dry brushing everything.

That should help give the fantasy dudes a more unified look that is distinct from the sci-fi guys.  Of course, we OSR types know that a little overlap in the two can be a good thing, so don't be surprised to see a death bot or alien monster or two show up in Castle Meatgrinder from time to time.

Never Paint Alone - A Podcast Recommendation

In The Garage

The best time for painting - at least for middle-aged family men for whom this hobby is at the bottom of a long, long list of things to do - is that magic hour between seeing the kids off to bed and when days tribulations finally catch up to you.  Hopefully, that's a quiet hour of solitude, so it's nice to have a little something to keep you company, whether it be movies, books on tape*, a little music, whatever helps the mind stay as busy as your hands.

One of my more recent additions is a podcast made just for guys like me, and if you're reading this, probably for guys like you.  In The Garage  is pretty much two guys who sit around for an hour talking about 15mm scale miniature wargaming.

Dungeon Construction - Paint on the Walls

Watching Guy Ritchie's The Man From U.N.C.L.E. was a fun, if trying*, way to pass time while slapping paint around on the tiles for Castle Meatgrinder.  The tiles were spraypainted earlier in the day, with some trepidation.  

*Fun spy flick, but a mistake to put on a movie with that many subtitles in it while you try to paint something.



Worried for nothing.  The craft store sells a nice foam-safe spray paint in a dark gray.  After spraying these boards, you can dust them with a black and light gray for an easy mottling effect.  The boards were ready for use, at that point, but I slapped down some brown and gray on the floors, too, to add even more texture.

Dungeoneering Tiles, Take Two

When last we met, I file-thirteened a pile of half-finished terrain consisting of a bunch of shoddy dungeon work.  This time out, I built a dungeon using my preferred materials, foamcore and balsa wood.  This time around, I used foamcore for the bases and balsa wood for the 'walls'.  The balsa is straight and very easy to work with.  So easy, that I ran out of it quick and had to halt work for a few days while I ran out and picked up more of it.  The photos below show just a few of the three-inch square tiles constructed to date.  I also have a small number of six- and nine-inch rooms to add to the mix as well.

Now, I'm not sure that this is going to work out well.  Everyone tells me that foamcore warps like the devil when you paint it, but that's never been an issue for me before, so we're going to give it the old college try. If it doesn't work...no problem, that just means I get start over, and that means I get to build more stuff.  It's my own little Xanatos gambit.

Like the tiles, my second round of doors turned out better, too.  This version was constructed entirely out of popsicle sticks, which give it a lot more rigidity.  The base is still too light, though, so every time you open the door, the whole thing tips over just a teeny bit (one of the virtues of working in 15mm scale) and the door winds up acting as a kickstand.  It's not too egregious, though, so we'll live with it.

As you can see, they are still a little too big, but that adds to the alien-terrain feeling.  And hey, ogres, giants, and dragons gotta squeeze through those things, too, you know!

The next step, painting, will be make-or-break it.  I plan to base these things in dark gray spray paint, and even though I've got something designed for use with styrofoam, you never know until you pull the trigger.  If the painting goes well, we've got a new dungeon tile system.  Better yet, and I have some thoughts on how to make this system even more flexible in ways that I haven't seen done before.  Stay tuned.

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Last month was my best month ever for hits on this blog.  Thank you all for stopping by the old Abox residence.  You folks are the best motivation evar!