So, I’m afraid I’m going to be lazy, and just link to a G+ album.
Anyway, you can see a number weapons in this picture, and in the linked album there are some actual models that the equipment would be put on.
So I think I can objectively lay claim to being awesome. Admittedly, in the limited arena of Role-Playing, but still.
Today I got a standing ovation during a game. When was that last time you got a standing ovation for anything, much less the accurate portrayal of an uplifted dolphin dealing with the confusing messiness of human relations.
I suppose I should back up a few steps here and start from the beginning, or something vaguely resembling it. We are playing Apocalypse World (the Actual Plays should start going up on I Podcast Magic Missile soon) and if you keep reading, there may be minor spoilers, but I’ll be frank, it doesn’t matter that much. Unless you’re an absolute purest, forge ahead, spoilers bedamned!
Anyways, we’re playing AW, we have a Brainer, Gun-Lugger, Maestro’D and Skinner. Also, we have one of the weirder Kickstarter stretch goals, the Space Marine Mammal (played by yours truly). One of the caveats our MC put in place was that if I were to choose the SMM I’d have to run it straight, and I am. That’s not to say some hilarity doesn’t ensue, but Susan has nothing on Man as far as silliness goes. And yeah, our Gun-Lugger’s name is Man.
So anyways, last time Man got poisoned, and didn’t really start to kick in until this session. Susan ended up picking up Man and flying him to his mom’s house, and then, when it became apparent she couldn’t actually help him, and might be totes crazy, flew back to Silver’s Goldmine to seek medical attention for him. Once there it became apparent that his employer might not have Man’s best interests at heart, and so Susan sought the advice of onboard AI. You’ll just have to listen to the AP to hear justice done, because I certainly can’t reproduce the scene here with sufficient accuracy. However my rendition of the situation, and Susan’s reasoning was enough to cause two players to stand up and clap.
Yeah, I’m doing it right. Now I just need to figure out how to make enough money to live RPing.
Still, no pictures, because I’m lame. Maybe I’ll remember tomorrow. However the magnets I use are rare earth magnets. We actually carry them at FNG for exactly this purpose, though I did pick up some from Think Geek before they became popular for use in minis. The ones I use are 1/8″x1/16″ discs. I am careful to always check magnets against previously assembled pieces so that the polarity matches up. Pretty much every model I have that uses a flying base now has a magnet in it, whether it’s a Battle Fleet Gothic Eldar ship, Tau Gun Drone, eldar Jetbike or whatever. The smaller ones are just a little too tiny I’ve found. Though I have seen folks only who have used two of the 16x32ers.
They’re pretty sweet. I’ll try and get some pictures up this weekend, but I’ve been putting magnets in my Eldar army for 40k. Both in the arms and on guns. This way I can easily swap what goes where. I can field my Autarch on a Jetbike with a witchblade one week, and then drop a Singing Spear on him the next. Need to pop tanks? I can stick bright lances on my War Walkers. Up against a swarm army? A pair of scatter lasers. It’s gonna be hot. Of course, now I just need to paint all of this stuff… it’s not like I already have a queue of a million miniatures to paint. Oh wait.
I guess I better get to it.
What is GenCon you may ask? Well it started long ago, and it’s about games. Long before you could look at cats on this wonderful thing called the internet, before every house had a computer with 256k of memory, there was wargaming. Historical re-enactment on your tabletop. Fantasy battles. You name it.
Without internet some of these games got played by mail, with each player having a copy of the board, and pieces in their basement, and mailing the details of turns. Or having the occasional get together. There were newsletters, and zines.
And near Lake Geneva, Wisconsin an idea was born, let’s get a bunch of people together, and have a gaming convention. And of course it was called the Geneva Convention because of the place, and the fact that the main focus was wargames it had a nice little ring to it.
Forty+ years later it is possibly the biggest gaming convention around. Board games, card games, miniatures, role-playing, video-games you name it everything is represented. It’s moved to Indianapolis to be more central as people travel from all over the US. I’ve been about 5 times now (missed last year) and it is an absolute blast. This year I’m planning on focusing more on the RPG aspect, I’m going to be spending a bit of time at Games on Demand, but I also intend to help out with the Men In Black (Steve Jackson Games super secret demo team).
I plan on attending the True Dungeon a time or two (especially if I can rope a few friends in) which is basically live action D&D. I am NOT going to fail to play the Mech Warrior pods this year. I might play in a UFS tourney. There is just so much awesome stuff, I can’t wait. I probably won’t take quite as many pictures of the cosplayers this year… but then again, I might not be able to resist. I might even try my hand at it, though I doubt my purple mohawk is still good.
I don’t know. Today was good though. We switched servers yesterday, and today I got basically everything flipped and set up right. Still have a little bit of electronic housework, but everything is working now. Some of the highlights of the server move:
* Every event in our meeting room calendar being shifted by 3 hours due to a hack in the software designed to counteract a weird setting on the old server. Hack removed, everything is perfect now.
* WordPress no longer stuck on Latin charset, but shift to UTF-8 changed lots of characters in whacky ways. Search & replace is my friend, but it can be a little daunting when 6k+ changes are made.
* Email is still a little weird, but it all works and people really will have to dig to find the weirdness.
* Test server is go (and basically all good).
So tomorrow I can get back to actually updating the frontpage, putting in the calendar (basically the boring once a week, once a month stuff) and maybe next week I can get back to working on the fancy site overhaul that keeps getting pushed back for more important things.
For great success. I’m going to try and start this horse back up again. It’s been a while, and I’ve let it malinger. Apparently structure isn’t what I need. Habit, repetition. So yeah I’m going to start trying to write here every day. Of course, this is only a few weeks before GenCon, so almost immediately upon starting I’ll be taking a break but we’ll see if I can’t start again AND make some interesting posts or something.
Well, the interesting posts will have to start tomorrow. For now all I can tell you is today I got some Tetris socks.
Okay, so it was for fun and experience, but that doesn’t sound as good.
Today* I stripped… a bunch of deamonettes… All of the pictures in this are clickable for larger versions. Some are cropped pretty close already though.
My friend Will gave me a bunch of abused and neglected minis he had no intent of ever using. Poorly (and incompletely) painted, sloppily assembled, bases long gone. So if I’m going to repaint these (hey, it could happen some day. I’ll certainly catch up on Dr. Who and Buffy before I run out of mini’s to paint, but that’s another conversation) I’m going to need to strip them. I have a crap ton of other bequeathed minis in terrible shape which could be useful if stripped and reassembled (we’ll come back to this) so I figured starting with the ones I’m most likely to paint next would be good.
If you’re going to use this guide, here’s what you will need:
Patience – Lots of it!
Pine-Sol – Might as well go economy size, the extra you can use to clean your house.
Glass Jar or Plastic tub – Make sure it has a tight fitting lid unless you really like the smell of pinesol.
Stiff toothbrush – You want hard bristles here.
Dish Soap – You’ve probably already got this.
Gloves – Not a requirement with Pine-Sol, I didn’t use them but my finger skin is now all dry and crackly … it doesn’t hurt, but it’s a little unpleasent.
So there are lots of guides out there, touting all kinds of different chemicals, most of which are more hazardous than Pine-Sol. I like low hazard and biodegradable for pretty much anything I’m going to be dipping my hands in, plus I happened to have a bottle of Pine-Sol under the sink already. So I tossed the minis in a plastic tub, poured Pine-Sol in until they were submerged just, and the let it sit for two days. Depending on how caked on the minis are, you might want to give it longer. Certainly you’re going to want to wait at least 24 hours**. I didn’t think to take a real before picture, but the mini in the pictures above is straight from the tub. A little of the paint has flaked right off, but most is still loosely attached and you can see not much care was put into painting her.
So I set up a bowl of warm water in the sink, and about 1 minute of scrubbing w/ the toothbrush, occasionally dipping it in the soapy water and/or rinsing under running hot water, yielded this version of the mini. You’ll notice there is still a little bit of paint here and there. Mostly in the nooks and crannies. I may toss these minis into a fresh batch of Pine-Sol for another couple of days to see if I can get them spotlessly clean.
Now, on the mini to the left, you may notice has a huge green and white splotch on her leg, back and butt. I’m fairly certain that is superglue. I wasn’t really able to remove that even w/ a hobby knife. This is where some of the other more toxic chemicals might do a better job. That said, the Pine-Sol did detach all of the arms, and I was mostly able to pick off the superglue with my fingernails, only occasionally having to resort to my hobby knife.
And at the bottom of this post you can see the complete minis drying on a thoroughly soaked paper towel.
*Actually, I did this earlier this week, but my webhost was suffering a DDOS attack and took WordPress down for a few hours. Conveniently the hours when I was going to post this.
**One of my other friends Duncan, who is possibly the best painter I know, has apparently also used Pine-Sol to great effect. He claims that only 3-4 hours are really needed to get most of the paint off.
So yeah, 2 Forgotten Beasts slain. If we can get through this tantrum spiral and make the dwarves happy again it might actually be salvageable. Work is progressing well on our Waterworks project. A well. Aha! Do you see what I did there? Anyways, 3 lever operated floodgates so as not to flood too much. Tulon has withdrawn from society and claimed a craftdwarfs workshop. I kind of hope he makes us some nice furniture or something with which we can spruce up the place. Nope. A Crundle Bone Mask. I’m sure it menaces with spikes and stuff.
Another wave of migrants has arrived, putting us back to 78 dwarves. And somehow one of my dwarves has fallen down the well and drowned. It doesn’t matter, a small goblin ambush of only a couple dozen gobbos has slaughtered my militia and is now running rampant through my fortress. They’ve easily killed as many dwarves as the first forgotton beast did. With my dwarves already less than happy, probably a vampire lurking somewhere in my fort, and things only likely to get worse, it’s probably time to call this fort a failure and try again.
Since this is the end, here are some highlights of the fort! Our trade depot, and the lightly trapped main entrance, as well as the caravan entrance.
Here’s the hall of the dead. All but 4 of these coffins are full. And those 4 only because I just built them. Maybe I’ll run the game long enough to bury all of the dead.
Here you can see a portion of the fine housing. Discounting Noble housing on the end, this could once fully functional support 102 dwarves. I’d been planning on duplicating it a layer down, but now there’s no real need.
Thus ends the tale of BalancedCudgel.
Addendum! So I decided to finish up the graves, and 22 more dwarves arrived just as I finished setting out the third column of coffins (which are basically filling up with dead as fast as I can get them crafted and then placed. It almost tempts me to continue with this fort. I mean, what’s the worst that could happen at this point?
So of the 68 surviving dwarves, 17 are unhappy. Or worse. Several have gone insane, and a few have died of self inflicted starvation/dehydration. We nearly have enough Coffins to house the remains of all the dwarves that have fallen due to the Forgotten Beast and it’s aftermath. Soon, maybe the fort can get back to normal. Or as normal as can be expected. We’ve nearly finished the great wall. The 2nd cavern is safely walled off.
A modest wave of 8 stout migrants have arrived. Apparently even the tales of sadness and woe can’t keep the good dwarves away from our magnificent fort. A human caravan has arrived, and on its heels comes Gethust the Forgotten Beast. I seriously doubt my fort can survive another dozen or more deaths, I already have regular tantrums, things being destroyed and infighting. How did Gethrust get through my defenses you may ask, well, in my flu-addled state, I forgot that hornets can traditionally fly. And this one is no exception. Then again maybe not. There were only 2 fatalities before my militia put it down! We’ve traded for much of what the humans have to offer.
The wildlife preservere is now complete. Next big project will be to finish walling off the caverns for safety.