Meet Emrim

Meet Emrim. For a dwarf (and a thief*) he's a good sort, and a fine shot to have alongside you in a fight. Not behind you, mind, he's not a perfect shot by any means.

This lovely old figure (not sure where he's in production now; Viking Forge? Alternative Armies?) will be my ten year old's character in our Western Lands campaign using the early D&D retroclone ruleset, Basic Fantasy RPG, which is my go-to set for this kind of thing. So far we've gamed solely with paper, pencil, eraser, and imagination, but I think it might respark their interest to have some representational figures and a gridded mat for key encounters.

I'm not planning on handing the figure over yet. Apart from anything else he needs varnishing and a couple of foliage bits on the base. The main reason is that I have a vague plan to make one if those "deluxe" gaming boxes that look like a book but contain a dice box with pencil, dice, and figure storage. We'll see.

Thirty-one figures painted this year now, if you include 10mm figures; seventeen of them since late August!


*He prefers "investigator"

Time passes 01

[The story so far]

Time passes 01

We've now reached the stage where all the players have dispersed to university etc. so our gaming is likely to be far more spread out, with maybe only a single game session per year. This is the first such gap, but on Friday we're getting the band back together (including a boyfriend and girlfriend who will be exposed to the full oddness of the Averaigne Adventurers en masse). 


So what's been happening since the last session? Well...

Averaigne campaign - session 40

[The story so far]

Session 40 - in which there are trolls, a sad end, bandits, guile, guilt, vengeance, and promotion

The adventurers, including new recruit Gern, head after Lord Montfort to force him to explain his role in the lizardyness of his wife.

NOTE: in order to keep a complete record, but not put off posting these any longer, I'm just transcribing my DM notes. Short and sweet, but this was a monster session to round off our regular gaming. And it happened about a year ago (bad Mr Rab!), but we've the opportunity for a game on Friday so I'm getting things up to date again.

Double figures

With a grunt of "It'll do!" I put down my brush and reached double figures of completed miniatures for 2018 and also completed the set of current characters (seven, plus a dog and a choice of two characters to replace the latest one Ed killed) for my currently-paused old-school D&D campaign, Averaigne.

The latest two figures are the (previously unknown to me) adventurer variant of Mimbrin from the Dwarf King's Court boxed set from 1982 - exactly the same figure but with a great big pack slung across his back - and a masked wizard that caused me much irritation to paint. Still, no regrets and no do-overs this year, so he'll have to face eldritch what-nots and delve into long forgotten dungeons just as he is!

Assuming that "Mimbrin" will take on an NPC role, the photo below shows the party at full strength.

Ain't no party like a D&D party...

... 'cos a D&D party don't stop until they're out of healing potions and all the clerics are dead!

If that's the case, this party should keep going for a little while as they have not one, but two fully-fledged clerics, as well as a fighter who has a newfound devotion to the god of safe passage to the afterlife and is seeking holy orders.

Still phone photos, but this is what I've painted this month...

D&D party - WIP 2

Those of you who lie awake at night, worrying over my ability to finish painting any figures to completion need fret no longer. At the end of week three of 2018 I have finished three figures, and am probably only one session away from finishing three more. I've amazed even myself!

Here are the current three WIP figures (two Ral Partha, and I think the dog is one of Farmer Maggot's hounds from GW's film tie-in range). I'll save showing the finished miniatures until the whole adventuring party is complete and, if I'm feeling brave, varnished.

These figures represent Dumnorix (cleric of Alathea and righteous smiter), dog (who hasn't appeared in our adventures yet; he's one of the two additional pieces that got lifted from the shelf of shame to join this project), and Nausicaa (elf of great diplomacy, great hair, and great boots).

D&D party - WIP 1

I'm enjoying painting up these Ral Partha figures for the current characters in my Averaigne campaign which we're playing using the BFRPG rules for a retro-D&D experience. All are WIP, and just snapped with my phone - proper photographs will happen when I finish a batch of them. There are eight characters in total, and two extra pieces if I get round to it. The plan is to complete them all by the end of February.

Gwen Smoll
A tough little fighter who will, when the situation demands, "just whack it with [her] axe".

Oiseau Nouriture
Lights his sword on fire to receive divine guidance.

The man with no name
The next character that Ed O will doubtless get killed in highly characterful but entertainingly idiotic ways.

Dungeon delving

Regular readers will know that I've overcome my teenage/early-adulthood disdain for roleplaying and have been enthusiastically dungeoneering with retroclone Dungeons and Dragons with my sons and, separately, a group of students (sadly on hiatus while they're off at university). We've been using the excellent opensource Basic Fantasy Roleplaying Game (BFRPG) rules by Chris Gonnerman (Solomariah on several forums), and doing so purely with dice, pencil and paper in full "theatre of the mind" style.

But I got some new toys over Christmas, so I think there's going to be a little more of a half-way approach for encounters from now on. Think props and clarifications, representative rather than millimeter perfect, and absolutely no counting of squares or arguing line of sight! But I still get to use a few figures when I want to. Anyway, the new toys:

A Chessex Battlemat:

Some of the great dry-wipe monster tokens from Billiam Babble of Inked Adventures:

And an impulse purchase of some adventurer miniatures in Autumn last year yielded what I needed to provide suitable figures for the Averaigne crew. Last night I started blocking out metals and a first layer of flesh in front of McMafia:

It feels good to be painting again and starting the new year with a new project feels fresh and appropriate. There's also the chance of a get-together game in mid Spring, so I have a target.

Arthurian illustrations

A large part of my interest in the medieval fantasy that can be found in the games I mostly play (WFB, Dragon Rampant, my Averaigne Basic Fantasy/D&D campaign, Knights' Quest and various other dungeon-crawling games) is the combination of folkloric and chivalric legends. In some ways I'm quite Victorian in my enthusiasm for chivalry and its modern incarnations of gentlemanly conduct, while recognising the sometimes restrictive gendering aspects that don't sit well with some. I'm also a big fan of the works of painters such as Burne-Jones and other pre-Raphaelites, with their medievalism. When the two combine, I'm a happy man - and I've discovered a new artist that hits the spot that I wanted to share.

Katharine Cameron, a member of the Glasgow Art School in the late 1890s, worked as a book illustrator (among other things) and for me captures that slightly naive, watercolour/stained glass effect (I'm sure there's a proper artistic term for that). What caught my eye were these illustrations she did for Mary MacGregor's 1907 Stories of King Arthur's Knights that formed part of the Told to the Children series.

Bombadier beetle shells? We're rich!

Yesterday my two boys (9 and 7) asked me to run a roleplaying session for them, continuing the adventures of the dwarven thief and fighter duo (Gremdullim and Emrin) with their trusty NPC comrades, the human cleric Jerard and fighter Geoffroi. I protested that I hadn't prepped anything, they didn't care - "Just make it up, Daddy, isn't that the point of the game, to make up a story together?" How could I resist their old-school wisdom? Back to Morgansfort we went...

Stab!

Well, Japanese stab binding at least, which is a binding style that threads around the spine of the book, making it perfect for single sheets.

Never one to pass up an opportunity to pick up a new hobby, especially if it involves some aspect of creativity, I've been doing a bit of basic bookbinding. Aside from notebooks I've made a couple of sketchbooks, one of which is a thing of beauty if I say so myself and will be a Christmas gift to an artist friend. I also thought that the various pdf modules I've downloaded from RPGDriveThru would be easier and nicer to use if I printed them and bound them.

In order for my printer not to die, I put together my own black and white covers, reusing some of the lovely oldschool artwork from within the modules themselves.

So here we go:

Averaigne campaign - session 39

[The story so far]

Session 39 - in which there is shopping and kidnapping

The adventurers, including new recruit Gern, re-equip themselves for further heroism and consider just what to do about their original quest, the ailing Lady Montfort.

NOTE: in order to keep a complete record, but not put off posting these any longer, I'm just transcribing my DM notes. Short and sweet.

Averaigne campaign - session 38

[The story so far]

Session 38 - in which a new NPC, and the necessity for a new PC, appear

The battle complete, and both the bone-golem and its summoners destroyed, it's time to check pulses and loot the enemy

NOTE: in order to keep a complete record, but not put off posting these any longer, I'm just transcribing my DM notes. Short and sweet.

Averaigne campaign - session 37

[The story so far]

Session 37 - in which they run away and then go back
The adventurers are hopelessly outclassed by the cultists an their bone golem, so they run away like cowards cunningly withdraw to look for help.


NOTE: in order to keep a complete record, but not put off posting these any longer, I'm just transcribing my DM notes. Short and sweet.

The adventurers revealed

Sometimes I consider getting appropriate miniatures for the characters of my players in the BFRPG campaign I've been DMing for the last year or so, but finding figures that are  "just right" is pretty tricky. Today, though, I found a site called Hero Forge which lets you design a character and then have it 3d printed. As you might imagine, such a service is rather expensive but the process of design is good fun. You can also export the images, so here is what 20 minutes of fiddling allowed me to produce for the characters:

Pinboard #01

I spend too much time online to start another platform, but I do want to keep track of/share random pictures that are geek-worthy. So I'm going to dump them on here!
#RPG #Memes

Averaigne campaign - session 36

[The story so far]

Session 36 - Guards, Cultists, and Bone Golems - oh my! 
Carefully, the party edged down the stairwell, light up ahead of them clearly visible and with a blue tinge. Although old and stained in places with mossy-mold, the steps were clean and freshly swept - there were even a pair of brooms to one side!

They readied their weapons and advanced grimly.

Averaigne campaign - session 35

[The story so far]

Session 35 - Paddle power
After a surprisingly restful night in the little side-passage they'd found leading off from the main sewer, it was time to explore further, starting with the door ahead of them.

Averaigne Inkarnate

Yay for bad puns as blog titles.

I can't find the post on FB which put me on to Inkarnate as a mapping app, but I'm glad they did. It's free to sign up, takes about fifteen minutes to learn all the controls, and then you're off. There are limitations (available stock art, how much you can scale it, lack of a good road texture), but it's pretty nifty. Apparently there's a proper commercial release on the way that will also allow city and dungeon mapping. Jolly good!

Here is my first attempt at mapping Averaigne with it. I need to work a bit on intermixing different scale trees, I think, and I need to rough out some more bits to fill in the map, but not bad for the time taken, imho.

Averaigne campaign - session 34

[The story so far]

Session 34 - Stone spears and eggs
The bats swirled around their heads, diving and biting at them. Tybalt was face down in the sewage and not moving but, despite his shield held above him, Dumnorix was struggling to force his way through the flock to get to his aid. It looked bleak as the party struggled to find an effective response.