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"

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.

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...

Polyhedrals and Parenting - 2

After the success of my first foray into BFRPG and roleplaying in general with my two protogeeks, we have played twice since. The first of those included defeating a gelatinous cube with fire, large albino carnivorous apes, and a run-in with goblins that nearly got Emrim the thief killed. Very nearly. The two dwarves had limped back to Morgansfort to heal, catching a lift on a cart studded with goblin arrows. As well as cleverly trading their news for a free night's lodging, they cashed in the little treasure they'd found, re-equipped, and got lumbered with a young cleric and taciturn guardsman - both the head of the Watch and the chief cleric of Tah in the fort wanted their own man with the dwarves if they returned to the ruined fort in the river. Rumours of a great hairy beast bringing squabbling goblin tribes together were causing concern, along with several tales of itinerant clerics vanishing.

(Apologies for not referencing pictures - lots unattributed on searches I made)

Emrim (dwarf thief played by MiniRab#1) and Gremdullin (dwarf fighter played by MiniRab#2)

Polyhedrals and Parenting

Because they're not at school this week, today I did the following with my boys - some maths, handwriting, reading aloud, basic economics, problem-solving, use of adjectives, probability, imaginative writing, spelling new words through phonics knowledge, science (wild animals, habitats and behaviour), and geography.

That's right, I introduced them to D&D, and it was awesome.