This could be the beginning of something great...

 So, last Friday, after half a year of calendar conflicts, we finally had our first session of Traveller after our character creation session in December. And boy did we have fun!

This game was originally intended as a one-off/tryout, but at the end of this session, we all agreed this will become a full blown campaign! Everyone had fun and is hungry for more.

I decided to run a premade adventure as the system is new to me as well, so I'd rather focus on getting familiar with the rules and telling the story, rather than crafting it as well.

We blew through about 90% of the adventure in a single, roughly 4-hour, gaming session.  This is mostly because our group are all old hands at RPGs and all avid consumers of true crime/forensics documentaries. And this was an investigation adventure...
Essentially, wherever the adventure said "if the players do not find/do this, it will be revealed on day "x", they essentially uncovered it on day one. They saved a massive amount of time by not interrogating the crew of the ship involved in a certain incident. Next session will be the final act of this adventure, and then it's on to the next one. (Which is linked to this one, but the players don't know it...yet.) And after that...To infinity and beyond! 😄

One of the things I've been wanting to do with my Game Mastering is to do more with props, handouts and table dressing. And now that this game will be more than a one-off, it'll be worthwhile investing in fun stuff and immersion enhancements. 

The first project will be character folders for the players... 

See you again next time!

 Wow, it's been a while, hasn't it?

Lots of stuff happened, I lost the heart to hobby and blog for a bit after the events of last post. I did pick hobbying back, but not yet keeping up with this blog. Especially as I got Covid last September. Which turned out to be Long Covid... Added to that discovering I have diabetes (possibly triggered/exacerbated by the covid infection) and getting the flu on top of that all, resetting my recovery back to zero in december.

Anyhow, enough moping, let's see what I've been up to in the intervening months. Not gonna say much, just dump pictures.

April 2022

May 2022

June 2022

A commission for a friend.

July 2022

August  2022

September & October 2022

'Rona....

November 2022

December 2022

In December, I also pitched a Traveller RPG one-off to my friends, that may, if all like it, become a campaign.

And I (re)discovered Battletech!

January 2023

And that's us all caught up.

The 28mm scale Warhammer mech still needs basing, once that is done, I'll take some glamour shots of the beast. He'll be accompanied by a Locust and maybe some infantry, for large scale skirmish level games and/or mech on mech duels.  I still need to decide what the OpFor will be...

The arrival of loot

This is a loot-themed post...

First, a real-life bit of "loot" arrived. A while ago, I impulse-bought a Geralt of Rivia (of the Witcher game and book series), I came across it at a price I couldn't resist, and pulled the trigger before thinking twice.
Here's the man himself:

 

If he seems a bit moist in this picture, that is correct. As a second-hand, he was missing his box and had been wrapped in bubblewrap for transit. This, as well as the mandhandling he received during his travel by post resulted in some warping of the figure: The sword on his back was bow-shaped and the one in his hands seemed distinctly noodle-like. Luckily some hot water allowed me to reset everything to its intended shape. This picture was taken right after his form-correcting bath...

It's a very good figure, with only a few flaws: the mould-lines that were left unremoved and the misplacement of the eye decals, making Gerald distinctly cross-eyed. I'm going to enjoy him in his unmodified state for a few days/weeks as I debate wether or not to go ahead on a full repaint.

The other loot is more gaming related. A while back, I ordered some sets of fantasy coins to use as in-game currency for, for example, tabletop RPGS or my own idea for Questing/Chivalry based fantasy skirmishing. These coins can accomodate a range of wealth from the daily loaf of bread costing a copper bit, up to major purchases using an impressively large golden coin. But as adventurers have a tendency to end up ludicrously wealthy (especially in things like D&D) and like their wealth portable, I needed a way to represent even greater riches. In come precious stones...
Another cheap online purchase:

In this picture you can see a few of them. (for reference, the largest coins in the pictures are about an inch across).

Unfortunately, the glass jewels came with that typical silvered backing, that I'm now trying to remove.
Apparently, a mix of salt and vinegar should work, but I'm not yet seeing much effect:

If this fails, it's on to sterner measures, and I'll see if the same oven cleaner I used on my Gaslands Hotwheels will have a similar effect on these gems silvery coating...

See you next time!

Fresh blood for the Iron Kingdoms, and a "Hive, Sweet Hive" digression.

The past few weekends I've been off and on painting on expansions for my Iron Kingdoms roster of heroes (or murder-hobos, depending on your point of view).
The latest addition has been this Sword Knight, finished over the weekend:

Nothing too fancy, and a close match to the "official" Sword Knight colours. One of my few undisputably bright and shining heroes for the Iron Kingdoms.

I've also received my Necromunda box early last week and have been prepping the terrain for painting some point in the near future (I also took the opportunity to assemble a few pieces of the recently released 40K Objectives models):

This weekend I finished reading the rulebook, and with perfect timing, today my copy of Gang War arrived! So far, the new rules look promising and I'm looking forward to trying them out soon.

See you next time!

And another heroine steps onto the gaslit streets of the Iron Kingdoms

I decided to focus on just a single miniature today, again for the Iron Kingdoms, a mysterious, but well-to-do lady, hidden behind her gasmask:

The mini is, if I recall correcty, a steampunk lady from Black Cat Bases/Moonfleet. The colour scheme is an homage to a dear friend of mine, who's also into Victoriana and steampunk, her favorite colour is a deep purple...

See you next time!

New heroes enter the Iron Kingdoms

Last week I (re)started on some IKRPG miniatures. Today I had some time to finish them.
Here they are:

An Ironhead in a relatively light and unmodified suit of Steam Armor, a member of the Order of Illumination and finally, an Arcane Mechanik. No names yet, as these aren't intended for specific player characters (yet...).
The Ironhead is a Hasslefree miniature, the other two are from the Privateer Press Iron Kingdoms range.

Here's a few more views:

See you next time!

A bit of catching up

Whoop, I sort of forgot to post my progress over the past weekends... I messed up my back a bit, putting a bit of a damper on several activities, including the hobby. Luckily I'm on the mend, but the involuntary hiatus has caused a bit of a lack of focus. So, hobby-wise I'm all over the place at the moment.

The last thing I could do with the airbrush (at least until I get an indoor setup organised) before the weather turned to autumn, was to do a quick test of concept/practice run for the hairspray and salt weathering I intend to do on my Necromunda scenery:

 Lessons learned from this: I need to get/make a more varied and smaller mix of salt grains, as these chips are rather large and thus crude. Plus I will need to find a way to wash off the brine without damaging the non-waterproof parts of the terrain (the Pringles can and plaster are the ones I'm most worried about....). But all in all, a good test run.

 I also received some things. First is what may be the oddest thing I've ever bought for wargaming:

Three sets of animated LED fake eyelashes. Got them for a song out of China. The intent is to integrate them into some scenery for lighting effects as they're cheaper than most model lighting sets, and quite compact, making them easy to integrate. I have two sets of blue LEDs to use for a generator wall I've been wanting to build for my Space Hulk terrain for a long time.
The other one is a yellow light that should be ideal for Necromunda.

The second is Frostgrave: Ghost Archipelago:

Haven't read it properly yet, just leafed through it, but it promises to be as much fun as it's predecessor!

So, where is the lack of focus, you ask?
Well, alongside building a tank for my DAK, I spontaneously started assembling/basing miniatures for IKRPG. None of them for characters I'm ever likely to play...

As I was down the IKRPG rabbit hole anyway, I might as well finish of some long-suffering WIP mini's. The leftmost and rightmost are official IKRPG miniatures, the central one in the steam armour is from Hasslefree Miniatures. Barely past the primer stage, these were the project for this weekend:

I'm happy with the progress I've made on these. All that's left to do is finish the metals and bases, eyes and gauges, as well as the hair on the two bareheaded ones (the central one will be redheaded, the right one a dark blonde). Hopefully I can finish them next weekend.

See you next time!

Nerd Bounty

No new hobby news, the muse is still on vacation. :(

But, today the postman was kind to me...
Last year I had participated in a Kickstarter for gaming coins, these coins were large, sounded well and were generally wonderfull, their self-claimed "legendary" status was deserved. Their only flaw was that their size and small number made them not entirely practical for actual RPG use, as they couldn't cover small day-to-day transactions.
So I turned to kickstarter once more for a batch of smaller coins to supplement them. These arrived today:

(More pics and loot after the break:)

Pants painting

Well, here she is, the finished Miko (Well, almost, I still need to flock the base):

As I would be using much of the same colours, she was joined on the painting table by one of her travelling companions, the itinerant priest:

While the mika maintains some effort to remain neat and presentable, you can see the priest just goes about in his travel-stained clothes.

Both miniatures are from the Perry Samurai range, with some conversion. The Mika has had her hakama added, and the priest has the chest of drawers added to his back. (The RPG character he represents has sworn a sacred vow to only own what he can carry with him, hence the huge travelling case. When creating the character, another friend asked "Why not just get a horse?" To which both the player of the priest and me exclaimed simultaneously: "Do you have any idea how heavy horses are, he could never lift one, let alone carry it!" :D I love my RPG group... )

Now that these are done, I intend to get back to painting my Escher, as well as building some terrain for a mate.

See you next time!