Quick post this morning to share a couple of .gifs that made me laugh out loud on an otherwise pretty dull Wednesday. This grooves nicely with the Lord of the Rings binge I've been on lately...
Part One...
and Part Two.
You have to view the pages one at a time because otherwise the .gifs start running on their own, and they need to be viewed sequentially.
Forget flying to Mordor on Giant Eagles...Boromir FTW!
Wednesday, January 11, 2012
Thursday, January 5, 2012
Painted Miniature: Old School Ranger
This miniature came to me from the same fellow who gave me the dwarf from the previous blog post. Unfortunately I completely forgot to take a "before" picture of the unpainted mini, but there wasn't much to get excited about except a somewhat battered lead figure.
Unlike the dwarf, I decided to paint this fellow in green shades, given his obvious ranger appearance. He's got a sword, a bow and arrows, and a very "Horn of Gondor"-like hunting horn. The clothes are all shades of Games Workshop greens, the horn is Bleached Bone (as are the arrows) banded with Dwarf Bronze. The hilt of the sword is also bronze. I gave the greens a wash of Thraka Green and his flesh tones and the horn a wash of Delvan Mud.
All in all I think he turned out...okay. Part of the problem with these old lead minis is it's SO easy for them to get dinged up, and this one spent about twenty years rattling around in the bottom of someone's painting case, and I don't think it was a terribly high-quality sculpt to begin with, but it does have a certain degree of homely character to it, and the model overall was fun to paint (I was listening to The Fellowship of the Ring audio dramatization while painting, so there was some good inspiration going on at the time.
Unlike the dwarf, I decided to paint this fellow in green shades, given his obvious ranger appearance. He's got a sword, a bow and arrows, and a very "Horn of Gondor"-like hunting horn. The clothes are all shades of Games Workshop greens, the horn is Bleached Bone (as are the arrows) banded with Dwarf Bronze. The hilt of the sword is also bronze. I gave the greens a wash of Thraka Green and his flesh tones and the horn a wash of Delvan Mud.
All in all I think he turned out...okay. Part of the problem with these old lead minis is it's SO easy for them to get dinged up, and this one spent about twenty years rattling around in the bottom of someone's painting case, and I don't think it was a terribly high-quality sculpt to begin with, but it does have a certain degree of homely character to it, and the model overall was fun to paint (I was listening to The Fellowship of the Ring audio dramatization while painting, so there was some good inspiration going on at the time.
Wednesday, December 14, 2011
Painted Miniature: Old School Dwarf Warrior
A friend of mine was moving a couple of years ago, and in order to clear out some of his junk, he gave me a box of random miniatures and painting supplies. A lot of it was just junk that I wound up throwing away, but there were a few miniatures worth keeping. They sat in a drawer for a long while until recently, when I based them and decided I wanted to paint them up for the heck of it.
Here's the Dwarf Warrior. He's an old lead miniature, probably at least 20 years old. If someone recognizes the manufacturer, please let me know:
He's a gnarled, tired, battered old fellow, but his armor is in good repair, he's got a few good pouches, and his axe looks well used but still capable of chopping up goblin skulls. Here's the finished product:
I'm not a great painter, so bear with me here, but I really like how he turned out. I base coated him black, then painted his armor Boltgun Metal (I use Games Workshop paints...), making it look like chainmail. But I then gave it a black wash several times, darkening it to a blackened iron look, and brushed on a light coat of Dwarven Bronze. For the hair and beard, I layered on Shadow Grey, Fortress Grey, and finally a little highlighting with bleached bone. The leather items and the shield were all various layerings of Beastial Brown, Vermin Brown, and Snakebite Leather. The skin was Vermin Brown with Dwarf Flesh over that. Finally, I gave the whole miniature several good washes of Devlan Mud, which gives him a great dark, dirty, weathered look that, in my mind, brings the whole miniature together.
So there we are. I think this guy came out all right. I need to do a better job of basing him, covering up the gaps, probably adding a little rocky soil, but all in all I think the old fellow came out well.
Here's the Dwarf Warrior. He's an old lead miniature, probably at least 20 years old. If someone recognizes the manufacturer, please let me know:
He's a gnarled, tired, battered old fellow, but his armor is in good repair, he's got a few good pouches, and his axe looks well used but still capable of chopping up goblin skulls. Here's the finished product:
I'm not a great painter, so bear with me here, but I really like how he turned out. I base coated him black, then painted his armor Boltgun Metal (I use Games Workshop paints...), making it look like chainmail. But I then gave it a black wash several times, darkening it to a blackened iron look, and brushed on a light coat of Dwarven Bronze. For the hair and beard, I layered on Shadow Grey, Fortress Grey, and finally a little highlighting with bleached bone. The leather items and the shield were all various layerings of Beastial Brown, Vermin Brown, and Snakebite Leather. The skin was Vermin Brown with Dwarf Flesh over that. Finally, I gave the whole miniature several good washes of Devlan Mud, which gives him a great dark, dirty, weathered look that, in my mind, brings the whole miniature together.
So there we are. I think this guy came out all right. I need to do a better job of basing him, covering up the gaps, probably adding a little rocky soil, but all in all I think the old fellow came out well.
Friday, October 14, 2011
Getting Back into the Gaming Groove
Coming back to RPGs after a year or more of being on hiatus is weird, but I'm beginning to enjoy the process again. One of the things I've started working on is actual playtesting for the T&B RPG. I'm developing a magical "post-apocalyptic" mini-setting, which I'm calling "The Mad God's Sandbox". I'm populating it with a lot of less than bog-standard fantasy races; ratmen, lizardmen, birdmen, inscect-men, sentient undead and golems as non-human PC races. I'm trying to come up with some fun adventures and interesting ways in which I can play with the rules and see how they help or hinder gameplay.
The response I've gotten from the Delta Green adventure was very positive, and I hope to have a follow-up adventure in a few weeks. The players all seem to be attached to their pre-gens in one way or another, so at most I think there will be a little skill-tweaking and re-shuffling. Hopefully that game will continue on in a happy fashion.
I'm also trying to get back to working on my 40K miniatures. It has been over a year since I've played a game of 40K, but I've made some new gaming contacts and it'd be nice to get a game up and running soon. I recently went through and took stock of my models and what needed to be done to make some improvements, so I have my "work orders" planned out for the next few months.
Also, my old Castles & Crusades gaming group may be finally getting back together after more than a year and a half hiatus. That should be a lot of fun - if we all remember what we were doing when the game ended last time!
Anyhow, just wanted to pass along some updates and let the world know that the blog is still alive and kicking!
The response I've gotten from the Delta Green adventure was very positive, and I hope to have a follow-up adventure in a few weeks. The players all seem to be attached to their pre-gens in one way or another, so at most I think there will be a little skill-tweaking and re-shuffling. Hopefully that game will continue on in a happy fashion.
I'm also trying to get back to working on my 40K miniatures. It has been over a year since I've played a game of 40K, but I've made some new gaming contacts and it'd be nice to get a game up and running soon. I recently went through and took stock of my models and what needed to be done to make some improvements, so I have my "work orders" planned out for the next few months.
Also, my old Castles & Crusades gaming group may be finally getting back together after more than a year and a half hiatus. That should be a lot of fun - if we all remember what we were doing when the game ended last time!
Anyhow, just wanted to pass along some updates and let the world know that the blog is still alive and kicking!
Thursday, October 6, 2011
Finally Running a Delta Green Campaign!
So after taking a long hiatus from RPGing in general, both development and gameplay, a friend of mine talked me into running a RPG campaign for a bunch of relatively new tabletop gamers. This crowd had varying levels of experience, from "a short D&D 3.5 campaign and that's it" for one player, to someone who'd basically made a Serenity RPG character...and that's about it. All of them had a good deal of board-game and miniatures gaming experience though, so they all understood things like using dice, how to process rules, and so forth.
I was worried when the subject of what kind of game to run came up, and I received the typical "I dunno, I don't really have a preference" responses. In my experience, when people give such an answer, what usually happens is that something is put together that about half the players don't like, and interest quickly flags after the first session or two. So I fired off a couple of e-mails detailing a few ideas, and the idea of a "modern conspiracy game akin to the X-Files" stuck. Hello, Delta Green!
I'd had the DG reprint (with the D20 rules, not that it really matters) for a couple of years, but my current gaming group hadn't really expressed any interest in running this game. On the other hand, I'd been itching to run a modern day occult/weird conspiracy game for ages, and now was my chance. I put together some writeups on the sort of world DG was set in, glossing over a lot of the Cthulhu-heavy aspects of the setting (most of the players are only passingly familiar with the Mythos anyhow). We decided to have a one-shot adventure with pre-generated characters, to see what people thought of the game play before diving into the conspiracy itself.
As a one-shot, I decided to hand the characters a "nautical adventure" and by that, I mean a "ghost ship" of sorts. A freighter drifting into the Boston harbor islands, boarded by the Coast Guard only to find the crew slaughtered. Of the six players, we had three FBI agents, two Boston Police Harbor Patrol, and one Coast Guard security specialist. The pre-generated characters were really only "half-gen"s; I rolled up the stats and assigned some points to skills, but then let players distribute the rest to their liking.
Quick back-up; I settled on Goblinoid Games' GORE RPG as the system of choice. I preferred BRP to the D20 system my edition of DG uses, but both the original CoC rules and the generic BRP rulebook I considered too involved for a bunch of almost complete RPG newbies. The GORE rules are simple, straightforward, easily tinkered with for any desirable results, and of course, mesh nicely with all the other CoC material I have on hand.
We played the adventure out in about three hours. There was some good investigation, and the players all immediately began asking good questions, falling into their respective roles, and everyone got along very well. As no one at the table knew any more than half of the other players, I was expecting at least one bad pairing, but overall the group chemistry seemed to flow smoothly. By the end of the game session, those people who didn't have to immediately run all went out for dinner and drinks, which is always a good sign.
As for the adventure, I think it went quite well. Turns out that three members of the ship's crew were exposed to a dangerous chemical being transported in one of the cargo holds. The tank of chemicals, along with a lot of high-tech scientific equipment, was being shipped from Europe to a research think-tank in the Boston area. Somehow, that tank was punctured (a strange, five-pointed puncture mark was found on the ruptured tank...) and the three crew members suffered the most direct exposure.
These members of the crew went psychotic, destroying the ship's propulsion controls, navigation, and communications gear, and then slaughtering the rest of the crew. Of the three, two were killed and one captured; the surviving crew member had barricaded himself in the chain room, huddled in a hastily drawn, pentagram-like circle, raving about the devil being trapped aboard the ship, and about preventing the ship from getting to shore. The game ended with the party dropping that crewman with a non-lethal beanbag round from a shotgun, and taking him off the ship. As for the "devil", the Coast Guard security team did find some strange scratch marks on the hull and railing of the ship...
From here on out, the game will have a mix of government conspiracy coupled with a heavy dose of the "weird". We'll only be meeting once a month, but I think this game is going to have some good promise.
I was worried when the subject of what kind of game to run came up, and I received the typical "I dunno, I don't really have a preference" responses. In my experience, when people give such an answer, what usually happens is that something is put together that about half the players don't like, and interest quickly flags after the first session or two. So I fired off a couple of e-mails detailing a few ideas, and the idea of a "modern conspiracy game akin to the X-Files" stuck. Hello, Delta Green!
I'd had the DG reprint (with the D20 rules, not that it really matters) for a couple of years, but my current gaming group hadn't really expressed any interest in running this game. On the other hand, I'd been itching to run a modern day occult/weird conspiracy game for ages, and now was my chance. I put together some writeups on the sort of world DG was set in, glossing over a lot of the Cthulhu-heavy aspects of the setting (most of the players are only passingly familiar with the Mythos anyhow). We decided to have a one-shot adventure with pre-generated characters, to see what people thought of the game play before diving into the conspiracy itself.
As a one-shot, I decided to hand the characters a "nautical adventure" and by that, I mean a "ghost ship" of sorts. A freighter drifting into the Boston harbor islands, boarded by the Coast Guard only to find the crew slaughtered. Of the six players, we had three FBI agents, two Boston Police Harbor Patrol, and one Coast Guard security specialist. The pre-generated characters were really only "half-gen"s; I rolled up the stats and assigned some points to skills, but then let players distribute the rest to their liking.
Quick back-up; I settled on Goblinoid Games' GORE RPG as the system of choice. I preferred BRP to the D20 system my edition of DG uses, but both the original CoC rules and the generic BRP rulebook I considered too involved for a bunch of almost complete RPG newbies. The GORE rules are simple, straightforward, easily tinkered with for any desirable results, and of course, mesh nicely with all the other CoC material I have on hand.
We played the adventure out in about three hours. There was some good investigation, and the players all immediately began asking good questions, falling into their respective roles, and everyone got along very well. As no one at the table knew any more than half of the other players, I was expecting at least one bad pairing, but overall the group chemistry seemed to flow smoothly. By the end of the game session, those people who didn't have to immediately run all went out for dinner and drinks, which is always a good sign.
As for the adventure, I think it went quite well. Turns out that three members of the ship's crew were exposed to a dangerous chemical being transported in one of the cargo holds. The tank of chemicals, along with a lot of high-tech scientific equipment, was being shipped from Europe to a research think-tank in the Boston area. Somehow, that tank was punctured (a strange, five-pointed puncture mark was found on the ruptured tank...) and the three crew members suffered the most direct exposure.
These members of the crew went psychotic, destroying the ship's propulsion controls, navigation, and communications gear, and then slaughtering the rest of the crew. Of the three, two were killed and one captured; the surviving crew member had barricaded himself in the chain room, huddled in a hastily drawn, pentagram-like circle, raving about the devil being trapped aboard the ship, and about preventing the ship from getting to shore. The game ended with the party dropping that crewman with a non-lethal beanbag round from a shotgun, and taking him off the ship. As for the "devil", the Coast Guard security team did find some strange scratch marks on the hull and railing of the ship...
From here on out, the game will have a mix of government conspiracy coupled with a heavy dose of the "weird". We'll only be meeting once a month, but I think this game is going to have some good promise.
Thursday, August 11, 2011
On Sale Now: Rivalry - A Ghost Story
A couple of months ago, I had a dream about hunting ghosts in an old hotel. I occasionally have weird dreams like that, but this one was unusually creepy, and inspired me to come up with a short ghost story.
However, "Rivaly" isn't that story. Instead, what began as the main character's introduction and origin anecdote turned into a six-thousand word short story in and of itself. The story of "Rivalry" is based around, in part, a weird experience I had at a friend's house when I was in grade school. We kept thinking his house was haunted; it wasn't of course, but a couple of odd occurrences did spook our overactive imaginations.
It's rather amazing how little things that happen to you as a kid can have a strong impact on you decades later. And the bigger that trigger event is, the bigger the wallop can be later on in life. I'm no developmental psychologist, but I don't really buy into that whole "kids bounce back better" theory. Personally, I just think trauma at a young age buries the scars deeper and affects your life in the same way an underwater mountain can affect ocean currents, waves, and tides without anything being obvious on the surface of the water.
So with that in mind, I wrote "Rivalry". It is not a horror story, per se. Many classic "ghost stories" are not necessarily horrific. Most are creepy, unsettling, and by the end you give a shiver and find yourself a little less comfortable sitting alone at home late at night. Aficionados of the horror gaming genre may agree with my opinion that it is extremely hard to cause "horror" during a horror gaming session, but I have seen players become creeped out and unsettled. If you can give your players a case of the "heebie jeebies", then that's often reward enough for an evening's gaming. That was the objective I set out to meet with this story, and from all the feedback I've received, "Rivalry" comes pretty darn close to achieving that goal.
So if you enjoy a classic ghost story a la M.R. James or Sheridan Le Fanu, I invite you to give "Rivalry - A Ghost Story" a try. $0.99 at Amazon, approximately six thousand words. Perfect for a ten-minute read just before going to bed tonight, and who knows - with a little redesigning, maybe you can use it as inspiration for your next ghost-related horror gaming scenario?
Here's the description copy from the Amazon product page:
However, "Rivaly" isn't that story. Instead, what began as the main character's introduction and origin anecdote turned into a six-thousand word short story in and of itself. The story of "Rivalry" is based around, in part, a weird experience I had at a friend's house when I was in grade school. We kept thinking his house was haunted; it wasn't of course, but a couple of odd occurrences did spook our overactive imaginations.
It's rather amazing how little things that happen to you as a kid can have a strong impact on you decades later. And the bigger that trigger event is, the bigger the wallop can be later on in life. I'm no developmental psychologist, but I don't really buy into that whole "kids bounce back better" theory. Personally, I just think trauma at a young age buries the scars deeper and affects your life in the same way an underwater mountain can affect ocean currents, waves, and tides without anything being obvious on the surface of the water.
So with that in mind, I wrote "Rivalry". It is not a horror story, per se. Many classic "ghost stories" are not necessarily horrific. Most are creepy, unsettling, and by the end you give a shiver and find yourself a little less comfortable sitting alone at home late at night. Aficionados of the horror gaming genre may agree with my opinion that it is extremely hard to cause "horror" during a horror gaming session, but I have seen players become creeped out and unsettled. If you can give your players a case of the "heebie jeebies", then that's often reward enough for an evening's gaming. That was the objective I set out to meet with this story, and from all the feedback I've received, "Rivalry" comes pretty darn close to achieving that goal.
So if you enjoy a classic ghost story a la M.R. James or Sheridan Le Fanu, I invite you to give "Rivalry - A Ghost Story" a try. $0.99 at Amazon, approximately six thousand words. Perfect for a ten-minute read just before going to bed tonight, and who knows - with a little redesigning, maybe you can use it as inspiration for your next ghost-related horror gaming scenario?
Here's the description copy from the Amazon product page:
Owen is a kid fascinated by ghost stories, but he's never seen a ghost, or met anyone who has - until Doug moves into town. Owen soon learns that Doug's family is haunted by a ghost that follows them from town to town, an entity that can slam doors and throw coffee mugs, an entity that finds Doug's family no matter where they move.
Fascinated by his friend's haunting, Owen begs Doug to let him spend the night, hoping to have a ghostly encounter of his own. Doug reluctantly agrees to ask his parents' permission, but when Mike and Sharon say no, it's the ghost that throws the temper tantrum, forcing Doug's parents to agree to the sleepover.
Owen packs a "ghost hunting kit" and prepares for a weekend of thrilling supernatural encounters, but what he experiences will change his life forever...
Monday, June 20, 2011
Hatchet Force Journal Issue #1 On Sale Now
Although I have been on a sort of T&B blogging hiatus for the last half year or so, I've been working on a lot of different projects. First among those is my thriller Killer Instincts, the first draft of which I have recently finished and am subjecting to its first critique. Beyond that, I've been working on research for a series of WW2 British Commando adventure stories, as well as doing a lot of blogging over at my Post Modern Pulps Blog.
However, the big news of the day is that I've just released my first e-journal, Hatchet Force Journal, on Amazon for the Kindle. It is a journal "celebrating stories of action and adventure", and I hope it will do for the serial action and adventure fiction fan community what periodicals like Fight On! did for the retro-gaming community. In fact, magazines like FO were the direct inspiration for HFJ, so I owe all of you a big thank you for showing me it can be done.
So I invite all of you who have any interest in action and adventure fiction to go out there and give Hatchet Force Journal a try. If you don't have a Kindle, most smart phones have Kindle apps, and you can install the Kindle Reader on both PCs and Macs for free. At $2,99, I think there is a lot of quality material in there (if I do say so myself).
However, the big news of the day is that I've just released my first e-journal, Hatchet Force Journal, on Amazon for the Kindle. It is a journal "celebrating stories of action and adventure", and I hope it will do for the serial action and adventure fiction fan community what periodicals like Fight On! did for the retro-gaming community. In fact, magazines like FO were the direct inspiration for HFJ, so I owe all of you a big thank you for showing me it can be done.
So I invite all of you who have any interest in action and adventure fiction to go out there and give Hatchet Force Journal a try. If you don't have a Kindle, most smart phones have Kindle apps, and you can install the Kindle Reader on both PCs and Macs for free. At $2,99, I think there is a lot of quality material in there (if I do say so myself).
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