What's Done in June

Every year, I write this January post of like THIS IS WHAT I WILL DO, and then most times it never works out.

I won’t say what I said I would do, but I will say what I have done, and also I have pictures. In addition to the pictured projects, I've primed a squad of rats for Blood Bowl, and a couple of other figures (a Reaper Efreet woman, I think? for Frostgrave)

I went ahead and dropped the $$$ on a 3d printer for my 44th birthday. Below you'll see some Plague Marines of the Old Skewl, topped off with my remixed-space marine pack that I found on Thingiverse (link in a second). It's necessitated learning the new skill of 3d modelling and the printing process, so that's sort of cool.

Just below that, you'll see the thing in various stages of BUILT, with my 1st printed model - a Rankin & Bass-style Goblin from DTRPG (link in a sec)

Here she is, the unchristen'd 3d-Printer, a Creality Ender 3.



Also, I made some flocking with green paint, soapy water, and the contents of my miter-saw's catch bag. Turned out pretty satisfactory, but I haven't flocked anything, yet.



Also, I made nine 8-inch by 8-inch "Ruined City" tiles to be used for Frostgrave or Necromunda. Really, the more Frostgrave I play the more Frostgrave I want to play. The reverse is sadly true for most of the Games Workshop games I play these days. Don't get me wrong, I love the Newcromunda models. I mean the goliaths and escher are great right out the box, and the little bits! o! the little bits. But like, I feel like I'd need to buy like 20 books to get it all, then they'd put out a book that had the rules and no fluff and it would be like twice as much as then fall apart the first time I opened it.

I would feel that way, I don't know if that's how it worked out. Anyways, me n the kiddo had fun drawing the little stones on the surface of the tiles. And the painting was fun, too. Not as $pendy as a $ector Imperiali$, yeah, but like I got a 3d-printer, man.

The Irritating Problem of Shared-Walls Dungeon Maps

When I was a wee lad, let us say in the summer of '83 or '84, maybe, it was at that time in my life that I had been introduced to D&D and found in it a very useful tool for avoiding the tedium of day-to-day earthly life. Also, the Atari 2600 and my favorite game Adventure. Maybe a couple of others.

I also discovered graph paper, almost accidentally, and since I'd had a couple of modules in my collection my brain lit up like a Christmas tree! AHA I could make some dungeons, too, but what really happened was that I - maybe in an unhealthy way - would just draw mazes on the graph paper OVER AND OVER AND OVER and then give them to my grandparents who (godsblessum) were like non-plussed but cooperative. And they solved them, agreeably, and so I had to escalate the process, and I would put in rooms with treasure, and then traps, and the occasional monster and so what you would get is a lot like what we would call a dungeon these days, but pretty MAZE-y. I recall hours upon hours of sweaty NW Florida afternoons laboring over whether the squares were too similar, or maybe the paths were too linear, or whatever a young guy would have gotten into before he'd discovered other kinds of masturbatory exercises. Pretty soon, I burned out the pad of graph paper or found myself stymied or maybe I discovered the piano in the clubhouse room near the pool and tried to figure out how to play LET ME CALL YOU SWEETHEART. Maudlin.

Literally the same cover as the one I toiled at. You can find anything.

Anyways, maybe a year or two later, the Gold Box adventures (pool of radiance etc) and another favorite of mine TELENGARD came out on the c64 and we - my buddies and me - were into these day long affairs of maze-maze-maze-kill-kill-kill-maze-maze-maze and hey! who's to say it wasn't great? Not me, that's for sure! But I think I'd learned my lesson in terms of tedious mazes and I got to be irritated by the "Shared Wall" phenomenon. That is, when you use graph paper to make mazes the way I did, and you make them dense, the way I did, naturally your Grandad is gonna be like "Oh Man I just Drill Through This and Head For The Exit". The cheater.

Now - you cannot pull this sort of trick on a C64 - the in-game physics don't allow for Passwall or Dimension Door or whathave-you. So - always you're going to be presented with the spooky anxiety of SHIT MAYBE THEY WILL JUST CHOOSE TO DIG, OR HACK, OR ZAP THEIR WAY THROUGH THIS B

So, I drifted away to the more "moderner" way of doing it, which is to say I separate, now, my hallways and my walls so that there are no shared walls in there to dig through, or maybe a Xorn could do it or Purple Worm or something but not a hard-scrabble group of murderhobos.

But, Like, Why, Man? My grandpa is D-E-D (godsblessum) and I would applaud any party of miners who could pull of a feat like I've described. These little pencil lines on the graph paper in no way represent a adamantine/plascrete/duralloy surface. I guess they could. They're walls in the Mythic Underworld, bro! My old penchant for doodling twisty little passages (all alike) in between special treasure filled rooms is retrospectively LEGIT

Let us consider that on a piece of graph paper wherein one square = 10', then the line that represents a wall if you draw it that way is like perfect for your average interior wall in an office building which may really be like 8 inches thick but if an office was a dungeon (it kinda really is a DUNGEON comrades!) then any able-bodied murder hobo would skip all the traps and locks and stuck doors and just break those fucking walls the eff down. And you should let them! And all the monsters will come running and then the PCs will be eaten and maybe the next batch of PCs is not quite as dense.

I been noodling around with a system I stole from some OSR-type guys to make a long stretch of maze more logistically doable at the table. Frankly, a pen n paper tracing of the route is anticlimactic and further allows the viewing of my TOP SEKRIT MAP and so that's a no-no. This procedure uses a deck of cards and the players using PC skill or player knowledge to get through a set number of cards in order to exit the labyrinth. It's pretty clever (sadly I dint think of it) and ripe for hacking... Make a couple of awesome stretches of geomorphs interspersed with some procedural-simulated mazes which get easier with travelling and cost light/food/water/etc.? Now we're talking some Mythic Underworld.

Anyways, a paper-thin wall is not a barrier unless they agree it is. Or, unless it's made of very stern fantasy-type stuff.

The Land of Nine Lives - Also, a Challenge To You

We were a little bored. So She wanted to make a game for me to take to The Club (properly, The Historic Haven). She wanted me to give it to them. She called it Warhammer 3, but after I wrote all the rules down it seemed more like a sneaky game of tag, which is fine. I transcribed it all with an orange colored pencil.

But then she started dictating the characters, where it got to be WEIRD and FUN and O MAI

Fish people, Hunters, The Scientist, A Giant Beer Bottle Castle With a Mustache with Little Beer Bottle People. There is a hypnotizist monster with an accordion, but in the drawing it comes across as an alligator-like thing. It lives in a cave and it has red eyes so you know JUST KNOW that it's evil. I'm not making any of this up - it's from her. I embellished my end with some Bubble People (untrustworthy!) and a Robot (crazy!) and trolls, of course.

I can see the influence of Stardew Valley (She's smitten with it) and also Pokemon and some other things. We got a whole set of the main Sailor Scouts and the two cats after I purchased her like 20 little vinyl chibis ... please not that sailor Pluto and Uranus don't count because we haven't made it that far (come to think of it we haven't yet met Sailor Jupiter or Venus in the series, yet!)

How do you play this game? Interestingly, kids do this sort of stuff all the time. I did it. You probably did it, too. You don't need rules, but what we did was we got my lap-board for drawing on, and we taped together ("on the inseams") four sheets of blank white copy paper. Then we made a list of the people we thought should be in it. and then we marked off for each of them a little territory, and some (like the Tiger Girl) live with the others (The Tiger Girl lives with the Princess, King, and Queen). Then you doodle whatever you want in there, and you let your kid doodle too, or direct your doodling, or however they want. Then you put little tags on stuff.

I'm off to get a big pad of paper.

Here's the challenge: I want you to do this, too. I want you to make a setting with a kid. Your kid, a relative, whatever. Make a settting for a RPG game, and share it. Let the kid do most of the thinking. You just help. If you're a kid, you get bonus points.

Schadenfreude

A buddy of mine, wise and nameless, wrote me yesterday. He said he was surprised that (what with all the Mandy Morbid hubbub going down these past few hours) I didn't hit him up with a text. A text full of schadenfreude. I told him I was well past caring, but that I had indeed checked a certain person's twitter feed and he was mostly posting about... gummi bears. I guess when you're in the headlights, a good thing to do is to not give accusations firm footing by acknowledging them.

A couple of years ago, I was really frothing at the mouth about a certain Villainous Celebrity, how this cat was wrecking the scene, how his influence was down to style and not much substance and how he brought a fog of conflict with him wherever he went. My personal conflicts with This Dude were somewhat on the low end of import, but he called for my... what? Like shunning? Or something? on Google Plus. Now that the Old Madam is gone

I often went off the deep end and did myself a great deal of harm, in terms of footing and credentials, by really letting it fly on this guy and his defenders. In a way that I term SCORCHED EARTH style, if someone is trying to invalidate your experience of abuse, or your recognition of abuse, and people are telling you "WELL HE WAS ALWAYS NICE TO ME" and trying to change your mind about it, there's no longer any need to resort to logic and reason. Logic and Reason is what people will use to justify their abuse, what people use to make that itch, the cognitive dissonance, the image they have of an abuser and the truth that they feel down in there, they Logic and Reason to quiet that little voice in there, the one that says something is Not Adding Up.

You know what, fuck Logic and Reason. And Fuck You for defending that guy. I guess it takes a #metoo moment to set the course of justice straight or whatever.

I hope you get what's coming to you, Mr. Villainous Celebrity Artiste. All the motherfuckers clamboring out of the woodwork saying SORRY I SHOULDA SEEN IT

Well, you shoulda listened is what.

2019 Warpstone Cup

Summer 2019 Blood Bowl League Proposal

WARPSTONE CUP FREE FOR ALL

DRIVEN BY CAPITALISM AND/OR MISERY

Open source living rulebook. No cards or fancy gimmicks, no KEEP PURCHASING model. You have a squad? You’re in. THE GRINDER WANTS MORE MEAT. THE PEOPLE ARE RESTLESS AND IN NEED OF DIVERSION

First half season regular pitches only

Then biweekly Streetbowl/Beach Bowl/DungeonBowl/BridgeBowl events as the Warpstone Falls From the sky

The finals include DungeonBowl and regular pitch events - driven underground, the fans' insatiable blood lust cannot be denied, quenched, or postponed on account of weather-like events!

You can own multiple regular and minor-variant teams in the league to pull models to make legit DB college teams, or not, as you like. (Like, a regular BB team and two Streetbowl teams, for example)

Submit shared Freelancers and arrange to use custom and classic star players. I was thinking some sort of Mordheim-like warpstorm would promote hiring of converted/kitbashed journeymen with different monthly themes, so your stock human team could be a spaghetti-like mess at the end of the season, fit only for immolation. Like: May means a superfluity of Undead stalk the land and so Skeleton, Zombie, and Ghoul Journeymen are now available for everyone. June means dwarves and halfling Freelancers are available since the hills and mountains have been smashed up by warpstone-fall. Any non-usual (to your base team) weirdos come with animosity automatically, but you can use any upgrade to REMOVE it. Bones McRattleton proved himself to his new team mates in less than 2 games! If you have a model, all it has to do to get on the pitch by the end of the season is to be painted and in the right colors.

TOTAL CHAOS

YOU LOSE 1d8 SAN JUST FOR HAVING READ THIS

I think I have BB17 humans, rats,Old 40k Dark Elf conversions in process but I like the new sets so much I may shelve them. Was also working on converting some 40k/fantasy Orcs into a smallish squad (thanks, Baity!)

Amber college team is complete - maybe some effects (the blood for the blood god makes me pretty happy). Vallejo mud and rust look great just sprinkled liberally on everything

Anyway, this is my brain trying to shake off the cold and imagining happier summer times

If I were commissioner, in the current political climate, I would totally make bribery cheaper and more legal, and tied to the President's poll numbers and things like the GDP, just for a laugh.

DIY #screenprinted T-Shirts for all participants! Available in Green-on-Black, or in classy (effeminate) Black-on-Green.

The Winner's Cup is a beautifully purchased Goodwill-store goblet, festooned with hot-glue, acrylic crystals, and day-glo paint (I actually want to do this now just to make one)