The Emperor's Dauntless

My next dumb little project is to bring this heathen Revell SBD Dauntless into the Emperor's service.  The Dauntless was a cool plane back in the day, a successful dive bomber and (most impressively) about 16.00$ at Michael's Hobby Store, and they always always seem to have it. I think I've been considering this project for like 5 years, now.  The 1/48th scale means that a 33mm fig ought to suit it nicely, but it looks like my plans might fit a little bit... Tightly.

For your comparison, the original pilot, here next to his IG Sentinel replacement

A cool thing is I get some free flight crew but they look a little weak and slight compared to their chunkier brethren.

I plan to magnetize this puppy up for various swaps out. I don't know why - the thing will never get play but I want to do it as a conversation piece and a homily on kit bashing; and of course it will be relaxing and fun.

I'll probably have torn out my hair by the end of it but wish me Luck.

Edits:  took a couple of hours an there's glue everywhere but here she is:

Ol' Betsy or Delilah or Daphne

A SBD-Harpy in the service of the Imperial Guard, Home Defense Force patrol squadron, call sign SBD-HH

Captain Hank Hadrian (call sign "Henry")

Gunner/Spotter Alfred Alfgrim (call sign "Grouse")

Bomber Francis "Fuligin" Goreson (not pictured, below)

It's been a good long time since I've put together a non-chunky model, and there's a good deal of flash and poor design (taking it off the sprue with nippers should eat a part of the seam where the wing joins)

Lots of bits and greebles to add tomorrow night or something, but I'm gratified in that the magnetic tape strips fit nicely inside the wings, so the neodymium magnets sit on the surface as tight as a harpy's, uh, beak

Also, the landing gear retract and deploy. That's pretty cool.  Now to figure out some flight stand and to affix the purity seals and strike the rotary engine runes

Let the Litanies of Liftoff commence, and warm the Blessed Promethium!

AVE SALUTEM MULTAM ET KAIRE ad ORBIS

Butchering the Latin and Greek that was a focus of my early college education for a weak joke.  Nepenthe and Lethe where art thy cooling waters?

I don't think that posting miniatures and wargaming stuff will always appeal to my other blog's readers, so I'll keep it on here.  Expect superfluous notes and hasty iPhone pictures about my Dark Angels army and breaking into kit bashing and painting tips and other dumb stuff.

I sort of dig weird war games and might glom up some bolt action troops with some 40K and like some peanut butter in some chocolate maybe it'll be okay. A Genestealer Cult is the first order of business

Here are some pictures from ye first meeting with the local 40K group whose names I recall but do not have permission to put their faces on here yet

One last note - I'm intrigued at how well the iPhone is suited to take eye-level shots of wargames figs and terrain.  Hmm.

Noctules for DCC/LLC/SW OSR

Reading Gene Wolfe's Claw of the Conciliator - it was recommended to me pretty highly by a slew of my favorite G+ Fantasy /Sci_Fi thinkers. Just last night passed the bit where the protagonist and his buddy are being chased through the woods by the deep black, tissue-paper-like Noctules, a life form that flits through the air hunting for body heat and physiological energy.  They come from an alien environment to Severian's Urth, and are used by unscrupulous persons as weapons of assassination but sometimes escape their handlers and turn on them.

Once they smother and kill a target, they work their way into their mouths and nasal passages down into the target's lungs to absorb the remaining life-force and residual heat.  Cutting them with blades merely divides them into smaller versions, releasing a good deal of heat energy that washes over the target, causing low levels of heat damage.  They can be contained in air- and water-tight containers and will become dormant and can be hid away and disposed of but they take no damage from heat-based attacks and these only make them larger.  They may be drawn away from targets by a fire of sufficient size; clerical turning may disrupt them and cause their hateful forms to disperse for a time.

Should a living thing die from the attacks of Noctules, the Noctules will invade the lungs or similar organs and reproduce there, 1d10 more Noctules emerging a day later at dusk

DCC NOCTULE:  Init +6; Atk bite +4 melee (1d4 energy drain and Stamina loss); AC 15; HD 2d6; MV fly 40’; Act 1d20; SP smother (latches onto target's face and automatically inflicts 1d4 Stamina damage per round until killed), invulnerability to edged weapons (any hit divides it into two pieces with 1/2 original's HP), invulnerability to blunt weapons (-2d on the chain with blunt weapon hits), SV Fort +8, Ref +8, Will -4; AL C.

LL ADV NOCTULE:
Imp (Lesser Negative Planar Vermin)
No. Enc.: 1d6
Alignment: Lawful (evil)
Movement: 60 Fly (5 Crawl)
Armor Class: 3
Hit Dice: 2
Attacks: 1 (smother)
Damage: 1d6+Special (Save vs. Petrify/Paralyze or lose 1d4 Constitution)
Save: F2
Morale: 8
Hoard Class: none
XP: 240

S&W NOCTULE
Hit Dice: 2
Armor Class: 5 [15]
Attacks: Smothering Drain (1d6 per round after the first, Save or Lose 1d4 Constitution)
Saving Throw: 9
Special: Drains life energy and health
Move: 4/18 (flying)
Alignment: Chaos
Challenge Level/XP: 3/60


DW NOCTULE
Tags: Amorphous, Group, Planar, Small, Stealthy, Terrifying
Smother (d6 damage) 8 HP 5 Armor (strikes by edged weapons only add another Noctule to the group)
Close, Reach
Special Qualities: almost undetectable in Darkness (-3 to Discern Reality about their presence!), flittering
Instinct: To consume heat and life energy, to reproduce in the innards of a warm dead body

Special moves for players:

Stuff it In Here!
Roll +DEX (if a suitable container is available)
On a 10+ remove a Noctule from the group and place in a suitable container
On a 7-9 avoid the Noctule's smothering embrace, but lose your next attack
On a Miss, automatically be subject to the Noctule's smothering attack

Flittering Horrors!
If you have detected the Noctules, and are able to postpone all other activities and flee, ROLL +DEX or +INT
On a 12+ evade the Noctules entirely through quickness of wit or action
On a 10-11, evade the Noctules, but they find another victim (an innocent one!), hold 1
On a 7-9, subtract 1 from the number of pursuing Noctules
On a Miss, they find you in the next encounter, and attack all parties
Spend the 1 hold to reveal the identity of the victim, express remorse or self-satisfaction, and gain 1XP

More Burroughs in Your RPGs

I visited an amazing bookstore today after work where I picked up a bunch of paperbacks (F. Lieber, Gene Wolfe, even the Dungeon of Dread DnD CYOA book).  But before that, I had a thread going with some of the guys about Burroughs - not E.R. the other one, William.  We always think it's E.R., though, don't we?  Anyways, on the way home I was lost in a creative fugue and missed my exit off the highway, and was worried after I would miss it again and nothing seemed right on the highway like WHERE THE FUCK AM I THIS DOES NOT SEEM FAMILIAR TO ME

EDIT: G_DAAAAMN CHECK THIS JUNK OUT AND GET ON THE RPG NOD

I can't find an image of Burroughs using dice

Me and +Evan Lindsey and +Alex Chalk and +Darien Mason and +Dave Younce played a game set loosely in Burrough's Cairo Interzone from Naked Lunch a couple of months back.  There I go, name-dropping again. Anyways, it goes hand in hand with the idea that all these possible realities crashed together after our initial Transylvanian Adventures game, in which super-science and occultism from a heretical Christian cult opened the doors of reality real real wide.  At the end James' Simon and Darien's Dr. Prometheus killed a couple of mutated cultists and ran afoul of The Abbot in a way so bad that blessed unconsciousness came for them and seared local reality into oblivion.  We haven't figured out what happened to Simon, but he was a character with promise.

"Okay, man, what does this have to do with games, man?" you ask.  Well, it got me thinking about Burroughs' cut and paste thing.  How could we stick a narrative version of cut n' paste writing into a game?  It would take a huge mid-narrative context shift and would need to be jarring for the players, I mean, that's kind of the point.  You can see how changes in the referential level work and how when they are not resolved they cause discomfort - check out the bit in Hoffstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach: an Eternal Golden Braid.  So, how do we go for this kind of discomfort in an RPG setting?  It does seem not easy - I think I saw James Raggi pull it off in the summon spell from LoTFP.  High level failures require a complete change in the milieu of the game and a switch of the DM/Judge/GM/Whatever.  I think this is brilliant and could be done with some good cooperation from a willing group of players, but it'd be hard to do outside of face-to-face...

INTERDICTED: ALSO THIS SHIZNIT, YOU HEADLESS RYKOR, YOU

So?  One way I propose such is to blow the lid of the genre conventions in the game abruptly and without warning, but in a way that fits tidily into the narrative established beforehand.  There're a couple of easily suggested ways depending upon your genre, but luckily when players put faith in fantasy tropes anything's possible.

I'm not going to give it away just yet, but my experiment ought to be complete quite soon.  Instead, here's a related but not entirely complete random list of terrible stereotypical accents I could maybe pull off in a pinch:

A picture of Mel Blanc.  It's pertinent, trust me.

d20 Terrible NPC Accents by Noah during a game

1) Bad Cockney/Limey/East Ender (although I know full well there are many fine gradations of "Brit")
2) Bad German
3) Decent Yaley/Harvard Bastard (Ivy League Fucker)
4) Scotty from Star Trek
5) Orky
6) Western US/Country
7) Hillbilly (interestingly different from the Country one)
8) Terrible but hilarious Cold War Russian (not quite as good as +James Jeffers ' elf in Keep on the Borderlands)
9) Any kind of Hispanic accent from the Western Hemisphere (including awful terrible cartoon stereotypes)
10) Aussie Dingo Dundee
11) East Indie
12) Rasta Guy
13) Surfer Dude
14) Valley Girl
15) New Yorker
16) Philly/Jersey Pete (but I can't control it well and it drifts into 17, below)
17) Boston Southy
18) Shogunese (but to do the accent properly I have to do only nonsensical gibberish like a Samurai in full-on death mode)
19) South Africaner (Afrikaans English - also terrible)
20) Frenchie the Baguette Skunk

Table of Misdirection d16 +/- Luck Modifier:

1) Western (Boot Hill)
2) Future Perfect
3) Post Apockyclipse Mutant Hell
4) Paranoia/Logan's Run Dystopia
5) Court Intrigue
6) Horror History/Pulp
7) Horror Fantasy (Ye Olde Grimme Worlde)
8) Robot Fight GO!
9) Bubblegum Kaiju Tentacules
10) Hat-zulu
11) Saturday Morning Cloak and Dagger
12) Sparkly the Masquerade of Blood
13) Werewolf: The Sparkly Masquerade of Blood Vampires of Grey
14) Gangbusters of Capone Island
15) Barnstormers and Bullets
16) Star Tracks

The Realm of Alfgrim

Alfgrim is the home of my knight, Sir Maledoric Goreson, eighth-ælfen Cleric of Nebrovolent and apostate preacher travelling to Normandie for the Jousting Tournament run by +Mike Davison

It's great fun to think of places spawned by these FLAILSNAILS-y things, although my stance on the play style has been sort of... Filled with animosity. I know, I know. Let this be proof that hearts may change.

Gloomy and dew-clouded Alfgrim sits on a mystical border between Elfland, Narnia, Ravenloft, and Averoigne.  It's a pocket dimension that was fairly simple some decades ago; a few monochrome castles, a couple of dragons, a wicked sorcerer and an Enchanted Chalice was all that distinguished it. Since the Chalice was recovered and brought to the Yellow Castle by Sir Carredot, the place has bloomed and blossomed and become as wormy as an untended rose-bush.

Weeds and briars now grow wild over the once well-tended paths and gardens. The Black Castle fell into disrepair and is plagued by Kleptobats and Goblins (the Kaotic kind like in Disney's Cinderella, not the little green men kind). The various other great Castles have turned inward and become corrupt. The Dukes and Barons of Alfgrim owe their obeisance to the Master of the Enchanted Chalice. Some say he is a spiteful and gloomy avatar of the King of Elfland, but his Yellow Robes and jealous possession of the Chalice suggest he may have been the King of the Yellow Castle long ago. He may have once been a Nyarlathotep worshipper but he is rarely seen these years since he travels back and forth to other realms with some frequency.

A picture here of the Yellow Castle

Yorghl, Grundhl, and Rhindl have retired to deep caverns and spawned a multitude of other smaller and distinctive drakes that give sport to the plethora of minor knights that roam the demesne. Every gong-farmer, low courtesan and boot-black may become a knight by fulfilling a mysterious and inscrutable mission of the Yellow King. His agents come in the deep of night bearing a parchment scroll upon which is described some (perhaps trivial) task, the completion of which garners the man or woman a horse, lance, sword, and shield. Why the ruler would want a super-abundance of knights is unclear, but the nobility is prone to casual internecine warfare for unclear reasons and the ranks need be filled. The knights are broken down into a myriad of orders, and only a scant half dozen orders follow traditional notions of chivalry and then only loosely. For every 10,000 knights one might be a Paladin but several hundred are Blackguards, Anti-Paladins and Scoundrels. The rest are mere fighting men with tawdry banners.

The women at court all admire and copy elvish fashion and it is considered a great accomplishment to poison a rival and seduce his elvish mistress. The men are great fops and prone to change at the literal blowing of the wind. Powdered wigs are the norm as is ghastly makeup.

The stoutest children are delivered to the elves for whipping and scullery duty to put them in their place. They may return humbled, but they might also be changelings or 500 years older when their apprenticeships in the workshops of the elves are complete. They may come back the same day fully grown and half maddened.

There are no normal Dwarfs in Alfgrim but Duergar  and Redcaps abound in the woods and hills. Goblins and Hobs war with the elves on the borders of the elf lands and the occasional non-corrupt wandering preacher spreads the word of the Crucified Immortal Savior that was worshipped before Averoigne was clipped from the Aereth of long-ago. A million tiny saints have cropped up since then, and the worship of the gods of the Romani and Griega abounds beneath the surface and is accepted. The Master of the Chalice accepts dignitaries from the Bishop of Averoigne and sends couriers to and fro - they deal in finding heretics on the lam. These heretics are known to spread false doctrines of the nature of the demiurges that (if spread unchecked) could threaten the basis of the Averoignal Church

I envision some kind of Darklands/CAS/Mythos/Albrecht Durer/Pre-Raphaelite mockery of Chaucer and the Grail Legend

New Spells

1. Thornbloom
2. Prayer of St. Roch
3. Flyblown
4. Summon Dryad

New Monsters

1. Lapines - Rabbit Hobbits
2. Cruhound - the furious spirit of a faithful dog killed in anger by its master
3. Pilgrim Ghuls - flagellant penant-cannibals who wander in packs trying hard and generally failing to delay the onset of their ghoul sickness. They serve St. Wendy Go
4. Confessor Engines - great hulking suits of armor driven by the priests of the Crucified Immortal to find and destroy wayward heretics. They have a very narrow understanding of doctrine and do their best to flay and cremate armchair philosophers and theologians they come across after a brief debate
5. Worm Surgeons - they offer bleeding, tending of wounds, barbering, and the innoculation of Grinthworms to remove physical disfigurements. Usually unpleasantly symetrical and totally within the Uncanny Valley of physical perfection 

Random Encounters by Hex Type (more to come, here):

1. Road
2. Castle/Keep
3. City/Village/Town
4. Swamp/Riverside/Lakeshore
5. Hills
6. Fields
7. Forests

Even law abiding citizens ought not to be trusted in travelling the realm.  On a 1d4 roll of 1-3, the encounter will be dangerous and evil, and on a 4 the Reaction Roll will be adjusted to that of the lowest party member's - not the ostensible leader's.  Everyone is distrustful on the roads in Alfgrim.

Exports: silver, wheat, oak, pine, herbs, cinnabar, venoms, toxins, dragonscale and dragon flesh (not bones!), rubies, mushrooms, zombies and skeletal-automata, vivimantic chimerae

Imports: beef, chicken, corpses, lead, iron, exotic animals and monsters, spirits (alchemical), spirits (metaphysical)

Governmental structure: a loose aristocracy; the Master of the Enchanted Chalice is a despot but his concerns do not intersect with the day-to-day affairs of Alfgrim except in the matter of executions

Necromancy and Vivimancy are cottage industries and the Alfgrimners do hot trade with Y'lorgne and ship Chimerical monstrosities throughout the multiverse (mainly within the domains Alfgrim touches directly). Their arts of surgery and chirugery (and the subset skills of psychick chirugery) are well-advanced. The people have a very lawful streak, but almost all are pragmatist and sensible except in the matter of fashion and the most recent elfin fads and literature. They are by and large fairly dull and un-creative and easily ruled, doing their utmost to stay within the confines of the law and still make a profit and do the other party harm. Internecine strife is common and within the bounds of the law these feuds are perfectly legal.

Languages: the people of Alfgrim benefit from a steady diet of the pesc d'babel and use it in a number of condiments. Aminos from the fish provide the people of Alfgrim with a strange polyglottism and they all know a variety of modern and ancient languages. Low Gloranthan and Latinate Gothic are not susceptible to the amino frequencies of the fish and the first is used as the ritual language of the Worshipers of the Romani gods and the second as the language of the Church of of the Crucified Immortal

Stick that in your ear, monsieur

Population: as of QR 1871, Alfgrim's total population was about 428,000, mostly spread throughout several large cities and numerous villages. Isolated farm-steaders are often eaten by Hobs so the people of Alfgrim group in defensible walled settlements. Of these, perhaps 13000 are Duergar tradesmen, 7000 are elf and half-elfen aristocrats at court, and about 3000 others of various mixed local and inter-planar races. Of this small contingent, most are Saurioids (Sleestaks and Serpent-Men) and Crafted-persons (Golems of various types)

Main cities/villages

1. Külm (the ostensible capital and seat of the Yellow Castle and its court)
2. Theiönne
3. Meitz
4. Kurtesse
5. Arinz
6. Muteinne

Notable NPCs:

1. The Yellow King, Master of the Enchanted Chalice, Commander of the Army of Squamous Flame, Opener of the Gates of the Kingdom
2. Aric D'Anseln, High Lieutenant of the Order of the Chalice, Head Inquisitor
3. Veruc, Hobgoblin Archmagos
4. Aegelberth - Wandering Minstrel, key to the Narnian Gate (on the lam)
5. Roberiel - Master of Rats and Minister of Hameline
6. Byrine Gorgestes - Guardian of the Black Tower
7. Jehann Dehurke - epileptic messiah and Key to the Averoignal Gate
8. Laboragh Cortosk - Alchemist-Assassin and Head-Demon Worshipper of Vaubrac
9. Lafcadio Hanzo - Ninja/Cobbler, Pilgrim from the Ketsu Empire

Notable Unique Monsters

1. Yorghl and Grindhl the Dragons are long-dead but Rhindl bears their spawn at the bottom of the Gevaudrun Caverns. From there, monthly, a new dragon-spawn issues forth to wrack the lands. They still serve the Master of The Enchanted Chalice and it is unclear why he permits them to ravage the land. To kill dragons without a permit is High Treason.
2. Baroness Trustoupe - Doppelgänger Matriarch of Elteste. It is natural and common for doppelgangers to enter into service of thieves guilds and the Baroness is rumoured to be everywhere
3. Quentin Parago - Lapine Knight-Errant
4. Hamaradd - Owlbear Genius
5. Chuparant - Vampire, Current Key to the Ravenloft Gate (missing; presumed dormant - the Ravenloft Gate is open and unclosable)