New Product - Kickstarter - Litchmyre Dungeon

My 6 year old daughter who has been a regular bystander on our weekly Wednesday night RPG gaming sessions turned to me the other day and asked to play herself.

Great I thought my daughter wants to play the kind of games that I enjoy, how awesome!. Then the little alarm bell in the back of my mind went off that for the last 3 years I have been running a horror campaign in which I have nearly traumatised my grown players let alone the developing mind of my very own 6 year old. So plan B was born.

I have dusted off my old copy of Heroquest from back in the days when GW needed to team up with MB to make the mass market and D&D was only in its most famous 'Red Book' second edition.

Of course before I can introduce my daughter to the wonderous world that started a lifelong gaming obsession for me I need to paint the sad looking monochromatic plastic figures contained in this ancient artifact (This may become the subject of a later post watch this space). I was struck by how simple these figures are when compared against the great creations that are coming out of every model studio now. and as if in answer to my thoughts about how cool it would be to see this board game revisited with todays skilled figure artists what should flutter past my screen but a Kickstarter tackling that very topic thus I present to you Zealot Miniatures Litchmyre Dungeon.

Zealot Miniatures -Twisting Catacombs Litchmyre Dungeon Project

Review - Software - Campaign Logger

Well after a absence of over a year from writing any entries here I am returning with a product reveiw.

Unlike most of my content on here, this review relates to a digital product and doesn't involve anything I get to apply a coat of paint to.

Anybody who knows me would be well aware that my gaming does not just relate to Games Workshop games, and more often is old school RPG, such as our regular D&D campaign (many thanks to our most excellent GM Karl).

Recently it came my turn to run a game and while I am quite experienced as a player I am in fairness quite a newbie as a GM. As such I am always on the lookout for anything that will help me keep track of the millions of threads a game played at the level we do often produces.

Much of my GM'ing is done on the fly as I have a plot in mind and a few set peices but much of what happens in between is player driven so can't really be to planned.

I am the recipient of a weekly newsletter that comes from a vastly more experienced GM than my self - I refer of course to Johnn Four. Which led me to investigate his very own product Campaign Logger Campaign Logger Website.

This is a particularly useful product which allows you to tag your notes which allows you to very quickly reference all occurrences which use that tag.
The program uses an almost web like interface and by annotating objects of interest with one of the special characters (§+@^#$!%*~+)

What the addition of these special tags does is marks the texts that follows it as a link, this in turn allows you to see any entry that shares the same link (for example NPC name) at once.

How does this help? I hear you cry, well if you have players like mine they like details and a detail created on the fly 2 years ago can very easily become plot pivots and hooks so being able to quickly refer to any information and pull up its history on the fly has got to be helpful.


I am a convert to this product and my simple words do not reflect how powerful a tool this is so please check it out for yourself at https://campaign-logger.com/

Showcase - Necron Doom Sythe

Well with my 41'st (Millennium) Birthday just past, I was given a shiney Necron flyer as a most thoughtful gift.

Never having tackled large Necron vehicles before I had to re-think the way I paint a bit for this as these need a different skill set to painting my more normal fare of high elves and space wolves. So undaunted I dusted off my far to idle airbrush to provide some soft panel edging before striking hard and fast with the brush for edge highlighting.

I'm pleased with the result, see what you think

 

Tutorial - Sculpting - Modelling Mushrooms

After a massive absence from the Blog entirely caused by real life, work and all those other things we hate, I am returning with a quick tutorial on how to sculpt mushrooms. One of the facebook groups I am a member of had a fellow hobbyist who found the need to sculpt some giant mushrooms for his night goblin army, but lacked the knowledge on how to go about such a feat, so he asked the community how and I offered this solution.

Top Tip - Recipe Cards

Today I'm gonna share with you one of the techniques I use to achieve consistency across a given force (the one shown is the photos is my Space Wolves but that's just as the photo has a perfect demonstration in it).

We all know that painting a reasonable size army is not only a labour of love but also very time consuming meaning a force can often take years to finish (especially with rule changes and changes to force distribution and 'new stuff' to include) that being the case how do you paint something the same way as you did that miniature you painted two years ago?

Most of us are blessed with the ability to just about remember how it was done and with a bit of trial and error can do a reasonable copy of the original. My method removes the trial and error part and allows you to focus on the fun part the actual painting.

I call it the Recipe Card  (wonders if he should try and trademark this as its so simple)............

Showcase - Female Elven Archer

Today I'm posting up a piece of work I finished a few days ago (and oddly this is not the first place its been shown I displayed firstly on the facebook site 'eavier metal) the figure comes from Avatars Of War and is a lovely sculpt with very few mould lines to clean off. the only real additions to this fine figure is the base and the arrow which I will describe details on, after the pictures.

Showcase - Twin Linked Knights

Today was have a showcase of a pair of miniatures I painted as a birthday gift for a friend ( He is somewhat partial to playing paladins and has a particular liking for certain shades of blue)

The colour palettes were chosen from his personal tastes and for the alternative scheme the choice of colour was down to my 2 year old daughter.

Enjoy...