Injury Report

We took a crack at painting with little avail. I have another session of physical therapy tomorrow morning and I am hoping that he will possess some sort of magic that fixes my neck so I get to work on my friggin' banshess.

A little of the beaten path for what we got going here thus far, as it is a project blog, and I can't do much of the projects I was working on, my project has become firing up a D&D game here in Spokane. By game I mean, Travis and his wife have gracefully decided to learn how to play, which is nice...it will keep me sane.

I started playing D&D when I was seven and never looked back. 22 years later it is still a big passion of mine. Like most of my diversions, sometimes I am way into it, and other times months can go by without me throwing a d20. I decided to grab something new-to-me for this round of dalliance. Also, since Travis and his wife have never played before, it was going to be new to all of us.

Anyway, I grabbed the 4th Edition Forgotten Realms setting since Travis was somewhat familiar and Kathy had played Baldur's Gate. I was pretty surprised to see that they had kind of turned the world on its ear. The whole Spellplague thing is pretty cool, and I don't hate on any attempts to change things up. I am just curious if they wrote it happening? I remember really enjoying the Avatar Trilogy and liking that I could see the effects that the books had on the game world.

We are going to run the adventure in the beginning of the book for now. So everyone can get into the new setting, including myself. I will give a holler here occasionally and report how it is going.

I would ask if any of the folks who subject themselves to my nonsense are aware of any novels covering Cyric killing Mystra and the efforts to imprison Cyric afterwards to post in the comments what their names are. I would love the chance to read them.

Thanks for reading,

T

Sept World Belsbeth Primus

Just wanted to give a quick "thank you" to everyone who participated in the experiment that was the Planetary Empires Campaign. In a lot of ways it worked, but in others it failed. Nonetheless myself and a few others had a great deal of fun devising rules and painting tiles. So there is that.

Also I feel like a schmuck for winning my own campaign, but I figured we may as well stamp this one "done" and try for something that will work.

What did work? For the last four weeks, at least a few of the guys in the six man group were actively seeking games with another. I submit that a few of us are in a perpetual state of game seeking, however it was able to scare up a few more games than usual and even cause our Sisters player to blow the dust off his chicas and burn some heretic ass.

Another victory was the likely hood that if I hadn't ran it, my Planetary Empires set would probably still be in the shrink wrap. Needing to use them lit a fire for me to complete them, and I am glad I did.

Lastly, the rules are pretty slick. They seem a bit simplistic, but they are pretty inclusive of the things that could happen in a campaign. In all, I think my house rules were a little too much. And got in the way of the rules set.

What didn't work? Not having a central location to store the map. No one ever made conquest rolls because they couldn't ever make it to where the map was. Despite gallant efforts, it never seemed to work out. The map really needed a location where all the players had access to it in their own time. In the future it would almost be better to hex grid a map out and list the attributes of the "tile". That way players could say they are attacking tile 6 and roll when the game is complete. Also this hex map could be stored on the interwebs so people always had it available. This of course, defeats the purpose of spending fifty bucks on the tiles, but the purpose is all ready defeated if no one is coming to see the map anyway.

On the painting front, this "whip-lash like" thing is becoming increasingly annoying each day. The ten days it was supposed to hurt were up yesterday and I am still a little achy. Granted it is less, but I still can't really look down for any amount of time without my stomach roiling and my head swimming.

One always wants what they can't have. I have painted crap a thousand times in my head over the last two weeks, eager to be able to realize it on a miniature. I have even been building crap that I "may" use at sometime so I can still feel like I am doing something for my hobby. All in all it is asinine and the more I talk about it the more I am infuriated, so I am gonna stop.

Thanks for reading,
T

Excuses Are Like...

We all know how that saying ends. I have been in a bad way as far as painting goes lately. Nothing hyper-dramatic or anything. Last week we had our annual corporate show in Vegas so that took up some time...and money, and stamina.

I pretty much hate going to Vegas to work. It is like having a job at Disneyland. Everyone is out fuggin' off and having fun. And you have to maintain an air of professionalism. For those that have sat with drunk people until the wee hours of the morning while not being drunk yourself, you understand my pain. Turns out drunk people are pretty friggin' boring, unless you are one of them.

Dumber still is the fact that I have some how given myself, in the words of my doctor, "A whiplash-like injury." How you ask? Apparently from a leg-press weight machine. The trouble with all of this nonsense is that looking down for prolonged periods of time (Which is how I paint.) causes big headaches and makes me feel like I am gonna huck. I can stop this by taking the muscle relaxers prescribed to me, however they kinda make me all "loose" and I am not sure how conducive that is to painting any kind of detail.

What is frustrating is that I can only paint in spurts before I have to stand up or lay down in order to take the strain off my neck. It is re-god-damn-diculous! The doc says to give it ten days, but I hope it goes away a lot quicker.

Despite all this I have attempted to keep painting Banshees and I will throw the next two up as soon as I am done. My Tau call to me, but I do not want to leave that Banshee squad unfinished.

Lastly, I wanted to give huge internet props to Rodolfo, the Press Ganger for Spokane. I went into Hobbytown on the north side yesterday to play a Planetary Empires campaign game and there was at least ten guys there playing Warmachine and Hordes. It was pretty epic, and I can not wait for January to roll around where I get my new rules. Maybe those Rhulic forces will once again get some love? I think they are somewhere under that pile of dust on my bookshelf. Anyway, if you are interested in checking their scene out shoot an email to Rodolfo (rodolfopagsanjan@yahoo.com) and get the low down. It looked like a good time.

I will persevere to show off two more banshees here in the next couple days!

Thanks for reading,
T

Belsbeth Week 2

Just a quick update to show the planetscape of Belsbeth after a week of the campaign.

From Mars Project Blog

From Mars Project Blog

From Mars Project Blog

From Mars Project Blog

From Mars Project Blog

Right now the most real estate is held for The Greater Good. However I think at least three of those tiles are Chem Marshes, which our campaign can be lost on a roll of a "6" at the end of each round. I know later on in the week 5,000 points of Space Marines will be throwing down with 5,000 points of Chaos Daemons and Iron Warriors. Hopefully we will get some pics of that at Lord Infestus' blog (crosses fingers).

There is still few tiles that are unclaimed, including the ominous hive city Bloodholm.

From Mars Project Blog

From Mars Project Blog

Thanks for reading,
T

Flights of Fancy

Last night I took the highway to the danger zone. No I didn't watch Top Gun, but I probably should have had. Instead I decided to deviate from what I should be doing (Tau) in order to paint something that I just wanted to paint. While the practice of painting what one wants to paint is probably healthy to most enthusiasts, it is the pretty much detrimental to me. I only ever want to paint one of every model, and I end up with a metric shit ton of "one-off's" and not a single squad, let alone army, done. So, like the junky who has been clean and gave it all up because they thought that one time wouldn't set them back on their path; I appear at the methadone clinic of internet. Guilty, but not ashamed of what I have done the night before.

From Stuff I Have Painted

From Stuff I Have Painted

From Stuff I Have Painted

Oh my god, she was so worth it. This model was a friggin' delight to paint. I whiled away four and a half hours on her and didn't realize the time had gone by. There was cool areas for line-highlighting and other flatter areas for blending. She was like some kind of model painter's aptitude test where you could express all your techniques.

I did her up to look Ulthwesque. I have always liked Ulthwe, probably because I dislike Chaos so much. I remember back in the older editions Ulthwe had the cool guardians because they didn't have a lot of aspect warriors so I tried to make the armor look like an antique bone in an attempt to communicate that this banshee has been around for awhile, or at least the armor has. I also started out with the second edition black and yellow to denote Ulthwe, but the red of the newer edition looked better on the model.

My big trouble is that I don't know what colors to do her base. I have a feeling that if I do my normal colors, which are a lot of off-whites, the base will eat her. I want something that will let her pop off the base, but also, in the random event that I ever finished a guardian, would look good with a predominantly black model as well. If you have a second help a brother out. This black base is killing me.

Thanks for reading,
T

Pathfinder Alpha

So the pathfinders are next. I always need to paint one model in a squad before I start doing any kind of line painting. It seems like I need the one mini to familiarize myself and my brushes with the colors, lines, etc. The pathfinders were a lot of fun, and should go relatively quickly. They are a lot of fatigues.

I used the same P3 and Citadel Wash color combos as I did for my fire warriors Sash'ui. The one exception was that, because the fatigues were so prevalent on the pathfinders, I wanted a smoother and more cloth like blend. In order to do that I based the fatigues with P3 Trollblood Base, then washed it with a mix of VMC Matte Medium, water, P3 Greatcoat Grey, and a little P3 Armor Wash for flow. Once the wash was dry I went back over the raised areas again with P3 Trollblood Base and finally put the line high lights on with P3 Frostbite. I wanted to bring it up to P3 Menoth White Highlight but the Frostbite maintained the blue better. I choose color richness over reality in this case.

From Stuff I Have Painted

Like my fire warriors, I put the squad markings on the shoulders and helmets, though the pathfinders are opposite side because they only had the one shoulder pad. The one squad marking on this guy's shoulder is pretty effed, I am going to go back and clean it up tonight, it was just pissing me off last night and sometimes I need to walk away.

From Stuff I Have Painted

I used my ghetto glow effect on the marker light and the grenades. The grenades will require a smoother blend on future models but hey, this is why I paint one first.

Thanks for reading,
T

It's on!

There it is, the surface of Belsbeth. Starting today it will be riddled with battle, hopefuuly. It is nice to have the project complete. I only have 5 areas to show off because my 6th player, who is running Space Marines, has not yet given me any flags or buildings. So, as of now, he holds nothing! I am pretty sure he will get them to me this week and I can take pics then.

Salamander's turf:

From Stuff I Have Painted

Some of the bug's turf:

From Stuff I Have Painted

The Sister's stomping grounds:

From Stuff I Have Painted

The Daemon's land:

From Stuff I Have Painted

Tau turf:

From Stuff I Have Painted

The, as of yet, unclaimed Hive City Bloodholm:

From Stuff I Have Painted

The temperate regions of the planet's surface:

From Stuff I Have Painted

The desert and The Ravage:

From Stuff I Have Painted

Close-up of The Ravage:

From Stuff I Have Painted

Very pleased with the way the map turned out, but I already find myself wishing I had more tiles. The overall visual appeal and tactile sense of the map are extremly rewarding. We tacked on a lot of house rules here and here and decided to use the stratagems suggested at the GW site. We will see how it all plays out, but if nothing else, it gives a couple guys a good reason to get together and play some Warhammer 40K.

My mind is already shooting off into crazy directions with what to do for the next one. However I need to focus up, or rather refocus on my Tau. I primed some pathfinders last night so presumably they will be the next to get paint. I really want to do a suit- crisis or stealth- but decided to get back in the grove of detail, as compared to the en masse stlye of the tiles, on some fairly cool and simple models. Hopefully I can have some pics of them up soon.

Thanks for reading,
T