Its Fort Friday!

Hey Guys!

Sorry to say but there won't be a Fort Friday post with any actual content in it this week - i've just been super busy with things!

Lords of Gossamer and Shadow has picked up. We're now on a solid nine players which is pretty damn impressive for an IRC game with only one ST. Several story threads are being chased which is cool and exciting in equal parts as hopefully people will be able to find out hidden bits about secret backstory and stuff.

I've started running Dungeon World. Which is perhaps the most fun i've ever had at character creation ever.
I'm really gutted we didn't think to record the first session... but on the other hand, it would have been two hours of us pissing ourselves laughing...

Modelling and Painting has taken a bit of a backseat, sadly. I should get back on that! Slaine and Ukko are almost finished now!

I was dead chuffed to find someone link to one of  my blog posts on RPG.Net as well. Ok, it was just the pictures but thats KIND of like fame!

So yeah, thats the State of the Nation.

Lords of Gossamer & Shadow: Session One

Session One: The Agora

Characters Involved 

Ursula Axilla: The PI
Ginger Syn: The Dimension-Hopping Good Time Gal
Tezoac: The Educated Wildman
Kitt: The Meddling Youth
Weaver: The Scout
Rui Shi: The Demon Hunter
The Revenant: A Shambling Corpse-Soldier

The session begins with all the characters in The Agora - a Marketplace on the grand stair where the merchants of countless worlds come to ply their trades.

Tezoac is browsing through the stalls and several traders attempt to convince him that their wares are the ones that he wants. Ursula on the other hand had set up a deck chair outside of the door that leads to her own personal world 'The Office', pretending to sleep so that she can catch her shady chess-by-mail partner dropping off his next turn. Kitt had set up his small 'information and magic' stall somewhere and Rui Shi had been aimed towards it to find out some information about the Demon he had been chasing.

Ginger was browsing for some warmer clothes now that she had gotten back from Ganan (She was, for the most part, entirely done with the whole 'Warrior Princess' thing.). Weaver had likewise been browsing through the stall for items of interest!

The Revenant, on the other hand, was hunting.

It had followed a group of organics from its battlefeild to here and having now way to return to the theatre of operations had decided to instead continue investigating the group that had led her out. Wishing to stop one of the organics from escaping, it grabbed one of their arms (the others had spread throughout the market). With an agressive shout, the person tried to pull away and when it realised that it couldn't escaped, Howled as its skin began to rip and its bones re-align and snap violently, claws bursting from its fingertips.

A werewolf!

The Revenant had been in Close Quarters Combat situations with similar, less organic soldiers before and decided to slam the creature's head as hard as it could into the floor as a solution to the attempt it made to attack the corpse-soldier. With the sound of marble floor cracking, it seemed like that werewolf gave up on life.

However, all around the market a riot had begun as fights had broken out with that single howl. Even worse, from apparantly no-where a giant Bull-creature had appeared and in the panic, several of the older market-goers shouted that 'The Minotaur' was here. It did not help the riot situation at all.

Ursula, now given up on pretending to be asleep as soon as a riot had broken out underneath her, opens the door to her office and shouts for the wardens to get inside where its safe.

Tezoac, a master of the Umbra notices a little ball of Umbral energy inside the Minotaur and decides to weaken whatever force was attempting to keep it under control, allowing the Umbra to start attacking the minotaur directly.

 Two of the others who had been with the werewolf start running towards The Revenant in order to gain vengance, Weaver levelling her utility-pad at one of them and loosing a paralysing cantrip at the creature which suddenly stopped being able to move or stop its own momentum, sending it crashing to the ground where Ursula added an extra hole straight through its head with her energy pistol.

The Revenant slams a trench knife into the back of the werewolf in her hand's neck, severing the spinal coloumn and drops him on the ground so she's free to handle the werewolf who is still charging at her, its skin shredding and turning into a man-wolf beast.

Kitt, on the other hand, had decided that discretion was the greater part of valor and had been packing away his market stall and running for Ursula's office, Rui Shi trailing behind him blithely ignoring the market in uproar as he tries to get some answers from the young wizard.

Weaver, working out that this 'Minotaur' is the focal point for all of this chaos and panic assumes that it is some sort of Glitch/Umbra aligned creature and throws a 'Negation' cantrip towards it from her bracer, which sadly bounces off of it.

Tezoac, a plan in mind, starts walking towards the Minotaur, shapeshifting in front of it in an attempt to get its attention and swelling his own size in preparation to attack it, using the Umbra to shift his own body into one better suited for what he had in mind.

Revenant grapples the werewolf charging towards her and opens up its throat with her trench dagger after grabbing it by the shoulder whilst Weaver tosses a 'Pain' cantrip at the Minotaur with a mind to get it in the testicles. Ginger opens up with Bugsy into the Minotaur and sending out sprays of blood and bone where she hits, the maniacal robot brain inside the gun cackling madly as she does so. Tezoac punches the Minotaur in the face so hard he dislocates its jaw, sending its head jolting to the side with the immense impact.

The Minotaur decides that all of this pain he's in is because of the thing who just smacked him in the face.

Kitt starts to cast a spell from the door to Ursula's Office, pulling out his silver rapier Argentus he had claimed from a world over-run with werewolves he'd adventured in before.

Weaver and Rui Shi have retreated into Ursula's office at this point, Ursula is still holding the door open.

The Minotaur starts chasing Tezoac, who shifts into a more nimble running form to keep his distance from the Minotaur. It barrels through some people and sends them flying, Ginger using her machinegun to keep its attention away from hapless innocents.

Tezoac leads the Minotaur up a stairway in an attempt to trick it into following him off a balcony, Kitt is still spellcasting. Revenant fails to notice that the corpses around her have started healing their fatal wounds and finishes off the one she had cut the throat off and was still holding by slamming him into the floor a few times. It notices one of the corpses is missing.

Tezoac spins around at the edge of a balcony, facing the Minotaur. Kitt says ancient words of power that sound remarkably like 'Beam me up, Scotty'. The Minotaur bellows, its now broken jaw splitting into two when it does so as the umbra begins to unravel its form. Revenant notices the corpse she previously made is now alive and crawling back to its feet.

The minotaur charges at Tezoac and... passes straight through him. It was an Illusion! A very confused Tez now stands next to Kitt, who slumps over exhausted. The Minotaur gets some sweet, sweet air before gravity kicks in and theres a series of nasty cracking noises as it hits the floor. Ginger kicks the corpse of the minotaur in the head.

Revenant decides that rather then let another one get back up, she's going to hack off the one she's just chokeslammed's head. The one allready standing takes that as his cue to bolt for safety, turning into a rat-man as it does and scrabbling away

Tezoac heads over to investigate the Minotaur's body and He and Ginger notice that its still trying to heal its injuries. Kitt shouts a warning to Revenant about the previously hole-in-the-head werebeast's getting back up and she proceedes to turn it into mush. Tezoac gestures at the Minotaur's head, which begins to implode and dissolve.

Kitt tosses his Silver Rapier to the Revenant, who, not really understanding why a sword is being thrown at it grabs it by the blade. It doesnt seem overly bothered by the fact it has a sword cutting into it.

The Minotaur still seems to be trying to regenerate its wounds (A minotaur that regenerates? Madness) and now, fleshy tendrils of meat are slapping around the ground because the Umbra is working just as hard to mess it up as it is trying to heal its wounds.

Kitt shouts that the Revenant should 'Stab it with the sword' - The revenant is suddenly a blur of motion and slams its trench knife into the shoulder of the were-rat pinning it to the wall, followed shortly by slamming the silver sword through its heart, which seems to almost catch fire and burn the flesh of it while it does so.

People retire to ursula's office to make sense of what happened and relax!

End session!

Some investigation occurs during downtime.

The Gonzo History Project!

My buddy over at the Gonzo History Project finally got his gaming blog up and running!

You should totally take a look at it - especially because he's got a competition running at the minute!

You can find the post Here!

Back to Basics Scenery

Did a bit  of an experiment with Plastercine in an attempt to make a scenery mould.

The basic plastercine moulds. These  are  recreations because the old ones got squished...

Lookit those bubbles

This was a major dissapointment for me. I tried really, really hard to minimise how many bubbles would appear on these moulds and they have massive ones. You might notice on the plastercine picture above how those bubbles end up coming out on the models before smoothing. Bah! nevermind, they don't need to be perfect.

Woot!

On the other  hand, after the bubbles have been smoothed down and the air dough has dried, the things look pretty damn swish. Painted up, inked and with some very simple drybrushing they look pretty good IMO. Housemate did point out they were a little dark for a river so i might give it another whack with a lighter paint later on and see how it works, but i'm pretty happy.

I went with a straight line and a bendy line so that people can have bespoke rivers!

... Next, bridges!

Back to Basics Wargaming

Remember when battle reports used to look like this?

I do. I used to love the old White Dwarf battle reports that had been set up in this way - When I was younger I was a massive Warhammer Fantasy Battles fan and the battle reports were allways the first thing I would look up whenever I cracked open a new magazine.

One of the things that allways bums me out when it comes to wargaming is that...  Well, imagination  will allways provide more ideas then the real world can provide for. If i want to have a platoon of sentient crystal golems invade the homelands of psychic hedgehog men... well, good luck getting the miniatures for that, right?

Except. Those little squares up above could be anything, couldn't they?

Yes. Yes they could.

So began my first 'Big' moulding project. I broke out the Silli and a skull shaped cookie cutter to see how  well  it would come out. I sanded down an old Domino we had laying around for the basic rectangular shape and then applied my terribly shaky carving hand to it until I got a shape I was pleased with.
I then applied Silli and went to work. When I got back 6 hours later, the following was waiting for me.

Sucsess!

A slight amount  of bubbling around the top, but I wasn't planning to fill the thing to capacity anyway.

The moulds are actually pretty flexible.

It had worked pretty well. I took  a small amount of Air Dough and pressed it into the bottom of  the mould,  using the back of the Domino to press it down and get a good flat back to it.

Tada!

Obviously,  I was very chuffed with how clever I was. I then proceeded to print out 91 of the little buggers.

I decided to go with a very basic 'one colour and a white triangle' colour scheme, with the little rectangle in the corner being white as well to allow people to write numbers on them for book-keeping during game. I used Citadel paints because... well, I have a fucking ton of them around. I then used some Devlan Mud/Agarash Earthshade/Liquid Talent to get into the cracks, painted the white on and cleaned up the colouring.

The whole process

Personally, i'm really, really happy with them. Next stop... Scenery!

Silli: My Other New Favourite Thing

So as I mentioned in last week's Fort Friday post, the Maid of Wynn brought some cheap and cheerful rubber moulding material into my peripheral vision. Its called Silli and while I havn't worked out all of the kinks in getting a perfectly un-bubbled mould out of the stuff I like to think i've managed OK so far.

As you can see from the picture, Silli is a two part mixture that doesnt set until its mixed together thoroughly in the same sort of way you might use Kneadite/Greenstuff or Milliput. The difference is that this stuff starts off goopy and sticky as all hell, can't be finely shaped and ends up with the consistancy of rubber once its been cured.

Maid of Wynn thinks that I should also mention that this stuff is silicon based and food grade as well, which means if you're a fan of cake decoration like she is you could have all sorts of fun with making edible warhammer miniatures to go on top of a cakey battlefeild...

(She doesnt realise however that she has now thrown down her own gauntlet and i'm going to force her to make her first FW post...)

You get a decent amount of the stuff when you get even the smalled pack and it seems to go way, way further then it looks like it will

And even after all this, I still had a bit of the green left over!

This is all from one 150g packet of Silli. I basically bought the smallest pack so that I could get used to moulding things for when i'm ready to move up to Resin Casting.  I might make a short detour into this re-usable re-meltable rubber stuff that was pointed out to me.

So yeah. I've tried it out a few times with varying levels of sucsess. Sometimes the moulds seem to bubble up and othertimes they don't. I guess practise makes perfect.

Air Dough: My New Favourite Thing Ever

So for a while i've been looking to get into Resin Moulding. I have tons of ideas for stuff I want to make and play with and all sorts and the concept of getting into model making is really exciting for me. I went to my local model store to have a look one day with the Maid of Wynn and she pointed out to me that these guys were selling something called Silli (Which i'll make a post about next week...). I picked some up and then decided that really, I needed something to use as material for my practise moulds.

It was then that I discovered... Newclay Air Dough.

The little pot on the left was £3.00. The bag down behind it was £11 for 4 times the amount...

This stuff is pretty damn cool and pretty damn cheap. And for me, cheap is definately a deciding factor. (... I might make a GW negative post at some point out of frustration to explain...). Its a very light air-drying clay that would be exceptionally suitable for nursery schools (or Kindergartens for you americans out there)... As you might have told from the art on the front of the pot.

I played around with it for a while. You can mould it straight off and it dries in about 8 hours at room temperature. Theres a little warping, which is a shame but isnt too bad if you arn't expecting brilliance from something that costs £3 a tub.

Little car. Yes, its rubbish, but i'm not great with hand crafting yet...

Took two peices of air clay and mixed paint in with them. Sadly, i think mixing in the paint weakens the clay itself and causes those stretch-splits you can see there.

And a bunch of rocks. Yes, i'm aware one looks like a willy. Very adult of you

So yeah. I played around a lot with the potentials and limitations of the stuff. It dries almost like a weird paper mache pulp almost and is incredibly light. You can paint on it with Citadel Miniature Paints just fine and it holds the paint without a need for a Primer.

All in all, pretty good stuff.

Next, i'll cover my experiments with Silli and the awesome stuff i managed by combining the two in my craft projects...