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...

Let me tell you about... Lords of Gossamer & Shadow

So I've gotten my grubby little mitts on a copy of Lords of Gossamer & Shadow. It is the spiritual successor to Eric Wujcik's Amber Diceless Roleplaying Game and is powered by the same system. Here's the blurb from the Rite Publishing website:

This world is but one of untold many, a flux of chance caught between shadow and light. It is a world poised between great powers that shape and define all matter, one of many battlegrounds in an epic struggle between form and cacophony. The lords and knights in this battle move between realms with impunity: they are the creators, shapers, and destroyers of worlds.
In Lords of Gossamer & Shadow, the player-characters are agents caught up in this immense, multi-dimensional struggle. Born into it, their birthright is one of unimaginable power... and with it great danger! They will bear unique and idiosyncratic magical artifacts, command legions drawn from the myriad of otherworlds, and wield incredible powers that alter the very substance of reality. They are players in a Machiavellian conspiracy with the greatest of stakes, and arrayed against them are the deadliest of foes... each other! Lords of Gossamer & Shadow (Diceless) is an original sourcebook and roleplaying game using Erick Wujcik's diceless rules system, the same system that powered Amber Diceless Role-Playing. Lords of Gossamer and Shadow will be a standalone product, but is fully compatible with the existing rules system and can be readily used in new and existing campaigns.

I've actually read through the whole book - which is a novel prospect for me. It MIGHT be because I played Amber for almost the entirety of my teenage years and have been waiting excitedly for Lords of Gossamer for some time now...

Its a good book. I really like it. The artwork in it is very evocative (even if the front cover is very misleading...) and the powers have a very solid and interesting theme to them. It's a very loving new take on an old cult classic - But its definitely not a replacement for the Amber  DRPG... Don't think of it like its a 'new edition' of the game because the powers represented in it aren't quite Amber.

I am beginning to run a game of it, so I'm sure you guys will get some  LOG&S themed posts for the foreseeable future!

Let Me Tell You A Little Something About... Ars Magica

Ars Magica is complicated as Hell.

Here’s the blurb from the beginning of the book:

"Dragons lair in the mountains, angels watch over the Church. Faeries dance in the forests and demons tempt men and women to their ultimate downfall. The magi of the Order of Hermes live in a world of mythic power, the world of Mythic Europe. Welcome to that world.

Welcome to Ars Magica."

What they neglected to welcome you to was a maths lesson.

Ars Magica is an incredibly old game – Maybe not as old as Dungeons and Dragons but this game was put to print three years after I was born. So at the ripe old age of 26 this game has been around for a bloody long time. Old  doesn’t nessicarily mean bad however… after all, the game seems to have (Ironically) picked up a bit of a cult following amongst gamers both old and new. It is also apparently one of the first RPG’s to use the Troupe  Gaming style where the ST/GM is swapped out every game for another member of the group and each player had multiple characters (Allowing a wizard who sees a rise in wolf attacks as nothing more then news he  didn’t need to be bothered to tell to stay in his laboratory working on a new spell to turn swords into ploughshares…)

Unfortunately, from the perspective of a first time player like myself muddling through character creation to see what happens it can also seem a bit like a brick wall. The game is designed around combining one number with another number (or more!) and adding other factors in like the size of an affected area or extending the duration of a spell’s length for example. The book can be a bit unclear if you don’t know what you’re already looking for and for me, that gives it the feel of a book written for people who already know the game from an older edition (we’re currently on 5^th Edition, written in 1994!)

But.

Theres just something about the game which really grabs me. Theres a logic behind the maths that actually gives the setting a reason for being that way. For example – do you know why Wizards have Staves or Wands? I do – Its because a Wand can give you a bonus to repelling things, a bonus to projectile spells like fireballs or even a bonus to destroying or controlling things at a distance. But also, what is your wand made of? Wood can give you a bonus to controlling both living and dead wood, silver and coral provide a significant bonus against lycanthropes and demons respectively… Having put a lot of thought into what your wand or your sword or whatever looks like can provide a wealth of in character bonuses. And I am all about that level of detail.

The spell system is complicated… but like the rules for Item creation they can be very customisable. Magic is done by combining a Technique (such as ‘Creation’ or ‘Control’) with a Form (Such as ‘Fire’, ‘Water’ or ‘Animal’). Specialising in a wide range Forms or Techniques allows you to have a significant width of magical capability whereas focusing on a Form or Technique gives you a depth of power. Someone with a single form like Ignis (Latin for Fire) but a vast number of Techniques would allow them a great deal of things they could do with Fire… Or that same person focusing entirely on the technique of Muto (Latin for Change) could pick up very low levels of almost every Form and allow them to manipulate almost anything.

I am a huge fan of customisation in my characters and that is damn cool in my opinion.

One shame is that because of the huge amount of mechanics the book holds the setting suffers somewhat. Its not a huge problem for people who already know the game, but for someone breaking into the game without any knowledge of it it can be a little disheartening. The book has a lot of (out of print, as far as I can tell) supplements however which can fix that a little.

That’s my first opinions of it, anyway.

Project: Redcap are an Ars Magica community. Check out their website to learn more about the game!