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We celebrated S1's birthday recently. Labor Day through New Year's is very busy for us - six birthdays and 4 major holidays. We're not flying back to the "Old Country" for Christmas so I've really opened the wallet lately. Anyway, here are some pictures from S1's special day.
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Halloween post updated with trick-or-treat pictures
![]() Looking at Immeril's tile and card, I like the purple color scheme, white hair, and black eyes. His fantasy race is Eladrin, which are mystic elves of legend (more like the Fey than brownies or forest people). They are tall and slim of build, with fair skin and white hair.; they have pointy ears and solid-colored eyes. They also have a racial affinity for magic, which leads to an archetype of eladrin wizards. His sculpt has adventurer's clothing, like boots and pants (no pansy gowns or robes), a tunic (like you might see on a Jedi), and a flowing cloak. He's holding a ball of flame in his hands. Funny story about that - after painting the fireball, I asked for my wife's opinion. She said "I have no idea what that is" - I thought it was obviously a ball of flame, but she said she's not used to seeing people's hands on fire. Truly, we come from different worlds... Below are some different paint jobs for the Eladrin wizard. The leftmost figure has a Jedi-like look that I admire, with the leather tunic and earth-tone robes. But, I like the bases and color-schemes to match the card; the fireball looks nice, though. The center figure is from a painter whose pieces always look very nice, and this is no exception. Although I want a purple color scheme, this is a bit much, and the cloak blends with the tunic too much. The right-most figure is from the D&D Miniatures game and is prepainted (same sculpt), to give an idea of what a mass-produced paint job looks like. Not as bad as it could be, but the boots really should be a different brown than the leggings. I like the interpretation of metallic greaves along the arms, which is different than how the previous two artists saw the same sculpt.
Unfortunately, I don't have any more intermediate images of Immeril so these are my final shots.
I've cleaned up the borders of this figure since taking these pictures, particularly at the sleeves. Immeril is certainly not my best character (that distinction belongs to Kat the Rogue, whose dark shades fit my painting style better than these bright colors) but not my worst either, and I've enjoyed working in a bright palette. I'm looking forward to working on the last Ravenlot hero, Arjhan the Dragonborn.
![]() Happy Halloween, one and all! As we know, it's my favorite holiday, and I have the day off to carve pumpkins with the kids, go to Halloween parties, and Trick or Treat in the evening (to say nothing of missing all the craziness that goes on in West Hollywood). But for the morning, the kids have school so I have some time to work on the website and paint. For now, I'll put up some Halloween stuff we've already done, and add the Trick-or-Treating pictures later. I put up a "read more" break to keep from slowing the rest of the site down, so open the post and click "read more" ![]() I decided to make posts for the children's birthdays, so I need to do one for D1 (whose birthday was almost two months ago) and for D3, whose birthday was this week. It's funny how they keep getting older and I don't... My website interface has been updated, and I now have slideshows, so I am trying out this new feature. D1 birthday at the beach, from September 2013 (a little late...)D3's Birthday - 2 years old!![]() While putting S1 to bed, he said that it felt like the whole weekend was wasted. Okay, so what did we do this weekend?
So, why wouldn't there be a National Heroscape Day? S1 and I played in a local Heroscape Tournament, SoCal Slaughter, which you can read about here. These aren't the glory days of Heroscape, and there were only 9 people who showed up. S1 originally wasn't going to play, but since there were an odd number of people registered, someone would have to sit out each round, so we pressed him into service to make an even number of players. Fortunately we had brought an army of figures that he liked, so he had something to play. I'll list the armies played below:
My army was based around using the Marro Stingers, which have the possibility of raising their attach depending on a dice roll, and Su-Bak-Na raises the probability of that roll. The Stingers hit harder than any other ranged unit in the game, and their are still relatively cheap for highly rated figures ($3.50 per set). Less powerful ranged squads sell for $10+. The $/effectiveness is probably why 1/3 of the players brought Marro Stingers. I included Marrden Hounds because I got them in an EBay listing that was poorly labeled (probably paid about 25% of the value) so I wanted to use them. They really paid off well in this tournament. My strategy was to send out my stingers to shoot the opponent's units; since their bonus has a possibility of sacrificing one of my own units, I have plenty of backup units (4 squads of Stingers is 12 figures, but you can only activate 3 at a time). Su-Bak-Na hits extremely hard, but has low defense, so he comes out at the end to kill one figure at a time (when it's too late to swarm him). The 'grubs are a filler unit, and they have synergy with Su-bak-na; when activated, in addition to taking a turn with the 'grubs I can also take a turn with Su-Bak Na, and he can eat one a turn to lose a wound. The Marrden hounds are large, double-base figures which have a plague; any figure adjacent to a Hound has a 30% chance of taking one damage. Being double based, they can be adjacent to a lot of figures, including my own, which is a drawback. They have a high chance of moving 8 hexes per turn (another probability roll boosted by Su-Bak-Na), which is another bonus, and their defense is very high. But I worried about plaguing my own guys, and my probability rolls are terrible (I rolled 1 on a d20 ten out of 14 times, which is almost impossible and suggests I'm not randomizing well). S1's army is based on samurai, who deal automatic damage if they roll better defense than the opponent rolled attack. This makes them hard to kill, because you shouldn't attack them at all if the odds aren't in your favor. Brunak is a neat figure who can carry a figure and isn't harmed by lava. The Minions have a high defense and any successful hits they roll are doubled, which makes them very dangerous from height (which adds extra attack). When we first arrived at the host's apartment, he had tubs of Heroscape terrain and figures out. S1 wanted to build some maps for fun out of parts we had never seen, while I helped build some maps for the tournament. I thought Ice Blossom was the nicest looking, but it was hard as heck to play on. Hot Heights looked better in real life than in the computer rendering, and the Quasatch Playground was neat with the jungle trees but there was so much bushy terrain that it was hard to move figures on. Eventually the 9 people playing showed up, S1 was drafted to play, we were assigned our maps and opponents, and we set out to play. Round 1: My opponent was named Buddy, who is Xotli at Heroscapers, and we played on the Quasatch Playground map. This map uses two sets of Ticalla Jungle, which are now between $75 and $125 apiece. Hummph. He brought an army that was almost all official custom units (explaining C3V and the custom unit process is a post unto itself). I told him that he would just have to explain to me how everything worked on the fly. He was a very nice guy, very helpful and I think just happy to be playing. I led off by moving my stingers onto the stone bridge in the middle of the map, but his custom units moved into the same area, so I couldn't get height on them. My final move of the first round was to move out my Marrden hounds, who plagued some of my opponent's units. I managed to kill a lot of his squad figures, who can take only a single damage, and who were very hard to kill from range. The Marrden Hounds locked down a number of units, who couldn't leave their area without risking a damage, and plagued a bunch on my turn. My stingers managed to take out his war witch, who was his major figure, and I won on points when time was called. Unlike Magic, you don't play best of three, so I moved on to my next map and opponent. S1 won his round against a girl who came with Buddy's son. I forget what she played, but their map was the Burial Marsh. I thought she was very patient with S1, who neither wins nor loses gracefully and was too excited to think straight. Round 2: My opponent was Leo, who is a perennial top placer at this event. I talked to him before the tournament and got a little advice, although he was a bit cagey about advising an opponent. Otherwise, he seemed friendly enough. He was certainly a graceful winner, because he cleaned the floor with me this round. Our map was Ice Blossom, which was extremely hard for me. The ice tiles require two movement points to move onto, and my guys had poor movement. If a figure hits the water, it has to end its movement, and the center is elevated, which requires a movement point per hex. My opponent, by contrast, had an army of a Fen Hydra, Q9, and 3 sets of phantom knights. The Phantom Knights have flying, so they aren't stopped by water or ice and don't pay for elevation changes. They also get a +3 to defense if attacked from range, which makes them ridiculously hard to kill, and they can disengage from an enemy figure without taking damage. They also only cost 10 pts more than my stingers per squad, so I think they really outclassed my guys. I could never get height, the phantom knights flew across the map to engage my figures and pick them off, and I didn't even mention Q9. Q9 is the best unit in the game, his regular attack has a range of 9, which is more than halfway across the map, and he has a special attack that lets him attack three times. His defense is also great, and being a robot he couldn't be plagued by my Hounds. Essentially, his phantom knights owned the center heights whenever I moved forward, and going around the ice along the edges was a shooting range for Q9. My mid-game strategy, after murdering all my first wave units, was to gang up all 3 marro stingers in a squad on whatever knight engaged mine. Since I had 4 squads of stingers, I could still field a full-strength squad to kill a Knight even when he killed one of my guys. I brought Su-Bak-Na out at the end to kill knights as well, which she did a good job of, picking them off one at a time. My opponent said I made a fatal mistake, when I won initiative I should have crossed the map to fight Q9 and risked the disengagement strike from the knight she was fighting. A lucky roll could have done Q9 in that turn, which would have changed the game, but I didn't see it at the time. I did take this advice to heart in my next round. S1 lost his round against a Marro Stinger army, played by last year's champion, on the Bad Moon Rising Map. There were plenty of tears, although he tried to man up. I don't know if his opponent was embarassed or just keeping cool, but he didn't take advantage of it either. Round 3: My opponent was Greg, the host of the tournament and the guy who sold me a considerable amount of my terrain/figures. We were back on the Quasatch Playground map, which was good because I had some experience with but bad because I would have like to try something new. Greg's army was a Vydar ranged army, using Nakita Agents, Krav Maga Agents, Warforged soldiers, and Laglor (the Vydar flagbearer, who increases the range of Vydar shooters). The Krav Maga are tough because a single rolled defense blocks all hits, the Nakita Agents deal an automatic damage if a small or medium unit touches them, and the warforged get one automatic defense in addition to what they roll. What he didn't count on was Marrden Hounds. The Hounds are large figures so they don't take damage from engaging Nakita Agents, but they are low to the ground, so there was no line of sight when they crept around the edge of the map. Their 8 move got them around very fast and their 5 defense made them very hard to shoot. I moved in next to Laglor and some warforged soldiers to plague them, but my Marro Stingers were locked down by another Warforged. I realized that my best chance of winning the game was to disengage my hounds (and risk the diengagement attack), move to lock down some shooters, and plague them with some lucky rolls. I succeeded in my plan (about a 50/50 chance of it working) and killed enough guys to win the game. It certainly could have gone either way, but I remembered the advice from my previous opponent. Also, I started rolling my dice in a cup, which i think helped randomize my rolls. S1 played a by named Max on the Hot Heights. He had an advantage because Brunak is immune to lava damage, but it turned out that neither player remembered to deal lava damage, so even tough S1 won it was a tainted victory. Also, he had a lot of trouble concentrating due to his previous loss, and really his attention span is not so long. That meant he was wandering around to other tables during his game, and hiding under the table during his round, and sitting on his head while playing. Not the best behavior, but the other boys were pretty tolerant. ![]() Final: My score of 2-1, and losing to the tournament winner (Leo) meant that I was in third place, and S1 was 4th. The prizes were a C3V custom figure from the national committee, a homemade custom squad from C3V, $10, $7, $5, and $3 (money came from registration money). The #1 guy chose the $10 because he drove from O.C. and needed the gas money. #2 took the custom figure and I took the custom squad. S1 got the $7. So, we did quite well in terms of prizes. After the tournament ended, the adults talked about games and things while the kids built some other maps and played their own game. S1 and I played Monty Python Fluxx with Buddy and Greg, which was about as silly as advertised. Buddy has 3 young kids and they are homeschooled as well, and they all like to play board games so hopefully we will meet up again in the future. ![]() So, Thursday before last the kids had the barfing bug and the wife had a doctor's appointment, which meant I took a sick day from work to take care of my kids (and yes, my boss knew why). I spent the morning with the kids helping them to do their school assignments and practicing piano. My wife came home about midday, which is too late to be worth going to work for a half-day (even at noon, the drive would take maybe an hour). Thus, I found myself with some time as the children had their lessons from mom. What to do, what to do... did I mention that the weather was beautiful outside? I've been working on Drow army, and it's finally almost finished. The wizard and priestess are wrapped up, and there's some touchup on the duelists yet to do. I painted the bases today, so I should have a post relatively soon showing the development of this army. The kids had their own projects too... Here are some projects I've been dinking around with but have't felt inspired to finish...
![]() Wait, it isn't Halloween yet ... is it? At our house, we kicked off the Halloween season this Sunday by decorating the place with orange lights, cardboard cutouts, and assorted knick-knackery. Halloween is my favorite holiday, sort of an antipode to Christmas. As much as I like Christmas, I do have some conflicted feelings about it. There's the tension between the secular and religious observations, the cost of gifts, and the expectation that you will achieve a transcendental spiritual state through a proper celebration and the depression if you don't. When Charlie Brown says that he feels depressed around the holidays, I know how he feels.* Halloween is, by contrast, a fairly simple holiday. In the immortal words of Garfield, "Boom, you go out, you get candy." As usual, we spent the rest of our weekend working on our new favorite game, Heroscape. The game is centered around miniature plastic figures and modular terrain to build your own battlefield. The characters cover an astounding range of archetypes, from WW II GI's to robots to knights and dragons to an orc riding a dinosaur. There are ninjas and samurai but no pirates, which I think is an insult and an oversight that should be rectified immediately, except that the license for the game is dead and no new parts are being produced. The scale is 28 mm, which opens up veritable avenues for substitutions from other miniature games, particularly heroclix and (horrorclix). Generic terrain like grasslands, rocks, and sand is pretty easy to get, but some of the special sets like lava and forest cost a pretty penny. I picked up 3 sets of the castle expansion from a local guy and that is what we've built the most with. Here are the two older kids and the castle we built as soon as we got it: Here is the tableau from this weekend: Here's our castle, with a bridge to cross the moat. There's an alien hive which pumps out monsters, located in a swampy area with some trees. In the bottom left there is a volcano and the bottom right shows a keep. I built most of it, but my son added the keep and the towers of the castle (which I am quite impressed with - I asked him to build me a few more). He didn't care for the swamp, but it makes for nice hindering terrain and is thematically linked to the alien monsters. We never did play the game (according to the rules anyway), but the ninjas manning the castle did a number of Hollwood-style moves to put my aliens out of business. * To be honest, I used to find Christmas a little frightening, and not just because a fat old man who likes kids goes on a breaking-and-entering spree. When my mother would get out the family Christmas ornaments and engage in the old traditions, there's a feeling of connectedness to something that goes back to antiquity (or at least the 1800's, which is a long time to someone who thinks the wait from lunch to 3 PM snacks is a long time). This feeling then forces the realization that there was a time when you were not, and there will come a time when you will not be. Children naturally live in the now, and to consider a past and future that doesn't include them is a little frightening. As an adult, you learn to mentally accept this, but the same atavistic terror bubbles up for many people when discussing deep space and deep time. When Carl Sagan spoke of "billions and billions", HPL would hear "the awful millenia" My son is frightened of the word "forever", and I suspect, despite his inarticulateness, that he feels something of the same.
![]() The Old Man of the Underdeep is the third part of a set with the Archmage of the Underdeep and Mistress of the Underdeep; the latter two were gifted to Rob and Julianna. Originally this piece was to go with the others, so that I would have a figure when I play with them. But, I didn't finish him in time, so he is staying with me for now. The color scheme was meant to remain thematic with the others. He is the same sculpt as the King of the Mountain, which is the Duergar Guard figure from Legend of Drizz't. Since I have already painted this sculpt once, and practiced the color scheme on two other figures, I had a much easier time than usual in my painting. I started with a black wash over the figure, to bring out the details. A 28 mm figure can have some subtleties that aren't visible at first glance, and these D&D figures are pretty detailed for game components. If you compare the Duergar, as represented in the D&D world, with standard fantasy dwarves, their skin is duskier and their eyes glow red. I changed the earth tones of the King Under the Mountain to stone and shadow. I used steel for the beard and eyebrows, which is a "colder" color than the bronze that I used for the King. The chain mail is the dark-blue "cobalt" which I used for the previous Drow pieces, and steel for the knee-pads and epaulets (silver is too shiny). I used purple for the cloak, which is quite regal in comparison to the King, but it matched the clothing choices of the Drow. I left the cloak grey. These are the intermediate step pictures: I really liked the skin color and beard, although you can see that the skin color is uneven in places - this is the black wash from the beginning. I darkened some grey to mostly match the effect of the wash over grey primer, and touched up the skin to fill in the empty spots without repainting all the skin. The red dots for eyes look very good from a distance, although I can see from the close-ups that his left eye looks rather googly. His boots were cobalt like the rest his armor, but matched leg- and foot-wear always make me think of footie pajamas, so I repainted his boots black. I spent a lot of time on the folds and creases of his cloak for the illusion of lighting, although how much light do you get in a place called "Underdeep" anyway? His hammer is steel instead of silver, which, as I said earlier, looks darker and less "holy". These are the final pictures: I like the figure, but there are some flaws. The gold on his shield is too uneven, and needs a third or fourth coat. The base should have been cobalt instead of purple to match the rest of the set (I may have decided on a purple base back when the boots were cobalt and I didn't want them blending in). Also, you can see some strings or clumps of paint around the edge of the base. I get careless when doing bases, with wide open spaces; I keep rubbing the paint around until it is partly dried, and then the solid part moves around on top of the liquid part and the surface is no longer smooth. If I wanted perfection, I could probably cut it off with a hobby knife, but I expect I would more likely cut myself or the figure than improve the paint job.
So, the Old Man of the Underdeep will be my character when next I play Legend of Drizz't with Rob! |
AuthorI am a father of five who is currently working as a medical physicist at [a nice place]. I have a Ph.D. in particle physics and I like games. Archives
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