2019 Crafting challenge wrap-up

As 2019 winds to a close, my self-imposed crafting challenge was a success.  A week was enough time to do some reasonably sized stuff but spaced out enough that on super busy weeks it wasn't too big of a commitment.  If I have a regret, it's that it felt like too many of these ended up being video-only weeks.  I'll probably do something similar next year, too, so watch this space!

Week 39 interesting goblin minis
Week 38 horde of goblin minis
Week 37 Elethar map
Week 36 Thriemar map
Week 35 mini peg board
Week 34 mounted tree props
Week 33 a danger of kobold minis
Week 32 Eridani blueprints
Week 31 Lego Envoy and Barracuda
Week 30 dungeon stacker stackers
Week 29 Lego gunships
Week 28 Lego Pelican tanker
Week 27 video only
Week 26 video only
Week 25 video + SHIPtember
Week 24 video only
Week 23 video only
Week 22 video only
Week 21 video only
Week 20 video + 5 skellington minis
Week 19 video + Lego Eridani
Week 18 video + Kelldra map
Week 17 video only
Week 16 video only
Week 15 video + Regault battlepods
Week 14 video only
Week 13 video + Veritechs
Week 12 video only
Week 11 video + giant spider minis
Week 10 video + Oriens blueprints
Week 9 video only
Week 8 video + cobblestone tile repaint
Week 7 video only
Week 6 L-shaped building
Week 5 Lego freighters
Week 4 Lego gunships + mecha + alcohol article
Week 3 cobblestone tiles + dwarven brother minis
Week 2 Ezren, Rogan, female human ranger minis + coinage article
Week 1 Rolling box
Kickoff

Crafting challenge, week 39

Squeaking in just before the end of the year I hit my 100 figs painted with these four goblins.  These were the interesting ones in the set from Bones 4 and in a better world I wouldn't have rushed some of the details.  I think they'll be fine on the table but don't work under scrutiny.

I'll do a longer wrap up in a couple days in my increasingly non-award winning year in review post but I'll say a few things here since I'm thinking about it.  Even though I hit my goal, it feels like a hollow success.  I tried some new stuff out and learned a few things but feel like I ended the year only slightly better off than I started it.  I bought a lot of gear and got gains out of that but feel like everything this year was rushed to hit a deadline.  While I went faster, I feel like I did so at generally lower quality overall and I'm not sure that's a good trade.  I'll write more about this later.

2019 finished mini counter:  102/100

Crafting challenge, week 38

These are most of the goblins I've been working on over the last few weeks.  There have been good days and bad days and I tried a bunch of new stuff.  These and took somewhere in the range of 30ish hours over the 24 of them at fairly low quality--under table top quality which I am not happy with. 

For my own historical records, here's more or less what I did:

• Kind of cleaned mold lines (looked better while I was cleaning but the figs are white plastic)
• Primed, zenithaled with the airbrush
• Home-made wash + drybrush value sketch
• Green skintones put down with airbrush (painfully)
• Wet blended the different color coding; everything else was normal base + highlights
• Picked out some small details, pulled up some highlights
• Ruined everything with badly applied washes

These are in no way my best work but get me to within striking range of my goal.  I've got the four more interesting characters for next week as they're already mostly done.  

2019 finished mini counter:  98/100

Crafting challenge, week 37

Slightly filler-y entry this week because I've been really busy and burning hard on my small army of goblins.  This is another of the neighborhoods in Cedarwood and one that some stuff will probably happen in when we resume the campaign in the new year.  There might be another one of these next week because of typical holiday stuff.

So.  Goblins.  I'm at 74/100 for the year which is super disappointing.  There are 28 of them maybe just over half done given most of a day of painting yesterday.  I figure I've got eight to twelve hours left to finish them so there's still hope.

Crafting challenge, week 36

This week I've been super busy but ended up making some maps for Saturday's game.  I've made several of these this year and this isn't the first one to show up here.  We don't always use them but then again, they aren't hard to make, either.  The advice I gave in that post still stands:  GMing magic happens in the spaces between and every time I've filled in all the blanks I've been sad about it.  As usual, (c) 2019 me but feel free to use in your home games.

In other news, my goblins are going really slowly.  Despite batch painting being overall faster, the number of them makes it seem more daunting than it actually is.  I don't get many blocks of 3-4 uninterrupted hours and I have a hangup for not finishing a step completely.  Luckily, Vince gives this advice which I'm going to experiment with as soon as I can get back to the painting desk.

Crafting challenge, week 35

If there's a thing I like to build other than spaceships and buildings (and games...and stories...and probably other stuff) it's tools.  But before we get to the main event we need some background stuff.

I'm in the process of moving furniture around.  Earlier this year I moved my crafting area from downstairs to a small bedroom upstairs that also contained a bunch of office stuff.  While this was an improvement, it was awfully cramped.  While this house is significantly smaller than my last, I'm offended that I've been using the space so badly.  This round of moves frees up the large master bedroom complete with its own sinks which will be the new crafting/office/misc stuff room.

When I moved the crafting area upstairs, the first thing I built was a pegboard for storing mini blister packs since I have so many.  This didn't get logged here for...reasons (I can't actually remember why).  It was one of my old painting blotters with some bamboo skewers hotglued to it.  While this worked OK, the hot glue wasn't strong and couldn't hold much weight.  I had to move stuff anyway, so I took the time to rebuild it.

Instead of the janky "this was a paint blotter" pattern that was on it, I primed it with one of my ancient cans of mini primer.  I also poked holes at an upward angle to a) keep the blisters from falling off, and b) to allow for a stronger connection.  These were then glued on front and back.  So far it's holding but hopefully it won't need another go around.

I'm also painting a passel of goblins but they're going very slowly.

Crafting challenge, week 34

This week we have a late post more because I got super busy cleaning and moving furniture and less because I had nothing to show.  Granted, there isn't a lot to show but here you go.  These trees were purchased months ago and replace the low-rent Lego trees I'd been using.  They're hot glued to bases and are surprisingly sturdy though the bigger ones probably still want a washer or coin glued to the bottom.  It's been on my list for a while and I finally got around to sort it out. 

Crafting challenge, week 33

This week I've got kobolds.  Lots of kobolds.  A danger of kobolds.  There are seventeen of them here, some of them very poorly molded (the dudes on the right).  My painting has not helped this. 

The dudes on the left are super fun in all kinds of super fun ways.  I spent some time experimenting with finer details than I'd normally capture because these sculpts were so fun despite the fact that I really wanted to crank through them so I could hit my target of 100 this year.  If I had it to do again (and I might) I'd possibly spend more time to get a better result.

So next up we get some orksgoblins.  there are 26 which, if my basic arithmetic checks out, means finishing those puts the 2019 total at 102.  They're already primed, zenithaled and value sketched.  I'm going to experiment base coating with my super cheap airbrush because a) I like using it, and b) this's supposed to faster.   We'll see.

2019 finished mini counter:  74/100

Crafting challenge, week 32

I'd hoped to have more but things didn't work out the way I wanted them to.  The image over there is the schematics for the Eridani pictured somewhere.  I rushed through it if I'm honest but I don't think that's too big of a problem. 

This is probably too big of a thing for running actual fights but it's pretty useful to establish fictional positioning.  Also, good for catastrophes.  Feel free to use in your personal games and for non-commercial purposes.

In other news, the thing I hoped to put up here is a painted danger of kobolds.  Yes, that's the plural for kobolds according to me.  They still need a couple layers of washes but otherwise the 17 of them are done.  That would put me at 74 total.  With seven weeks remaining in the year I gotta finish like four per week to make it.  It's looking unlikely at this point. 

Crafting challenge, week 31

It will come as no surprise that this year also isn't my year to do nanowrimo so I got that goin' for me.  Instead, I'll throw some lego builds here.

The Envoy is the last of the bulk freighters I'll do for now as a variation on the Pelican earlier.  The other bulk freighters (Mule, Zephyr) had containers port and starboard.  The two newest have containers dorsal and ventral.  I don't know which of those is actually better--it probably depends on the configuration of the stations they're loading/unloading at. 

The Barracuda started as an engine table scrap I liked so I kept going.  I liked the engines a lot and got up to the guns and realized that it wanted to be a lot bigger than I wanted it to be.  There's a better ship in there, I think, and if I get some time this week I'll try to find it.

More design work as well this week but as usual, nothing to show yet.  Maybe a screenshot of the character sheet will find its way here if I can get the bugs shaken out.

Next week:  video?  If not next week then I'm feeling good for the week after.

Crafting challenge, week 30

I finished off my dungeon stacker stackers this week.  Well, my second try at, anyway.  The first ones were built too small and wouldn't fit on top of the stackers.  These are supposed to be ancient light stone constructions that have been left out in the elements for millennia.

The wall tops are Readi-board with the paper pulled off of one side and textured with a Green Stuff World rolling pin.  The walls are XPS with the smaller sections textured the same way.  The larger piece intended for gates was hand-textured with a ball point pen and rolled up foil wad.

If I had it to do over again (and I might) I'd probably draw on the bricks like the big gate piece since that looked the best.  The texturing on the smaller pieces is weak and the wash didn't pick them out as well as I'd expected.  I probably should have started with a darker base coat in either case.  The only piece that looks reasonable is the big one so I might have another go at these.

This week I also did a bunch of design work but there isn't anything to show there.

Crafting challenge, week 29

This week marks the first in five months that I haven't done a video and I might not make one next week, either.  I made it through 22 consecutively which is its own accomplishment and looking back, I probably made six or so that I thought were OK (the rest were crap).  I'm not going to miss the stress of figuring out what to say, how to say it, and then shouting into a microphone for several hours each week. 

Instead, I've been doing other creative things.  The ships shown here are more bits from the post-BrickCon excitement.  We're planning a collab hopefully to be shown at BrickCan 2020 if all goes well.  I've got a lot more to build but there's time yet so other than my pals crushing it in the "build ships for a collab next year" department, I'm not in any particular hurry.

Also this week, I started building some dungeon stacker stackers because we're going to have some wall combat action sometime real soon, maybe next weekend, and I like to be prepared.  They're built and primed but painting will be a couple days yet.  Unless something goes terribly wrong, pictures should land here next week.

Last but by no means least, I've started redesigning my fantasy game.  I've got some ideas on how to make it work better and honestly, I can't leave well enough alone. I'm pooling my learnings from the Sci-Fi game I mostly built earlier this year and additional learnings from Fate and Blades in the Dark to hopefully streamline some stuff even further.  Part of me wants to wait until I've had time to study Genesys but given the size of that book, I figure that's a ways off yet. 

So far, the new system looks a lot meaner and a lot leaner.  Combat and other resolution rolls should be streamlined and some of the last corners get knocked off of the majority of mechanics.  As an added bonus, something akin to aspects in Fate should replace the normal belief system that players find so hard to wrestle with.  I'm not 100% sold on it yet, but it's also in its infancy.  If all goes well, we can trot it out sometime soon--hopefully in time for chapter 2 possibly in a couple weeks' time.

Crafting challenge, week 28

I am starting to be stupidly busy (again) and it's way past time to wind down the video a week thing that's been such a rollercoaster.  At the very least I'd like to not have a release when my Saturday game runs because I feel like the quality of the game is dropping because I'm thinking about it less.  This week's video is here.

Last week was BrickCon and one of the things I like best about going to cons is all the ideas and excitement that they ignite.  The problem is that I'm usually suuuuuper tired and by the time I've recovered I'm busy with something else or the excitement has died down.  This time I made a conscious effort to build right after the con and here's the first postable result.

In other news:  we're looking pretty doomed to finish 100 minis by year's end.

Crafting challenge, week 27

This is a video-only week (here) but mostly because BrickCon ate up most of the time.  And for those of you who noticed that I post-dated this one, it's because I forgot to publish it amidst all the BrickCon festivities.

Crafting challenge, week 26

This week saw the construction of a video and not a lot else.  (video here)  This one included three maps which I built from free textures found online.  I like building maps even if I don't use them and I'm starting to wonder if I couldn't build a few more and put them up on DriveThruRPG or something.

Next week is BrickCon so there isn't going to be a lot of action here, though the video is already shot.  The week after that also looks rough.

The best scene in any streamed RPG(TM)

This is The Best Scene In Any Streamed RPG(TM).  It's from the early part of Nebula Jazz season 2 which I'm still watching.  I'm not going to break it down but you should super watch it.  I don't think this would have worked if Adam hadn't played it up at every turn.  Sam, for his part, played into it perfectly.  It's a thing of beauty.

Crafting challenge, week 25

I meant to post this yesterday but got busy and forgot (go figure).  Video is here which concludes the multi-part discussion I'd been going through.  On the one hand I'm happy it's complete as I think it's my best advice.  On the other hand, going back to the days of not knowing what I'm going to make isn't great.

The good news is that my obligations for SHIPtember are now complete.  You can see the goods on flickr.

Crafting challenge, week 24

This week was mainly building one video and avoiding doing what I'm supposed to be doing, namely working on SHIPtember.  My build is not going well which shouldn't really be a surprise except that at this point last year I was already done.  I didn't really have much going on then which isn't true today but I don't think I've even hit the 1/4 mark with this build yet.  That's a little concerning.  To make matters worse, I know I'm missing some parts but don't want to put in a pile of orders right before brickcon.  It's looking a lot like I'm not going to finish for the show and that sucks. 

I'm at that scary part where I don't really want to continue building.  This happens on every big build and on every big multi-day project.  I get it most weeks for videos especially if the scripting isn't going well.  It's now happened so often that I expect it and have powered through it in the vast majority of cases, usually to good result.  This time feels different and I don't know if it's because so much creative energy is going into videos or what, but I really, really want to stop.  I'ma build like crazy today and see how I feel this time next week.  I don't like quitting on creative endeavors but something doesn't feel right and I don't like it.

Crafting challenge, week 23

I think I'm over the halfway point on my "make prep suck less" multi-part thing at which point I think I'm going to seriously explore other ideas for making videos easier.  The response from last week's video was underwhelming and again I note how terribly ironic it is to have that one voted down and the previous one at the top of the subreddit.  I have no idea how these things work but I'm really starting to not like it.

This week does have a bunch of crafting in it but other than the video it's mostly SHIPtember stuff which you can watch at my flickr.  This one's a departure from my normal scheme so we'll see how it goes.  Brickcon looms in the distance, too, and I really need to get on bricklink to buy some parts.

Crafting challenge, week 22

This one gets filed under "that's the definition of irony."  (video here)  Story time.

I saidtyped this last week:

I might feel differently if the response was higher.  It's been overwhelmingly positive for sure, but they're not driving many views and it is a pain to have to go try to drum up support every week.  

I've been going through a roller coaster of emotions every week revolving around whatever the script is and how terrible it might be.  It's usually better once the video is posted but not always--last week was one of those.  I hate having to advertise stuff and it's a real feel-bad moment in my week.  One of the places I'd been posting is the Matt Colville subreddit as it's a place that has mostly reasonable folks and occasionally good discussion.  I didn't post this one specifically because the last one did so poorly there.

I also saidtyped this:

If something significant changes in that time I'll reconsider but for now that's the plan.

Turns out that someone else posted my video to the Matt Colville subreddit.  It was heavily upvoted and drove a ridiculous amount of traffic.  It's driven more than double the channel's total views and more than tripled the sub count.  It's a pretty significant change.  A week later it's still driving subs and views more than the previous 14 videos combined.

The truth remains that building videos takes too much time.  It's also true that I still hate advertising stuff--none of that has changed.  This month I'm doing SHIPtember despite my better judgement so I'll have even less time for other stuff.  I'm not entirely sure how to make sense of all of this but for now I'm content to ride the wave and see where it goes.

Crafting challenge, week 21

This week was dominated by a video but this is probably one of the last times that this happens.  Despite streamlining my process considerably, it's still taking way longer than I can sustain to make these.  I can afford around 8 hours a week before it seriously cuts into other things that I'm currently slacking at including prep for my own games.  Just counting the new format stuff the average per episode is around 12 hours.  This one weighed in at around 15 which basically means it's the only significant thing I did this week outside of work.

I might feel differently if the response was higher.  It's been overwhelmingly positive for sure, but they're not driving many views and it is a pain to have to go try to drum up support every week.  Search is not driving significant traffic despite my careful SEO.  This is not for lack of reasonable thumbnails--mine are clocking in on the high side at over ~5% on average but there isn't enough traffic to drive stuff on its own. 

I'm at the point of needing to figure some stuff out (also, SHIPtember is on the way) and I don't think I can keep throwing time into this bottomless bucket.  Right now I'm thinking I'll finish the ones I feel like I have to make and then only post stuff when I have more to say.  It's looking like three or four more, some of which I think will be short-ish.  If something significant changes in that time I'll reconsider but for now that's the plan.

Crafting challenge, week 20

Video here and if I'm honest, I don't think it's that great.  I didn't feel low energy yesterday when I shot it but the final result is kind of dead.  I suspect the analytics will confirm around this time next week.  I've been thinking critically about the process and

Luckily, I've got more than just a video this week.  These five skellies didn't quite make it into last week's post but they're done now.  Certainly not my best work but I really, really wanted to paint.

2019 finished mini counter:  57/100

Crafting challenge, week 19

Obligatory video can be found here.  Luckily that's not the only thing I have this week.  Over there on the right (hopefully) is a ship.  I noodled with a bunch of ideas before I landed on this particular construction heavily influenced by some of dasnewten's work.  I think it mostly works though there are things I'm not super happy with.  This is the ship we're going to be using in my next sci-fi campaign (starting soon!) so eventually there should be schematics up here for it.

In other news, I realized this week that SHIPtember is only a couple weeks away with BrickCon right after that.  Then I panicked. 

Crafting challenge, week 18

I feel like I did a lot more stuff than I have to show this week but I'm pretty sure I said that before.  Other than this week's video, I wrote this post about filling out Cedarwood details mostly so I could refer to it when dispensing advice.  I also did a bunch more design work on the sci-fi game but again there isn't anything I can show here.

I wanted to post a cool microspace Lego thing I built but I only got as far as noodling with ideas yesterday.  If I'm lucky I'll edit this guy right here and add a picture.

edit:  didn't get done till the wee hours of the morning so it'll arrive in next week's update!

Filling Out a City

About six months ago I made this post where I stuck the Cedarwood map in all of its pixel-busting glory in these un-hallowed pages.  I've referred to it quite a lot over that time mostly when dispensing GM advice.  Well today I want to post some of the finer-grained pieces for similar examples.  So here goes.

These are two of the neighborhoods of Cedarwood in exactly they detail that I built them in when I needed them.  In fact, there's probably too much detail there for what I needed.  For the most part, aspiring GMs don't really need to go into this kind of detail.  In the case of the Kelldra map, we ran like three sessions there so having that detail really helped.  For the Greypeak map, we spent, I dunno, a couple hours there so most of that wasn't used.  

This is a common trap that new folks tend to fall into:  wanting to figure everything out, but if you've watched my prep: tools and tips video, then you know how bad an idea this usually is.  Both of these maps have spaces where I can fill in what the labeled buildings are.  (Pro tip:  those buildings were chosen for their easy representation with the terrain I've built.)  Heck, most of the buildings aren't even labeled so I'm not in any real trouble if I run out.  That's the trick:  GMing magic happens where we leave space because we can fill it in when we have a need.

Feel free to use both of these for personal use but please not in your publication or anything like that (copyright me 2019).  If anyone really wants, I'd be happy to post the rest of the ones I have detailed if it'll help your game be a little more awesome.

In other news, I no longer have to be unhappy about having only a video to post this week :)

Crafting challenge, week 17

Output this week was low but there's been a breakthrough!  (video here)  I've not been a proponent of top N lists but in retrospect, I don't really know why.  Maybe they felt really lame to me or artificially forced content into a form they didn't necessarily fit.  Well, I feel differently now.

This one has been pretty fun.  With a formula, I'm both able to see if a point can stand on its own and mercilessly distill the idea if it seems too big.  The result is a better and punchier set of data.  In my script I'm looking for 20ish bullet-like points which stretches the tape to around 7 minutes which isn't terrible.  I was able to harvest all the advice I've been giving out on reddit and massage it into some hopefully evocative advice.

Because the scope is limited, it takes less time to write and edit.  I also did a dozen-ish read-throughs (out loud--my neighbors probably think I'm crazy) which helped smooth out some of the rough spots.  I found that a lot of the jokes I liked when I wrote them didn't work when delivered and a handful of jokes sort of came out of a lousy practice delivery.  I think this is probably the best piece of content I've put on youtube which helps it all feel more worthwhile.  No idea how it'll be received but I'm hopefull it'll be better than bad.

I also did a bunch of design and graduated my sci-fi game to v0.02 which is a real thing, just not one that has anything to show.

Note:  youtube is currently being very bad and uploading very slowly.  I've fixed the link after many trials and tribulations.

Crafting challenge, week 16

Again I had grand plans for all the stuff I was going to get done and again all I can show is a video.  (I think it's a good one, though.)  I also made this google sheet that rolls character concepts randomly. 

I did do some painting, though not much.  I've got five skeletons from Reaper Bones recent kickstarter that'd been prepped.  I want to explore some blending and weathering techniques otherwise I probably would have burned through these guys.

The way the math works out is 8.3 figs per month to get to 100 which means 67 by August which feels like a long way away.

Crafting challenge, week 15

This week we have things other than a video!  (finally) ((though, the video is right here.))

The Regault pods are finally done and pictured over there on the right.  Like the Veritechs, they look better in the picture than they do in real life.  Everything about this project has been awful and I'm super glad these are done.  I experimented with different painting approaches and pretty much hated all of them.  I don't like doing washes over large areas and I don't like doing base coats.  I wasn't able to reasonably handle pin lines and many of the pieces were so small I couldn't pull the flash and mold lines off of them.

This one goes into the "welp, that sucked" bucket.  I suspect that my OCD will get the better of me at some point and I'll be forced to go over some of the worst parts of these but boy did they need to be done.  The only upside to this whole debacle was experimenting with Pro Arcyl paints which are still awesome.

2019 finished mini counter:  52/100

Crafting challenge, week 14

This week I did a super mess of work but only finished one thing, this video.  This is a little frustrating.  I did manage to move my crafting station to a different room, something I've wanted for a while.  Unfortunately, moving my recording area didn't work out--the acoustics were lousy over there.

I also did a bunch of painting but didn't finish anything so by my own rules, I don't get credit this week.  I also recorded enough video for next week's post and a channel intro but since neither of those are done either, I also don't get credit for those this week.  So, yeah.  Who wrote these rules, anyway?

Two very nice upsides worth noting:

• The new crafting area is much tidier.  It almost certainly won't stay that way for long, but it's got more options than the old area.
• I got my Pro Acryl paints in the mail.  They are awesome.  They seem to go out of stock really quickly, though.

Crafting challenge, week 13

Earlier in the week I thought that things were going well.  By the end of Tuesday night I had already recorded all of my video for the week.  You can see the results here.  Sadly, I didn't finish my editing until Friday.  Saturday I was busy with other stuff, but Sunday, yeah, Sunday I'd finally get to sit down and paint.

Welp, it's Sunday and I've given up on painting for the day.  I had some new techniques to try out and some lofty goals and the short version is both fell short.  The technique for pin lining didn't work on the Veritechs and I ended up stopping after a few hours of frustration.  You can see the results on the right.  I think they're some of the poorest paint jobs I've done in a while.  Unlike most of my pictures, these look far worse in person. 

I could not get the wash into the lines without making a mess and I wasn't able to clean up the mess without screwing something else up.  My ink-infused white paint would come off with staggering ease and washing the whole thing looked really bad.  I was going to start on the Zentraedi pods but it turns out the places you have to paint them aren't at all denoted on the mini which means I'd need to freehand it on every single pod.  Not today. 

I really want to strip these and try again.  The airbrushing went so well but everything else went so badly.  Construction was a huge pain and painting is proving to be a huge pain too.  I'll have some time this week to work on the pods but just like these I suspect I'll get to the point that I just want to be done and leave them looking crappy.  I was so excited to get these and they have been nothing but frustration.  That sucks.  The rest of the unassembled ones will stay in the box until I get the skill to do these better.

2019 finished mini counter:  42/100

Crafting challenge, week 12

Remember how I said I wanted to do more in a week than just a video?  Well, I failed at that this week.  I did get a video up, you can watch it here, but that's all I did.

This one was rough.  The script is long (~350 lines) and even though I think it turned out pretty well, it went through a mess of revisions.  In fact, the main thesis changed after two days of writing which certainly didn't help.  I can make excuses about other time commitments and whatnot but they're not really germane.  This video just took a bunch of time. 

Where did the time go?  Four days to research, writing, and editing weigh in at ~12 hours.  Friday I did nothing--I needed a break.  Sunday I did all the filming, editing, and wrestling with youtube.  That took ~6 hours.  That's ~18 hours for just under 13 minutes of video.  That seems like a lot, and that's despite a lot of stuff going very well like editing. 

If I'm going to keep doing this youtube thing long term I'm going to have to start being way more efficient at it.  I don't think I want to be spending my entire week making one ~10 minute video--I got way too much crap going on for that to be sustainable.  I regularly say "everything is an optimization problem" and this is no different.  I just don't know how to optimize it yet. 

Crafting challenge, week 11

This week went quite a lot like last week with big chunks of it consumed by making and editing a video.  This one's a recording of one of my preparation sessions for a game I ran not long after the recording.  As an added bonus I did a recap of the session afterward.

I did manage to do a bunch of hobbying but unfortunately most of it didn't get finished.  The three badly painted giant spiders on the right are what I did finish.  These are from one of the D&D boardgames but I can't be bothered to look up which one.  They're basically primed, zenithal-ed, and then washed twice with Badger Minitaire Ghost Tints (brown then engine oil).  Next week (scheduling gods willing) I should have at least some swoopy planes.

2019 finished mini counter:  37/100.  I'm about a dozen behind right now :/

Crafting challenge, week 10

A couple things got done this week.  I made this video about initiative and time but it's really about game design, and I built the ship layout displayed somewhere on here.  I needed a ship's blueprints so I could invade it with pirates.  As one does.  This is the v01 deck plan for the Oriens class freighter which I've posted here before.  Feel free to use this for your home games and whatnot but please do not publish it without written permission.

My wrestling with my Robotech Tactics figures continues.  I've got the dozen-ish Zentraedi mecha and five plane-mode Veritechs assembled and primed.  Hopefully I can carve off some time this week to paint them.  I'm also hoping that painting these will be easier than assembling these was.  I am not in a hurry to put together the remaining Veritechs and Destroids.

I've also started prepping another army of kobolds and goblins and I think some skeletons in hope more than expectation at this point.  I'm about 17 figs short of where I should be right now to hit 100 figs painted this year but I suspect the next two batches will get me pretty close.

Crafting challenge, week 9

This week was pretty busy for me but I did a thing which you can find here.  Those of you who know me won't find this surprising in any way but I have very strong opinions on stances and metagaming.  I was going to do something less interesting but when I got to looking at my potential video topics list that's the guy that jumped off the page at me.  I didn't think I could get away with not doing that one next.  

The creation process went long for a couple reasons.  Despite having had a lot of time to think and develop my ideas, I'd never organized them more than explaining stuff in person.  The editing process, for those who don't know, is often where a pile of time is spent.  My first two videos were recaps of articles I'd already published so a lot of that hard work had already been done.  This time around that wasn't true and I covered a couple deep topics.  Between the research, pulling my awful jokes out of it, writing the script, and general difficulty with a medium I don't fully grok yet, it all went long.  

An additional problem is that this week I ran two games. Well, as of the writing of this post, the second hasn't happened quite yet, but the other one ran yesterday.  We were at a point in the other game that I needed to do a bunch of prep which also ate a bunch of time.  Life's hard that way sometimes.  

I don't really want the "thing a week challenge" to devolve into "I made another video this week" but it probably will be for a while until I get things humming along better.  In particular, I've super wanted to paint some stuff (Bones 4 shipment arrived recently) but I haven't made the time to sit down and do so.  I'm also not helped by having started to put together Robotech RPG Tactics figs a couple weeks ago which are in about a thousandy-eleventy parts each so my crafting table is full of partially assembled mecha.  Someday those will be assembled and painted mecha but not today.  Someday I'll also get back to designing my other game, somewhat ironically why I was putting those mecha together in the first place.  

Crafting challenge, week 8

Like last week, this week was mostly consumed by a video.  This was not helped by shooting it twice.  It's been a learning experience as one might expect.  While it feels like it's getting easier, I'm not sure it is.  This video is a recap of this article on coins and I might have cut a little more than I should have.  I don't think all of my videos will be recaps of articles (the next one probably won't). 

I also did a last minute drybrushing of my cobblestone tiles.  The texturing was great but I struggled with the wash partially because I was really lazy.  On the table the look ok but not good.  This pops them out a little more and makes them a lot more consistent.  I like this better.  Because I had paint available, I also did a once over on a few of the building bases that had similar issues. 

Next week we have a longer video that hopefully won't get in the way of a bunch of painting.  I've been wanting to fire up the airbrush and do a big batch of...er...something.  Maybe some kobolds which are starting to pile up.  Or maybe *gasp* some gnolls!  (I love gnolls.)  Watch this space!

Crafting challenge, week 7

This week is a departure from my normal crafting shenanigans in a big way.  I made a youtube video which you can watch here.  It's a video recap of this post about alcohol which I am very fond of.  If you didn't like the jokes there, well, I don't think I can truthfully claim they're any better in video form.

If I'm honest, this is mostly Shoe's doing (again) and I don't think I do anything quite as unnatural as watching myself shout into a camera with a microphone up in my grill.  But that's how I spent a big chunk of this week.  And then there was the editing.  If you thought I hate shingles, I really hate editing.  I'm told that everyone hates the sound of their voice but whomever it was among you that was supposed to tell me that my voice really sucks, well, you slacked bigtime.

Even though it took the better part of two nights (around 6 hours) to film 37 usable clips filling around 6 minutes and the better part of 3 days to edit into something reasonable, I think it turned out OK.  It definitely got easier the further I got.  I can't say for sure if this youtube thing is going to be a regular occurrence but it's been interesting enough to try again for next week.  Hopefully that won't be the only thing I can report on here, but watch this space for update!

Crafting challenge, week 6

This week (really, this weekend) I returned to my beloved Proxxon and the pile of foam that litters my crafting area.  Problem:  my map of Cedarwood has a bunch of L-shaped buildings but I don't have any L-shaped props.  That's no longer true!

This building is 2x3 with a 1 tile thing off the side of it.  It's the normal tile size (1.75"x1.75") and the base is textured foam mounted to medium weight chipboard.  I would have switched the base to Readi-Board but I wanted to use up some of the random scraps I have laying around.  Construction is pretty much what you might expect:  hot glue of major structures with faux-beams covering the seams.  Hated shingles are PVAed down (yes, I verbed that) as normal.  I also remembered to add a chimney but I think it's a little too small.

Other than the color (which I don't really like) I only did one experiment on this one.  I usually build the roof facia board out of coffee stirrers or crafting sticks to hide the sides of the shingle beds.  This time I used medium weight chipboard textured with the gnarling on my hobby knife.  This was easier to work with but a) didn't hold the texture, and b) warped when painted.  I don't think I'll do that again, but hey, that's how we learn, right?

First coat is the typical BMC base coat of Mod Podge + black craft paint.  All paints on this one are craft paints despite me wanting to airbrush stuff--that'll have to wait.  I wanted to experiment with colors some so the roof is the same slate green as the base but I'd forgotten that I'd textured the shingles as wood.  So that's fun.  The minty-green plaster is also a hard sell.  Drybrushing and homemade-washing proceeded as normal.

The strength of this one is in its build, I think.  While I tried to paint this one bravely, I don't think the color combination really works.  I may repaint it later.

Crafting challenge, week 5

This week I've been busy with housework and other obligations but that didn't keep me from crafting!

The setup is that I've done a ton of design work on my sci-fi game and started working on larger starships.  I don't think the game is about starships as much as small craft like fighter and mecha, but they are around and will probably play a big part.  And what is everyone's favorite thing to do in mecha and fighters that isn't blowing each other up?  It's blowing each other up defending or attacking a bigger ship like a freighter!  That's right, kids, you can't escape escort missions, even in fake space.

I usually build in microspace scale which is nominally anything smaller than minifig scale, though usually a much larger scale than this.  Last week's fighters and mecha were way too big but I think these guys are much closer to what I was looking for.  If I were to guess, I'd say the small craft builds are probably 3x too big in comparison.

I built the Zephyr first.   It looks an awful lot more like a warship than a bulk freighter which I suppose is pretty typical for me.  While I'd like to pretend that I just threw it together, I didn't.  I wrestled with the thing for several hours before I got it looking the way I want--the engines in particular.

I didn't want the cargo containers to be stuck right next to each other and a half stud offset looked too big.  I ended up with a studs-ahead configuration which winds up with a weird geometry which isn't quite as tight as I'd wanted but works out well enough anyway.  The containers are probably too tall but a plate and a tile was too short and I didn't really want to stack two plates and a tile.

The Zephyr stood on my desk for a few days, taunting me with its warship-ness.  I re-wrote some of the fiction so it'd make more sense.  It's a fancy bulk freighter.  One with some high tech and expensive things in it.  That was clearly not going to work for the kind of garbage scow players might own and operate.  It's also really big (frigate sized).  Well, crap.

This Oriens came next, a workhorse in the sector.  The build itself was much easier since I had already established the size, shape, and general layout of the cargo containers.  It'd be lame if they weren't compatible, after all.  They say that constraint sometimes frees the artist and that's certainly the case here.  In fact, I built all three of the other ones within a couple hours because of it.

Because there's an expensive frigate sized freighter that's fancy and expensive, that strongly implies that there's a more affordable frigate sized freighter.  I imagine the Mule class is fairly common, hauling a mess of who knows what across the sector.  They're expensive because of its size, but not so expensive that only the opulently wealthy can afford them.  Sometimes you want a normal train and not a sports train.  Sorry, Clarkson.

And the last one is the worst of them, probably.  The Junkers class light freighter is the aforementinoned garbage scow.  If you're going to play debtrunner you're going to need something that the players might plausibly pay off.  Well, this is that ship and it's not very good.

I usually build without a lot of outside influences.  Well, I mean there's the places I pulled my aesthetic leanings from, but beyond that there's only occasionally fiction that goes with them.  This time around I had a fiction and just wanted to build standins.  The interesting thing was that I made changes in the other direction, too.

I'd started with an abstract idea of what these ships were, possibly with some ideas of balance, but had no idea what they might look like.  This meant that choosing armaments and arcs was pretty scattershot.  Building them after the fact meant that I knew roughly what I wanted in terms of armament but then could go back and fix the arcs to be more reasonable because now I knew how they worked.  This is fun.  I think I'll eventually build all the starships in this way even if I never do anything else with them.  Being able to have a strong physical rooting for the fiction isn't a luxury I usually have and I really like that.

That seems like a lot

It's a little hard to believe but this so-called-blog has been around for just over 12 and a half years.  I find that hard to believe, anyway.  I started this thing to improve my writing.  It has.  I don't think there's a better way to force myself to organize my thoughts than to stick it out on the intertoobs for anyone to see.  It's also massively helped my editing skills, grammar, and vocabulary.  Turns out when you spend a lot of time doing a thing you want to improve, you'll sometimes get better at it.  Weird how that works.

Since I started this thing I've moved five times, sold two homes, bought two homes, and bought two cars.  In 2006 the best non-ridiculously-priced CPU you could buy was a core 2 duo.  I also had gout a couple more times (that sucked), rewrote my RPG a couple times and ran three years worth of campaigns.  In 2006 Legoing was still 4 years off for me and I'd never played a Bioware or Bethesda game.  I learned how to BBQ and have since cooked untold hundreds of pounds of it.  All of my leadership studies have been between these points.  All of my coffee roasting has been between these two points.  I've purchased four desktop machines and five laptops (I think).  All of my mini painting and tabletop crafting happens within the last couple years, even.

All that and I published 200 blog posts.  Just though you should know!

Crafting challenge, week 4

This week I've got two things.  Well, one article (this was a fun one) and several builds.  This week I've been busy building a new game.  I'll save my design level comments for a different time but I will say that a) it's a somewhat streamlined version of my other game, b) it's a sci-fi setting, c) it's a lot more sandboxy than the other game.  I'm at the point of really testing combat rules and I needed tokens.  So I built some.


I haven't done any serious Legoing (yes, I verbed that) since last SHIPtember.  I also usually don't build at this scale.  So I'm both rusty and kind of out of where my expertise lies.  I've got lots of parts, too, just not many in this particular scale.  It's been...challenging.

I've always been impressed with micro-builds even though I tend to build really big.  This goes back to my early days in the hobby trying to mentally deconstruct the myriad train and space builds at shows.  Now, nine years on I still do this at shows.  I also usually try to build or at the very least go through the instructions for the sets I buy because there's usually an interesting part usage hiding in there somewhere.

For this little excursion, I wanted a bunch of mecha and small fighters.  I got a bunch of fighters and a really big mecha.  Most of them are significantly bigger than I wanted but will work for my testing purposes and might be good platforms to build gunships and whatnot on.  Turns out I'm not good at building small.  The mecha has proved quite difficult given all the articulation I want to pack in there.

At any rate, I think this is a start.  I'm not exactly overflowing with sci-fi minis and I really don't need to be buying even more minis that I don't have time to paint.  Hopefully in the future I'll be able to crank out stuff closer to the scale I want

Worldbuilding Part 3: Alcohol

Anthropologists posit that it was alcohol, not bread, that spurred humankind to stay in an area and build settlements.  Indeed, few things are as pervasive in our society as intoxicants but today we're focusing an alcohol, brewed and distilled.

As it turns out, us human-type-creatures are super fond of booze, cultural and legal admonishments notwithstanding.  It also turns out that you have to do very little work to get things to ferment into our favorite drinkable--ethanol.  You basically need water, a starch (or better yet, a sugar), and yeast though sometimes mother nature will supply this for you too. 

Historical

I am not a booze historian, though, I imagine that's a really interesting field.  Here's a listing I stuck together for my own use of things people actually fermented and drank in antiquity.  Like chiles which have different names for fresh, dried, and smoked versions, many of these drinks have distilled versions which I've supplied as appropriate.

• Beer:  a basic fermented drink made from grains of some sort and a yeast.  There's some work that needs to be done to convert the starches in the grain into sugars so the yeast can do they thang but it's easy enough to do in the comfort of your own kitchen should you be so inclined.  I could easily fill multiple articles about beers and whisk(e)ys but we'll keep it to the basics.  
• A beer with slow-working yeast that likes low cave-like temperatures are typically German lagers.  Pilsners (from the Czech city of Pilsen), Marzens (with two dots) famous for Oktoberfest, and Dopplebocks brewed by monks to replace bread during fasting are all examples.  
• A beer made with fast-working yeast at just under room temperature are typically ales of which there are many, many types.  These include porters probably named after the folks who primarily drank them, stouts, barleywines, lambics made with fruit, and most (all?) farmhouse ales.  They take not much time to ferment and don't need to be aged.  
• Beers with different grain bills turn into some of our modern day favorites when distilled including Bourbon, Whisk(e)ys, and I dunno, a lot of stuff, including my personal favorite Scotch.  Most of today's cheap liquors start with a thing that looks a lot like beer.  
• Ethiopian tella is a beer brewed from teff and sorghum (assumedly malted or otherwise converted).  
• Cider:  These are fruits or fruit juices that are fermented into an alcoholic drink.  We think of cider today as fermented (or non) apple juice.  I'm lumping a bunch of things into the same category even though they're not really the same thing.  
• Cider made from pears is called perry.  
• Distilling cider yields the founding father favorite applejack.  
• Wine:  Today we think of a wine as a drink made from grapes, usually not distilled, and often aged, but wine is a pretty generic term.  
• Brandy is distilled wine and originated for preservation and to ease shipping.  Cognac and Armagnac are brandies specific to regions of France.  
• Fruit wines of all types are known and Romania has a fantastic distilled version made from plums named tuica with some fancy letters.  
• Mead:  I find it fascinating that mead is so well-recognized in popular culture but so few people know where it comes from.  The answer:  bees.  Mead is often adulterated with other stuff but beyond water, honey, and yeast, that's it.  
• An Ethiopian version of mead is called tej and includes bittering agents.  
• Balche (with an accent) is a Mexican version with roots all the way back to the Mayans.
• A mead with fruit like berries is called a melomel.  
• Metheglin is mead with added herbs and spices 
• Distilling mead is sometimes called honey jack.  
• Potato beer doesn't seem to have been a thing but as a cheap way to increase the fermentables in a mash they're super popular.  We're probably all familiar with vodka but the Norwegians also have akvavit distilled and flavored with herbs.  
• Rice is a common ingredient in modern beers but Japanese sake is a non-distilled drink made primarily from rice.   
• Distilled rice drinks are unsurprisingly common.  
• Corn is also a common ingredient in modern beers and commonly made into chicha in South and Central America.  
• Bourbon is distilled from a mash mainly comprised of corn.  

Hazards

Other than hangovers, there are many hazards with alcohol in worldbuilding.  First and foremost:  pay close attention to how things are named.  An "Elven Cognac" doesn't make much sense since Cognac is a French town, unless your Elves are French.  Which I suppose they could be.  Similarly, "Dwarven Scotch" doesn't make much sense even though four out of five grognards think dwarves should speak in Scots English, myself included.  We also get in trouble with things named in other languages that aren't place names.  Lager comes from the German lagern meaning "to store" and we often anglicize this as lagering.  You can make up your own etymology if you like but be mindful of where some of these came from.

Another pitfall is wanting to stick things together for story or other reasons that don't make sense culturally or geographically.  Sake drinkers likely won't originate in an arid place because you can't easily grow rice there.  Similarly, people who don't grow grain won't be brewing a lot of beer. They probably have all kinds of other fermentable drinks, but that probably won't be one of them.

As a final thought on hazards, people have a history of staple drinks following stuff that a) grows commonly, and b) is cheap.  Large drinking establishments/cultures/traditions require a lot of raw materials to produce the volumes required.  Industries and trade are almost always found around these situations as opposed to fermenting in small batches for personal use, sometimes to preserve the value of fermentables at the tail end of their usefulness.  

How the Dwarves Got Their Whisky

You can go at this from basically two directions:  decide what they drink and adjust things around it, or figure out what goes on there and then figure out what they brew.  I do a mix of the two as suits the situation.  Here's a long for-instance.

Dwarves in my world love beer and whisky and we're going from "what they drink" to "what has to be true".  Both beer and whisky require grain in abundance and grain doesn't generally grow underground very well.  Kallvor is a low-magic world so there are no mystical greenhouses.  What has to be true for this to work?  They either have to grow it themselves or import it from someone else.  

Imagine, for a moment, a drinking craze going on in the Dwarven Empire.  These guys are good craftsmen, heavy drinkers, and most of all, excellent traders.  How long do you think it would take for a Dwarven merchant to go from "gawd, this crap is super expensive to buy" to "why can't we grow and make this ourselves?"  Maybe they hire a lot of farm laborers and the staff to hire, train, and organize them.  Do you think those guys would make a barrel of royals?  

Now let's go from beer to whisky.  What do we know about beer?  It's heavy (I mean, water's freaking heavy and beer is mostly water), it goes bad real fast if not kept cool and out of sunlight both of which are common in merchant trains, and you can distill it to make it better in just about every way.  Remember brandy?  Same solution to the same problem so it shouldn't be a stretch.

What happens when Dwarves start setting up large scale farms to supply grains for beer production?  Every Dwarven settlement that has arable lands is now heavily incentivized to set up fields that they might not have done otherwise since most of their food is grown underground.  We expect that major Dwarven settlements are trade hubs for their raw materials and crafts so they already have a bartertown on the surface, but now this takes on extra significance as the hub of trade and the center of their farm systems.  Now we play this forward for thousands of years and we have traditions and establishments that have become, dare I say bedrock, of Dwarven society.  Was it crafts or booze that built the Dwarven Empires of old?  Sounds like a good discussion over a pint.

One of the greatest cities on the Kallvor map is Vendregogh, an old Dwarven barter town.  The Dwarven undercity has been abandoned for ages but the tradition of grain growing and beer making remain.  Because of their heritage, they lean heavily into Dwarven traditions more than, say, Elven or Human traditions.  Furthermore, since there's an unbroken tradition of large scale farming there, they're better at it than, say, their counterparts elsewhere like Falcon or Trand.  Does this explain Vendregogh's prosperity?  Maybe!

Kobba

OK, fine, I'll give one more example.  Cedarwood, forever immortalized in pixels is a town in the middle of the forest unimaginatively called the Black Wode.  This time we go in the other direction from "what they have" to "what they drink".  From the fiction, Cedarwood is an ancient walled city that's been busy ripping itself apart for thousands of years.  They don't really grow anything inside the city and the walls aren't super far from the forest itself.  Given that any large farming system would require a) tearing down a lot of forest, b) a large standing army to keep it safe from enemies, we quickly arrive at a reliance on farmers markets supplied by mostly subsistence farmers from the nearby area.

What do subsistence farmers in a mixed deciduous and coniferous forest grow?  Tree fruits are probably common, as are berries, but stuff like like potatoes, carrots, beets, onions, and other root vegetables are likely staples.  We don our creative hat for a minute and take inspiration from sugar beets, sweet potatoes, and Dwarf Fortress to create a mythical forest-native tuber named sweet root.

This fictional tuber is found natively in the area and has been cultivated for the thousands of years that the site has been inhabited.  In that time selective breeding has increased crop yields and sugar content and they are grown commonly in the area.  On top of eating them as a bland, if high value source of calories, they can also be processed into molasses or mashed and fermented into the sweet, perfumed, local favorite known as kobba.

Kobba is usually brewed on site at taverns and each brewer has their preferred adjuncts and mash ratios and whatnot.  It's a fairly forgiving fermentable with a relatively high yield and can produce cheap low quality rotgut to fancy oak aged super high alcohol content drinks and everything in between.  But why stop there?  Let's take the second runnings or maybe the first runnings from a really questionable crop of sweet root, ferment it, an then distill it.  Then you get a very rum-like and perfumed liquor called krum.

But Wait, There's More!

If we're talking about rabbit holes, this one's awfully deep.  "What do you drink here?" is a really good way to connect with the culture and traditions of an area and having good answers helps your fictional world live in relatable ways.  It also helps breath some life into your ever present bars and taverns maybe adding some color to the characters who live and work there.  In the words of one of my players "games tend to represent the interests of the designers."  I guess I'm a drunk.

In this session we've talked a little about biomes, agriculture on both small and large scale, etymology, and all manner of brewing science.  We've also considered quite a lot of other cultures to grow inspiration given all the cool stuff going on in this world.  This is one of the many truths I see in Worldbuilding--verisimilitude lives in the details and otherwise forgotten associations.

Crafting challenge, week 3

For this week I had to solve a problem.  I knew there was a big street fight about to happen and while I have plenty of buildings, I didn't think my dungeon tiles looked good with them.  These are the cobblestone tiles I made.

These are built to be modular with my other tiles so they're the same 2" grid and built up with the same cardboard lock scheme.  As an added bonus, I got to use up a bunch of the scrap chipboard I've got laying around.  I knew I kept that stuff around for a reason.  These are 1/4" thick to match the double thickness cardboard that make up the other tiles and they're textured with the same Green Stuff World pavement roller I use on other builds.  I think I might switch to Readi-Board for future tiles because I think it's easier to texture with rolling pins even if it's slightly thinner than I'd like.

For anyone interested in purchasing these for your own usage, be aware that there are different scales of rolling pins sometimes with different textures and the same name.  I don't know why they do this but it's awfully confusing.  

I did the texturing, priming (with ye old Mod Podge and black paint) and painting before mounting the cardboard lock mechanism so that nothing would gum up the locking slots.  I cheated and airbrushed these which is, IMO, a unique kind of hell when working with such light objects.  The normal wash I use for just about everything else finished the painting part at which point everything got glued as normal.  I worried a lot that the weight required to glue properly would damage the texturing but that turned out not to be a problem.  To finish, I hit them with a couple coats of matte finish. 

If I had to make my dungeon tiles over again (and I might) I think I'd make them a lot like this.  We used to use the walled tiles pretty often but it's kind of fallen out of favor for no particular reason.  These are easier to make, have better texturing (in general) are easier to paint, are easier to store and IMO have a lot more character.  A good palette of scatter terrain feels sufficient to do most of the stuff we care about.

I also painted two miniatures!  These are Fulumbar Ironhand and Dain Deepaxe both from Reaper Bones.  These are also player characters, one right now and the other possibly in the future.  I took these to a slightly higher standard than normal but as I've said before:  I'm not a good painter.  I experimented quite a lot with these guys since they were so detailed.  I'm starting to think that outside of practicing technique that mini quality is directly related to the amount of time and effort spent.  I'll be experimenting with that in the future.

2019 finished mini counter:  34/100.