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.

Crafting challenge, week 2

This week I finished three minis, two of those mostly painted today.  I experimented more than normal and even though I didn't do a great job I feel like I learned a bunch in the process.  These are for player characters and since they get more screen time than baddies I put a lot more effort in than usual.  I think it's a half step up from my normal "looks OK on the tabletop" quality bar.  Someday I'll be good at this.

From left to right (front view) they are:
- Ezren, Iconic Wizard from Reaper (aka Moses throwing a gang sign)
- Rogan, Half-Orc Thief also from Reaper

- Female Human Ranger (1 of 2) from Nolzur's Marvelous Minis

You knew it was going to happen eventually but I gotta rant about a thing.  I generally like Nolzur's line though I think their faces could use some, I dunno, re-proportioning.  This is the first time I painted a fig in that line that I thought was a real pain.  Lots of parts of this fig aren't easily reachable which means that parts of it are painted less well than I'd like because I didn't want to take a saw to it. 

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that whoever modeled it didn't think all that hard about how one might paint it.  I feel like I can be critical of this because I do the same thing when I have to assemble my figs.  I'm getting better about this.  A lot of what made the human ranger time consuming was working around difficulties in the sculpting.  By contrast, I spent that time on extra details/layers/whatevers on the other two. 

I also wrote an article!  This one was already mostly complete last month but needed a little bit extra.  I did a bunch of other writing this week so hopefully that stuff will show up here soon.  I'm liking all the worldbuilding stuff and I'm finding that I have quite a lot more to say about it than I thought I did.  Inspiration for a new topic seems to pop up every other day or so. 

2019 finished mini counter:  32/100

Shoe's 30 for 30 Roundup

I've found it awfully hard to refer back to my 30 for 30 posts so here's an index page. 

1. 1x Treasure chest (scatter)
2. 4x painted minis (hunting drake, mageknight dwarf)
3. Merchant's House (build)
4. Merchant's House (paint)
5. Tavern (build)
6. Tavern (paint)
7. 7x painted goblins
8. 4x brick walls (scatter)
9. Worldbuilding Part 1:  Travel and Time
10. Village Hall (build)
11. Village Hall (paint)
12. Guard Tower
13. Modular Jetty (build)
14. Modular Jetty (paint)
15. Modular first floor and roof (build)
16. 6x Crates (scatter)
17. Modular first floor and roof (paint)
18. Thatched Cottage
19. Second Floor Speed Build
20. 4x Shacks (scatter)
21. Merchant's Shop (build)
22. Merchant's Shop (paint)
23. Tavern #2 lower floors (build)
24. Tavern #2 upper roof (build)
25. Tavern #2 (paint)
26. 15x painted minis (goblins and swarms)
27. Windmill (build)
28. Windmill (paint)
29. 2x Farmhouses
30. Bugman's
31. Retro

Worldbuilding part 2: Coinage

This is part 2 of my not-quite-a-series-yet on worldbuilding, one of my favorite topics.  We discussed travel and time in part 1.  Got a worldbuilding topic you'd like to discuss?  Drop it in the comments!

Coinage

Money itself is a pretty deep subject and already assumes that civilizations in your world have such a concept.  We'll assume that's true and use coins as an example of the kinds of details that can really help your world come to life.  You don't need to solve for these things, but then again we don't really need to build our own worlds either, do we?

How Big Are US Coins?

I stated it in the first part:  verisimilitude is important to me.  So when I hear about characters in RPGs carrying around thousands of coins I have to ask stuff like "how do they carry all those coins?" and "how much does it all weigh?"  Gold is a stupidly heavy metal and really big coins are going to be really unwieldy in any kind of count over a couple digits.  To understand this better for my world, here's some of the work I did.

For those of you not in the US, I'm pretty sure you can do similar homework.  All I'ma say about that, is that Wikipedia is awfully well stocked.

• A penny is 0.75 inches in diameter (~19mm), 1.55mm thick, and weighs 2.5g.
• A nickel is 0.835 inches in diameter (~21mm), is 1.95mm thick, and weighs 5g.
• A quarter is 0.955 inches in diameter (~24mm), is 1.75mm thick, and weighs 5.67g.
• A half dollar is 1.205 inches in diameter (~31mm), is 2.15mm thick, and weighs 11.34g.

"So what?" I hear you thinking, unnamed anonymous reader.  "What does that even mean?"  

• $5 of pennies is heavier than most swords (no, really; swords aren't as heavy as you might think).  
• 100 nickels is well over a pound.
• $63 in quarters is heavier than the average longsword (these are two handed weapons--don't believe DnD's claims about this weapon!)
• 800 half dollars weighs just over 20 pounds, more than the weight of a historical chain hauberk!

But wait!  This is with modern materials, mainly zinc and copper which are relatively light.  Let's convert all these to silver and gold with the power of maths!

• Pennies are 97.5% zinc and 2.5% copper, (7.140 g/mL*97.5%+8.96 g/mL)
• Nickels are 75% copper and 25% nickel (8.96 g/mL*75%+8.9 g/mL)
• Quarters and half dollars are ~92% copper and and ~8% nickel (you get the idea)
• Silver is 10.5 g/mL
• Gold is 19.32 g/mL

Assuming I've wielded my arcane alchemy maths correctly and assuming non-alloys:

• 100 penny sized coins would weigh ~0.8 pounds if silver and ~1.5 pounds if gold
• 100 nickel sized coins would weigh ~1.3 pounds if silver and ~2.4 pounds if gold
• 100 quarter sized coins would weigh ~1.5 pounds if silver and ~2.7 pounds if gold
• 100 half dollar sized coins would weigh ~3 pounds if silver and ~5.4 pounds if gold

In real-world objects:

• a 12oz can of your favorite fizzy beverage would be around 35 nickel-sized gold coins.  
• A gallon of water would be about 568 quarter-sized silver pieces.  
• Your 10 pound bag of charcoal would be 185 half dollar sized gold coins.  
• A thing costing 15,000 gold pieces the size of a penny would require a pile of coins weighing as much as a reasonably sized anvil! 

It is just plain not practical to carry around that kind of weight on a regular basis.  Things shouldn't cost that much or at the very least, the top level coins should have more value.  In my world, a gold piece is a really valuable coin a few of which is enough to buy a horse or a house in some places.  Smaller denominations stay useful including the humble copper piece and as a result most folks aren't carrying around more than a half dozen coins.  I have a handy chart on my GM screen with sizes, weights, and counts per pound of each denomination across many nations including their names and nicknames which brings me to my next topic.  Let it never be said that I'm not a master of the smooth segue.

What Are Your Coins Called?

While copper, silver, and gold pieces are easy to remember and have a clear denomination, I think they're awfully boring.  We don't call pennies "zinc pieces" do we?  Nickels are the exception that proves the rule, I guess, and have their own fascinating history.  Do all of your world's nations share the same coins?  Real world nations don't!  So what do you call coins in your world?  

There's lots of places to take inspiration from.  The Romans had piles of different types of coins in their thousands of years of history and that's just one(ish) nation!  Many US coin names have interesting histories (though not quarters--sorry, bud).  Here are some examples from around the world.

Kallvor's coin names follow a theme on a per-nation basis.  Lanvelon's coins are largely named after Roman coins (Sestertius, Denarius, Solidus).  Few people would pick up on that and those that do can learn something about the nation that minted them by connotation (old empire, now a vestige of its former power concentrated in a single city).  Kezhor coin names follow practical military gear (armor) for a practical and militaristic nation (Shield, Helm, Cuirass).  Querthon owes its coin names from one of my all-time favorite games (Sword, Scepter, Crown).  Those crafty elves do name their coinage after the metals they're made of (Aerius, Argentius, Auereus, Melleus) which are cognate with their Latin names.  Two of these will ring true for fans of the periodic table (Ag and Au); the last one I made up.

Deserving of their own paragraph, the dwarves of Kallvor control most of the trade in the known world.  Named after their deity of trade and prosperity, Tharkur, the backbone of their currency (silver pieces) are known far and wide as Tharks and for gameplay's sake, sets the standard for currency realm-wide.  Thark is also the common dwarven name for trader or merchant.  The single smaller denomination is the Penz or Pawn in Common.  Gold pieces are known as Royals or Kings in common (etymology note:  the word royal comes through French from Latin so I'm OK with royal being the dwarven word here).  You don't often need more than a gold piece, but if you do, the dwarves have you covered with Archroyals or Arcs hearkening to their earlier days of Archkings presiding over multiple undermountain kingdoms.

OK, now the fun part!  We've established that the lowest dwarven denomination is the copper pawn (Penz).  This leads us to the all-too-familiar sayings, now dwarvenized to "here're my two pawns" and "I ain't got two penz to rub together".  Dwarves don't spit nails as much as they "throw Tharks" when they're angry and since ducks aren't often found in either undermountain kingdom, they tend to get their "Royals in a row" with the added connotation of a tradesdwarf rolling their coins after a successful day.  On top of being awesomely alliterative, it also gives the connotation of importance because language is awesome.

But Wait, There's More!

Coinage is really complicated!  Is the value of the coin the value of the metal that makes it?  What shapes are they?  Can you distinguish between different nations' coins at a glance or are they all boringly similar shapes and sizes?  We haven't even talked about exchange rates, minting, or metallurgy yet!  This, like all of the topics I'll cover in this not-quite-series-yet are deep rabbit holes that can add depth and character to your world.

Crafting challenge, week 1

This is where we ended.

I have a Table of Ultimate Gaming.  I like it a lot but it presents a couple problems.  These are made worse by the complexity of my game and the myriad gaming tools and props and whatnot that invariably clutter the playing space.  Today (well, this week) I'm going to try to fix that.

We've switched to playing on the top surface of the table to allow more space for writing stuff.  This is more convenient for scribbling notes or on character sheets or whatever but it's an absolutely lousy surface to roll dice on--the neoprene in the bottom of the table is way better.  Players also have a lot of game pieces to keep track of.  There are usually a mess of dice, these turn-based counter-y things that hold spindowns, and most of the time we use towers to get better mileage out of pretty dice that are badly weighted.  That got me thinking that I could solve multiple problems in one go.  So here we are.

This is where I thought we'd ended.

Construction is pretty much the normal deal except there are no removable parts or anything.  The base is Readi-Board because I wanted to experiment with it as a base material.  It holds a texture pretty well so it might be a good alternative to thin slabs of XPS.  The inner walls are also Readi-Board.  Texturing was done with the same pen and wad of foil as normal and it's painted quite poorly, I think.

The smaller area is intended for holding dice as shown.  Assuming my players aren't super drunk and can tell dice apart, this should work out OK.  In a pinch, the thinner towers with some modification will work in here too.  The large part is for the tower, and while the normal boxes do fit in there, I didn't think they fit well so I modified one to be without the...err...chinstraps...or whatever they are.  It fits the space pretty well and does work...sort of.

This is still a WIP (obviously).

The middle picture is what I thought was the final version.  A handful of things immediately became clear when doing the shoot and testing it.  The textured base looks cool but rolls like crap.  A piece of felt on the bottom helps this out quite a lot.  It also raises the base by a tiny amount which makes it slightly easier to pick out dice since the walls are about a quarter of an inch too tall.  The large area doesn't quite work as a rolling box without the tower and I find myself wanting another half inch or so at the bottom where dice are retrieved.

This was always intended as a prototype to see if the approach was reasonable.  We'll learn more when we play next weekend when I can get some actual feedback from actual players.  I rather expect this to go through several iterations before we arrive at a good form factor.  I think this is a good start, tho.

Weekly Challenge

Looking back on my award winning recap of Shoe's 30 for 30 challenge, I rather like the idea of doing a thing on a regular schedule.  I don't know that I can keep doing a daily thing, even if some of them are small, because that kind of gets in the way of doing bigger and better things.  A thing a week seems pretty reasonable and allows for more complexity should it be warranted.  Assuming I can remember to do my thing and don't get sidetracked or busy or something, I feel this is pretty reasonable.  So here we go.

Rules for this challenge:

• Post a completed thing here, facebook, youtube, whatever.  Unlike Shoe's 30 for 30, I'm going to consider painting a required part of being complete since there's an entire week involved.
• Post better photos where appropriate :/
• Valid things:
• A piece of terrain (building, scatter, prop)
• A painted mini
• An illustration or sketch in digital or traditional media
• An article or other piece of writing of more than, I dunno, 1000 words
• An audio sample should I be so bold (as if I need another hobby)
• A Lego build
• Other?  I dunno.  I feel like I do a wide variety of things.
• If the month contains a larger, more daunting challenge, the thing could be a weekly update.  Examples that I'd like to do this year:
• SHIPtember
• NaNoWriMo

By my count there are 39 weeks left this year so here we go.  I'm aiming to post on Sundays.