Blacklist Backlog week 1 (2024 week 4)

This week we're beginning the end-run of Blacklist Fantasy Series 1. Astute readers will note that there's been quite a few blf1 figs here in the last several months but now we're on the home stretch.

Kicking things off, we have Street Vendor, Female Elf Barbarian and Male Half Elf Bard. These aren't  characters that are likely to get a lot of screen time and thus I didn't spend a whole lot of time with them. I'm still experimenting with Army Speed Paints 2.0 and they're continuing to impress. Also like a lot of these, the mold lines have been awful and that made a lot of the painting a lot less enjoyable than it should have been. Probably the street vendor's tchochkes should be metallic and probably the elf barbarian was meant to be pantsless but I did neither of those. The monk's wrappings, scarf, and sash are messier than they look in the figure. The barbarian's face is slightly better in person. These three aren't my best work (clearly) and overall they were done in about six hours.

 Next up we have Male Elf Bard, Female Human Barbarian, and Female Elf Ranger. I don't super like any of these sculpts but that didn't prevent me from not spending a lot of time with them. The highlighting on the green came out well as did the highlighting on the black parts. The bard's instrument and barbarian's hair really didn't come out well, tho. Also, while the color composition of the barbarian is ostensibly correct, I don't think that the shade of red I chose for her hair works super well and I certainly didn't spend enough time with it. The ranger's red basecoat was played again by Contrast Paint and again I note how shiny it is and how much I dislike that. Also not sure why her head is so small. They were done in around the same six hours and I note that the detail density on these three is right around where I want it.

Last up we have a b-b-bonus! These three props are from Dungeons and Lasers from I think their first kickstarter. They've been sitting around on my painting table for a while and one day when I was done with what I'd set out to do, I wanted to continue so I slapped some paint on them. I don't slap paint around as often as I used to so it's extra satisfying when I do so. On the one hand, I like that my standard quality is raising. On the other hand, I don't like that the time spent per fig and the pressure to paint well is raising too. Probably there's more I should think about here, but for now we'll leave it there. Also, I have three more props to use.

2024 finished mini counter: 27/208

A thing a week 2024, week 3

This week we have only the former: stuff on my painting desk that I'm trying to finish without being a part of a category I'm trying to close out. This is an artifact of how I record things (usually by year or kickstarter) and not at all interesting. These figs are mostly in the big bucket of "misc" which is everything else, and not a category that gets finished probably ever.

First up we have Vistra Dwarf Fighter from the Wrath of Ashardalon boardgame and Alaeros, Northland Fighter from the Temple of Elemental Evil boardgame. These are not good sculpts. Vistra is gigantic for a dwarf and being as hunched over as she is, she's got a lot of negative space. The texturing on her cloak is nice but the stuff on her armor is really overkill, especially compared to the other figs in that set. Last, there was no way to sanely deal with the mold lines given the texturing. All of the detail mean that despite cutting about a million corners, she still took like three hours to paint. Bleh. For Alaeros, I hate that his axe is bendy. I hate that he has so many stinking straps. I hate all the fur even though I spent what feels like too much time on it. Sometimes during the painting of these kinds of figures, I question my judgement when prepping them. 

Next up we have from the Legend of Drizzt boardgame the titular Drizzt, some notable character or other Jarlaxle, and love interest Catti-brie. Given that I read all these books when I was young, I should probably remember but I don't and I can't be bothered to look them up. These are OK sculpts with very poor molding like most of the other figs in the cycle of boardgames and as such I (clearly) didn't spend a lot of time with them. It's also curious that they're so all over the board in their style. It looks like Drizzt and Jarlaxle were done by the same people or at least people with similar styles. Catti-brie looks like she came from another set entirely. I can only guess at why this is. 

Last up we have Half-Elf Warlock - Jilsa Rennwin from DnD is a Woman and looking at that page, it seems I screwed up. I should have printed her at 32mm like a lot of the other 3d prints and and increasingly large proportion of my collection. Instead I printed her at 25mm like a dumb. That made painting her a lot harder than it needed to be especially in her face and gambeson which I spent a lot of time on. 

2024 finished mini counter: 18/208

A thing a week 2024, week 2

This week we have a continuation of what we had last week, namely me trying to finish up stuff on my workbench while also making progress on some categories I'm trying to complete.

First up we have Arjan, Dragonborn Fighter and Heskan, Dragonborn Wizard from the Castle Ravenloft board game and Wrath of Ashardalon board game respectively. These are not fantastic sculpts and the molding on these two in particular is awful. Arjan's right leg has this massive hole in it that I didn't think I could fill effectively and both of them have ridiculously bad mold lines that I did very little with. I did some highlighting on their scale-tones (or whatever) and I extra regretted picking out the lightning patterns on Heskan's robes. These were my first figs painted with Army Painter Speed Paint 2.0. Arjan's...er...jerkin? is painted solely with them and so far, I really, really like them. 

Next up from Blacklist Fantasy Series 1 we have female dragonkin warlock and male dragonkin warrior. Between the two, she is way nicer of a sculpt and sans my inability to deal with her mold lines sanely might have been this year's first high quality paint job. I super like the contrast between her cloak, her robe, and her scale-tones. He is...derpy, I mean, pretty obviously. I have no idea what the sculptor was thinking, especially since most of the rest of the blacklist sculpts have been comparatively good. His derpiness didn't prevent me from doing a lot of highlighting work though I'm not 100% sure I got the intended scale tones vs. armor bits correct.

Last up, also from Blacklist Fantasy Series 1 we have demonkin assassin and demonkin sorcerer. I like these sculpts, too, and again we have a situation where we might have had high quality paint jobs had I dealt more sanely with their mold lines. Also of note, I don't have a lot of use for demonkin in my games so I have no idea if/when they'll ever get screen time. I didn't spend a lot of time highlighting the purples and though they look shoddy here, they look slightly less shoddy in person same as the skintones. The dark leather bits is mostly played by Speed Paint 2.0 with some minor edge highlighting. My one week retro on these is that they're really good.

2024 finished mini counter: 12/208

A thing a week 2024, week 1

New year, new challenge, and the easiest numbering I'll ever do. 

We kick off the festivities with a Profane Altar and Books from bones 4. It's not something I would have likely purchased directly but it's a fun set of props for the table. I didn't spend a super long time on the altar part--it's pretty clearly a wash + drybrush cycle but the books took longer than might be obvious. The books are free floating and since they weren't big enough to stick a magnet to, I had to be super careful painting each side separately. I think it's a good result given the investment and since it counted as one number in the bones 4 campaign, it counts as one for our purposes here. 

Next up we have Balzador, Cleric from Bones 5 and Aravir, Elf Ranger from Bones 4. I'm pretty sure I have a pair of Balzador's twins one or both of which in metal so don't be surprised if his dopplegangers shows up again. These guys aren't super-detailed and Aravir in particular had a really soft mold so I had to work harder than I really wanted to. The green is played by contrast paint with layers of an ancient Reaper pot of forest green and Golden So Flat green highlight and as much as I like painting in green, you'd think I'd do it more. The metallics are pretty uninteresting by contrast. Probably they both could have used more work but I'm not unhappy with the result. 

This chonky dude is Khanag the Slayer from bones 4. He came in about a million piece (so, like four) and I dumbly, lazily glued him all together before priming. Well, that was dumb. He's so chonky with all of his negative space that I super struggled to get paint everywhere I wanted it. I also didn't study the fig well enough to start so he ended up less well color balanced than I'd like. The blue on his faulds doesn't super sell since it's patchy and doesn't match the tone of his cloak and I didn't have another place to put blue on him. I like the contrast between the orangey leathers and the blue but you can tell that I didn't spend a ton of time on those leathers. Not 100% sure why he's got all the chains going on but I'm not about to ask him.  

Last up we have Bryn, Half Elf Rogue and Estra, Iconic Spiritualist

 both from bones 4 and I did not realize these shots were so blown out prior to really looking at these shots. Bryn, like Aravir had some really soft sculpting so her sleeves and oversized bag aren't as nice as they could have been. I went back and forth with her color scheme before landingon the one shown here. I knew I wanted very saturated colors but waffled more than usual this time around. Also, WTF is going on with her outfit? That looks super uncomfortable. Why do her pants lace up the long way in two places? Fantasy artists, jeez. Estra has some awful mold lines super visible on her hands in person. I like this sculpt since it's not super busy and texturing made my brand new Army Painter Speed paints 2.0 work super well. As an added bonus, they all seem to be extra flat which is way better than the shiny finish I often get out of contrast paints. I left the patchiness of the basecoat on her robe because I liked the look of it. I like to pretend that this shows a character who's been actively adventuring, I dunno, in a dungeon or something rather than the glamor photo paintjobs that we usually see. 

2024 finished mini counter: 6/208

2024 crafting challenge

This is now the fifth year I've done this kind of challenge which is way longer than I ever expected. Probably I should write a five year retro or something. If only I could stop buying new fancy toys and could stop starting new projects maybe my pile of potential wouldn't be quite so large. Like last year I'd like to do more high quality work and have a strong disincentive from batch painting by not having anywhere near as many batches left to paint. 

Valid things:

• A finished piece or WIP representing not less than two hours of effort
• NaNoWriMo which I still haven't done, SHIPtember, and high quality paint jobs are good candidates
• Gaming terrain, prop, scatter (etc.)
• One or more painted minis
• An illustration or sketch in digital or traditional media (some day...)
• An article or other piece of writing of, I dunno, 1000 words or so
• A Lego build
• A software tool (yes, hard to believe I still build these)
• A video (some day...)
• A tool for hobbying or something
• Other?  Much of what I do defies easy categorization

Goals:

• Two Hundred Eight painted miniatures of at least tabletop quality (4/week)
• Twelve high quality pieces involving at least one of OSL, NMM, or unusual attention to detail at least six of which should be NMM (1/month and I'm not going to be super picky about NMM since it's still scary)
• Four busts or larger figs (1/quarter)
• One structure, meaningful tool, or other foam/wood/hobby creation

2023 in Review

ThisLast year was full of ups and downs. One of the ups was retiring, possibly For Realz(TM). One of the downs was a serious one. Specifically, my mother became terminally ill and I spent a chunk of the fall caring for her during her passing. This affected me way more than I expected and I don't think the affecting is over yet. Nothing is coloring my worldview more. Hug your mother if you can, kids. Life is short; play hard.

Painting

It was another big year for painting as you can probably tell from the shot on the right. I pushed through some really sticky points in the last quarter of the year but still managed to exceed the fig-per-day for the year in addition to hitting all my other goals. You could argue that the "quality paint jobs" could have been more quality which is fair. I still haven't pulled out all the stops for a single fig yet but I've thought about it a lot. Someday. Maybe. And maybe someday my photography will improve, too. 

A couple more milestones rolled by in 2023, too. All my vintage figs are painted now and I've hit five years of painting. I'd meant to write a thing to commemorate it but I didn't get to it. Dunno how many 365+ painted years I'm going to have moving forward as it's awfully grindy, especially when working through large volumes of characters. Without one of the outstanding kickstarters fulfilling soon, I'm nearing the end of the reasonably easy batches and don't foresee purchasing anything army-like in the near future.

RPGs

I ran two campaigns most of thislast year like I been doing since 2019. Neither of them finished even though both could have. The bi-weekly in-person one will be the last game we play in this world/era and it ties up a five and a half season meta-campaign that started in 2020 but you'll have to wait for it to finish to see how it turned out. I'll probably do a larger write up when I can get my head around it.  

Video Games

Starcom Nexus: *** (2019)

I forgot I played this game thislast year since I played it mostly at the very end of 2022 home sick with covid. It was...interesting. The story itself isn't anything to write home about but it had its moments. The big thing the game has is a "construct your own ship" mechanic where you bolt different components on a frame and away you go. I thought this was pretty cool until I realized that basically the only thing that mattered was speed. If you had firepower too, great, but after a point it wasn't a strict necessity. It's worth checking out and done by a single indie dude IIRC. 

Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries: The Rise of Rasalhague: ***** (2023)

Mechwarrior 5 Mercenaries: The Dragon's Gambit: ***** (2023)

Pretty sure I said somewhere that I'm a sucker for anything Battletech and this year more or less proves it. At this point, Pirahna Games will pretty much get a tithe from me every time they release a new DLC. Rise of Rasalhague added some new mechanics which I liked, an unusually difficult mini-campaign, and some new mechs which are always good. In particular, they added a "these mercs roll here" spaces and randomly they will attack you or help you on your mission. There's a whole set of rewards for those. Fun. They also added a "these guys aren't strictly bad guys but might not be friendly" which I liked a lot, too. I don't think the second DLC added any mechanics but the mini-campaign was good and I ended up playing through the rest of the game anyway. Next DLC or Mechwarrior 6; I don't care. Take my money!

Fantasy Wars: ** (2007)

Fantasy Wars is not a great game but Steam tells me I spent not quite 24 hours with it. There are some serious design issues in it, particularly, some of the missions were overly-scripted and under-specified which led to many Throw the Controller Moments(TM). I also dislike games that have failure spirals. Example: if you squeak by losing most of your units, you're at a serious, serious disadvantage for the rest of the game since a) you won't have the cash to rebuild your army, and b) even if you have the cash, they won't be upgraded enough to see you through the later parts of the game which are brutal. The last mission in particular is a real mess but I gritted through it and despite all that, the game does have  a charm. I enjoyed it some but can't really recommend it. 

Shadowrun: Hong Kong: ****(2015)

NGL, I have a love/hate thing going on with Shadowrun Returns and despite what I said in my 2020 in Review post, I did wait...like three years. The writing is pretty good and I liked the characters a lot but at this point that's really table stakes. The system still sucks, tho, and they made decking not just worse but way worse to the point that I never wanted to do it. Sad news: you have to in some places. I would have liked to import my character from the previous versions of the game but neither the story nor the system really allow for it. I didn't play the follow-up mini-campaign and would have liked to, but I am dumb and played a modded version that supposedly fixed a bunch of bugs and would have to play through the game again. While I did like it, I don't know that I liked it that much. 

Ember: **** (2016)

I played this late in the year and honestly didn't have high expectations. I don't even remember when I bought it--almost certainly on a Steam sale at some point. Ember is a charming and solid RPG inspired by some of the Old Skool(TM) RPGs that I remember fondly. Is it a AAA offering? No, it is not, but it's a steal at the price and does a lot of work to not overstay its welcome. Steam tells me I completed it in about 15 hours but I didn't complete everything and haven't (and probably won't) playthrough for other endings. I would like to see a sequel, expansion, or another game from this studio on this engine someday, tho, and that's saying something. 

Divinity: Original Sin Enhanced Edition: *** (2015)

In the waning days of thislast year I went rumaging through my list of Steam games to play and since I'd been on a RPG kick, I picked this one. I kickstarted it a decade (!) ago as a big fan of Larian's other games. As per usual, I started playing it way after it cam eout in late 2018 only to promptly get sidetracked by, er, probably Battletech? I'm far too lazy to go look it up. I started a brand new game and was immediately reminded of why it wasn't hard to put it down to begin with. The game is full of very vague puzzles which I hate and one-shot-kills which I also hate and later in the game they added "guys that can't be hurt at all" which I also also hate. If you're noticing a trend here, well, that's not coincidental. I don't have the patience I had when I was young and this game really tested my resolve. I get being Old-Skool(TM) but, jeez, the 80s called and they want their game design back. I liked most of the combats and some of the writing but there really was too much of it. They tried to throw a couple twists in there but IMO they didn't sell. Ultimately I suspect I'll remember this as a very grindy and painful game and I immediately uninstalled it when I'd finished mere minutes before typing this. I'm told the the sequel is better and I really hope that's the case. Will it be another three years before I get there? We'll just have to wait and see.