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.  

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 31: retro

Anyone who's been following for the last 30 days know that this month I've built or painted and sometimes wrote a pile of stuff.  I figured I'd take a post to go over the highs, lows, and learnings in the hopes that it might help someone else going on a similar journey, however short or long.  Also, it makes the 20 posts in the last four years seem extra anemic compared to 31 in one month.  March is greedy having 31 days.

The bill of goods, if anyone cares, looks like this:

• 15x scatter terrain (treasure chest, 4x scatter walls, 6x crates, 4x shacks)
• 26x minis painted
• 14x buildings (merchant's house, tavern, village hall, guard tower, modular house, house with modular roof, thatched roof cottage, second floor modular, merchant's shop, tavern #2, windmill, 2x farmhouses, Bugman's Brewery)
• 1x article

Thanks for being sunny today, weather!

I think the biggest improvements are around the techniques, materials and tools in the hobby.  I already had a pretty good handle on mini paints but craft paints are IMO a lot harder to use.  I said way back on day 2 that XPS is a pretty forgiving medium and I still believe that.  The limits of the materials and tools are a lot clearer now.  I can draw very good parallels between learning how to work with large Lego structures and this process.

One of the bigger learnings was how to plan a building project, even a small one, and what things make it easier, harder, more detailed, less accurate, etc.  I've infamously said that engineering is an exercise of tradeoffs and I hope that some of my rantings in the last 30 days show the process I went through and why I landed on the things I did.  Throughout the challenge up until Bugman's, I was pretty sure I would be building another structure.   It might seem lame but knowing this gave me an excuse to try something new and I experimented quite a lot. 

I also feel I've improved my painting quite a lot.  Part of that was making build concessions which meant that I was less likely to get bored/fatigued/interrupted.  That results in fewer mistakes.  A real big chunk of the improvement is due to finally making a proper wash.  It also took me a while to dial in how to properly drybrush with craft paints but I think I'm getting it now.  I'm still not a good painter and I might not ever be, but I don't feel like I'm going to mess a thing up anymore.  Vince gives the advice to paint bravely and I freely admit that I struggle with this one.

I only wrote one article though I have many (many) in the works that I got significant effort into.  I thought I'd need these more than I did which just means I get to pump up my post count for the rest of the year.  Bonus!  I also didn't do any illustrations which, well, is a little disappointing.  Soon, hopefully.

I learned a ton about architecture and the European middle ages, too.  I've typed it before but I'll type it again:  verisimilitude is important to me, and I expend considerable effort trying to get the details right.  My "research" leads me down rabbit holes pretty often and this one was no exception.  New words in my vocabulary that I picked up during this challenge:  dormer, hipped roofing, thatching, half-timbered, field stone, and probably a handful of others I've forgotten.

As an interesting anecdote, I started listening to RollPlay Swan Song a little before starting this challenge.  It was, more than most things, a near-constant companion during this effort.  The last bits of the last episode played as I set up this shot which is somehow fitting.  I've always found it interesting how disparate things can become closely associated.  I think I will associate this month with that show and how crazy, thought-provoking, and entertaining it is.  It's worth a watch if you have the time. 

It's been a heck of a month and at the end of my 30 day sojourn I feel a lot more confident in the field of table top crafting.  I didn't go into this thing with any particular expectations other than working on it, but I feel like I got more out of it than I put in.  Despite the time commitment, I think I'd do it again if I had the opportunity.  Then again, I do still have 71 minis to paint this year!

Also, shingles are still bullshit.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 30: Bugman's Brewery

And on the last day we have something extra fun.  When I started building stuff, I asked the eponymous Shoe what I could build for him.  He gave me a grainy photo of a wargaming table with a big building in the middle.  Apparently Bugman's Brewery is a fun piece of Warhammer lore but since I don't play that game I don't really have the details.  An intertoobs search got me this stuff.  Using the photographic evidence I've found online as a starting point, here's my take on this particular piece of lore.

The first and most difficult thing is its size.  It's the biggest structure I've built and defied easy handling in a bunch of ways.  Three things made this easier.  First, Shoe's going to handle the painting which is just as well because he's a much better painter.  Second, it doesn't need an interior playable space so I guess that's also a first for one of my buildings.  Third, I don't need to base it--it's just the building.  I'm sure Shoe will base it which again is just as well because he's going to do a much better job than I will.

As this is the last day of the challenge and it's a gift, I wanted to punch up the detail a bit but I had other obligations today.  I normally pop out windows out because I have this delusion that I'm going to use my cool Dollar Tree tea lights to light these guys.  In this case there's no reason to so instead of popping them out, I built some of them up. 

There are six windows on the bottom floor so I made those simple--they're shuddered.  This gave some really fun visual interest and I imagine that some of them have been replaced over time because Bugman's is a rowdy joint.  The ones upstairs I wanted to something really fun with and since there are only two of them, I pushed them out as bay windows.  I didn't glue the mesh pieces in (not shown) to aid in the painting.  Same with the door.

I'm not sure it comes out in the photos, but the building is a T-shape with a thing hanging off of one side in the back. I imagine this as a pretty normal building with a smokehouse tacked on out back.  The smokehouse is almost like my shacks from day 20 except sturdier and attached to the building. 

Since I suspect Shoe won't be around to pick this guy up any time soon, I may tinker with it more over the next couple days at a more leisurely pace.  It should be pretty cool when it's painted.  This ends Shoe's 30 for 30 challenge and I think it's gone well.  I'll do a wrap up tomorrow.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 29

They're less dark in meat space.

These aren't especially complicated but there are two of them and they're painted.  For context, we're going to get in the WaBac(TM) machine to the beginning of February.  I've been Proxxoning for like two or three weeks and I stumble across BMC's Medieval Cottage.   I built two of these, pictures lost in the mists of time.  The originals were a pain to build and more of a pain to paint.  They were buildings #2 and #3 that I'd built out of XPS as I started tenuously exploring this medium.  Today (well, yesterday) I revisited those same builds with all the stuff I learned since then.

I think I'm getting the hang of this.

The stonework was done with a pen and I glued these together with PVA to keep the seams neat.  I mostly succeeded.  Remembering all the trouble I routinely have with painting these guys and the fact that they don't often read well from the table, I made the stones extra big.  This also made them easier to draw.  If you count the chimneys and hearths texturing took about an hour per building.

The pitch on these roofs is exactly 45 degrees on purpose.  At this scale I don't have to do anything weird to get pieces of the correct size.  I made two changes in construction this time around.  First, I glued my interior braces to the roof and the pieces of roof together before gluing them to the wall.  I've been in the habit of gluing each piece to the existing walls first.  For big pieces this is really painful and I ended up with some pretty serious gaps and other faults as a result.  Second, I textured most of the shingles on the build.

Build complete!

I used to texture shingles before cutting them and stopped because it was a pain.  The static charge you get on foam shingles by running a wire brush over them for texturing is significant and they aren't very heavy.  As a result, they'll frustrate most attempts to keep them together.  I started as normal and about the third time I had them fly all over my workstation while moving my bin, I decided to texture and cut as I went.  I found my cutting was more accurate and the long strips don't generally have trouble fitting in bins.  I think this is a win and as a bonus, I think they look much better. 

So here are my two new farmhouses.  Total build and painting (not drying) time for both is right around four and a half hours. 

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 28

Painting today as expected but I got a head start for tomorrow's and Saturday's build.  The mill wasn't especially difficult to paint, especially since the vanes pull off (yay Lego!) but I did try to not gum up any of the working pieces.

The raw wood was only washed with my terrible brown wash and not primed.  This wash looks lousy most of the time but it does make wood look fairly weathered in one coat.  I didn't dare drybrush these despite being fully cured with wood glue.  I don't think toothpicks were really meant for that kind of abuse.

The walls and whatnot are pretty much the same grey with lighter drybrush and wash.  If it looks like the vanes don't line up properly with the door, that's a side effect of me whittling the doorway after building.  The roof washed out even though it was supposed to be dark.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 27: windmill

As I'm running out of days in this challenge I decided to do something interesting.  That was almost a mistake as it turned out.  I don't think this is my best work but I learned a ton on the way.  I had three goals:

1. make the thing stand straight
2. slightly taper the walls better than on day 12.  
3. add at least one playable floor

The vanes (?) are made of coffee stirrers and toothpicks wood glued together.  I'm not even sure why I have wood glue or when I might have bought it but I do.  Because I didn't trust my ability to build working mechanisms in foam and toothpicks I sacrificed a handful of Lego bricks on this build.  As a result, the whole thing does rotate though it isn't quite tall enough despite all my measuring.

The first goal kind of worked itself out.  There isn't any special counter weighting in the structure as the blades ended up being pretty light.  So we got that one for free.

The second goal was realized by making a guide and working mainly with PVA.  You can see my guide on the right in one of those shots, and yes, I build a lot of tools out of Lego.  I knew the height was going to be right around four inches for the walls and had a good beginning and ending width.  I didn't do math on the slope, really, I just worked with the Lego until I got what I wanted.

The base of the building contains a round-ish slab of XPS.  I don't have a circle cutting jig (it hasn't come up often enough to build one yet) so I traced this one out with a compass Pringles can and cut it out with my trusty wrong-handed OLFA knife.  This time around I drew the cobbles on the floor rather than using a textured rolling pin.  I felt like this was a small space and I wanted to have a circular pattern.  This completed the third goal.

The walls are pretty much what you'd expect and dipped into the billionty extra bricks I milled for day 12.  That build was supposed to be a heck of a lot taller but I got bored with it so I have lots sitting around.  Despite carving every stinking brick to shape there were still really big gaps but a lot fewer than last time.  I filled those again with the myriad random chips leftover from carving them.

This one was spendier than I expected and there were more than a few moments that I didn't think I was going to make it.  I'm glad i followed through with it since I think it looks pretty good but carving every brick and every shingle really sucked.  I still like the idea of building structures out of bricks but I think this build has steered me away from round structures built out of bricks.  Tomorrow should be an uninteresting painting job and maybe getting started on day 29's build.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 26

More painting today, this time minis, and I hear what you're thinking anonymous reader, "most of those are just tiny things."  Yes, yes, they are.  They're still minis, though and they still need paint.  I note that my setup isn't fantastic for photos.  If I'm ambitious tomorrow, I may try to fix some lighting.  Today's total is 15 figs in like 7 hours and thankfully clears some clutter off my crafting area.

These doods are goblins.  Specifically Nolzur's Marvelous Miniatures Goblins.  I like these sculpts quite a lot.  They look like they mean business.  I didn't clean these up as much as I should have before painting so they aren't as nice as they might have been.  I tried to limit the number of colors to go faster so these and the next guys are all dressed in the same colors.  Must be embarrassing.

These guys are also Nolzur's Marvelous Miniatures, this time Kobolds.  They match my other kobolds and are also dressed in the same colors.  I had to mix a wash (gasp) since they're turquoise and I didn't have one.  I don't like Army Painter paints all that much even though I use them frequently.  Their washes on the other hand are fabulous.

Yep, these guys are here and didn't take a ton of effort to paint.  Like I said before, they needed paint and they're miniatures so they count toward my total.  The two panthers and three purple-based spider swarms are from the Legend of Drizzt Boardgame.  The other two Spider Swarms and two Rat Swarms are Reaper Bones.  They were mostly airbrushed.

2019 finished mini counter:  29/100

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 25

Yep, we're painting today.  This is a lot more complicated than normal buildings because a) it's big, b) it's complicated, and c) it separates into four pieces.  I was not helped by having a splitting headache, either.

I cheated again and airbrushed the roof and two wood floor surfaces.  The roof is mixed brown and red and the floor is just brown.  I'm using my Badger Minitaire paints which are significantly more expensive but I really didn't want to deal with cleaning up after throwing craft paint through my airbrush.  I'm not sure what it is, but I really like look of the airbrush base coats over the mod podge primer.  It's also a heck of a lot faster.

I picked out individual stones in the walls in three colors and did the same two-tone base flags and pavement as usual.  The pillars return to their customary position on the pavement base.  I did quite a lot of drybrushing this time around with not quite as large differences.  The color choices on the roof in particular is fairly subtle but that's what I wanted.  The new wash went over everything but the roof.  I think it dried a little heavy on the stonework and I made a real mess of it trying to pull some of it off.

I had serious reservations about going with the light turquoise walls if I'm honest.  The idea came from photographic evidence of a similar building in the same color scheme.  I'm not sure how well the warm roof and cool walls works but I went with it anyway.  I'm kind of bored with the off-white walls.


Just like the rest of this project, painting was a serious effort.  Even with the airbrushing and generally forgiving builds (the dormers were a significant exception) it still took around six hours not including drying time.  Twenty-four-ish hours seems like a big expenditure but I think the result is good even if I did screw up the wash.  Tomorrow will probably be something less difficult.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 24: tavern #2

Today completes the second tavern in all of its complexity.  It's a serious build with a serious roof which took a serious amount of effort.  I learned a bunch of stuff here and I even did some maths.  Terrifying.

In very basic terms, this is a modular roof.  I built one of these on day 15 though it feels like months ago.  Complicating this one is that it's much larger (twice the size, actually) which means that large pieces of foam bend and warp and generally don't behave.  I did a bunch of measurements and scale drawings because I didn't think I could wing it.  I'd find out that I was correct so I got that going for me. 

This is a story about complications.  Most of those stem from doing things on autopilot which didn't work and mis-transcribing some of my measurements and making a bunch of really bad cuts.  I though "wow, there should be an overhang on the roof!"  Except I forgot that this one had pitches on all sides.  Then I fiddled with the side pieces and realized they didn't fit once I had the wall standins glued in (the pieces that hold onto the base).  Some shaving and whittling later, I had side pieces that almost fit but that I bodged together enough to glue.  It all got covered with shingles anyway.

Another thing that I should have put more thought into are the window...thingies...damnit...dormers.  I had a sensible plan to start:  two facing the road.  I was pretty sure the placement was good due to planning.  When I started building this morning I thought, "heck, why not build two on the other side too?  How hard could it be?"  Yeah. 

One thing that didn't go badly was the structure of the thing.  I did a lot of measuring and fitting to ensure that it wouldn't warp badly when being glued.  I also got the pitch of the roof right (45 degrees) which made a lot of stuff easier.  There's a good deal of reinforcing and that kind of thing and the result is a solid piece in as much as any building made out of foam ever is.  I also didn't forget the chimney so no one has to freeze to death. 

Shingling, as one might predict, was a freakin' nightmare.  The dormers look good at their current location but shingling between them was a real mess.  The overhangs on the dormer roofs (gabled, I believe) make this harder yet.  Shingling including the cardboard pieces ended up at four hours which is way longer than I'd expected. 

This is pretty much all I did today.  It was way more complicated than I'd anticipated and I expected a lot.  Seven hours yesterday, nine hours today, and probably two hours planning things out in paint.net puts this at eighteen prior to painting.  If we account for some of the bad missteps and refining the roof structure construction some, I could see this reducing but I don't think by much.  There's just a lot of crap that needs effort.  The result is good, though, and I think it'll look better painted.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 23

We're stepping back from the speed builds for the next two days so we can build something big and with good detail.  This is part of another tavern, cleverly called "tavern 2" in my notes and includes the base, the second floor, and....[drum roll please]...the third playable floor base.  The roof should arrive tomorrow.  I would have liked to have had the entire build complete for a big reveal but I've got other obligations today and I want to do something really complicated.  Because I like pain.  Apparently.

The posts go with the bottom this time because painting was such a stinking hassle yesterday.  I do like the toothpick thing and I'm thinking I should do that every time there are free-standing posts.  It makes me wish the base had a thicker piece of foam.  If we think back to tavern #1 way back on day 5 it was two pieces of much thicker XPS glued together with a thick slab on top.  The base of this one is two super thin pieces of XPS glued to a piece of medium weight chipboard with a thin slab on top.

The XPS on the base is textured pretty much exactly like the last one with the Green Stuff World rolling pins.  The walls are hand-textured with a pen just like day 21.  The floor platform for the second floor is similarly a pair of thin slabs glued together with beams sticking out just far enough to show properly.  That means that the floor itself wasn't super well supported and ended up being extra flimsy.  I fixed this with craft sticks underneath.  I also remembered that day 21's beams were exposed in the underneath area and a pain to paint so I covered them up with timbers so I wouldn't have to deal with it.  This construction is pretty solid and weighty which means that heavy metal minis standing on the overhang are less likely to topple it over.

The playable foundation for floor #3 is pretty much the same as floor #2 without the need to overhang anything.  As such its construction is a lot less complicated but still reinforced with crafting sticks.  The playable slab doesn't fit on top of the wall--it's the same size as the one below, so it has to be sitting on platforms.  So I dutifully made a bunch of platforms and then screwed up gluing the slab to them.  Turns out that I didn't have time to reposition before the hot glue cured so I had to pull the whole thing off again.  That sucked.  For next time, I'm going to limit the number of glue points on the original...err...gluing, then reinforce after the fact.  That worked out much better.  There's some fixup to avoid showing gaps between the slab and walls which shouldn't be a problem once it's primed and painted.

So far, minus my dumb blunders, it's turned out pretty much how I want it.  I think we're up to seven hours of build time so far but unlike normal, I didn't take good notes.  Tomorrow, though, the real pain begins.  I even did maths.  The horror.

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 22

Today, predictably, was a day of painting.  I also got ahead on tomorrow's build which is good because I have stuff going on tomorrow.  Painting wasn't difficult but then again it hasn't been since I started drawing timbers.

My new wash isn't as dark as the old so I didn't paint the stones as cartoony as last time.  I also toned down the drybrushing on the wood and stone for the same reason.  The flags are supposed to be sandstone or something like that but I don't think it came through.  And if you were looking for another reason to not like the posts being attached to the upper floor:  it made the front really painful to paint.

While I like the look of the antique white (or was it vanilla ice cream?) walls, I wanted to try something more bold.  I imagine this building as a merchant's shop with living quarters and extra rooms on the second floor.  It makes sense that they'd want to paint their building in an unusual color to attract attention so I went with an earthy red + off white which turned out more like a peach color.  I don't hate it but it contrasts weirdly with the dark blue roof.  I don't think it's quite as garish in person.

Overall I think this was a good build and probably the best executed paint job even with questionable color choices.  With the three-ish hours of painting the total build + paint time is around eight hours and I think it's some of my best work. 

Shoe's 30 for 30, day 21

At this point I've built a bunch of buildings and mostly sated my need for them.  Also, storage is starting to be an issue.  Glam shot today has too small a background because I had to cut up the big piece of Readi-board for the roof.  I'll get more soon. 

I've done a lot to speed up my building in the last N builds which means that spending more time should result in higher quality.  I liked the tavern build way back on day 5 (that was more than two weeks ago!) and kind of want a few buildings with overhangs like that to build a nice street scene.

You folks know the drill by now.  These are hot glued with a mix of built timbers and drawn timbers and drawn stonework.  I think the stonework is starting to look good, probably because I've drawn so many of these.  While I dislike how long it takes, I think the result is good and beats the crap out of the other ideas I had to get the same effect.

The roof is the normal foamcore.  I raised it more than I wanted; I was aiming for a 90 degree peak but didn't do the math and it's slightly less.  I also switched to 3/4" width shingles as an experiment but I don't think I like them--they seem way too big.  I remembered the chimney, too, so there's that.

This time around I put the pillars with the top and drove a toothpick through it for strength.  This pokes into the top and through the length of the pillar so we'll see how well that works.  I think I already don't like this because its location isn't clear when the roof comes off so anyone trying to hide behind is imprecise at best.

Total build time including the priming is right around five hours and I think it's a good result.  I expect painting to be fewer than four hours which should happen tomorrow.