Bannerlord

I've spent some time with the most recent installment of the Mount & Blade franchise that recently released on steam early access.  Steam says 128 hours so "some time" might be an understatement.  If you liked previous versions of M&B, this might be right up your alley.  Also, everything in here is my personal opinion--I don't speak for my employer yadda yadda yadda (lawyers really do make me saytype these things).

I first talked about Mount & Blade and my modding excursions therein way back here in 2010 taking a prominent place in the first award winning Year in Review posts on this so-called blog.  Warband, the middle installment, shows up in 2011 and 2012 and today I remember it somewhat more fondly than I wrote about all those years ago.  I'll add into the mix a pair of M&B engine games like With Fire and Sword and Caribbean!  I built a fairly successful mod in the original which I won't bother to link to here since it wouldn't run anyway but today we're going to talk about Bannerlord. 

The Good

Wide monitors have their advantages.

It is, as one might expect, a pretty big step up from either of its predecessors but as I understand it, they built a company in the intervening 8 years and rebuilt a lot of their technology.  Gone are the clunky scripting system stuffed into the tuples of python code--it's all in C# now which is both good and bad.  The graphics got a pretty serious overhaul and they've done a pretty good job of optimizing things so even really big battles aren't chug-fests. 

The UI keeps most of its flavor from previous installments, including some of its itinerant clunk, and it super needs a way to move an entire stack of something from one side to another.  I kind of knew how things worked so I didn't have too much trouble with it, but I imagine for a newcomer it would be iffy.  I also super missed things being consistently dropped into the log.  A common occurrence was being called away after a siege to chase some chumps off of a village except that the game didn't seem to provide me a place to find the village after my siege fun.

There's a crafting subsystem which we'll discuss a bit more in the next section.  I generally liked it though I have my gripes.  I'm a fan of being able to customize things to my liking and I ended up building some fancy swords that fit my playstyle even if I constantly forgot to change them.  I do hope they add more to this as they continue to develop the game.

If I had to put my finger on what I thought the best thing was in Bannerlord, it's that the kingdom management stuff is put first and foremost.  The main quest line, clunky and unfinished as it is, guides you through the basics of it ending with a very M&B understated victory dialog.  The game doesn't actually finish after that as far as I can tell, but it's there.  For those unfamiliar, you used to have to retire your character from the camp menu.

As a final note in this section, I didn't realize how much I missed horse archery.  It's been a long time since Warband where I'd built that skill and it has not lost any of its luster.  My old and broken body, on the other hand, has started to fail me.  It's just as satisfying to headshot a chump off of a horse while both of you are galloping at full tilt.

The Bad

Mount & Blade has always had pacing problems.  It's what drove me to mod the original in the first place.    My mod moved at a much faster pace will my playthroughs running 40-60 hours on average.  I mostly unleashed the AI to do what it was already programmed to do through tuning the variables that already existed.  This got a lot worse in Warband.  Steam says I put 393 hours into it which is nigh unto MMO territory.  Eight years ago I had a lot more time on my hands and I ground through it so I'm sad to say that Bannerlord continues in that vein.

Bannerlord is grindy in a way that 2020 old and broken me doesn't appreciate.  While I like the skill system and specializations it takes so freakin' long to train things that it's painfully painful to get good at any one thing much less two or three.  Pick the wrong thing?  Parts of the game are really brutal.  For instance:  if you specialize in bow and not melee weapons, you'll be real sad when you're out of arrows and your mans are being slaughtered at the top of that ladder.  The flip?   Worse.  Didn't get in the front of the line to get on the ladder?  Have fun waiting for your mans to get slaughtered at the top.

Crafting is also grindy--really grindy.  I modded my game (C#, remember?) and even at 25x crafting speed I couldn't unlock enough parts to build reasonable things.  I had piles of materials but no components and before I had more denars than I could spend I couldn't be buying the top tier swords to smelt for a 1 in 20 chance to unlock a random part.  It's only slightly easier if you're forging stuff.  Not cool.  

Lots of pieces of the game aren't well explained, probably because they're still building it.  The original M&B and Warband both lacked good user-facing lord recruitment mechanisms.  They both had them, I just don't think they worked very well.  This continues in Bannerlord.  I had conquered 2/3 of the map before I got my first allied clan and only because I save-scummed to get them.  This pseudo-fixed once I got my victory screen but by then I was pretty much done.  That's the nature of the sandbox, though--you might end up at war with every single faction making the in-game mechanic moot.

Hopes For the Future

We don't often see person-scaled armies in games so if you're interested in that kind of thing I'm not aware of a better choice at the moment.  I hope they continue to license their engine with all of its hundreds-of-actors-strong fights because even with today's supercomputers we're super starved for these kinds of games.  Even though I didn't particular care for WF&S, I'm hoping to see new versions of it and Caribbean! soon.

I still haven't played a game that hooks me on medieval combat the way that M&B has.  The gameplay is better this time around even in its pseudo-finished state, and it looks a lot better than the previous installments.  The worst thing about this game is that I know it's going to eat up a bunch of time when I get back to it to see what fun things they changed.

A thing a week 2020, week 16

This week we return to the painting world with one half speed paint and one half "do some real work" paint.  This year is flying by and it's hard to think that the last minis I posted were three months ago.  That's also when the "real work" on these figs happened.  I put effort into the faces and a little effort in the bodies but the legs and arms and weapons and metal bits were a speed paint because I needed to show a thing this week and these were half done from January. 

The faces were several layers to practice shading with special attention to eyes.  The bodies were quick wet blends with an ancient 20th century paint which I still have a lot of.  Things I learned:  wet paint lightened looks a lot lighter than that same paint when dry.  The arms and legs are crap. 

These are Viking Hirdmen from Warlord Games, my favorite place in the UK to buy miniatures.  They look an awful lot like my other random Viking figs that I painted last year with different heads. 

2020 finished mini counter:  7/20

A thing a week 2020, week 15

Busy doing other things this week so it's lucky I ran into this liftship that I started a while ago.  I've pulled the hexes off of these and made the background transparent to work better with Roll20.  On the one hand, I like being able to fix a scale by baking the hexes into the image.  On the other hand, lining that up in a non-precision tool a pain in the ass.  Furthermore, it's impossible to set arbitrary orientations for them which is a thing that you might want to do when in an actual battle with, you know, real movement and tactical concerns.  In meat space this is less of a problem and as an added bonus, the figs will go along for the ride. 

Pictured on the right is a cutter, an inexpensive two deck cargo vessel sometimes used for other purposes.  Feel free to use in your home game as necessary (c) me 2020. 

Given that it looks like we'll be in lockdown for a while longer this year, I'm starting to think it's worth it to throw money at Roll20 to get access to their deeper scripting API.  If their macro language is anything to judge from, I have to imagine this will involve a lot of pain.  So I got that to look forward to.

A thing a week 2020, week 14

I'm hoping this is the last of these for a while.  They're fun to make but I think enough of them are represented here.  I'd endeavored to build one out of foam this weekend but didn't get to it. I've got a reasonable idea of how I want to do this but it's at the edge of my ability with the material.  I'm not 100% sure how they should sit on the table and they'd have to be sturdy enough to hold figs safely some of which are quite heavy. 

As always, feel free to use this for your home games (c) me 2020.

A thing a week 2020, week 13

Week 3 of liftships.  I need a couple of these for next episode so here's one that I built instead of the stuff I was supposed to be doing (aka building a level for today's game).  There's probably another one on the way next week unless a) I can find a good one someone else built, or b) I end up with a lot more unencumbered time than I expect and I do something else.

One really nice thing about these is that they're way easier than building in foam or Lego or something.  Someday, when all of this isolation crap is over, I'll need to build these as props so I got that to look forward to.

Feel free to use for your home games (c) me 2020.

A thing a week 2020, week 12

This week we have another airship liftship.  These are fun to build and like the last one a) it was built from scratch except the wood texture, and b) you're free to use it in your home games but please don't redistribute (c) me 2020. 

This is a single deck knarr, both rugged and practical.  I imagine these as low-cost versions of the fancier liftships in the realm operated by a smaller crew.  It was inspired by the old middle-age sailing ship of the same name.

My copious free time has been ruinously constrained in the last few week but hopefully we're coming outta that tunnel stunned but alive. 

A thing a week 2020, week 11

Yesterday I started a new campaign.  With that campaign I needed an airship, so I built one!  Outside of the wood texture and hex map, everything here was built from scratch.  Eventually I'll build a hero prop for it but as we're stuck in quarantine for the next little but, I didn't need one.  Granted, at normal scale, this prop would be, um, big.

Not shown is the rudder underneath or the weird sails on top but this gives the tactical bits for play that we needed.  Feel free to use this in your own home games as usual.  This image (c) me 2020.

A thing a week 2020, week 10

This week it's tool time and not just tool time, it's Lego tool time.  A long time ago (more than three years ago, apparently) I built a bunch of status trays for tracking bleeds and buffs and whatnot.  These have worked pretty well (pictured here). 

In the intervening chunk of time, my game has shifted considerably from tracking numbers on paper to counting values with chips.   I bought a bunch of cheap acrylic chip holders that work OK but I've never really been happy with them since the nice deluxe chips don't fit very well and small numbers of chips tip over and fall out and are generally unruly.

These trays are built mostly from plates, faded stuff from my collection, and other parts I have in extra abundance from the pick a brick wall.  They also combine two things that would otherwise float around the table taking up space and getting in the way.  We'll probably iterate on them a few times before we're through.

A thing a week 2020, week 9

I collect a lot of concept art for the many games I run.  Organizing this stuff is a real pain in the butt especially when their names are random strings of letters and numbers impossible for most people to remember.  What if there existed a tool that would a) preview this art, b) allow tagging of this art, and c) could display it faster than Windows Photos and without chewing through all available RAM?  Well, I wrote that tool. 

It's a super basic HTML server built in C#.  You hand it a config file with the tags you care about which it throws in checkboxes at the top.  It remembers tags per image (stored in a handy json file) and allows re-tagging if, like me, you often file things while drunk.

This is not a fancy tool and it's got some seriously bad usability issues but it's already saved me a pile of time starting my new campaign. 

meta:  forgot to post this on Sunday but it's backdated through the power of technology!

A thing a week 2020, week 8

It is rare that you get to end a campaign on a high note but I did so yesterday.  The writeup is this week's entry for a thing a week.  Colville says that role playing games are the most fun you can have with your brain and I have to agree with him.  I choked up a little bit when delivering the last few scenes in the epilogue.  I can only hope that the campaign that follows in three weeks will be as good.

Run time weighed in at about 1.1 TNGs and spanned ten players with five regulars.  Lots of materials were built or painted for this campaign and my notes spanned hundreds of pages.  The Company started with 21 named NPCs and ended with six more by the end.  There were 32 more named NPCs in the other factions in the city some of whom were combatants and some of whom got quite a lot of screen time.  Another fifteen or so were improvised up as needed.  I don't think I'll miss any of the NPCs in this campaign as much as I still miss Zarashi but there were some good ones.

Ending a Campaign

I'll remember this one as "The Cedarwood Campaign" moving forward.  It's a place I've wanted to explore for a long, long time, and one that's been in the background in a couple of the campaigns I've run recently.  I pitched it as "The Black Company meets the end of the world" and I think we hit the high notes of that theme.  Some of it went really well and we were able to end it on a high note.  Most importantly, folks had fun, myself included, which is all you can really ask for.  We played 22 sessions with two session 0s at an average of 6 hours per session.  That puts us at about 144 hours which is more than Star Trek:  The Next Generation.

I didn't need to draw the whole city, but I'm really glad I did!  From the opening sessions, the map of the city was front and center and it continued to be a fantastic gaming aid up until the end.  In fact, the end of the campaign centered on the city, specifically, defending it from the Forces of Darkness(TM).  One of my biggest takeaways right now is that having this kind of prop is extremely useful when you need to improvise up an encounter at a moment's notice.  The neighborhood maps also ended up being super useful as a worldbuilding exercise.  Lots of the flavor of the game arose out of this exercise.

I'm not a film buff but there's a lot to learn from film in terms of framing scenes.  I picked this up from the great Adam Koebel whose shows I watch regularly.  This campaign was the first where I really tried to lean into that.  It didn't all work out since I'm still learning the techniques and lingo but overall I think it made the campaign better.  Also, I love saying shit like "this is where the special effects budget was blown for the episode," and "viewers who watched the first season would recognize...," which is aimed at the players who played in both.  Nearing the end I used it to end scenes which otherwise may have overstayed their welcome.  I think this is a thing I've been missing and I think it's improving my GMing.  I do this in my online campaign, too, so I'm getting a lot of practice. 

Along for the ride with the cinematics came a lot of "meta-gaming knowledge" which allowed me to present a lot more information than just what the PCs saw.  I did a lot of lingering shots and internal monologues of NPCs which I think is a fun way to reflect the PCs' actions back to their players.  I like showing things this way.  It's making me think through visuals with a lot more clarity which in turn helps me describe what's going on.  Most importantly:  my players seem to enjoy the game being presented as a TV show complete with intro and end credit shenanigans. 

The large cast of NPCs was a mixed blessing.  I had plans and interesting pieces for each of them but we only really interacted with about a third of them and not all of the interesting NPCs were from this exercise.  The ones that stuck were quite memorable (more below) but there were many that had almost no speaking lines at all.  When you embark on these things you don't get to be sad when you don't use material you spent a lot of time on but didn't get screen time but I like to think that these characters added to the perceived pastiche of Cedarwood, The Company, and its members.

We will remember Throam Greybreaker as the greatest of these both in imagined size and in character.  He had a great voice and speech pattern, basically me speaking as slowly as I can stand at the very bottom of my vocal range--it's a thing, and it's cool.  A "business troll" from the start, Throam was a mob boss running a particularly sketchy piece of the city.  I didn't intend for Throam to be a likable character but the players liked him well enough.  It started with running jobs for him against a common enemy and ended up in formal alliance.  When I narrated him out of the story in the epilogue, he had become a respected leader of the city--a voice of reason and stability as the world rebuilt from the war. 

Two other standouts were Heofar the Mountain, a Kezhor Hand of Ilmar, a larger than life drunkard with a similarly sized personality and Reinwald the Unsteady, an elderly Word of Ilmar scholar with a bad limp.  Both of them had fun voices and the places where I played Reinwald well, I think were some of my best acting moments in the campaign.  Heofar was plain fun to play between heavily drinking most of the time to his dark humor, to narrating the graphic ways in which he dispatched his enemies.  Apparently I'm good for a handful of memorable NPCs per campaign. 

There were too many great moments in our not quite 150 hours but I'll leave a few of these here.  Goodhands wrestled a sewer croc while zapping it with an electric damage shield.  The meat of the croc was served as a stew in the PCs' adopted home:  the Skylight Inn and Tavern.  Despite the fact that I got shade thrown on my youtube channel, the PCs loved making dex and then reflex checks to catch the mugs of kobba slid across the bartop by Meat, an NPC who started as a PC.  Wings named his rooftop scouts the "Up top division" which at one point resulted in a hilarious conversation between him and a former Ork skorcher named Rider.  Goodhands once went on a serious bender which resulted in the infamous line:  "I took a nap in the bacon." 

I've run many campaigns and successfully ended six.  I think I'll remember this one fondly and right now I think it's the best I've managed so far.  Part of it was undoubtedly digging into the things I do and why I do them for youtube.  Some of it was listening critically to Koebel working his magic.  Some of it was shifting the game system around to a thing that does what I want better, but most of it was due to the awesome players I've gamed with over the last fifteen months or so.  Thanks, guys!

A thing a week 2020, week 7

Busy this week but managed to crank out a couple sketches.  I would have done more but a) I didn't want to force it, and b) a new version of Dwarf Fortress came out.  I also started building a tool to tag my mountainous concept art folder but there's nothing to show yet so it can't go here.

I would be a better artist if I focused on fewer things and did them consistently.  I know this; it's part of why I'm not a good artist.  I also know that the more I try to force it, the worse results I get, and the worse results I get the less likely I am to pick it up again later.  That means I do less of that thing and as a result I'm less good at it.

Life is about tradeoffs.  There may be a day that I regret this but I'm making the decision with eyes wide open.  Thus, to maintain the joy I take in my art and as a result do more of it and get better at it, I've learned to not force it.  Maybe that'll change in the unforseeable future but that's where I am right now.

A thing a week 2020, week 6

A couple weeks ago I built a map which was cool but we found out in play that it was too small.  I've fixed that.  This one is 24" on a side with some of the extraneous stuff pulled out and with clear zone boundaries.  Turns out that when you playtest stuff, you can revise and make them better!

This campaign is coming to a close in a couple weeks which I'm sure I'll write about at some point.  There's always something bittersweet about ending a campaign but we're already over one Star Trek The Next Generation's run time. 

A thing a week 2020, week 5

I'd intended on doing some illustration in last year's challenge but never really got around to it.  These three marked a significant and sadly normal drought.  The last reasonable piece I worked on was something like early 2017 and, since I was never really happy with it, I never posted it.  Before that we're goin' way back here to the heady days of 2016 (and even that was a sketch done a year earlier).

I won't tell the whole story but I ended up with not a lot of time on Monday night and I didn't want to do nothing.  Maybe it was the random art tutorials I watched on youtube last week but I ended up horking around on pinterest and not even drawing inspiration from the bajillion such pins I keep for that purpose.  I picked something that I didn't like a whole lot but that had a good pose and started from there.  The armor is mine but the pose, face structure, and really all that hard compositional stuff is all from the original art.  I'm trying to understand non-metallic metals prior to slapping paint on a fig and selling that in graphite is a step along that path.

I found this experience enlightening.  Apparently mini painting has given me a lot more control and patience than I ever enjoyed when I arted more frequently.  Aside from some screwing around on the first day, everything else went pretty easily.  I wasn't drawing for any particular reason except to do so and these didn't go toward any larger work which is unusual.  Maybe these were easier because I didn't care all that much and could focus on the art.  There's probably a lesson there.  Each piece was an hour or two. 

Techincal crap (if anyone cares):  0.7mm HB mechanical pencil, non-kneadable eraser, and EF Ebony 6325 vintage pencil I bought before it was vintage on folded over 8.5"x14" printer paper bought around the same time.  You can be part of a long line of people being snarky over my choice of art medium if you're into that kind of thing.  

A thing a week 2020, week 4

Cedarwood is the city that keeps on giving.  This is the tactical map we were supposed to use yesterday in the final act of my Saturday campaign.  People fell ill and, well, I've now got a bunch of brisket to eat.  It's a hard life.

I could have used the neighborhood map but I felt it lost some of the nuance of the street layout.  This offers more tactical decisions which is what I wanted.  It's notable that tactical decisions is not what the map was drawn for--it was purely an artistic work motivated slightly by some critical thought on how the city might function.  We've gotten a year of gameplay out of this thing (more than 125 hours of table time) so I feel like it was a good investment.

I'd make it bigger if I were to do it again.  It's a little hard to fit the chips where you might want them and they obscure the map itself which will be a pain when we actually start playing.  This is basically a giant image printed out on my trusty color printer and mounted on medium weight chipboard.  Each page is 7.5"x7.5" which is a half inch smaller than I wanted but I mathed wrong and did the page setup incorrectly before printing.  Mounting was done with gluesticks because I didn't need more than that. 

The unit chips were glued in 1" strips and cut out with scissors.  I spaced them out by about 1/16" of an inch so there'd be space to cut.  I would have preferred a little bit more.  Also, since it's hard to see in the picture, the actual unit stats are in purple.  This makes the stats much easier to read on the black structure.  I learned this when writing out the stat cards I usually use at the table.

A thing a week 2020, week 3

Like last week, this week we have a mini.  This is a Reaper Bones Highland Heroine and a fig I like quite a lot.  This was the original figure I wanted to take to the highest quality I could more than a year ago at the end of 2018.  She sat partially painted all of last year as a reminder that I had no idea how far I could take a figure.  She's painted for Finch, the northern warrior in my Saturday game and every time she took the field, I had to have a standin--another sad reminder.

Even though I had other projects going, I decided at the very tail end of last year to finish.  The cloak is wet blended at an OK level.  The lows and highs are good but the midtones are weak.  Her hair is many (many) layers including washes and drybrushing that doesn't really come through. 

And now I get to talkwrite about all the things that are super wrong.  Her sword is bent.  This is a common thing for Bones figures.  You can usually straighten that stuff out in very hot tap water but this one wouldn't.  Next up, I did a crap job with mold lines.  This is also hard with bones since they're mostly all white and they're hard to see.  How hard?  Well, I cut a bunch of the actual molding on her right leg with a very sharp knife trying to get rid of one.  I painted the strapping to make up for it but if you look close, it's clearly very wrong.  The paint is heavy in places because last year I didn't really know a) how to prime, and b) how to thin paint properly.  She might be one of the last figs I primed with rattle cans which I'm super bad at.

The fur on her cloak looks good as does the strapping minus where I had to make it up because I destroyed the molding.  The metal disks are super washed with Nuln gloss which really popped them out.  I also put real effort into tonal variation and color wheel balance.  Even though I didn't do any freehand (tartan or something would be appropriate), I think she looks good.

What I think went best was her face.  The eyes on the sculpt are already big so I painted them as big anime eyes.  Since they were so (relatively) big, I did lit colored irises in her eyes with a reflection point for the first time.  Her skin is well-shaded and I tried to account for a lower jaw sculpt that felt weak to me.  My shading doesn't hold up super well under scrutiny but  it works on the table.

Overall, I think this might be a shade lower quality than last week's offering but better than average.  I can only guess at the work time with a year's pause between but I'd go with 30-35 hours total, maybe 20ish of which was done in the last three weeks.  I'm pretty sure nothing of the original paint job exists.  She's better in person than in these shots which my phone super struggled with.  I might have to break out the nice camera in the future. 

2020 finished mini counter:  2/50

A thing a week 2020, week 2

This week we have a mini.  This is the crossbow variant of Nolzur's Human Female Ranger.  (The bow variant is way back here.)  She's mostly a good fig.  I had to work extra hard to get some expression in her face and there are places that are super hard to reach with a brush like behind the bow or underneath the cloak.  Given the myriad other figs I've painted, it feels like these are less well laid out.

The goal was to take her as far as I could reasonably go in about 25 hours so this currently marks the limit of quality that I can produce.  I painted as many details as I could stand in addition to these four things:

• I pushed the lighting through different colors rather than relying on zenithal and glazes with special attention to increasing tonal variation.
• The cloak marks the first serious attempt at wet blending I've done.  
• I put extra attention into details on her face despite the questionable sculpt.  
• I used a color wheel for the first time for color composition and put some thought into having color triangles.  

I'm not unhappy with the quality but I don't think it's my best work despite what I saidtyped above.    I'd prepped the model a while ago and really didn't do a good job and since most of this fig was painted late in the night over a couple weeks, my brush work is not all as non-sloppy as it should be.  She does look better in person than in these lousy phone shots, FWIW.  

On the other hand, I quite like wet blending.  It's faster and easier than a lot of the other blending methods I've tried and gives a lot more time to adjust if it goes wrong.  I've done more of this since I did the cloak on this fig and it's getting better.  

2020 finished mini counter:  1/50

edit:  apparently didn't hit "publish" even though it was ready to go on time :/

A thing a week 2020, week 1

Starting the year we've got something different.  I'm pretty sure I've said this before here, but I love building tools, especially if they're going to get a lot of usage.  I'd built a paint holder when I started mini painting for realz about a year and a half ago.  That's like a million years in game developer time.  Since then I've picked up some additional paint racks and quite a lot of additional paints to the point that the storage I have is overflowing.  Furthermore, none of my racks can hold large ink bottles like these.

Basic construction is double thickness cardboard and medium weight chipboard--basically the same stuff I built my old tiles out of.  It took about a day to cut everything and jam it together with hot glue and PVA.  Then everything got a couple coats of random hardware store rattle can paint that I once thought I could use for minis.  Note:  Reaper Bones are very particular about primers.

Overall, it fits its purpose--it holds paint.  The brush holders on top didn't work and I'll probably rip those off.  They're too far back to reach easily so I don't think revisiting them is going to be useful.  The basic rack parts are also pretty tight because I didn't account for the width of the chipboard when planning it out.  I made the same mistake on the old one but that was like a million years ago.  I'm not helped by the fact that Pro Acryl bottles are slightly larger than Army Painter droppers.

edit:  this guy didn't want to publish for some reason. 

2020 Crafting challenge

I'm not one for new year's resolutions or anything but I do like challenges.  Last year's two were fun, if a little daunting at times, and I figured I should do another such thing this year.  Just like last year, I want to make a thing a week and I'll use similar rules:

• The thing must be posted here (Sundays again, probably) and it has to be done unless it's part of a big thing like SHIPtember or NaNoWriMo which I still haven't done yet.
• Valid things:
• Gaming terrain, prop, scatter (etc.)
• A painted mini
• An illustration or sketch in digital or traditional media which I don't do nearly enough of
• An article or other piece of writing of, I dunno, 1000 words or more
• A Lego build
• A video
• Other?  I do enough stuff that it's hard to enumerate what all might end up here.

In addition to these, I have the additional goals:

• Fifty painted miniatures (down from 100 last year)
• Five miniatures pushing quality
• At least one serious attempt at non-metallic metals
• Five buildings of reasonable size pushing level of detail and quality

This feels like a lot (and it is).  I expect to be unusually busy this year.  If I'm smart I'll post quarterly goal updates to see how things are tracking but chances are real good that I'll forget.

2019 in Review

2019 has been a weird year full of things I didn't expect.  I won't write about everything but here's what we got.

Gaming
There was very little noteworthy video game playing this year which is unusual but my tabletop gaming ramped up.  At the end of this year we officially hit two and a half years for the Saturday bi-weekly fantasy game and started up a couple different campaigns on Sundays online.  That's had its own set of tradeoffs but is going well enough given the circumstances.  Here's hoping that nextthis year will continue going strong.

Articles
I did a lot of writing this year.  It started with Adventures in Mini Painting #2, rolled through some worldbuilding stuff and ended up with Filling Out a City.  I also hit 200 posts here which is an achievement of some kind.  I've wanted to do a bunch of this kind of writing for forever but never carved out the time to do it.  The additional research I did helped me improve my own worldbuilding, game, and designs, and served as a springboard for video making.

Videos
Through the latter half of the year I wrote, filmed, and edited 22 videos.  I learned a lot during that exercise and got to become very familiar with my various verbal ticks.  If all I got out of that effort was turning down the volume on those, I'd feel like it was worthwhile.  If other folks got something out of my ramblings, so much the better.

Other than wishing I'd done a better job with them, my only other regret was that these took sooooo much time.  I'd like to do more nextthis year given everything I've learned but we'll see.  I feel like there's more I want to say about video making and youtube in general but this isn't really the place for it.

Terrain
Shoe's 30 for 30 pretty much kicked off my terrain building hobbyaddiction.  I'd expected my Thing a Week to include more terrain but it didn't work out that way.  I've gotten some pretty good mileage out of the terrain I have in the Saturday game but I'm reminded that there's a bunch of stuff I need still.  During Shoe's 30 for 30 the focus was on speed and building fundamentals.  I don't expect to have many strict time constraints moving forward so I kind of want to push level of detail and quality in nextthis year's efforts.  Watch this space!

Painting
At the end of last year I wanted to bring a single fig to high (for me) quality and had started down that path.  I made some progress in January but never got back to it.  Shoe's 30 for 30 chewed up a lot of creative energy but the time constraint prevented large investments in any one thing which is why the figs painted that month look the way they do.  I was also extremely busy this year but that's usually true--it's about carving out the time and being deliberate in practice which I didn't do.  Worse still, the battle pods and Veritechs over the summer were a goddamn nightmare.  This really killed my motivation to hobby in the middle of this year when I did have time.

Pushing the level of quality is completely missing in my mini painting experience thusfar.  I've experimented a fair bit this year but got caught up in a lot of batch painting to meet an arbitrary number.  I hit the number but feel like I've lost some quality as a result.  While I do like batch painting, I'm not sure it's a good thing for me to do.  I'm really hoping I can carve off time to get better at this stuff in 2020.

Design
When I first wrote this section way back in the spring I had loftier goals for where my design efforts would land. Well, I didn't make those and my penance is that I've had to rewrite this section.  Life is hard sometimes.

I started down a path in late April to streamline my fantasy game or at the very furthest point, build a skirmish game with some of the same ideas.  Through the design process I ended up with a sci-fi game instead.  There's good and bad to that but being a completely different game led to some more creative solutions.  The first version of it ended up in a pretty good place that we're busy refining through play right now.  Some day there might be words here describing that effort if all goes well.

The really cool thing is that I started pulling some of those same ideas, now slightly tested, into the fantasy system.  Here too I made significant efforts to streamline.  Some of this has been rocky but I think it'll work out in the end.  This feels like a significant step in the design space--from very crunchy details to streamlined for playability that I wouldn't have otherwise gotten.  The other note I'll make is that I might think there's nothing really left to streamline but I've thought that twice already over the last three-ish years.

Fin
So that's 2019 in a nutshell, at least, the stuff I'm going to discuss here.  Tune in next year to see how 2020 went!

edit:  apparently I've been doing these for a decade including the two that got back-posted thislast year.  That feels like an accomplishment of some kind.