Holiday Adventures

A mysterious envelope arrived in the post today...

This year's DCC Holiday Adventure!  Trials of the Toy Makers.

Toy making gnomes, murder, and missing children.  It must be Christmas!. :-)  Get your copy here while you can!

Miniatures Monday

This week's Miniatures Monday brings us a barbarian war chief.  I'm not sure how he keeps that helmet on his head, but it does look stylish!

Magic Potions

I came across this last night.  It's a tequila bottle, but it looks like it would make an awesome potion bottle.

So what sort of potion do you think would be found in this?  Would it be baneful or beneficial?

The Presents of Christmas Past

As I've grown older Christmas has become a lot less about the gifts to me and more of a winter version of Thanksgiving.  I enjoy sitting by the fire sipping a drink and talking with family and friends much more than I enjoy unwrapping gifts and certainly more than I enjoy going to the mall.  This doesn't mean that I don't like gifts, just that they have become a lot less important to me.  However I do hold on to very fond memories of gifts that I received at a time when Christmas was really a lot more about presents to me.  So I give you a photo of part of my Christmas haul from I believe 1982, which could more appropriately have been called a very D&D Christmas.

It was a great year for D&D and a great Christmas.  Garay Gygax was still with TSR, and my parents got me some of the very best that the game had to offer.  I finally had my very own copy of the Dungeon Master's guide with its vast array of arcane knowledge that I could use to bedevil my players.  I got a Dungeon Master's Screen so that I could shield my maps and notes from the prying eyes of players who wanted to try to get an advantage over my adventures.  There was a booklet of Hexagonal Mapping Paper so that I could draw my own wilderness maps like the one that was in the Isle of Dread.  Dungeon Module I1, Dwellers of the Forbidden City was under the tree and the evil frog men that dwelt within it did not disappoint.  Now these had all been on my Christmas list, but then there was a surprise.  My parents were always good at getting me things that I wanted but didn't know that I wanted yet, mostly because I didn't know that they existed.  Probably the best example of this of all time was the Dark Tower boardgame from Milton Bradley that I had received the Christmas before.  I'm sure that I'll be writing about that in the future, but that year the surprise was The Lost Caverns of Tsojcanth.

Now I had never even heard of this adventure, but as I unwrapped it, I knew that it would be awesome!  just look at that great cover painting by Erol Otus.  Who cares if I could even pronounce the name?  Tsojcanth.  It just sounded awesome.  I'm guessing that while my parents were Christmas shopping, most likely at Walden Books, as that was the best place in our area to get D&D stuff, they must have come across this and been as enthralled by the picture as I was.  It turned out to be one of my favorite adventures ever.  It had it all: a great wilderness trek through the mountains, a vast labyrinth of caves, a foxy vampire queen, and yes, even an underground river.  It was the best D&D related surprise ever and a great Christmas like all of the Christmases in those days.  So this holiday season, as we gather to game, or to talk about gaming, or just to hang out, let's remember those people who first encouraged and indulged our love of gaming.

Miniatures Monday

This week's installment of Miniatures Monday brings something other than a barbarian.  A viking!  So, yeah, it's a barbarian. :-)

Miniatures Monday

This week we are moving back to some familiar territory with a barbarian.  I painted an identical copy of this miniature last year, but with different colored fur and a different sword.  I'm fairly happy with how the black sword with the evil green glow turned out.

He has a twin brother too.  I painted an identical miniature with a slightly different color scheme a while back.  maybe I'll post it later this week as a bonus.

Miniatures Monday

After a rather long hiatus, Miniatures Monday has finally returned.  To start off, I've decided to go with something a bit different.  I tend to work a lot with earth tones, but I was experimenting with some different color schemes and the result was this.  So here we see the evil Purple Knight advancing with his glowing green sword.

Look what arrived today in time for my Birthday!

The second Dwarven Forge Kickstarter set!  Two boxes.  Thats an awful lot of caves and caverns.  I'll post more pictures once I open them.

Happy Halloween!

Check out the crew at the coolest bar in town!

Jurassic Park!

Phantasm V Ravager Teaser: How did I not know about this until now?!?!

I can't believe that Don Coscarelli actually made Phantasm V.  Don't get me wrong, I'm ecstatic but amazed.  It will be great to see Angus Scrim as the Tall man one more time, and of course Reggie.  Supposedly it's in post production and it's unclear whether it will get a theatrical release or be straight to video like the previous two.  In any case, I can't wait!  http://www.phantasm.com/

Eternity

Forever is the realm of the young, for only they lack the perspective to see that even the horizon has its limits.

A sorcerously glowing lightning cloud!

I saw this cloud on my walk around the neighborhood the other night and was pretty impressed with the lightning that was flashing and glowing within it.  We don't get to see clouds like this around these parts very often.

Where Have all the Miniature Gone?

I know that Miniatures Monday has been missing for that past several weeks, and I apologize for that.  Things have been quite busy, and while I have been painting, I haven't been finishing, which of course is trouble if I actually want to post anything.  I do have one completed that I may try to photograph and get up on the sight tomorrow.  If not, by hook or by crook, he'll be up for August 11th.  In the meantime, I took a quick shot at some works in progress.  These should be finding their way to the blog in the coming weeks and months.

Some partially painted miniatures.

 

I Like Star Wars

Let me say it without reservation.  I like Star Wars.  I grew up on star wars and have always wanted to pilot the Milenium Falcon.  I also love role playing games, and have been playing them since I was 10 (which was quite some time ago mind you).  I have however never run a Star Wars Roleplaying game.  Enter Edge of the Empire.  I like the system.  Character creation is a bit heavy lifting for my taste, but it gets the job done and the dice mechanic is very nice and does a great job of providing story/color opportunities for the game.  It would seem that with all of those things lined up that Edge of the Empire would be my go to game, but it's not.  It's just not the genre that really holds me as a Game Master, and that makes me feel bad, because it incorporates a lot of things that I love, and it had a gorgeous rulebook.  I'm a sucker for gorgeous books.  But it's not my own free flowing world that I can craft to reflect my vision.  It's still at some level George's vision.  I am torn.

100 years ago today..

The aging Emperor the the Austro Hungarian Empire, Franz Joseph declared war on Serbia, officially beginning a war that would change Europe and much of the world forever.  He would not live to see the world that resulted.  Not an auspicious anniversary.

Perhaps it's time to break out my copy of Avalon Hill's The Guns of August.