Dead Dwarves Drink No Ales

Another quick update on the dungeon project. The Mines of Moria boxed set has been invaluable so far in providing a little extra "lived-in" feel to my dungeon. With the addition of the crypt pieces I just finished, I figured it would be fitting to add some corpses. So I tackled the last 3 small pieces in the MoM set:

And here they are in the dungeon itself:

And finally, creeping out some living dwarves:

"I feel like maybe we should go back..."

With these done, the only piece from the MoM set I have left is the giant door. I don't think that I will be painting that anytime soon, though. It doesn't work well with the dungeon pieces and is kinda boring. Not at all spooky like dwarf skellingtons.

Dungeon: Corners and Crypts

Well, it has been a while since I've posted any real progress on my dungeon. Life just hasn't given me much time to work on anything, and some other projects have had to take precedence. However, I was getting tired of seeing plain white pieces in places, so I broke out the paint and did up a few small pieces.

As you can see, I chose some short wall pieces so that I could get some slightly larger rooms. I also did up some hallway caps so that I can have passages that end in something other than rooms or stairs. But I am particularly excited about these:

The corner wall pieces I have been meaning to do for a while. I love not having to be stuck with perfectly square/rectangular rooms anymore. The skull wall was also fun to paint. I love having a wall with buttresses and the skull, while kinda rough, is still creepy. Of course where there are skulls, there are crypts!

On the left you can see the tomb piece that came with the Dungeonstone set itself. On the right is Balin's tomb from the Mines of Moria box set that I had painted almost a year ago. I'm not a huge fan of the DS piece. It is kinda plain and blends in with the surrounding dungeon:

I think it will get used sparingly as a secondary crypt. Balin's tomb, on the other hand, looks suitably impressive:

Of course having all those pieces painted together means I can now assemble one heck of a burial chamber:

 Just watch out for angry wights!

With those pieces, all I have left are hallways for my dungeon, which means I am essentially done with the meat of the project. I will have to start looking for more furniture and monsters to populate it with! Reaper Bones Kickstarter, wherefore art thee...

The Lich King of Tir Norak

All right, time for another dungeon crawl! It's been a while since I've had time to work on my 3D dungeon and I've been itching to do some more playtesting on my solo dungeon crawl rules. So this time, instead of busting out a pile of half painted plaster-resin, I decided to use some of the stacks of D&D Dungeon Tiles I have lying around.

Behold its 2D mystery!

My SDC rules are a mix of Song of Blades and Heroes and its companion dungeon rules, Song of Gold and Darkness, plus a bunch of custom rules to populate the dungeon. Someday I may actually write some of them down, but for now they mostly occupy my head and a few tables in some spreadsheets. The biggest thing I need to playtest are the rules for scenic items (which sadly don't pop up much in this report; yay random tables!).

I had been working with a campaign system, but after some imbalances and a total wipeout of the party after my last (unrecorded) adventure, I decided to start anew and focus on the basics. I whipped up my party from the pre-experience days and threw them back in the dungeon fresh. And here are the heroes!

Our brave adventurers have learned that the tomb of the Lich King of Tir Norak has been uncovered by some bandits. While the lich has not been seen, the promise of riches has been drawing evil things to the tomb, and it is only a matter of time before he has been woken from his slumber. The brave heroes sally forth to destroy the lich before he can be awakened!

The heroes find themselves at the door to the tomb. The thief detects a trap rigged to the door, a needle laced with deadly poison. He is able to disarm it, but the trap foretells trouble ahead.

What luck! Behind the door lies a chest! From the scuff marks on the floor, it appears to have been dragged from deeper in the dungeon and left here. Hopefully its owners don't come looking for it soon. The chest is quickly unlocked and 400 gold is found inside!

The heroes move down the hallway, but are soon alerted to the shuffling feet and coarse laughs of a troop of bugbears! There are howls of rage and it soon becomes clear who had left the chest.

The heroes rush down the hall to meet them, and the elf wizard manages to enchant the bugbears, freezing them in their tracks. One shakes off the spell and deals the thief a stunning blow.

Short work is made of the frozen bugbears, but the free one leaps past its fallen comrades to press its advantage and slays the thief!

Enraged, the paladin rushes forward, swinging his axe. A burst of magical lights from the elf wizard blinds the beast, letting him be cut down easily. Checking the bodies, the heroes find strange spider tattoos on the necks of the bugbears, possibly slave marks. Saddened by the loss of their friend, they press on and hope there are more traps...

Opening the next door, the heroes see two dark shapes studying the door across the room. Dark elves! A witch and her bodyguard by the looks. They turn and the bodyguard rushes forward to block the elf ranger's path while the witch ensnares the templar warrior with bands of black energy.

The elf ranger quickly fells the dark elf in front of him, leaping forward to engage the witch and clearing a path for the paladin to do the same. Surrounded, the witch is swiftly hacked to pieces. They find 600 gold on the corpses, plus a magic mace that is given to the templar when the spell holding him finally wears off.

Obviously intrigued by the door the dark elves were inspecting, the heroes move forward and open it, ignoring the warning runes etched into it long ago. Behind the door they find a wizardly skeleton on a throne flanked by two statues. Three long-dead bodies lie on the floor. As the heroes enter, the skeleton on the throne rises and shouts an arcane spell, causing the bodies on the floor to rise. Looks like they found the lich!

The crypt guardians shamble forward to engage the heroes while the lich freezes the paladin with a spell. The paladin shakes off the evil enchantment and the heroes press into the room aided by some magical support from their own wizard.

Fearing the banishing power of the templar, the lich weaves a spell around him, enveloping him in magical darkness. The elf ranger smashes a guardian to the ground, opening a pathway to the lich.

The lich is surrounded and immobilized by a spell before being hacked to pieces. The templar shakes off the now weakened spell and uses his holy power to banish the lich's soul, thereby ending his power forever! The heroes loot the room finding 800 gold! Now it is time to hit the tavern for food, wine and possibly find a new thief.

This crawl taught me a couple things. First, my 3D dungeon is nice, but the tiles offer me more variety and space to maneuver in. The 3D dungeon is a little cramped. I won't be switching to tiles exclusively, but I will probably be using them a little more often in the future.

Second, spell-casting enemies need extra support to make them a challenge. The dark elf fight went rather quickly and the witch wasn't much of a threat with only one bodyguard. Meanwhile, I added an extra guardian to the lich fight and that felt like a real fight. The lich wasn't too tough to handle, but I felt like a wrong roll with all that magic flying around could make things go badly very quickly. I'm going to have to re-jig my encounter tables a little in the future.

So that's it for this quest. Happy adventuring!

Rolling With Dragons

Well, it's been a while since I've posted on here. Almost two full months in fact. A combination of real life and a horrible sinus infection will do that occasionally.

This has essentially been me for about a month now.

But when I came across this discussion on The Miniatures Page, I was reminded of an old friend from my formative days of gaming: Dragon Dice! I was also surprised to find out someone still produces and sells them!

Originally released in 1995, Dragon Dice was TSR's bid to try and drag people away from the Magic: The Gathering craze at that time. It didn't quite succeed, but it did bring something unique to the table. Now at that time I was 13-14 and already a mega nerd. I had already discovered Magic and I was completely ensconced in D&D whenever I got the chance. When Dragon Dice hit shelves, it seemed like the best of both worlds: A collectible game with dice plus elves, goblins and dwarves. TSR got peanut butter all up in my chocolate.

I was hooked immediately. Whenever I wasn't shuffling Magic cards, I was rolling Dragon Dice. I suppose at that age, there were very few activities that I engaged in that didn't involve repetitive hand movements.

Anyway, I had very loving parents that encouraged my hobbies even if they didn't understand them and probably cried themselves to sleep at night, so I had a LOT of Dragon Dice. I had long ago buried them in my parents' basement, but they were not hard to find. And I guess I had forgotten that I had acquired so very many of them. How many dice, you ask? This many:

That smaller pile consists of the dice I only ever really used.

I remember at the time I was a big fan of both Lava Elves and Dwarves. Since my Dwarf dice were better, they became my chosen race. I carried them in my the Earth (yellow) dice bag, and I absolutely had to have the official Dwarf play mat:

For practical purposes, the mat was a terrible idea. First of all it smelled like a corpse when first unwrapped. The game with two players can be played on a space approximately 18 inches. Because of its awful diamond-shaped design, the mat required a single player to have about two feet of space of his own. If two people had mats, you were so far apart you could barely see each other's rolls, let alone reach over to roll your own dice at your opponent's home terrain. My 14 year old brain solved this problem by letting the Buried area hang off the table and I Velcroed my dice bag to the spot to hold the dice.

Thereby ruining two potential collectors items! Yay!

Despite this I used this mat in every game and I loved every second of it. I have long since lost any clues to what my old armies might have been. So I sat down and pooled up some small 18 health armies from each of the original races, plus the basics to play some games:

Coral Elves and Lava Elves

Dwarves and Goblins

Terrain

Scaled death machines

Terrain and dragons were very important. I distinctly remember gravitating toward Dwarves because I didn't really have the right dice to play others. A second Highland and some green or blue dragons would have fixed that. The kid-that-has-disposable-income in me ordered a couple of green dragons off eBay just to even those out, but I don't think I'm going to spend any more on it for now.

I'm hoping to engage some of my former opponents (i.e. my cousins) in some battles over the holiday weekend. I certainly have enough dice to go around. It just remains to be seen if we can still move after all of that sweet, delicious ham.

Have a happy holiday everyone, and don't forget to roll some dice!

Enoch's Kin

I have a terrible track record of getting things painted. I enjoy painting as a hobby, but I am not a very dedicated painter. The thought of painting a whole army of miniatures exactly the same way, all at the same time makes me a little queasy. I tend to flit from project to project, leave some half finished, work on something else and eventually come back to them. If I were to paint any one of my several great grey hordes to a decent standard it would probably take me 20 years.

I guess what I'm saying is I'm lazy.

So, when I bought the models from Hasslefree for this project, it was actually over a year ago. I received them On February 1st, 2012 and promptly primed and base coated them. And then I moved onto something else. I would come back, paint a few things her or there, then work on something else. I finished them 2 days ago. It took me over a year to paint 5 models that should have been done in a week.

So I present to you, Enoch Whately and his family, cultists of Cthulhu:

Enoch Whately

Patience Whately

Their sons Ezekiel (Zeke), Jedidiah (Jed) and Barnabas (Barney)

Of course, being such a big Lovecraft fan, I couldn't let my happy little family get away without a little of their own fiction (warning: some of this is a tad grisly).

Enoch's Kin

Looking up, the starry sky was ringed by leaves, the circle of the clearing in which he stood. Enoch Whately gazed out into the darkness, the moon itself hidden away by the forest around him. It would not be witness to what happened here tonight.

He dropped his gaze to the stone before him, a massive piece of rock that had stood on this land long before the Whately family had settled these parts some seven generations ago. And it had always borne the same sinister countenance that leered back at him now. Squat and humanoid, it sat with clawed hands on drawn up knees, its bat-like wings folded. The surface was weathered and pitted, but scales could clearly be made out across the skin. But most odd was its round, dead-eyed face which had a cluster of tentacles where the mouth should be, as if some great cephalopod had taken up residence on its shoulders.

Looking to his right he saw his wife, Patience, hooded and robed in purple, holding the brazier to light their work. The sickly green flame that flickered there gave the clearing an eldritch pall. Scanning around her saw his three sons, Barney, Zeke and Jed. Also in purple robes, they droned behind their hoods, intoning the same chant he had once used to assist his father before him.

Finally his eyes dropped to the girl on the ground before him, bound and unclothed as per the rites. She was just barely a woman, maybe fifteen or so years old. Not many people traveled through those parts, but some lost their way in their rush to more civilized areas. He was glad she and her family had come along when they had because the other local families got mighty worked up when one of their own went missing.

The panic was clearly visible in her eyes when he raised the thick-handled knife he held above her. Those same eyes widened when her plunged the blade into her chest, her screaming muffled by her thick gag, though there was no one around to hear. And those eyes went dead as Enoch cut her heart from her chest.

Enoch held the heart up before the stone face, the throes of its last beats sending rivulets of the girl's blood down his arm. Staring into the tentacled face, he began the intonation:

"Ph'nglui mglw'nafh Cthulhu R'lyeh wgah'nagl fhtagn..."

Star Wars X-Wing Episode III: A New Hope

I have recently come across the most extraordinary thing: A game my wife will play.

Now, my wife is not a gamer. She enjoys mainstream games like Monopoly or Trivial Pursuit, and she did buy the NCIS board game not too long ago for us to play together. I don't mind some of those types of games (except Trivial Pursuit, which I really hate) but I am a hobby gamer. I like games that have strong themes (especially dungeon crawls) or involve miniatures. They don't have to be competitive, but are not her cup of tea because they often involve war, death and mayhem if possible.

He makes any game better.

However, my wife has come to really enjoy Star Wars. Our first date, in fact, was watching all 6 movies. Since at the time she had only ever seen Episode III, I only have to assume she was really, REALLY attracted to me. It's definitely how I knew she was a keeper.

Ok, so she's beautiful too.

When I first purchased X-Wing, I made some sort of  offhanded remark about her trying it with me and she said she would. We do this with every game I purchase though and it is an exchange that neither of us follow through with generally. I usually ask in order to include her in the hobby, but I don't really expect it because I know she isn't really into it, and that's ok. I just want to let her know she is welcome but I'm not going to push it. A probably she agrees to make me feel better and show interest, but she knows I'm not going to pester her about it either. She has been really good about trying things though, and there are a couple she will acquiesce to (such as HeroQuest or Magic: The Gathering).

So I was stunned one day when I jokingly suggested playing some X-Wing and she agreed. I was elated! She said the ships looked cool, as well as the new mat I had gotten, plus she liked doing Star Wars things with me.

I set up the game with her playing the Rebels and me with Imperials. We started off with the basic game, her with Luke and I with a couple of TIEs. Obviously we had to put Episode IV on in the background while we played.

She said it would inspire her better and I'm always up for some fitting music and sound effects. It is possible that it was too inspiring. This was the result:

Goddammnit.

In the first couple turns she managed to smoke one of my TIEs. I was on the back foot the entire game from there on out. However, she was having a fantastic time. Neither of us was truly used to the movement system yet, so we laughed about how we were always flying the wrong way or bumping into each other. The dice alternately showered us with both love and hate, so our turns were fairly even. Ultimately though, my luck eventually ran out and she won. She loves kicking my ass, so there was much rejoicing.

I was shocked, however when she immediately asked to play again. Moreover, she was not happy with just Luke. She wanted more ships! I responded by giving her Wedge (or "Wedgie" as she has come to call him).

"Man this flight suit is really riding up today."

In order to make the points even (and to indulge my need for saying "I have you now!" when I'm tailing an enemy ship) I took Vader. There was some discussion following this choice since what she really meant was "Only I can have more ships." Apparently she was happy getting a Death Star destroying hero if I was going to be stuck with only two TIE fighters. After calmly explaining points values and how awesome X-Wings were, she agreed that I could at least defend myself and we got the second game underway. This time we added some life to the mat with a couple planet templates from Battlefleet Gothic.


With more options on either side, the game was a blast. Vader could never seem to close in on the X-Wings, and though I eventually managed to take out Wedge, when it finally came down to just Luke and Vader, she managed to get the drop on me and blew me outta the sky.

We were having an amazing time. She was getting a good handle on the movement and managing to avoid when I was closing in. She also picked up on fire arcs and target locks like a pro. I am both scared and aroused by this turn of events.

And of course we had to play another game the next night. I was stunned when she actually requested another game of her own volition after the fact. That is actually something that has never happened with any game we have ever played, even the mainstream ones. Usually I request playing a game and then she chooses one of those or acquiesces to my choice. This was like the sighting of a rare white elk only with dice.

"I used my crossbow of elk-slaying +2"

So once again we set up the mat with a new planet to fight around and set to work. This time we used a couple of upgrades (R2, torpedoes, missles, etc.) but the lists were basically the same.

 

Of course it wasn't long until we started taking casualties. In fact, her first shot of the game looked something like this:

GODDAMMNIT.

Yep, another total smoking of my TIE. If fact, this has become something of a regular event. TIEs are pretty flimsy and she has become very adept at closing in when I least expect it, while I have become very adept at rolling blank faces. Amazingly enough I managed a win on this game.

We have both had a blast so far and I can't wait for a re-match. Unfortunately I have been distracted  by other games and the holidays took up all of our time after out last game. Hopefully we will be able to squeeze in some games now that we both have more time. I know I am extremely happy to have a game we can both enjoy and that she can share in at least a fraction of my hobby. Even if she pouts every time she loses a ship.

This image has been included at her "suggestion"