Q: What Constitutes a Friendly Game?

I played a 1500 pt WHFB game this weekend that raised some questions for me.  My Ogre Kingdoms opponent asked me, "Is this a friendly game?"  I answered that it was, and that it was my first game against Ogres.  He responded by telling me that I would definitely want to use my power dice to dispell his toothcracker (or some other unpleasant sounding) remains-in-play spell.  I did so.

As the game progressed someone on the sidelines did a bit of kibitzing, reminding me of rules or things I had forgotten to do, like re-roll for hatred, etc.  As things started to go south for the Ogres I could hear my opponent muttering "I thought this was supposed to be a friendly game" or similar under his breath multiple times.  Clearly he thought someone helping me remember things was beyond that scope, even though I am a very occasional player (1-2 times a year.)

So this raised the question:  What constitutes a friendly/casual game?

Thinking it over a little, I think these are the sorts of things I would do in a casual game:

• Allow my opponent to do something he had forgotten in a prior phase as long as it wouldn't rewrite history too much.  A good example is allowing him to rally a fleeing unit after charges are declared.
  
• Let any charges / range checks of my opponent that are so close as to be questionable go in favor of my opponent.
• I would not require explicitly visible actions (for people who roll so fast that you can't see anything and all they say is "okay, 4 wounds" during combat.)
• Be congenial over any rules that are  broken, but try and point out any obvious errors and give him the opportunity to correct them.
  
• Allow him to look up any rule that gets questioned without making disparaging comments about knowing the rules or the time rule lookups take.
  

Little things like this keep the narrative of the battle alive with a minimum of the sort arguing that takes the focus off the models and puts it on the cantankerous gamers.

So what are your thoughts?

Paint Queek Cwossing

Skaven day!  Yay!  Saturday was the first major Skaven release since I started this crazy hobby, so I was somewhat thrilled.  I bought pretty much one of everything new that came out (a spearhead box would have been nice for this, but I heard through the grapevine that the spearhead boxes never sold all that well.)

I participated in the painting competition as well, and won first place with the Queek you see here.  I got a print of the Skaven book cover as my prize.  I was under the impression that I was competing for a Screaming Bell, but I suppose I will find out on 11/21 when they come out.  Either way I have a pretty snazzy Queek to field.  My local store is "GW Paint Creek Crossing" so hopefully the title of this entry makes more sense now.

I met up on Saturday for some gaming and ran into fellow UnderEmpire member Kariko83, whose Moulder horde is something to behold.  I am inspired to hire a few units of Giant Rats for my army, or at least assemble the GR's and Rat Ogres I already own.  We set up a 6000 point game (3 Skaven players @ 2000 each plus a Vampire Counts, Ogre Kingdoms and Lizardmen army of 2000 points each.)  Unfortunately VC guy started to feel sick at the top of turn 2 and we called the game.  I played 1500 against the Ogre Kingdoms guy later and suprised him with Clan Pestilens fun (and I quote, "Nobody has even done that to me before!  Not even Blood Knights!  Those things are so broken!")  Hooray!  I finally got accused of cheese!  He ended up winning with table quarters and standards, and the game was great fun.  I play about once or twice a year normally, so to get almost 8 turns in was a rare treat.

Deathmaster Snikch was nowhere to be found on Skaven day.  Pfft.  Isn't that just like clan Eshin?

Pics from the aborted 6k game.

Random Find: Tina + Wolf

Just a quick heads-up for an artist I stumbled across quite randomly.  She works with vector art, and I find her work intriguing.

Check it out:
http://tinaandwolf.blogspot.com/

She's barely started posting, so this might be a fun one for you to follow.

From Jaunty to Karmic

I've upgraded my work desktop from Ubuntu 9.04 (Jaunty Jackalope) to 9.1 (Karmic Koala.)  Here are a few observations.

• The Nvidia bug that caused the pointer bitmap to fragment at certain screen locations has been fixed.
• Audio is back to both the headphones and speakers working simultaneously (true in Intrepid, mutually exclusive in Jaunty.)  I'm not sure if this is a design feature or a bug.
• Desktop panels jumped from primary (left) monitor to secondary (right) monitor.  I was able to move them back by deselecting "Expand" in the panel preferences, dragging the panel back to the left monitor and then re-selecting "Expand."
• I was having some issues with Sun Virtualbox (not OSE) where the app would grab the keyboard and not let go.  This let ctrl-alt-del work in the XP environment, but made everything else useless.  I did a full cold boot of Ubuntu and for no discernible reason it works fine now.

For anyone who does any development work for Unix servers, I am beyond praise for Ubuntu/Eclipse.  I have a better development system than I've ever had before with hardly a difference between my desktop and the production server in term of code workings.

Inquisitor Lord Grussom and Retinue

I decided to put a little work in on my Inquisitor Lord's retinue tonight.  I had pretty much abandoned the standard Witch Hunter Inquisitor model after reading Dan Abnett's amazing Eisenhorn trilogy.  He gives so much depth and character to the Inquisition that I wanted a more unique representation.

Inquisitor Lord Grussom is a zealot of the most confrontational variety.  Not one for intrigue, he rushes in to deliver the Emperor's justice with a fearlessness that his colleagues both admire and ridicule.  Since suffering a grievous injury at the hands of a chaos cultist to whom he was in the process of meting out judgement with a hammer, Grussom has donned the Sacred Armor of Hokiprus Goll for battle.  Goll's armor, an ancient suit of golden power armor, was recovered from a ruined shrine world by Grussom after a long search for protection befitting one bringing Terra's light.  No helmet was recovered for Goll's armor, and Grussom's battered visage is a direct result of his face bearing the brunt of his headlong assault against the followers of chaos.

While Grussom's rise through the ranks of the Inquisition has been less than meteoric, many count his chief confidant, Interrogator Atwa Rove, as the guiding hand behind the unswerving force of Grussom and his ascent.  Rove hails from a background where a well placed word and a bullet have equally weighty ends, and guiding the somewhat guile-less Grussom has been a challenge he has enjoyed to no end.  While surely steering Grussom, Rove would balk at the word manipulation.  They are long friends and only Rove's machinations have gotten Grussom the influence that has allowed him to prosecute his mandate with such fervor.

Crusaders Hyrem and Lorem are brothers from a world cut off for six millenia from the Astronomicon by a warp storm.  During that time the world fell on backwards times technologically and adopted heretical practices in their worship of the Emperor.  Upon emergence from the warp storm and repatriation into the Imperium, Hyrem and Lorem were part of a knightly order that assisted in rooting out and destroying the rogue priesthood so that the Emperor's true Ecclesiarchy could take its place again.  Grussom took them on as retinue bodyguards after they achieved a bit of notoriety for these actions, and parades them around endlessly explaining that their home world is an example of what happens when humanity is left to its own devices with no Ordo to guide it.  They wear the armor of their order and weapons retrofitted to be a bit more technologically advanced.

Bound Psyker 2280-12 was assigned to Grussom after Rove kept complaining that he could never get the stink of the warp off his jacket.  No one remembers the poor soul's name, and he keeps surviving encounters with the ruinous powers no matter how often or cavalierly Grussom and Rove throw him between themselves and rogue psykers.  It has become something of a game to see how long he'll live, and they do their best to protect him from the more mundane dangers of bullets and las-shots.

Improve Your Painting for $2

This may seem amazingly obvious, but as a beginning painter I didn't quite grasp it.

You can't paint what you can't see.

To paint with precision, you must be able to see what you are painting and be able to see your brushwork in enough detail to be able to figure out what you want to do and then do it.  I used overhead incandescent lighting for my first seventy five models or so (go Skaven!) but was never able to get them above basic tabletop quality.  "Good from afar, but far from good."

So how does $2 help?  You go to the dollar store and buy yourself a compact fluorescent bulb and a pair of +3.5 reading glasses.  A CF bulb in a goose neck lamp (or ever better, two CF bulbs in two goose neck lamps!) will  give enough light close to the mini to actually see the thing, and CF bulbs have a much better lighting spectrum then incandescent bulbs without getting nearly as hot.  Trying to use incandescent "daylight" bulbs in close quarters can get to be uncomfortably warm.  Use of specialized lights like an Ott light give good results, but the advent of the CF bulb has put them in the "diminishing returns for the price" category.  When painting small details or freehand try the +3.5 reading glasses.  You'll have to experiment with how far to hold the mini from your face, but the amount of magnification this provides is quite adequate for detail work.  Also, the fact that you are looking through two lenses maintain binocular vision, something that has prevented me from effectively using single magnifying glasses in the past.  I just couldn't judge where the brush was in relation to the mini.  All I was getting were up-close-and-personal mistakes!

I've been using bright lights for a while, and only recently got the reading glasses (which I wear right over my regular glasses when painting.)  I did some touch ups on Vayl's body armor using the glasses, and was surprised of the detail I had missed previously.  Not only was I able to see what I had missed along with the less than tidy areas, but I was able to see areas where the color consistency were sorely lacking.  Now I should probably go over all that fiddly armor and highlight the wolf grey with skull white.  That should improve the pop quite a bit.

So try it!  It's only $2 ya cheapskate!

A Productive Night

Jimmy came over last night for our weekly hobby session, and for some reason we were both quite productive.  I mostly finished Vayl, painted that little Cryx cutie in the middle from primer and put the starting basecoats on a mini that I'm painting for Monster Zero of the UnderEmpire.  One of the things I did with Vayl was paint up her little orb-weapon thingy in shades of blue to white, then put a few thin coats of Vallejo Model Color Metal Medium over it.  VMCMM is basically just metal flakes and acrylic medium, so it addes a pearlescent shimmer to things.  I last used it on the Howling Banshees power sword from the diorama I did for competition last year (and my first 8 on coolmini or not!)  also put a little on her headpiece, since I'm not even really sure what it's supposed to be, so why not be shiny too!  My digital camera also appears to have had a conniption over the colors in this picture, since it decided that everything should be a little more blue.

The photo above reminded me of mentioning the table refinishing too.  The pic below is from a couple years ago, and you can see the darker finish of the table.  For some reason the finish was getting more and more sensitive to temperature and moisture, leaving rings when anything came in contact with it that was hot, cold or wet.  Any papers left on the table with the slightest bit of moisture would stick to the point of needing to be peeled off and scraped.  Stef decided enough was enough so she dragged the table out onto the deck and started sanding the finish off, which basically carmelized the varnigh onto the sandpaper.  In the end it took a great deal of turpentine, but we stripped off the gummy old finish and put a few coats of clear, semi-gloss polyurethane.  The results were pleasing.

Vayl, WIP 2

She's gotten more color, and it's a fairly limited palette.  The only paints I used tonight were Wolf Grey and Night Blue (both Vallejo Game Colors.)  There are so many fiddly armor bits on the front that what started out as a careful detailing looked like a drybrush by the time I was done.  I'll have a lot of clean up work to do there.  The feathers got a base of Wolf Grey, then a wash of Asurman Blue, then a drybrush of Wolf Grey again.  I'll probably do a selective drybrush highlight with 50/50 skull white/wolf grey later.

Overall, an interesting model.  I'm not sure I'm doing it justice.  It still feels experimental at this point.

On a home note, my eldest daughter climbed into bed with me and Stef sometime in the night.  As I went to wake her up for school, she stretched luxuriously and knocked a glass of water I had next to the bed right down into my shoes.  Great.  I poured the shoes out and left them by the furnace duct to hopefully dry.