Constantly Risking Obscurity

Q: What Constitutes a Friendly Game?

2009-11-09T18:30:00.003-05:00

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

2009-11-09T07:07:00.004-05:00

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

2009-11-06T15:10:00.001-05:00

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

2009-11-04T14:13:00.001-05:00

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

2009-11-03T00:57:00.003-05:00

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

2009-10-29T17:39:00.010-04:00

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

2009-10-23T07:39:00.001-04:00

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

2009-10-22T00:45:00.000-04:00

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.

Radio Quote of the Day

2009-10-21T16:16:00.004-04:00

From the Michigan Radio pledge drive this morning...

"Most of our funding comes from viewers like you.... 40%!"

eBay, We Need To Talk

2009-10-20T09:09:00.002-04:00

...and you may want to sit down.

I'm really sick of eBay. I'm sick of them charging me >10% of item price in fees. I'm tired of them raising prices and then telling me that it's a fee decrease (what is commonly referred to as eBay Math) and I am tired of their heavy handed way of dealing with any issue I have as a seller. I'm done with eBay. Period. I know others are too.

As a result, I have a pressing question for the wargaming community...

Do you look anywhere other than eBay for auctions?

I can search and find various other auction sites with various levels of wargaming product, but I really want to know where you folks actually shop. I should mention that what I've been selling on eBay are minis painted to high quality, but I'm interested in any info you can provide whether is pertains to that or not.

Let me know. Thanks!
...and, um, eBay? Your stuff is out on the curb.

Vayl ... why blue skin again?

2009-10-19T00:51:00.002-04:00

I started working on Hordes Warlock "Vayl, Disciple of Everblight" recently. For no reason I can fathom I just started painting her skin blue. I put a little work in on face and torso, but the hands are still atrocious.

I dunno.... does the blue work? Will she look redonkulous next to a Carnivean?

Also, I have the framework done for a plain, blue box, and the aspect ratios look correct. Maybe getting ready to paint a box blue carried over into other minis.

You Had Me At "Kill-Kill"

2009-10-16T12:19:00.002-04:00

Oh, my wonderful rats. Skaven is the first army I picked when I started this whole crazy thing back in aught-four. And now (sniff) I can't say I've ever been happier. Goodbye clanrats that look like monkeys. Goodbye struggling to rank up models with huge tails. Hello to a plastic Screaming Bell with a Rat Ogre ringer!

What I really want to know is will there be a spearhead? Other armies have gotten one lately, and I'd love to get all these new models (and the book) in one big box. Even without a spearhead we really need a new battalion box, since the old one has the old clanrats in it.

Games Workshop has been right on target lately. Between the Space Wolves (which even I, an admitted Space Wolf scoffer, think are cool) to those amazing Space Hulk models, to a host of ForgeWorld type models done in plastic, it just seems that everything they are doing is not just good but, in the vernacular, real good.

Five Days with Evony

2009-10-16T10:58:00.002-04:00

So the five days of Evony have concluded for this week's Friday Challenge. All in all the game is somewhat fun, but those ads. Sheesh. And in case you aren't familiar with the game, you get 7 days of protection from attack. The alliances that declare war on you can't touch you until your eigth day.

Play Now, My Lord!

2009-10-14T15:58:00.001-04:00

I know... I can't believe it either. I'm playing Evony. A bunch of my coworkers started playing it, and I'm in too now. It's a "fire and forget" strategy game where things happen whether you are online to micromanage or not. That makes a little tweaking every few hours enough to play.

You have probably seen the ads for Evony, with this example being the most tame of them. I loved what Popcap did on this parody ad for Plants vs. Zombies (which is the best game I've played this year, easily.)

So here's the deal: come play Evony with us. Join up on server 87, teleport to "Bohemia" (you'll start with a city teleporter) and join the alliance "UDIE". It's fun and a bit addictive.

A Mystery No Longer!

2009-10-12T14:49:00.001-04:00

Thanks to IbnIblis for identifying the mystery elf as Ral Partha mini "Elf Blade Maiden Mistress."

And now, I shall paint her!

Biscuity Endeavors

2009-10-12T10:56:00.002-04:00

I have been on a quest to make decent biscuits for a while now. Not perfect ones, just decent ones. Until this weekend the best I could do was sort of Bisquicky dry lumpy things. I tried drop biscuits, rolled biscuits, multiple thin layers (hey it works for paint) and nothing ever came out the way I had envisioned.

Then along came Alton Brown.

On Thursday his show "Good Eats" was all about biscuits. By Saturday morning I was making biscuits that were decent. By Sunday night they were exactly what I had envisioned. The secret is all in the wheat. I kid you not. If you don't have time to watch the video of the entire biscuit episode from the link above, just do this:

2 C winter wheat flour (or 1.5 C all purpose and .5 C cake flour)
1/2 tsp salt
4 tsp baking powder
1/4 tsp baking soda
1/2 C shortening
1 C buttermilk

Mix dry ingredients. Cut in shortening until about pea sized lumps remain. Mix in buttermilk until you have a sticky dough ball. Dump ball onto floured surface and press out with hands until it's about an inch thick. Cut 2" biscuits and bake in a 475-500 degree oven for 10-12 minutes.

The Ultimate Showdown

2009-10-08T10:30:00.003-04:00

Tonight's concerts in Southeast Michigan:

Jonathan Coulton in Ann Arbor
They Might Be Giants in Detroit

What's a nerd to do?

Oh, and I may have just found my favorite tshirt ever.

Don't Even Ask

2009-10-05T09:18:00.008-04:00

Because, seriously, what more could possibly be said?

Nurgle Monstrosity - Completed!

2009-10-02T16:39:00.003-04:00

Last night Jimmy came over and retrieved his completed Nurgle Dreadnought. The thing is almost as big as a Land Raider. I gave it a decent paint job, but as I was doing it just as a favor I didn't put more than about 20 hours into it. And there is a lot of model there to paint. Since this is a gaming piece there's plenty of gloss varnish on the sticky bits. I don't like the way gloss varnish photographs but I do like the look of it on the table.

For complete pictures, check out my project blog: The Nurgle Monstrosity

Space Hulk meets Nurgle

2009-10-01T11:00:00.004-04:00

Okay, not exactly. We've been sick at my house, first my wife and then me. The kids seem unscathed so far, but the taint of Papa Nurgle has definitely been upon us. I don't know if it was H1N1 or not, but we had all the symptoms and were both down hard for days.

At the point where I was finally able to stay up past the kids' bedtime, my wife and I played our first game of Space Hulk. Despite my previous rage against limited edition games, I broke down and bought one rather than risk never being able to get one except at greatly inflated eBay cost. If GW releases this game in an unlimited edition format you can bet that they will never be able to pull the "limited edition" stunt again. That trick works exactly once.

Neither Stef nor I had ever played SH before, but the rules were fairly straightforward. We played mission 1, and Stef's genestealers uttlerly destroyed my marines. In retrospect I should have been more aggressive about moving toward the objective. I was playing a very defensive game based mainly on my experience with the Space Hulk computer game. Overwatch is essential to the computer version since everything is moving so fast. With the new command points system and only five marines to worry about I could have played the entire game without overwatch and done better. Most overwatch action points were wasted. I also need to remember how well the heavy flamer template blocks movement for future games. All in all the entire game took about 45 minutes, including a number of rule lookups. The next run should be quicker, and hopefully the larger missions won't require a lot of reference.

And in case you've been living under a rock, the minis for this game are chicken fried awesome.

Adeptus Comicus

2009-09-24T21:27:00.004-04:00

This little bit of silliness came about after I build my first drop pod and wondered how a dreadnought would be loaded on one. The troop carrying guts of the thing seem too integrated into the structure to be easily converted.

Anyway, the idea of how dreads might actually use a drop pod gave me a tickle, so I'm sharing the initial pencil with you. I plan on cleaning it up and inking it now that it's digital.

In case you can't read my chicken scratching, here's the script.

Technician: Brother Awesomenus is scheduled for drop assault but our last drop pod has troop restraints installed.

Brother Awesomenus: Fear not, brothers. I shall go into battle in the manner of our ancient forefathers.

Yes, I realize I wrote "manor" instead of "manner." Deal. Also, I have no real concept of whether an ancient Space Marine Dreadnought would call an Adeptus Mechanicus tech "brother." Same response... deal. I liked the dread calming the fretting tech with his kind words of wisdom. So there ya have it.

Can you ID the Mystery Elf?

2009-09-22T20:56:00.002-04:00

My wife bought this for me at a garage sale a few years ago. I have not been able to identify it yet. I thought she might be a witch elf or Drow, but all my searching has not turned up an answer.

Clues:

Cut marks on the bottom of the feet are consistant with a GW "slotta" base.
She does not appear to be made of lead

Any ideas?

A Day in the Life

2009-09-22T15:54:00.002-04:00

This will be edited all day. Feel free to live vicariously.

7:22 AM: woke up. realized I had turned alarm off. freaked out getting kids up for school
8:13 AM: dropped kids off at school without breakfast. MEAP is today.
8:28 AM: call from Stef to see if I'm okay, since I was so freaked out getting the kids to school
8:37 AM: determined perl daemon process I started last night is still running. so far so good.
9:05 AM: dumped about 20 lbs of recycling off my trash-hole desk
9:22 AM: call from 800 number at desk phone. didn't answer
9:37 AM: off for my third cup of coffee. is it time to go home yet?
9:45 AM: minor panic attack thinking about the fact that the code we are just about to move to production works in Zimbra 5 but not Zimbra 6. Our hosting provider for Zimbra is planning on upgrading from 5 to 6 in about 4-6 weeks, giving us a narrow window to come up with something new. Current project took about 4 months to complete.
9:52 AM: taking a minute while Ann Marie gets her code moved to a test server to refine repackager process for EMU Today. Just prettying up the presentation a little.
9:57 AM: putting on my magnificent "bose triport" headphones to listen to Abbey Road again. This makes about 100 times in the past three weeks.
11:09 AM: Apparently Ann Marie and I have been working on a different schema assumption (mostly because I didn't change the table creates in the svn repository) so we're getting that ironed out. hooray for unit tests.
11:16 AM: Whoops. killed my daemon by dropping the primary event table. I need to change the query code to try and autorecover from a db connection error rather than just die.
12:05 PM: Walked up to the student center. The mural of pandas on the wall where "Panda Express" chinese take-out used to be is odd.
1:20 PM: Fifth cup of coffee. EMU Today harvester is done and on beta tab. Next stop, public beta opt-in.
3:50 PM: Our little cabal of technocracy has decided that our vendor is insane, and we've decided to do the work ourselves. It will be a metric crap-ton of extra work, but the OT won't be half bad and the result will be a system that we can use in a timely manner for a lot less money. Also, cup #6 of coffee is cold and nearly empty. I guess "cup" isn't really the correct term. It's a travel mug that holds about two mugs worth of coffee. Does that make this cup 12? Just finished listening to the Beatles rooftop concert on youtube.
4:22 PM: Back to trying to get what I was working on before the 2:30 meeting going.... can't seem to get the channel app to read the ldap attributes passed to it. There are other working channels here that do it, so I must have a configuration option wrong. Rule One of Life: if it doesn't work it's probably not someone else's fault.

My New Best Friends

2009-09-21T11:19:00.002-04:00

It's been a long time since I've worked in any industrial settings. Back in those days I used to carry around things like safety glasses and earplugs all the time, since I regularly needed them.

This weekend, I came to love earplugs again.

I've been having trouble hearing people lately. It just seems like select people are mumbling most of the time. Asking them to speak louder doesn't help me, since loud doesn't seem to equate to clear. As we packed the family into the car Saturday morning to head to a nephew's birthday party I grabbed (on a whim) a pair of earplugs from my travel kit. I had a bit of a headache and the kids were pretty riled up so I was already expecting a loud ride. Add to that Stef's recent fondness of playing books-on-tape type stories for the kids in the car using her little speaker she bought and the earplugs seem more and more attractive.

What I didn't expect is that they would help me hear better. With the road noise and most of the incidental passenger sounds pushed down, I was actually able to hear and understand voices better. In Manchester, MI later that day I was able to understand the announcer with the bullhorn just fine with the earplugs in. Without them her voice was just an incomprehensible buzz/echo.

The only downside is that people think I'm avoiding listening to them when I wear the earplugs, an irony I'd say since wearing them results in me understanding more. I think wearing earplugs is less detached looking than wearing headphones, since headphones always give the impression that you are listening to something else, whereas earplugs mean you are just listening to less.

One in a Million Rolls

2009-09-14T09:30:00.008-04:00

I have never seen this happen. Ever. Well, I have now and I don't suppose I will again. We're still not sure how it happened. Inspection of the table afterward showed nothing that would have obviously caused it.

Here's the same roll from another angle. After gawking at it for a while, manager Brett came over and bumped the table edge so it fell on its side. What was the end roll? A one. On a roll to wound. I asserted it should be a rending wound for being so unusual, but since I wasn't playing nobody cared what I had to say. ;-)

Saturday I actually played a game at the Paint Creek Crossing GW store. I had intended to participate in the Headhunters event, but instead of running at 1 PM and 4 PM apparently they only had one run at 2 PM. Oh, well. I still got a 2k pick-up game in with my Skaven. My opponent refused to play anything less than 2k and I found out why... he had a Vampire Lord on a dragon that constituted about 1/3 of his points. I shot the thing like crazy but couldn't seem to do any damage to it, not even with two characters blasting warp lightning and 8 jezzails. My opponent didn't really know the rules very well, so I was just sort of letting him call the shots; I hadn't played in over two years, and I was just looking to have fun. I wasn't really doing him any favors I know, but I didn't really feel like arguing. Another fellow who wasw willing to point out rules saddled up to the table and started pointing out errors, but soon after that my opponent ran out of time and had to leave. Having gotten a taste of playing again I think I will be back. My ten year old daughter came with me and enjoyed it, so I'm hoping this will be the start of her gaming experience.