Slapping on the first paint...

Just Skeleton Bone primer and one coat of Greedy Gold
so far...

Two things I need to consider for next time:

• Using gold spray for undercoat rather than painting it on over another undercoat - especially if I'm to have kids doing this. (or silver for Necrons, green for orcs, etc)
• Using my desk and desk-light rather than my (admittedly larger) dining table with overhead light. Couldn't see too well.

I'm planning to follow the Warhammer Facebook channel's procedure, at least so far as I can with basic Army Painter colors. I've got their Speedpaints for the non-metallics and am looking forward to trying them, but those to be used in any library program will be Citadel Base paints. Shouldn't look too different in the end, though.

AOS construction

Obtained some glue, brushes, and more paint, so ready to build and undercoat the Storm of Sigmar set.

Building the AOS minis was messier than I remembered. Construction has always been my favorite part of the "hobby," but Games Workshop has sharply reduced the customizability of their models. These are monopose, so it took a little work to make sure they were assembled correctly. They are also designed in such a way that you almost have to puzzle them together - for example one of these figures has the back and one leg matching up with the other leg and one arm!

Next step is basecoating (with Army Painter Skeleton spray), but I've just remembered my bottle of regular Skeleton-colored paint is at work, so won't be able to touch up right away. It's dark out anyway...

More Deliveries

Life is still crazy, and I will be taking a break this week for self-care. Which may or may not include some gaming stuff for relaxation; as you're about to see, it will require further purchases.

I picked up the 1st edition Warhammer: Age of Sigmar box.

It was actually cheaper than the original price, and came with free shipping, so I jumped on it.

To my surprise, however - having bought the similarly-sized 40K starter that came out about the same time - it did not contain push-fit figures, nor "one-rule-at-a-time" scenarios, nor painting tips. It'll be a bit more work.

I haven't built anything plastic that wasn't push-fit in years. That's kinda the point of the Wofun Paperboys, after all.

I only cut out one before realizing I'd need
to sort them...

The rest of the contents.

The rulebook is not as beginner-friendly as the 40K starter; it contains the full rules of the game as they were at the time, and the included scenarios do not take you "step-by-step." Probably no point, as none of the included figures have shooting weapons or magic; simple heroic abilities are provided for commander figures. The scenarios do start out with smaller units and simple objectives, and are on larger tables than the 22x22inch paper "boards" provided these days. They are progressive, so that by the end you are using all four units, and a simple campaign bonus is included - if one side wins a Major Victory, they roll on a bonus table and may use that bonus once during the next game.

My next purchase from my Friendly Local Game Store (I recently discovered one about six miles from work) will be plastic glue, and some paint - most likely Army Painter, as I am assured they are of similar quality to Citadel but half the price. I am tempted by their version of Contrast, but the (excellent) painting guide I've found online specifically for these figures is pre-Contrast - the usual base-shade-highlight combo.

Colors required:

Khornate Chaos

• Black
• Brass
• Red
• Skin

Stormcast Eternals

• Blue
• Gold
• White

Both

• Tan undercoat spray (which I need for the Warhammer Alliance stuff anyway)
• Metal
• Brown
• Pink

My other delivery was my long-awaited copy of X-treme Dungeon Mastery, second edition, which finished its Kickstarter shortly after I started this blog. 

Though I've had the e-book and e-audio version for a while now, my hard copy and custom character drawing by Schlock Mercenary cartoonist Howard Tayler was in the very last shipment - probably because my character request was more complex than most:

What I was hoping for was a city-guard recruiting poster for my "Queen's Own Troubleshooters" campaign at work. Not a bad result. This will go inside the cover of my campaign binder - if I ever get the campaign back off the ground, which at present doesn't look likely anytime soon.

Finally, Lexi got another couple boxes to play with:

At least someone's happy!

Brilliant!

[Owing to several copies and pastes from OpenAI to Discord and back, the mix of fonts in here is a bit crazy. Hope it's still readable.]

Michael Raston at the Lizardman Diaries blog has just written about using AI text and image generators to create characters for RPGs and online wargames.

I had no idea this was a thing. But this is a thing. And it's pretty awesome.

Two of my experiments, as run thru https://chat.openai.com/chat:

Prompt: Background and physical description of a hardbitten halfling adventurer. [Inspired by Tolkien's initial inspiration for what became Strider.]

The halfling adventurer in question is known as Jack "the Stalwart" Hammerfoot. Jack is a veteran adventurer, having spent decades exploring the world and facing all manner of dangers. Despite his small stature, Jack is known for his bravery, his strength, and his unyielding determination.

Physically, Jack is a typical halfling, standing only three feet tall. However, he is more heavily muscled than most halflings, with broad shoulders and powerful arms. His face is rugged and weathered, with a thick beard and piercing blue eyes. He wears his hair in a thick braid, which reaches down to the small of his back.

Jack is usually seen wearing a suit of battered plate armor, which he has customized over the years with various spikes and studs. He carries a massive warhammer at his side, which he has named "Thunderstrike". The warhammer is almost as tall as Jack himself, and he wields it with devastating force.

Jack has a reputation for being hardbitten and tough as nails. He has survived numerous battles and close calls, and has the scars to prove it. He speaks in a gruff, no-nonsense voice, and is not afraid to speak his mind or stand up for what he believes in.

Despite his tough exterior, Jack has a soft spot for the downtrodden and the oppressed. He has been known to take on quests and missions that others would consider too risky or too thankless, simply because he believes it is the right thing to do. He also has a love of good food and drink, and is always willing to share a meal and a mug of ale with his fellow adventurers.

Jack is a living legend in the world of adventurers, and his name is known far and wide. He has faced dragons, demons, and other fearsome creatures, and has emerged victorious every time. He is respected and admired by those who know him, and feared by those who would dare to cross him.

A little too heroic for my taste as a player-character, but might make a good NPC (and surprisingly dangerous opponent for a party). Also described a bit too much like a dwarf. (Halflings generally don't have beards.) Perhaps he has dwarf blood, which accounts for his unusual demeanor and strength?

Picture from Midjourney

The AI-generated pic of him is hilarious. Entirely dwarf (except the ears) with no armor or warhammer, but definitely rugged and, for some reason, illustrated by Disney. Reminds me a bit of Asterix, in fact. He definitely looks ready for a classic "you all meet in a bar(fight)" DnD encounter!

Prompt: Description of a band of toy soldiers lost in the sandbox. [Inspired by The Twelves.]

The band of toy soldiers in question are a motley crew of plastic figures, lost in the vast expanse of a child's sandbox. They are a diverse group, with soldiers representing different branches of the military, from the army to the navy to the air force.

Physically, the toy soldiers are all roughly the same size, standing at about two inches tall. They are made of brightly colored plastic, with intricate details on their uniforms and equipment. Some are equipped with rifles or pistols, while others carry binoculars or radio equipment.

Despite their small size, the toy soldiers are fiercely determined to survive in their new environment. They have formed a tight-knit community within the sandbox, with each soldier taking on a specific role and responsibility. Some soldiers are tasked with scouting the perimeter of the sandbox for potential dangers, while others work to fortify their position with makeshift barriers and defenses.

The toy soldiers are resourceful and creative, using whatever materials they can find within the sandbox to fashion new equipment and tools. They have built rafts out of twigs and leaves to navigate the sandbox's "ocean", and have constructed rudimentary bridges and tunnels to move between different areas.

However, the toy soldiers face numerous challenges in their new environment. They are constantly at risk from the elements, with sandstorms and rainstorms posing a constant threat. They must also contend with other creatures that inhabit the sandbox, from ants to spiders to the occasional curious cat.

Despite these challenges, the toy soldiers remain determined to survive and thrive in their new home. They have formed a strong bond with one another, and have developed a fierce loyalty to their community. They know that their survival depends on their ability to work together and support one another, and they will do whatever it takes to protect their fellow soldiers and preserve their way of life in the sandbox.

Pretty basic and expected, except for the ocean. Any puddle would dry up in short order, right? I love the touch of the "occasional curious cat."

Four choices. A little too busy.

Just for fun, "Children's book illustration of The Biplane Evermore, an anthropomorphic De Havilland Tiger Moth."

I got biplanes all right, but with tiger stripes. And two of them with cute animal pilots instead of faces. The lower right one might work for what I had in mind, but isn't expressive enough for purposes of the song.

I've always wanted to do my own illustrations for that song, a family favorite that my brother and sister refused to sleep without my singing it to them. Another is The Beaches of St. Valery, a stone-cold classic by the late Davy Steele.

"So I huddled all night, in a hammered old house,
While the shells and the bullets rained down."

And it just occurred to me:

I can't cartoon, but if I could use this to get something close to what I want, and sketch it...

Dang. This has possibilities!

Another delivery

Ordered a handful of gaming tools and bits from Games Workshop, and received them remarkably quickly for the free shipping (I was quoted nine business days, got it in three).

• Some 25mm bases for the Ork Boyz I've been sorting.

• A drill to help assemble the metal Ork Nobs. I've never needed to pin a mini before, but superglue isn't working this time. The tool doesn't come with instructions, so I'll need to find some and learn to use it properly. Probably also need a vise.

• A painting handle. Might seem superfluous, but I've watched it in action on Youtube for a while now, and I understand the appeal. Looking forward to trying it.

• A painting-water cup. I threw it in mostly to get to the point of free shipping, but it's got a couple of handy features. Scores in the inner face to keep your brush pointy, and a curious "lip" that can hold a brush or two out of the cup (all those reminders of not leaving them in the water or smushed against the bottom!).

• And a free book - a sampler of five short stories from the latest series. A fine taster for the Warhammer worlds - when I finish it I might try passing it around the teens at work.

More Rocky Hills

My missing package of rocky hills turned up, two weeks late. Wonder where they were; maybe in the back of a warm truck or something, since two of the pieces were stuck together and "popped" apart, losing paint in the process.

This is more jagged and "realistic" terrain compared to the first, very rectangular batch.

There are five larger, flat-topped, angular pieces, and ten smaller, "messier" rubble pieces.

The larger pieces have some jutting bits on top marring the total flatness. While a nice, realistic touch, it makes them harder to stack. But generally all that will fit on them are the rubble pieces anyway.

I like the rubble - the smaller pieces will make good cover anywhere on a table, even for my 18mms. They are heavier than the hills, or at any rate rattle satisfyingly when they hit the table - I think actual rocks were used in their construction, not just foam.

Here's the damaged parts - quite minor:

I'm open to suggestions about repair. At this point I'm thinking of trying a textured "basing" paint from Citadel. A thin layer might obscure the pink without rising above the surrounding rock, and if so, look like a proper chip in the stone. Or perhaps just plain black or dark grey, with sharp highlighting like that visible elsewhere on the pieces.

Had a bad day, but this little thing makes me feel that little bit better. Thanks for reading.

Civil Wars

More reading - two histories and a ruleset. I was hoping to go to a "MicroCon" that the club was running this weekend, but schedules and other commitments conspired to stop me at the last moment. So I'm even more P'O'd at present. My dad has offered to help me move to a larger apartment, and a game room of my own is tempting, but my job is difficult enough right now that I'm not sure it's worth the effort.

"...Afghans proudly thought of
their land as Yaghistan -- 
the land of rebellion."

It repeats in greater detail some of the character descriptions and events of Peter Hopkirk's The Great Game. While it is more focused on Shah Shuja's story, it also details the Western intrigue that both helped and hindered him in his ambitions. The British prejudice (not in a racial sense) of the situation led them to support Shuja, who had been defeated already four times trying to regain his throne, rather than Dost Muhammad who held a much more commanding position. Their fear of Russian expansion in fact led the (previously disinterested) Russians to court Persia.

Worse were the British efforts to control Shuja and his government in order to prop him up. There are Catch-22 parallels here with South Vietnam; on the one hand, Shuja could not survive without British support - on the other, that very fact made him anathema and increased the interest in bringing him down. If all that your allies can do to help you is to literally take over and set you aside, what is the use of them? Like the presidents of South Vietnam, it was a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't position - and the US had the same problem in Afghanistan in the 2010s. They could raise a new, more effective and conventional Afghan military - but that in itself repulsed the more traditional population and made them more likely to resist the obvious usurpers. As in Vietnam, they could only be sure of the cities (barely even those) and whatever areas they controlled directly - the rest was a sea of dissent. The country was too poor to support itself, so millions of foreign aid were poured in to little effect. The parallels with 2001-2021 are starkly laid out - and a bit terrifying.

Hilariously, Shah Shuja, who the British had been undermining and ignoring ever since they arrived in Kabul, was the first and only man to respond quickly when the rebellion started. Yet, without control of his own government or army, he could do nothing. His most loyal followers, when they saw the tepid British response, practically had no choice but to go over to the rebels. The political and military leaders failed to respond to the uprising when it happened, and were practically quiescent throughout until the retreat. This only encouraged the Afghans, who noticed quickly that the soldiers were even forbidden by their own officers to fire on robbers in the streets. They lost the moral high ground when the political officer, MacNaghten, was murdered while trying to double-cross the Afghan leaders, who declared Jihad.

And then they marched out of the cantonments towards the high passes, despite all the warnings of the few friends they had left (including Shah Shuja himself, who despite their condescension still considered himself their ally). Shuja held out in the Bala Hisar fortress nearby, and would continue to do so for a year. The best the British could have done was to retreat to it, but it's obvious their leaders just wanted any excuse to go home - even if that meant abandoning virtually all their followers in the process.

As pointed out by the author and one of the more pragmatic survivors, there was betrayal in this, but also breathtaking stupidity. I am inclined to go back and read the first Flashman novel, now I've gotten the full details.

A fine sample of the farcical reasoning behind much of the fighting: Governor Ellenborough read a (fictional) report that the gates of Ghazni had been stolen from an Indian temple, so as revenge, he ordered them brought back to India in triumph to avenge this "insult". The officers who took the gates recognized the evidence of their original Islamic construction, and neither the Afghans nor the Hindustanis cared. A cutting quote:

"As the saying goes, real power does not need tawdry propaganda! A more lasting monument until today is the quantity of rotting corpses of the English troops that still block the highways..."

Dalrymple uses contemporary Afghan historians and epic narrative poetry to characterize how the Afghans felt about what was going on, using the latter frequently in place of a conventional narrative. Many of these writings, available for the first time in English, were published in the 1850s in India, possibly to incite the Mutiny (which, the author pointedly notes, first broke out among regiments whose officers had abandoned them during the disastrous retreat). Almost like fiction, it brings out the atmosphere of the place and time. Characterful sketches and paintings of the principal characters are included as well.

Compares and contrasts the lives and combat experience of William Oates of the 15th Alabama, and Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain of the 20th Maine. I had not considered Oates before, but he wrote just as well as Chamberlain despite a more desultory education. His early life was in the Wild West, but since this is antebellum, that means what is now the Deep South, and Texas, all of which were much more frontierish in the 1840s and '50s. A generation later and with different luck, Oates might have become a gunfighter. But despite his scrappy history, he worked his way up and, like Chamberlain, became a teacher.

Chamberlain, points out the author, did not have quite the heroic upbringing that hagiographers have ascribed to him. His father went bankrupt a couple times, and Chamberlain himself struggled against stuttering all his life. Though a brilliant junior professor at Bowdoin, he felt compelled to join the Army, going so far as to find a pretext - leave to study in Britain - to get away with it, and his coworkers were surprised and disgruntled. His feeling towards the war was more idealistic - Harriet Beecher Stowe was a neighbor, and Jeff Davis spoke at Bowdoin before the war.

The narrative here is fairly bare-bones, even in the combat writing, and the few maps are not of much use. But then, the book is less a military history and more an exploration of character. Chamberlain's relationship with his independent-minded wife was particularly fraught - she was uninterested in being the First Lady of Maine, for example, and lost three children in infancy. While Oates, curiously enough, was one of the few Confederates who urged his government to arm slaves and offer them freedom to join the beleaguered rebel army, which like the more famous Patrick Cleburne retarded his career. This is the same man who defended one of his veterans from a charge of murdering a black man. Basically, both men were ambitious to the point of being willing to put other considerations aside - Chamberlain his wife's needs, Oates his distaste for the KKK and other overt signs of white supremacy. Both initially moderate in their views, they ended up on directly opposite sides of the aisle politically, because Chamberlain, to keep his office, leaned into the Radical Republican agenda which otherwise was not his style.

So while they were both successful, there was also a sort of unrecognized tragedy in their lives.

I haven't finished this one yet, but it's increasingly depressing. Chamberlain had a couple minor scandals in his leadership both of the state and Bowdoin, and as his career wound down, Oates' burst into flower. He went to Congress (in the process marrying a woman who had been born into the house where he recovered from wounds while he was staying there) by building and leading the Democratic political machine, grinding down the black man to do it, and learning to filibuster.

A smaller and shorter ruleset than I expected. I'm interested in the premise, but so far as I can tell, most of the available volumes are more pictures than "fluff." I'm torn between:

• using my SCW-ish figures on a small scale (changing inches for centimeters), which would allow me to use full-sized platoons and a few light vehicles on my small tables.
• or using some of my 54mms. Like the SCW, none of these are really for the period, but WWI Scots and Western Desert British will work, while Germans can be Fascist foreign legion and Japanese could suggest skirmishes in "the far pavilions". On my tables I'd only really be able to have ten men a side.

There is no fluff at all in the rules here, not even army lists. (A generic recommendation of a command section, three ten-man squads, and optional vehicles and a "special" squad is provided.) Clearly players are expected to add flavor themselves. Gradations of experience help here. Royalist regulars would be better trained, while the socialists of Manchester would be poorly equipped but have greater swings in morale.

The rules themselves are not that complex, but there are a lot of variables to keep track of. This is part and parcel of having a Spanish-Civil-War-esque feel, where the training, equipment and origin of troops must widely vary. Vehicles are the same way, as they can be commandeered civilian, hastily-militarized, or proper armoured cars and tanks (in varying types and with varying armament). Thankfully the damage chart is the same for all, albeit with modified rolls for different types. For less than 25 pages, this is pretty packed. I will need a Quick Reference Sheet, for sure.

The only portion that contains the atmosphere of the "period" in play is a list of Random Event cards on the back cover. Suggestions like "Bike has a flat tyre or phone lines cut - one unit out of communications", "Nice weather for ducks - a downpour reduces shooting range by 6", or "Ha ha, they forgot to fill it up - an enemy vehicle runs out of fuel and may not move." Except for the front cover and a cheerful man with colorful scarf, pipe and teacup (who seems to be the rules' mascot), the only illustrations are color photos of minis.

Overall, though, I am quite interested in the game and the theme. I think my next purchase will be the Concise Sourcebook, but it's clearly possible to play without it to begin with. I have the feeling Spanish Civil War rules can work in a pinch as well, as there is clearly that same heterogenous mix of political and religious views bouncing off each other - a little more chaotic than Spain, even.