Dark Fable Egyptian Mummies (and Lady-Friends)

As promised, here are some quick snapshots of the Egyptian figures I painted this weekend:

Realizations and Working Hard at the Painting Table

In the past few weeks, as the weather's warmed up to the point where I can prime figures outside again, I've begun painting again, only to come up against a rather ugly realization.

I have lost the patience required to paint whole units of 28mm figures.  I used to be able to do big blocks of Games Workshop Orcs and Skeletons without batting an eye (granted, the skeletons were sprayed black and drybrushed ivory, but still), and now...

I went through a huge struggle just to work up the motivation to paint eight Greek Hoplites.  They're not finished.  I'm not sure they will be.  Right now they're sitting in a little plastic container, mocking me.  Sitting down and doing nigh-identical figures over and over again...I'm not sure I can do it any more.  Even working in nice stages of, "OK, armor's done, next round, cloth, then a round of leather bits" is proving deeply discouraging for me.

On the other hand, I'm having no trouble painting characterful figures, especially, um, characters!

If you'll recall back in December I posted about backing Dark Fable's Egyptians on Kickstarter.  I got my two packs a month or two back, and over the last couple days I've gotten them painted, and it was very relaxing and enjoyable to do so - I'll post some pictures as soon as I varnish them.

Having five figures at a time that have a theme, but aren't the same guy over and over again, seems to have worked very well for me.  As such, I've ordered a couple packs from Pulp Figures to keep me busy for the next couple weeks - I love Bob Murch's big, chunky, richly detailed and lively sculpts and I love 1930s Pulp...anything, really.  Most of my reading lately has been pulpish stuff, and in August Gina and I will be attending Pulpfest in Columbus, Ohio for a long weekend getaway - and hitting a couple geology museums, hiking trails and a large conservatory with attached butterfly conservatorium along the way.

Gina's actually been razzing me about my order from Pulp Figures today - I bought them in part because this weekend is Spin-Off, a twice-a-year uber-sale her local yarn and fiber store holds and in the past she's bought hundreds of dollars worth of high-end yarn and knitting supplies during Spin-Off Weekend, and whenever she gets in a consumerist mood it invariably infects me as well.  Naturally, since I preemptively ordered two packs of toy soldiers, she hasn't bought anything at Spin-Off yet, and is actually not sure if she'll get anything - she's reading a book about decluttering one's life and the value of minimizing one's possessions to just things you truly love and which bring you great joy in life, and getting herself a little freaked out that she's burying herself in a mountain of possessions that she's not in love with.

I'd mentioned to her mid-week last week that I wasn't sure about ordering from Pulp Figures, because there weren't really any packs available that I really looked at and said, "I HAVE to have that."  Instead it was a lot of packs that garnered a response of, "Well, that'd probably be fun to paint," and she used that to try and discourage me from spending the money - or spending it elsewhere on figures that I HAD to have.  But throughout the week I discovered that there were several packs that I just kept going to the website and looking at, and I finally broke down last night and ordered two of them.  So pretty soon I should be getting a pack of Canadian Mounties and a pack of American Rocketeers - I'm not sure why the Mounties resonated so strongly with me, a non-Canadian, but the Rocketeer figures are modeled on The Rocketeer, which was one of my favorite movies as a kid and I fell even more in love with the character a few years ago when the comics got reprinted.  So the opportunity for five Rocketeers...

And yeah, I know, irony of ironies - I struggle painting eight Greek soldiers but two sets of five guys in matching uniforms is okay.  Go figure.

Mini Painters' Corollaries to Murphy's Law

Today I finally had the time and the climate to lay down a coat of primer and begin painting a set of eight Spartan Hoplites I'd assembled months ago, before the arctic came to visit for six months.  And I began to remember some things about miniature painting...

1. There will always be one color that you just can't get good coverage with...until you accidentally get some on part of the figure you didn't want it on.
2. There will always be a piece of flash that's invisible until you prime...then it's enormous.  
3. A hair will inevitably fall on to wet paint.  Even if you're entirely bald, a hair will materialize from somewhere.  

Anyone else have any good ones?

Interlude: Convention Gaming, "Dead Light"

This past weekend was my home gaming convention, Running GAGG - put on by the Geneseo Area Gaming Group of SUNY Geneseo, my alma mater.  This year was the 19th annual Running GAGG, and I've attended almost every one since the 10th - I missed last year because I was moving my girlfriend from Maryland to New York that weekend, and I think I missed the 14th or 15th as well, but other than that I've hit every one, usually running at least one session of Call of Cthulhu.

Between work and some family stuff, I was only able to be at the convention on Friday night this year, and I'd decided to run the first 7th Edition CofC module released, "Dead Light," a survival-horror scenario taking place over the course of a single stormy night on the road between Arkham and...I think the module has it as Ipswitch, I might have done Aylesbury because I read over the module a time or two before running and then pretty much ran it from memory with a heavy mix of making it up as I went along.

I had five players, at least three of whom I'd run for at past Running GAGGs -- I'm not sure if Mike had played in my games before, but I knew the two Daves and Ben had both played in my con-games in the past.  Everyone was familiar with the game from 6th edition, and I walked them through character creation under the new 7th edition rules.  Our investigative party ended up consisting of:

A Speakeasy Owner (Ben)
A Bootlegger (Dave)
A Photographer (Dave)
A Jazz Musician (Mike)
A Chauffeur (George)

On a stormswept night in late April, on the road from Arkham to Aylesbury, the party had to quickly slam on the brakes to avoid running over a pale, half-dressed young woman who stumbles into the road.  She's barely responsive except to mumble "the light," and "Granddad" over and over.  Recalling a diner and gas station up the road, they take her there to try and find out who she is and to get her a doctor.  One of them notices a flicker of silvery light, like the after-image of a lightning strike, out of the corner of their eye, but when they turn their head, see nothing.

The gas station is half-blocked by a still-running pick-up truck, its door hanging open.  Inside, they meet a grouchy, half-drunk farmer whose truck it is, and he mutters something about "you'd be in a hurry too if you saw the light."  He's resistant to saying anything more.

As for the girl, they find out she's Emilia Webb, the granddaughter of a retired local physician, Dr. Cornelius Webb.  She lives with him at his cottage up the road.  Forcing a little bit of whiskey and then coffee past her lips, they manage to revive her enough that she can tell of a break-in at her grandfather's house, two masked men forcing their way in.  She can't remember anything past that, however, and they decide to investigate the house.

They soon find that the power's out at the Webb house (the speakeasy owner and chauffeur working together manage to get it working again), and stumble across - literally - the scene of a horrible crime.  They find Cornelius Webb dead, apparently of blood loss from a gunshot wound.  They also find one of his attackers - or half of him, anyways, his lower half having been seemingly burned away.  The upper half was worse - every blood vessel in his body had burst as if the blood had boiled in his veins.  On the ground between them is an overturned casket, like a jewelry box of wrought iron, its edge sticky with black sealing wax.

They also find a series of strange, deep burn marks at about waist-height on a line of trees on the property.  The bootlegger notices a flicker of silvery light, like the after-image of a lightning strike, out of the corner of his eye, but when he turned his head, saw nothing.

They clean up the area as best they can and decide to get Emilia back to the house and asleep - they found some powerful sleeping pills and discharge papers from the Sandhill Institute for Girls, a high-end sanitarium, in her bedroom.

Once she's in the car again back at the diner, a lighting flash reveals a figure standing on the edge of the road.  The bootlegger and speakeasy owner (I think...it was a late night game) investigate the figure and find he's the second masked assailant, now out of his mind and babbling about "the light."  They quickly subdue him, tie him up and shove him in the trunk of the car, then take him and move him to the basement of the Webb house for interrogation.

Emilia drugged and asleep and the masked man too insane to give sensible answers, they decide to leave him tied up in the basement and catch a few winks of sleep themselves.  They're awoken by screams coming from the basement, and discover a silvery light, flowing like liquid, pouring in through a hole in a ground-level window into the basement, coiling around the masked man and burning its way into him.  Soon it's inside him, burning its way out, pouring, syrup-like, from his mouth and eye sockets as his flesh collapses into fine, white ash.

In a panic, the bootlegger fires three shots from his shotgun at the light, and while it seems to flinch back from the flash of gunpowder going off, the shots themselves do nothing.  The party runs upstairs and barricades the basement door behind them.

The jazz musician starts trying to wake up Emilia and get her out, while the bootlegger and speakeasy owner tear through Webb's study and bedroom looking for information on this strange light.  They manage to find a diary in which only a few pages are written; a brief history of the light as a "sin eater," passed down from physician to physician in Arkham since the 1600s, used to quietly dispose of stillborn children, especially those born out of wedlock or deformed.  There's also a page of dates, initials, and fees paid that sends a brief shiver down the speakeasy owner's spine as he realizes that these are dates and fees paid for the sin-eating light's service.

They do however find phonetic instructions of how to talk the light back into its casket.  They run back in the room just as the chauffeur, holding the casket out to try and catch the light in it, is consumed as the light burns through the basement door and flows over him.

They say the words and the light coils its way back into the casket.  Sealing it shut, come morning (and the end of the storm), they take it out into the deepest part of the woods and bury it, along with the remains of the half-eaten burglar and Dr. Webb.  They leave Emilia asleep and get back on the road to Aylesbury.

***

The session went really well I thought, especially since it was way past my bedtime these days when we began play.  Everyone had a good time and I got to hand out a bunch of custom D6s I'd had printed up by Chessex with Elder Signs in place of the "1"

I also got to talk to Meghan of Chaosium who was there working a booth and got to express my love of Call of Cthulhu directly to a representative of the company that makes it and asked her about if there was still any support for Chaosium's old "Cthulhu Cultist" GM program, because I'd love to have the company's blessing to do outreach for my favorite RPG and spread the love at conventions.  There's a lot of small college gaming conventions in my area because every local college has their own gaming club and their own convention, so it's a fairly easy thing for me to go around to Simcon, UBCon, etc and run games.  I mean, I'm probably going to do that anyways, but I'd love to have Chaosium catalogs or something I can give to players at the end of sessions.

Wargames Factory Spartans - Base 1

Happy New Year, wargames and RPG enthusiasts! As they say, what you do this night will be what you do for the rest of the year, so I ate some tortilla chips and guacamole and assembled some toy soldiers.

I had decided I would assemble and base my Wargames Factory Greeks, Amazons and Persians for Neil Thomas' One-Hour Wargames - I bought a stack of 50mm x 100mm bases to glue groups of figures to; eight figures to a base for heavy infantry, six figures to a base for archers and skirmishers, four figures to a base for cavalry.

In proper gamer fashion, I rolled a die to determine which unit I'd do first - my plan is for three bases of Hoplites, three bases of Persian Archers, three bases of Persian Immortals, and three bases of Amazon Archers/Skirmishers.

The dice came up with Hoplites, so I pulled out the box and got to work after dinner.  It's been a long time since I've assembled a multipart plastic kit like this - I think the last time I'd done one of these was back in high school when I was still doing Warhammer figures, more then a decade ago now.

So with this first batch of eight Hoplites there's a couple where the poses ended up a little wonky but by the time I reached the sixth Hoplite or so I was feeling pretty confident, and the next eleven bases I'm going to assemble will look darn good.

They're not glued down to the base yet - I'm going to sticky-tac them to a couple of popsicle sticks, prime them, paint them, paint and decal their shields, glue those on, and then glue the figures to the base.

The Kraken Wakes

Here's the first set of shots of Cthulhu finished:

As you can see, the "nature-inspired" pattern I mentioned yesterday has resolved itself into a series of leopard-spots, done in dark green and a deep, nearly-black purple to break up all the medium green and because who else has a leopard-print Cthulhu? No one, that's who.

I've got to start getting ready to drive out to Buffalo for the finale of Christmas, so some close-up shots of things like his eyes and the spots themselves will have to wait until I get back.

From The Eternal Sea He Rises

Work has been continuing at an excellent pace on my Reaper Cthulhu - in fact, by the time you read this, I'll have completed work on him.  Yes, my painting is happily outpacing my blogging, but I wanted to stop and show you some "in progress" shots.

First off, a good shot of the tonal changes on his belly and thighs:

Next, a headshot, showing the color gradients from back of skull to tentacles:

His nails have been done; it doesn't show up real well here, but they're a very dark gray, not quite black:

And this is the beginning of something a little sneaky; I decided that I didn't want my Cthulhu to just be simply green...I wanted some patterning to him, something inspired by nature.  My first thought was a fine stippling with a dark green down the spine, but that morphed a bit...