the safe hΘle

the other night i had a moment where i was like i want to work on the next Perilous Tales scenario. i have been wanting to do the Blob villain scenario for the game for some time now. i had a good idea of how to do it and i was going to do the globs of the Blob like i did my oozes for Dungeon and Dragons. i asked Rita if she wanted to help out and so we had a craft day making blobs. i had her make small little globs using just regular hot glue. straight from the hot glue gun to a sheet of wax paper. there bigger ones had hot glue put on and then dipped into cold water to create some form of a living blog of mass. so i mapped out a diagram of how many of each type of globs i need to play the scenario. after messing up on a little glob, i settled for one less needed because at that point i was getting tired and wanted to clean up before bed. the next morning i took them out and sprayed white primer on them and let them dry for a few hours. then in the afternoon i added watered down pink ...

spent the last few weeks building miniatures and setting time aside to begin painting. i am kind of excited about what i have planned to get painted and finished. a few wild west buildings, a handful of fantasy figures, and most certainly the ever lasting MotU collection i have been cracking at for the past year or so. in between working and messing around with this and that, i have been looking at some agnostic tabletop games so of course i built some miniatures for those games. one game i am looking forward to is Forbidden Psalm. i know it's been out for a while and i know of it but never looked into it until now. recently a former group member got in touch with me and we chatted, one thing led to another and we chatted about Dungeons and Dragons and the old campaign sessions. he told me about some life changes and a light bulb went off. i asked about his character he was running in our old campaign and was curious if he wanted to rejoin with the group we had running right now. a...

several weeks ago i was reading some posts on Dave's Wargames Terrain Workshop blog page , and he was in the process of adding some terrifying Gnarloc Raiders for i assume is a Kroot army. but i noticed it was for a painting challenge that i did not know about. so i went over to Dead Dick's Tavern and checked out what this challenge was about. for the month of May, this challenge you had to paint a monstrous creature or something big. i thought this challenge would be cool, but unfortunately i didn't really have any big monsters to paint or whatnot. until i remembered i did have some things somewhere. last year i bought a terrain crate from Mantic Games called "the Haunted Manor". and in it was what they called a goliath monstrosity. which basically to me was a chunk of hard plastic in the shape of an eldritch monster of sorts. picking the color scheme for it i didn't want to go with the green i have been doing lately for these Lovecraft creatures. and what c...

this past week our D&D group went on their first quest to find a magic item to relinquish a threat that has a hold on the local town.  i didn't want to throw them a hefty encounter, but i did make it interesting and odd at the same time. taking a short cut through some ruins they come to find out the ruins are covered in spider webs which made the players uneasy. cutting through some ruins, the group takes a shortcut to the manor to save some time before the sun goes down. getting ambushed by several giant spiders. through the trees, Wynze hears some bellowing... an overweight gluttonous troll makes its way to see what's happening.  rolling for the troll's claw attacks, once again another amazing dice roll on my part. Thorgrimm summons some thunder and lightning and connects his warhammer underneath the troll's chin. i got a plastic "hour glass" from the last convention i was at, as a joke to Rita because i always say she takes too long deciding what to do...

another year in the books and ever so close to the five year anniversary next year. just thinking of spending four years playing with the same folks (mostly) and running with the same characters that we all made and love, is amazing. i cannot wait for our group's fifth anniversary i will have to plan some kind of remarkable campaign or even an incredible encounter that brings everything together. but for now our fourth year is written and we have come a long way in our short time together. a year later felt like only a short time because we had fun and had a great time together. we created a whole new group for them as we do for new players but yet as time went on, we had an idea for even more characters so another group of PC's were created. and yes i ended up making more PC's and NPC's of my own. i've expressed in the past that i enjoy writing up these yearly reports, because it documents our growth and the changes we have gone through over time. i originally star...

back in January when i was supposed to get some of my MotU miniatures painted for a painting challenge i got a little distracted and came across a game that was simple and yet fun even for solo play. i went through the rulebook and counted all the AI characters for all the scenarios and made a list. i would have used my D&D figures for the priests and the paladins but i did not have any normal civilians as villagers for the game. so i go myself a box of Frostgrave cultists and soldiers and did a little kit bashing. after doing that i figured might as well do the rest so at least all the AI heroes would look somewhat uniformed and in scale with one another. rangers. the rangers are made out of the soldier sprue. priests. the priests are made out of the wizard sprue. the priests are equipped with hand items and wands. paladins. these heroes are straight out of the knights box. wizards. i gave the wizards staves or small hand items. wanted to separate the priests and the wizards apart...

ever since this brittle arctic air swept over the east coast here in the United States i have lost all motivation to do any painting or anything. only played a handful of Dungeons and Dragons with the group and managed to get a handful of MotU figures ready to be painted, but being so cold i haven't even thought of picking up a paintbrush. and work isn't helping with the upcoming schedule changes, i feel like i won't get anything completed for the Paint What You Got challenge. to get me through this winter hell i did manage to come across a new game called Deth Wizards from Snarling Badger Studios. and i can't get enough of this game being a well written solo or 1v1 game. even though i said i was gonna paint my MotU figures for the PWYG challenge, i did manage to get a hold of some plastic sprues of Frostgrave soldiers and cultists to make the npc characters for Deth Wizards and hopefully if the weather cooperates i'll get them painted quickly and in time for the ch...

last weekend or so i bought Deth Wizards, a pretty cool game that after watching some introduction and game-play videos on it, i was surprised how easy i was able to pick up on it. i really love how there isn't much to it based on the fact it is an agnostic miniature game. so i basically had most of what i needed to play. i might have to get some actual buildings but i do have the "buildings" that i can use for now from the Tenfold Dungeon "The Town" box set. so a day or so later i made a quick necromancer character and an undead warband. i used one of my D&D characters for this game and it's just funny how in D&D he is actually a wizard of the college of necromancy. i picked an easy legacy of necromancy to use at first. i went with the ability to choose undead that are hulks and are a little bit of a tank.   after writing down all the information i need to play a story mode campaign, i played an introduction game for myself to get the basics down wh...