Discovering the Ark of the Covenant

    I have been sorting through games and miniatures in my basement, deciding what I want to keep and what to sell. In a dusty box on the corner of a shelf, I discovered that I had inherited the lost Ark of the Covenant from a friend's collection.

    Of course, when one finds the lost Ark, and one has recently purchased the Pulp Alley rules, one needs to start putting his DAK pile of potential to use.

    I decided to start with a Warlord Games' Opel Blitz to transport the troops and, naturally, the Ark.

    Assembly began. Once again, I had to make some decisions regarding which parts to paint before gluing the cab and bed together. I also started assembling the passengers.

    Credit where credit is due, the parting of these soldiers for mold making was pretty darned good. There are only minor gaps between a few parts, and the instructions made their placement clear. The legs, arms and weapons have to go in specific places, but there is a variety of heads, and they can be positioned in natural poses.

    I completed the subassemblies, primed them and painted the interior. The truck was then assembled, painted in the base colors and washed with a dark brown stain.

    While that work dried, I turned my attention to the passengers. They were painted in their base colors and washed with the brown stain.

    At this point, I added the highlights to the truck and soldiers and did some preliminary weathering on the model.

    Decals were applied, followed by some additional weathering, mud, dust and rust. The final step was to put the windshield in.

    This was a piece of acetate that resisted being glued to the frame with the recommended styrene plastic cement. I tried superglue on another cutoff piece, but the resulting bond was not secure. In the end, I settled for press fitting the windshield between the steering wheel and the frame of the truck. I'll need to handle it with a bit of care, but I'm calling it done.

    Minor annoyances aside, this was another fun build with several lessons learned and more practice with new techniques. I have about a platoon of infantry left from the DAK starter army box, and I've purchased motorcycles with and without sidecars to add some variety. I'm looking forward to getting these on the table for a few games of Pulp Alley.

Rebuilding Highlander Studios

    Life takes some strange turns. Over the last several years, I have been working full time as a primary care giver, managing a community garden, and sitting on the local planning commission. I have just recently been able to get back to painting and sculpting. I'd like to thank all of you who have poked me during this time to see what I was working on and how I was doing.

    The care giver job has a definite end in the foreseeable future. I am shifting my focus back to sculpting and painting miniatures and am looking to build my clientele again. I'd appreciate your consideration if you have projects you would like to have done.

    Thanks. And have a great day!

 My Beef With the Greif

    Early this spring, I purchased Warlord Games' 250 German halftrack model. My first beef is not with Warlord Games; it is with the seller. Warlord boxes are pretty flimsy, and this was shipped in a soft envelope rather than a box. It arrived slightly crushed.

    This irritates me on a very basic level. When I buy something new, I expect it to arrive in pristine condition. I don't always build my models, and I sometimes resell them if I decide not to continue with a project.

    I have some leftover DAK infantry from a starter army, so I decided to build this one as Rommel's Greif command halftrack. This led to the discovery of my second beef, this one firmly the fault of Warlord.

    The crew for the halftrack is really small and poorly proportioned, nothing like the "heroic" proportions of the big heads and hands and squat bodies of their standard WWII fare. Rommel and one crewman actually look like dwarves, and the radio operator is a halfling buddy they brought along to cram into the floor of the vehicle.

    The third and final beef is again with the shipping. While cutting the parts from the sprues, I found that the rear panel of the halftrack around the door had been bent and would not fit properly. A few minutes with a heat gun and some creative cursing, and it was straightened well enough to continue. I did partial assemblies, leaving the interior accessible for painting.

    The interior painting went well enough, with the exception of a minor user error. When I test-fit the top and bottom, I realized that I had forgotten to paint the upper interior. More painting ensued, and while the wash on these parts was drying, the demi-human crew was painted.

    The only hangup with the final assembly was filling the gaps left by the warped upper hull. A little bit of putty and some smoothing, and I was ready to mask the interior and prime the beast.

    Next, I painted the basic colors, added a wash and a highlight to the vehicle, and test-fit the crew. The final beef was discovered at this stage. The two crewmen fit in well. They are snug, but they stand on the decking correctly. There is no proper way to fit Rommel with his feet on the deck. He ends up balanced on top of the back of a seat. Probably due to the fact that he's a dwarf.

    At this point, all that was left was to add the decals and weather the model. Positioning the Greif wording was a little tricky. Some Vallejo weathering powders were added for dust and mud, and a spray of flat sealant completed the build.

    Sure, I have some issues with the manufacturing and shipping of this model, but all in all, this was a really fun project, and I like the look of the end product. The assembly and fit of most parts are well thought out, and the instructions are clear. It will make a fine addition to the DAK troops when they arrive on the gaming table. 

Brigade Bashing

     This is an adjunct post to the previous one about my experiences with roll20 for running RPGs. While I was getting my Forbidden Lands game up and running I was working on two parallel projects for more traditional table top wargames with miniatures. One friend was just starting to get into Burrows and Badgers before the isolation order came down. And I had been painting a Napoleonic Penninsular army for Black Powder. When I'm learning a new skill I become somewhat obsessed. I like to push limits and try things that stretch or break the systems involved. Naturally I decided to try adapting roll20 to both the aforementioned games. It's a virtual table top, right?

     I'll focus this post on the Black Powder Battles development since it's the one that, while still rough, is fully functional as a wargame with live opponents. My first step was to start counter design. I didn't even create a new came at this point. I simply started grabbing some blank top downs from Junior General and colorized them.

     To give some direction to the project, I chose a specific battle to build. Working with some judicious cut and paste and Inkscape, I developed the textures and terrain layout for a 4' x 6' board. I like that I can keep notes about terrain effects and any other information directly on or near the map area where it is available at a glance. At this point I was also starting to develop the look and feel of the units and the flexibility I wanted to build in.

     I styled them after the bases I use in the physical game. They are discrete stands of 4 figures that can be moved as a group or individually selected to affect formation changes. The tokens in roll20 have Aura settings that I'm using for different conditions; red for disordered and yellow for shaken. These can be turned on at the same time to represent both conditions at once with a resulting orange color. I have since set the shape of the disordered to square so it is easier still to see when both are present.

     I wrote a simple dice roller macro and added it to the macro bar and also the token action bar. This one will ask for the number of dice with a preset value of 3 and then ask for the number to get a hit. Again, I used a preset, 4, for the number needed. This will troll dice and report the number of successes. I still need to write one for command rolls and a few other things. But right now the roller can be set to 2 dice and the results added manually to see if your orders are received.

    There is a built in measurement function for checking distances with a slightly different function to measure moves as you are manipulation units.

     Here is the Rolica set up with all of the infantry added. I still have to design the cavalry, artillery and leader tokens.

     I wanted to get a trial game in with a friend this weekend so I took some time to develop a character sheet that would show relevant information for each brigade. It's been about 20 years since I've done any work with HTML and CSS code. Man, have things changed, but I must say for the better. Using a couple example sheets and watching an hour or two of training videos, I was able to pur this together. It lacks polish but it does the job. It has an expandable section where battalions can be added or removed as needed. That was a pretty clever bit of code that I blatantly ripped from another sheet.

     Rolica is not ready to roll yet so I made a simple map with some brigades and stunt double leaders for the game tonight. It took about 45 minutes to teach the interface to my buddy, but things wen't fairly smoothly once a unit or two was moved. In typical fashion my troops (British) don't seem to be interested in joining the fray. All in all, this has been time well spent and I plan to use this with distant friends even when the lock down is over. I can see being able to use it for multiple players since that's pretty much what the platform was designed to do.

     If you have any questions about specifics or thughts about VTT in general, I'd love to hear from you.

Sign of theTimes

     For years I have been avoiding virtual gaming with friends. There have been a few excursions into MMORGs, but nothing by the way of table top RPGs or miniatures games. I simply prefer the social aspects of gathering together to play, share a meal, and generally catch up with each other. The last few months has really put a damper on those activities. So I took the plunge and set up a virtual game session for a few of my friends using Roll20.

     I've had a Roll20 account since 2012. I looked at the interface once or twice and was disappointed in the overall functionality at the time. Boy, have things progressed in the past 8 years. I started playing around about 3 weeks ago when a few friends agreed to test it out with me. I had a free account, so I knew there were some things I just wouldn't be able to do within the game. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find that there are a ton of workarounds for things if you use the tools cleverly.

     I started with some simple map making and token creation. The tokens were assigned stats and I started writing macros to automate several functions that would be used repeatedly. I was truly delighted to learn that the rollable tables can hold graphical images for values. The dice workaround in the picture above uses rollable tables with images of each face. These tables can be dragged to the table top where a right click opens a menu for options. There is a choose side option slider that allows the selection of any of the images in the table. But... the most fun option is the random selection that acts like a dice roller. This gives a result and displays the image from that result.

     By taking this a step farther, I input several different images of specific monster races into tables. The token gets dragged to the mat and I randomly roll or choose the images I want. I add a couple dead images at the end of each table so as the monsters are defeated I can choose to display that side. Pretty handy.

     My next step was to start uploading tile sets and playing with lighting and fog of war settings. These really increase the immersion visually; something that is hard to do on a physical table top. To help with that I have a discord server set up with different audio channels for when the party is split or I need to speak with a select group of players privately. Switching back and for takes a click of a button.

     Here are views of the same scene from the GM perspective and that of the player. You can start to see how this can be effective.

     Maps can be made interactive by assigning macros to value fields in the token editor. All of the numbered ares and the large circle at the bottom can be clicked on to run a macro that opens the relevant player information. These handouts include a section visible only to the GM.

     Put it all together and you start building adventures one scene at a time. You can build several map pages and easily switch players from one scene to the next with a slider book mark. Players can be sent to separate maps if needed and background audio can be added for atmosphere.

     This is all available on free accounts and I'm sure I'm barely scratching the surface of roll20's potential. I have switched to a pro account to try out some additional functions. I'm enjoying the upgrade, but the free stuff is really enough to make most of what a GM wants happen.