Frostgrave Ghost Archipelago
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Author Archives: grumpyoldtin
My cunning plan continued
I made a start today on some trapdoors and single doors.
Next week I’ll do the double castle doors.
Fear of the blank page
Well hello there new followers!
Now you may be wondering why I am diverging off piste from my usual fayre of little lead men.
Or not as I think some of you are just randoms and I know for definite that one of you is of canine persuasion.
My more regular readers will know that my Daughter piqued my interest in Bullet Journalling. No more backs of fag packets for me.
I was quite happy with my Tiger notebook, but it didn’t really have much room and if I’m designing for the “pro” Bullet Journal users I thought I should get the real Mc. Coy (“He’s dead Jim!”) to try out my designs and to photograph them for my webstore.
What to buy?
It seemed to be that the Leuchtturm 1917 was the gold standard. So that’s what I went and purchased.
Then I sat for two days staring at the blank pages.
Where do I start?
What if I make a mistake?
I was gripped with indecision.
But I sat down today, after shovelling what seemed several metric tons of snow, and made a start.
The Reever’s Arms
2018 is the year of extracting digit. My old gaming buddy, mugodice.wordpress.com, had wanted an inn for his games a couple of years ago and I had been putting it off.
The brief was that it had to occupy an eight inch square footprint.
So spoiling his birthday suprise here it is.
I have a cunning plan. Maybe?
Somebody yesterday on the Oldhammer Community page in Friendface posted an interesting question.
“Has anybody made replacement doors for the Mighty Fortress?”
The Mighty Fortress was a polystyrene castle made by Games Workshop in the mid-eighties.
Due to the age of this many of the plastic doors have disappeared or have been broken.
Some people on the Oldhammer page suggested 3D printing. This got me thinking.
Why can’t I laser cut replacements?
I dug my Mighty Fortress out and I used a piece of scrap 3mm MDF to guage sizes.
It fitted perfectly.
Next project.
First off the block
A really quick and dirty job. These are from Dreamforge Games and I’ll be using them as Storm Troopers in my Not-Imperial Guard Army. It was a quick hose with the airbrush and a few little brush additions. Not my best work, but I just wanted to knock one out and have something on the table in a couple of days.
These figures actually deserve a bit more time and attention as they have some lovely detail.
Reflections on 2017
I’m somewhat late on this one as I’ve been laid low with a rather unpleasant flu-like lurgy.
A quick catch-up on a couple of pieces from my last post.
Here is the Barbarian from the OS Miniatures Company. This was a challenge that I undertook to have him painted before Christmas. Nobody else took up the challenge which was a pity.
This was from Warmonger Miniatures, again painted up for Christmas.
There is one more figure which was supposed to be my last figure of 2017, but the lurgy stopped that. I’ll post when it is finished.
Old age seems to have telescoped the year. Blink and I’ll miss it.
The first three months were taken up with making the Rogue Stars display board. April/May I did some landscaping in the garden converting a be-shrubbed steep slope into a flat grassy terrace.
June/July/August were at Electric Love. I had a great time and it gave me enough money to buy my own small laser cutter.
The rest of the year seemed to evaporate, lttle jobs around the house and making bits with my loot from the summer.
Here is a group shot of what I finished painting. There is a lot more half finished and the 2018 goal is to finish all the half started jobs from the past few years, the Heresy Dragon being the main target, get all that out of the way so I have a clean slate. Then one project at a time, start it and finish it.
Yeah right!
Product of the Year 2017
On reflection it has to be the laser cutter. It’s small and slow but it has enabled me to prototype ideas and to make stuff on the fly. Christmas cards, party invites, party bag goodies, cake icing molds and gift tags just to name a few bits and bobs.
Heroes and Zeroes
Firstly the Heroes.
At the top of the list are the Facebook friends; EvH, DW, SR, ME and CF. They have been a constant source (sauce?) of inspiration, advice and encouragement. I might actually meet some of them in RL oneday.
Then comes the figure manufacturers who have gifted me with lovely toys this last year.
Ramshackle Games
http://shop.ramshacklegames.co.uk/index.php
The OS Miniatures Company
https://www.facebook.com/OldSchoolMinis1985/
Avatars of War
http://www.avatars-of-war.com/eng/web/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=59&Itemid=51
Warmonger Miniatures
https://www.warmongerminiatures.com/
Finally Revolution Events
https://www.revolutionevent.com/
For fun, education and loot.
Now to the Zeroes
Wayland Games for lengthy delays, poor communication and their unwillingness (or inability) to combine orders.
TNT for their lack of customer service and making life just that little bit harder.
Games Workshop for tantalising me with the new rules for 40K, promises of fewer books and then conveniently forgetting about all that.
The new plastics are beautiful though.
The OS Miniatures Company
Recently I got a parcel containing some miniatures from The OS Miniatures Company.
https://www.facebook.com/OldSchoolMinis1985/
This is a company aiming to fill the gaps in the Warhammer Fantasy Battle army books. Obviously with an old school feel.
So here are some images of what I have managed to paint so far.
A cheeky little chappie blowing his own trumpet
A Chaos Barbarian. This is part of a challenge to be completed before Christmas.
A Chaos Dwarf Arse Cannon.
Test paint
A Work-in-Progress shot of the whole group of Alpine Dwarfs
The tyranny of Bullet Journaling
Blame my Daughter.
I am disorganised.
I am untidy.
I am lazy.
In my ideal world I would sit at my desk and paint, all day and everyday.
However in RL there are jobs to be done, kids to be fed, laundry, chickens etc. etc. etc.
I’d never heard of Bullet Journaling before. Go and Goggle it. There are about twelve million results, I just looked. So it must be fairly popular.
My Daughter visited in the summer and spent some time hunched over a notebook. I didn’t really pay any attention.
She came back last month and on a shopping/sightseeing trip (Salzburg is very picturesque if you didn’t know) had wanted to spend a small fortune on rubber stamps for her journal. My Wife told her to talk to me first.
I had some rubber sheet especially for laser cutting and knocked off a set of the stamps she was after. She was delighted and pointed me in the direction of stencils for journaling.
I erm “copied” a stencil sheet that she wanted. Basically traced the image in Illustrator, quite roughly and cut it on my laser.
She was delighted, again, and gave me a shopping list of designs that she wanted. There are a number of stencils on the market, but I want to do better.
The material I used was Kraftplex.
Kraftplex specifications
It’s a softwood pulp pressed into sheets and I had been given some samples to try from Happylab.
Back to the original topic.
I make myself “To Do” lists on the back of envelopes etc, which I proceed to lose or are “tidied” up.
So I considered buying myself a Bullet Journal and start organising myself. I took a peek at Leuchtturm1917 on Amazon which my Daughter stated was the absolute gold standard in Bullet Journals. Not excessively expensive, however it was the size issue. A5. I have a little Man-Bag and I carry around an A6 (ish) book from Tiger (their webshite is excessively annoying). So why not just use what I have and adapt.
Using my own bastardised version I have started making my own daily task lists. In reality this means I am always busy and tasks seem to overflow to the next day, but rarely to the next week.
Here are some date stamps in the production queue.
Birthday party invites for Number Two Son produced on the laser cutter.
Maybe time for a zero task day soon?
Hobby Cheating
I have just stumbled across this YouTube channel.
https://www.youtube.com/user/PhatWOP001/featured
By a guy called Vince Venturella.
Full of interesting little nuggets of information. I’ve just watched one on oil washes which makes me want to ditch my Army Painter Quickshade which has been my goto solution for just about everything.
Now to find time to watch the other hundred or so videos.
Frostgrave Ghost Archipelago
Winter is here
This really needs no introduction and a lot more eloquent people have written about this.
Frostgrave looked very interesting, never played it but never mind, but the only drawback that I could see was that all your scenery had to be winter themed which could be quite restrictive.
Ghost Arcipelago is set in a more tropical environment so the scenery can be integrated into other games.
At my rather casual reading of the rulebook it appears that it can be a sandbox of a rule-set. You want pyrates, OK. Savages, no problem. Dinosaurs, why not? It seems it can be a lot of fun.
I’ve put out a request for players on my local gaming forum, but no takers as yet.
http://www.diefestung.com/forum/
Next year’s Austrian Salute is looming and I’d like to try and win best gaming table again. I’ve set a standard so I have to go one better and I’m up against Christoph from Grune Horde who does his own laser cutting. To win I have to have an oustanding table AND play the game.
I have my gaming table, thankyou Electric Love. And I have started planning out a possible layout. I wanted my island system to be as interchangeable as possible so I could go from small islands to large conglomerations.
You can see on the right the first iteration of the design process. Looks nice however the pieces don’t fit seemlessly, there would be a little gully between each cluster.
This led me to laser cut this little device which means I can have perpendicular edges enabling everything to fit together unobtrusively. Hopefully.
Laser cutting some islands.
Lush tropical islands need to be accessorised.
Here are some scatter plants. I need a lot more. Thank heavens for eBay and cheap chinese aquarium suppliers.
Some scenery from my bitz box. Who knows what eldritch terrors this statue has witnessed.
On a final note. I’m having to squint to type this so apologies for any smelling mistooks. I had my eyes tested and my prescription has changed very slightly. Trying to be sensible and grown up and looking after my eyes I took the new lenses. After a week of squinting at the computer, I thought my eyes took time to adjust. Sitting a metre back from the screen hunched at a weird angle trying to reach the mouse I’d have enough and went back to the optician.
“You didn’t say you wanted to read as well.”
Using the interweb acronym FFS!
Advertising
I’m told that occasionally visitors to this blog may be presented with advertising.
A laser cutter which is all mine
With my ill gotten gains from the summer I bought myself a laser cutter. It is a 30cm by 40cm machine from Shen Hui Laser Company based in China.
https://shenhuilaser.en.alibaba.com/
It was a bit of a performance getting it. First with the money transfer and then with TNT not communicating with itself.
But it arrived.
Unpacking revealed the quality of the components.
Not very good. There was great big screw in the middle of the work-bed which threw out any pretensions of a level work surface. And the airhose is of the cheapest material and finish one could imagine.
The provided software was unintuitive and useless.
Customer support is non-existent.
Thankfully there is the interweb. I found a piece of software called K40 Whisperer and some support groups dedicated to Chinese laser cutters.
It is slow and takes a couple of passes to cut through anything so it is only useful for prototyping ideas.
For the real work I’ll have to continue using Happylab in Salzburg.
Stuff wot I made
Warning: Picture heavy!
This is a collection of photos of bits and bobs I made over the summer. I “operate in the autism spectrum” to give it it’s official designation, diagnosis seven years ago. So it has been comparatively recently that I have found out why I act or behave the way I do. It has been a revelation because I can see why I approach things in a certain way or why I just don’t really “get” people. One of the things that I have discovered about myself is that I like things to be tidy and organised. The state of my environment reflects my mental state and vice versa. I am more likely to be happy in an organised environment.
This collection of images shows my growing obsession with tidy/organised, and it helps bring stuff together that I had spread over several boxes in different locations.
This is a spray booth I have made from plastic mounting board (from Electric Love, a running theme throughout this post), LED strips from a flohmarkt and a bathroom extractor fan. At the moment the extractor hose doesn’t connect to anything as yet. In all this cost me just under fifteen Euros.
A box to store my various Dremel bits in. Made from an old Sacher Torte box where I engraved the lid.
http://www.sacher.com
A set of drawers, from the recycle centre, which had cracked plastic drawer fronts. I replaced them with some lasercut wood. I’m using them to store my glass working tools and my spare Dremel.
I have another Dremel with a flexible drive which I’ve mounted on a curtain rail above my workdesk.
My work chair has been acquired by Number 2 Son for his desk in his bedroom, so I needed something to sit on. This came from recycling and I added a bit of timber (Electric Love) for height and some wheels from Hofer. I works well and I’m using it to store electrical cabling which once filled a box on my workshop shelves.
More bits from Electric Love. I have been storing my lasercut stock in shoe boxes, but it didn’t look very professional when I went to shows. The grey boxes were thrown out because they had had holes drilled in the bottom and were deemed unfit for further use. They were ideal for me. I cleaned them up, they had been used as storage boxes on the site quads, so very quite dusty. I used more of the plastic mounting board to make dividers. Next job is to work through my computer files and organise properly. This links to my next post. Watch this space. I also got an empty champagne box with no lid. Quick trip to Bauhaus and Happylab and voila! a new lid.
These shelves, again chucked out from Electric Love, are ideal for storing my basing supplies.
While working on site we would lug around big tool crates filled with everything we would need. Clearing up at the end of the festival each tool crate had handfulls of loose screws. Logistics got some under-employed jungs to sort them out by size into empty beer glasses. Once all the shelves had been restocked there was a crate of sorted screws left over. They were going to be binned so I grabbed them and took them home. I made these screw boxes with some leftover MDF.
Hot glue-gun holder, instructions from
http://www.instructables.com
A box for my hot-wire foam cutter. An eBay purchase. Sadly the vendor failed to supply the correct plug. However, my super talented neighbour wired in the correct cable.
This is my self-made clump maker. You can see my first attempts at making clumps. Not too bad, but not perfect.
I have now taken advice from this site
http://www.youtube.com/user/TheTerrainTutor
and ordered better materials.
Progress report to follow.
This links in to my clump maker. Flower tufts. I’m using sawdust from work which has been dyed with cheap acryllic paints from my local pound store. More details to follow.
Boys hard at work in the workshop and the finished blasters.
Dark Imperium
This, I expect most of you know this already, is the eighth iteration of the Warhammer 40K rule-set. I hadn’t played since Rogue Trader, the first iteration, back in the eighties.
I was lured to this by a new streamlined ruleset and the promise of not having to lug around armfuls of codices like the previous editions.
Something simple for me and the Boys.
I used the money earned from gardening towards this coupled with a discount from my “Local” (ha ha) gaming store.
The box is rather beautifully presented and it feels value for money. Fifty odd figures, thick rulebook and dice etc.
No complaints there.
A unit of Pox Walkers from the box
Top left, an old Chaos Marine from the eighties. Centre three figures from the Death Guard “push-fit” box. Rear right, a plastic Chaos Marine from the nineties?
Also purchased were three Index books with the stats for the new rules. Had I have known that G’Dub were going to publish new codices immediately I wouldn’t have bothered and saved myself some money.
I visited my local WARHAMMER store to introduce myself to the new Red-Shirt and in chatting mentioned that I was a bit peeved about the time gap between Indices and Codices. “Well I knew that!” I was helpfully informed. “But I didn’t. Me customer, me spend money. Peeved customer not spend money.”
That didn’t go down too well.
genuine grumpy old tin 