This is where I have been concentrating my energies for the last couple of months.

There will be a rather more informative posting next week.
This is where I have been concentrating my energies for the last couple of months.

There will be a rather more informative posting next week.
To everyone out there…..
I have been a bit brow beaten and full of self doubt over the last few months which is why I haven’t been posting much.
Unwards and upwards (hopefully) for 2019.
If you see wood panels there is a very high probability that my work colleague and I had something to do with it.
I got a phone call asking if I wanted to work some extra weeks at Electric Love.
https://www.electriclove.at/en
Well I jumped at the chance of getting some extra readies. My shopping list this Summer is quite long, topping up sundries and materials and the biggie a 3D printer. I want to escape the rather angular forms of laser cutting and start producing more organic forms with the help of the 3D Printer and a Vac Former. I found an interesting tutorial on YouTube, which after the success of my Clump Maker, I think I’ll give it a go.
There will be sporadic updates but as I am going to be hitting twelve or fourteen hour days nearer the festival I might not have the energy.
Time to dig out my rusty steed and burn off some of that winter fat.

My rusty steed
Well hello new followers! This post is going to totally phaze you, are you sure you’re following the right person?
This is something I wrote about thirty years ago and I was prompted to dig it out following a post on the Facebook Middlehammer group. Sometimes being a hoarder can be useful. This is written for WHFB 3rd edition so if anyone knows the formulae to convert this to 6th let me know.
Snotlings
Are you tired of limp-wristed elves, solid dependable dwarves, highly spiked chaos thingys or noisy dirty orcs? Then what you need my friend is SNOTLINGS! Yes! Those gibbering green creatures lurking in the corners. A bit of light relief to bring a smile to your battle weary face. “But theyse always runs away!” comes a voice from the back of the room. Well with a bit of beefing up they won’t, or not very often anyways.
Most of these charactors are based on figures produced by Citadel Miniatures.
Spit the Chicken Slayer
Snotling Major (Level 5 only) Hero
Bravest of the brave. His tales of derring-do are sung (well sort of hummed a bit) after the Midwinter feast of roast ferret and acorn beer. His mighty thews armoured with the spoils of a thousand (well, more than five) dwarven rubbish tips. On his side he wears the mighty sword of champions “Stoatbanger”. Purloined from a visit to Ye Olde Reject Shoppe. Forged in the fires of chaos and twinned to its bearer in an unholy alliance of flesh and soul. Allegedly.
Special Rules
Spit commands a minimum of 3 Snotling bases and a maximum of 6 bases. When commanded by Spit the Snotlings will charge or receive a charge if they outnumber their foe by two-to-one. If they are charged by a unit they don’t outnumber they will run away.
Snotling Fanatic
Worshippers of the dour god ‘Arikross these devotees are fed on a diet of muesli. They hide amongst ordinary Snotlings until 6 inches away from an enemy unit. Then irrespective of the normal turn sequence the Fanatic is loosed towards the enemy with squeaky cries of, “Brookie! Brookie!”
The Fanatic is pointed in the direction the Snotling Player wishes him to travel and moves 2D4 inches. If a double is rolled the Fanatic has suffered from a heart attack or the inability to control his whirling iron ball.
The Fanatic uses a 3/4 inch template for damage purposes. Any unit moved over by the Fanatic receives automatic D4 strength 3 hits with no saving throw for armour.
For more specific information please read the section on page 98 WHFB about Goblin Fanatics.
Grip’s Sheep Warriors
Far away in the mountains of Norsca live and thrive a tough breed of mountain sheep. Quite how they found their way to Grip’s tribe at the World’s Edge Mountains is unknown; although it has been suggested that a dwarf with a penchant for things four legged was to blame. This is usually suggested in a lowered voice many leagues away from the nearest dwarf.
Grip’s tribe is nomadic, wandering from pasture to pasture only heading back to the tribal caves in the depths of winter.
The toughest, hardiest rams are used for battle (the weaker ones for the cooking pot), whilst the ewes are used as draught animals.
The Snotling rider and beast seem to have a special bond between them, probably because neither can realise how stupid the other is. In the summer in the high pastures Snotlings and their mounts can be seen fondly head-butting each other. it is considered a sign of weakness if a rider is knocked out by his mount. In winter, flocks can be found wandering around with little hammocks slung underneath protecting the Snotlings from the wrath of winter’s might by the sheeps thick coat.
There is a Snotling tale about Fid the Wise who tried to light a fire in his hammock. much talk is made of the impressive turn of speed from the irate ram. Not much is known of Fid’s whereabouts after this.
Special Rules
The riders cannot wear armour as the noise distracts the rams.
The rams have a butt attack S2 with no armour saving throw.
Barp
Level 5 Magician

A chance encounter with a sorcerer, a chaos deamonette and a bag of “Magick Dust” left Barp in possession of one spell. Unfortunately that is all, Barp is now a drooling idiot capable of blurting out that one spell if left unattended. The Snotling tribe is incredibily proud of him and will wheel him out at every battle hoping he will use the spell contained within his noggin. Nobody quite knows what the spell is, “BUT A SPELS A SPEL INNIT!”
Special Rules
Barp has no stats, he has to stay in base to base contact with other Snotlings. These are to stop him from saying the spell inadvertantly (it’s the only thing he knows).
The Snotling player has to say in advance to the GM in how many turns Barp will say the spell, that is if Barp is going to be used. When the time comes the GM will pick at random ONE Level 1 Battle Magic spell, without telling the Snotling player what it is. The spell is then cast on the nearest enemy unit within 12 inches. If there is no enemy unit within 12 inches the spell is cast on the nearest Snotling unit.
Once the spell is cast Barp reverts back to a normal Snotling, never to cast a spell again.
Well so much for my plan to be adding content everyday to this blog. I haven’t quite grasped how time has flown by. Last week I didn’t get round to BuJo-ing and so was very disorganised.
Here is the landscaping I did last year and how it is now.
I have revamped my blog, some of you may have noticed the changes. I had to do this as the theme I had been using was “Retired” so I could not get any techical support for it. I added the Shoppe which has involved a lot of work. Firstly cataloguing all my work. I had to get all my designs organised, they were in a folder marked “Laser” but not properly organised. I didn’t realise how many designs I had made. Then I had to photograph them. This involved recutting many designs as I had painted examples, but not the bare MDF designs. Where am I going to store them all? Then to edit the photos so they were of a consistant size and style. And finally put them on-line. Still more to go!
Regular readers may remember that I made a cunning plan and produced some replacement doors for the Mighty Fortress. These have been very popular and requests have been made for additional parts.
I have about six more designs to make and then I’m done with this project. The cutting is a pain though. Because I’ve made everything to my quality standard each piece takes an hour and a half to cut, that’s on the big Happylab laser. On my little one it would take three or four hours each.
It’s not all been fun and games though……
There has been time to visit the lake.
May I recommend this Kickstarter from The OS Miniatures Company?
Tonight, at around six (GMT) I’m getting my first review. Hopefully a positive one.
http://tabletopgamesuk.co.uk/2018/03/28/grumpy-old-tin-review/
Not going so swimmingly
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.


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!
I did manage to do a few bits and bobs before and during my time at Electric Love, but I don’t seem to have photographed everything. I plan to remedy this before too long.

This was inspired by the Blanchitsu articles in White Dwarf and I rather liked the floaty bits that people had made. This is part of my ongoing Imperial Court which is slowly building up.

This is a little speeder I’d lasercut and will be putting up for sale.


My old gaming buddy Seb had sent me some figures. With them was this halfling which I liked but just didn’t quite know what to do with. So rather than having it sit on the leadpile I thought I’d paint him up and return him. I had a blast painting him and I made the most impractical gaming base ever.

This was the Mayor of Helsreach, a freebie figure from Curtis of Ramshackle Games.
He was given out at the annual BOYL event at Wargames Foundry
http://bringoutyourlead.co.uk/
I really want to go to this one day.
I’ve now taken the leap to Etsy. The first steps to untold wealth?
There is some updated content in the “Man Cave Project”. It’s finally coming together.
News and announcements
(sorry, no balloons)
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