My goals for this blog

 With this blog I want to share my journey of becoming a better painter. I do not think I will ever get to the level of winning a painting competition, but who knows. I will be writing about techniques and paints that I use. Here is the list of the paint that I used on an Ogre, of course it will look more professional then this from now on. 

 I will try do that with every miniature. I will try to share with you what I have found that works and what has not worked for me.

I had an old knight miniature laying around and I painted that and in the mean time I had ordered some ordered miniatures. I was having so much fun, I knew I would go broke from buying miniatures. This is is one of that I purchased. It is a Halfing Rogue that looks like he is noising around someplace where he should not be.

Getting back to the statement, “I knew that I would go broke from buying miniatures.” I purchased a Anycubic Photon Mono M5s Pro. 

Here are a couple of miniatures that I printed and painted. Now the Ogre, is the first time that I have ever layered skin tone on a miniature. The Alien Creature and the Skeleton/Mummy are miniatures from One Page Rules and the Ogre is from

https://www.myminifactory.com/object/3d-print-ogres-set-of-3-196163

Thank you so much taking time to read and look at my Blog.

Take Care.

Mike

Getting Back to Painting Miniatures

 

I have not painted miniatures for some time, at least before the Covid pandemic. There is one reason basically. We are now using a VTT for playing our TTRPGs.  I have been painting miniatures for a long time.  In fact I used to play Warhammer 40K in epic scale.  I still have a bunch of Citadel paints from 20 plus years ago.  I had no inclination to paint any miniatures until a couple of weeks ago.

Here are the rest of my paints.

A gentleman that sits next to me at our work place runs a campaign for his cousins and he purchased Heroforge miniatures that are based on their player characters in the campaign. He is showing me the miniature, he tries to pull it out of the box he has it in and he breaks off the sword I then try to get it out the plastic container that he has it in. Unbeknownst to us there is a rubber like cement in the plastic container and the base is attached to the wall of the container by the a fore mentioned adhesive. As I am taking the miniature out of the container. I break it off at the ankles, Of course I feel really badly, not as bad as I could have because he broke off the sword. I tell him I will fix it and paint it for him as I feel so guilty. I pin and glue the parts back together. Instead of three parts, now it is one.

I wanted to practice a little bit before I started the Druid character that we snapped pieces off of. I had a Bloodmane, Gnoll Champion made by Reaper Miniatures in metal. I did not know the name of the miniature nor the manufacture right off the top of my head, as I had to ask the Google. I think I retained some of my knowledge, now off to the Druid.

I think this is a pretty good sculpt and it was fun to paint.  Sorry for the photos being a little out of focus.

The photos did over saturate the blue kilt.  It is not that bright of blue on the miniature.

My coworker really did not have any specific way that he wished the Druid to be painted other than that she have red hair as the player has red hair. He was quite specific what kind of red hair as he stated; “Not over the top red hair”.

Here is the completed miniature.

I was going to paint her Cuirass as if were made out of Birch Bark. Believe it or not there are several painting guides that describe how to do this and I believe I could have adapted them for miniature painting. However, once I put my Optivisor on and primed it, I realized that the Cuirass was not smooth. On the chest there were swirls and on the back there were vines. I need a little more space and smooth surfaces to be able to use the Birch Bark technique. None the less I believe it came out pretty well. I am not a professional painter by any means. I think I paint at an average game table proficiency. I subscribe to the arm length rule. Does the miniature look good at arms length? Yep, good enough for me!


This project has really inspired me to get back into painting miniatures, both fantasy and military miniatures. I supported a Kickstarter Resin Printer some years ago. I learned, but never ever support a Kickstarter Resin Printer campaign. Long story short, I got a printer. A lot of people had issues printing with it. I never had an issue with it printing. My issue was with the resin Vat. Once you unscrewed the screws to change the FEP sheet on the resin vat. The nuts would start to freewheel and one could not tighten them up. I had a useless paperweight.

I purchased about $50 worth of miniatures a weekend or two ago. I thought to myself that I might as well get another resin printer if I am going to purchased miniatures. I have all the safety equipment, I have a vented space to get rid the stinky vapors.

 So a purchased Anycubic Photon Mono M5s Pro. We will see about that journey once I get it zeroed in and making good miniatures.

Thank you for taking time to read my post.
Till next time, take care.

A bit of history of me and playing RPGs

 

Outta my way Mr Peabody and Sherman. I am taking the way back machine on this post.

I recall doing this and I am sure you did this too. I went out and bought the Advanced D&D Monster manual. Cracking that book open and perusing those pages. Before long you had most if not all the monsters memorized. 

 

Then when the Fiend Folio came out we all did the same thing. Started reading the book over and over again, memorizing those monster's weaknesses and abilities. 

 

There are three Monster Manuals that were not as well known and I loved using them in my campaigns when I was running games in the 80s.

 These Monster Manuals were edited by Steve Perrin and Jeff Pimper. They are titled All The Worlds Monsters, Vol I, Vol II and Vol III respectively and were printed by Chaosium.

 

 

 

Most players did not own them and the meta gaming took place to a lesser degree. It also gave DM's so many more options in choosing creatures. These volumes have so many different monsters. Here are just a few creatures that are in these books

 Have you ever seen the movie The Deadly Mantis released in 1957? 

 

 Here is Giant Preying Mantis that would fill the bill to play the part in the movie.

 

I know that early printings of Deities & Demigods had creatures based on Melnibonéan Mythos created in the Elric series written by Michael Moorcock.

 

Not all the monsters were featured in the Fiend Folio. In the tale “To Rescue Tanelorn” a creature called the Olab was described. It is covered in these books.

 Are you a fan of  Lin Carter's "Warrior At World's End"? Here are stats for the Death Dwarf.

If you are a fan of the author Jack Vance as I am. My favorite Novel is “The Diridr” published in 1969 and by the way I highly recommend it. If you have read his novel “The Dragon Masters”?  The Fiend is in these books.

I could go on and on all the interesting creatures. There are stats for The Cockroach that Cincinnati based on the song by the same name. If you have never heard it, boy it is a real toe tapper.

How about creatures based on the Oz series by Frank L Baum? These books have them.  Have you ever wanted to use a Tarn ( A large Flying Mount) or maybe a Kaiila (A Carnivorous Mount) from the Gor series by John Norman.

 Even Rosemary's Baby from the movie by the same name is in these volumes.

  I could do on and on.  If you still play Advanced Dungeons & Dragons or any of the new games such as Dungeon Crawl Classics or Lamentations of the Flame Princess.  Rosemary's Baby would fit right in with latter rule set.  

 

A little heads up, I am going to do a quick review of Lamentations of the Flame Princess as my next blog post.

I owned all three volumes, but I let someone borrow them back in the day and of course I never got them back. I did repurchased them in PDF and they are still available on Chaosium's Website.

https://www.chaosium.com/search.php?search_query=monsters

These are $5.00 dollars a pop and worth every cent.

Thank you for taking the time to read this and take care.

Mike G

 

Hello all,

Allow me to introduce myself. Whoa, wait a second that first sentence reads like a lyric from a Rolling Stones song and I am certainly not Old Scratch.

Let me start over. I am starting to write a blog about RPG games that I play and run. I will also cover new RPGs and my take on them, I intend to write about products products that our group uses for our RPG games. I previously wrote a blog that was mainly about Military Tabletop Wargames. I will provide a link to that blog. I do not really write anything for it any longer.

https://mikesminiatures.blogspot.com/

I will have to be honest with you. I have painted a lot of miniatures over the years. However one person in our group has Cerebral Palsy and he has difficulty seeing a tabletop game. Our Game Masters wish to keep him involved in the games. Our solution is and thank goodness for them, a Virtual Table Top. I may cover some RPG miniatures in the future, but that certainly will not be the focus of this blog.

What the focus of this blog will be running commentary of gaming sessions I run and gaming sessions I play in. To a lesser extent this blog contents will feature Fantasy books, Sci Fi and Post Apocalyptic(some well know and others not known as well). I will also feature some of the software that we use, Foundry VTT, Dungeondraft, Arkenforge and Dungeon Alchemist to name a few.

I have been playing RPGs since 1976. I started playing D&D in about 1976 and quickly started to play AD&D shortly after. I still have all my AD&D books with some TSR and a few Judges Guild supplements I started playing Tabletop Miniature Wargaming since 1981. I discovered that at Gen Con XIV in 1981. Up until the last eight years I played mostly Tabletop Wargaming, but I did play a few RPGs too. I played a lot of computer games and I was a community contributor for a computer game for a short while as well. About six years ago I started playing RPGs again and have not looked back. Here are a few of the games that I have played over the years plus some that have rekindled my joy of playing Role Playing Games. These are not necessarily in chronological order or they may not be photos of the first edition as I do not own some of the editions that I first started playing the game.

-D&D

-AD&D

As I stated earlier I have all my old D&D books. The one I am happiest that I still have have is the 1st edition Deities and Demigods.

 

-Traveller  One has to love a game that one can die in character creation. 

 

 

 

-Call of Cthulhu     Don't go insane.

 

-Rolemaster Roll, Roll, Roll the dice and let me look up on those three tables

-Star Trek by FASA

Never cared for this game as playing the Prime Directive sucked

It became a much better game when they published the Klingon supplements. The Klingons suited our groups play style.

-D&D 3.5/OGL

Star Wars by West End Games Get ready to throw those six sided dice.

-BattleLords of the 23^rd Century This game has a great sense of humor. In the book the publishers wrote Famous Last words. A couple of them are as follows.

-Is napalm heat sensitive?

-Anyone know where the Phentari went? This one is funny if you had played the game

-What do mean every time we shoot it's eyes glow brighter and it gets bigger?

This is really one of my favorite RPGs. 

 

-Deadlands Hell on Earth

-Fallout: The Role Playing Game

-Pathfinder  I have not played nor ran, but plan on doing both.

 

-Starfinder  I was running a game and our first session was a week or so before everything shut down due to the pandemic. I was running The Dead Suns Adventure Pact published by Paizo. I am now in the process of preparing a home brew game using Foundry VTT. I have all the scenes made for this story arc, but now I have to populate them with creatures, aliens and things that go bump in the night.

-Dungeon Crawl Classic  I have not played nor ran it, but intend to in the future.

I do own both Star Trek Adventures and Achtung Cthulhu. I am not sure I am going to run games featuring these games. I won copies in a drawing.

That pretty much wraps my relationship with RPGs.

Thank you so much for taking the time to read and peruse what I have written. If you enjoyed this blog, please subscribe and tell some of your friends. It would be greatly appreciated and I always respond to comments or questions. Please take care and I want to thank you again for your time.

Mike G