Mountains of madness?

Time to cast: 1 hour. 
Time to glue: 1 hour. 
Time to dry: 1 week. 
Time to base: 6 minutes. 
Time to dry: 1 day.
Time to paint: 1 hour. 

Look and behold: one cast each of moulds 81-84.  A second batch is drying, I think 2 batches will go a long way making cave encounters a lot more realistic and enjoyable in Runequest and CoC alike.  I'm doing a superdry white brush tomorrow, then some varnish, and we're good to go!

Message from Cthulhu!

Great Old Cthulhu himself has seen fit to send me a parcel, containing a collection of weird looking artifacts, packaged in an alchemist treebark concoction and polymer cover, a container surely devised by the old gods.

I have tried to make a picture of it, but some of the packages resisted by malignantly reflecting every bit of light in the investigation room.  Still, for what it's worth, here is the picture.  In the meanwhile said package has again disappeared, very probably it went back into the void.  Or maybe someone wrapped it in gift paper and put it under the christmas tree.  Time will tell.

Hirst casting tryouts

Hiring children to do the work proves much cheaper,
and they can be bullied into working unpaid overtime easily

We had a few casting tests today, with the help of my son and daughter, to establish how many hirst silicon moulds one can cast per unit of time.  The tests pointed out that the speed I could reach very much depends on the number of moulds available.  At one time, I had 7 moulds 'in the air' at once.  That was doable, I would say I could manage to keep 10 moulds busy.  Depending on turnaround time, and therefore drying time, I could do 2 to 2,5 rounds per hour.  Some of the things I found:

1. Setting up took me about 45 minutes.  This will be the same for one person doing 3 moulds or 4 persons doing 40 moulds so organization is essential.
2. We need more mixing bowls: it is a very bad idea to rinse your mixing bowl in the sink, you have to let the plaster set and then remove it.  For one person, 5 mixing bowls is a good number.  Luckily, these are dead cheap.
3. It took me over one hour to clean up.  This will also be required after every cast, so it would be best to try and organize big casting sessions.

The homemade vibration board worked VERY well, so that's going to stay.  I have a nice setup in mind, with one person making the mixture, one scraper, one unpacker and one all-round, and that should allow to make lots of casts in the course of an afternoon or so.

Chaaaarge

The planning stage - it lasted a full four seconds :)

After the capture of Aelwyn, his brother rounded up some of Aelwyn's friends to go and kick ass in the Grey Dog forest.  In spite of common sense, they charge into the woods, using a very crude decoy ploy while Odd the Dark sneaks past the enemy on his warhorse - yeah I know - and liberates the weakened prisoner.  They even give Miskar a good run for his money.  Doubtlessly to be continued!

The story: Miskar under pressure!

Call of Cthulhu

Newspaper archives are essential for CoC!

We're starting a few games of CoC, in order to get a fresh kick after several months of hack and slay.  Call of Cthulhu is easily the best RPG out there, with intelligent scenario's, cool atmosphere, and frightening occurences, so what's not to like.  I have started by delving into my New York Times frontpages for our first scenario, the old classic 'The Haunted House".  The book above features all front pages from 1920 to 1927 - the traditional CoC era, and then some.  It would work for 1890 gameplay and WW2 gameplay as well.  Even 2009 is in there!  I'm looking forward at using this resource, and might well comment on it some more soon.