A band of broo

Another batch of miniatures just about ready: these are a bunch of Lance and Laser broo I painted up recently.  still needs the final touches, but I prefer making pics first and playing with them a bit so I find every spot I forgot.  These were a lot of fun to paint, and I'm happy to say I'm in a good flow for painting, with 2 miniatures a day on average.

New RuneQuest Miniatures

I've been quite busy during the last few weeks, we have been playing the overture of our RQ6 Pavis campaign, but I also found the time to paint or finish quite a few miniatures:

Mad Knight: Cannibal Victim, Witch and Harvesting Young Girl

Mad Knight: 2 Priests and a Witch

Mad Knight: Victim Scene but now with blood drinking chief

Mad Knight: Three Youngsters

Don't remember where from, but funny kids

Hasslefree: Kids with dog menacing old lady

RuneQuest 6 scenario 1

Herculon and Daerius charge forward, while Jaya prepares her bow and Giomanach starts casting Palsy

We had the last session of our first scenario yesterday. In it the party ran into what was left of a party of ogres masquerading as Etyries traders. Since the encounter took place in the chaparral, far away from civilisation, and since the party was coming from the direction of the ogre lair they cleaned out just before, both sides realised on sight that there would be no pretending. The adventurers charged on sight, leaving the ogre animist little opportunity to prepare, and only one managed to summon its ancestor spirit in time.

They then returned to Pavis to check out the shop the ogres were running, and had what one could call 'a good day' with lots of goods they could sell, plus they got a four wheeled wagon out of the deal. Time for some well deserved R&R and training now...

Miniatures are Amazon (cart), Mad Knight (cannibals), and a mix with some L&L in the distance.

Posted with Blogsy - (c) Rudy Boeynaems 2012

Some new Pavis terrain

Our RPG table with the lighting switched on

I needed some underground for chaparal and desert terrain, and I decides to try out using a vulcanized rubber sheet as underground, with a brown and white mix of paint dabs for a bit of variation. I took a few minutes to prepare a few cast rock formations and drybrush them, and the result is quite nice, if I say so myself.

 

Posted with Blogsy - (c) Rudy Boeynaems 2012

Loz Whitaker on TDM: Glorantha soon(er)!

Here's what Loz posted on the TDM forum concerning the Glorantha development roadmap:

Concerning our plans for Glorantha.

Its clear people want us to do something. It was the question most asked of me at Gencon, and so we are accelerating our plans a little (a LITTLE, I hasten to add). The likelihood of Gloranthan publications will be something like this:

RuneQuest: Adventures in Glorantha (yes, it steals, shamelessly, the title of the never-published RQIV, but it has to be done). This will be a general introduction to the lozenge plus all the rules tweaks and chargen tweaks needed to play in Glorantha. And it will be 3rd Age.

Stat Packs: Probably free PDFs to accompany Moon Design's releases such as Sartar, Pavis and Harrek. Before we can release these, we need RQ:AiG.

Setting: We'll be taking a region of Glorantha and developing the bejesus out of it. Yes, we know which area. Its all agreed with Moon Design and its one Pete and I love to bits.

Scenarios: To support the Setting. Additional scenarios, expansions, and so on. Some will be free PDFs, some will be full books.

With the setting we want to recreate that RQ2 'Borderlands' or 'Pavis' feel: s place that RQ Glorantha players feel is theirs, and detailed enough to capture the imagination, but not so detailed as to deter newcomers. Which is why the region we've been given is so perfect and exciting.

I won't say more than the above until we're in a position to offer some more concrete details. But this gives you an idea of what we have planned.

Artist impression of Pairing Stones

Here is a digital impression for my adventure this weekend:

Outside of New Pavis, the most mythically important regional holy place for Sartarites is the Pairing Stones. This remarkable pair of menhirs is located on a rocky bluff about 60 miles northwest of Pavis. One is pale blue and the other is pale brown. Both are some 25 feet high and tilt slightly towards on another. Here it is easy to contact Orlanth; one of the sons of Orlanth was wed at this place and, after he died the final time, was burned and apotheosized. Many traditionalist Sartarite clans perform secret ceremonies here such as initiation and heroquests. The Pairing Stones are currently under the control of the powerful Bullford Clan and their Storm Voice Farangar Horseteeth.

Posted with Blogsy - (c) Rudy Boeynaems 2012

Sculpting a Krarshtkid

Lets check what the Glorantha Index tells us:

Spawn of Krarsht, the Devouring Mother.

Roughly circular in body, with six asymmetrically arranged legs around a three-jawed maw. Spit a sticky stuff called Pratzim, and secrete acid.



Chaotic and irregular, that is music to the ears of a low talent sculpter like yours truly, plus I just might need a few krarshtkids for an upcoming adventure, so I went ahead and mixed up a gob of pratzim, magic sculp and skewered some wire into a cork, and voila!

Posted with Blogsy - (c) Rudy Boeynaems 2012

New chaos Creatures announced on Mad Knight!

While checking out the Madknight site this morning I noticed how a new chapter called Scorpion Men had appeared in the shop, and several new products are visible, including a Queen Bagogix, Old Thumper, Tentaclus and Quackchitter. These new wonders are supposed to become available by the beginning of September, Andrew posted on fb that the shop will be closed until then. Looking forward to these new goodies a lot!

Posted with Blogsy - (c) Rudy Boeynaems 2012

More Hirst goodness

After glueing up a cartload of cavern floor tiles and water and rock caves, I made some bits and pieces from another mould into an attempt at a modular inside terrain system. Early days, it's a modest start, but the idea seems easier to implement in Hirst than it was with scratchbuilt, mainly because of the Hirst dimensions and consistency.

The idea is to have 3 or 4 sizes of room flooring, and as many wall types, first in the combination visible here, but this can easily be expanded afterwards. I'm hoping to basecoat it all up tomorrow evening.

Posted with Blogsy - (c) Rudy Boeynaems 2012

Pavis building test & more

The house of Ofnow Konsekwenz in Pavis

Here is how the first building turned out.  Not too shabby, but there are some things I'll be taking along for the next version: I want a roof terrace, so the outer wall must be higher, I need a height difference of 15 mm, minus 3 from the foamboard leaves 12, that's a nice balustrade.  Then I can make a hole in the roof and mount a little hirst trapdoor in.  Simple and good looking.
The door was made from a sheet of balsa, engraved with a byro and an exacto knife.  The windows are mosquito net, brushed brown and glued between the two walls.  Bottom plate in foamboard, white glue, fish tank sand.

This nice wyrm was painted, start to finish, in under one hour.  The basecoat, subsequent base red and a nice white brush started of the figure really well, after that it was just a bit of detaling and a pinch of flock.  Very happy with it, and I just know that if I keep going at it, it might get better, but not a lot.

Rearranged hirst block storage

After some testing by fellow clubmember Ben we purchased a heap of these small three drawers units for storing our cast hirstblocks before assembly. The shop only had these left, in all kinds of frivolous colours, so we now have a mix. I think 9 more will complete the rack and offer us a lot of separated storage. Following an idea of other clubmember Peter I am now manufacturing drying racks, with a simple wooden frame and birdcage fence, to solve the problem of cardboard boxes saturating with the water from the drying blocks. All around air, that should allow for optimal drying, short of installing an hot air oven, of course.

Posted with Blogsy - (c) Rudy Boeynaems 2012

Pavis style buildings

As the start of our Pavis campaign approaches, things start getting hectic. I made an inventory of my Glorantha Miniatures Pipeline. About 100 unprepped/semiprepped miniatures, 100 more prepped and based miniatures, and about 150 in various stages of progress. About 20 are more or less finished, but need that last bit of TLC, mostly a coat of dull varnish.

Another important part is terrain. We have been diligently casting hirst, and I hope to finish quite a bit of caves and caverns by next weekend, but we also need Pavis style buildings, including the test building on the picture here, but also temples, clan houses, all in a style somewhere in the middle of ancient greece, egypt, and Conan's Cimmeria.


A third project that is underway, is our Pavis campaign wiki, introducing Pavis, Prax, the protagonists, player characters, and a lot more. For copyright reasons, we decided to keep this wiki private, so we can share maps and snippets of pdf between players, but once the PC descriptions are finished, I'll post these on the hiording blog and tdm.

Posted with Blogsy - (c) Rudy Boeynaems 2012

Another hirst casting session

The result of 3 people casting hirst for an entire day (4 runs) is about 60 casts, working from 9 h30 until 15h30, not including cleanup. It's a lot of effort, but the yield is considerable, I have cast the caves 3 more times, and we did a lot of roman and egyptian stuff for Pavis style halls.

Posted with Blogsy - (c) Rudy Boeynaems 2012

Dark fury heading your way

Lance & Laser mistress race troll

The Lance & Laser mistress race trolls from Lance & Laser look great, sadly the same blueprint was used for all other troll races as well, all the L&L trolls have the long snout, even the trollkin.  In that respect Mad Knight Casting did a much better job making miniatures that look like the Troll Types Explored page in Trollpak.  Still, it's not a real problem, as so often more miniatures is a good thing, it means variety, and with about 30 trollkin you can't go wrong!

Quick and dirty miniature pictures

Pentax K-5, Pentax 100 mm f:4 macro lens

Here's the setup I use to be able to make a decent picture of a miniature within 3 minutes, 2 of which as needed for setting up and breaking up.

• DSLR on a tripod, which is standing ready, height adjusted, on top of my cabinet
  
• Macro 1:2 lens for close range, with manual focus
• Lightbox in foamboard with flocked baseplate and nice pic for background (these are changeable, just have the one background / baseplate at the moment though
• Focusing with 10x liveview for perfect sharpness
• White balance set to tungsten to compensate for cheap ass office yellow light
• Develop in lightroom, crop and watermark and voila!

 

Posted with Blogsy - (c) Rudy Boeynaems 2012

Another dark troll

Looking for a fight

And a view from the back

Here is another dark troll finished, next up are some Lance and Lasers I have to finish up, and then it's time for a bit of Mad Knight goodness, I think I'm gonna start with the cannibal cult.

Introducing Blogsy

I have purchased my first iPad 2 shortly after launch. Nowadays, I am a dedicated iPad user and I own a iPad3 which I have on my lap most of my free time: it is a great tool for chatting, browsing, reading fori, looking to pictures or listen to music. However, the one thing (there might be others) the iPad sucked at completely was blogging.

Theoretically, it should be a great tool for blogging. But it just wasn't, for lack of decent application. So far, I downloaded every blogging tool out there, but most didnot dothe job properly. The blogger app itself is the only one remotely working, if you know your way around html.

This is my first post using blogsy. The interface looks very promising, I hope the app lives up to it. At least you don't need to write html! The formatting options look first class, up to par with the blogger flash app.

 

Posted with Blogsy

Female troll about to split skulls

Otherworld troll, slightly altered face to resemble the Uz idiom

And another one from the back

This week I almost finished 7 miniatures, mostly trolls, but this is the only one I actually, completely finished -unless I briefly go back to it- including base flocking and retouching. I like the statures of the otherworld figures quite well, and since there is no thing like too many Uz, I bought the lot, and they are slowly getting painted, so I can finally start painting the brilliant Mad Knight Glorantha stuff that I started basing and prepping last week!

Posted with Blogsy - (c) Rudy Boeynaems 2012

Loz and Pete answering Elin Dalståls questions

The Authors of the new and acclaimed RuneQuest 6 rulebook answering questions about RQ6, Anathaym, and female stereotypes in the rpg hobby on the gamingaswomen blog.

Read the interview here

These are a few of my favourite things

On rpg.net today: What's your favourite things about Runequest 6?
I have a long list of favourites, but to mention the most important ones:

Streamlined character generation: it goes a lot faster now and players need no handholding
Finally the perfect approach to healing, both natural and magical!
Passive blocking: an answer to the question: where is that shield?
Special effects v2: a great system, now with maturity
Animism: the next step after the RAW and the S&P articles

There's a lot more I'm still discovering, and I'm gonna wait before writing a review until I have had the chance to really test all the new rules in a few sessions, but as you can tell I'm really happy with the new incarnation!

RuneQuest 6 released!

Yesterday morning the latest incarnation of RuneQuest 6 was released by The Design Mechanism. I have preordered the printed version and was able to download the pdf straight away. At first glance, the new rulebook looks tremendous. Very little errors found so far, excellent production, clean lay-out, a very readable tome it has become.

Upon further inspection, it becomes apparent that some chapters are very similar to MRQ 2, others have been completely rewritten. The most obvious novelty is the Magic chapter. The rulebook describes 5 magic systems, with new skills, allowing GMs to cater to every game world they want. The combat changes are less obvious, although the veteran will notice the new special effects, the next version of the Combat Manoeuvers introduced in MRQ 2.

But even in the chapters where changes are not immediately obvious, after through reading a lot of under the surface streamlining becomes apparent. One example is how character generation careers are no longer a complicated list of 5% and 10% increases,always a tedious moment during chargen, instead the player chooses 3 skills and distributes skill points, making matters a lot more simple.

Another example of increased ergonomy is the brilliant help sheet showing new players how to proceed, allowing the GM to handle other matters. Once I return home from holiday, I'll put the combat rules to the test, especially the optional miniature rules, but my first impression is positive: this looks like the RuneQuest version to rule all others!