The Occumancer of Caliburn Fell

"The Realm of Shadows is dark and shrouded in illusion. Most adventurers are lost forever in the mists before they ever reach their goal, never mind the risks of the Faceless, the Skald or Shadowserpents. For those with the knowing of it, though, there is one they can go to for guidance. He sees all. His eyeless vision pierces shadow and flame and madness equally. He will guide your steps  - for a price. He is the Occumancer and he can be found at Caliburn Fell."

Having built the Warscryer Citadel, my thoughts turned inevitably to who would dwell within it. The idea of the vast telescope suggested a seer of some description and a rifle through the bits box turned up some interesting stuff. the only major conversion was adding some grotty texture to the cloak with liquid greenstuff; the rest of it was largely cutting up and bashing a variety of different parts.

The painting was again very simple; lots of washes and shading. This left time for some fancy trim and checks to help with the overall John Blanche palette. I painted the base with trompe l'oeil flagstones which were tinted to match the brickwork of the scenery.

I'm rather happy with this chap as he fits with the scenery and helps sell the story of the Caliburn Fell.

Radagast the Brown

"Radagast is, of course, a worthy wizard, a master of shapes and changes of hue; and he has much lore of herbs and beasts, and birds are especially his friends."

-Gandalf the Grey, Fellowship of the Ring

"I don't understand why it's not working! It's not as if it's witchcraft! .... Oh, but it is. A dark and terrible magic..."

-Radagast, An Unexpected Journey

This was a little treat to myself a few months ago; a treat for two reasons. First because I wanted to complete my set of Middle Earth wizards and secondly because Sylvester McCoy is one of my favourite Doctors, so the chance to have a 28mm version of him was too good to pass up.

There's not a lot to say on this one, other than that I took one lesson from the Blanchitsu work I'd been doing -  a very light drybrush of white as the absolute final stage of painting . Here you can see it's helped bring out the detail of the cloak as well and slightly fading down all the colours and making the whole thing look lived in.

As an aside, we also had another game of Memoir 44. I occurs to me that all most people who've joined the blog have seen is the painting so you might not know where the title comes from.

These cards would be lovely if I had any troops in the centre at all.

There are five symbols on the dice. Would you like to guess what the symbol is that denotes a miss? Go on, have a guess. 

And that's where the title of the blog comes from.

Adventurers - Midlam and Oathsworn

So my main present from She Who Must Be Obeyed was a complete set of Vallejo Model Colour paints which she found, unused, second hand.

Either that or she mugged someone for it.

I've been using mainly Vallejo Game Colour paints for years, but the Model range gives a much more natural palette which will - I think - work better with where my style is at now. After packing the Young Ones off to bed and watching Doctor Who (which was wonderful) I cracked open the new paints and painted the Dwarf character played by She Who Must Be Obeyed in my Mid-Life Crisis D&D game. I also finished off the wizard for another of our players.

Oathsworn dwarf - Thor Lowkey





Midlam Miniatures Wizard




I was able to practise a few techniques I needed to brush up on - excuse the pun. Both cloaks were done with glazes and the stunty chap's armour was gone with a mixture of inks and washes. Skin was layering as per usual. The mud was a mixture of drybrushing and my Tamiya mud stick. Having got shots of them painted, I'm going to try to the Vallejo brush on varnish so that if they get wrecked at least I've got good shots.

All that's left for them is basing; I'm undecided between a wilderness or dungeon base. Any bright ideas, please drop 'em in the comments.

My big takeaway from this is that I need practise with eyes for display models. I will therefore use the Ramblers of Rohan as test pieces for a) a more muted colour scheme and b) eyes.

Paint Table Saturday

I get to use this again, as I've actually managed to paint on a Saturday:

So, what's on the table?

Well, first we have D&D. I'm painting miniatures for my players. Unfortunately, as it turns out, new players have a rather hackneyed visual of their characters. Our wizard player, for example, sent me this as reference:

My reaction was about as you'd imagine. Anyway, based on a recommendation from Edwin in the comments last month, I pootled over to Midlam Miniatures who furnished me with the last word in  bog standard wizardry.

The miniature is exceptionally crisply cast with a very fine cloak and a characterful face. He's been lovely to paint so far - I'll definitely shop with them again as some of their townfolk are excellent. They even popped me a couple of nice D6s in the box.

So here he is with basecoat and simple shading:

Hopefully I'll finish him tomorrow.

In second place on the table, my new major project. A while ago I mentioned that I'd scored a copy of Dwarf king's Hold with some rather lovely Mantic undead. I thought for a while about the paint scheme to use and eventually settled on doing something not naturalistic. As the game presents these as creatures being raised as the game goes on I though that something more ethereal might be in order.

A long time ago I developed a technique for my Cryx which gave an effect somewhat akin to the Army of the Dead from the Lord of the Rings movies which seems like a great opportunity to repurpose.

The trick of it is to use artists ink rather than painting ink as it gives a much greater depth. The actual process is simple: undercoat black then drybrush progressively from dark grey up to white. Then block in large areas with white. This gives your rather gleefully monochrome figures like so:

You then add a good green in wash which gives you this rather lovely effect|:

Finally, you block back in the white and add more green if required - that's for tomorrow.

Very simple, and hopefully very effective. So the rest of the undead will be on the table this week - marking permitting. I also have another session of D&D on friday, so I'll leave you with the photo I took today while thinking about what can dot the landscape:

Here be Dragons

This is part of a continuing strand of worldbuilding blogs for my nascent D&D 5th Edition game. If you're only here for the wargames, modelling and painting, feel free to skip on to the next entry. 

So, but considering money and British history, I have some details roughed out for how my world is going to work on a social level. But the big question remains - what about the dragons? This is really shorthand for how does magic effect the world.

Although, to be fair, dragons are pretty cool on their own.

On a metaphyscial level, D&D has always operated on the assumption that the world operates on normal physical laws with magic sort of laid over the top; it's easy to think of it in computer terms as being a back door that allows casters to hack the code of reality and do things that normal users can't. This is made more or less explicit in a little boxout in the 5th Edition PHB. I'm happy to work with this - after all, I want these new players to get a proper D&D experience.

So, how does magic work here? I'll cover this in a few sections.

Dragons

Ok, they're too big to ignore and they are pretty iconic, so we need to deal with them. I'm happy to have them as a sentient race - after all, I have a dragonborn cleric in the party. So let's deal with them on that basis. We know that we've got our Roman analogue elves in the backstory and they have a slave-based economy - which certainly fits with Fitz-Badger's comment under the last post about the Mirkwood influence; I can certainly imagine Thranduil putting the Dwarves to work. So that's how Dragons got here - dragon slaves were used as transport and heavy cavalry in much the same way that Claudius threw a few elephants into the British campaign. I also live the visual of ruined 'docking towers' dotting the landscape where the sky-triremes were once berthed as part of the Empire's trade routes. 

When the Fall came, some of them were left behind; and through some means that we can explore at another juncture this led to some form of interbreeding - probably some sort of cult, it usually is - which results in the dragonborn. There was probably a small number of dragons left behind which makes them rare and interesting. I'll fiddle around the edges of this concept to come up with a reason for wyverns - after all, what is my Wales analogue without a red dragon? - but this gives me a way to have them around but without taking the world too far from our basis.

Halflings and Gnomes

Yeah, I'm going to go with the Jewish Mediaeval model here. Not the purges and the discrimination - although that might produce some good story seeds if I decide to play that card - but by having them as dispersed populations without a homeland. They'll need some sort of service or goods that they can provide, analogous to the moneylending of the middle ages, but I might leave that until I've got a handle on religion. Whatever it is will be cultural rather than race-based as there's nothing in the PHB that jumps out at me as a big enough hook.

Magic Users

Yeah, this is the big one. I'll deal with clerics in another post as that requires me to get to grips with religion which is a bigger question than we have here.

The Wizard player has already mentioned in play the 'Head of [his] Order' so I know there must be more than one order of casters. Normally I could flail around for a while with that but the nice thing about working with D&D is that rules presuppose certain things about every setting. To whit:

• There are three types of arcane Spellcaster: Wizards, Sorcerers and Warlocks. So that's my orders sorted out.
• Magic items can be created - interestingly, in 5th, non-magic users can create certain potions if they are proficient in the apothecary skill. I see no reason why non-spellcasting smiths couldn't make magical weapons or armour - after all, if it's good enough for Mime in the Ring Cycle, it's good enough for me. 
• Teleportation Gates can be made permanent quite simply. This has, I think, a far reaching effect on the game world, unless it is strictly controlled. Thankfully, by skipping forward slightly in my pillaging from history, I can quite easily put in a method of social control for such power - I'll put it under the control of a Guild. I can't take full credit for this idea - after all, it's pretty much the same solution Frank Herbert came up with. 

So, for my world, I can quite comfortably add the following:

The Guild of Journeymen: controls teleportation gates in ever major city. Only Guild casters know the sigil keys for these gates and these are the main trade routes for major merchants. This had a brilliant knock on effect - it leaves the roads and rivers as the only routes affordable by minor merchants and so is ripe for smuggling and wilderness adventures. After all, if most of the King's taxes are collected at the Journeymen's Gate, he has no need to pay for expensive patrols on the roads out and about the place.

There will be three main orders of casters; the Witan (Wizards), with the name stolen from the Old English for 'to know'; the Trowe/Faithbreakers (the first being what they call themselves, as in true to Things with which they have made pacts, and the latter being the literal translation of Warlock); and finally the Scinlaecan (middle english for Sorceress). For this to work practically, we're looking at a Guild-type system again, a closed shop of magic users in which unapproved magic is frowned upon. I imagine some people employed by the Orders as witchfinders, whose job it is to find magic users and bring them 'in from the cold'. I can't imagine these being anything other than figures of fear, sweeping into villages and hauling away talented children. I've always preferred innocuous names for bad guys, so lets call them Gatherers.

Horror

I'm actually incapable of running a game without some horror elements. As I alluded to in the last post, I ran Call of Cthulhu for more years than I can comfortably count on a weekly basis. So, where can I slip in some horror? Well, we'll obviously have some Grendel-influenced trolls and other beasties in the fens and moors, but that's just a case of presentation rather than content. It's not Lovecraftian by any means.

Baked into the rules system of the Warlock is the idea of the pact with an Other - be it a fiend, an Old One or the Fey. But what is all magic was simply accessing the powers of unknowable Things From Before Time? What if, every time magic was used, the fabric of our current reality which keeps them at bay was weakened? And that pretty much gives me a cosmological reason to start introducing Arboleths, Beholders and Ithilids into the milieu. At some point, our Wizard will have to realise that every piffly little Magic Missile he casts brings the destruction of the entire world one step closer, until he realises that he has almost unlimited power but is too afraid to use it... And that's Lovecraftian horror.

That's pretty much it for the moment - the next couple of posts will be miniatures based while I wait for the next game session. By seeing how the characters play I'll gain a bit more cultural information about their races and classes.

As aways, let me know in the comments what you think and I'll nick the best ideas.

Interregnum - A Review of Dungeons and Dragons: The Lost Mines of Phandelvar

Just a quick note in two parts about my first go at running a roleplaying game in a decade.

Part the First: the game

The new edition of D&D is lovely. It's jettisoned a large amount of clutter from the rules; although it's kept that awful class and level system - although that does have a certain retro charm - the rest of it very much feels like a game that's taken  notice of the evolution of rulessets over the last twenty years.

The use of a D20 makes the odds very unpredictable - there's a huge amount of swing in combats and skills checks; the advantage mechanism - which is a bloody brilliant bit of design - mitigates this somewhat but I've added to that with allowing players to use Inspiration for rerolls.

And Inspiration - we're dealing with an edition of D&D which mechanically rewards players for playing their characters. We're through the looking glass, here.

The Lost Mines is an adventure that comes in the starter box. It's neat, well structured and has a good balance of set-pieces and sandbox freedom that is an excellent introduction to the concept of roleplaying for novices. I can imagine a new GM being a touch overwhelmed by it as I've already had to go quite fast and loose with some elements to make it flow. There is one encounter about halfway through that is going to kill any party that rushes in where angels fear to tread -- which I'm all in favour of.

Basically, if anyone is umm-ing and ahh-ing about buying this new edition, go for it. You won't be disappointed.

Part the Second: the play's the thing

So, we have 3 players. A female Religious Studies teacher; a male RS teacher; and a male IT Network Manager and Web Designer. Respectively, they created a Dwarf Fighter, a Dragonborn Cleric and a Human Wizard. As they hadn't had any RPGs under their belt before, I decided to give them the full experience and have them meet in a tavern.

It didn't go well.

The dwarf threw nuts at the head of the dragonborn; when the cleric went over to batter the 'shortarse runt', the wizard tripped him up -- with a crit, no less. Things went rapidly downhill from there.

I actually missed a trick here - I should have locked them all up and played it as The Usual Suspects; but alas I am rusty and missed the chance. Anyway, by an NPC resorting to bribery, I managed to get them escorting a wagonload of supplies up north.

They traveled for a day without speaking to each other.

They camped the night without speaking to each other (and didn't post a piquet - if that happens again I shall destroy them with a wandering beastie of some description).

The dwarf seems to be developing a drinking problem.

Thankfully, a goblin ambush provided something of a common enemy; party relationships were not helped by the fact that the wizard took out more than the Cleric who is operating under the assumption that he is an effective warrior - he's yet to see the Dwarf fighter go The Full Gimli.

Anyway, we left it where they were heading into the Goblin hideout in pursuit of that most noble of all adventurers - loot.

So basically it took them three hours to go from never having played D&D to breaking into someone's home to nick their stuff. I'd say that counts as a success, wouldn't you?

So my question is - I need some good miniatures for the characters. Any suggestions for the following (and you know I'm happy to convert and sculpt as required):

• A male human wizard, aged and bearded, robed, quarterstaff and with a pointy hat - no brim. 
• A male dwarf with a two-handed warhammer, slung shield and chainmail. Flagon of ale would be nice but not essential.
• A male dragonborn cleric in chainmail with a two-handed warhammer, slung shield. Wings would be nice but not a dealbreaker.

Any thoughts gratefully appreciated.

I promise I'll stop the D&D posts soon and get back to the wargaming - I have another WFB match coming up.