Transcript
So I haven’t been able to get out to hardly any tabletop, nerd, fantasy sci-fi conventions due to the normal roadblocks we all gotta deal with: work schedule, finances, et cetera, right? I did get to drag some of my sisters and my daughter to Origins Game Fair back in the summer and that was awesome. I’d really like to attend Adepticon or Nova Open some day and maybe even enter a painting contest just for fun. But you know, it’s good to have dreams, right?
But, a month or so ago, I got to take a genuine vacation, 10 whole days of actual carefree travel and time off and I went to visit my daughter in Minnesota for the first time. And this turned out to be one of the best trips I’ve ever taken. Mostly because of how much time I got to spend with my kiddo. But it also turned out to be like a convention shopping experience for yours truly, and when I got home with 15 lbs of loot, I thought I’d do one of these hobby haul slash travelogue video things and share all the fun stuff with you. Not just to spout off about all the cool merch I collected but also to just to share some of the things I learned about along the way in case it piques your interest too!
Intro
Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy where sometimes we do a mashup of tabletop travelogue, shopping spree and anecdotes. And we thank our patrons for partially supporting such a cool vacation – you, my friends, deserve some kind of award!
Side note before we get started – I had no idea I was going to make this video, so I did not take hardly any photos of anything remotely related to what we’re talking about today. Just to preemptively point out this particularly frustrating lack of visual aids.
I happened to hit Minnesota during one of it’s apparently rare set of great weather days, out of the week and a half that I was there, it only rained twice and I didn’t even have to wear a jacket most of the time. The trees were just starting to turn colors and it was pretty green and every neighborhood looked like what I call a movie set neighborhood. Cause out here in California, which is mostly a desert trying desperately to masquerade as something else, we just don’t have this kind of natural aesthetic.
But no place is perfect – and yes, I know I need to go back to experience Minnesota when it’s retreated beyond the wall and fight white walkers and wildlings – but one thing I pretty off-putting are the Minnesota freeway ramps. These things are a travesty of industrial design. In most other states I’ve been to, when you get on the freeway, you cruise up the onramp, you merge with traffic and you go on your way. Minnesotans apparently like to keep their drivers on their toes. Every single on ramp is paired with an off ramp, after which the right hand lane ends. Every single time. And the resulting merging zones are incredibly short, every single time.
I guess it’s a good thing Minnesotans seem relatively a bit more gracious in their driving etiquette, cause out here those ridiculously short cross merging enter/exit lanes would just be full of gun battle road rage all day long.
All right, I’m being silly but it was definitely a thing.
Okay, so on to the actual cool stuff. So one of the main activities my daughter had planned for us was attending the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, which is apparently the 2nd largest in the country, behind the big one in Texas. I like the whole Renfest scene but I typically don’t go to those out here because it’s usually 100 degrees and dusty AF. But the Minnesota Renfest runs for like two months and I was super lucky to go on a day after it had rained, so it was super nice walking around. And it’s a huge a space with permanent buildings, this section here is like 1/20th of the whole park.
So what kinda loot dropped for me at the Renfest? Well, the first thing I got – and don’t laugh, one day you’re gonna be older than dirt too and then we’ll see – but I got this stuff, Spicy Ice. If I’m walking or standing all day, my lower back will start to hurt. I’ve got a pretty rad pair of shoes that help with this but there’s only so much that can be done after 5 or 6 hours on my feet. So my daughter took me to this handmade soap shop where one of her friends worked and they gave me this stuff to try out. I thought, okay, holistic Icy Hot, this’ll probably smell good and not do much for the actual soreness in my back. Well, I bought two of these bottles after trying it out. It smells pretty fantastic, not like a sports medicine or old folks home, and it worked really well! I was very surprised. So, you know, I got some soap too, which also smells really good and I can attest works great too. The soap doesn’t smell super perfumey which I hate, it’s pretty mellow. Now, not every vendor at the Renfest has a website but Seventh Sojourn does. You’re welcome.
All right, next we came across a couple of pottery shops, but this guy and his partners had some of the most unique pieces in the park. Now I know you’re like “why am I watching this old guy talk about old people stuff? Pottery? C’mon!” All I can say is that these Winchester Pottery wares hit me on an artistic level. Even though they had like a series of designs, every piece in a series was still super organic and unique, cause it’s all done by hand and nothing is like stamped or templated. And of course there’s some kind of resonance going on with my appreciation of that book A Single Shard <snap>. Seeing their stuff just made me kinda want a new mug for daily use. I was having trouble choosing the exact one I wanted and my daughter pointed this one out and I knew it was the one. The subtle suggestion of the forest and the mountain and the colors, it was pretty unique and just spoke to me a little bit, it has a vibe, like you can kinda get lost in the illusion of depth, it’s just trippy. To me. And! Winchester Potter has a has an Etsy store. You’re welcome.
Now, we’re gonna get to the game and hobby stuff, but you know, the Renfest isn’t really where you’re gonna find a lot of that stuff, but they do have other unique vendors right? Like this place, which sells tea – and yes, I bought some decaf chai and some chocolate mint, cause I’m civilized and whimsical. But these dudes also sell all these flavors of olive oil and balsamic vinegar. When I spotted this espresso balsamic I was like, what the hell’s going on here? They gave me a sample and, well, it was pretty good. Like real good. Like drink it straight good. It’s a little bit sweet, it’s rich and the coffee is just kind of a solid hint. What? Whimsy, right? And Iron Ladle Kitchen has a dot com. You’re welcome.
Now this … this would have been spectacular back in my pot-smoking days – I’m sorry, cannabis intake days – I always wanted a Gandalf style church warden pipe, they are just cool. So I got this partially for my younger self and partially for what might become another video topic. We’ll leave it at that for now.
The last ting I got at the Renfest I found on the last day right as we were exiting the park for the final time. And this is an example of how the universe works and how we’re all part of the same fabric of things.
The first full day I was in Minneapolis was the first day we went to the Renfest. Because my daughter gets annual passes we could always go additional days if we wanted. But we didn’t go back unto the very last full day of my trip. Now I’ve been vaguely thinking for the past few months about picking up a tarot deck to use as a storytelling prompt system. There’s a ton of card-based writing prompt things out there and undoubtedly some use tarot decks or whatever, I just thought I might make my own like Runehammer has mentioned doing. So in the interim week between our Renfest visits I casually mentioned to my daughter that it’d be cool to find a place that sold tarot decks, like maybe a haunted bookstore or psychic alchemists shop or something. So we did a couple of quick google map searches while we were checking out Minneapolis and St. Paul but we didn’t look too hard and I wasn’t like fixated on it.
But then, on our way out of the Renfest on that last day, I saw this shop called Merlins Mind or something like that and I just poked my head in to see what it was selling. And yep, this shot was full of all kinds of magical and fantasy books and in the back corner, a whole display of tarot cards. I almost got this deck, Abigail Larson’s Dark Wood tarot, I follow her on Instagram and had seen the art for this come up in her feed. But there were lots of other decks and my daughter was stoked to find this one with art by Guilia Francesca Massaglia in the style of Alphonse Mucha, one of art nouveau’s preeminent art deco illustrators and one of my daughter’s favorite artists. And I love his stuff as well. So it was a no-brainer, that’s the deck I brought home. And there you go, the universe showing paths based on intent and desire. Or, you know, it was just a random coincidence.
So that wraps up the Renfest haul – but we’re just getting started! Gaming and other hobby stuff coming right up. But first, a bit of a weird side trip – my daughter’s friend invited us to go kayaking on a small lake that her parents live on the shore of. So, we did that and I have exactly zero pics of that excursion. But what I do have is a pretty fun idea for some fantasy demi-god lore that was born whole cloth out of a particular aspect of our kayaking adventure. We’re gonna go deep on that in a future video about writing and inspiration.
And on our way home from the lake we stopped in a little town called Excelsior that was holding a street fair thing for their apple festival. At least that’s what the sign said, but we couldn’t find a single apple, let alone like a slice of apple pie, which is what I wanted, in the whole place. What we did find, though, was this booth that sold artisanal maple syrups. Now I like me some 100% pure maple syrup, there is no substitute and anything with corn syrup is heresy and garbage and should be stricken from the record. Is real maple syrup expensive? Yes it is. Is it worth it? Yes it is. Quality over quantity – in most cases, mmm? My daughter picked some vanilla-infused syrup and I had to get this small batch oak whiskey barrel-aged syrup, which comes in a glass flask, c’mon! On another whim I also grabbed this shaker of Hickory Maple Sugar seasoning – it’s subtle and full of umami – look, chili powder, garlic, onion, hickory, cayenne – it’s good! And wouldn’t you know it, Matter’s Farm to Table has a website. You’re welcome.
All right, this is what you’ve probably been waiting for, the five of you that made it this far. Maybe it’s time for a beer. Or a shot of some espresso balsamic vinegar.
So my kiddo had a couple days of normal work – she’s an interior designer – so I had a couple of days to roam around on my own during normal business hours. And what do you s’pose was the first search term I put into Google Maps? That’s right, tabletop game stores near me.
Technically, my daughter and her boyfriend kickstarted my search with links to two stores, so I started with those. Now, right up front I gotta say, Minnesota kicks California’s ass as far as game stores go. Like Mike Tyson clobbering PeeWee Herman in fact. There are way more game stores and they are all 99% better than most of the Southern California game stores I’ve been to. In my opinion, the only shop I’ve been to that seems remotely on par with what you Minnesotans got is my closest local game store Lost Planet.
So my first introduction to the Minnesota game store scene was properly stupendous. It’s called The Source and its half comic book store, half board game store, half war-game store and half TTRPG store. Oh, and half game play area with really big tables. I was in this place for probably five hours over a couple of visits.
The first section I got lost in was the graphic novel stacks, which you kind of see first when you enter. They had a LOT of stuff. So I launched my initial scouting operation in as systematic a way as possible – I was determined to go down every aisle and inspect every shelf. I got out of the comics section pretty quick because, frankly, it was just overwhelming. I reached the skirmish game section and that was fairly well stocked with most of the bigger games, they even had a small Infinity display and that’s where I picked up my first bit of loot, the Dragon Lady. It’s just a cool mini I’ve had on several web-based favorite lists and she’s a pretty unique figure for a cyberpunk game, maybe even Stargrave.
Now when I got to the tabletop RPG section, which is a wall of floor to ceiling shelves that runs the length of the entire store, that’s where I realized something in a tactile way that I have really paid attention to. There is a LOT of rpg material out there. Which I know on a basic level, but seeing stuff online is different than being confronted with stacks and stacks of physical product. And I really liked how most of this stuff was published by companies other than the big brands.
Browsing in a physical book store or whatever definitely exposes one or rather increases the chances of new discoveries, at least for me. I like being able to pick up a new book and flip through it, that’s what will sell me on something a lot more than just a digital photo of a cover and a summary blurb of online text. The Source even had a specific section for indy and local creators, and that’s where I found this gem: Into the Wyrd and Wild! It’s basically a setting book for wilderness adventures, ostensibly based on 5e but written to be system agnostic. It’s full of creatures, magic items, locations, wilderness survival rules, factions and it’s just cool. I really like the format and find it very inspiring for how approach a couple projects I’ve got on the back burner.
I also picked up Blades in the Dark because the copy I’d ordered months ago never shipped from the online retailer I ordered from.
The Source also had the largest display of Reaper Bones figures and Dark Sword minis I’ve ever seen in one place. I don’t generally paint Reaper figures anymore – even though I’ve got quite a few metal ones still tucked away in the Pile of Opportunity – but I want to do a beginner painting tutorial specifically using Reaper Bones figures and so I grabbed a few for that proverbial rainy day.
There was also a small hobby tool and random things section and I picked up some angled tweezers and a bag of these slim little sanding sticks. I also saw these weird little packets of 3D printed grass and bushes and decided these bog myrtle things might fit the scale of this … uh … secret thing I’ve collected … for a future video … sssh!
And of course, what kind of nerd would I be if I didn’t grab some dice? Just to mark the occasion.
Now, on my way out I perused the final display cases and they had some interesting things behind the glass. Notably some sealed resin kits from Kingdom Death. If they’d had one I wanted, I’d for sure have liberated it from it’s glass shelf <indy swaps idol> but aside from that, I made one of the coolest discoveries of the whole trip. I noticed a black and white photo of a miniature I knew from YouTube – Miniac’s the Countess. I didn’t see any packages or boxes so assumed they were out of stock. But then I noticed some painted figures one shelf over and I again thought, huh, I think I recognize that one. And that one. And THAT one! Hey, wait a minute … yep, I finally noticed the giant plaques – two of my favorite mini-painting YouTubers had their stuff on display right here in The Source game store. Miniac and Ninjon!
And lemme tell you something. Seeing miniatures in person, without the psychological distortion properties of macro photography, really makes the skill and talent hit home. Like seriously. It’s a weird thing to realize that the macro close-ups on a 4k display or high resolution tablet kind of just don’t do a miniature justice in a weird way. Magnified brush strokes really belie the incredible work at scale when seen with the naked eye in person. I must have stared at those minis for twenty minutes. They were just super impressive and just ridiculously cool to see in person. So that was an unexpected treat.
I finally forced myself to leave that store and headed to the next stop: GameZenter. Which happens to be across a parking lot from the Asmodee headquarters. That was a trip when I noticed that building across from my rental car. Now GameZenter didn’t have nearly as much stuff as The Source, but they did have two things The Source did not: a huge sale going on and a full cafe complete with beer on tap. C’mon! I actually only picked up one item here, the original box of Rebel Commandos from Star Wars Legion, which I got for 30% off. I’d always wanted a box of these guys, but not for Legion, I’m not really interested in Star Wars games but these guys will be perfect for Stargrave.
The following day I decided to do a quick search for a new term, just to see what it brought up. “Scale model hobby shop” brought up one store that wasn’t a chain like Hobby Lobby and it’s called, of all things, Scale Model Supplies. And it’s exactly what I thought it would be. It’s in a basement, it’s huge, and it’s full of 1970s decor. It’s full of model trains and terrain and of course plastic model kits and paint lines like Tester’s and Humbrol enamels. It’s got a huge selection of Woodland Scenics products, tons of WWII kits and car kits and planes and ships and weird sci-fi and Gundam kits. It was cool, but all I picked up there were these three sheets of styrene for scratch building.
My daughter and I had a sight-seeing stop planned for the Mall of America cause … well, you know, the Lego store, duh. Which turned out to be the most fully stocked Lego store I’ve ever been too. And I’ve been to a lot of Lego stores. It was kind of stunning to see just how many different Lego sets they had available. But that’s not the point of this little detour. Whiling away some of those business day hours, I happened to punch Lego into Google Maps just to see geographically where the Mall of American was and a second blip popped up on the radar, some place called Brickmania. Lego-curious and with time to just relax and chill – I told you, best vacation ever – I hit that Direction button and followed the blue line to see what Brickmania was all about.
Which, it turns out, is kind of insane. I realized once I was in the store that I had seen their booths at various Lego conventions. But I was not prepared for their main location. They create and sell premium packaged third party Lego sets consisting of genuine Lego parts and custom designed instructions for builds spanning the entire historical era of mechanized warfare. They print their own blank Lego pieces with the same resin process that the Lego company uses, so their stuff is indistinguishable from printed OEM Lego parts. They also print custom designed minifigures!
I mean, look at this stuff! It’s nuts. And they have at least 20 display cases like this one chock full of WWI, WWII and modern military vehicles, tanks, planes and helicopters, et cetera. It’s crazy. I didn’t get a pic of this display case, but they had the entire fleet of Fury Road vehicles all built out of Lego.
One thing I will say is that the prices for their kits seem pretty exorbitant, unfortunately, but I’ve never purchased one of their kits so I don’t really know what you’re getting for all those ducats. But! At the back of the store they had a bunch of game tables set up and I found this! Their own original skirmish game! They’ve written a rule set based around tiny Lego tanks. Tanks aren’t necessarily something I really into, but the idea that it’s all about little Lego builds, I couldn’t resist. I picked up both booklets, the first of which has the core rule set, which fills up exactly 2 pages, super straight forward and simple, and then there are like 30 pages of build instructions for various micro tanks from a bunch of different countries. The second book offers expanded rules with things like weather and terrain and updated points values for the armies. These little tanks use a lot of standard Lego parts and are probably easy to build out of anyone’s existing Lego collections. It’s just cool and creative. I mean, it’s a game about blowing stuff up, but … I guess most of our games are, right?
And this is giving me some ideas for future projects – like, maybe we could come up with some expanded rules of our own that allow for crazier fantasy or sci-fi Lego builds. Mmm, I might have crack open the Lego Pile of Opportunity pretty soon.
Okay, on another day I looked up more tabletop game stores and I found this absolute gem of a shop – Tower Games. This place gives The Source a run for the ducats and I’d go so far as to say that these two meccas of hobby madness tied for first place in my book. Tower Games is physically much smaller than The Source, but they don’t deal in comics and the way it’s set up, run and stocked makes it very competitive. It’s super well-organized, spic-and-span clean and thoroughly packed with stuff. It was almost like being inside a miniature when compared to the bigger stores, and maybe that’s why I liked it so much. They even had bathrooms and miniature shopping baskets.
So, let’s see what Tower Games seduced me into buying. I got this Pirate Borg book off their RPG shelf, it just called to me. I don’t have Mork Borg but perusing this book in the aisle I was just taken by the ship combat rules and all the other pirate-themed stuff in it, it looks very cool and seems easily portable to any other system. And I dig the interior design in this little book, which is weird because one of the reasons I haven’t picked up Mork Borg is I find the interior visual chaos a little bit off-putting, kinda hard to read – for me – and not exactly pleasing aesthetically – again, to me. It’s like 80% there, but I can’t quite get into it. But Pirate Borg, I don’t know, I kinda dig it.
Now this hot pink thing was hard to miss and I had to check it out, thinking it was gonna be something I quickly put back. But just flipping through it, I quickly grew eager to give it a good read. I like the idea of crazy Victorian or medieval fantasy city slash urban crawls and “Into The Cess and Citadel” looks like it’s gonna be a great adventure-building and idea resource. Again, there’s very little chance I would have ever come across this online. And, I must confess, I’m really digging the print and binding quality of these digest-sized hardbacks, they feel really satisfying to hold in the hand and the little ribbon bookmarks, they’re just cool. I almost bought the Old School Essentials book purely out of digging the physical book design. But I reined myself in. You gotta maintain some sense of purpose and intent when shopping, otherwise you end up with too much fruit that goes bad before you can eat it. <grin>
Across from the RPG shelves were multiple shelves of Green Stuff World products and racks of Gamers Grass, one of my favorite tuft manufacturers. I grabbed a bunch of these weird color tufts and some tall brown grass to reinforce the Pile of Opportunity Terrain Edition and I picked up this weird little silicone mold from GSW. It’s for making little random sci-fi control panels and it occurred to me that some of that transparent UV resin might produce some interesting little parts with some interesting possibilities as far as painting and practical lighting might go. So, we’ll mess with these in the future too. And hey, twenty resin tombstones? Yes please.
On the GSW rack, I also found these, Monument Hobbies Synthetic Pro brushes. They also had the full paint rack of Pro-Acryl colors and Duncan’s Two Thin Coats paint line, neither of which I’ve seen in a store before. I’ve heard a lot of good things about these synthetic brushes, which I find hard to believe, so I was stoked to be able to just pick up a couple in person to try out – trying out new brushes is one of my favorite things to do, I don’t know why. But with these being the same price as Rosemary & Co series 8 Kolinsky sables, I’m remaining skeptical. But still, it’s gonna be fun to try ‘em out.
Next, the Games Workshop shelves, where they had a lot of, well, everything. Including these three sets I’d never seen. Hey, GW produces way too much stuff for me to keep up with, c’mon. This Aqualith terrain kit looks pretty epic and also like something I could not replicate without spending a ton of labor on. So this’ll be pretty fun to slap down on a table at some point.
Now these two sets really caught my eye. Tell me these crazy giant flea-riding guys don’t smack of something Dark Crystal flavor-wise, right? That’s the vibe I got anyway. And these Nomads are just cool, they really don’t look like anything else GW has made recently. Both of these sets kinda fell into this vague game idea I’ve had on the back burner simmering for a while … but, you know the first rule of idea execution is you don’t talk about your ideas, lest you the magic smoke out and run outta fuel. Hm? Yeah, you know what I’m talking about.
All right, to wrap this trip up, I decided one day to google book stores, just to see. As terrible as it is, I have very few book stores in my area, which is pretty lame. After visiting this tiny little pulp bookshop called Once Upon A Crime – which indeed carried only mysteries and crime novels – I hit up a chain that we don’t have out here called Half Off books. Pretty straightforward and pretty large. I got a couple of Saga graphic novels – yes, I’m way behind – and Critical Role’s Vox Machina Origins because it was cheap. I also got this blu ray of The Revenant, which I haven’t seen since I saw it in the theater. And it costs more to rent from a streaming service. Hey, Lubezki shot this flick almost entirely at magic hour, it’s a feat of cinematography if nothing else.
And the last store my daughter took me to defies explanation. It’s called the Axe Man or Axe Man surplus, something like that. It’s the Axe Man. I don’t really have words for it. But if you’re ever in the area, you should probably check it out, just to experience it. It is a surplus store, it’s got piles and piles and piles of the weirdest stuff, from electronics to glass bottles to … I don’t even know. I can’t describe everything that was in there. But one thing to check out for sure are all the item signs, they are hilarious and worth the trip alone. I’m so disappointed I didn’t take any pictures in there.
But I got this weird tray for carrying hobby stuff or whatever and a tiny cutting mat, I didn’t know they made ‘em this small. And they had stacks of every size of cutting mat for like 75% less than Amazon prices. No joke, if I could have got them on the plane home, I would have bought at least four of the big 36” mats. Anyway, the Axe Man. Go there with a pickup truck.
Well, that about wraps it up, dear viewers, a legacy of exploration and consumerism archived on YouTube for posterity. Buying stuff isn’t what made my trip fun for me – that’s all fleeting dopamine hits. The real trip was all the time I got to spend with my daughter and all the new stuff I got to see and experience. And taking a bunch of days to just not think about other life stuff. It’s real good to have a break – I think Europeans have a handle on this concept that we Americans just shy away from.
So, if you can, take a vacation. That probably sounds like a dick thing to say, I get it. But even if you just give yourself permission to spend a single hour not worrying about the future or bemoaning the past, that can be one of the best hours you ever spend.
Cause remember, someday we ain’t gonna be here. Enjoy the trip when you can.
See ya!