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Speed Painting My First KILL TEAM, Ork Kommandos!

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Transcript

Killer Klowns From Outer Space. That’s the name of my first kill team, there’s just no way around it. 

INTRO

Yes, I’m late to the game as always. I haven’t played Warhammer or 40K since 1996 and the same buddy I gamed with back then decided to join me in checking out the current version of Kill Team. Because skirmish just fits the bill over having to buy and paint up 24 square feet worth of miniatures. When I first saw this Octarius box set I knew I kind of wanted to paint up those orc commandos. They just looked cool and I thought Hoffman, with his love of all things World War II and World War I, would probably dig that Krieg unit. 

Is it weird that as a species we tend to make hobbies out of generally horrific things? Just a musing.

Anyway, we agreed to split the cheaper version of the Octarius box and get to painting, so I embarked upon what I think is my biggest speed painting project to date, comprising a total of 12 miniatures. Just cleaning mold lines and assembly took a week of hobby time.

Knowing the classic orc skin tone is green I thought I’d try one of the classic bits of YouTube advice and spray the underside of the minis with an opposite color during the zenithal process, so I went in with some purple ink. The sculpts are very cool and loaded with detail. 

Now detail is awesome and I love it – until I have to paint all of it. But my favorite figures on this team are probably the Squig and the Grot – or, you know, the goblin – with his little grappling hook and diving fins. Like, what the hell does he have diving fins for?

There was one thing I had to do that was kind of unavoidable, and I dislike doing this thing but, well, at least I only had to do it for four of the 12. That thing is: Subassemblies. A few of these guys with the bigger guns just would have been too hard to paint when fully assembled so I gave in and put the subassemblies on their own paint stands. Hoffman just laughed at me cause I think he painted 9 out of his 10 puny Krieg dudes in subassemblies. Yes, I was aghast as well.

My plan for the color scheme had exactly one bullet point: orange shirts. Nope I don’t know why, I just wanted them to be bright, I think. OK I had three bullet points: orange shirts, oil wash, metallic chipping. So to start off I’m throwing down the first skin color. I kind of wanted to do these guys entirely with the Vallejo Xpress colors, but I did end up having to throw in some Citadel contrast paint. Vallejo announced their second batch of Xpress colors which introduces quite a few more hues but as of this paint project, I couldn’t find them anywhere. But anyway, they have a good orange for the shirts so onward we go. 

So the first guy I splashed up with this Xpress green called orc flesh – I mean it’s printed right there on the tin, right, so we got to try it and even though I tell myself I’m speed painting I’m kind of not because I’m still trying all this time to color inside the lines.

Whatever, leave me alone. Transparent paints a pain the behind sometimes.

I like to vary skin tones in units, so I always planned to do different tones on these guys. Plus I’m still learning these Xpress colors so I put on the Snake Green which turned out to be much bluer than I expected but that’s great. It’s a cool color and he’s a cool orc.  

Now for the orange shirt, the main event! Initially I mixed the Xpress orange with Xpress medium thinking I might build up some shadows but the orange was not dense enough for speed painting, so I eventually just went full strength with it. Now I’m still figuring out the overall scheme on these two prototypes and I thought I should get some grungy color on these guys somewhere but this is where the Xpress line falls way short. They just don’t have any colors like this Ratling Grime, so a Citadel we go.

Then of course we gotta separate the boots from the pants so I used the Xpress colors Black Lotus, which is obviously blue. Yes, I know I could’ve mixed shades to get a certain color but that’s against the speed painting rules and you know we are 100% law-abiding citizens on this channel! 

At this point I am becoming very aware of the rising clown suit meter so I’m like hey, some good old fashion OD green will ground these guys, c’mon! So the backpacks they’ve apparently looted from an army surplus cargo boat off the event horizon of some sad imperial guard vacation planet somewhere, one size fits all – they’re getting the olive drab treatment. Which, in point of fact, is a mixed color.

And there’s our first two guys with what is now the official paint scheme. Nothing clown-y about them at all right? What are you talking about? <insert killer clown clip>

So now for blocking in detail bits. They’ve all got these LBE style straps and belts and at first I thought: ooh leather! But brown just gets all muddled in the orange shirt so next I tried black to be more contrasty except I didn’t want to just go straight black, I thought a dark gray would be the ticket. This Sooty Black ink is great but for this, I wanted more coverage quicker so out comes the classic Basilicanum Gray contrast paint.

Side-by-side, I think most would agree the gray black is superior to the brown, so I corrected <insert shining clip> the blue orc’s poor fashion choice. 

Time to base the metal parts in typical black. I plan to highlight some of this with some Vallejo steel to show that it’s metal but since the Xpress line doesn’t have a true black or even a dark gray, we must again go with a typical Citadel contrast black like Black Legion or Black Templar.

I really enjoyed the metallic chipping on the red gun casings on those Infinity figures I painted a while back <snap> and I for sure wanted to do that again with these guys, with the added bonus of all their grenades.

So is there a color I haven’t used yet? Oh yes I’ve missed one of the primary colors! You’re only a half assed clown if you ain’t wearing, at the bare minimum, all the primaries, c’mon!

I like the hue of this Vallejo Xpress yellow a bit more than Citadels Bad Moon yellow. It’s a tad bit warmer or less green in comparison. Oh, don’t worry I’m gonna use the Bad Moon yellow too, you’ll see. When I saw these big axes and some of the metal facemasks on these guys, I thought metallic chipped yellow would be awesome so the axes get the yellow and also the incendiary heads of the potato masher grenades.

Now somehow, in all of my four hours worth of recorded clips, I failed to capture the first time I painted a bed roll fluorescent pink, which is a shame because I feel that is the moment true insanity set in. But all you get is the bed roll strap painting. You’re welcome. For some reason pink bedrolls really just made me laugh, I kept thinking of these guys stealing a cargo container bound for Kmart and cracking it open to find it full of hot pink sleeping bags.

Here’s you can see the Bad Moon yellow vs the Xpress yellow I like the Xpress color better in this particular case.

And here are the first couple of clowns. Game on!

Now I thought I might try to warm up the hands on this guy, put a little blood under the skin, et cetera, right, you’ve seen lotsa people do that on their orcs, but silly me, putting transparent yellow over blue was always gonna make green. And yeah, it IS fun being me sometimes. 

I went for a third green on the next guy’s skin tone and I kinda started painting them in pairs so I could change up the skin tone with each batch. 

This guy I thought would have a blue grenade because I hadn’t used quite the entire rainbow yet and I’m nothing if not a completionist. 

Oh and there’s leather wraps for some stuff so those get Xpress Color copper brown.

Here’s the first subassembly, the rocket launcher and even though I really dislike painting in subassemblies – 100% because of the post-painting, pain in the ass assembly factor – but as far as the actual painting in subassemblies goes, well that’s why you do it, right? So you can easily paint a figure without huge pieces in the way of other pieces.

Red and white rockets was the plan all along and there are hoses and cables and metal boxes and fins and just all kinds of detail. Which again looks fantastic but holy cow is taking a long long time to paint, speedy or otherwise. I mean, look – this guy’s back pack has exactly two big old bullets on it, so of course those have to picked out in a different color. Sheesh.

More yellow is always a good idea, I say, so got cables, got yellow!

And the white rocket heads – if I was a good painter I’d probably do the little checkerboard stripe thing on these but, well, you can see the answer to that question right here.

Squig time! I’m painting him with these three colors just like I would a torch or flame element. Cause all red clearly just ain’t rainbow enough. The straps get a greenish gray, I don’t know why, and then all the bits that are gonna be red metal have to be touched up with the pale gray for the transparency issue. 

He’s got a mouthful of grenades so they have to be blue. I suppose they’re phosphorus grenades. I also think the phrase “mouthful of grenades” should be on a t-shirt.

A squig’s teeth are a major feature of its face, but they’re reminding me that a lot of the orcs have teeth and fingernails I haven’t painted yet. Double sheesh. A quick bit with the light sand paint and then some army painter wash to dirty them up and we’ll call ‘em done.

I painted his wire cable thing in the Citadel Bad Moon yellow because it has that different tint to make it stick out a little bit from the yellow I used on the overall skin.

And the grot! Of the two available heads to choose, I had to pick the scuba mask cause that’s the correct choice, duh. I mean, this little guy’s running around in a wet suit with a grappling hook, like what the hell is going on with this guy! He’s just too cute. I want a Warhammer TV animated series about just this one fellow right here. It’d be fun to write up a little short story for him, he’s so goofy. And what he does on the battlefield is pure comedy, but we’ll chat about that in a later episode.

So he’s got a candy blue wet suit, hey, he likes bright colors – but he’s gotta show team spirit so he’s got himself some orange gloves and orange flippers. And he’s got the standard issue backpack with the OD green but then he’s also nabbed himself a child’s size neon pink bedroll. And there he is, proudly as clown-y as his orc commando buddies.

The big boss is the last dude in the line, even though there’s still a lot to do. I mixed up the light green and the blue green for his flesh, which makes a pretty typical orcish green. His arm is Frankensteined into his cyber claw thing so a little brown to mix up some dead flesh color might work.

I wrestled a lot with deciding where to put the orange on his coat – inside liner vs outside shell. I went back and forth quite a bit, but in the end the flipped collar sold me on the liner being orange. And we’re not gonna mention that it’s a halloween coat now either, just keep that to yourself.

He gets red for all the metal box and casing bits and yellow for the main attraction. And of course he’s gotta have some blue – I mean, where’d all the other commandos get the idea to go full clown suit in the first place, right? That’s right, the director influences the tone of the entire set.

Before doing the last few steps, I had to assemble the subassemblies and this is why I just don’t like doing this whenever possible. The rocket launcher was an easier one to do because it only had one arm in the subassembly. 

And this little piece I almost forgot, but it’s too cool to not put on, so I just slapped the raw plastic with some black paint.

The flamer guy gave me huge problems going together, I should have left one of his arms off but well, gotta deal with it now. This is me fixing the kludgy glue joint that I messed with for like 20 minutes just to get the arms to sit right.

For the base base coats, I grabbed some of this hi-flow golden paint to cover them cause I have these bottles just laying around and hardly use them, so there you go.

Vallejo Metal Color steel is my dark silver metallic paint of choice and while I was mostly just gonna highlight the black metal bits, on the flamer barrel specifically I put a full coat of it so I could try out doing that metal heating effect in a bit.

And now we embark on a step that took a long time and was ridiculously tedious and is definitely not a part of speed painting – until we say it is of course. Metal chipping using that Vallejo metal colors steel and exhaust manifold which is a brighter, slightly warmer metallic. And that exhaust manifold on the yellow is absolutely producing the effect i was hoping for. I really dig it!  

Now the heat rainbow on the flamer, just for fun – are you a clown if you ain’t got a rainbow somewhere? Probably not, you’re just a poser.

Doing all the chipping on these figures took at least three hobby sessions but I didn’t record any more of it, cause it’s all the same technique applied everywhere.

I slapped some brighter desert color on the bases just before the oil wash, figuring I’ll dry brush the bases later.

And finally oil wash time! Typical mix of brown and black and I used a straight brown wash on the yellow bits. 

After letting them sit for 30 minutes I went back in for the wiping off stage and I’m officially unhappy with my technique. Somehow I’ve got to figure out how to do a reverse dry brush with this stuff, because I end up wiping off most of the wash from recesses that I want to hold it and it’s just … frustrating.  

I added some drybrushing and tufts to the bases before matte coating everything and then went back in with the metal colors to brighten up the chipping here and there. And there we go, a full Kill Team speed painted in the same amount of time a real painter would have painted up a fully non-speed painted squad. All in all they’re fine, I’m glad they’re done, but I certainly would like to paint some of these guys with a full attention to detail and not speed painting. But you know it is what it is. Hoffman and I played Kill Team and I have thoughts on it. Again, we’ll address those in a future video. I do dig the Grot tho, he’s just gotta be my favorite. He needs a name, for sure. 

Well, anyway, I guess another project down, that feels good. So, go finish something, you can feel good too!

See ya!

The Voice In Our Heads That Wants Us To FAIL!

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Transcript

All these YouTube videos cover the same topic. All these painted miniatures feature the same sculpt. These movies tell essentially the same story. These illustrations are of the same literary character …

There’s so much content out there, most of it regurgitating or dealing with the same topics, so why bother even trying to make something? It’s all been done before, thousands of times, right? 

Right. No arguing that. But guess what? That ain’t no excuse. Let’s talk about it.

INTRO

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we specifically discuss the general thing that drives most creative endeavors. And we specifically thank our patrons for their general and much appreciated support!

The other day, my friend talked to a therapist and he came away with this one nugget that fascinated him. Which he told me about and I was subsequently intrigued. The therapist had simply pointed out that “no one knows what’s inside your head.” And I think that’s a true statement. As much as we all like to fret about how others are going react to us or something we made, we gotta admit that we are just making shit up.

We’re good at that. We’re human after all, and there are some things we just excel at. But this fact that no one outside of our own brain knows what we’re thinking or what we’re feeling is a good thing to remember. You might have a mini you painted or a story you’ve written or an RPG adventure you’ve created, any number of things, and you can see all the flaws and things you don’t like about that thing you’ve made and it’s real easy to assume those are all the things everyone else is going to fixate on. Because that’s what YOU fixate on.

And that’s one part of this whole idea we’re chatting about today. But another, and really the part I’m most interested in – today – is the notion that your aesthetic is YOUR aesthetic. Which makes it by definition “unique”. Now, there will always be some similarities and evidence of whatever’s influenced us or general influences we share with other humans, of course. But at the very least, all the little microdecisions you make concerning a creative project are going to add up to something that’s more “you” than you might feel like.

Something else that adds to the uniqueness of your aesthetic is your perspective. Only you occupy your plot point in space and time. And only you have experienced your experiences through your mental and physical filter system. So only you are in possession of your perspective. In a theoretical exercise, it doesn’t matter if a hundred people are shown the same reference and given the same instructions, none of the hundred results are going to be exactly the same. We’re referring to artistic exercises here, not math or logic exercises.

It’s real easy to tell yourself there’s no reason to try and do something. I know from vast experience that this is a fact. And it’s just kinda too easy, right? I mean, to not do something is often the easiest thing in the world. It’s almost like someone designed a genius trap for all of us to fall into. In fact, it kinda irks me when I think real hard about it. But it could just be one of those things on the obstacle course, intended to test us and weed out the weak.

Don’t take offense, we’re all weak sometimes, it’s just part of the nature of the game we’ve been dropped into.

Regardless of whatever else it is, it’s a thing. But it’s a thing made out of gossamer. It’s a thing like a mirage is a thing, like heat haze or something. We gotta roll Perception to see through the illusion.

But back to the main idea, which is all about how your aesthetic – your sense of artistic taste – is yours alone and it’s unique to you. Which has ramifications.

Let’s say you wanna make a YouTube video about you playing Minecraft. But you look at the sheer number of Minecraft Let’s Plays on YouTube and realize that number is nothing short of staggering. How could you possibly create something new and interesting that hasn’t been done before? Why would people watch YOUR video when there are literally a million others they’ve already watched or could watch.

First, those questions can’t really be answered by you. Because you don’t have enough data INSIDE your head to make that deduction. We’ll feel like we have enough data, but that’s an illusion, a spell spun up by our own minds. Second, you don’t have any idea how people might react to a video you made because, again, you don’t have enough data to make that deduction. But your brain is expert at making you THINK you have enough data.

Huh … this is making the human mind sound an awful lot like AI. Everyone’s freaking out because AI generates false information during a query and presents it as true, and it sounds very convincing … and it sounds just like what we’re talking about our brains doing to ourselves. Uh-huh. Sorry, that literally just occurred to me and it’s kinda … tripping me out.

Okay, let’s back away from the rabbit hole. 

Third, let’s say you hit on an idea you think is brand new and unique and people will love it. Again, you can’t possibly know – with absolute certainty – that people will react the way you think they will. You may have an intuition, you may have market research, but hey, people with a lotta money and lotta market research still made this. And this.  And this.

Let’s look at another niche – movie directors. Anyone can direct or attempt to direct a movie. Obviously having some experience will go a long way toward getting you hired, but if a producer has a script and is looking to hire a director, how do you think they choose from the thousands of possible candidates out there? That’s right, they gravitate toward a director whose aesthetic they like. I mean, is David Fincher a better director than Sofia Coppola? Not really, they just have different aesthetics. 

Somebody’s gonna take issue with that comparison. But I stand by it.

Of course there are other factors involved in someone being hired to do something, like availability and cost and other things. But if those things were all equal, all that’s left to base a decision on is aesthetic.

And what is aesthetic if not a product of all the minor – and major – decisions a person makes in a creative production? Every decision, no matter how small, affects the overall final product in some way. And the sum of those parts adds up to something unique and personal.

Even if you’re gonna paint up your space marine kill team just like the box art – which is still a personal, aesthetic choice – that kill team is YOUR kill team.

Let’s say you’re gonna run one of D&D’s published hardback adventures. That title has sold a lotta copies. So what? Your sessions aren’t gonna be the same as any other Dungeon Master who’s running that game, even if it were for the same players. 

So what does all this mean? What are ya gettin’ at, weirdo? I hear you in the back.

Never let your internal voice talk you down from just doing something. Or just sharing something you’ve made. Yes, I am saying do as I say and not as I do. But I’m trying, dammit. I mean, c’mon, everyone shares everything anyway, join the herd! Sure, sometimes people are gonna see things you make in somewhat the same way you do, but it’s rare someone else is going to notice the exact same things you do. Keep in mind, this goes for both “good” and “bad” things. This is where you get to learn and grow. Learning from criticism is self-explanatory, but learning from compliments is historically underrated.

Part of that is the human tendency to focus on criticism and ignore compliments, but pay attention to what people like about something you’ve made. You can use that information to help guide your creative decisions too – and you can lean into or away from stuff like that as well. And you can always ignore whatever you want to ignore. But the bottom line is, that voice in your head telling you that no one’s going to like your stuff, that doing this thing is impossible, it’s just a voice in your head. It doesn’t know anything more than you do. Cause it is you.

So, go make something and share it. You never know what the reaction might be! 

See ya!

Silver Bayonet Saga Chapter Two (a Narrative Battle Report)!

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Transcript

THE RUINED CHAPEL

EXT. WOODS – DAY

A muddy, still stream. A staff breaks the surface, plunging down slowly to check the depth.

Jolanda Scaletta stands at the edge of the brackish water crossing her path. Her dipped staff suggests the water isn’t too deep. She lifts her already-muddy skirts, but hesitates, scanning her surroundings, the woods, with a frown.

Vermont Escoffier steps into frame, her studied look causing him to survey the woods himself. 

Vermont: “Something ahead? Claude’s out there somewhere.”

Still fixed on the woods, Jolanda replies softly, “Running water offers protection, no? Standing water may do the same, but not for us.”

Vermont glances sideways at her.

CUT TO:

Muddy boots trudging through the undergrowth, two pairs.

Infantryman Baptiste grunts, surly, hefting his musket over his shoulder on its strap and yanking a leather-wrapped canteen from his belt. “That bastard scout’s gone and got his lost again, I know it.”

Before he can sip, the canteen is snatched from his hand, grenadier Brielle hefts it with a grin, swigs from it. “Claude only got us lost once. You, on the other hand, didn’t know the map was upside down.” She grins, then pushes deeper into the trees.

Baptiste snarls, “That’s my -” and cuts himself off as the canteen flies back at him from the trees.

CUT TO:

Felice, moving slowly through the bracken, every sound, every twig crack, every squirrel squirreling through the forest, making her twitch, nervous eyes darting here, there, to the side and back. 

CLOSE UP: her hands white knuckling her musket.

A gloved hand lands on her shoulder and a beaked plague mask enters frame; it’s hanging around Gaspar Gagneux’s neck.

Gaspar: We’re all here together, remember?

Felice nods shakily.

A small creak from up head draws her attention, and she hisses, raising the musket, the barrel trembling, and from the woods a harsh whisper calls, “It’s Claude, uh, just, you know, don’t fire up on me.”

CLOSE UP: a gloved hand thumbs the hammer of a holstered pistol carefully back down. Tilt up to reveal Gaspar’s silent relief.

POV: sighting down the barrel of the musket. Gaspar’s gloved hand gently pushes the barrel down out of frame, revealing a blue-coated Claude emerging from the trees.

CUT TO:

The warband huddles together with Claude and Ottilie at the center.

Claude: We’re very close. The old walking path lies just yonder.

Ottilie looks skyward.

HER POV: the sun shining through breaks in swaying branches

Ottilie: Mid-morning. This is good. We need to be on our way back to the regiment by nightfall.

“Is this the rally point then?” asks Claude.

Jolanda points across the stream of stagnant water behind them. “On the other side of the stream if you please.”

Ottilie sizes her up and nods. “So be it. We don’t know exactly what we’re looking for, but we’ll probably know when we find it.”

Baptiste grunts. “So it’s true, then, we be grave-robbing today?”

Brielle snorts. “You’ve been robbing graves since you were nigh-high as a weasel or I’m a three-legged sow.”

Ottillie looks at Baptiste: “The old records say there was a cemetery. You, however, will be robbing any nightmares of the chance to murder us, aye?”

Baptist grunts again.

Ottilie looks at her troops. “Felice, Baptiste with me, eyes open, soul shielded.”

The warband replies in unison: “Mind clear. Powder dry.”

Craning up: the warband disburses into the trees, camera tilting down to the ribbon of still water below.

CUT TO:

Low angle, half-buried cobblestone. A boot steps into frame. TILT UP, reveal Claude creeping forward along an overgrown path. 

REVERSE ANGLE: ahead of him, some sort of stone arch choked by creeping vines, rusty black iron hanging in some facsimile of a once-proud gate.

He drops to a knee, swinging up that great musket with the brass tubular sight. Something beyond has captured his attention. The trees have thickened, here shadows threatening to swallow the whole forest.

Claude sights down the barrel and murmurs, “What do we have here? Another party we weren’t invited to? I’d say that sounds about right.”

Confusion crosses his face, followed by a slow horror. He’s lowering the gun, rising backwards, then turning and running.

INTRO

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes it’s Chapter Two in an on-going narrative skirmish game series! And you might think that’s a weird way to phrase that since this is technically our first Chapter Two, but over time, there’s bound to be more!

And we thank our patrons for their monthly support, which goes quite a ways in both a material and spiritual sense!

Ah and if you’re new to the channel, you can see Chapter One of this saga, right here. <snap>

So we’ll get right into it, shall we? Well, let me preface this one with a couple of notes. Even though this scenario ended up being a shorter game than Chapter One, it took me twice as long to shoot it, and I don’t know why. Just thought I’d throw that little bit of trivia in there for no apparent reason. Tabletop Alchemy, the proud home of rambles and long-winded stories!

Second off, look at these stats for the Vampire in The Silver Bayonet! These things have me pretty much terrified for our little warband. And I thought the werewolves were tough! <snap> 

They’re Indestructible, which means they’re immune to all damage that doesn’t come from those sources to which they’re allergic – which is silver, blessed and I guess things that are on fire. They’re Ethereal, which means they can see AND MOVE through any terrain without penalties. Which, I assume, means walls and stuff. Ridiculous. They have the Hypnotic attribute, which means any figure trying to make a Move to Attack must first pass a Courage check. They’re Indefatigable, so they can only ever have one Fatigue token, they’re Strong, which means they get a plus 1 to melee damage – oh and look! They have this attribute called Soul Sheer. And THAT means any figure they cause damage to has to make a Terror check with a penalty equal to the amount of damage they inflicted. They’ve got a +3 to melee, 14 Health and a 15 Defense. They are literal monsters and I don’t think any of The Nightmare Hunters are capable of withstanding a battle with these things, not even a little bit. 

So yeah, I’m pretty terrified of these things getting on the board. And according to our scenario’s special rules, one Vampire arrives at the end of Turn 1 and another at the end of Turn 5.

To be fair, I think these vampire stats are a pretty slick representation of the general mythic vampire, right? All those attributes and scores really do evoke “vampire”. I just really, really don’t want to face one. 

Which is also the accurate response according to myth and legend, right? Good on ya, Mr. McCoullough. 

Third and last here, I think in a future video it’s going to be fun to write up a couple of homebrew rules for solo players. Well, at least for me but you know maybe some other solo players might wanna use them too. That’ll be interesting to do together ‘cause I’ve never really written any skirmish-type rules, but in today’s game I’ll point out a couple of things I’d like to do rule-wise in the future. 

How about a montage?

Okay, so the table is set, we just need to put down the clue markers and here’s a little legend of the playing pieces we’ll be using. We’ve got the clue markers, which I put together in this little video here <snap>, and we’ll use the black dice as Power Dice, the blue dice as Skill Dice and the red and green dice as Monster Dice. 

Four clue markers go on the table today, according to the scenario set up instructions, and each goes in a corner of the central ruins. And now, deployment. 

First we put down the starting enemies, of which there are six zombies – called revenants in The Silver Bayonet – and each one of these goes next to the six main gravestones that ring the chapel ruins. I added this little cemetery area because it just felt like a logical terrain addition to the location. Our last zombie is apparently starting on top of a broken sarcophagus, cause like most of us, he’s just a teenager deep down.

And over here is the gate slash entrance path to the whole place and so that’s the direction our warband is coming from, even though the scenario states that we could deploy soldiers on any or all table edges. The narrative kind of helps give me direction so I just kind defer to that when I can. 

So Claude has rushed back to Ottilie to warn her about the stirring undead. Ottilie breaks the warband into two squads and keeps the edgy Felice with her along with Baptiste and the doctor, who refuses to leave the officer unattended. Ottilie reminds everyone how the dead don’t care much about being shot – she tells them to engage in hand-to-hand combat with blade and flame to put them down.

This attribute here is the reason they aren’t super-susceptible to black powder weapons, they automatically reduce any shooting damage by 4, which is a pretty hefty penalty, enough to dissuade our intrepid soldiers from wasting ammunition.

Ottilie’s squad deploys along what we’ll call the western border, with Officer Bastarauche gaining a perch on a tall rock and her accompanying soldiers arrayed alongside her on the forest floor. 

Claude takes the supernatural investigator and occultist with him around to the north and Brielle the grenadier follows. The scout has his eye on a rocky perch just ahead of him and the others fan out amongst the trees. Vermont in particular is very keen on getting into those ruins, hoping to discover some kind of artifact. But he can see more than one undead lurking through the trees and that’s definitely dampening the treasure-hunting mood.

And as Turn One begins, clouds roll in and the trees thicken somehow and it’s almost as if night is falling – while the Gloaming rises. Line of sight for the game has been minimized to 12 inches. A mist coalesces along the forest floor and the revenants stumble and moan listlessly in the gloom. Felice shivers.

Now here is where I want to write up a rule from scratch and that rule would be Stealth. Now a stealth rule probably has no place in the general game but for solo players, I feel this is almost a missing feature. I mean, I know it’s just a combat skirmish game, but because we get so into narrative here amongst ourselves, when I look at this board and I think of how the story would go, I think Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars would do their best to capitalize on some sort of stealthy movement. You know, instead of just charging in to fight right away.

But, like I said, we’ll get into that in an another video down the road. For now, without a stealth mechanic, Ottilie leans over her rock to tell Baptiste that she’s going to try to take out this closest aberration, but the goal is to reach those ruins. Before he can reply she leaps down and rushes forward, musket coming off her shoulder with its shining silver bayonet slashing through the gloom as she Moves to Attack!

She rolls a 9 and a 7 plus one for her melee and she connects with a brutal stab that hammers the revenant to the ground. She rips her bayonet free and with a single hit point left, the revenant savagely Strikes Back, snapping at her ankle like a rabid dog impervious to pain or reason.

And it rolls … double nines! It’s damn near torn her leg off! With it’s +1 for melee, it ravages Ottilie like a starving bear, clawing on its way up the fearless officer, who is shocked by the sudden savagery as she stumbles back, trying to keep the maniacal thing at bay with the butt of her musket.

Baptiste aims his musket but snarls in frustration at his officer’s reminder of the undead’s disinclination to suffer much from shooting attacks, so he drops aim and charges through the trees to barrel into the shrieking starving revenant himself.

And wow, another nine shows up, he gets a total of 15 with his plus one to melee and he slams into the soulless creature, growling like a bear himself. That nine on the power die puts that revenant back in the mud for sure. He knocks it so hard into the cracked sarcophagus behind, its head snaps clean off.

Gaspar cuts along the back of the rock his Officer was on and catches up to her, rummaging in his satchel, but as he reaches her, he spots shambling movement off in the murk and panics slightly. He draws out his pistol and fires over Ottilie’s shoulder, startling her and Baptiste both.

The second unit hears that shot echo strangely, and in the gloom Claude mutters, “Well. I suppose five minutes of surprise is all we could ask for, huh?” Brielle and Vermont look nonplussed. Jolanda isn’t paying attention, fixated as she seems to be on the darkening vault of tree canopy.

Gaspar rolls a bizarre fourth nine in a row on the power die and a six on the skill die for a 15 total and hits the revenant – much to his own surprise. “En guard?” he whispers to himself.

With its damage reduction attribute, its only reaction to Gaspar’s black powder ball tearing a chunk out of it, is to shuffle twitchily for a more clear look at the doctor and the other humans gathered there like a buffet line. It bears its teeth, eternal hunger burning deep in its dead gaze.

Felice, wanting to show her beloved leader she’s not afraid, grits her teeth and advances through the trees, wiping leaves out of her face, to cover the flank. Blinking in the growing murk, she squints to spot the moaning corpse the doctor fired upon and, with a darting glance at the darkening ambiance, she lights her torch and raises it high. “I see it,” she mutters and decides to sprint to put herself in line with Baptiste, anxious to help.

With the first squad fully activated, we now enter the Monster Phase.

That revenant Gaspar invited to the party barely notices Felice move into its peripheral vision. Its black heart is set on the feast before it and it shambles through the shadows dragging one broken foot. It doesn’t run. It doesn’t hurry. It just stumbles forward toward Baptiste, opening its mouth in an impossibly large gaping maw, heedless of the branches raking at its face, its hollow eyes.

The next revenant can smell Felice, her fear like smoke in the air and it lurches through the woods towards the vivandierie and her flickering flame.

Two revenants shamble towards the second squad, Brielle barking, “We’ve got the loudest scout in the legion, I swear.” She arches an eyebrow at Claude. “But I appreciate you serving them up, I’ve got a silver ducat says I put more in the mud than you today.”

“Uh huh,” Claude drawls into his scope. “I believe I’ll take that bet, grenadier.”

The last revenant, weeping strangely, shambles towards Ottilie and the doctor.

That’s all the enemies, so the second squad activates now.

Claude scrambles up that rock and sweeps the murk with his scoped eye. A guttural moan from beneath him makes him swish the musket down and a revenant looms up in his scope. He jerks his eye out of the glass to sight down the barrel instead and fires nearly point blank down the escarpment. 

A 3 + 10 + 1 for his accuracy and his crazy aim proves true. He grunts with satisfaction as a chunk of skull blows out of the side of the revenant’s head, then sighs in dismay as it looks up at him for a beat … and after its damage reduction, it begins to climb. 

Brielle snaps at Vermont and Jolanda, “You’re on your own for a beat, lemme help our talkative scout stay alive.” And she’s charging through the trees with her bayonet leading the way.

She slams into the rock-climbing revenant, stabbing wildly with her bayonet and with a seven and two and her plus one for melee, she manages to slip on a gnarled root and just miss the moaning zombie, blade scraping across the cracked granite. “Merde!” 

That zombie strikes back with a lurch and falls on her with a sudden ferocity, rolling a 10 and a 9! A huge counterattack that even Brielle is stunned by, the monstrous thing tearing at her, shredding through her coat and raking a huge gaping wound in her side. Brielle screams despite herself, twisting away in the last moment, forcing a laugh and coughing up blood. She spits in a creature’s face with a grimace.

Now, here we’ll use our first die from our Fate Pool, in which of course we only have two dice to start with. We’ll roll the skill die from the pool and we get a seven which will negate four of those 9 damage points; not great but we’ll see how it goes. So Brielle is at five health instead of 1.

Vermont Escoffier keeps eyeing those ruins. He nudges Jolanda. “With me?” Jolanda nods, closes her eyes and holds her staff at the undead atrocity stumbling towards them. She curses it with a prayer to the Almighty, beseeching the Creator for just a bit of sunlight, even if only metaphorical, and blesses the aberrant creature.

Now, here I made a mistake and I overlooked both the Courage check and the point of damage occultists are supposed to take upon attempting to cast a spell. I realize this later on, but hey sometimes we make mistakes, if it happens to be in our favor… well, it’s still a mistake. 

So the revenant’s gotta make a Courage check with target number of 18 and it’s got a, oh wow, these things have +5 Courage?! Who wrote this scenario? This is only chapter 2 and it feels like we’re on hard-core mode, good grief! It rolls and 11 + 5 = 16; excellent! Not enough. It suffers -1 penalty to all it’s rolls for the rest of the game. 

Vermont charges ahead as soon as Jolanda touches his shoulder. He swings at the blessed zombie with all his might, trying to cave it in in one go with his heavy mace … and the revenant shuffles mindlessly into a mossy hole that causes it to stumble just under the supernatural investigator’s wild attack. He curses and tries to over-correct as the creature Strikes Back at him. 

And that die that jumped out of the rolling tray was a 1 and I’m damn well keeping it! Fight me! It’s a one! For a total of 11 which misses! Vermont recoils with a grunt, just out reach. Yes! (Napoleon Dynamite) 

And that’s the end of Turn One. Now, some end of turn stuff happens of course, first, a new revenant clambers up out of the ground and the directional die will show us … that it appears topside beside a sarcophagus very close to our second unit. Great.

Second, a vampire is arriving, drawn by the psychic screams of horror and the smell of warm blood. We gotta roll that directional die again to determine which corner of the table it’s going come from. I’m deathly afraid of this thing. Here goes. All right!! Finally something good! I mean it’s the farthest corner from our guys as possible, that’s literally the best we could hope for. Whoa, okay, we’ve got a fighting chance, at least for now.

Turn Number Two.

The doc goes first, pulling a great brass syringe from his satchel and stabbing Ottilie with it. She belts out a cry and jerks away from him. “It’s going to make you feel better.” Upon her snarling glare, he adds, desperate, “I swear!” and she gains two health, back up to a whopping six out of 14.

Baptiste lunges at the monster before him, stabbing with his heavy bayonet. The infantryman is pissed off today and with a 9 + 8 + 1 for melee, he runs the revenant through and ruthlessly twists the blade, then kicks the twice dead thing off his weapon. “Back to the inferno with you.”

Ottilie sprints into the chapel ruins, vaulting over a cracked sarcophagus with a burst of energy from Gaspar’s terrible syringe. She desperately starts searching one musty corner, kicking over a moldering heap of detritus and scattering ancient broken floor tiles. She yells as loud as she can, “Vermont, Jolanda, still breathing?” “Currently, madam!” is the distant answer.

Felice sprints after Ottilie. “I’m right behind you, Madame.” Ottilie replies, “Search this damn place. Find us one thing to make this bloody excursion worth it.”

And we’re on to the Monster Phase.

Unbeknownst to our crew, silent death is drifting towards the graveyard and the ruins, the smell of blood lighting it’s way like a synathetic beacon. Synathetic isn’t a word, but neither are vampires. Except in the Gloaming.

Baptiste has a new friend coming to say hi, much to his chagrin. The revenant that didn’t move last turn now sees lunch on the menu and hobbles toward Vermont and Jolanda. The NEWLY risen revenant agrees that lunch sounds like a great idea and follows suit.

The revenant that tried to hug Vermont earlier comes at him with open arms and renewed vigor. It’s broken jaw carving a hideous smile in the shade, it’s cold embrace all chipped teeth and talons scraped from finger bones and it rolls an 8 + 7 + 1 for melee but minus one from Jolanda’s metaphorical sunlight blessing, but the blessed curse isn’t enough to stop it, and it wraps Vermont up in a vicious hug and takes a bite out of him for good measure – and 8 points of damage.

Now here we’re going to meta-game for a moment and this is one of those homebrew rule things I want to write up. So when I built Vermont’s character and chose his special attributes, I chose Monster Expert as one of them and I didn’t know yet how that functioned in solo play. Monster Expert adds one extra Monster Die to a warband’s Fate Pool. But in solo play, the player doesn’t get any Monster Dice in their Fate Pool. So this is essentially worthless in solo play UNLESS we brew up a bit of homebrew rules. Now I’m not gonna think to hard about it right this moment, we’ll develop this idea later on. For now, I’m just gonna say that Vermont’s Monster Expertness allows him to force a single re-roll of a monster’s power die once per game, kind of just like an additional Fate Pool die, which is probably a bit much and why this needs some actual thought behind it. But for now, he turns that eight into a one which turns that hug of pain into a blind miss, which happens because  the revenant stumbles into another mossy pothole which pulls it off kilter with a sad, sad moan. It really wants those hugs and kisses.

Vermont Strikes Back, sidestepping the clumsy attack and brings his mace around with an uppercut swing for a 6 + 10 + 2 for his melee and his mace crunches into the zombie face with an echoing crack. That mace is a heavy weapon which adds one to the damage, leaving the revenant with three hit points. With deep breaths, Vermont readies himself for more unwanted advances.

The slavering insanity that nearly killed Brielle lunges again at the wounded Grenadier, gnashing at her with tooth and bone – and that’s another bounce out that’s a one! And I’m keeping that one too! Deal with it!Struggling to breathe through broken ribs the Grenadier forces a grin as she manages to get her musket up between them, holding the scrabbling monster just out of reach. 

With a wheezing snarl, she kicks back at it – very reminiscent of a Baptiste move – and rolls the illustrious 6 + 9 but if only those dice had been reversed! As it stands, she punts it hard in the chest, and as it flies back, she slashes at it with her bayonet for seven damage and they both get their fatigue tokens.

And that brings us to the second squad activation phase.

With an exasperated sigh Claude slings his musket and leaps from his rocky perch, sliding down with pebbles and debris cascading after him – and he lands right between Brielle and her opponent. Somehow his boot knife has materialized in his hand and it thunks down on that skull he already shot once. Yes! 9 + 3 + 1 for melee, the MVP is back, the revenant collapses under the great deluge that is Claude Cellier, the mouthy scout. Without looking back, already shouldering that musket and bringing the scope to his eye, he mutters, “That silver ducat is most likely mine, eh?”

Even in terrible pain, Brielle can’t stomach it, spitting a curse. She looks around for something to smash and spots the two zombies attacking Vermont and limply charges the wounded one. Ooh it’s about time. We got some good rolls a 9 + 8 + 1 for her melee but minus one for fatigue and she cleaves that zombie fully in half, her bayonet falling like a bolt of lightning. The rotting corpse falls away to either side, revealing the snarling grenadier’s blood-streaked visage. “We’re even now, you mouthy bastard!”

Claude, eye to his scope, sighs a third time.

Vermont, emboldened by Brielle’s barbarous victory, rushes at the next revenant, the thing standing between him and the ruins beyond. His swings that heavy mace and wow, another run of nines and eights! 

It better stop when the monsters go, though. 

So an 8 + 9 + 2 for melee and -1 for fatigue and his mace knocks the hanging jaw clean off that revenant, one point shy of putting it down. Its whole decrepit body shivers with the impact, and yet, it strikes back like an undead cobra. OMG the 9 + 8 reversed! This mission is rigged.

We’re gonna burn a re-roll. Wait, okay, wait just a minute. Okay, looking at the board, we might not use that last Fate Die just yet. So that zombie snaps back with 10 damage, which is enormous. Vermont buckles under the brutal rending fingers that tear at him with the black strength of the Gloaming.

Jolanda hisses at the wound Vermont suffers and steps up, smoothly drawing her silver knife. Whoa, what that roll says is that Jolanda just walks calmly up to the thing and slices her blade across its exposed throat, finishing the job Vermont started. The thing slowly sags to a sitting position and its head rolls down into its own lap, staring up at them all. With a fistful of coat, Brielle keeps Vermont on his feet, both bleeding heavily and wheezing for breath. 

Jolanda turns to watch another revenant doddering towards them from the weird midday twilight. She frowns, takes a curious sniff, looking off into the shadowy depths of the woods past the ruins. “Vermont,” she says, “light your torch.” Into the gloom, she calls out, “Mistress! There is something else here!”

And that is the end of turn two. Fatigue tokens are collected, and a new revenant halls itself out of the ground near Baptiste and Ottilie.  

Turn Number Three

To kick things off with what might be a terrible decision, Felice crosses the ruined chapel to get to the far clue marker. The special rules for searching in here require her to make a target number eight check to successfully investigate, so let’s do it as Felice searches, desperately, for what, she has no idea. She makes the roll with a 10 and we finally get to draw a card: the king of spades! Which means she trips on a dark sack that clinks and from inside she retrieves a bag of silver shot. Excellent! Now if only Felice had a firearm with which to use that possibly soon to be precious item.

And this is another thing I want to create a small homebrew rule for, the trading or passing off of found objects. But again, we’ll deal with that later. And another side note, in the intro, I forgot that Felice doesn’t carry a firearm, so that scene with her and Vermont and Claude would have been slightly different.

All right, Ottilie nods at her vivandierie and continues searching herself. Over her shoulder, she says, “We need to fall back, Felice. Find Claude and the rest.” 

“Ma’am?” 

“I’ll be right behind you.”

She rolls for her investigation check, knocking over an ancient pest-ridden cabinet. She barely makes it with a nine and the cabinet disintegrates as she tips it over, muck rats, squealing, and darting over her boots. Something down in a chink in the wall glints – let’s draw a card! Queen of spades! Ottilie digs a silver knife out of the wall, just what the woman with a silver bayonet needs, right? You can never have too many knives – that’s another Bloody Nine reference – except in this game where one is really all you need, mechanically-speaking. But this knife has an intricately carved ebony handle and the blade is bright and razor sharp – it’s a handsome specimen of single edged wit, for sure.

Kicking diseased-looking rodents out of her path, Ottilie crosses to another corner of the ruins. She yells, “It’s time to go. Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars, retreat!”

Upon hearing this Baptiste grins mirthlessly at the revenant trudging towards him. Confident he can outrun the stupid thing, he retreats just far enough to stay out of reach, baiting it to keep it fixed on him and not his crewmate and commanding officer who are poking around in the ruins back there.

And to make sure he’s captured its attention, he shoots at it. Another big role! 9 + 10 + 1 for his accuracy, his shot easily center punches a musketball into the creeping zombie’s chest, knocking it off its feet. It spasms … and then clambers back up with five points because it doesn’t care about being shot. 

“Reload your pistol doc and fall back,” Baptiste growls. Gaspar, glancing about nervously, reloads his gun, but then instead of falling back, he heads towards the ruins. “Doc, you bloody fool, where are you going?”

“Where she goes, I go,” is Gaspar’s sober reply.

And that puts us into the Monster Phase.

The vampire glides silently through the ancient graveyard, its feet lost in a shadow it seems to pull with it like a vast black cloak swallowing the world.

Baptiste’s zombie follows after him mindlessly, moaning and limping through the bracken, it just wants to return his thoughtful gift of a bullet.

The last revenant lurches towards Jolanda’s gleaming white headdress, which captures its attention from the other humans, who to be fair are slightly further away from it and it wants lunch now dammit! 7 + 4 + 1 in melee and it claws at our occultist but with her Defense of 13, she just takes a calm step backward from the lumbering atrocity, which is her way of Backing Off instead of Striking Back.

All right, second unit time and it’s pretty simple. They all fall back but they don’t retreat just yet. Brielle calls out, “We await you at the tree line, Madam!” With the pained grunt, she hefts her musket and fires at the single revenant in front of her and with a 3 + 10 + 1, she scores a hit but again the dead walker’s dead flesh just absorbs the shot like a rock tossed in the mud. Brielle spits more blood on the ground in disgust.

From his rock Claude snipes at her, “I take it that was a miss, dear grenadier.”

“I hit the damned thing, damn you!”

“Aye, just not hard enough eh?”

“Shut your mouthy mouth, you mouthy bastard.”

Smiling grimly to himself, Claude reloads his musket.

Jolanda murmurs to herself, once again clasping her holy staff, and this time we remember to make the Courage check, where she rolls double eights, no problem. She blesses that incoming revenant with another prayer beseeching the Above to share its light and winces, touching her forehead where a sharp pain lances briefly through her mind and she loses a hit point for casting a spell. The zombie rolls it’s Courage check and it’ll be close – oh boy, it rolls of 15 + 5 for its Courage and no penalties so it passes the check and suffers not the blessing, curse or otherwise.

Another revenant punches up from the grave dirt for air and lumbers to its feet by this grave marker and we’re now at

Turn Number Four. 

Just a reminder that at the end of Turn Five another vampire is going to appear on the board and I’ll be up front with you – I had every intention of trying my best to get the Nightmare Hunters off the board before that happens.

We start with Ottilie, who’s still ransacking the ruins. Felice hears that new revenant claw its way up from the dirt and she is sensing something foreboding now as well, something putting her teeth on edge. She begs her commander, “You ordered us to leave, you must be leaving as well?!”

“One last look,” Ottilie grunts. “Get moving. That’s an order.”

Ottilie rolls for her investigation check, which she passes easily and while kicking over a pile of broken stones and bricks, she catches another small glint, covered in old spiderwebs and we draw another card: the jack of spades! She finds a small icon, a tiny golden figure with the mark of a saint on its base. “This,” she murmurs, turning the small statue over in her gloved hand, “this is something useful.” She looks out from the ruins into the murky forest, pondering. With a self-satisfied nod, she calls, “Retreat on the double, we’re done here!”

And the bonus that icon gives us is we get to add another power die to our Fate Pool, excellent.

Now Ottilie and Felice haul ass out of the ruins. Felice can sprint but Ottilie spent her action searching so she gets the standard 6 inch move. Gaspar sprints after her towards the rally point and Baptiste sprints off the board and that’s it! No monsters can catch any of the crew on their turn and everyone makes it successfully back across the running water, back to where the sun is able to dapple down through the trees again. 

Vermont and Brielle hobble across the stream supporting each other. Jolanda walks calmly, pausing for a brief moment on the far side of the stream to let her bare feet feel the damp sand. Ottilie and Felice and Gaspar are the last to cross the stream and together, Les Chasseur de Cauchemars head back to the regiment, somewhat the worse for wear but silently hopeful in their gait. As the rest trudge down the trail, Jolanda stops and turns to look back toward the ruined chapel. She pantomimes the sign of the Cross and bows her head in thanks and murmurs, “We shall return with the cleansing fire.” 

And we fade to black. 

All right, another battle report in the can!

An interesting thing about being able to do these battle reports as a video is that I’m essentially debriefing myself and studying the battle after the fact. Which means of course seeing things I should have done differently, et cetera. I think my most interesting take-away after going over this game again is how I missed out on the tactical nature of the revenant movement stat for most of the game. Like at the beginning Ottilie literally rushes into hand-to-hand combat because I was fixated on this Damage Reduction attribute the zombies had. But they also only had a movement of 4 versus our warband’s movement of 6 inches. And I didn’t capitalize on that until the very end with Baptiste doing his kiting thing. Really, even though a new revenant was going to spawn every turn, if I had focused fire with multiple troops on single zombies, I probably could have whittled down one or two per turn from a totally safe distance. Well, maybe. The dice of course are really what drive things, so you never know right?

But yeah, this definitely felt like a shorter game compared to the last one, but it was still really fun. I know a lot of you actually liked the last battle report and I really like these too, but I can tell that I have to be pretty careful about over-producing them. They take a pretty large amount of effort on the production side and while I really enjoy the end result, I gotta be careful to pace myself so I don’t burn myself out on doing them, if you get what I’m saying.

I mean, I wanna play a bunch of different games, but I really only want to do this type narrative battle report. Storytelling is really what I enjoy and these things – as if you couldn’t tell – sorta help me scratch that itch as a “failed filmmaker”. But anyway I hope you had as much as fun as I did – there’s really only one campaign thing we have to do post-game, because we didn’t lose any warband members this time, and that’s allocate XP. 

Every member gets one XP for going through the grind and then they took out I think six revenants, at least five and for that, the warband as a whole gets one XP point. They get one XP because more than four of the soldiers got off the table of their own volition and they get one XP for successfully investigating three or more clue markers.

So I gave Ottilie one of the extra XP points, one to Brielle and one to Jolanda, who from a story-perspective I’m really starting to lik quite a bit, she’s just developing as a cool character, to me anyway. I like her mysteriousness. 

All right guys, well, cheers and, you know … go play a game! 

See ya! 

D&D Lore From Real Life (Using IRL Experiences As Writing Prompts)!

by
Transcript

So a bit ago I went on vacation to visit my daughter in Minnesota <snap> and while there my daughters friend invited us to go kayaking on a small lake. And there was a very specific thing that happened that inspired today’s writing exercise.

Exercise in world-building? I don’t know exactly what to call it but we’re gonna take a mundane experience and use it for fantastical inspiration. Or, you know, we’re just gonna be creative and have fun making shit up for D&D!

INTRO

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we create lore out of thin air and we use real life as a writing prompt! And we salute our patrons for their steadfast support of whim and whimsy!

So, we’ve all heard that thing about “writing what you know.” Cool. But ain’t nobody said “write what you know exactly word for word with no embellishments or imagination.” Right? This is where we get to tell tall tales, stretch the truth, flesh out that shower idea – you know what I’m talking about. All the best ideas occur in the shower. Where you don’t have a your waterproof notebook to write ‘em down so you forget ‘em as soon as you get out.

This is an example of capturing lightning in a bottle. Which is definitely NOT hyperbole … okay, it most certainly is. 

First, I’ll tell you where the idea came from and then we’ll write out the little story it inspired. My daughter and I drive out to this lakeside community outside Minneapolis and meet her friend’s parents in the driveway of their awesome house. It’s awesome because it’s on this forested hillside overlooking this small lake that’s surrounded by other properties. Now, I’m from Southern California, so to me this actually looks like a big lake but I really have no sense of what makes a lake big or small. Here it is on Google maps, you tell me.

To get from the house and driveway down to the water where the kayak dock is, we have to traipse down several flights of pretty steep wooden stairs, going down through the trees and stuff clinging to the side of this equally pretty steep hillside. At the bottom there’s a tall wooden pier extending out maybe 20 feet over the water, about 3 feet above it. The kayaks are on these racks built into the hillside, and they’re stored horizontally and keel up. Keep the rain out, right? There are a pair of single seaters and a two-seater on the racks. My daughter’s friend and her dad are taking the two-seater and we’re getting the singles.

Her dad is super cool and apparently goes kayaking all the time. But it must have been, I don’t know, late in the season or something, or, come to think of it, he probably just doesn’t give a fuck about what’s coming next. He’s a braver man than me for sure.

It takes two of us to get a kayak pulled off the rack and carried over the pier and dropped into the lake. Yes, I wish I had photos or video of all this, but I just didn’t know I’d be telling you dear viewers about all this until it was much too late. Professional!  

So I’m dragging my end out onto the dock and I’m wondering when we’re gonna set the thing down so we can clean it out. Because it’s full of webs and I can see spiders crawling all over the place. But the guy just swipes once at the webs and then instructs me to help him lower it into the water and we drop it in the lake. And he says, “Hop in, I’ll hold it steady this oar.”

Now, like every sane person in the world, I have a bit of arachnophobia. A smidge. A skoash. And my brain is screaming but I find myself just climbing down into this horror show like I’m having an out of body experience. While I’m climbing down I’m trying to brush out more webs with my oar but that isn’t really working and I see a big spider dart away up under the front deck, you know, where my feet and legs are gonna go. I’m just sorta running on autopilot, kinda like that military mindset kicking in where you just gotta do this nutty thing that’s in front of you and everyone else is doing. 

To clarify, it wasn’t an actual out of body experience. I’ve had one of those, an actual out of body experience and it involved a heroic volume of tequila … but that’s a story for another time. And probably another channel.

So I’m trapped in this kayak, my daughter and I both in our separate little floating spider islands, and I’m trying to row and look for spiders at the same time. I literally watched a little one spin a web from the deck of the kayak to my knee – I was wearing jeans, I always wear jeans – cause you never know when a spider is gonna wanna climb on you – and as we paddle out further I keep trying to keep my feet from extending too far down into the kayak and I keep looking for that big one I saw scurry up inside there and it’s just like a waking nightmare.

My daughter and I knew we weren’t crazy because her friend, who’s in the two-seater with her dad, keeps yelping periodically and batting at spiders in THEIR kayak. And then we go on this two hour kayak ride, us and the arachnids, touring around this admittedly very pretty lake. And yes I discovered later that I got bit twice. Someone in the group said there weren’t any poisonous spiders in Minnesota but I suspect that’s BS.  

So that’s the experience that inspired this idea of a mythological fairy tale sorta thing, like one of those demi-god origin stories told by Native Americans or some bit of a Viking saga. I just saw this image of some crazy ancient dude in heavy dreadlocks sailing across a lake at midnight under a full moon in a wooden canoe type of thing full of spiders. And figured I should write it out ‘cause it could work as a good bit of lore or something.

Which we can write up now, just riffing on whatever comes out of the old noggin, stream of consciousness style – which is probably how most of us do our first draft stuff, right? All you need is that one image, that one idea, that one detail and from there, you just spool it out, see where the river runs. 

Now, we all have our own styles and influences and whatever, so what I come up with will certainly be different from what anyone else does and there’s no right or wrong, there’s just creativity and having fun and “just doing your thing”. 

So here’s what I punched out, while listening to some select tracks from the Brittania score that I wish I could play here while I read this but you know, that’s frowned upon.

Uhm-hartha Wynya-Shäkt, the father of many son-eating daughters, was cast afar in the rage of his wife, the Starkiller, the Siren’s Wrath, She Who Cannot Forget Nor Forgive. Uhm-hartha found himself stranded in the middle of a great moss forest, the trees so dense not a single ray of sunlight reached the ground. Wandering through the ever-twilight, Uhm-hartha finally discovered the edge of a lake, a lake full of shining light. 

Stood upon the rocky shore, he saw a star pulled down from the velvet heavens and drowned in the waters below. His wife, murdering the very stars in her rage at the world. He heard the cries of the people in all their many lands, their anguish at losing their skyward maps, their very way in the world rising like heat on the edges of his vision.

He knew he must put a stop to the Siren’s Wrath before the sky went as black as her gorgeous heart. 

And so he circumnavigated the rocky shore in the hopes of finding a path to follow. But he only found the twilit wood was itself an island in the starfall lake. He needs must cross the far waters and gain the other side. 

He spied an ancient, felled and hollow tree thick with moss and bramble, which he rolled over to find brimming with spiders and their eggs. He collected an offering of live beetles and bid the spiders if they would like to see a new world. 

Queens from the various tribes emerged from the scuttling morass of web and leg and presented their various markings of death and warning to the moss-cloaked man. A bargain was struck and the queens of arachnid bade the human find a staff from which the smallest of them might ride high in the night to witness this journey across the fallen rain. 

Uhm-hartha Wynya-shäkt watched another star yanked from its perch in the heavens and drowned and went into the woods to find his staff. When he returned he held aloft a gnarled and mossy branch into which he had rammed the cloven hoof of a stag’s carcass he’d found mouldering among the roots of a massive tree, sprouted with moon fungi and golden lace. 

The various spider queens of small and tiny stature took to the staff and Uhm-hartha dragged the makeshift canoe to the water’s edge and stepped inside. He pressed with the staff to push away from the rocky bank and a thousand spiders swarmed the mossy top of the ancient water-borne log. Those spider queens of the large variety scaled Uhm-hartha’s legs and arms and the giant queens unfolded their long legs and bristled up over his shoulders and together they crossed those shining waters, the grave of the dying stars lighting their wake. 

The reflection of Uhm-hartha Wynya-shäkt’s passage, the first Druid, can be seen in the night sky, that bright river of stars that divides the heavens and shows us our way when we are lost. 

Well, that’s all kinds of messy, but it definitely captures that initial idea I had, and that’s all I need for now. I can noodle with this all I want. That bit at the end about this being the first druid, that just sorta popped up in the flow of things and I could really run with that. Obviously here I’m going for this kind of oral history, mythology vibe, kind of intentionally not paying attention to logic or details, really more going for flavor and that sort of weird thing myths and old fairy tales have of feeling sorta untethered to reality in anyway, untethered to logic. It’s like more about flavor than anything else. It’s a myth, so we don’t worry about technical or scientific details, or even details in general.  

This little thing can become part of my world-building, it could pop up in a short story, it could inspire a miniature paint scheme or a scratch build or whatever, who knows?

So, see if you’ve got a memory of some experience that you could use as a jumping off point in writing something creative. I mean, really all I’m saying is – go write something short for fun and don’t worry about the details, see what happens.

See ya! 

Painting Up Ruins For Skirmish Scenarios!

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Transcript

Let me let you in on a little secret: painting terrain is not my favorite thing to do. There, I said it. But you know that ain’t stopping us today. Cause Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars <snap> is going to work again, all not their own, hunting nightmares.

So let’s get to speed painting the bits we need for the next Silver Bayonet skirmish scenario!

INTRO

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we’re just prepping for the next chapter in an ongoing story! That we’re making up ourselves … and using dice to see how things turn out. And where we thank our patrons for their help in turning the pages!

All right, for Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars’ next mission we need some specified terrain for our vampires and revenants <snap>. Here’s what the scenario asks for: ruins of a small chapel, six inches by six inches. Six grave stones. A bunch of trees and rocks.

Well, we’ve got the trees and rocks covered from the last scenario <snap> so I went digging through all my MDF terrain to see if I had something that could work for this chapel thing. I do have this cemetery set from Games Workshop but I didn’t think it was quite right. The mausoleums aren’t open and we’re supposed to put clue markers inside the ruined building. 

I knew I had some TT Combat MDF ruins built and in a box, so I figured this was a good opportunity to paint some up. That’s why we do this right? We play games to build and paint figures and terrain and we paint figures and terrain to play games – the perfect circle. Which doesn’t  exist. <snap> 

I’m just trying to see how many of these things I can do in one video.

I chose a few pieces that should nicely fit the scenario requirements along with a couple of extras just for fun. And I ordered some 3D printed gravestones because I was planning this before I took my vacation and found those Green Stuff World resin tombstones. Ah, the life of a collector, huh? Cheers to all of us.

I primed everything gray with the airbrush and having essentially no idea on how to proceed decided to goin with some sponge texturing to start. Mostly the plan was to use a bunch of washes and some dry brushing to knock these things out.

While I really like the idea of terrain, it is not my favorite thing to paint. It’s rare that I feel like taking a lot of time on terrain and this is compounded by the filming process. But as Logan Nine-Fingers says, paraphrased, it’s better to get on with a thing than live in fear of getting on with the thing. The Bloody Nine’s anti-procrastination quote.

I used a piece of pick and pluck foam from an old Chessex case for the texturing, just tore the ends off a bit and I’m using craft paint because I default to that stuff for almost all the terrain I do. 

I had grand plans for making the floor look like a completely different interior surface, like with black and white tiles and grout and leaves and, well, you can see I got real lazy and went for a bit of brown and green splotches instead.

Tabletop Alchemy – quality work guaranteed.

I felt the sponge texture wasn’t quite enough so I went in with some dry brushing just to bring out some more texture and the edges of things. There’s all kinds of things I could do to this piece to make way more camera-friendly, like puttying up the wall joints and picking out the window frames in different colors, but this is speed-painting terrain, so everything’s just getting the same texture and color and we’re not worrying about details very much. We need it on the table for gameplay and not for display, right, so tabletop standard is our goal.

These wash things I have are pretty old, I’m pretty sure the company that made them has gone out of business. I never used them much on figures because they are less a wash more of a heavy shade, they kind of color everything and don’t really just sit in the recesses. So they’ve been tossed in the craft paint box and I thought this might be a good opportunity to put ‘em to work.

I kinda had this idea of making the ruins darker at the base than the top so that’s why I ran the green down into the blue. Not sure if it’s working but I’m rolling with it. I’m not sure why I went with more blue for the floor, I initially thought I’d put some brown on there but then I thought that might look too contrasty for ruins, so blue it is.

Now this piece is part of a group of similar pieces that you can stack together to make an arched wall, but I got this idea for using it as a ruined entrance to the chapel cemetery, just thought it would be cool on the table when setting up the scene. So it’s getting the same process as the main building, but I there some of this red wash on the upper walking surface and now that I’m thinking about it, I probably should have used this color for on the main building’s upper floor too. That 20/20 hindsight, always a swift kick in the pants, ain’t it?

Now this piece is from a different set of ruins and I like the brick basing. I used more of the brown paint for some sponge texture on those bricks and we’ll get some color contrast on this piece between those bricks and the walls with the red wash again.

I used some Citadel Athenian Camoushade to really green up the walls here but I kinda wish I’d gone for a brownish color, like a sepia maybe. But it is what it is, there’s no going back in speed painting. Right? I thought I read that somewhere.

Now to let all those washes dry up, nothing more fun than drybrushing some tombstones. I stuck em all on these chopsticks for priming and it just makes it easy to batch brush ‘em. Again, just a very simple process, dry brush and wash.

I also got four of these stone coffins, they are pretty fun. The ones with the half-open lids have a bunch of 3d printing supports in the interiors and I just left those in there, I thought they kinda looked like spiderwebs or something. 

For the bases I used that Camoushade and then alternated Nuln Oil and Targor Rageshade on the grave markers. And on the sarcophagi I mixed three or four different Citadel washes, including my favorite Coelia Greenshade, which is a really nice blue, just to give the things more flavor. 

I tried this Vallejo moss and lichen stuff, but it’s pretty bright and I should have spotted it on there in little tiny patches, I didn’t like the large swatches of it so I only did that on one. The slimy green stuff is darker and works fine, I just put a little bit here and there, I think I’d get into using these things more on more detailed models. I mean doing more detailed work than tabletop standard.

Using green and brown inks I went over all the vine things on all the tombstones and coffins. There are quite a few vines. I just randomly put down the brown and greens and just sorta mottled them up. I probably should have gone back in with a dry brush or a highlight on the vines after the fact but I didn’t, I kept moving.

Using that same sepia ink from the vines, I cut in these window frames on this stretch of ruins, just to pick them out a bit from the walls. 

Oh, right, I nearly forgot the portcullis thing. I just used black ink, could have used black paint but I had a bunch of these pieces sitting on top of the regular paint box so the inks were the lazy man’s choice. The other matching arch pieces in this set, I think there are four of them, all have the portcullis bit set at different heights. This one seemed the best match for this particular scenario.

There were also these two other MDF pieces, just a couple more extra bits for the table. I decided to try out a lightening dry brush over the washes with the idea of going from the top down to the middle and letting the lower halves stay dark, just to lean into the top down gradient thing. 

I think it worked out so I went on to apply that to the bigger pieces.

Now my favorite part of most terrain, I don’t know why. Flocking is always just fun to me. Probably because it’s like a wash, it’s got two steps: put down glue, put down flock. Walk away. I grabbed a couple of little containers of left over flock from other projects and just through them all down randomly. The one thing I was really looking forward to was just using straight medium green fine flock to create some moss growing over the stone or down in the crevices. I really dig this effect and I used it everywhere. 

Now for the final touch – some very hastily applied ivy and shrubbery. So here’s something I’ve discovered recently: this gorilla glue superglue says it sets in 10-seconds on the package, and it’s pretty accurate. I’ve been using this Bob Smith Industries stuff for so long I just thought all superglue was the same. 

It is not. The Bob Smith stuff takes forever to set, it got so frustrating that I grabbed this gorilla glue as soon as I noticed that blurb about 10 seconds. So I’ll be using this stuff from now on. Now here’s the thing, I like the replaceable tips the Bob Smith bottles have available and I’ve got a handful of them. The gorilla glue bottle doesn’t have a  fine tip, but I realized the cap that screws onto the gorilla bottle is actually the same thread as the replacement caps for the Bob Smith bottles. So off-camera I cut the gorilla glue tip off at the top of the threads and put on a fine tipped replacement cap and it works great!

All right, so after I stopped shooting I added more ivy stuff to the main ruins piece and this just makes the model more expensive. I could have used like two or three packages of ivy on this thing and that would have been like $40 in just ivy. So it just got a few small bits. It also got the moss flock in some of the cracks and wall joins, but I did a very sloppy job on those. But anyway, in this particular case, half-assed is better than not done at all! At least for today.

So there we go, all the individual pieces, they’re fine, they’re usable. You can see that I worked really hard to make them stand out from the gaming mat, the contrast is stellar. I realized halfway through these were gonna blend in almost like camouflage on my mat, but, you know, I can just say I was going for “realism”. Ha. Well, it is what it is. But the group will make a perfect setup for the scenario as intended. You can see I added some ivy and stuff to the upper walls of the centerpiece and overall that thing really needs some additional paintwork to kinda make it actually look finished, like maybe painting the window frames and stuff. My two favorite bits are the red leaves on the upper floor and the mossy bits added to that low brick wall, those two things came out just like I thought they would. I like the overall color of the ruins too, I just wish I’d gone with maybe a more neutral gray, but that’s really just in the context of this particular game mat. 

Anyway, that’ll do it, we’re all set to play the next game and find out how Otillie and the rest far against the undead. So I guess I better get to writing and playing, so I can get that show in the can.

See ya!

Hobby Haul / Travelogue (aka Vacation With Loot)!

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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!

Raising The Dead! Painting New Enemy Minis for Silver Bayonet!

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Transcript

So, Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars is being deployed again. 

Buried in the orders they successfully retrieved from that fallen unit out in the haunted woods <snap> are a handful of notes from their fallen supernatural investigator detailing a hidden route to a long-abandoned chapel. Fragments of the journal mention possible artifacts that may lay in the ruins. Artifacts that may possess power of some kind. 

There is also a stained and torn map that bears an esoteric symbol, and Ottilie tasks Jolanda and Vermont with deciphering its meaning. But before they can come to a conclusion, something happening up the battle line has the local command in a hurry for artifact acquisition. So Ottilie rallies her band of nightmare hunters and they prepare to set out once more in search of that from which most regiments flee.

When Ottilie asks her occultist and supernatural investigator what they think the esoteric symbol means, Vermont responds with, “Possibly sacred, or perhaps blessed.” Jolanda adds in a softly correcting tone, “Yet more something of the inverse of that.” Ottilie is confused. “What does that mean exactly?” 

Jolanda crouches and picks up a handful of dark soil, lets it run through her delicately aged fingers. The rest of the warband watch with piqued interest. She glances up. “It is uncertain, mistress.”

Today, we raise the dead!

INTRO

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we gotta paint up some new enemy models for another round of skirmish game combat! And we thank our patrons for their continued support in the face of such extreme battle conditions!

Hey, so we get lucky today – lots of games need some zombie miniatures, right? So painting up some shambling undead is a great investment in the future. And that’s what Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars is gonna be facing out in the haunted woods very soon.

If you’re new to the channel, there’s a playlist detailing our first foray into Joe McCullough’s The Silver Bayonet skirmish game, and that’s where you can find out all about the warband, their leader and their first skirmish scenario. <snap>

But Ottilie and her stalwart badasses are not just facing zombies, oh no, our intrepid warband of Napoleonic nightmare hunters might run into some true gothic horror in the form of vampires!

So I had a brand new box of Games Workshop zombies in the Pile of Opportunity, which is perfect. I built up ten of these little Revenants – which is what zombies are called in The Silver Bayonet rulebook. But as for vampires, initially I was like, huh, I don’t think I actually have any of those. Which is dumb, right? Everyone should have some vampires, I mean, for D&D or whatever. But then the Pile of Opportunity: Primed and Ready Edition stepped up to the plate – I have these all ready to go from the Cursed City box set. These will be perfect too AND I get to knock a dent in that Primed and Ready stash, don’t I?

We must be full of tiger’s blood today, cause we’re winning left and right!

And on top of all that winning already, we’re gonna put a lesson from last month to use this month – we’re gonna do another batch of oil washing! Sometimes stuff just works.

So while I painted up 10 of these cute little undead monsters, we’re  just gonna see a couple of them on camera for most of the painting process. And again, since they’re just zombies and there needs to be bunch of them, we’re just gonna go easy and have fun. We know the oil wash is gonna come in clutch and fix anything we don’t like anyway, right?  Right?

We’ll do a handful of them with this greenish skin tone, using express colors to keep it simple. I just mix up a batch and I’ll put it on three or four of them off-screen and then we’ll go with a different shade for some other ones later.

Now this guy is having trouble keeping his insides on the inside so a little thinned out purple can do a trick of us and bring home the gross factor, right?

I wanted to add some discoloration to the skin tone, so I mixed up some violet and magenta and medium and put that into some of recesses. Carrying forward our mindset from a couple of videos ago, I’m just having some fun and experimenting with colors, ain’t no stress. You can see I used some burnt umber ink on this guy’s scythe blade too.

I opted to flesh out some of the wounds on our guy with the stomach ache with a different shade of purple, just to see what it did. 

And you can see I’m still struggling with how to keep my hair out of the camera. Maybe I should just shave my head and be done with it.

I used some thinned down blue ink to shade this guy’s skin, again, just throwing different colors around to see what they do. 

Some burnt umber ink tones down some of the wood elements on this guy and then I just painted up his pants with it too.

Now on this guy we’ll mix up a different skin tone from blue and green and express medium, and I’ll slap this on a handful of other zombies. 

Then to bruise up the flesh a bit on this guy I added some thinned down purple in the recesses. 

And then went in with an even thinner, lighter purple to add some color to the overall skin, I think it was looking a little too blue.

Sepia ink seemed like a good choice for all the roots these guys are sporting, must suck to wake up and find yourself tangled in roots instead of bedsheets. Kind of a bummer I guess, being a zombie.

And now I reached for a bottle of some actual paint for this guy’s pants, a light beige, which should shade down nicely under the oil wash.

I love using this Sooty Black Ink for leather belts and straps, it’s one of my favorite techniques now, at least for weathered up sorta figures.

Now, Express black lotus is actually a blue tone and not super dark, so i added some black ink to try to deepen it a bit, and I put it on all the metal objects.

Typhus corrosion from Citadel is an awesome texture paint, I actually really like it and I’d forgotten I had it. I  just threw it on this dude’s pants, but I probably should have put it on his lower legs and feet too. Ah well.

Here’s some pale sand for the scroll parchment color, and it just occurred to me while writing this script what I need to do for this thing. We’ll see if it turned out at the end.

I used some very thin pale gray to add some subtle highlights to the skin texture on this guy. I didn’t do a lot intricate highlighting or shading with most of these guys, you know, we’re just chilling and trying to speed paint a bit, not get bogged down in too many details. But, that’s the cool thing about all this – if I feel like I want to something, I just do it.

Targor rageshade goes all over the pants, which is probably unnecessary because of the coming oil wash but if you weren’t doing an oil wash, this is a great weathering color from Citadel.

How about a little bit of thinned magenta ink for the open wounds? It’s a nice touch, right?

Then some little touches of gunmetal grey from vallejo metal color for the belt buckle and the axe on this guy’s mind and then I’ll thin way down a couple of pro acryl colors for rust and some sepia ink to shade up the sword and armor bits.

I got these Golden high flow paints when I bought all those inks just cause I saw them on the shelf and was curious to see what they were like. They’re pretty cool, but I only got a few colors and i’m starting to use them on bases because they don’t really need thinning. I need to experiment with them on actual miniatures some more to see what I think overall. But for bases, they work great.

And now we go with the oil wash! Typical burnt umber and black mix, and I got some Gamsol thinner and we just douse these guys with it. I kinda made two washes of different thinness and went back and forth wherever I wanted to add more color or density. Again, just playing around, and if you wanna see more about how to have fun trying new things, you can check this video out right here <snap> to see what I’m jabbering about.

After 20 minutes I go back in for the wiping stage. And again this process was super easy and produced pretty good results. I still need to try painting up a miniature without any weathering to see what the oils will look like, but yeah, this is kind of a staple process for me now to have in the toolbox. It’s just the tip of the iceberg concerning oils for sure but it’s so easy. Aside from the equipment management hassle of having an oil palette and brushes to clean and the 24 hour drying time.

Now onto the vampires, and these I decided I wasn’t going to do an oil wash on. I don’t know why exactly, they actually would be fine to do more tests on, but for whatever reason i just figured i’d do these without the oil wash. I can always go back and add a wash if I want.

I went for a blue gray skin tone using the xpress colors over the zenithal primer coat. You know, undead vampire skin tone right? Super original.

My only plan for these guys was red armor. They don’t have very much armor so I felt a punchy color was warranted here. I used some pale gray to clean up the armor bits in prep for the red translucent paint that would be coming along.

I used some full strength black lotus xpress color to darken the feet but you can’t see that because I exceptionally good at getting my hair in front of the lens. Without looking even! 

Still winning!

I mixed up a red color for the base armor tone knowing i would be going in with a darker color to crush the shadows afterward.

I added black to a darker red, both xpress colors, to glaze in the shadows and it worked pretty good, like it was kinda what I had planned.

Then sooty black of course for the straps holding the armor on and then I really wasn’t sure what to do with these guys’ modesty patches, this strategically placed fur, right, so I just went in with a lighter warm gray to highlight it. Apparently I missed hitting the record button before I dropped some Nuln oil wash over the fur following the highlighting.

Now this pillar was freaking me out, I wanted to try to find some color that worked as a compliment to the overall colors of the vampire, but I also just wanted to throw some crazy paint down to see if I could create a cool mottled stone effect without just using a straight color. So I started with an alarming yellow, watered way down.  

Then some sap green ink to make it even crazier, also thinned down a bit. 

And then some snakebite leather contrast paint to add in some browns to this clown suit piece of rock. But hey, trust the process right? We can always paint over something if it doesn’t work.

I dry brushed some pale gray to pick out the edges and add some texture and some calming down of the clown colors and then more Targor rage shade to seam it all up and then a final dry brush of pale gray over the top of that to bring back some of the highlights and texture. I think this actually turned out pretty cool for a stone texture.

Then it was time to clean up their hair with some pale gray thinking that with the bluish skin and the red armor, I might have to leave the hair as white. I didn’t like this idea much, their hair is so cool, sculpt-wise, but I was having trouble envisioning a color that wouldn’t clash too bad with the existing palette.

And the swords presented the same problem to me, I originally thought I’d make them some kind of magical color but that seemed like a mistake too as far as the palette went. Then I hit on using this exhaust manifold color which is like a slightly burnt silver color. I kinda like the idea that these vampires might be running around with blades engineered to take out their mortal enemies, the werewolves right?

And then I found an old bottle of dark metallic color called steel I forgot I had and this is a great metallic for base metal color.

I used wildwood contrast on the sword hilts, don’t ask me why, cause I’m not sure exactly. I could have used black but thought that might be too contrasty and require some metallics over it and i wasn’t sure i wanted to make the hilt metallic in addition to the blade. So I don’t know, I’m just rolling with it.

I tried highlighting up the hair with pro acryl white. Now everyone on youtube seems to love this particular brand of white, and I do like pro acryl’s other colors but this white just doesn’t work for me. It turns into a gummy mess on the wet palette within seconds and it doesn’t thin down right and it goes on very rough even after thinning it with water, which is all literally the opposite of everything I’ve ever heard about this white paint. So I don’t know what to say but I’m getting rid of this bottle and going back to using my P3 white which was my favorite.

Oh, here we go, here’s a shot of putting nuln oil on the modesty patches. Just in case, you know, you didn’t believe me.

Then I kinda rushed through another batch of clown painting on this vampire’s fallen pillar and just started working on the base along with it, same sort of process, just trying to conjure a color that wasn’t too similar to the vampire herself and still looked like interesting stone to set it apart from the general ground texture.

And after some more consideration of the white hair, I decided to try an hombre using blue express colors. I don’t know if in the end this was a good choice – I thought about going from black to red to sort of counterpoint the red armor and I’m not even a hundred percent sure the white hair was really all that bad to begin with, but here they are getting blue hair dye.

And there we go, a bunch of zombies and vampires hungry for Les Chasseurs de Cauchemars. I do like how the oil wash came out on these guys, and the variety of ways you can build these zombies is actually pretty cool, there’s a lot of choices on the sprues in this box. And I’ve still got ten left to build. But yeah, they should be fun on the table. Ah, and here’s that little idea I had – it’s cheesy but I think it’s too perfect. I mean, the guy has a scroll nailed to his back, what else could it possibly say?

And here are the vampires with all their bases tufted and done. I’m still not sure about the hair color, I should have done one in black and red just to see what it looked like. Their skin tone is super flat, I know, I just didn’t feel courageous enough to try tackle highlighting the musculature. I will soon, never fear, we gonna learn things together. Or, you know, you’re just gonna yell at the screen about how I should be doing things. Hey, I aim to please – if nothing else, I provide you with a venting range. You’re welcome!

So, prepare to play a skirmish game, and prepare for the next chapter in The Silver Bayonet narrative series. Ah, but there’s gonna be one more video coming up with some more prep before we get to the actual battle report, so keep an eye out for that.

And, you know, go raise some dead!

See ya!

My D&D Origin Story!

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Transcript

How’d you get into D&D? Your friend showed you this mystical booklet and weird esoteric dice you’d never seen before? You wanted to be Legolas and one day someone in the high school drama club invited you to a “role playing exercise”? 

Maybe you just had a good time watching Stranger Things and you jumped on this curious bandwagon of misfits and miscreants tooling around in these kinda cool tabletop game stores?

We’ve all got our stories about how we first encountered Dungeons and Dragons – and this one is mine. Oh, and this is also Tabletop Alchemy’s one year YouTube anniversary. I should have come up with something better to talk about.

INTRO

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes it’s story time! And where we thank our patrons for their kind and generous support, much obliged!

All right, it’s 1981. I didn’t know what cool music was yet, my favorite book was Harriet The Spy and my favorite movie was Empire Strikes Back. I was in the fifth grade at Our Lady of Perpetual Help, a Catholic elementary school smack dab in the middle of a desert.

One day my friend Alan grabs me at recess, all excited and tells me he’s got this new game we gotta try out. He’s got this red box in his hands and drags me over to the walkway in front of our classroom. The rest of the school is all out on the playground doing playground stuff in a hundred and ten degree heat. He slaps this box on the ground and opens it up. 

Now at this point in my life, I’ve played all the board games in our family closet, board games in my grandparents’ garage, I’ve played cribbage and yahtzee and uno and old maid and go fish, but inside this red box Alan has are thin booklets with wall-to-wall text in tiny font and what look like math tables and lists, there’s some graph paper in there and pencils and weird, hollow plastic red dice, they’re strange shapes but also they’re really cheap and crappy feeling because they have no weight to them. They’re like cheesy prizes at a ChuckECheese or something. Notably, there is no board nor any playing cards in this box.

And I’m like, “So what is this man?”

And he’s like, “It’s Dungeons and Dragons!” Like I was supposed to know what that meant.

But I have no idea what he’s talking about. Let’s take a moment to clarify what my setup here implies: I’m 10 and I’m in a Catholic elementary school. I’m also an alter boy at the church that owns the school. The only rock and roll songs I’ve heard are on my mom’s vinyl records of The Monkeys. I’m what they call “sheltered”, but I don’t know this. Nor does Alan. 

In contrast, Alan’s parents are literal Hell’s Angels bikers. Okay, that might be dramatic. They were definitely bikers, and there’s a 99% chance they belonged to a riding group, and there’s a tiny chance that group was the Hell’s Angels. But of course they’ve enrolled their kid in a Catholic school … so maybe they’re reformed Hell’s Angels. Or retired Hell’s Angels. At any rate, Alan’s parents were very cool and laid back, and he always had a pretty decent acquisition platform for the coolest toys. Like, he had the Star Wars Death Star play set as soon as it came out. And on top of that, he had all the cool Star Wars figures, and on top of that he had the holy grail – multiple stormtroopers in addition to all the best characters.

I had these two – the mailbox and the bug-eyed guy.

Anyway, there we are sitting on the concrete in front of our classroom and Alan is trying to explain to me how this game works. I’m not even convinced this is a game at this point. He’s telling me I’m gonna be this character, maybe a fighter or a wizard, and I’m gonna go into this dungeon place. And all I have in my mind is a dungeon cell from some 1960s tv movie or something. Why am I going into a dungeon cell?

I asked him where the board was and he says, with a straight face, there IS no board. He’s drawing something on a piece of that graph paper with one of the pencils. I didn’t understand what was going on. So roll this, he says, and gives me the d20. “You can fight a goblin,” he says. I don’t think I knew what a goblin was at that point. I might have. But I sure didn’t understand how we got from “here’s a piece of graph paper and a die” to “you’re fighting a goblin”. I try to explain to him that he’s not making any sense.

He starts flipping through one of the booklets and it looks like a text book to me – not even a regular text book but like something for college students or professors or something. It was literally impenetrable to me for the two minutes I had to look at it. 

I have a tendency to want to “get to the bottom line” quickly, like when I don’t understand something. And I just kept asking questions like “where’s my character?” as in “where’s my Monopoly top hat.” And how do I move. And he’s looking at this table in one of the books and saying things like “Okay, you gotta roll a 12 on that dice there.” And I’m like, “What? How do you know I have to roll a 12? And where’s the goblin?”

And then the school bell rings and we have to pack up all the papers and cheesy dice and booklets. Alan’s a little frustrated I think but you know, we’re ten, so, whatever, we just go back to class. I had no idea what the game part of the game was that he was trying to show me. I suppose he didn’t really understand everything about what he was doing either, but maybe if he’d like acted out how the game was played, maybe I would have got it. But, you know, that’s probably giving my ten-year old self too much credit. The whole thing just confused me.

But nevertheless, I went home and tried to explain to my mom what Alan had shown me at recess. And unbeknownst to me, there was something going on in the world that I was completely unaware of. I was ten, I didn’t watch the news. You didn’t either when you were ten.

So what I didn’t know was that my mom was already familiar with D&D. And after I told her about Alan and his weird new game that didn’t seem like a game at all, well, I was barred from hanging out with Alan from that point forward. I was fairly shocked by this unilateral response, it seemed totally outta left field and I didn’t understand. And there was one more surprise coming down the road too.

The next day I rode my bike the two miles to school like I did every day, but this time Alan and mutual friend ours confronted me by blocking my path on the sidewalk with their own bikes, and he was kinda pissed. I didn’t know what was going on and he’s telling me it’s all my fault and I’m like what’s my fault, dude, what’s going on? And it turns out that the school had forcibly banned Dungeons and Dragons from its campus. That very morning. And he was literally the only kid who had brought the game to school. I think he’d been called into the principal’s office you know, like the whole shebang, right? Read some kind of riot act, et cetera.

Again, I was pretty shocked and still did not comprehend why all this was happening but me and Alan, we weren’t ever quite the same friends after that.

Now, my mom watches these videos  – no, I don’t know why – and she’s heard me tell this story before. She and I had the appropriate rocky relationship throughout my teen years and we’re appropriately close now, so you know, this is just another example of getting some views at someone else’s expense. Everything gets funnier the older it gets. Like wine. Or cheese.

So, I never gave D&D a second thought after that, never even like heard of it again. My second, and technically my officially lasting encounter with D&D happened six or seven years later. In fact, this encounter was really with the fantasy genre itself, which up to that point I wasn’t even really aware of how big of a fan I was myself. I never got into the  – hold on, let me cast my cantrip of Protection from Fandom – I could never get through more than 10 pages of The Hobbit or The Lord of the Rings. But, on the flip side, I was huge fan of Peter Pan, Robin Hood, and a guy I worked with at the public library during my first high school summer job gave me his extra copies of the first four Elfquest graphic novels, which I totally fell in love with and those were my introduction to the idea that there were such a thing as non-superhero comic books. 

I told you, I’m late to the game on most things, always have been.

So I was a fan of “fantasy” but I never quite thought of it in that way. But one day I was in the mall bookstore with a buddy of mine – yep, the classic 80s Waldenbooks – and I spotted a book on the shelf and the cover art just grabbed me. This cover art right here.  And my buddy mentioned something about Dragonlance being based on Dungeons and Dragons. I devoured that first Dragonlance trilogy and then it was time for DnD. My bookstore buddy showed me a couple of his Advanced Dungeons and Dragons rulebooks and I was hooked, right away this time. I went right back to the mall, to another classic store called the Gamekeeper and I got the Players Handbook, this one, which I know now is the 2nd printing with the better cover. And I got the 2nd printing Dungeon Master’s Guide soon after.

I’ll be honest, at the risk of alienating some of you dear viewers. Hey, we all have our aesthetic preferences, what works for you or works for me doesn’t have to work for everyone. If my buddy had shown me the 1st printing covers of those books and those were the only ones available, there’s a pretty big chance I would have not been interested. No shade on the artist, I just really like Jeff Easley’s work. And Larry Elmore’s stuff of course, and he did the covers for the Dragonlance trilogy.

In fact, I remember later seeing the covers for DnD 3rd edition when I got out of the Army and I thought they were so cheesy looking I didn’t even consider buying those books. Oh, allow me: I’m a terrible person I know, I’m just a hack that judges books by their covers half the time.

Anyway, I was saving up my ducats from paycheck to paycheck from the movie theater where I worked – one day I’ll share some stories from that whole adventure, it was definitely my favorite job – but I’d buy another DnD rule book as soon as I could afford one. I hadn’t actually played the game yet but I was just all in, making characters and reading the rules and stuff. Eventually I found out a guy I worked at the movie theater was a dungeon master and he invited me to a big game he was setting up for new players with the intention of starting a campaign. Or something like that. So I jumped at the chance to play.

And it was pretty much a total fiasco. There were too many players, and it took like 3 hours just to get everyone’s characters set up and when we finally started actually playing, it was just a huge boring mess. It took like half an hour just to get to your turn in combat right? So I never went back to that group, BUT, that experience of interacting with the game in some fashion, was enough to give me a grasp of the basic gameplay process and that coupled with the facts that I didn’t know anyone else who played and my own personal leanings, led me right into wanting to run games myself.

I ended up recruiting a couple of new players from other guys I worked with at the movie theater and I ran a couple of very small sessions in people’s garages late at night after work and shortly after that I joined the Army, and I shipped all my DnD books to Germany with me. I ran a small campaign for a couple of months during my stint overseas and when I got out, during the summer of 1992, I stumbled across Shadowrun 2nd Edition. And a group of us, including my buddy from the bookstore, all decided to go to what was my first tabletop gaming convention, here in Los Angeles. It still runs every year, it’s called Strategicon. The one activity I engaged in during that convention was a “learn how to play Shadowrun” event, and the GM who ran our table was so good at describing things cinematically and clearly that I was just blown away and I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I ran Shadowrun for our group for a year straight. It was super fun. 

And playing Shadowrun is how I found out about miniatures and how much I didn’t know I needed them. I found that I really liked painting them and using them for the game. And as most things are doorways to others, TTRPG miniatures became a gateway to the discovery of wargames like Warhammer and Warhammer 40k and, you know, the slippery slide had begun. I progressively got into lots of other hobby stuff too, but those are tales for another time.

And that’s how I got into D&D and the hobby in general. Which I guess further led to this very moment right now, where I’m telling you all about it. Which, yes, seems, in hindsight, like a ridiculous thing to be doing. I don’t know why this would this would be interesting, but hey, maybe there should be a two-drink minimum for all my videos. That’d help, right? 

Anyway, I guess let me know how you discovered your first tabletop hobby game. Especially if it involves scholastic book bannings of some kind.

See ya!

The Joy Of Experimentation (or, Painting Minis Like a Madman)!

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Transcript

Experiment. A scientific procedure undertaken to make a discovery, test a hypothesis or demonstrate a known fact. 

Let’s take this definition and make it our own, shall we?

Artistic experiment: a moment in time when an artist puts aside all expectation and discipline to feel the freedom of trying something new just for the fun and joy of it. Quickly followed by the inherent discovery and testing of new techniques.

This is the most fun I’ve had painting miniatures in a long time. Maybe ever!

INTRO

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we stumble across something others have been doing for eons and realize we’re very very late to the game. And we thank our patrons for kindly supporting these exercises into newfound discoveries.

Today we’re going full Bob Ross and we’re casting aside any goals, expectations and worries brought about by “having to something right”. My buddy Hoffman was telling me about how years ago – and I mean decades – he would do a lot of his mini painting with inks, specifically the long-discontinued Games Workshop inks. He loved them and I always admired his painting chops, so I promptly engaged that hobbyist shopping module and went and got … too much stuff.

And then we hopped on a FaceTime call just to hang out and hobby. And I’ve got all these inks and new paints on my table and don’t quite know what to do with them. I know people have been painting with inks for decades but I’ve never really used them, so I was like “I want to try these out but what do I try them out on?”

And that’s when it hit me: it was time to leverage the Pile of Shame! I have this group of skeletons from the Cursed City box that I had started with the intention of using them as my first test subjects for oil washes, which is another technique I’ve never tried. I bought all the oil wash supplies like two years ago, maybe longer. 

Lemme alone!

So I pulled one of these guys out and used it as a test subject. I thought, okay, fuck it, they’re just sitting over there gathering literal dust, let’s just grab one and try these inks out on it.

Now, this is the crux of today’s topic. I’ll talk through the painting I did, but here’s the TLDR: it’ll sound dumb but I’ve never grabbed a mini and just messed around with putting paint on it, never without the idea that I’m painting this figure to be a finished miniature.

I’ve never just thought, ok, let’s just play around, I’m not gonna fish this mini, let’s just do some tests and see what happens. And I’ll tell you what, this was so ridiculously fun. Liberating is what I’d really call it. I just used random colors and random techniques and I was just carefree. You’re gonna hear a lot of these words repeated, and you could ascribe that to enthusiastic emphasis. I can’t overstate how awesome this was, for me.

I don’t know the first thing about inks, and it just doesn’t matter. This miniature’s gonna look like a clown – and that simply doesn’t matter.

So I’ve got all these inks but I also, just the other day, picked up some of Vallejo’s version of Contrast paints, which they call Xpress Color. The reason I wanted to check them out is I read a review online that said they dry slower and flatter than GW Contrast paints. If anyone needs more working time, it’s me.

So we’re gonna play around with some of these closet skeletons and just have fun.

I’m also trying out a new camera position which worked nicely, except for the fact that my hair got into almost every shot. Now I know, you’re like, “dude, Ignatius, didn’t you just buy a camera that had live HDMI out so you could monitor your shots?”

Yes. Yes I did, dear viewer, exactly that. And what happened is, when I looked up to check the framing and focus, my hair would leave the shot, so I didn’t realize what was happening.

laugh it up fuzzball

Okay, I started out with some AK Interactive sepia ink for the breastplate. I thinned it down a little with water and just wanted to see what this color was like. I’ve noticed the AK brand sepia and burnt umber are a lot more gray than other brands but all good, this is what experimenting is all about.

So to see some actual “brown” colored ink, I tried this Daler Rowney burnt umber on the scale mail. Basically each part of the model represents a test area for something, right? So I put full strength burnt umber on the lower scale mail stuff and then thinned it out for on the upper scales, just to see what the difference was like.

One thing I’ve been noticing with inks is they seem to help me with learning glazing. Working with ink is pretty fun because they are so fluid but the glazing is great because they’re highly pigmented as well as thin. So I glazed some Daler Rowney purple into the breastplate just to practice adding some shadow. The purple is cool but what if we glaze some Liquitex burnt sienna and carbon black over that purple? Pretty fun just messing with the colors like this.

Okay, let’s try some of these Xpress Colors – I’m thinning this wasteland brown way down with the xpress medium and trying it out on the skelly’s bones. Two things of immediate note: one, the xpress paint is pretty nice, easily on par with Citadel’s Contrast line; two, this paint smells like Vallejo added some kind of perfume to it – they didn’t of course but there is a definite weirdly fruity sweet smell to this paint. And their inks smell like this too. I’m very susceptible to harsh chemical fumes but this stuff doesn’t bother me, I’ve just never used an acrylic hobby paint – other than Tamiya paints – that have a tangible odor.

Now this line of metallic colors from Vallejo Metal Color is hands down the best metallic paints I’ve ever come across. This copper is awesome. Now let’s try out this dark turquoise ink. I watered it way down to see what it does over the copper. I think it’s pretty cool! Maybe it’s not the correct color for verdigris but who cares?

Now for a great big experiment: what will thinned down burnt sienna do as a wash over all this yellow? Again, this is the luxury of just messing around – it doesn’t matter, we’re just gonna find out! I definitely need to experiment more with trying to get it smooth but the overall weathered look is pretty good.  

How about on the back side we mix purple with burnt umber and try that? I must say I’m pretty happy I have a Pile of Opportunity to leverage this way, this is just so fun! So this mix was a bit too thin to make a dramatic change, so I just got some less diluted and tried adding that to the deeper areas on the tabard. 

I missed capturing putting some green Vallejo ink on this vambrace but here I’m deepening the shadows by glazing some more into it.

All right, how about some Vallejo yellow ink full strength all over the shield? Why? I don’t know. I just wanted to try the yellow ink out somewhere and so there we go! 

Now I also picked up some bottles of Vallejo’s new formula game color. I got some purple because I don’t typically paint much purple and I wanted to see what this new formula is like. So here’s midnight purple on the spear blade, it’s very fluid and nice to work with, feels kinda like a thinner version of Citadel paint.

Also, I swear this is not a sponsored video by any of the companies I mention today.

I used a lighter shade of purple to blend up some highlights and one of the properties of this new formula is it stays wetter longer and I’m really like this stuff. Damn, I might have to get some more colors!

I put some AK sepia ink on the haft of the spear just to see what it looked like full strength. It’s a pretty dark warm gray, I just don’t know why they call it sepia. I could always mix in some red ink if I wanted to make it more “sepia”, maybe. 

I picked up this Daler Rowney sap green ink just cause I liked the color, so I’m trying it out here on our guy’s metal nikes, and this is a great color! Some of this I’m thinning, some not, I didn’t keep track cause I’m a wild man!

All right, for these leather straps I’m gonna try out the AK ink called Sooty Black, and we’ll put it down full strength. It reminds me of a cross between Citadel’s Black Legion and Basilicanum gray, but it’s thinner and flows easier obviously because it’s an ink. I like this stuff, nice to work with.

I wanted to try the dark turquoise ink full strength so why not put some on the yellow shield? Why not try out making a blend from the yellow into blue shadow? Using some water to thin it and smooth the transition really made for a nice gradient. I’ve always had problems doing this with regular paint!

I have this raw sienna that I’ve used like once, but I thought it might be a perfect shading for the yellow, so on it goes. I think it’s a good weathering color for the yellow and at first I thought I wouldn’t put it over the blue but then I thought “it’s a pretty light color, it might just unify the whole thing.” So onto the blue it went.

Now this, my friends, is my new favorite go-to dark steel color – Vallejo metal color gunmetal. This is 100% replacing my standard Scalecolor black metal paint. As I mentioned earlier, this metal color line is staggeringly awesome. Why am I putting purple on the spear blade? Because! And now I’m putting some thinned down xpress color copper brown over that spear just to see what it does, the idea being maybe it’ll create some rusty weathering.

I just kept going with that gunmetal, adding some chipping and little pops of metallic shine on the edges of things. This shield is literally surprising me with how cool it’s coming out. Does it look realistic? We don’t care! The real question is: do we care? No, ‘cause it looks rad!

I like these metal highlights so much I just started adding them to other bits and pieces everywhere. This is another advantage to painting a skeleton, though, right? Weathering and dirty paint jobs are kinda the the effect.

I put full strength Daler Rowney burnt umber and AK burnt Umber on the base, just to check ‘em out. Their consistency and high pigment makes them pretty ideal for quickly covering bases. 

For some specific rust color, I mixed yellow ink, red ink and xpress copper brown and thinned the mix with water. I even put some rust on the shield. As Hoffman would say, we’re going full clown suit. Does bronze or copper rust? Nope, but say it with me now: who cares?!

Someone out there does care, deeply, and they’re having a conniption fit right about now. You’re welcome!

And I’m gonna double down and throw some verdigris on the shield too! Right next to the rust! This guy might be actually usable. I mean like he may be graduating from test subject to tabletop.

Okay, so I originally thought I’d use this guy for the oil test on top of everything else. But I decided I like how he turned out, so I’m gonna splash up two more skellies specifically to try the oil washes on. We’re not gonna watch all that of course – except for these two tidbits here.

I decided to tint this guy’s bones with some green, like he’s a mossy skeleton or something. I mixed xpress color orc skin with dwarf skin and thinned it out and I kinda like how it looks.

I also got what’s knowns as a “wild hair” and washed some purple over that yellow tabard just to see what it would do. It didn’t go on as smoothly as some of the other inks, so i’m just making a mental note of that. Good for chunky weathering maybe.

Now here’s a third skeleton and the reason I’m doing two to test oils on is I’m gonna gloss coat one of them to see how much of a difference that makes in working with the oil wash. But most of the inks dry to a satin finish anyway so this might not be much of a difference test.

But I do want to show you this one thing that works out pretty good. Some thinned down xpress wasteland brown did a pretty nice job of shading the tabard, I was pretty happy to see that. That’s definitely something to keep in mind. 

Ah and one more detail, right here. I mixed some xpress storm blue with the xpress white color and check it out, it kinda makes a decent nonmetallic metal thing right? It’s not contrasty enough but still, pretty cool for a single coat of paint. 

All right I let the gloss coat dry for 24 hours, not sure if that was necessary but you know, relax when you can right?

So I mixed up a wash with the Mona Lisa stuff and a bit of black and bit of burnt umber oil paint and here goes nothing. Right away this is looking too thin to me. So I gonna add some more black for attempt number two, and this is much better I think.

We just slop this stuff on, just making sure it gets everywhere. The gloss coat definitely makes the oil slide off the raised areas way more than it does on the non-gloss coated figure. One huge advantage to oils is they just don’t dry, you have plenty of working time. The main pain in the butt with this oil stuff its trying to keep all the tools, brushes, palette – which is metal by the way – and paper towels with oil thinner on them, keeping all that stuff separate from any water stuff. Having never painted with oils before, all this is new to me. 

I waited 20 minutes before going back over the minis with a q-tip sponge thing that was dampened with a little bit of thinner. I can see already that this procedure is another technique that’s easy to do but hard to master. I also think that this oil wash technique would be good to try on a mini that’s been painted in a more clean and proper fashion to see what it does. Because of the hours-long drying time, the option to go back and add more or remove more remains viable for quite a while.

So, here they are, the subjects of the artistic experiment sessions. They’ve all been matte varnished and based. This was my very first one, the one that kicked off this whole thing. You can see I had a sword here to mess around with and I did most of the inks on this one full strength. And this one my buddy Hoffman did when he came up for a visit and wanted to try out Contrast paints for the first time. 

And here are three we did in today’s video and the oil wash really did a great job. This is the first one and it didn’t get the oil wash. Overall I dig this guy, but I could see now maybe putting an oil wash on him just to get a little more patina across all the surfaces and some better outlining. 

This guy had the gloss coat put on before the oil wash and he looks pretty good too. The oil wash seems to work like a matte coat as well, not insofar as making a matte finish – all of these have been matte coated as the last step – but the oil wash does work towards unifying all the different surfaces. I think I need to try an oil wash on some figures that aren’t heavily weathered beforehand, just to see what it does then. These guys were pretty well weathered prior to the oil wash.

This dude got the oil wash without a gloss coat and I’m not sure there’s too much of difference – between using a gloss coat and not. There’s some for sure, I just need less heavily weathered test subjects to get a more accurate idea I think of what it’s doing. But as far as what the oil wash does, this little bit here, his exposed ribs, I didn’t have any shading in there at all and the wash really filled in those recesses in a pretty nice way. All in all, I do enjoy the oil washes, they just have that annoying 24 hour drying time to consider. Which isn’t really that big of a deal, but it’s a thing.

Here’s the guy with and without the oil wash – the wash is fairly subtle but overall you can see how it unified the feel of all the different bits. And you can see how the various inks and paints have different finishes, from glossy to satin to flat. Now of course the final matte coat does a lot toward this too but the oil wash definitely adds some depth and lining to the figure.

It was just so much fun to mess around and try stuff out with no expectations – and the idea that there just weren’t any mistakes made everything take on this totally carefree, have-fun-with-paints vibe that I just had to share. This mindset is a new one for me and I learned quite a bit. Mostly I learned that I need to paint with this mindset going forward. Well, not really that I NEED to, but I WANT to.

So again, this exercise has been the most fun I’ve had painting minis in a long time. And it’s not like I haven’t enjoyed painting minis, not at all, but I feel like I’ve unlocked a new level in my head. 

So, go grab a mini outta that pile of shame – yeah, THAT pile of shame <snap> – and just have some fun experimenting with it. Try out some inks! Or whatever strikes your fancy. It’ll be a good time, trust me.

See ya!

Jack Of All Trades or Master Of One – How Do You Identify?

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Transcript

Today’s video topic is really just a rumination, a ramble, if you will. Essentially I’m just trying to work through an idea, or a notion, or a … a “wondering” maybe. A musing even. Yes I meant do that. Don’t doubt! It may have something to do with personality or maybe being happy, which is what a lot of rumination is all about.

There are a lot of facets in our tabletop hobby. Which means there are a lot of things to excel at. Just like in life – everything’s a fractal, the seed of the whole contained in every part. That’s also the structure of a hologram, right? And our universe might be a hologram … ooh.

Well, anyway, back to the point: for a good two thirds of my life, I firmly believed that one of the coolest phrases or labels was “jack of all trades”. Conveniently disregarding the flip side of that particular coin: master of none.

INTRO

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we try to figure ourselves out by examining the tabletop hobby as an example. And we thank our patrons for their fearless support of such random endeavors. Muchas gracias!

When I was a kid dreading bedtime cause I wanted to keep reading whatever book I was reading – I was always super jealous of kids in the movies who had awesome bedrooms designed by art directors and read their books with flashlights under the blankets – I’d just get caught – at some point I encountered the term “Jack of All Trades” and I thought that was the coolest thing ever.

A couple of my heroes back then were Han Solo – duh – and John Bender – also duh – and I’ve always had this jack of all trades thing in the back of my mind as something really cool to be. It really, I understand now, sorta became a subconscious thing that resonated with my penchant for liking or being interested in a lot of different things.

Now in our various niches in the tabletop hobby, there are so many things to do, to get good at, to master. Game mastering, for instance. Or writing, or miniature painting, terrain building, strategy, storytelling, mapmaking, illustration, publishing, design, music, special effects, photography even. I mean, the list just kinda keeps on going and with the democratization of technologies, there’s no end in sight. There’s 3d sculpting and printing, dice manufacturing, woodworking, playing card design, game design, there’s just a ton of stuff. And that’s just one niche!

If you’re like me – which is not recommended – you really dig the top tier artists and producers out there. You not only appreciate and marvel at their stunning craftsmanship and talent but you harbor a desire in your black heart to produce something of a similar quality. But you also come to realize – whether through age or experience or both – the tremendous amount of skill and focus required to achieve such levels of artistic success. And I don’t mean financial success, that’s a whole different ball of wax, I just mean successfully creating masterful works of art that people enjoy.

And being a jack of all trades is kind of not just an impediment but almost antithetical to this kind of achievement.

Now, I’m not saying that, say, Angel Giraldez isn’t good at anything except painting miniatures. Or Joe McCullough is only great at writing games. Or Matt Mercer is only good at DMing … and voice acting. Not at all. What I am saying is that it’s a somewhat safe assumption – is there such a thing as a “safe” assumption? i don’t think so – I think think it’s a somewhat safe assumption that these folks have sunk a disproportionate number of hours into that “thing” that they’ve mastered. And that’s awesome.

But a jack of all trades is also a master of none. As much as I’ve wanted to be a Sergio Calvo of miniature painting or a Brennan Lee Miller of DMing or a Coen Brother of directing or a Chivo Lubezki of cinematography or a William Gibson of writing, et cetera, et cetera, I’m highly unlikely to become a “master” of anything.

And that’s okay, despite the periodic bouts of frustration and empty wishful thinking. This is mostly because of two factors: my inherent laziness and my unwillingness to focus on one thing for an exorbitant amount of time. This doesn’t mean I COULDN’T put in those ten thousand hours of practice on a singular endeavor, I certainly could. I just make a decision, either consciously or unconsciously, every day NOT to. Every time I think about it, I’m like, well, yeah, I could go do that for ten hours today but then I couldn’t do this stuff over here or that stuff over there. Or at least I’d have to put that stuff off for a few years.

And yet … I still WISH I could paint or write or build a masterpiece!

There are certainly advantages to the jack of all trades skillset. If we were to look at life through the lens of an RPG, for example, it’s hard to argue that having a wide array of lower scored skills on the character sheet is a waste of XP. But it’s equally hard to ignore the meteoric rise potential of having a super high ability score in a particular skill or two.

I think what I’ve come to realize about life is that … wait for these awesome words of wisdom, savor the moment … here they come … The grass is always greener – over there.

It always is. That’s our perception anyway.

Do I wish from time to time that I had otaku-level focus on just one thing, one discipline, one creative outlet I could turn into mountains of high praise, commercial success and adoration from legions of fans? And critics? Absolutely, from time to time.

But I also enjoy being interesting in lots of things. Even though I know that sorta keeps me in the realm of “master of nothin’.” Lately, however, I’ve been discovering I can do some things I always actively “believed” I could never or would never be able to do. That’s another interesting side effect of the jack of all trades thing. But also just the everyday “you never know until you try” thing.

In fact, I wanna point out something about the word “belief”. If you classify a thought as a “belief”, by the very nature of the word, you’re installing some rigid psychic limits in your mind that are easy to forget are simply self-constructed. I try to be very conscious of when and how I use the word “belief”, because classifying something as a belief makes it difficult to change, even though, by its very nature, it means something that isn’t necessarily provable, and therefor possibly incorrect or maybe just NOT infallible.

Anyway, back to the topic at hand – typically you gotta try something a few times to really see if you can get the hang of something. I mean, essentially you can learn to do anything given enough time and enough practice. Of course, liking something or some activity in and of itself goes a long way towards helping one weather that initial storm of “I want to do this but I suck at it” feeling.

As a personal example, I remember TO THIS DAY being at my school desk in first grade. At Our Lady of Perpetual Help elementary school in Indio, California, where yes, it was a 110 degrees outside in the spring time. My teacher was Sister Adrian and in the month of October she handed all of us first graders big sheets of colored craft paper. The assignment was: draw a picture for Halloween. I loved Halloween, just like you do. And I remember looking at that paper and KNOWING the image I wanted to draw. A creepy haunted house with a giant moon behind it. With like broken windows and curtains streaming in the breeze and crooked shingles and a twisted wrought iron gate. And I got out my crayons and I started to draw. And I quickly realized that I didn’t know how to translate the idea in my thought-cage to that piece of paper.

Anyway, my drawing was a stupid first grader’s stick figure version of a house. I thoroughly hated it. Really what I hated was my own lack of ability. At the end of the day, Sister Adrian showed off everyone’s pictures one at a time, holding them up so we could all see ‘em. And some of them were super cool to my six year old eye and I was just filled with frustration. From that point on I just got it in my head that I simply could not “do art”.

Some four and half decades later, sitting around one day, I drew a cactus in my notebook. I don’t know why. It seemed like an easy thing to sketch out I guess. And that little cactus kinda shocked me. So I drew another one. And another. 

Now I still don’t know anything about how to draw, but look at what I’ve been doing, doodling-wise. Yeah, lotta books and plants in pots. And recently I started drawing random weird medieval weapons. I’m not thinking about anything in particular – least of all “realism” – I’m just doodling, cause it’s a great little stress reliever and I like the way these pens I found feel on this particular paper I’ve got. And every time, I’m a little bit amazed that I drew something “readable”, like, you can tell what it is.

I don’t know thing one about illustration and even though I’ve always kind of wanted to “be an illustrator” – or more accurately – “be able to paint or draw a picture that doesn’t look like a first grader did it”, I know I don’t have the ten thousand hours to put into just this one thing in order to, you know, get good. I got too many other interests. And distractions. 

So jack of all trades it is for me. I have no idea what this topic might mean for you, but I just wanted to chat about it. Just like there are so many facets to our hobby, there are many facets to life. If you wanna be a master of one – or some – you gonna get focused, you gonna put in the mileage, and you gonna get good. Or if you’re happy doing all the things, do ‘em all!

So let me know what you think of all this. I mean, besides the whole “Get on with the hobby stuff, man!”

See ya!