Lego

All right, today is gonna be a weird one. This is due in no small part to my recent, a, tussle with a couple of viruses, and one of the results of,, tussling with him. We’re gonna talk about drugs, we’re gonna talk about other worlds and we’re gonna fuck around with something that’s part of my tabletop hobby, but may not be part of your tabletop hobby. But it’s still miniature!

So maybe grab a drink and a snack for this one because we’re going hard into the alchemy for this one.

Intro.

Greetings, good humans and welcome to tabletop alchemy, where sometimes your hose goes off the deep end and dares you to come along with him! And where we think our patrons for indulging The Alchemist in the room!

All right, I guess I should put a warning upfront for this one. I want to talk about psychedelics. I’m not promoting the use of any narcotics – prescription or otherwise – but I’ve got a secondhand story that has fascinated me from the first time I heard it.

And typically the fourth Thursday of the month is a crafting or painting video, so here’s my take on that for this month.

This is stud.io. It’s a 3-D virtual Lego building software. Now, some of you know, I’m into Lego, otherwise known as a certified AFOL Dash you can look that up – and when I got sick for half of December and half of January, I kind of go back into i. Because I couldn’t think or be energetics enough to get my personal creative project done, it was just super nice to build something or in my case quite a few some things from instructions and provided materials. And I just love how a Lego build magically grows from a pile of desperate pieces into something recognizable. From chaos to order right before your eyes, very satisfying.

I’ve never really used Studio before and some thing I am really curious about is how it handles creating instructions. But to test that we need a bill so I thought I just mock up my little mushroom, mock and use that to test out the whole program. To prep this I did figure out how to set up a separate project-based parts list and so I’ve already added most of the parts included in my little MOC for easy brick selection.

Now, while I work on that, let me tell you a story. A few years ago, my friend, Brian –, I don’t think he’ll mind me using his name I don’t think – did something he always wanted to do, and the day after he told me all about it. Because I was super interested in what this experience was like, especially from someone I knew really well.

So, he had a met a friend at the place he was working who knew how to distill or refine DMT, dimethyltriptamine. DMT is found in almost trace amounts in almost every living thing, plant or animal, including in our own brains. Brian had wanted to try a DMT trip and to be perfectly frank I’ve been very curious myself about that. I haven’t yet, but who knows. DMT is essentially the train ticket ingredient found in ayahuasca but taking in the form of ayahuasca is like an all-day event and the trip takes hours, from what I understand. Taking distilled or refined DMT results in a trip that lasts for 5-10 minutes and then you’re back, and from what I gather, once the trip is over, there’s no real lingering effects, no hangover, no nausea, you’re physically fine and operational. Mentally, you’ve just got this crazy experience to mull over for a few days.

So Brian and sets up a date with his buddy to go on this trip and his buddy has quite a bit of experience with DMT and will shepherd him through it from start to finish and Brian’s brother is also attending as another voyager but also as a chaperone during the trip, right. Okay, so the guy fills a pipe with whatever the appropriate amount of DMT powder is and helps Brian smoke it. Now this process right at the start has it’s own protocol – you need to take nice solid BIG hits off this pipe and you have take three hits in a row. The whole point of this is that DMT starts acting very quickly the human brain, but it’s also dosage-dependent on how far out your trip is gonna go. The term “breaking through” is used a lot, if you don’t imbibe enough, you don’t get the full experience.

Okay, so Brian, a typical cannabis user, takes three really big hits off this pipe. And he said that even after the first hit he started to mentally go, and his buddy had to really help him get the next two hits off the pipe achieved. Now, there’s a definite caveat here, which most people who try to describe their psychedelic trips will invoke – and Brian was no different when relating his story to me. Essentially, he’s gonna try to describe what he saw and experienced but that really he doesn’t have the words to express truly what he was seeing and feeling, because the experience is so beyond or above or past the primitive level of vocabulary I guess is one way to put it.

So Brian’s train is leaving the station, he’s like zooming out of this reality, from his perspective. And he arrives in what he describes as a sort of hallway. Maybe like being inside of a kaleidoscope. He gets the feeling of being in a hallway even though maybe visually it isn’t super defined that way. He’s seeing all kinds of shifting patterns and colors and texture, but he just has the feeling that he’s in a hallway. And a being, an autonomous living thing comes the hall to greet him. And the best he could describe it as was like a sort of silhouette made up of moving geometric stained glass patterns that kept folding in on itself over and over. And this being – which these entities are called, in the broader public colloquialism as “machine elves” – this being is talking to Brian, or communicating rather, without words. It’s like he said he knew what the machine elf was communicating but it definitely wasn’t talking or using like verbal words. And the machine elf was greeting him and was happy to see him and was expressing this like welcoming happiness of like, “hey, we’re glad you’re here, welcome, welcome!” 

Okay, time out – I know this sounds like I’m just going relate this story and it’s for fun or whatever, but there’s a very real kind of mind-boggling statistic? or fact? or property? something! there’s this one thing that brings up some genuine scientific questions that is super fascinating to me and I’m looking forward to what you guys might make it.

Okay, so Brian is in the hallway with the machine elf, he’s inside the kaleidoscope. And the machine elf wants Brain to follow it and it takes him to a doorway – again, the literal word “doorway” is only how he can describe it in verbal language, it’s not exactly what he sees or experiences, but it’s the best facsimile he has to describe it. And they go through this doorway and enter this really large “room” and it’s full of machine elves and strange “machinery” even. He said there were like hundreds of entities in this room and some were working with this weird machinery and a lot of them were maybe partying – I may be getting some of these details wrong, just from the passage of time since he told me about this – but he said it was pretty overwhelming, but again it was like he could hear them communicating ideas of “welcome, and we’re happy to see you and it’s great you’re here”. But overall this room and all of this activity was a little much. 

So the machine elf that greeted him takes him back into the hallway and they move down the hallway, they’re moving away from that one door way. And it takes him to another doorway and sorta bids him to enter that doorway. So Brian goes into another space and this one he describes as being like super vast, like the ceiling is way way way up and the room is just enormous. And in this room is another being, but it isn’t a machine elf. This thing is gigantic, and he said it’s really hard to describe but it was kind of like a giant tiki mask – I know, this totally bizarre – but it’s like this psychedelic fractalized, fractalizing tiki mask that’s like 40 stories tall. And Brian said he’d never felt so small next to another living entity. He said that this big dude didn’t really talk to him or hardly acknowledged his presence but that he was sure that it was aware that he was there. And there was nothing malicious about it but it was just kind of ambivalent about him being there. And Brian said I think that he just stood in this room with this gigantic entity for a while and didn’t feel afraid but understood that that entity could crush him or remove him from reality in the blink of an eye. And he was just experiencing these feelings and just hanging out in the room. I forget if he said that the entity looked at him or not, I think he might have said that initially the giant dude kind of looked down at him once but it never communicated with him like the machine elf did.

And then the machine elf eventually led him back out of the room in the hallway and back towards the way they’d come from and then Brian returned to our reality and his trip came to an end.

Now Brian is a proud atheist. And one of my first questions for him was, so did this experience affect his atheism in any way. Because both Brian and I were very curious about whether this experience was all internal, meaning generated by his own brain, or if he really met autonomous entities, right? And his answer to that was this was absolutely the most poignant experience he’d ever had in any way that could possibly sway his atheistic opinion.

Now, here’s the thing that trips me out the most. So after Brian goes on his trip, he’s telling his buddy about it and his buddy says oh, you met so-and-so. And Brian’s like, “what?” It turns out there’s a whole database online where people who go on these psychedelic journeys, specifically this DMT trip, which seems to take people to a common location, there’s this database where people record what they saw and what entities they’ve met and Brian found the description of the giant tiki head dude and there’s a name for it and many people have encountered that same entity. And there’s a whole bunch of entities that have been recorded and cross-referenced by psychonauts – I like word psychonaut. And this what fascinates me to no end. There are now university research teams trying to “map” the DMT world, this location that people go to on the drug. And it’s this fact that disparate people going on these trips are all seeing the same entities and describing them the same way independent of each other.

So what is going on here? Is there actually another space, another dimension, another location that you literally go to when you trip on DMT? And if so … well, what the hell does that mean for science and our universe and our reality? It’s so intriguing that I do want to try it myself, I would love to go on a psychedelic trip, but to perfectly honest, I worry that my own bad memories or feelings of nervousness or whatever, would result in a “bad trip”, that’s the one thing that has kept me from seeking out this experience myself. But nowadays there are entire programs that help people through the experience, where they guide you through some exercises and help you placate those inner fears so you can have relatively high odds of having a “good trip”. 

And then, to tie this all back to our little Lego build here, we’ve got lower tier psychedelics like “magic mushrooms” proving to be extremely effective in psychiatry and psychology. Clinics are using them to treat PTSD, depression, you know all these emotional and mental afflictions that typically would have been treated – poorly I might add – with synthetic pharmaceuticals. I have gone very lightweight trips with psilocybin and other than the nausea aspect, I’ve found those psychedelic affects to be quite nice personally. I’ve done acid once and would never recommend that over mushrooms. 

And also non-psychedelic mushrooms are a fantastic food to cook up! I got some lion’s mane from the store the other day, I’ve wanted to try lion’s mane for years and never saw it in a regular store til a couple a weeks ago and I just bought my second package of it. For like $5 I get what is as filling as a steak dinner and it just cuts up and cooks up kinda like tofu and it’s just super good! And you know, when I go to Five Guys cause I want to pay like $30 for a burger and fries – don’t get me started – I get sautéed mushrooms on it. Or when I get a baguette from my local French-style bakery and get a bratwurst or a chicken sausage from the store, I love just drowning that brat in sautéed mushrooms and onions. So good!

All right let’s see what this Stud.io does with the instruction thing. I have a parts list for this MOC on brick link so I think you could order the parts and build this yourself if you wanted to – if I can figure out how to get a link to the parts list for the public. One thing I want to point out here is I built this MOC I guess around 10 years ago, so in that time Lego has introduced quite a few new excellent foliage parts and other new bricks that would be super cool to introduce into this model. So I want to make a new little shroom forest with some of these new pieces, so when I do that I’ll call it Shrooms 2024. 

So this instruction builder is actually pretty cool. It’s definitely got it’s own learning curve here, like I don’t understand why the build is being illustrated from what I would call the “back” of the model, but it looks like I’ll have to go into each instructional step and turn the model around. Tedious but doable. I think creating instructions might take as long as building the whole thing, lol, but it’s pretty cool how professional it the pages look! You could make something that mimics actual Lego instructions fairly easily. I think is pretty rad.

And I saw this button, so let’s see what a render does, this should be interesting. Let’s go with high resolution and changing the light direction doesn’t seem to update in the thumbnail or live view so we’ll just have to run a render and see what it does. For this little build it didn’t take too long but I bet it would take quite a few minutes if you had a much bigger model in here. Wow, that is pretty cool! Check that out. I don’t know why the tan mushroom dishes don’t have the mushroom texture pattern like the red one, but I’ll have to explore this more. It’s pretty neat looking, pretty realistic, I’m surprised. 

I mean, building in 3d like this doesn’t hold a candle to working with actual Lego, but this is pretty damn cool nonetheless.

Man, there are just so many ways to express your creativity these days, it’s kind of astounding. So many things to get into and explore and geek out on.

Well, I don’t know, if you’re into Lego, maybe check out this Stud dot IO software, and if you’re not into Lego … what are you doing?! 

All right, yell at me about Lego or how I’m diluting the tabletop hobby content on this channel or your thoughts on psychically accessing new dimensions and going on virtual trips to places unseen and on the other side of the rain.

See ya!

Half the stuff I come up with for the beginnings of videos never works because of the requirement to have a thumbnail and title that summarizes whole thing. Hard to build up any suspense or sense of mystery when you’re supposed to show the thing before you even talk about it.

I know, I just gotta get better at making thumbnails. Just let me complain and avoid the taking responsibility. It’s what I do best.

But in the meantime, you’ve seen this thing over my shoulder for quite a few videos now. I kinda wanted to run a contest and give a little prize to whoever first guessed exactly what it is. But I couldn’t figure out how to do that either.

This is why you tune into this channel, I know. Perfect, expert knowledge from a perfect expert who gets right to the point. Every time. You’re welcome.

Anyway, today we’re gonna talk about the company who made that thing and how their product could be a great substitute for tabletop terrain and miniatures.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we talk sometimes about one of my favorite products and companies in the world that has nothing to do with our hobby and try to make it … have something … to do with our hobby …  

Here’s Rowan Witchbane in a cameo, or as we in the industry call it, a lame attempt at maintaining the dear viewers’ good will! You don’t even look a the camera. It’s over there. What do I pay you for?

All right, let’s start with my classic sales pitch, often delivered in the aisle of a toy store, triggered upon hearing someone bemoan the sticker price of any particular LEGO set. And no, that’s not a facetious statement, I have definitely given this pitch several times in several toy stores. Once in a while, I am indeed “that guy”. Once in a while, you are too, let’s not kid ourselves. But you know, we try, right?

Ok, here we go:

Actually, Lego is a great company that makes an excellent product that has more value than you initially think when you’re just looking at that retail price. I’ve got five reason why.

Number One. My mom has a big plastic tub full of all the Lego pieces my siblings and I played with as kids, right? Now, the grandkids play with this same tub of Lego. And when I give a brand new Lego set to a niece or nephew or cousin, I know all those new pieces are going to work just fine with all those old ones. What company in this world makes a product right now that is 100% compatible with products they manufactured fifty or sixty years ago? It’s the literal opposite of “planned obsolescence”.

Number Two. Lego parts only lose value in one way: if they’re broken. And they are notoriously hard to break. That doesn’t mean they don’t break, just not very often. There’s a huge market for pre-owned Lego, you can always re-sell any Lego piece for typically as much – but usually more – than what you paid for it. Some folks literally invest cold hard cash in Lego parts. You know, as opposed to like precious metals. Seriously, there are people that do this.

Number Three. Lego is a medium more than a simple product. I mean, you buy one set of Lego and you can build an infinite number of things out of it. That alone gives it enormous value, way more than even paints or clay that will eventually run out or dry up, et cetera. And as a medium, it inspires creativity just by the very nature of what it is and how it works. And it works equally as well as a cooperative activity as it does as a solo activity.

Number Four. The Lego Company, which is currently a privately held company, meaning there are no shareholders demanding short term profits, the Lego company has set its own sustainability goals – and consistently met them. Their main headquarters in Denmark where all the design work and some packaging is done is 100% sustainably powered from an energy perspective. They are transitioning from their traditional petroleum-based plastic to more sustainable plant-based oil synthetics and already manufacture a small percentage of their pieces in this new material.

Number Five. Who doesn’t like Lego? Kids, adults, octogenarians, everyone has fun creating with Lego. And of course working with it teaches all kinds of concepts, from arts and crafts to math and engineering to design and fabrication. It’s a truly fantastic product with a fantastic philosophy behind it.

But, what in the world does Lego have to do with our tabletop hobby? I’m sure most of you know where I’m going to go with this, I mean, it was in the thumbnail. Or the title. It was spoiled somewhere.

I think Lego can be a pretty cool alternative to crafting terrain or painting miniatures. Actually, I should say, an alternative to “using” traditionally crafted terrain or painted miniatures in tabletop games. And this goes for both tabletop RPGs and skirmish games.

Now when I thought about this video topic I had no idea this existed. Yep, a whole sub reddit dedicated to rpg Lego builds and ideas. This shot of a manticore battle is pretty cool. Just googling “lego skirmish game terrain” brings up a ton of inspiration.

My first encounter with this idea was at a Lego convention in Silicon Valley – Bricks By The Bay. Someone there was running Zombicide games with 100% Lego assets, from terrain to minifigs. Another staple of most Lego conventions are huge Star Wars battle boards, they’ll be like five feet long and have hundreds of troop minifigs and ships and sometimes really big chunks of terrain. Actually there are always a ton of builds – wait, a ton of MOCs, if I don’t get the nomenclature correct LUGs are gonna deploy AFOLs to come after me – I’m kidding of course, most AFOLs are very nice people, just like tabletop hobbyists. Anyway, there are always tons of MOCs – that stands for My Own Creation – that look like fantasy and sci-fi terrain. There’s always something amazing to trip out on. I bought a damn book just about this one Mouseguard village build, it was so cool! And I was even able to buy a couple 3^rd party Mouseguard minifig heads! They are pretty rad.

Here’s my MOC that I took to display at the show. The roof is removable, and making it was a pain in the ass but I really wanted this “thatched roof” kinda vibe. The minifigs are built from official Lego parts and 3^rd party custom parts. But hey, looks like a war band or adventuring party to me!

All right let’s be honest. Building Lego terrain, even at minifig scale let alone at 28mm or 32mm, can take just as long or in some cases, longer, than crafting traditional terrain. And builds can get more expensive than using regular hobby materials for sure. The flip side of that is, as we’ve already pointed out, anything built out of Lego can be rebuilt into new stuff … I think there’s a formula for this. Yeah, there it is. And there’s also that re-sellability of all Lego parts.

I do think you could build scatter terrain or dungeon tiles or walls pretty quick. Rubble, little sci-fi bits, trees, even whole forests. Look at these Lego trees, they are pretty sweet and these kinds of builds are not super expensive to pull off. And if they break, you just put ‘em back together.

Now speaking of scale, there might be an issue regarding skirmish games, but I bet if you just used similar sized base plates, everything should work out relatively fine. Definitely for D&D or tabletop rpgs I don’t think this is an issue.

Now also like I mentioned, there’s a huge 3^rd party market with which to engage. You can buy, sell, and trade Lego parts. Bricklink is by far the most well-known but there are several sites like this. 

All right, hold up, before we go any further. The Lego hobby can be just as addicting as our own tabletop hobby. And I know. And you’ve been warned.

But check this Bricklink site out, it’s kind of amazing. You can search for individual parts by color, type, quantity, part number, part name, you can search for sets, you can find out what sets a particular part was originally distributed in. You can compare prices from multiple stores selling the same parts. You can buy new, unopened sets, used sets, you can look up a set, save its parts list and then run a cross-reference search for all of those parts and find all of the stores selling all of the pieces you would need to build that set. It’s basically endless. Look, we can buy a single banana. Just one. You know, for your pirate monkey or whatever. We should all have at least one Lego banana. It’s just a cool miniature.

But what about other people’s designs and builds? There are all kinds of sites that sell or even offer free building instructions. This site, Rebrickable, sells instructions folks have made for alternative builds you can make with just the parts from official Lego sets you already own. There are browser-based 3d building environments you can use to create a build virtually and then punch out a parts list and order the parts and bam, you’ve got a MOC IRL.

As for custom minifigs and minifig props, there are awesome creators out there who offer plenty of products to drain your wallet – I mean provide you with very cool custom parts that are basically indistinguishable from official Lego parts. In fact, a lot of them apply custom print designs to actual Lego pieces.

You can also buy Lego in bulk, either 2^nd hand or sometimes from Lego itself. Probably my favorite activity at Lego conventions – aside from just gawking at all the amazing builds in person – is to visit the bulk parts sellers where you can comb through 55 gallon drums of pieces and ferret out just the cool parts you want, and then pay for them by weight. 

You might already have some Lego in your house. Revealing a Lego scene could be a fun thing to surprise your players with, or you could taunt your potential war-game opponent with things like “My Lego minifigs are gonna kick your space marines’ armored asses!”

Wait, what? 

Ha! You read it, I totally knew you would!

Pardon me.

Actually, I did put together a whole female space marine squad … and they’ve got an attack drone too.

Here’s another thought, maybe Lego’s a way to introduce kids to various games. And you know, you can put ‘em to work – I need seventeen Lego trees, don’t come outta your room til they’re done! Free labor!

This channel’s getting demonetized for sure.

Anyway, Lego for me fits right into my tabletop hobby … appreciation? Obsession? Fixation? Thing that I like? Whatever the word is for it, Lego kinda hits the same serotonin receptors as miniatures do, for me. It’s got the building element, the designing element, the playing element. I mean, it’s different for sure, but its more similar than it is different. 

The way I got back into Lego was a friend showing me a Lego store some years ago and I saw this set right here. I mean, I hadn’t paid attention to Lego for like 30 years, and I was just so impressed with how detailed this Ecto One was, I was like, whoa, this looks like an actual miniature, like a model. And so I bought that set and building it was so cool, I instantly graduated to an adult fan of Lego status. 

Now I know Lego is not really going to be something you guys would probably really use in your tabletop games, but you never know. I just wanted to share. 

Ah, so many hobbies, so little time.

Well, if you fall in, have fun exploring the Lego rabbit hole. 

See ya on the other side!