YouTube Video

Cottagecore Tabletop Terrain!

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Transcript

Got my Last Of Us shirt on.

Today, I’m gonna share with you one of the super secret, little known, tried-and-true methods of measuring the visual quality of miniatures or models destined for the big screen. Circa 1995 and earlier … you know, prior to HD, 4k, 8k, digital cameras and projection, et cetera. So it might be a little outdated.

And due to being outdated, this little tidbit of wisdom from the golden age of practical Hollywood special effects miniatures is one that you can’t really use any more for one aspect of our hobby but you can for another. Sounds confusing, I know, but I swear it’ll make make sense in a bit. 

One thing you always did when working on a model for a big budget movie or tv commercial was establish which side of the model was the “hero” side. Meaning the side of the model that was going to be seen by camera. Because, kinda just like in video games today, if you ain’t seeing it, there ain’t no point in building it. Save them ducats everywhere you can.

Of course, we build models for tabletop gaming, which means … every side is the damn hero side.

Greetings good humans and welcome to TableTop Alchemy, where once in a while your host delivers some actual – if entirely outdated – insider information. At least anecdotes. And we tip our hats to our patrons for doing that patron thing – as always, much appreciated.

All right, today we’re gonna paint up our first MDF kit. Meaning, I’m gonna paint up my first MDF kit – well, I guess if I’m honest, it’s really half of a kit, since there are two houses included in this one set from TT Combat – but I’m really gonna paint it all the way up to finished, not my typical “oh I’m doing some experiments so I don’t have to actually finish a model” sorta thing – not Pachow – and we’ll dutifully note the thought processes and mistakes as per usual. 

And there are definitely mistakes coming up. But they’ll also illustrate one of the cool things about this hobby – mishaps or errors are actually all very low stakes because of the intended use cases for these miniatures. In other words, there’s not much you can do wrong that would preclude you from actually using a miniature or piece of terrain on the table, no matter what it’s final look looks like. I mean, you can play games with completely unpainted terrain and minis. Gasp. Dare to be different! 

Anyway, to kick off my first foray into the Pile of Opportunity: Terrain Edition, I selected one of the smallest kits I have. And as I’ve mentioned before, all my MDF kits are already built – and usable – so this is not a “how to build an MDF kit” or MDF kit review type of video, it’s just about painting up one of these little guys.

So I’ve got two copies of this Briar Rose Cottage set, and we’re gonna work on the smaller house from one of them today. I wanna start small, see what working with these things is like. Cause I gotta bunch to paint up. Seriously. A bunch. 

As a lot of you know I play a little bit of Minecraft and over the last year or so I’ve been enjoying, in that game, the “cottagecore” aesthetic and I feel like these Briar Rose Cottage models kinda fit right in there. I mean, it’s kinda in the name right? Cottagecore basically boils down to “I just wanna put a bunch of flowers and plants around a cute little house.” 

I think for a future video it would be fun to take the second copy of this little house and do it up as a “ruined” or “abandoned” cottage. Yeah, I’m definitely putting that in the list of terrain video ideas. But you know, there’s plenty of time to ruin today’s model too, so, let’s see how it goes.

Now, don’t worry, I haven’t forgotten about sharing that little tidbit of Hollywood special effects wisdom, but it’ll arrive at the appropriate time. 

So first thing is coming up with a color scheme. When I was trying to come up with a color scheme for the little house on the tabletop I had an odd thought. Well, it’s everywhere so it’s not surprising I had the thought, it’s surprising how long it took me to think of it. Me and my old brain, getting smoother by the day.

Let’s pop over to our friendly neighborhood job-killer: Midjourney AI. I pay the lowest monthly tier subscription to be able to use this whenever I want, but I’m pretty sure you can try it out for free if you’re curious about it. I’m sure a lot of you out there are already familiar with these art AIs, and I’m sure there’s more than a few of you that might be a little uncomfortable regarding my use of such a controversial tool. AI stuff in general is definitely worthy of a huge amount of discussion and debate and maybe one day we’ll chat about some of it together but for today (maybe in one other coming soon video, wink wink nudge nudge – I don’t know what that weird wink was. Do you, do you wink when you say wink wink? I don’t think so). Anyway, we’re just gonna use it for fun today. Typically, I use Midjourney to create b-roll images for my edits in these videos, but I thought it might be interesting to see what it generated as far as color schemes for today’s project.

First I uploaded this phone pic of the actual miniature as a reference for Midjourney, and then punched in “forest cottage with blue roof” as the first prompt. Because for whatever reason I was pretty sure I wanted to paint the roof of the model blue. There’s just something very cottagecorey about blue roofs, for me. Also Greek but in this case, a blue roof would hopefully add a little bit of cute fantasy flair to the piece. 

So here’s the first result and it’s not bad. Using a reference image is a pretty neat trick with Midjourney. Right away it’s kinda giving me a pretty decent color scheme. I went ahead and tried a few different prompts, here’s what I got with little tweaks to the prompt. I removed “blue roof” just to see what it would create and I actually really like this overgrown look, that’s also a very “cottagecore” sorta thing. But that’s also a lot of basing materials, so maybe one day, when the budget for this channel gets, you know, up here somewhere, we can start spamming expensive miniature plants.

So then I had a stroke of genius and added “tabletop terrain” to the prompt, just to see what it would do. Check out how it puts the houses on bases. I tried adding “stone cottage” to the prompt and this time Midjourney actually put the houses on tables even. Again, I found this pretty interesting. 

So, after checking these all out, I decided to go with a blonde stoned color for the – blonde stoned color? Oh boy. So, after checking these all out, I decided to go with a blonde stone color for the bricks and a reddish brown for the wool accents – wool accents? 

Before I could start painting the model I had to think a little bit about the base. And this is a pretty big question for me concerning all the MDF kits I have – whether to add a larger base to them or not. There are definitely good reasons NOT to add a base, such as adding a base increases the footprint of the model on the table and even for storage this could be an issue. Adding a base also increases the height of the model a little bit and to be perfectly honest, there’s just not really any reason TO add a base. 

Except one: flowers. I really wanted to decorate the outside of the cottage and I felt like I needed an outer area to put the decorative terrain stuff on, you know, the tufts and stuff. Now most of the MDF kits I own don’t have actual bases incorporated into them like this particular house does. I’m pretty sure this one has a base plate because of this little exterior workshop area. 

So next I was concerned with how just sticking this onto another larger baseplate was going to introduce this lip all the way around the house I’d have to deal with. As luck would have it, this model’s base is almost exactly 3 millimeters tall and matches really well with 3 millimeter Sintra. Sometimes luck does happen in our favor, we just don’t pay attention to it as much as when it doesn’t happen in our favor.

But then another thing I got stuck wrestling with was how to actually attach what essentially would be an “outer rim” to the model’s base, and I was worried about structural integrity. I briefly thought about cutting like 1” wide strips and building them up around the model but then there would just be all these connection points that would somehow have to be glued together and I ended up just tracing the outline of the model on a larger piece of Sintra and cutting it out. I tried to err on the smaller side of the outline but as you see there’s definitely a couple sides where there’s a big gap. But on the other sides the fit was very snug and I’m just going to rely on superglue and baking soda to hold the whole thing in place. Again, this is a pretty risky venture and having completed the model at this point, I would definitely say this isn’t the best way to do this. The whole cutting out the middle is a decent choice but what I would do next time in addition to this is get ahold of some very thin styrene or probably even just card would have worked, just something very thin and flat that I could super glue across the gaps on the top surface to reinforce the connection between the Sintra and the MDF. 

As you’ll see later, I go over the entire outer base with some terrain texture paste and that would easily have covered up any thin pieces of card or plastic. 

Now when I started going ham on the beveled Sintra edges, I made one massive mistake, and that’s purely from rushing the process. There you go, I just chopped a huge chunk of my border off because I was impatient. This is unsurprising, because it’s me. Hey, I’m a work in progress. For two seconds I thought about trying to repair that and three seconds later, I was like, nope, this is just how it is now. And this is what I mean about doing stuff for tabletop gaming, these pieces aren’t necessarily made for display and this is gonna be just fine during a game.

Another mistake I made is I forgot the whole “don’t forget to make your surfaces miniature-base friendly”. Usually this means putting a mini down to make sure the surfaces are wide enough and level enough to have a miniature stand on it. I should have cut my outer edge at least another 1/2 inch wide on at least three of the sides. Ah well, see the work in progress statement from, you know, like twenty seconds ago. 

Using both thick and medium viscosity superglue I attached the MDF to the Sintra and made sure I didn’t let any super glue leak through the bottom and attach itself to like the work surface or the scraps laying around. It seemed to work, and there it is, nice and flat. I’m actually pretty surprised.

So I put some Stynelrez gray primer down, kept the removable roof … removable, and yeah, once everything had a uniform gray coat, it’s time for paint. In case you’re looking for the best way to prime MDF terrain, specifically in cases where you can’t use a rattle can, I’ve got this video right here where you can check out some tests I do with various techniques and materials.

All right, I was pretty excited by this whole blue roof idea so that’s what I started with. I went with a pretty dark blue and actually took the time to paint individual tiles leaving the dark primer in between for some contrast. Now this is gonna end up being a sort of running motif through this entire exercise – me doing stuff in the long run that is just kinda unnecessary. Halfway through the roof painting I knew I should have just airbrushed a base coat of blue on the roof, and saved a lot of time. The results of my painstaking approach is essentially unnoticeable and therefore irrelevant.

After the base coat I drybrushed a brighter, more saturated blue across everything and then stepped up to a significantly lighter blue with the idea that I’d probably wash down the effect with … a wash. But I actually never did go back with a wash for that part, I ended up liking the sort of higher contrast weathered look from that really light blue dry brush. 

I went with a reddish brown for the timber details and blocked all those out in one pass. 

I blocked in the upper walls and the chimney with the “blonde stone” color I had in mind, which I mixed up from a light gray and a light sand color, and I planned to douse these surfaces in washes as well. 

I figured for the chimney bricks and the bricks that are in the lower walls, I could pick out some of them in different colors, so I even threw some pink in the mix and some oranges and grays, just to break up that overall flat blonde base color. 

I did some rough highlighting and edge highlighting with successively brighter browns on the wood bits. I definitely planned to put a wash over the wood bits as well so I tried to go brighter than necessary. The wood grain in a few of the detail pieces is pronounced in a stylized way, so I decided to go with a fairly cartoony approach to that wood grain, again, knowing the wash was gonna knock it all back down.

Then I slapped all those various washes down over all the various parts. I used similar wash colors but I used different brands and different hues to keep some subtle variation across the whole model so the different surfaces didn’t end up being too uniform. 

Now the upper wall portions I felt went too dark, and a little too saturated with the wash colors, and I happened to see little piece of foam flock on the desk and I thought, hey, let’s use that to do a cool sponge dabbing texturizing thing! 

I ended up really liking this sponged-on lighter paint look, I feel like it definitely created a sort of stucco or weathered plaster sort of look, and the contrast it created with the brighter portions in the middle I thought looked pretty good. After touching up spots where the sponge went outside the lines, I drybrushed some very flat black onto the chimney to simulate soot and then we’re onto the lower building.

I laid down a couple thin coats of the pale sand color mix for the brick walls, popped in some multi-color bricks to match what I did on the chimney, and then proceeded to screw the whole thing up with a wash that went on too heavy. These walls ended up going way darker than I wanted them too, I should have wiped off a lot of that wash from the middle flat areas. But I didn’t and as per usual, I just kept on trucking, things are gonna be what they’re gonna be. To brighten things up a bit and to add some texture to the walls, I went in with the sponge again and it worked okay. I like how this looks on the roof’s blank walls versus how it looks here on the brick pattern walls, but it definitely adds something to that crappy dark wash result. But then I couldn’t leave well enough alone and I had to go and mess it up again, with just another too dark wash. 

Yep, I’m the best at what I do, I defy you to find someone better. At making mistakes. I mean performing artistic experiments!

I base coated all the wood trim with the same color used on the roof and I did this little exterior patio thing in a different sorta more grayish brown just to get away from that uniformity again. I used Citadel Targor Rageshade, which is a bit on the purple side, to douse the canvas roof thing, again, just for some variation in color. 

Then I went through and added those sorta cartoony striations to the laser-cut wood grain and this took a pretty long time. And it’s also probably not something I would do again, I mean, not for a tabletop gaming piece. 

I did some drybrushing on the patio thing and then dropped a wash on the wood details. After that wash dried I felt like the wood was just really flat still, so I said screw it and did some drybrushing on the timbers too. And I think it actually worked. On the next models I’ll probably just go with a few layers of drybrushing rather than painting in those initial striations in the wood grain.

And of course the door is blue to match the roof. I know in feng shui the door should be red, but whoever lives here has not heard of feng shui, they just like the color blue. Like me. I used a darker, less saturated blue because, again, I just didn’t want to use the same exact color from another spot on the model. I just wanted to be similar. I literally drew in some wood grain on the door with a light blue and then washed it all down with Citadel Nightshade, specifically the old formula wash because I don’t have the new formula wash in that color.

Yet. I’ll get it, don’t you worry. 

Then I used cheapy craft paint to base the base in a brownish green. I kinda always do this even if I’m going to put other stuff on the top of it, I just want to make sure if there’s any spots I miss later on, they won’t show up as weird gray or white spots. 

Then I covered all the weird glue seams and most of the outer base with some AK Interactive Muddy Ground texture, “man it really tied the room together.”

Then it was finally time for the plants and foliage decor, the whole reason I wanted to do this little cottage to begin with. I used some standard chunky flock for this one bush and then went to town with the flowers and tufts and vines and shrubbery. Some of the products I’m using here are from Huge Minis, Mini Natur, Army Painter and AK Interactive – I’ll drop some links below for ya. I used this sort of autumn colored ivy product for the weird patio area, thinking maybe this is where a lot of work was done or maybe some smithing or something with smoke and open flames and so the plants in that area weren’t as bright as elsewhere. Or, you know, I did it just because it added more color variation. 

Then I flocked the entire base with a couple different leafy flocks and tucked it all up around the flowers and I used a little sand and some darker flock to kind of denote areas that had heavy foot traffic, like the front door and the patio workshop area. 

Then, taking some inspiration from both those Midjourney cottage images and my Minecraft cottagecore builds, I started adding some moss and ivy to the roof. I actually really like how that stuff looks agains the blue tiles and brown timbers, very contrasty and I don’t know, just kind a cool.

Then to wrap it all up I sprayed the whole house with Mecha Matte Varnish to seal it all up and unify all the different surface textures, like areas of exposed glue and some shiny areas left by certain washes, et cetera.

And here’s the finished piece. Overall, I’m pretty happy with it as far finishing a piece goes, but I do think that the walls got too dark and I should have probably repainted them. But you know me, I’ll apply whatever lessons I’ve learned here, in theory, to whatever the next model is I work on. 

But wait, what about that bit of Hollywood special effects wisdom? Well, this is where that comes into play. When we were asking ourselves if a model was complete enough or detailed enough to take the filming stage, we would perform one simple test, and you can do this yourself. Stand one one foot, tilt your head, close one eye and hop and down. Does the model look okay? If so, walk away, it’s done.

No, of course you think that’s a joke. And it was admittedly 50% facetious. But was also, and I’m not joking, 50% a legitimate test of what a model would probably look like on the big screen. Film grain, camera movement, motion blur, and dramatic lighting all tend to work together to sort of mash up fine details of a model in a movie. And I would bet cold hard ducats that if most of you were to see in-person actual Hollywood miniatures you would probably be surprised at the general lower level of detail or finish on a lot of them. They’re just not made for up-close scrutiny. Now granted, there were a few models that were very highly detailed and very nicely finished, but overall, tabletop quality is a lot closer to the level we were building too. 

And I feel that silly little quality measurement saying – hopping on one foot with one eye closed – is a good gauge for what can pass on the tabletop. So feel free to use it for that purpose. Of course, that goofy test is of no value whatsoever if you’re talking about putting photographs of your models online for display. We just live in a different world where movies can be freeze framed and scrutinized and that sort of thing just requires higher levels of attention to detail. But for games on a table, anything goes!  

So. Work to the level you like working to, to play your games. And always have fun.

See ya!

You Ain’t Gonna Get Motivated. So Now What?

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Transcript

Where’s the pill? There’s a pill, right? The magic motivation pill. There’s gotta be one right? There’s a pill for everything.

Of course there ain’t no magic pill for motivation. And no, Adderall does not count. 

Life is hard and people make more money selling “how to write books” than writing books about great stories.

I’m gonna save you some ducats right here, right now. This entire section of books boils down to exactly two sentences. Sit down. Start writing.

That’s it! Feel free to send any extra ducats I’ve saved you my way. I’ll put ‘em to good use.

All right, enough of that. Let’s talk about motivation. Or the lack thereof.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we sometimes stop beating around the bush and just face facts, as brutal as they may be.

And we never forget to thank our patrons, from whom a little goes a long way on this side of the screen.

Okay, strap in, we fixing to get ugly in this one.

Let’s get one simple fact straight: you ain’t gonna get motivated. There, I said it. You say it too. Feel better? Like a weight’s been lifted? Same here.

We really wanna be motivated. We really wanna do all the things. We don’t wanna be “that couch potato”. But if we ain’t motivated, how we gonna stuff done? Face it. We’re not. 

So, let’s start with a disclaimer: I can only approach this topic from a self-generated anecdotal experience. Meaning, this is just my own perspective, so, you know, take that for what it’s worth. Which is probably nothing. That disclaimer should be heavily implied on all my videos.

But there’s always gonna be folks like David Goggins. And folks who tell you to just watch David Goggins. 

For me, my lack of motivation started to manifest after I hit my mid-40s. Don’t act surprised, my cinematic references obviously belie my deceptively young look. 

The truth is, I had never felt unmotivated or true depression until a few years ago, you know, when life caught up with me in a number of gnarly ways. And I’ll tell you what – it was surprising. Dare I say, eye-opening.

But depression – even though it definitely fosters a lack of motivation – is a whole other topic with a billion youtube channels to explore and learn from or even just relate to. Which is all you might be able to do when you’re depressed, find someone to relate to or share it with. Anyway, if you need help with depression, there are legitimate resources just a few Google clicks away. Just keep in mind that the fixing of depression comes from inside and not outside. But external help can help get the internal workings working.

Today though we’re just gonna talk about motivation, or the lack thereof.

Tabletop Alchemy – where we treat the symptoms and never the cause. Cause we’re in the US. Duh.

All right, enough sidebars. As hobbyists, there are these things we wanna do. Not only do we wanna do them, we LIKE doing them. But as we know, “doing” things expends energy. And for one reason or another, we often find excuses NOT to expend energy. Part of it’s, no doubt, just simple animal nature we’re fighting against. And some folks seem to just have been born with more internal drive than others. I think this is also part of why “collecting” afflicts a lot of us in a maybe not-so-good way.

Simply buying something gives us a dopamine hit. It feels like “free drugs” even though we conveniently don’t think about how we’re trading ducats for these micro-doses. Don’t we all wanna live in Colorado with the special mushroom stores? And like most recreational pharmaceuticals, the particular micro-dose from purchasing things – or “collecting” as we call it – is fleeting and kinda without value. You know, like eating Wonder bread. Oh, the days of empty calories.

Eating all that Dolly Madison, I used to get the Dolly Madison cinnamon rolls and squish them up into a ball and eat the ball of dough and sugar. Apologies for how gross that sounds. Man, it was good!

Now we all know deep down that the dopamine hits from buying things is far inferior to the dopamine we generate from within when we work on or finish a personal project. But we also know deep down how working on a project requires effort. Sometimes working on a project requires downright pain-in-the-ass work. Which was in the title, so we should have known.

Warning: silly metaphor ahead.

Let’s say you’re standing in a field with a shiny new shovel you just bought at the hardware store and you’ve set yourself the task of moving a mountain cause it’s blocking your view of the beach. If you just look at the mountain, the mountain is going to crush you with the sheer enormity of the task ahead. The only way you’re gonna move that thing is if you stare at the ground and concentrate on one shovel of dirt at a time. 

Now, nothings ever gonna be 100% relatable by 100% of people, so you know, you might have to work with me here a bit, but here’s my singular piece of advice.

The next time you’re thinking about working on something, let’s say writing a dnd adventure or painting up a kill team for … Kill Team. Instead of thinking about the project at all, just set for yourself one very specific task. Just …. sit in the chair.

That’s it. Just tell yourself all you gotta do is sit. In the chair. You ain’t thinking about all the stuff you gotta do, you ain’t thinking about all the stuff you wanna do, all you’re doing is looking at a chair. And then sitting in it.

Sitting in a chair is easy, right? Yes, that’s a dumb question, of course it’s easy. We do it every day. Sometimes for way way way longer than we should. But in this particular instance, sitting in the chair is a good thing.

I think it’s safe to say that sitting in a chair is a vastly more achievable goal than … pretty much anything else. I know I can do it! I have full confidence in myself about at least one thing in life. Sitting in chairs. I bet you can sit in a chair too.

Now I’m also confidant you’re sitting in your chair right now scoffing at my dumb idea. Maybe some more than others, but I can sense the scoffing. But here’s the flip side of this coin, or the other shoe dropping, as the case may be. And it’s the answer to every self-help book, video, podcast, how do I get off my ass and do something piece of advice media that’s out there:

Brute force.

That’s it. On one side of the coin, sit in the chair. On the other side of the coin, brute force.

Do you detect a bit of malicious grin floating around behind the scenes? Perhaps.

But this is honestly what my own personal life experience has taught me. And yeah, it taught it to me the hard way. Do any of us learn anything the easy way? If so, I’ll buy your book.

We all want the diet pill. I’m no different. If there was a magic pill that fixed all my issues without any side effects or addictive properties, I’d be first in line at the dispensary. But we all know the category. Diet pills, pyramid schemes, getting something for nothing, if it sounds too good to be true, we know it is.

Brute force is how you get motivated. Actually it’s not even how you get motivated. Motivation is just an ephemeral descriptor of some intangible feeling. Brute force of will power is how we get stuff done. It’s one of the most important character stats in this game we’re all playing.

Now, I do do a couple other things to help me facilitate the brow-beating of my own willpower. For painting or crafting projects, I make sure the hobby desk is pre-set, ready to go. Everything I think I’ll need is already on it or within easy reach. I might do this days before I actually sit in the chair. And I mean the chair not in front of the tv.

Now, I understand some folks may not have the luxury of being able to leave their setup … set up. And you, my friends, have a tougher situation to overcome. But if you do, you’re benching way more psychic weight than I am and your mental pecs are gonna be a lot more impressive in the long run. 

For something like writing where I’m just using a computer, well, that’s always ready to go, so I don’t need to put any prep work into that kind of setup. Neither do you. It’s just us and that damn chair.

If I sit in the chair, I’m 99% guaranteed to get something beyond sitting in the chair accomplished. It might only be typing out one line or putting a single color on a model. Whatever it is, it’s very very rare that I if sit in the chair that I’ll get up again without doing anything at all in between. So I know that every time I sit in the chair, I’m digging out at least one shovel full of dirt from that mountain I refuse to look at. And one day that mountain’s gonna be gone and I’ll be able to see the beach. What a ridiculous metaphor.

Anyway, you know what’s coming. Go sit in the chair.

Good luck and god speed. 

See ya! 

Let’s Make FAILED Investigation Checks More Fun!

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Transcript

You hear the soft snick of the lock’s tumblers falling into place. The leaded glass French doors swing silently open and the rest of the party follows the tiefling rogue into the library. Moonlight streams in through the mullioned windows on the southern wall, riming the furniture and tall bookshelves in silver, making the polished mahogany gleam in the general gloom.

“I search for the stolen scroll.”

“I check for traps!”

“Check for secret doors!”

Okay. Roll an Investigation check.

Obviously a player making a low roll on an Investigation or Perception check is going to have an inkling that they’ve failed to succeed, and inevitably they’re going to feel like they’ve missed something. But if you can get your DM poker face down – and, let’s face it, that’s the best kind of poker face – you might be able to help maintain some game immersion and satisfy that craving for discovery even when reacting to low dice rolls. 

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we just talk about quick tips for new DMs, even if they’re common knowledge and your host is beating a dead horse. 

No horses were harmed in the making of this video. At least not physically. Metaphorically, that’s another story.

And where we also thank our patrons for hitting that tip jar and we thank you, dear viewer, for viewing and commenting and all that fun stuff! You guys know I read and respond to all the comments, right? It’s one of my favorite things to do. 

So let’s talk about this one tabletop rpg game mechanic that’s always bugged me just a little bit. Not the mechanic itself so much, but rather how using it sorta inevitably breaks immersion. I guess really all mechanics break immersion, so I guess that’s not really what I’m getting at. This mechanic has a tendency to kind of break immersion in a protracted sense within a player’s mind. The ubiquitous Investigation check. And to some extent the Perception check. 

There are whole videos out there on the differences between the two and when to use one versus the other, et cetera, but we’re not getting into that today. Mostly because I have trouble parsing that out myself sometimes.

Anyway, the gameplay that typically leads to an Investigation check, like whatever’s happening just prior to the call for one, is usually an interesting or engaging bit of scene setting. At least for me. And a good chunk of rpg gameplay is all about discovery, right? For me, discovery is one of the coolest, if not THE coolest, aspect of, well, not just games but real life. Discovering things, unraveling mysteries, seeing what’s on the other side of that mountain, or what’s at the end of this tunnel, it’s all about that intrinsic human drive to explore, to find something new. To discover something. And Investigation checks are like a little poppers of discovery potential. 

So your players are getting into a scene you’ve set, and then there’s this call for a game mechanic that carries an implicit notion that the player may well miss discovering something cool based on the roll of a die. And that’s fine, that’s part of this type of storytelling. The unpredictable nature of the story created by the RNG of die rolls is one of the core features of TTRPGs, right?

But Investigation checks are fun to make because they’re all about discovery. The thing that’s always bothered me about these checks is how a player will know or feel they’ve missed something when they miss a DC – or target number, for those of you not into DnD. It’s a bit of an inescapable metagame type thing. There’s just no real way to avoid it. And there’s always that delineation of the successful roll – beat the DC, find the secret door, fail the roll, find nothing.

So I’ve started using a technique for checks like these that is A) almost certainly not new at all and B) might be something you already do, whether consciously or subconsciously. My goals with the technique are to A) hit that “discovery” dopamine generator as much as possible, even when a player fails a check, and B) sort of bondo over this hard break of success slash fail.  

Bondo is what they use to fill in and smooth over like dents in cars and stuff … 

Anyway the technique is a very simple concept. You ready for it? Here it comes.

Bulleted lists. Eh? 

Well, I call ‘em ABLs! Ascending bulleted lists. Does that make it sound more impressive? No? What are you, nuts? Who asked you anyway?

Let’s say your players enter a library in a gothic hotel looking for something or someone. They’re on a quest and the last clue has led them here. You rattle off a brief atmospheric description of the chamber. Inevitably, someone’s going to ask something that calls for an investigation check. They roll an 8 and with their bonuses it’s a 12. I glance at my ABL and I know right away how many bullet points – or details – they’re gonna get. Now let’s say I had set 15 as the DC for finding the hidden bookcase door. So this player has technically failed the check, and now I proceed in a non-committal way, with something like “All right, the first thing you notice is the decadently thick carpets on the floor, they appear to be very expensive imports. You also note a hint of candle smoke in the air.” And so on. 

Here’s what my list looks like for this particular scene.

the carpets are thick, plush and imported 

there’s a faint smell of candle smoke 

one window is half-open 

the heavy desk is very neat and tidy, with stacks of organized paper, a writing quill and ink pot placed just so, but the bowl of sand has been tipped over 

one book in the darkest corner sticks out, as if it’s about to fall off the shelf 

And my little numbers there are target numbers. So a player gets all the details that fall below their dice roll result.

Everyone always notices something with their investigation check, it just depends on the strength of their roll how important or specific the details of what they notice are. I mean, maybe for a nat 1 I would just explain that they’ve become preoccupied with that pesky boot lace that won’t stay tied. 

Making ABLs like this serve a secondary purpose by helping me generate more details for specific locations or NPCs, and the more I know about a space or an NPC helps my ability to create a convincing setting and overall immersion. And often writing these details down can spur even more plot ideas or NPC attributes or backstory or whatever.

Now one issue this brings up is “prep”. Like what about checks that occur in spaces I haven’t either prepped or just have no reason to have extra detail pre-planned. I mean, let’s face it, in every session a DM is winging it more often than not. Just having this idea of tiered discovery gives me a general notion of how to proceed with my off-the-cuff improv. So while I’m never gonna come up with a whole list of things on the fly, I do have a mental framework to lean on. Just looking at a dice roll result will instantly let me know if I should give the player one, two, or three details, just as a rule of thumb. And doing that let’s me delve more into the scene as well because I immediately imagine myself in the space and just sorta describe what I imagine I see. Or hear. I always try to keep in mind the notion of the five senses and will try to hit things that aren’t just visual, like smell, sound, tactile surfaces. Even taste if it’s appropriate.

Back to that DM poker face. If you get good at that poker face, after some time, your players will either barely feel like they’re missing something on a roll higher than 10 or on the contrary, they’ll just start constantly feeling like they’re missing something. And that can be just as rewarding for you as any other result, ‘cause you can mess with ‘em all you want at that point.

Of course, one thing you should definitely avoid is having any singular NECESSARY clue or pivotal bit of information gated behind a, well, behind any DC or target number. If a piece of information is absolutely necessary for the completion of a quest or whatever, that info has to be made available somehow. Only put things that are not absolutely necessary behind a die roll.

Anyway, I’d really love to hear how you guys run Investigation checks. What tips or tricks do you use to make them engaging or fun or just not entirely binary metagame-y results. And if you’re a player and your DM’s done some cool stuff with Investigation checks, I’d love to hear about it. I truly am curious and always looking for new awesome ideas on how run the game better.

So, make an ABL. See what it inspires.  No, you don’t have to call it that.

See ya!

Finding Inspiration in Non-Tabletop Specific Hobby Spaces!

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Do you know there are people out there who build models that aren’t for tabletop games? I know, shocker! Of course you knew that, that’s a silly question. But have you ever bothered to check out some of these other hobby niches? How about a plastic model show, have you ever attended one of those? Some of us undoubtedly have. And some of us undoubtedly might want to!

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where sometimes we check out other niche hobbies that are right next door to our own!

So, back before I matured into the dashing, uber-clever professional talking at you now, I worked two jobs. My main gig was assistant managing a Starbucks and the other was working part time at my friend’s hobby shop. Incidentally, working at that hobby shop is how I got into the special fx industry to begin with but that’s a story for another day. You never know where life will take you.

Anyway, working weekends at the hobby shop, mostly for that coveted employee discount, I would hang out with all kinds of hobbyists. At one point, I even used to go to this military modeler’s club with a close friend of mine who was really into historical WWII modeling and this hobby club was run by the famous Bill Horan. Now most of you are probably wondering who Bill Horan is. He’s a master figure painter, often focusing on Napoleonic or historical miniatures. Not game stuff. Looking at his stuff now, his work might seem like a lot of top tier painting you see every day on instagram but back then, there were very few people painting at his level. Most of the guys in his club painted with oils or were into historical dioramas. I was basically just into the gaming minis but it was pretty awesome to see all this other stuff.

So, I was out of the hobby for a long time, a quarter of a century give or take. And when I got back into it, I went right back to the gaming miniatures. Here’s the very first mini I purchased and painted, maybe five years ago. A few months back, my buddy who I’d gone to the Bill Horan club with, invited me to a small model show. You know, just to hang out and see all the cool stuff. 

The show was put on by an IPMS chapter – that’s the International Plastic Modelers’ Society. It ran for a around six hours on a Saturday and was essentially a display and contest event. A bunch of hobbyists brought their models to display and take part in a friendly judged competition. On a whim, I decided to take a couple of my minis because, you know, it’s always fun to display your stuff, right, and it only cost a few bucks to enter. I didn’t expect there to be many tabletop game miniatures there and I was not wrong about that. I ended up entering my minis in the sci-fi / fantasy open category. But the main reason for going was just to hangout and look at a bunch of cool models. And I was not disappointed.

I think these smaller shows can be super cool for kids too, a lot of the shows don’t even charge if you’re not actually entering a model in the contest. So you can just like walk around and look at the cool stuff. A show like this can be a really cool way to see, in person, a wide variety of models and modeling techniques. You can take closeup shots of things or techniques you want to remember or study in the future, and seeing stuff in person is just always better than seeing an image on a screen.  

Like being able to walk around this nut’s crazy scratch built Star Wars Rebel Cruiser. It was enormous and had excellent nurnie application, as well as LED lighting! He even had a like home-printed booklet showing build progress and describing what he’d actually done work-wise.

Before I go any further with my little virtual scrapbook here, I do have to point out that I did not get any of the builders’ names for crediting them. This was not really my fault – each paper tag with a model’s name on the table specifically did not have a builder’s name and that’s because they were the judging slips for the contest. So the models were all, you know, anonymous.

Anyway, let’s look at some more cool stuff: 

Five Star Story mechs are typically done super clean and polished like this but I’ve always wanted to do one weathered up like these Gundam style models. I really liked the weathering and the sticker decal application on these. And the weathering on this tank is also really nice, very WWII style. 

This is just a cool mech design and beaten up, weathered yellow is always a good look, right? 

This trippy ship is obviously an airbrush, and the LED lighting is really cool. I found out later that this is or was an actual kit you could purchase.

Where else you gonna see a little rusty chibi gundam in a medieval courtyard? I mean besides Instagram. 

And this diorama was probably my favorite, because of it’s caption, which makes the whole thing. I mean, the build is awesome, but it’s also just a very clever idea, and very funny, which is always a winner. 

Here you go – Battlestar Galactica Viper launch tube, super cool little set piece with great lighting, and of course nostalgic for me. I always wanted to be Starbuck, running around with some Lego pistol I’d built in a handkerchief thigh holster, and then I could pretend to be Face from the A Team right?

This diorama has got just at on of trees and the leaves are super cool, the winter frost looks fantastic. 

This piece really tells a story in a single build, a family being photographed on a tank, bizarre and interesting and probably historically accurate.

I’m also a fan of model railroad stuff and one thing I always like about model train builds is the ability to incorporate movement and lighting.

Hey, here’s a Warhammer model! Actually two! I really liked the ice floe base, it’s a very cool resin pour with great underpainting.

This is my buddy’s BB8 with a very slick magnetic head that allows the thing to actually rotate like the movie prop. And this is his finely weathered R2D2 kit. 

These Japanese Star Wars kits are super nice, detail-wise. And I really like the scale of them, very desktop friendly.

This was an awesome lighting build, very cool idea for explosion crafting. I suppose you can craft explosions with grenades, but this one’s made with cotton balls. Much less expensive. Actually I don’t think it’s cotton balls, I think it might be some kind of spray foam. 

Here’s another example of great winter weathering. I could see trying this technique out on some space marines or 40k tanks.

This was one of my favorite pieces. It’s entirely scratch built and the painting and weathering is just top notch. It’s so detailed and it’s smaller than you think. And then there’s the companion model, the outhouse car, again, entirely scratch built and just full of tiny, very fun details. The beer box, the chainlink, the curtain door, all very cool. 

And there’s just so many clever artists out there, this little conversion is perfectly adorable and perfectly creepy, and perfectly fits one of my favorite aesthetics. You know, the adorably creepy aesthetic. AKA, the Tim Burton aesthetic. 

Here’s another diorama just literally chock full of detail. I really like the signage and just all the little things, you could like study this thing for hours I bet and never catch every single detail and effect. I can’t imagine how long this took to build.

There was way more stuff obviously that I’m not showing, there were probably two hundred model planes and a hundred model tanks, and there were a few odds and ends on the table my miniatures were placed on, like a life-sized bride of Frankenstein bust. There’s just a lot of stuff we don’t see in the tabletop niche specifically and I truly am a fan of just about anything in miniature form.

And here are my little minis on that table, and they just look little dark brown blobs. Which is why I was super surprised when I won a 3rd place medal for my troll kin shaman! Having just taken my little guys out for a weekend stroll, it was pretty neat to go home with one of the actual metal medals they were giving out as the contest trophies.

In the end, I think going to check out other model makers and hobbyists work in real life is a really fun and often inspiring thing to do on a Saturday. Another completely different but similar niche I find very cool are dollhouse miniatures. 

So, maybe check your local area for local model expos or miniature conventions, just take a peek at some other niches in the miniature hobby space. You might find some cool new stuff to inspire you! And, you know, you get outta the house.

And yes most of these shows will have a “dealer room”, where you can spend your ducats on all kinds of weird, old, out of print, unique kits or other types of collectibles or materials, et cetera.

So have fun wandering the proverbial hobby neighborhood! Let me know what you find!

See ya!

The Art of Giving And Receiving: A Mini Painting Gift Exchange!

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That’s right, It’s February and I’m talking about Christmas. And in a brief moment of secretive foreshadowing, there’s gonna be another Christmas video in the middle of summer, and you’re gonna thank me for it.

So, recently it was Christmas and I got a package in the mail from my daughter. And inside was one of the coolest gifts I’ve ever received. A brand new box of Games Workshop trolls – I mean troggoths.

I would dig having the job tasked with coming up with copyright enforceable names, that seems pretty fun, right? But we all know these are trolls.

Anyway, the trolls are not the cool part of the gift. I mean, they’re awesome sculpts, and when I opened the package I was like ooh! More trolls! Cause I already have this box in the Pile of Opportunity. But there was a note in the box, and my daughter said, in the note – and I’m paraphrasing here – Merry Christmas, Dad. THIS is a gift exchange. I sent you these trolls to paint for me and you send me a set of minis that I’ll paint for you.

Coolest gift ever.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we see everything as possible content like a good YouTuber.

I did ask my daughter if it was cool that I make a video about her Christmas gift and she was fine with that. C’mon, I’m not a total social media monster. Jeez.

Also, let me mention a couple new things – one, this backdrop. I just wanted to get some contrast between my skin tone and the skin tone wall back there. It’s just a chunk of printed cloth, so if this works okay, I’ll be able to toss up different backgrounds up now and then, and that sounds like fun for me.

And, two, I’d like to thank my patrons. I’m sure they’re wondering why it’s taken so long for me mention them, but as I’ve pointed out in the past I produce these videos weeks in advance – most of the time – so that’s why. Anyway, every one of you dear viewers is much appreciated and I thank my patrons for hitting that tip jar, that is very much appreciated as well. 

So onto these trolls and this week’s painting project. Another cool thing my daughter was okay with was the fact that I had already built and primed my box of trolls, so I didn’t have to do any assembly or prep for this particular project, which is always nice, right?

And as a further bonus, we’re tacking on another couple, small, FFTs onto this video. I’ve never made “water bases” and I’ve got a couple different products I’ve never used and today’s the day to use some of them. A while back I sent this STL file to a buddy of mine who’d just gotten a 3d printer and asked if he’d print up a selection of various sizes. Which he did, and he sent me a bunch. Many thanks, brother, again, much appreciated! 

And also – hey Eryn, it’s CryinMo!

Ah, nothing like inside jokes to alienate an audience, right? At ease! Smoke ‘em if you got ‘em. I don’t know where that came from. That’s back from my old military days.

Anyway, two of these trolls are set up on these relief bases, so we’ll see what kinda trouble I can make for myself towards the end of this project.

Oh yeah, here’s the set I sent my kiddo for her to paint. I requested two spears, two bows and of course the bow and baby dragon for the leader. I’m sure Age of Sigmar players just shaking their heads in dismay right about now.

Anyway, as I said, these guys were already primed, so I did a little white dry brush, but as per last month’s painting video, the undercoat is too bright. It’s all good, we’re gonna do the thing we do best – plow ahead, heedless of whatever cliffs may lie in our path.

I also set up a different camera angle from the last time, so we’ll see how this goes.

I kicked off the painting with those trademark bellies on these guys. Using a mix of Citadel Contrast Skeleton Horde and Apothecary white I just wanted to lay down some light shadow and tint the beer guts a bit. 

For the overall look I wanted to do each troll in a different color. My daughter will use these primarily in D&D with Warhammer being a secondary option. In DnD it’s helpful to have multiple figures of the same type, race, whatever, be somewhat differentiated for tracking and targeting purposes. I also didn’t want to just copy the box art. So I went with a blue and a green and an orange for each of the trolls. I guess they’re from the Chromatic Savages tribe, stomping through the swamps of despair with their bright colors warning of their potential lethality. Lethality, lethality. Whatever that word is. They’re bright and deadly right? Kinda like those tiny frogs. After a coat of the primary colors and some haphazard blending along the edges with a wet brush, I doubled up the richness of each color with a deeper version of each shade, thinking the central spine area would be the darkest spot, along with the patches of scales on their legs and the forearm ridges. Blending the edges of the contrast colors while trying not to mess up the light colored bellies was a bit nerve wracking. 

Sometimes just the way contrast paints work is a bit nerve-wracking, for me anyway. You’re always worried about moving fast because of the way they dry and their stellar ability to create coffee stains. I did find that once in a while, if I hadn’t waited too long, I could scrub up the edge of a “coffee stain” with a watered brush and some actual scrubbing. And putting contrast paints down on such large miniatures just increases this overall risk of leaving edges of applied paint to dry too long without blending. But you know, just gotta do the best you can. 

I put some standard dark wood contrast colors down on the weapon hafts and then for these giant axe hammer things, I thought the chiseled rock might be something like obsidian, but I didn’t go for pure black, more of a deep gray with the anticipation of doing some hard edge highlights down the road. The first coat is too light and I eventually come back to double it up with another coat of the same Basilicanum gray.

Now I had to do a little bit of touch up on some of the areas that would be getting different colors so those areas of contrast paint wouldn’t have patches under them and I also painted up the various bones with one of my favorite Citadel paints, Ushabti Bone. 

As I was doing this, I was thinking about something I needed to work on in my mini painting. I have lots of things I need to work on, technique-wise, but I have a tendency to make mental notes that are basically the equivalent of “Oh, I need to practice this, or I gotta get better at that” and then I stick those mental notes on a mental wall and never actually doing the things in question. I’m old enough to quit that stuff, I’m out of excuses. I gotta start consciously trying to address some of these things, right? I was thinking about how I need to consciously work on color scheme contrast. 

For instance, this big carved stone rock thing I thought, hey, this dude is orange … let’s be honest, it looks like he crawled out of a Walmart-sized bag of Cheeto dust – he’s orange so this massive rock over his head should be a cool tone, a cool gray versus a warm gray. And the base he’s on should also lean towards the cooler side of the spectrum. I figured I’d put a bunch of greenery on that base, and eventually I do just that.

Then I threw a Skeleton Horde and gray mix over the bone bits to shade them down and then it was time to knock out the leather straps. At this point I moved away from contrast paints to standard paints and I use a lot of P3 paints, I like their consistency and finish, to me they are very similar to the Citadel paints but a little bit cheaper. But I also like the pots better too, which, I mean, they’re old school Citadel pots right?

This blob of stuff on the back of Blueberry dude’s hammer axe, I couldn’t really tell what it was supposed to be. It probably could have been like heavy moss or something but I decided to paint it up like it was metal slag. 

Then keeping this idea of color contrast in mind, I thought these extra leather bindings would be red on Mr. Blueberry and Green Hornet here and blue on Cheeto-fingers. 

Now Green Hornet’s off-hand weapon is all this vaguely crystalline structure stuff and for whatever reason I kept thinking of rose quartz and rose marble. So, you know, I just slapped down a coat of of this pink contrast color and then some razor sharp edge highlights to try to sell this quartz idea. 

I kept thinking about what color or colors to do these loin cloths in but I eventually just, I just left them gray. I think it actually works in the end, because the trolls themselves are so bright and saturated.

I needed to get some color on the bases and of course since I want to put water down over these, the idea here is swamp. Even though … well, we’ll talk about this swamp idea and my failure to really capture that towards the end.

There’s always more details to pick out, stuff like this rope. I used the same color for the rope on Blueberry’s and Cheeto-fingers’ teeth and all their finger and toenails. I do try to keep in mind what a lot of the good mini painters always say: try to incorporate the same colors here and there to help with an overall unified look. I followed that up with Army Painter Soft Tone for some shading and then highlights’ll come later.

I use these three colors all the time to highlight up a rich red, but I know a lotta folks would say I don’t go bright enough. This is definitely one one of my mental post-it notes. But for now, this is as red as it gets. Blue highlights on this guy’s wrappings came out a lot more gray than blue and I kinda wish I’d pushed the saturation more.

I did some rough highlights on the brown leather details – if there are ever cases for working in sub-assemblies, which you know I dislike – these guys are definitely one of them. Some of this detail was just really difficult to reach and so, you know, we do what we can and we move on.

Got some dry brushing for the big stone head thing and I did a couple of shades, all the way  up to white. I know this isn’t how a lotta folks do this, but I like to put washes down after I dry brush, I just like how the washes smooth a lot of the dry-bushiness texture. I mean sometimes I want that texture and then I won’t put a wash over it. I put down multiple colors of wash to try to mottle the overall color of the stone and I kept thinking I’d like to have some moss growing on this chunk of statue, so I kept that in mind for the basing stage. 

Now it was time to do a bit of highlighting on the faces, again, I didn’t take this nearly far enough and that’s simply because at a certain point, I just don’t know what I’m doing. And also, I’m trying to not take a week per figure here. So just some basic highlighting over the contrast paint and I find often choosing highlight colors to go over contrast paint to be kinda difficult as well. I mean, the contrast paint does a pretty good job in some cases and it looks great, but it definitely looks to me like it does shadow and midtone, but it never does highlights. But then I look at the results and I wonder how I can blend in highlights to match how good the midtones and shadows are, texture-wise, because the contrast dries with basically a better look than I can match. But again, whatever, just moving on.

And now the pimple painting! Yup, this is a fun bit.  Dotted some white back over the Voluptuous Pink and of course there are only like forty-seven missed pimples all over the place, but to be honest, I think if I’d done every single one, these guys might just look like they had the measles or something.

And then the eyes, the worst part of any miniature, for me. Only Green Hornet had a really prominent eyeball, which was nice to paint, the others were just little squinty eyes. I dropped some reddish black into the sockets and normally I just paint eyes white and call it a day, cause I’ve never been good at painting non-stupid looking eyes on miniatures, but as I went in to paint the eyeball white, I was like, hey, maybe just a highlight is enough. Just a microdot. So I added microdots to the other guys’ eyes as well and called it good.

I added a bit of black metal to the axe hammer slag and figured some rust was in order and so added some watery burnt orange for that rust stain effect.

After dry brushing the bases I went in with some various washes to color and darken everything up a bit.

Then it’s time for foliage and basing. Like I mentioned, Cheeto-fingers got the full forest treatment with all kinds of tufts and vines and leafy scatter texture stuff. Lotta glue, both wood glue and watered down PVA, typical stuff, and just more and more layers of texture. I even remembered to put some moss on that chunk of statue.

After all the basing was done I sprayed these guys with a matte coat, Vallejo mecha matte varnish to be precise, this is how I like to finish off all my minis and of course I didn’t want to spray matte on top of the coming water texture.

Now for the cool part. Or the new part anyway. I have three products in the Pile of Opportunity Basing Edition that I’ve never used. I have two part clear resin, I have UV resin and I have a couple of “still water” products. I’ve worked with regular resin in the past quite a bit but not on such a small scale, so I called up one of my oldest buddies who I worked with in the fx industry – he actually never left it, he’s worked for Disney and Laika and all kinds of places – he’s one of those guys who builds an entire engine for a model tank even though the engine is behind miniature grating or engine doors and will never be seen by anyone else. Anyway, I asked him if I should bother with the two part resin and he felt the UV resin would be my best bet. He also told me I should probably do some tests. In like some little disposable containers or something. I promptly ignored that advice. And since I have multiple products I haven’t used before and at least two bases to try things out on, I decided to try the still water on one base and the UV resin on the other. 

Just in general, I think this UV resin stuff is pretty cool, I can see a lot of potential uses for this in the future. One very nice feature of the still water product versus the UV resin is that it self-levels. The UV resin needed some poking and prodding to smear out and fill in gaps. I did use the UV resin in stages, and that worked just fine too. The disadvantage to the still water product is that you can’t really pour it too thick and it needs 24 hours between layers to cure. And it shrinks. Like, a lot. The UV resin cures in about 40 seconds at least at this scale and using a decent little UV flashlight, and having that kind of speed makes it a very attractive choice. At least for small things like this. In fact, the still water is taking so long to do it’s thing, after this first application, which shrunk way down, I’m just dumping a thick layer on it for round two and then I’m going to top it off with the UV resin to finish it up in a couple days. Cause the thick layer literally took a couple days to dry.

Hey, I’m lazy AND impatient. Multi-classing, it’s the way to go.

But as for the “swamp” look, obviously my water effect is perfectly clear and perfectly wrong for swamp. I’ll have to look into adding either transparent paint layers in the future or even submerging fine flock or something to muddy up the overall effect. For now I just like this new little gimmick. And I did try to push in a couple of leaves to have them suspended in the resin and I do like how those turned out.

But there they are, three members of the dreaded Chromatic Savages tribe. There’s definitely additional techniques I’d like to use in the case of water bases in the future. Again like painting transparent colors between layers of resin, maybe adding splashes and ripples, stuff like that. But hey, one new thing at a time. 

So now I just gotta pack these guys up and ship ‘em off and hope my daughter digs ‘em. I’m looking forward to seeing what she sends me in return, snake-lady-wise!

Three more minis done, feels good. 

So, go finish something!

See ya!

The Most Fun Alternative Tabletop Terrain!

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Transcript

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 3rd 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 3rd 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 3rd 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 2nd 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!

Is It Better To Make a Character That Sucks?!

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Transcript

God mode! You spend hours trying to find some secret code to download and hack your game. You aren’t even sure the code is going to work, you’re just hoping. And then you punch that thing in and bang! You’re indestructible! Insanely powerful! You fly around doing all the things that were nearly impossible to achieve while playing in a normal mode. And it’s super fun! 

Some people love to play in god-mode. But it’s never sustainable. Right? Maybe that’s just me? I mean, once you’ve got infinite ammo, infinite funding, infinite mana, once you’ve got infinity, things tend to grow a little stale. Dare I say “boring”. This is literally probably why real life is hard. And why elves would be … insane. 

And why From Software games are actually bought and played. 

Not by me, I have no interest those kinds of tears.

But what is sustainable is min-maxing. Surfing Wowhead to find that perfect build for maxing out the DPS on your Shadowpriest. Or looking up info on what levels to dip into for multi classing your Sorlock or your rogue bard. 

Some folks enjoy it as its own kind of mini-game, this min-maxing of stats and rules exploits. And that’s awesome. But how about one time making a character that sucks.

Greetings good humans, and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we bite off more than we can chew by trying to arm-wrestle stupidly large concepts for use in our silly little hobby.

Is our hobby silly? No, not really. I mean, it’s not any sillier than chasing a ball around on a grass field or jumping outta perfectly good airplanes with plastic bags to hold onto. We all just wanna be Mary Poppins.

What came first, the Bag of Holding or Mary Poppins’ suitcase?

Anyway, our topic for today is min-maxing for tabletop rpgs. And yes, this is quite the iceberg. Not in an “ooh” sensationalistic way – though that would be kinda fun – but rather because asking this little anthill-sized question actually leads to a mountain-range sized plethora of topics and ideas to explore. 

I of course wanna say that playing whatever game you dig the way you dig it is always best and the coolest thing. All I want to do today is present an idea for discussion or inspiration that might be fun to try if you haven’t. At the very least it might be interesting to just think about. 

I’ve got a friend who’s tried a couple of tabletop RPG sessions and he’s been bored through every one of them. Now it’s possible some of that reaction stems from either the groups he’s played with or the game masters but I suspect it has a lot more to do with his misguided expectation of D&D being similar to a video game. I kinda explained to him that while video games can excel at “static storytelling” and action, D&D excels at “dynamic storytelling” and unpredictable character development. I should say “can” excel at those things.

Now min-maxing a character really can be it’s own mini-game sort of activity, kinda like how “building army lists” or “war bands” for skirmish games is basically it’s own pastime. But I think what can be even more interesting is how intentionally not min-maxing a character can create way more opportunities for interesting story. Versus, you know, tactical advantage. This really does just boil down to “how do you want to play your character”.

We can look at movies and books for some correlation here. Now these are just some random examples, and they’re all from media I quite enjoy. 

So how about the scene from Force Awakens where Rey just sorta suddenly figures out how to use the Force mind control gimmick. Or when she discovers she can definitely put this light saber to good use, based on her martial training with the staff thing she ran around with in the desert. You know, in D&D a fighter can just sorta pick up any weapon and go to work with it. Or how about any scene in a John Wick flick? This guy’s got gunkata down to a video game science, and it’s super fun to watch. In fact, most min-maxed characters are fun to watch. But to me they’re more like watching spectacle rather than watching story. And one is more satisfying to me than the other, in the long term. 

In contrast, we could look at, say, Ripley trying to survive her situation. Or McClane trying to survive his situation. For me, there’s a lot more investment in the character when I’m hoping John can stay alive on his godawful bloody feet than there is counting how many headshots John manages to crit in a four-second span. There’s probably just north of a gazillion other examples we could compare. None of which is to say one viewing experience is superior to the other, they are just different experiences.

And I’m not saying characters with flaws, or non min-maxed characters, are incompetent at what they do. Far from it. It’s just that they have more opportunity to create dramatic stories because they have limitations or obstacles to overcome in a more relatable manner. 

It’s hard to have a heroic moment while in god-mode.

Maybe one time you might wanna try out something like incorporating a substantial flaw for your character to overcome or contend with. You can do this even if you’re min-maxing a character. Doing something like this could inherently create the basis for a character arc without even trying.

Granted, this kind of reality bummerness might not be what you want in a fun pastime of a game, and that’s perfectly fine. I know a lot of the time we play games specifically for the power fantasy. But, maybe doing something like this once could result in a super satisfying story experience over the long haul. And maybe that would something new. It’s just an idea.

One of my favorite tables in any game book – not that I’ve read a whole bunch of rule sets, I have a pretty limited experience in that regard – but one of my favorite tables is the Permanent Injuries table found in the skirmish game Frostgrave – and subsequently in the Stargrave, Rangers of Shadowdeep and Ghost Archipelago books. I think this is pretty fun – I mean, it totally sucks in the tactical part of the game but it lends so much character to the warband I’m playing with. It almost forces story to imbue itself in what’s essentially otherwise just a chess match. Okay, chess match with ranged weapons.

So what if you’re playing a melee class and you lose an eye to some vile wizard’s bastard of an owl? Now you’ve got no depth perception and have to rely on, maybe a bow? for the first time in your life. I mean until you’ve trained your melee skills back up. Or maybe you go full Jaime Lannister, have to learn how to fight with only your off hand.

Or maybe your monk took an arrow in the knee. You try to be zen about it, but after descending into a life of crime to save up for some extravagant healing spell, you encounter something that shakes up or reinvigorates your faith in the universe and you start down a new, long and arduous path towards redemption.

This is fun, I’m gonna keep rolling.

What if you played a middle-aged merchant who’s always always wanted to cast magic. But your academic acumen has always been a stumbling block – like with me and math. Or maths. Whatever, whatever it’s called. Damn that low Intelligence score! But maybe perseverance in the face of constant failure – and a growing mastery of cantrips – starts to show some progress on the higher level, spell side of things?

Or how about rolling a straight up coward. Like maybe the character starts as a rogue, because they need to hide in the shadows and they’re afraid of things, but after one level goes into fighter class because they decide that dammit, they’re tired of being afraid of everything. Of course there’s no easy way to conquer internal fears, but through hard work, focused determination and internal struggle, they begin to master their overwhelming sense of fear. Maybe you work out some kind of fear-based constitution or wisdom save with the DM, who gets to decide when to call for it – maybe it functions a little like the Wild Magic table.

Here’s one I’ve always wanted to play. A surly egotistical bard who has no musical talent and feels sorely put upon by a world that doesn’t appreciate his craftsmanship. Cause he’s actually a skilled puppeteer who crafts amazing marionettes … How does a bard who’s just kind of an asshole inspire people with puppetry?

Or how about a half-orc zen cleric who’s addicted to opiates and is a steadfast pacifist. He’s a great healer but too long between fixes – or what he calls his “lunar dreams” – and his stats start suffering penalties. You can riff off of other classic existing characters, play someone like a Doc Holliday, a drunk who’s suffering from a terminal illness, but she’s still got things she wants to accomplish – nay, NEEDS to accomplish before she takes that one last long nap. 

That one last long nap? What? That’s terrible, that is terrible writing. Uh, anyway.

This is probably why I really like the idea of the Wild Magic surge or other similar mechanics. Unpredictability is another facet of great storytelling. Yes, stories typically adhere to a sort of pattern or rhythm but what makes a good story good is the unpredictable details that populate those classic patterns. This is why I think it’s fun to come up with strange or unexpected takes on character archetypes. I think Raistlin and Caramon from Dragonlance were a pair of awesome characters, of course Raistlin in particular. In literature some of my current favorite inspirational characters come from Mr. Abercrombie. He’s taken the writer’s advice “stick your characters in a tree and throw rocks at ‘em” to a whole other level. More like, stick your characters in a tree, light the tree on fire and start slinging tomahawks at ‘em. I’m sure at some point we’re gonna see Inquisitor Glokta on the big screen. 

The thing that’s cool about good stories is they typically teach us things about ourselves or about life and they kinda do it without us realizing it’s happening. There’s a reason psychologists are now getting into using role playing games as therapeutic exercises for patients and clients. Tragedy and failure are often what make stories both great and captivating, both because they are relatable to every one of us and because the contrast of those failures against hard won successes can be cathartic. And yeah, this can all be part of a Dungeons and Dragons game without really putting in too much extra effort. It’s just about approaching a character a certain way, and then rolling some dice!

And playing into story is playing into one of the strengths of tabletop role playing games versus video games. 

Like I said, this is really just a portion of an enormous conversational topic iceberg. Right now we’re just the Titanic and we’re interacting with a tiny chunk of it.

I just, I can’t hear the word iceberg without thinking of the Titanic. 

Where were we? Polishing the brass on the Titanic

Right. Well, I suppose that wraps this one up. I mean, aside from the dozens of highly sophisticated and convoluted discussions one could have over several pints of beer or cups of coffee in a dark, wood-paneled cafe. Or pub. Or, you know, wherever the story might find you.

So, go play a character that sucks. Could be fun.

See ya!

Slapped & Chopped & FFTs (not NFTs)!!

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Transcript

You ever hear of Brene Brown? She’s a professor who researches shame and vulnerability. And also a podcaster and author and speaker and all that stuff. In one of her early podcast episodes, she talked about a concept she calls F F T, and we’re gonna chat about that today in conjunction with chopping and slapping some minis. With Contrast paints, not chips, dips, chains, whips.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we do some things for the first time, even if the results threaten to suck! Cause we’re ballsy that way and we understand risks are necessary for rewards.

All right, I mentioned Brene Brown and her podcast. I’ve listened to exactly two episodes back when she first started it. Not “two” because it’s terrible, quite the contrary actually, I think she’s pretty interesting. But we all know we’re drowning in content and there’s only so much time in a day to dog paddle around and keep our heads above water. 

Anyway, one of these episodes was about the concept she calls F F T. Which stands for First [bleeping] Time. And there’s always a first [bleeping] time, right? Literally for everything. It’s one of those ideas that I sorta stare at and wonder how in the world I could not have realized it on my own, it’s so fundamental and simple, really. But then I realize it’s me I’m talking about and it’s not really surprising at all. 

F F T is an expression I wish I’d heard a long time ago, so I could incorporate it into my emotional thought process. The idea of acknowledging something as just being an F F T can really help you get through what’s most likely gonna be a series of embarrassing failures. 

I mean, learning experiences! What? What? I don’t know. Moving on.

Today’s video has two F F Ts for me.

This is the first time I’ve tried shooting a real mini painting video with a decent camera and lens, and boy, trying something you’ve seen done by real pros

can really open one’s eyes to just how “pro” they are. 

And here I had a whole paragraph about what a particular kind of a pain in the ass shooting miniature painting is but then I saw Ninjon’s video, where basically he says what I was thinking before I could say it.

You have to worry about keeping the mini in frame, keeping it in focus, capturing the most interesting parts of the painting process and you have to actually not screw up the paint job.

Side note, this is the second time in a month this has happened, where I have a notion and then see someone else do it right before me. The day I uploaded my Crystal Scatter terrain video – NOT pachow – and not the day I released the video – uploading day and release day are two different days for this channel – Vincey V released his miniature basing video incorporating the exact same product. 

These are bigger chunks of broken glass. They’re not sharp in any way, ‘cause of the way they’re rolled around and stuff, so there’s no sharp edges you’ll never cut yourself.

The social zeitgeist or global consciousness is incredibly frustrating sometimes. But I guess it can serve as a constant reminder that we are all connected. Either that or I’m in a simulation and the programmer is constantly [bleeping] with me. And I guess this is apparently the f-bomb parade episode.

Anyway, yes, painting minis under a camera is tricky.

And this is my first time – well, technically my second time – I’ve actually tried speed painting. I don’t really like the idea of speed painting even though I really like the idea of the results of speed painting – you know, having a bunch of miniatures completed. This is most likely due to the fact that I rarely paint groups of miniatures as “units”. Since I don’t really play big army games. I typically paint individual miniatures from units for use in DnD or whatever. Or as members of non-unified war bands. And as you’ll see here, I take way too long to do everything, including speed painting. As well as talking on camera. 

I will say, after having done this exercise for this video, I’m kinda on board with the idea of speed painting or group painting as something I’ll continue to do in the future.

And of course, we can no longer use the speed painting nomenclature, we must call it Slap Chop. Yeah. 

How many times you seen that gag now? triple digits? sounds about right

So, props to the YouTuber who appropriated the term, it’s a cool term and now it’s just sorta what we call this process, but I swear this whole “putting transparent paints over a zenithal base coat” is literally the second intended-use case for the entire category of transparent paints. As my typical luck would have it, I saw Goobertown Minis recently mention the actual French term for this technique which has been around for hundreds of years. And Brent makes a particularly excellent and comical point – which is the best kind of point.

Some folks have pointed out that this is pretty much just the French grisaille technique and it’s been around since the 1300s. Now the way I see it, the French had 700 years to convince me to use the word grisaille. And they failed.

I guess at this point I can just Frankenstein my videos out of better YouTubers’ better content. That’ll be my process – come late to the game, regurgitate what others have already done, cut to end credits. That’ll work, right?

Okay, you in the back there, you can put that shank – I mean hobby knife down, I’m getting to the painting. I swear. 

So for this slap chop speed paint experiment, I decided to crack open my Pile of Opportunity – Sci-Fi Edition and paint up some Infinity models. I’ve got a few of these stashed away and I haven’t painted a single one yet. In fact I haven’t really painted any sci-fi genre stuff since I got back into the hobby – but that hasn’t stopped me from collecting any, right? Of course not. C’mon, I’m a good hobbyist.

And another thing that’s probably slightly disappointing for some dear viewers is that while I do have the rule book for Infinity Code One – see? But anyway, I haven’t played it yet and actually collected a lot of my sci-fi stuff with the intention of playing Stargrave, there we go look at this smooth, smooth moves I got going on here with these books and a game called Reality’s Edge, which I have with me right here. This is ridiculous. Anyway, Reality’s Edge is basically a skirmish game version of Shadowrun without the magic and fantasy mashup. 

These Infinity models are really nice, though. I mean, sure, I wish they were high-end injection molded plastic, but building these metal cyberpunk figures took me right back to my initial experience with painting miniatures, like literally the first miniatures I ever painted. Which were Ral Partha Shadowrun miniatures. I can remember my first pots of Tamiya paint, cause that’s the paint I started out with, I didn’t use any thinner, I didn’t use any washes, you know, this was all pre-internet and I was just a terrible Dorito-fingered savage and I had just met a couple new friends at this hobby shop and to be perfectly honest I don’t know why Tamiya was recommended to me as the starting paint anyway. I think it’s because a lot of the customer base there built and painted military aircraft kits and stuff like that. 

Anyway, these Corvus Belli figures kicked me down memory lane and they are really super nice. Highly detailed. Great casts even, mostly full figures with an arm or two to attach, and really clever seam obfuscation. I didn’t have to do much clean up at all. And all this fine detail is both what freaked me out about painting them and what made me think Contrast paints might be perfect to use on ‘em.

Now I always like to paint minis on bases if I can, I always like as few steps as possible, meaning I kinda shy away from working in sub-assemblies. Once in a while it’s unavoidable, but you know, it’s just like when I shoot video, I hate working with green screens cause that means there’s additional work in post. 

I told you: I’m lazy.

So I pulled out one of my boxes from the Pile of Opportunity: Bases Edition – so many editions of the Pile of Opportunity – specifically the “urban” box and I found a few bases that would work for these guys. These bases are from Micro Art Studio, they come in two pieces, the standard base rim and the actual detail insert. I’m not sure what they’re made out of, the material is almost like vinyl or something, they say it’s resin on the company’s site, it’s kinda soft and chewy but still holds detail well. Super easy to carve into and they take paint really well. And superglue works great with it. 

The reason I have so many of these Micro Art Studio bases – and I have quite a few – is because I would buy them in bulk when Miniature Market would have these clearance sales. I’d get these packs of 7 or 10 bases for like three or four bucks, which is just a crazy value. You can still get these from the actual Micro Art Studio site, but you know, full price is a different conversation. In fact, I have a video about doing that sort of thing right here. Again, not Pachow.

Anyway, these miniatures have the sorta standard tabs a lot of metal minis have for either slotted bases or company names or whatever, so I usually trim these down with clippers and an x-acto knife to sort of create organic pins to stick into the bases, just for added strength. So you can see here I kinda messed up some of the Dremelling but you know, it’s not an exact science – at least not on my hobby desk. I don’t sweat this kinda stuff, definitely not for “tabletop quality” paint jobs. You can always cover this kinda thing up with basing materials or whatever. 

I glued up the various arms and weapons and Corvus Belli really does nice design work, each piece had a nice supported fitting area, and I just used super glue and little bit of kicker.

So then I primed ‘em up for this slap chop thing, but I went with a blue primer for the shadow areas and to be perfectly honest I probably didn’t go dark enough. I don’t generally like to go full black for the shadows, to me the transparent paints just don’t work quite right over super dark undercoats, essentially you can’t really see any color when they go over black, but in this particular case, I definitely should have gone a couple shades darker. Then I just dropped a lighter gray on ‘em from the top with the airbrush, and I’m using Stynylrez primers and just sorta mixing up my own colors. I gotta say again, these are really some good-looking miniatures.

On the first figure I attempted, very poorly, to do the Marco Frisoni technique of slap chop, but I would A need to get much much better at painting and B need a much darker undercoat to make that really work. He makes it looks so easy and so cool! And on top of my abilities being way below par, it was also taking a super long time. 

So I ditched that after the first one and went for a standard dry brush. This is definitely a new process for me, this sounds kinda dumb but I don’t think I’m a very good dry brusher. I don’t think I’m very good at dry brushing. I know like dry brushing is sorta the easiest skill to learn in mini painting but I feel like it’s one of those “easy to learn, tough to master” sorta things. But as we all know, practice is what makes us better. And you know who needs a lotta practice. I’m talking about me. I need a lot of practice. Surprise.

I used – oh boy. Somebody’s, somebody’s going to hire me for something, right?

I used the Army Painter brand of Artis Opus knock-off brushes for this, I have some makeup brushes too, I just hadn’t tried these Army Painter brushes out yet, seemed like the perfect time to use ‘em. They’re fine. I think I wish they were like 10% or 20% “softer” but again this is coming from someone who doesn’t have a lot of experience with this technique yet. So maybe they’re perfect and I just gotta develop a feel for ‘em.

Anyway, it’s finally time for some paint.  So let’s talk about color scheme for a second. I’m terrible at coming up with color schemes. Literally terrible. I know about the color wheel and complimentary vs crappy color combinations – although that’s never stopped me before from using crappy color combinations. I just have a hard time visualizing what something is “going” to look like in the real world. It’s kinda weird cause I have what I consider to be a decent imagination but trying to pinpoint something in my mind’s eye that’s going to transition from “artistic vision” to the real world is kinda tough for me. 

I have this issue outside of mini painting, like as an example when I set up for shooting say an interview, often the on camera talent will have a couple of shirts or tops to choose from and I usually have to ask them to put a particular shirt or something on so I can physically see it in the space in order to make a decision. So trying to come up with paint schemes for minis is always frustrating for me. 

And I’ve tried the technique before where you take a photo of the mini and drop it in Photoshop or whatever and like roughly color it, and that kinda helps a little bit but for it to really work for me, I’d have to put in like a lot of time coloring the image to … anyway, the TLDR is I’m not good at picking color schemes. It doesn’t help that a lot of the times when I look at a miniature, especially like a unit like these guys, my initial thought is, well, they’d be all in black. Or maybe some kind of camouflage based on whatever environment they’re assaulting or fighting in. And I also usually steer clear of the box art, I’m not sure why that is. Mostly it’s cause I want to feel like I’m doing my own thing, and then probably a little bit because I know my skill level is so much lower than the box art artists. 

At some point you just gotta plunge ahead, gotta get stuff done, right, so I just got some paints out. The one idea that occurred to me when I saw the sculpts was that their jackets are really cool and I had this image of beaten leather coats. I figured their pants would be black then I realized the coats seemed to be overcoats and they had other coats under the overcoats but now, looking at the box art, which I probably should have done at the beginning, I guess those layers are the same material. I didn’t get that by looking at the actual sculpts so I ended up choosing OD green for the third color. Brown, black and green. Super creative. I guess they’re getting in tousles in the forest or something. Even though they’re cyberpunky. 

Most of the paints I used on these guys are Citadel Contrast paints. Definitely not a sponsor. Now I kinda like painting coloring book style, where I block in the entire figure with base colors before doing details and highlights. To try to get some variance in texture if not color, I went with a regular paint for these extra military style bags they all have slung over their shoulders. 

I typically paint anything that is going to be black or metal with Black Templar Contrast, so I went over all the guns and holsters and armored knee pads with that. Some of the straps – and there are a TON of straps and bandoliers and, more straps, and buckles, and buttons and even more straps – a couple of them stood out so I decided to hit them with a different color but cleaned them up a bit with white to pick them out. And these backpack slash parachute things, I almost went with a rusty orange and I still kinda wish I had. I actually ended up just adding a little blue to the green to add, again, some differentiation. Then there’s all this zipper detail I couldn’t just let alone, so I just went over that stuff with some Black Legion Contrast. 

Now I really wanted a splash of color on these guys and I was scrolling Instagram, you know, like we all do, and I came across zero death painting and I really, really like this person’s Infinity models. These red gun bits are so cool – and of course the weathering is top notch. So you know I just stole that idea and cleaned up the areas I wanted to paint red with white and then went with a mix of these three colors for what I hoped would be a sorta “rusty red”. Definitely far from perfect but the pop of color really looks cool to me. Not as cool as zero death painting by any means but still, better than like all black or gunmetal. I added orange to the end of the rocket launcher just for, again, a little bit of variance. 

And then for their heads, all I could see in my mind was Ghost In The Shell imagery, and so I figured the brain cases would be basically white and I held off on choosing the faceplate color til the very end. I figured I’d want some kind of color on the faceplates so I did clean them up with some white. Again, I kinda wanted to go with orange but … I was too timid to try it. 

Which is nonsense, because I can just paint over it. I mean I still could. There’s just that whole lazy thing, remember. But for brain cases I put down some of the Apothecary White Contrast. And here something happened that I’ve never experienced personally before – the white P3 paint reactivated under the contrast paint. I’ve literally never had paints reactivate, like ever. I’ve used P3 white under Contrast quite a bit. So yeah, pretty strange. 

Anyway, then I moved on to the bases, typically I like doing bases, but since I was quote unquote speed painting, I figured I’d just do something relatively simple and add a few washes. I used some metallics for the cool textures on these prefab bases and messed around with these pipe colors here for a bit and the weird blue I put down on this one is just because the texture reminded me of this industrial blue plastic siding or roofing material I’ve seen before. I think actually the base was intended to be like some kind of terracotta tiles or something. And the washes are always fun cause they’re so easy. Right? Yeah, I’m right. Washes are fun. Cause they’re easy!

I finally decided to just sorta use the box art color on the faceplates and it’s not my favorite, I think I might go back one day and maybe try something else. Probably that orange I keep talking about. Maybe just on the sergeant or whatever the leader’s rank is there. Who am I kidding? I’m never going back to these. There’s way too many other minis for me mess up! I gotta get cracking!

I went in for some highlighting and cleaning up some detail and I tried to keep reminding myself that this was supposed to be a speed paint project. I just simply didn’t know when to stop. Basically I just quit when I realized that I would just keep working on these things for days and days if I didn’t. And that’s not to say they would have come out amazing if I had continued, it just means that I would have spent a lot of time getting a somewhat higher level of mediocrity. There are so many details on these figures that I could probably have spent another week on ‘em. I mean, I didn’t even weather these guys. 

Okay, originally I ended the work there, but I just couldn’t, I couldn’t quite stop. I had to do a little bit of weathering, I just couldn’t get over not having those cool metallic scratches at least on the red parts of the weapons. So off camera I doused those OD green bags with Citadel Athonean Camoshade – Athenian Camoshade? Athonian? I can never remember that one, but anyway you know what I’m talking about, the camoshade, sorta green brown! And then I matte varnished the minis, which is what I as I always do to finish them, and then I went back with the metallics to both touch up the metallic bits that got dulled by the matte spray and then I just did little tiny weathering on the red parts of the weapons. I feel much better. Even though there’s a ton more work that could be done on these guys.

But there they are, the results of my slap chop speed paint exercise. Now because I recorded every single bit of painting (except for the last part), I know exactly how long I spent on them. And it’s a little embarrassing. I spent over ten hours on these four figures, not counting the building and priming phase. But what’s even more embarrassing is had I not made this a specific “speed painting” project, I would probably still be working on them and I’m 100% sure that the results would not have been much better. 

But hey, I painted some miniatures. And despite the uncomfortableness of the camera setup or whatever, I do really enjoy the act of painting. It’s just a cool thing for me. And it’s been at least six months since I’ve painted a miniature. I’m not sure how long a real, “real” speed painting session on a unit of these guys should have taken, my guess is somewhere in the three to four hour range? I don’t know. I guess it really doesn’t matter, maybe speed painting is just like “art” – it’s all subjective.

Anyway, I do think I need to do more exercises with this whole slap chop method and I do think miniatures with a lot of texture and detail benefit from using transparent paints. And I know that you’ve heard that from plenty of places. I am looking forward to painting more Infinity models, they are super nice, again – and also, not sponsored. But, as luck would have it, my next painting project has already been picked out for me. We’ll get to that in next month’s video.

So I guess, uh, go slap or chop something, see what you think of it. Or for those of you that are already knee-deep in dry brushes and transparent paints, definitely let me know how I can improve. 

So … go paint something. Even if it’s your FFT!

See ya!

Make or Buy Tabletop Terrain?

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Transcript

Let’s see, I can pick up some XPS foam, get some ModPodge, cut it up with a craft knife, roll in some rock texture with balled up aluminum foil, maybe cut out a base of MDF or foam core, I can glue up some walls, maybe carve in some detail. Better get some balsa wood, I can make wood strips outta that, and even scribe in some extra wood grain detail. Okay, gotta make a roof, so maybe I’ll cut up some cereal boxes and use some scissors to trim out a row of shingle looking things. I can glue those to more foam core and that’ll make a good roof, and – oh, I forgot the windows. Right, okay, cut some windows into those foam core walls, and yeah I need a door. Okay I’ll cut that out of some foam core, strip off the outer layer of paper, scribe in some wood panelling and then I guess cut it into an arch? Yeah, then I gotta make an arch out of little bricks I can cut from the scrap XPS and glue those around the doorway … Or! I could just buy this.

Greetings good humans and welcome to Tabletop Alchemy, where we ponder useless things and argue about first world problems. 

Like making or buying tabletop terrain.

There’s no TLDR for this one – and even if there was, you know it’d be at the end of the video anyway, so why are you even asking?

I think most of us have the same reaction to the question of “should I buy this particular thing or just make it myself?” That reaction being “Making it will be cheaper!”  And sometimes, that’s true. Sometimes, it’s not, and sometimes it feels like it’s true when it actually isn’t. Confused? Good. Now I don’t feel so alone.

All us humans, I think we typically want two things: money and happiness. Whether those are misguided is a topic for another video. But I think the most valuable commodity in our human existence is time. We basically buy and sell time, trade it – all the time – without even realizing it. Or maybe just without acknowledging it. But we also sort of inherently equate Time with Free. And that’s a huge mistake. Like it’s super easy for us to just not consider what our time is worth because we labor under the delusion that we have an infinite amount of it. And I assure you, dear viewer, it’s the only thing we absolutely do not have an infinite amount of. And when I say the phrase, “what our time is worth”, the word worth, the word worth — the Rural Juror – when I say the word “Worth” I’m not limiting the meaning of the word worth to simply money. There are other things of value, some might say way more value, than ducats in the bank.

So, how often do you consciously include time in your decision-making process when considering how much something is worth? And the “something” doesn’t have be a consumable product, it could be an activity or time with another person, it could be a lot of things.

Now, I know there are a lotta people who do have a personality or cognitive process that allows them to really consider time when they are making decisions. I am not one of them. My friend Dan Adam of Paint All The Minis IS one of them. I literally marvel at his thought process sometimes when he explains to me how he thinks about or considers his hobby activities and purchases. And while I will never be able to think about things in the same way as he does, there’s definitely a few things I can learn from his perspective on things.

So let’s try to set up a few specific examples for today’s topic and see where they take us. First off, we need to set some parameters. I’m gonna say that there are three categories of purchasable terrain: Pre-painted and assembled; unpainted and unassembled; and 3d printable. Now there are folks who have 3d printers at home and folks who do not, like me – and yes, it is in fact all about me – so those of us who do not have printers might buy printed terrain from places like Etsy or whatever. For the purposes of this discussion, I’m gonna disregard pre-painted terrain and assume that painting will have to be done for all of our comparison subjects today.

So for test case number one, let’s use a medieval townhouse sorta thing. Here are three similar examples, one from the Ferrari of tabletop terrain, Dwarven Forge, another from TTCombat, a laser-cut MDF kit, and this last is a random item from a random Etsy seller. Note that this particular item is printed on an SLA printer, filament printer, so it’s not resin and therefore it’s much cheaper than a good resin print but also has those lithography print lines that I personally kinda hate. 

Now the Dwarven Forge item is a set of three smaller houses, but they are also custom-buildable out of all these magnetic pieces, so you can make one larger structure out of it. I think it’s close enough to the other two insofar as the amount of detail or usable space on the table to be a good comparison. I have the TTCombat model and I already built it, it took a couple hours and some wood glue, pretty straightforward but still, it does require assembly. The printed model has the most detailed interiors by far, so that’s a plus for that one. But we can already see a range of trade-offs versus cost. The TTCombat MDF model is probably the least detailed of all three but that laser etched surface does have fine detail that does show up under primer and paint. 

I got a video on that right here. And yes, I almost did it, I almost said pa-chow.

The printed model has better detail than the Dwarven Forge set and even though it’s got that annoying print texture, to be honest, painted up and on the table, it’s probably fine. I’m just weird and ornery about micro details that don’t really matter. So $136 bucks for the Dwarven Forge set, main advantage being you can rebuild the set in a number of ways. $50 for a printed building with max detail. Or around $20 for the MDF kit. We’re ignoring the shipping parameter ‘cause … well, I’m pseudo-scientific at best. Personally, I like the MDF kit and the printed one over the Dwarven Forge set – kinda for aesthetics but really for the price versus what you get. I think the printed one is my favorite, but the price tag of both it and the Dwarven Forge set definitely make me consider building my own. Whereas the TTCombat set, to me, is just a no-brainer.  

So let’s think about that for a minute. To build something similar to these ourselves, we’re gonna need some XPS foam – very doable, but still an associated cost. Now you can get a 4×8 sheet of 1/2” XPS, which is probably what I’d use for a building like this, for around $30. We’d only be using maybe a quarter of it for this build – yes, maybe less, but I’m the builder in this example and I’m 100% guaranteed to make many mistakes by measuring once and cutting 50 times, so whatever, just go make your mistake-free builds over there and leave me to my misery. So we’ll use say $8 worth of XPS foam. 

Now someone’s gonna shout out, “Just use foam core from the dollar store, you numbskull!” And your observation is valid. I am indeed known at times to be numb of skull, but I also, personally, hate building with foam core. It’s just, I don’t know, to me it just reeks of disposability. Stuff built out of foam core feels weightless and impermanent. Maybe because in a lot of industries foam core is what you use for mockups, not finished models. That’s why I like Sintra and plastic and even the XPS foam, which due to it’s density over foam core, feels a lot more permanent. I just want a like a certain feel from my models but yes, dollar store foam core would be much cheaper and is a completely viable alternative.

So we’ve got $8 of XPS. We’ll need something to make like the rock or brick base for the building, I think I’d scribe that into panels of Sintra but thin sheets of XPS could work. Balsa strips or strips of scribed Sintra could work for the exposed lumber beam details and more scribed XPS would work for the lower floor of the building. We gotta design the upper floor and engineer how both the upper floor and the roof are going to sit on the lower floor and be easily removable. That all probably involves some more strips of whatever main material we’re using and a whole bunch of time measuring and fitting and generally doing design and build work. The roof I would base out of large pieces of Sintra, but of course YOU can cut it outta card or foam core or whatever nonsense you wanna use. 

You guys know I’m just kidding with the sarcastic bits here – I do truly dislike using foam core myself but I know that’s literally my own issue in my own head, there’s nothing wrong and probably lots of things right with using foam core and it’s definitely versatile and cheap.

Now the shingles for the roof could either be painted on – lame – or cut out of stacked strips of card, which in this case, I think that’s a good use for card, or, if you wanted to be a little bit insane, you could hand-cut 500 shingles out of styrene and … no, no one’s gonna do that. But still, even just using card to trim out the shingle details, that’s a good chunk of time and some fiddly model-making work. Then of course you got some glue cost, that’s no big deal unless you’re using CA glue, but it’s still negligible. And then there’s probably going to be a ModPodge undercoat to seal the XPS foam et cetera. So I’m just throwing a number out there, maybe all told, we’re gonna spend around $15 on this model counting every bit of material used. Maybe it’s less, maybe it’s like $10 worth of materials. 

So right off the bat, even if we’re really conservative on the materials cost estimate, we’re already at least in the ballpark of that MDF kit price. And now we need to factor in TIME. Now, plenty of you out there might be able to knock this build out in a day. I would say if you’re an experienced model builder, and I mean in this hobby type of model building, and especially if you’ve built something like this before, my guess is you could build a structure similar to our three examples in, I don’t know, couple of hours? Just a guess, and I’m assuming a certain quality level here too. If you’re a solid scratch builder and you’ve never built a house like this before, my guess is this is probably a full 8 hour day of work. This might be the category I fall into, but I haven’t scratch built stuff in a long time. Now of course, as hobbyists, we would probably work on it an hour or two a day until it was done. But let’s say it takes a day to build a model similar to our purchasable examples both in detail quality, an interior, removable floors and roof. So how much is a day of work worth to you?

For some of us, the cost savings versus the day of work is a totally viable option. Some of us might think burning a day of work in lieu of spending $50 is nuts. Some of us might just wanna build our own model just because we wanna build our own model. For me, in my current financial situation, I would not by the Dwarven Forge set, but I would definitely consider the $50 printed model. And of course I already bought the MDF kit. The MDF kits, especially from TTCombat due to their pricing, really are almost no-brainer must-haves, in my opinion. They’re just too cost effective, even when comparing their seemingly lack of detail against more detailed but more expensive models. And you can always add some detail to the MDF structures! And to be even more honest, I think TTCombat has like some super competitive pricing compared to other MDF kit makers. I’m not putting down other MDF kit makers, there’s a bunch of awesome stuff out there that is super cool and a lotta designs that are not manufactured by TTCombat. 

But a day of work vs a day of free time to do other things you might want to or have to do, that is the question. And $20 or $50, for me, is kinda hard to trade off for 8 hours of my time. 

All right, let’s consider another test case: ruins.  A lotta times the same ruins can be used for both sci-fi and fantasy games, so right there, we have some added value. Here’s where I kinda default to “I’ll just build ruins myself” because I never think about them needing too much detail. But that said, there are some pretty cool purchasable ruins out there. Sets like these printed ruins – and these are PLA resin, not filament, so even better – the detail in these, and these from Dwarven Forge – I keep bringing up Dwarven Forge I’m just trying to have a set comparison, a set of, a comparison set that we return to. Anyway, these ruins are not something I could recreate easily at the home hobby desk. In fact, I would almost argue that these types of ruins, with all this sculpted detail, are maybe worth more of our hard-earned ducats than those buildings we just talked about. I mean, a building is something I can get my head around and actually believe I can make on my own, but the architectural details in these sets, there’s no way I’d be able to craft those on my own versus buying them. 

Now these kinds of ruins, this sorta rough hewn columns and rocky terrain type stuff, these are the kinds of things I think make home crafting a vastly better choice. Using just trimmings from other projects, you can knock out scatter terrain ruin pieces like this in like twenty minutes. Not counting painting. You can make walls outta XPS, columns outta cardboard tubes with filler slapped over ‘em, or odd pieces you find laying around, they don’t have to be pretty, they’re so fast and pretty easy to make they’re just pretty much disposable. 

All right, last test case – let’s use something big, something highly detailed and maybe a bit too stacked for this conversation but, you know, let’s roll with it. How about a medieval pirate ship? Now there are MDF ship models, and to be honest, they are probably the most game-friendly insofar as being able to put miniatures on them and move ‘em around, but admit it, they’re just not the coolest looking things. But then you have some cool printed ships to choose from. And they have price tags. But for me this is another example of there being no way I would ever try to build a ship on my own instead of buying one of these, I mean unless I just really wanted to build my own ship. I mean, this one’s between $90 and a $120 depending on the scale you get – there’s no way I could scratch build something like this in any reasonable time frame that would make home crafting a viable alternative to just buying this model. And I would buy it in 32mm scale. 

Now there are all kinds of other examples – like resin trees for instance. I don’t think I’d ever buy trees like this, I would just make some out of flock or the cheap model railroad trees you can get on Amazon. I’ve even got a few Woodland Scenics tree kits, and while those aren’t necessarily cheap, they’re cheaper by far than stuff like this. Again, this is all just personal preference!

We didn’t even talk about like dungeon tiles for DnD, which is kinda what Dwarven Forge started out their company with. I think Matt Mercer exclusively uses Dwarven Forge terrain for Critical Role, but you know, they have a production budget. I think dungeon tiles are probably best made at the home hobby desk, cause there are a bunch of cheap materials and simple crafting techniques shown off by a lot of excellent hobby channels. 

Or, you know, you can just draw on a twenty dollar dry erase battle map with a two dollar marker, which is, honestly, what I do most of the time. But I know that only works for tabletop rpgs, it’s not an option for wargames.

So, I guess in summary, what I’ve been getting at is that a lot of the time, buying some terrain is kinda preferable to crafting it, at least in my opinion.

If you guys have any suggestions for particular sellers online or brands of purchasable terrain you like or other ideas on how to craft or build terrain faster or cheaper at home, you know where to drop ‘em.

So go build something! Or maybe … go buy something! Yeah, that does seem a little weird to say out loud. 

Anyway, see ya!