Fitz's Roleplaying, Wargaming and Modeling-related blather
I've been 3d printing and painting some 1:144 WW1 aircraft, for playing Canvas Eagles , a tabletop WW1 dogfight game. I can't say that I've been exceptionally productive: these three (plus a Fokker Triplane that I gave away as a gift) are the sum total of my completed work so far. However, I've just ordered some 1:144 decals, which will make painting the little things much less of a chore.…
These 3d printed doors are some that I found on some site some time in the past, and I don't recall when or where or who the designer was. I printed them at 0.2mm layers on my Ender 3, and painted them with some home-made washes. The tall one in the middle is the original design, but I enshortened it, mainly for the sake of cutting its print time in half. The figures are the flat card standees…
Some time in the 1990s I bought a pack of GW metal Warhammer Skaven. I didn't have any interest in Warhammer, but I did want something I could use as wererats for my AD&D game. The skaven are a bit more heavily equipped than your standard AD&D wererat, but they looked ratty enough for my purposes.
I got these today, four AD&D adventure books, PoD items from DriveThruRPG, bought mostly on a whim. I must confess, I bought Halith Vorn and Zorth mainly because the illustration appealed to me, but they also had pretty good reviews on DTRPG. They took a bit longer to arrive than PoD stuff usually does, though only a bit. I made the order on June 8th, and today is the 24th; I normally expect a…
I'm trying to make some modelling flock, with only limited success. This is made from bits of a kitchen sponge, whizzed up in a blender, coloured with ordinary house paint kneaded through, dried in the oven and then ground again in a little electric coffee grinder. It's not utterly worthless, but I was hoping for a smaller grain size than this. Also, the sponge is yellow, so that affects the final…
Since I'm on a cardboard standee kick at the moment, I thought I would show you this — my very first hand-drawn paper AD&D character mini, from 1981. My friend Ivan (a wonderful man, now sadly deceased) was running what I think was his one and only AD&D campaign for our group, and wanted to try out the use of figure markers. Up until then, we'd always done pure theatre-of-the-mind stuff. For the…
Many years ago I ran a short-lived campaign set in a Mythic China milieu. I didn't have any 3d minis suitable for the aesthetic, so I made a bunch of standees. Naturally, being set in Mythic China, none of the players elected to play an actual Chinese character. Not one. We had a Japanese sumo wrestler, a Japanese samurai, and a Mongol warrior. And a donkey. The only vaguely Chinese character was…
Ive printed and cut out a new batch of paper minis from OkumArts, bought via DriveThruRPG. David Okum's minis are my favourites, when it comes to card standees. My main regret is that he doesn't seem to have done a great many fantasy RPG character class variants, or if he has, I've missed them. There are a few, but not a particularly wide variety. If he produced two-sheet PDFs of character minis…
I have a large (A1) laminated offset-square 1" grid that I use as a battle map for D&D. It works great, being very quick and convenient to set up with a whiteboard marker, and it's very clear and visible to all the players (and me). However, it turns out that it's not ideal for exploration sessions, as even on an A1 sheet, a one-inch grid doesn't go all that far. And if the party go off in an…
This 15mm (1/100 scale) Hanomag SdKfz 251 half-track ambulance is a model I designed and printed some considerable time ago, but the print was a partial failure — the nose of the vehicle is distorted, and the wheels didn't print at all. I just got around to making some new wheels and gluing them in place. I'll add it to the rest of the ambulances I've been modelling over recent years. I've got a…
I'm in the process of re-re-re-re-reorganising my workroom, and I found some 15mm WWII figures I've been looking for for quite a while. They're Battlefront 15mm WWII Mediterranean Brits in BD trousers and shirt-sleeves, ideal for representing troops in Italy in summer. It's quite an old set, and I don't think they're still available any more. Plus, I found some other Brits that I didn't even know…
I got this figure in a mixed lot of 15mm medievals and ancients some time back in the early(ish) 1980s. I'm not familiar with ancients though, and I'm not at all sure what it might be. I thought maybe a clibanophoros, but I'm really just guessing. I also don't know who the manufacturer was.
This arrived for me today, a PoD hardback via DriveThruRPG. Including postage, it cost me about $40 yankeebucks, so about $65 Kiwibucks. I got it purely out of curiosity, since I'm pretty happy with running AD&D2e and don't intend to change that any time soon. The author, Joseph Bloch, has said words to the effect that he was trying to write the game that Gary Gygax might have produced as AD&D2e…
I bought a copy of the AD&D2e Tome of Magic in PDF from DriveThruRPG. I would have preferred a PoD hard copy, but they don't offer one for this volume, and I figured that at least I could print the PDF and bind my own physical book. For those unfamiliar with it, the Tome of Magic is just a collection of additional spells and magic items for AD&D2e, and it also expands the clerical spheres and…
I've been casting about for ages for a paint palette with very small reservoirs, suitable for very small quantities of paint. I completely overlooked this: my used pill trays. Thanks to my ever-increasing decrepitude, I have a never-ending supply of them, and they're perfect for my purposes — compact, disposable, and white.
While I was looking through some accumulated boxes of stuff, I found one containing a whole bunch of old white metal miniatures from Ye Olden Times. This is a Night Hag by Grenadier, dated 1986. The bottom of the base Back in those days, the standard nominal figure size for roleplaying minis was 25mm instead of 28 or 32mm, as it is today. This one is quite small even by those standards, and…
This is a freebie STL of a WWII German Pantherturm , an emplaced Panther tank turret used extensively in the Italian campaign and during the fall of the Reich as a (relatively) cheap protected anti-tank bunker. https://www.wargaming3d.com/product/mojobob_hoochyman_pantherturm The model is designed at 1:100 scale for 15mm, but it will scale up for 20mm without any issues, and even 28mm at a pinch.…
This just arrived for me, a print-on-demand product from DTRPG. It's pretty much what it says on the cover: a whole bunch of magical artifacts for AD&D2e. It also includes some notes on the use of artifacts within an AD&D2e campaign, and a bunch of tables with which to generate the various random powers the artifacts are supposed to have. I like the concept of these artifacts in a campaign. They…
This is an FDM print of a fairly old Duncan Louca design, one of a set of three hags he did. I've printed it at a height of 75mm, as I had a need for a giant hag in a game session I was running, though that need passed long before I ever got the mini painted. It's painted entirely with glazes (Army Painter Speedpaint and Vallejo Xpress ) and washes, apart from the metallic gold of her piercings…
Vallejo Xpress is another entry into the colour glaze "speed-paint" style of mini paints. I noticed them on the rack when I went in to my FLGS for some normal Vallejo paint, and thought I'd give them a try in my constant search for hobby materials that cater to my laziness. They work decently well, though there's nothing startling about them. They dry to a glossier finish than Army Painter…
This is an old mini from the early 2000s, when WotC was newly the owner of D&D and had just published 3rd Edition. They also started producing a range of white metal miniatures to match the art in the Monster manual, of which this is one — the Displacer Beast. I don't know who the sculptor was, but it does a decent job of replicating the skinny, almost skeletal aspect of the MM artwork. It was a…
This is a 1/200 model by PlanePrinter (on Patreon), up-scaled to 1/144 scale and printed on my elderly Ender 3. It's intended for my WWII Desert Air Force, to support my 15mm WWII Brits in North Africa and the Mediterranean.
Some time ago I made myself an MDF box to use as a portable photographic stage for shooting models. I painted the inside matte white, to keep as much light as possible bouncing around in there. Ever since, from time to time, I've been tinkering with various setups to get the best out of it, and in the end it seems that the simplest is best. For light, I'm just using a single cheap equipoise lamp…
I've had these Battlefront 15mm Afrika Korps sitting around, based, primed and waiting for paint, for years now. I don't know for sure exactly how many years. I've finally pulled finger and got them sufficiently finished that I can use them in a game without being utterly ashamed. For some reason, and I can't quite put my finger on exactly why, I just don't enjoy painting infantry. So they tend to…
I've printed out and assembled my new DM's screen for AD&D2e. Structurally, it's 2mm grey-board covered with some of my home-made book-cloth. I didn't have enough of a single pattern to do the whole lot, which is why it's in two different patterns. The most useful in-game charts are on the two centre panels. The outer panels are less likely to be needed day-to-day, and I've added some hinged…