My weekend plans are flocked

Tomorrow, 12 hours from now, I will not be playing Fields of Glory at Recon in the the cities. Recon is a quarterly miniatures 'micro con' held by the MMGA* every few months. George and I went a few months back and played some DBM with a fine gentleman down in the cities. He has moved on now; to Field of Glory. In the interim I bought two armies for 15 mm FOG/DBM. Ostrogoths and Romans - a fine match. I had hoped to go down this weekend and take part in a FOG tourney (as a total NOOB) and get my ass kicked up and down the table top. But, today I got hit with OT at work. A mixed blessing, because it means all the things I had planned to do today, I didn't. And therefore I won't be going tonight or tomorrow. I will, however, get a little extra on my next check, so that will help. FOG appears to be on the move in the twin cities. I will probably get more chances to go down and learn to lose gracefully.

Instead, I have put some effort into getting my HOTT armies to table. I still have plenty of figs to base, but I also have enough bad guys and good guys to field some armies - though less strictly themed than I originally envisioned. Basically, for the moment, it will simply be forces of light and forces of darkness.. Orcs allies vs Elves and allies. I won't offer an opinion on which is the force of darkness, as the reader probably has his or her own opinions. Tonight I did a quick and dirty flocking off all my based Elves and allies.They look ok. I used a wet paint flocking technique, using a very wisconsinesque (iron rich mud) brown paint I picked up free at the local haz waste recovery place. I made several trips there last summer to get rid of a few things - more trips than were strictly necessary mind you - each time coming home with a few of their recycled paint cans in various earth and water tones. These are set aside for making scenery, battle mats, etc. Paint applied to base, base dipped in a mixed flock while paint is still wet and Viola! grass on a muddy field.

Tomorrow I hope to do the Orcs and allies. Most of the troops that are close to table ready are core army types. Blades, Spears, Riders, Knights, Warband. The only unusual units are the Magician and the Troll Artillery (I neglected to mention them in the last post, but they were pictured). That's ok for now, I suppose. I also popped one of the elf riders off the base, so that all my rider units have two figs and all my knights will have three, for standardization. It also allows me to make another Elven rider unit, as I still had one in the lab.


* the MMGA website is woefully out of date, but they have an active yahoo group.. if you want to join it, and can't find a link, drop me a note, I will modify this footnote to include one.. for now, I am a bit ty ty.. and rambling on as well oh, bother, it was easier just to add the link..

amazing the typos you see after you post these things. There are still quite a few, but the worst are gone.

Pictures...

Well, I finally have some progress to report on the HotT project, and pics to prove the point. The pics aren't all great, I need to set up a system for consistent, focused images..

An Elf Mage, Two Elf blades, Elf Riders, Knights and Shooters.


I will try to figure out what figs I used for each, at some point. I know the Blades with three elves were cloud warriors.. the shooters are combination of master archers and High Elven archers, the blades with four figs are High Elven warriors. I think the mage is Master Cyrus, and some apprentice adepts or some such.. At some point I will make a chart, maybe. Not mission critical, I guess..I also have a pile of Orcs based...

6 stands of war band, and 2 shooters. And a fair number of figs ready for basing.

if any of my legion fans knows of a tutorial on formatting the page when I put pics into it, I would love to get a link..

Screw it, done is better than perfect

I have been delaying the inevitable decision to give up on the removable basing for my Mage Knight HOTT armies. I am better off just mounting the figures to fixed bases, than taking more time trying to figure out a way to have my cake and eat it too. That said, I will begin this task this week. But I also must work on cleaning the geek room and its geek lab. That may be a project for tomorrow.

I loaned my digital camera to a friend who was taking a class, so pictures may be delayed indefinitely, or I may borrow one from my wife or kid. Right now the background for any pics I took would embarrass my family, and bring social services to clean my house.

I have also succumbed to my ebay compulsion, and purchased more mage knight figures. This time they are packaged as sets built around factions, which, I hope, means some consistency of theme. The pics on the auction were poor, but, if I am lucky, this should represent a nearly complete Elf and Orc army.

I did get Ubuntu online, and, in fact, got a new computer (2.4 G with a 40G hard drive and larger monitor for 45 bucks) to run it on. It has a dual monitor vid card, and I have an old LCD projector I plan to mount in my geek room for RPG purposes. My long term goal is to use the older P3 computer into a wiki server to manage my life, and all that data I have piled up.

I am probably going to start selling some of my board games. This feels like drowning my children, but, I have some projects that are going to demand some funds. A part time job might also be an option.. the horror..