…..Friday’s “Mystery Meat”…..

    ~ Attention. Here’s an update on tonight’s dinner. It was veal. I repeat, veal. The winner of tonight’s mystery meat contest is Jeffrey Corbin who guessed “some kind of beef.”~

    It’s 12:21 am, just got home from work, and once again I have nothing ready to post for the “Mystery Meat”. I feel like the worst blogger in the world, but I have been WAY too busy with my day job lately. I’m working on a mapping project that I really need to complete, and I’m close to being done. Once that’s put to bed, I can get back to my own stuff for awhile and actually post some new stuff here.

   I did get contacted by Joe Wetzel for an interesting project, DungeonMorph Dice, I am looking forward to helping with his project. It looks like a lot of fun, it is a great idea that I never would of thought of. Check it out.

   Dyson just recently put out Dodecahedron #3 check it out, Dyson does some great work! Check out his blog too, there are some awesome New Potions and the “Enchanter” Magic User Subclass for Labyrinth Lord. He also created some new “Enchanter” Spells. This guy is a workhorse. It’s late, I’m wiped out, and I’m going to bed.

…..Friday’s “Mystery Meat”…..Skeletons, Ghouls, & Zombies

 

   ~ Attention. Here’s an update on tonight’s dinner. It was veal. I repeat, veal. The winner of tonight’s mystery meat contest is Jeffrey Corbin who guessed “some kind of beef.”~

   This week, I’m posting some miniature pics. A while back I picked up a small set of some Mantic Games undead. I originally bought them to have some skeletons and ghouls for D&D, one thing lead to another,  and soon I had several sets along with the undead army boxed set. I had a lot of fun building these minis, very relaxing, yet a somewhat creative process. The skeletons are somewhat customizable. Each Skeleton sprue comes with ten sets of legs, ten torsos (six with heads and four without), five seperate heads, some extra arms with weapons, lots of spears and swords, a base insert for a skeleton coming out of the ground, a skeleton torso for the insert, a small tombstone, and a skeleton dog (rat?). I enjoyed assembling them with all the different options. These Skeletons look good on the table, and IMHO will work great for D&D.

 

   The Revenants (Heavily Armored Skeletons) were not as interesting to me. The sprues follow the same layout as the Skeleton sprues, same sets of legs, different torsos, most of these skeletons have helmets, no spears, but lots of extra armor bits to put on the models which were fun to get creative with, but the models overall just lacked something (to me). I think for me they just didn’t seem to be that menacing, because even with the extra armor, they just don’t seem to be bulked out much more than the regular skeletons. I still enjoyed building them, but the regular skeletons are still my favorites.

   The Ghouls are some nice sculpts, very nasty, evil looking, degenerated creatures. They come two to a sprue, two different sets of legs, and two different torsos, three heads, two extra hands with weapons, a mechanical looking claw and a sack of body parts. There can still be a lot of variation with poses and heads, and suprisingly you can make them look quite different with so few options. If you want to base them up in ranks for an army, you have to be carefull with the poses, as the arns etc. seem to get in the way of each other, unless a little forethought is used. But for roleplaying minis, these Ghouls are gruesome!

   The Zombies, I love these guys, when Mantic first came out with their Zombies, they had a limited time offer of buying individual sprues for like a $1.99 at their webstore. I bought ten sprues along with some bases immediately. Each sprue has three sets of legs, three torsos, three seperate arms, six different heads, a base insert (for a zombie torso rising from the ground) and a spinal column. At first I thought there should be some more parts for more options, but after I started building them, I realized I didn’t really need more options. Between what you get on the sprues, the fact that you can use the Ghoul legs and torsos with the Zombie heads (and even some of the Skeleton parts) you can easily build lots and lots of unique Zombies. I enjoy getting creative with them, trying to come up with different combinations.

   Here are some Zombies rising up from the ground.

   Overall I really like Mantic Games miniatures, I like to relax and build a handful of them every so often, they are relatively inexpensive, and work well for roleplaying or wargaming. Some of the poses, like the legs are a little static, the Revenants don’t really work for me, and the Ghouls, while very gruesome looking are a little more limited because of the lack of building options. I do recommend checking them out if you like miniatures, but be careful, they can become habit forming. …….Now where are my paints…..???

…..Friday’s “Mystery Meat”….. “I Hate Fun Too”

~ Attention. Here’s an update on tonight’s dinner. It was veal. I repeat, veal. The winner of tonight’s mystery meat contest is Jeffrey Corbin who guessed “some kind of beef.”~

   Welcome to yet another edition of Friday’s “Mystery Meat”. I’m on the road, and have no way to scan any of the new maps I’m working on. Yes, I am working on some new stuff, hard to tell lately with my significant lack of posts. This week I am going to try something a little different, I’m going to write. I cruise the blogs when I can, and one link led me to another, then to another when I came across an article on LoTFP by James Raggi titled “I Hate Fun” . I read it, I enjoyed it, I thought a lot about it. I just read it again.

   I hate fun too. I get it, it explains my whole journey into roleplaying. I started with the Holmes rules in the Boxed set. Funny enough I got the bug for D&D from “Reading” the Hobbit and the Lord Of The Rings Trilogy…..I quote James’ article,

   “But while Gygaxian D&D was forged from classic stories, with the perfect capacity to deal with the current fads (and that’s where Tolkien comes into D&D, as a secondary “hip” source to lure the kiddies in, not as a core component)”

   I understand where he is coming from, with the LOTR movies being so “hip” these days. I had to do it the old fashioned way back in the mid-seventies and read those books. None the less, they were a big influence on me and my foray into D&D. Once I got in to it, I started reading the some of the books and authors listed by Gary Gygax in AD&D. I loved Fafhrd & Grey Mouser, I discovered as in James’ statement above that those stories were closer to D&D than Tolkien. My brother who played D&D with me, discovered the Kane books by Karl Edward Wagner (just guess what his characters name was!)

   Mr. Raggi goes on to say, and I quote “It is rather unfortunate that Dungeons and Dragons had the subtitle “Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures.” It’s a historical problem that the term “role-playing game” (or any other suitable term to differentiate it from the wargaming hobby that was still in full swing) wasn’t used, as role-playing wasn’t its own genre at the time. It certainly wasn’t a wargame in any real sense, and Gygax (at least – I don’t know about Arneson), co-creator and writer of the actual text, didn’t even use miniatures!”

   I understand what James is saying here, but for me “Rules for Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns Playable with Paper and Pencil and Miniature Figures.” intrigued me even more than if it had been described as a “Game of Roleplaying”  I mean paper and pencil meant creation to me, miniatures were something that sounded like so much fun, and Fantastic Medieval Wargames Campaigns speaks for itself….as a fourteen year old, I didn’t really know what “Campaigns” meant, but I figured that out pretty damned quickly.

   Over time I did start digging deeper into the roots of the game, I remember getting a copy of “Blackmoor” my first year in college. I felt like I had discovered an ancient tome, from the deep dark history of D&D. When I read the first time, I was a little shocked when I read that Stephan, was really from outer space in the “Temple of the Frogs”. At first I thought that’s not “D&D”, then I realized just how open ended the original concept of D&D was, because of that little nugget. I have yet to read the original three booklets yet, but I will someday.

   While in the day we mostly played a very loose variation of the Holmes rules, with added bits from AD&D, most everything we played was completely our own creations (Excepting of Course B-1….the world’s greatest D&D module) we didn’t take the easy way out with adventure settings, or pre-programmed modules. I won’t say we never used other AD&D adventures from time to time, we did, but only if I could fit them into “Our campaign”.

   I am not doing his article justice in this simple short post. There is so much more in there than just the little I picked out. I highly recommend checking it out.  After reading and re-reading what Mr. Raggi wrote, I felt an affirmation of my entire journey into D&D, because I did dig deeper, and I have looked at the traditions…..and in the process I had fun, even though “I Hate Fun”

Footnote: I didn’t see it when he rolled it, but my brother’s character Kane had an 18/91 Strength……he swears to this day he didn’t fudge that dice role.

…..Friday’s “Mystery Meat”…..Canceled For One Week Only.

I feel awful, like I’ve let everyone down.  I just don’t have the time to get anything ready to post for this week’s “Mystery Meat”. I do plan to post it next week….as well as start posting again on a more regular basis. The daily demands of life have just been too overwhelming as of late. Stay tuned…..