Project 154

Colin Hagreen has an interesting challenge in Project 154, painting one of every combination race/character class in D&D. What, no alignment considerations? No multi-classing? ;-)

Podcasts!

All About Miniatures episode 6 is up, featuring a review of THW's Nuts!. Also, Napoleon 101 has episode 16 up, covering Eylau.

Upior Nagi's Hell Hole

Upior Nagi's Hell Hole is an interesting new blog, check it out.

Bongolesia

Murphy has taken the patriotic battles of the peoples of Bongolesia and is recreating them in miniature.

Hockey!

I went to see my first hockey game Friday night, as our neighbors' children were playing between periods for our local bush league team. It was a blast-- there were two fights in the first ten minutes. My wife was obviously not very familiar with hockey, and leaned over and asked, "Is that allowed?" I said, "No, but it's expected." I don't know if this is normal for hockey fans or just because the fans around here are a bunch of rednecks, but they were enthusiastically cheering the fights and booing the referees for interfering. Even my wife said, towards the end, that she'd like to see another fight! I feel like the Junior General. Now I just need a cat and to start complaining about Peter Forsberg, whoever he is.

War Engine Character Generator

We've been poking around with War Engine lately. The rules are very simple, but there are several "gotchas" you have to keep track of in character generation. So, I made an online character generator. It's still fairly rough-- there are certain legal characters you just can't make yet, and I'm not checking for every single gotcha, but it's still a real asset when creating troops. If you find a bug or are missing a feature you really need, let me know.

Slottabase Figures on Washers

Hachimantaro has a good method for basing slottabase figures on washers.

New Blog: DwarfMan's Wargames

DwarfMan's Wargames has started up.

Finished some SWAT figures

I'm going to start keeping track of what I've finished this year. Technically, I just finished 15 Cobalt Palansi (from the bargain bin at Historicon and no longer carried by Old Glory), but that's kind of cheating since I actually painted them last year. All I did this year was base them, then drop them in the yard when I was trying to varnish them. Those are thin figures, and several bent quite badly and broke the paint around their ankles. Yea! Anyway, I did finish painting ten SWAT figures last night-- five West Wind (from the bargain bin at Historicon) and five Foundry Street Violence (cheap off eBay). I still need to finish the bases, then paint sixteen more. They look good, I'll see if I can't post some pictures of them. I also have some small terrain pieces to be painted.

MiniBlogster

So it appears the Miniblogster site is officially dead, and the author will now be posting at Tabletop Gaming News.

World War Z

I love the premise and it's not a terrible book, but it's just not worth the effort to finish. I've read about half of the book so far, and here's what I think.

War Engine 2.1

The War Engine rules, the core of the old Shockforce game, are freely available now. I bought the 2.0 book on the strength of the many recommendations of members on TMP and they look appealing, but I've never gotten around to trying them out. That will hopefully change soon. There's also a Yahoo group.

Heroscape at MiniatureWargaming.com

MiniatureWargaming.com/ is running Heroscape related links all this month. I'll definitely be checking it out.

Are you a UNIX nerd also into Cthulhu?

I mentioned earlier about liking Charlie Stross's The Atrocity Archives. I'm reading the sequel right now, The Jennifer Morgue. OMG, I'm laughing my butt off sometimes. Alan Turing discovered that mathematics can do Lovecraft-style magic-- hence his subsequent suicide. Now it's ten years before the "stars are right," a.k.a. codename GREEN NIGHTMARE, and Capital Laundry Services, the UK's anti-supernatural government agency, is on the job. The main character is Bob Howard, and hacker who stumbled into the realm of magic and was given a job offer he couldn't refuse by Capital Laundry. Turns out, his middle names are Oliver Francis. B.O.F.H. Yeah. He's reading Tanenbaum for fun. And some fun quotes: "Just as it's possible to write a TCP/IP protocol stack in some utterly inappropriate programming language like ML or Visual Basic, so, too, it's possible to implement TCP/IP over carrier pigeons, or paper tape, or daemons summoned from the vasty deep." "...and while I know all the POSIX options to the kill(1) command, doing it with my bare hands is beyond my sphere of competence." Hah! What a hoot. It's still worth reading even if you don't get a lot out of the geek jokes, though. All the Lovecraft mythos is turned on full blast, only in a modern setting. The main plot is very X-Files, with a dash of James Bond (and Kernighan and Ritchie!)