21MAR13 And now for something a little different...

I am a sculptor. I know this shouldn't shock any of you as one of my very first blog posts years ago was about my first 1:6th scale figure... I've just started on another direction here recently, a massive drop in scale down to somewhere between 25mm to 32mm scale figures (as measured from toe to the top of the head, or toe to eyeball; depending on the sculptor and/or figure manufacturer). My photos are from making some dollies (what you call a very small scale figure armature) I made using a tutorial by Jason Miller on Matakishi's Tea House (http://www.matakishi.com/). I've been following Jason's sculpting work on Deviant Art for some time now taking mental notes and planning my start up. Obviously I had to have a stable place to set up and that wasn't happening for some time from 2011 onward as my family began our move from Alaska down to Nebraska starting in 2011... Yup, it took THAT long, almost three years to finally have real art space again (and even now its a bit, well, temporary as we are just renting a house...).

My workbench is a piece of 3/4” MDF board that measures about 3' by 5' across set up on some extra tall saw horses I made using brackets and 2x4's I cut myself, its a standing work bench, but when I sit in my pneumatic stool, it puts the surface at just below eye level allowing me to rest my elbows on it and work. Will this help? We shall see...

Everything I used today...

Dollies pre-solder.

How to avoid burns with the soldering iron...

About the right proportion, soldered...

A torso added with Green Stuff

The bench with the works in progress, and inspirational figures...

I pulled out about six corks I had in my sculpting tools along with some 24 ga. Copper wire and good ol' rosin core 60/40 electronic solder. I followed along with Miller's Lesson 1 and proceeded to build some dollies for figures pretty much following the designs he had to a letter with one exception. Instead of using a bit of green stuff to hold my twist together I soldered at that joint. Why? Well why waste green stuff on that? I'd rather solder it at this point, and in fact if it were a larger figure I'd use a cheaper epoxy for that part underneath anyway as Citadel green stuff is over $10 USD for .7oz/20g worth... Its running neck and neck with the street value of some illegal drugs being run by violent cartels (and with the way GW is with creatively interpreting IP and going ofter anyone who sells their product and posts pictures of it on their online store, or sells left over parts, or creates fan art one wonders if GW isn't their own cartel...).

Some notes on that epoxy price...  

Citadel Green Stuff in Omaha NE is about $10 USD for .7oz/20g

J-B Weld SteelStik in Omaha NE is about $9 USD for 2oz/57g (granted its not going to get the fine details, but I have used it for holding my armatures for larger figures in 1:6th and 1:12th scales...) with Locktite and other comparable brands being close in price for the same size.

A search on Amazon yielded some fruitful results for other model grade sculpting epoxy compounds:

Gale Force 9's version of Green Stuff is about $22 USD for 4.5oz/130g

Not too shabby GF9!  However, the winner overall for product quality and value has to be Magic Sculp with a close second being Apoxie Sculpt...  Both of which I have used extensively in the past before moving forced me to give away the remainder of these fine products.  

Apoxie Sculpt can be found in 1 lbs and 4 lbs weights for $12 and $33 USD respectively (sorry no metric conversions here on these, its late!)

Magic Sculp can be found in 1 lbs and 5 lbs(!!!!!) for $16.50 (okay, Apoxie wins in the 1 lbs weight class) and $33.50 USD (here we have the 5 lbs class title at only about $2 more for a whole pound extra).

Difference between green stuff and the Apoxie/Magic stuff is going to be the manner in which you work.  Green stuff is going to give you a more immediate satisfaction for working time, and therefore its pretty nice in that regard as its hard and sculpt ready moment you mix it.  My experience with Apoxie taught me the value of patience, I couldn't sculpt with it for almost an hour as it needed that time to set up a bit.  This is a severe disadvantage in my current stay-at-home dad mode with kids teaching me that Chaos is the natural state of the universe...  Magic Sculp was workable in about 10 to 15 after mixing if I recall, and I greatly appreciated that its labeled as 'resin' and 'hardener' instead of just 'A' and 'B'.  Both are superior products, equal to green stuff/Kneadatite in their own way, and value wise blowing green stuff out of the water completely.

Winged Horror visualized for BFRPG Sword and Board!

Based on the ever valuable opinions of the BFRPG forums and my friendly neighborhood game guild Legion of Myth, as well as my dedicated followers on Deviant Art, the background won!  Here you go folks.  I do have a Creative Commons License on this image, so use as you wish, just credit where its due and let me know if you put in any books or supplements that are going to be published on the web or in print (shoot me a printed copy and I might have to send a drawing...  that and if you are going to print it let me know so I can send you the massive 300 dpi .tiff file instead of this lo res 96 dpi .png).

24OCT12 Winged Horror drawing for BFRPG....

Is the background alright?

Or do you think it goes better without a background?

So, again slipping into my fun and games with the OGL Old School Renaissance that has been going on, and only growing incredibly, since 2008 I figured I'd offer my services as an artist to the Basic Fantasy and Microlite D20 crowd.  In this instance, its the Winged Horror from page 49 of the BFRPG "Sword and Board" rules supplement (which itself is a beautiful work from the BFRPG community).  My question here is which is better?  A background or none?  Would an inked background take away from the horror of this creature or add to it?

I'll give it some time before I ink the background and refine the drawing!  Hopefully some folks out there on Deviant Art, or the forums for the various OSR project, and finally here on Blogger give me some input...

Stars Without Number!

I cannot speak highly enough about the FREE version of Sine Nomine Publishing "Stars Without Number" available on DriveThru RPG http://rpg.drivethrustuff.com/product_info.php?products_id=86467&src=SNP_SWN_ImageLink&affiliate_id=323031%20

Why?  Well, you take the very best aspects of a gold classic like Marc Miller's Traveller, and then mix in some D20 3.5 OGL rules into it, finally add some VERY SOLID Game Master materials, you get a game capable of being an instant classic.  However, Kevin Crawford and company went FURTHER and made a FREE version to get you hooked and playing hip deep from the get go.  You potentially NEVER need a supplement with a creative GM.  That is a feature that attracted me to Mongoose Traveller until I was reading through the Starship creation section and found the tonnage rather limited... Not the case with SWN, no limits there.  Starships are still a bit more abstract than in Mongoose Traveller...  While the Starship Combat is indeed a bit more abstract, its much stronger than some brand name games set in highly copyrighted and heavily licensed science fiction franchises by the very company that created the OGL and is trying to get fans to forget it existed (WOTC D20 Star Wars if you didn't catch my meaning there).

That, and having just moved into a new neighborhood without any of my normal stuff at my fingertips, having a .pdf with a great game to build a little corner of some galaxy for players to explore is really nice.  I recommend this rule set to any gamer who has to travel somewhere light and only can carry a device to read and a set of dice.  

18FEB12 OGL Rant

So, while the D20 OGL SRD (http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=d20/article/srdarchive) this led to:

"When it was published in 2000 along with the 3rd edition of the rules, the OGL sparked unprecedented growth in the RPG industry. The OGL made it so easy to use the rules conventions of D&D like hit points, spells and monsters that hundreds of products - the official signifier of D&D-compatible materials created using the OGL - emblazoned on them made their way to game store shelves."
-Escapist (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9292-The-Ghosts-of-D-D-Past.2)

Why did WotC not do the same with D20 4.0?  After all, they are suffering right now, and I am believing its a result of ending the continued use of an OGL SRD with the newest editions!

The OSR is on the rise, along with other digital media creating a paradigm shift in the world of traditional gaming:

"Changes in how people buy RPGs and the freedom of the OGL combined to make the Old School Renaissance grow across the internet. The rise of digital distribution of PDFs through marketplaces like DriveThruRPG.com have allowed designers to make money selling their work with less overhead. The costs of printing books has also decreased, especially print-on-demand services that allow smaller print runs, so it's easier than ever for amateur designers to publish something gamers can bring to the table and use with any of D&D's older editions or retro-clones."
-Escapist (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/features/9293-The-State-of-D-D-Present.3)

Right now the world of games is going through a paradigm shift.  Board games are still going strong in many respects, but also deal with similar limitations.  What we all enjoy though is an increase in development budget, but we pay for it.  Fantasy Flight Games makes beautiful board games with high quality laminated cardboard components and beautifully sculpted plastic pieces that used to only be the realm of pewter.  However, its around $70 to $150 for these games as opposed to the $20 to $50 the same game concept years ago used to cost (part of that is indeed inflation).  RPGs however, are contracting sharply.

Steve Jackson Games publishes most GURPS supplements electronically, and spends the majority of the printing budget on the biggest cash cow of the company, Munchkin (I enjoy Munchkin myself...).  Other game companies are starting to publish more and more through DriveThru RPG and RPG Now.  Holdouts like WotC are suffering (that 4th Ed. wasn't so well received...).

As a result, we've seen the OSR take the OGL and thrive online.  Be it free rules, or low cost .pdf and print on demand, indie development seems to be rising.  Sales wise its harder to track...  Number of downloads would be an interesting figure to find out between the biggest names I've seen from OSRIC, Swords and Wizardry, and Basic Fantasy; along with sales of Labyrinth Lords and others.

Frankly, I think we need to embrace the OSR.  Where D&D 3.0, 3.5, 3.75, and 4.0 to varying degrees seemed to have failed is competing with computers.  Where the OSR takes 3.5 and strips the SRD down to the basics, and gives the GM a lot of story telling and rules adjudication power, it seems to thrive.  Volumes of rules, be it the many GURPS books I've enjoyed over the years, or some of the 3.5 books a friend gave me, only serve to slow down games.  Most of the gruntwork is best done by a computer, and then you wonder why you want to sit at the dinner table with a group of friends (unless you have a good GM who will throw the rules out some of the time anyway, which frankly is how the rules recommend being played anyway...).

That, and I'm a sucker for anything of quality to come out of Open Source.  I have little money to spend and waste on games anymore.  If the rules are free, I'll take em and use them when I feel like dungeon delving.  I'll use my "Descent: Journeys into the Darkness" game board and figures with BFRPG or Microlite 20...  Why the hell not?  To top it off, I like to draw pictures and get my art out there.

So, anyone in the OSR development world working a real job and designing games on the weekend is more than welcome to bug me about drawing up some creature sometime.  So long as the deadline is flexible...  I'll embrace OSR and OGL and use my FOSS image editing software (www.gimp.org and www.inkscape.org) and have some fun with you, for free.

04FEB12 Update!

Well, I've certainly been finding myself a bit more involved in working with folks in the OGL game writing crowd.  At least on the 'starter' side, by signing up for the various forums and seeing what I can do to put myself to work using my peculiar talent for drawing.

I posted more wargame/RPG map making resources on Deviant Art, do check out the Free Resource page up at the top!  With the new Blogger format, I'm able to post more pages behind the blog (or in front).  I'll link into Deviant Art, and see about find some other reputable file cabinet sites that will host files in the various image formats needed for editing.  Recommendations are welcome...

Legion of Myth Game Reviews...

The Guild Legion of Myth has a fairly new format for reviewing tabletop, board, and pen and paper RPG's...

So far I've written several reviews, beginning with my favorite board game, Ogre/GEV.

I'm fortunate that it doesn't matter when the game was published, and in fact most of what we all seem to enjoy is currently out of print at the present time!  Its a wonderful community over there as they embrace all forms of games with a focus on PC MMORPG's with Star Wars: The Old Republic being the current active guild.  At the moment due to computer limitations, I'm now focusing all my efforts in the realm of either older computer games or table top gaming.  Can't say its a bad thing.

Other game games that I've reviewed to date are:

Don Quixote (board)

Stars Without Number (RPG)

GURPS Traveller: Interstellar Wars (GURPS 4E RPG Sourcebook)

I have several other RPG rules sets and sourcebooks I'll knock out this year as well.  I have the Mongoose Traveller RPG rules which I think I wrote about once before, and the "Hammers Slammers" Sourcebook!  I've also had the opportunity to get a couple play sessions of the WotC D20 Star Wars RPG (Revised Core Rules) with a friend recently.  That one might lead to some interesting cartoons...

Boardgame wise, I'm hoping to get a good meaningful play session of Conan in sometime.  We'll see if that happens...  I certainly don't want it to collect any more dust!