Long time no bloggo

 Welp ... hate to say it, but I told you so. 

Okay so lets play catch up here - summer 24' I was asked to TO the Warmaster tourney at Adepticon in 25' and I did that, taught myself indesign and built a cool tourney pack, built 6 tables worth of terrain, figured out how to order felt mats for cheap, built a crazy gaming area in my basement, had a blast at 3drpcon in may, flew to Under the Dice and had a blast, flew to SCOTLAND in November to play in the Warmaster 25th narrative event and met all the European warmaster players ... So nope nothing at all to blog about. 

Just thought id blow some dust off the shelves here and settle back into maybe doing some posts here and there. I'd like to do a full recounting of my Scotland trip and post photos, I think that is at least worth backtracking for. I landed a new job in April and that's allowed me to play catch up in my life. Almost a year later and all the major fires are pretty much out, so I think I might have some time to at least start to record my hobby life and talk about it. the interesting thing is it isn't that I haven't been hobbying (obviously), but rather it is an outlet to take my mind off of other things and I don't exactly have the spare time to talk about how I spent my spare time. I'd just rather do it. At the same time, it'd be nice to write this shit down because my memory is shit and I find myself relearning things I already learned less than a year prior. Probably should take some time to slow down and write this shit down.

 Anyway, I'll be doing the Warmaster tourney again this year at Adepticon. I found some cool old art for the cover and inside cover, which I'll get printed again this time around. The cover is a 15th century mini painting of the Battle of Antioch (think its about half the size of a sheet of paper or smaller), and the inside piece is from 1884 painted by Sir John Gilbert titled 'the morning of the battle of agincourt'. 

Here is the rules for the event if you are curious: 

https://drive.google.com/file/d/195HTS-EIryKFwB0KLkn69Snd3rxvo3Jt/view?usp=sharing

I'll try to do another sooner than 18 months. 

Off to a terrible start, catch me downstream (part 1)

As predicted, I'm off to a terrible start. 

Starting a blog for an indoor hobby while it's summer time and you have a ton of outside hobbies, might not have been the greatest idea. Top that off with it being your busiest time of year for work, along with looking for other work so you don't starve all winter (again) and you have the perfect recipe for not getting shit for shit done.

Yet here we are. 

This being the case, I'm going to scrap the idea of going back and revisiting my hobby journey in full. Let's leave that for the doldrums of winter, when I should be painting and building and playing, but instead feel like burying my head in nostalgia and sadness.

Let's talk about rivers - why they are stupid to build for a table and why I can't figure out which river pun to use to represent the hobby block it is causing me (hobby dam?)

Rivers are one of those pieces of terrain that while it makes sense that they should be included on every table from a strategic/historical context, they rarely are. They are often seen as dividing lines in tables, either forcing players to play in a smaller area and creating a sort asymmetry for one army, or just get pigeonholed holed into 'narrative' games, which most pick-up gamers say they don't have time for (which is a lie). 

So it makes sense to just knock a big river out fast and quick and be done with it ... sound good? 

Wrong. Let's overdo it and make this the most overly detailed and complex river you can imagine. 

Styrene, caulk, 15 different ground covers, acrylic paint, oil paint, back to acrylics, then resin. Also some flock in there too before the resin, along with grass and reeds. then some clear silicone for waves, then a shit ton of static grass ... got it? okay lets go.

This was day 1-2. I picked up a 4x4 styrene sheet of 1/16th for 10 bucks at the local plastic shop. I had some caulk laying around from another project that I never used it for, and decided it'd be great for creating that rivers edge to catch the resin in. Pretty simple - cut shapes and then caulk the edges - shape the caulk with your fingers and use ample amounts of water to shape the banks.

Okay lets backtrack a minute. So one of the reasons I think that rivers don't get used often is a lack of river crossings - mainly bridges and fords if we are talking Warmaster. My thinking goes like this - overdo it on the crossings, and if you need less, you can take a few out. So two bridges and two fords - hopefully this provides enough crossings to not swing the game too hard one way or another, because goddamn I just love the look of a river on a board.

This bridge had to be assembled in 3d builder and then widened to make it 40mm - I just stretched the damn thing. bricks are forgiving like that. double up and lets go. 

Okay so mounted and cut. I made a width template for the ends from a popsicle stick - I think it was 3 1/2 inches give or take. Doesn't matter as long as they are all the same. Added a two fords, a split, an lake with an opening (so you can end a river) and a few smaller ponds for testers when it comes to resin and color. Also got a dusting of sand, which wont matter as it will all get static grassed to high hell. Mostly wanted to even out the caulk.

Let's leave it here for now, I'll come back in a few days and get you up to date on where I currently am, and then give me incentive to actually finish the damn dammed things. 

Take a step back.

 Hello world.

I'm going to try to keep this (somewhat) brief:

I returned to the hobby about a year and a half ago after purposefully removing myself from it for the better part of 20 years. Before that I spent a good chunk of my youth focusing on it, and a good chunk of that time working inside of it. Even after "leaving" the hobby, I was always side-eyeing it and keeping it in my peripheral if you will. As important as gaming once was to me, Because of lackluster mainstream games, companies leaning into a video game aesthetic, and me moving away from my primary gaming group, I never really felt the need to take the dive back in. However, over the past few years I was drawn back in by the kitbashing and oldhammer community - an appreciation for older art, models and an idea that we won't be drug into a relentless buying cycle and can instead focus on collection and enjoying games. I'm sure a fair bit of age and slowing down has something to do with it too.

It seems that many people in my age bracket also share a similar story, which has lead to a sort of comradery among us, which is what is leading to this blog.

Personally, I've always had a dumb appreciation for older clunky mechanics and an endless search for finding some gold among the discarded, to be brought to the surface and shined a light on for future hobbyists to maybe also appreciate. That goes back as far as I can remember - from old weird video games, to bartertown.org, the first years of ebay ... I always had the urge to keep track of the obscure, knowing that we might have missed that one diamond in the rough.

The long and short of it is this - I want an archive of all of the things i've done in the hobby so i can point people to how to's, show off the things I dig up and see my progress to keep me motivated. I also have a really shitty memory and I honestly forget how I even do things sometimes - I have a selfish interest in writing these things down to avoid future frustrations.

Instagram is an absolute dogshit platform for hobby related posts. Discord, while a great communication platform, also isn't great for archiving and showing step by steps on terrain building, painting, etc. At the end of the day, the blog reigns supreme...

Potentially. 

I'm fully expecting this place to not be updated regularly. Knowing myself and most blogs out there, this will most likely start strong and then taper off.

That said, I love the IDEA of a blog. I love the long format. I love that I can just ramble and over explain things. That there is no push and pull here, no algorithm incentivizing you to post, just free information for the masses to help push the hobby along and bounce ideas off of one another.

I'm going to start by going back and cataloging some of my hobby journey in the past year and things/projects/information that I think are worth having a hard post of in the world. The way our social media landscape works these days it's all about disappearing stories and monetized youtube videos. Not knocking these creators for doing their thing - but at the end of the day I don't really see these platforms standing the test of time because they require the advertising model to function - and I personally see that as a dead end.

Getting off my soapbox though and being realistic about this - we'll see how far I get. Life is busy, blogs require effort, and hobby time is ever shrinking as the hobby expands. the deeper you dig, the more things you have to do, the less time you have to do the things you want to get done. 

Doomed from the start. 

-kev