The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

More Pathfinder Minis

I'm not a Pathfinder player, but i'm quite enthusiastic about Paizo's new line of pre-painted miniatures. Over at their website, they continue to reveal more of those miniatures, these from the Heroes and Monsters collection, which is set to be released in early 2012.

Erik Mona's most recent blog entry provides a visual update of several figures, including the Lich, pictured below.


If you scroll down to the December 8th entry, Paizo reveals their Gargoyle and Goblin figures. Here are the four Goblins from the first set.

I've mentioned before that I dislike the Pathfinder humanoids, like the Goblins above. For those of you that do like them, I'll have a plethora to trade once I take possession of my case of figures.

Terrain For Skirmish Games

I enjoy an occasional LOTRSBG skirmish. I was introduced to the tabletop battles hobby late in my roleplaying game career, sometime in 2003 if memory serves. It was Games Workshop's Lord Of The Rings miniatures, and the related strategy battle game, that led me there.

Once you are introduced to tabletop skirmish games, there's a natural progression towards the other facets of the hobby, including terrain-building. This is a work-in-progress; a rocky outcropping that can be used as cover and visual interest. I think it needs some grass and foliage to finish it off.

Here are a couple of additional photos of the same rocky outcropping. I added some miniatures to provide scale.

Microgames: Still Back-Filling My Collection

I have a pretty extensive Microgame collection, but that doesn't mean i've stopped my search to fill in the gaps. I recently chanced upon several Dwarfstar microgames at reasonable prices and added them to my collection. Still, there are a handful of games, included Helltank, that continue to elude me.

Canadiana: The Safety Dance

The Safety Dance is perhaps the most hated of all Canadian songs.

Performed by the French Canadian band, Men Without Hats, this song has been spoofed multiple times, by such shows as Futurama, Simpsons and The Family Guy.

This song is an endless well for lampoonery. Enjoy.

DnD End Game: Empire Building

One of the forgotten pleasures of Dungeons and Dragons is reaching name level and being permitted to establish your own stronghold. This early feature of DnD is obviously inspired by the wargaming traditions of the first roleplayers.

The problem is, there are woefully inadequate rules in Original DnD to govern stronghold and empire building, and stonghold-building precipitates player-versus-player conflict, particularly when the name-level players want to expand into the same territories. Not to mention that the level of abstraction necessary to handle a game of empire building is different from the level of abstraction necessary for a game of dungeon-delving resource and hit point management.

Though not perfect by any means, I get my fantasy empire building and PvP conflict fix from our occasional games of Settlers of Catan. Settlers is at just about the right level of abstraction to avoid getting bogged down in the minutae, and allows for a certain amount of PvP conflict without resulting in the total elimination of the other players.

Settlers would be a suitable base upon which to build a really interesting high-level fantasy empire building game. I've heard good things about Small World as well, but have yet to give it a try.

Revolt On Antares/Erol Otus: One Fine Young Artist

From the Forward (sic) to The Arduin Grimoire; Volume 1, by Dave Hargrave:

"Special Note. The artwork for this supplement is the sole doing of one fine young artist: Errol (sic) Otus. I'm only glad I'll be able to say ten years from now, 'I knew him when...'"

Erol Otus did not merely produce fantasy artwork during the late 70's and early 80's. He also rendered the science fiction artwork below, which graced the centre pages of the 1981 TSR Revolt On Antares minigame booklet.

Click to embiggen.

With the seeming-success of Metagaming's microgame line, other game companies jumped into the soon-to-be-crashing minigame market. That included TSR, SPI, Task Force Games, Chaosium, Mayfair Games, Heritage USA, Operational Studies Group, Steve Jackson Games, and FASA.
TSR's Revolt On Antares concerns a power struggle on Imhirros, ninth planet in the Antares system, on the fringes of Imperial Space.

Several noble houses, the Imperial government, and alien invaders vie for control of Imhirros using raw military power, alien artifacts, galactic superheroes, and hereditary psychic abilities to achieve their ends. Interplayer diplomatic efforts are encouraged in the rulebook, but there are no game systems to regulate diplomacy.

The game was designed for TSR by Tom Moldvay, who also designed Avalon Hill's Lords Of Creation. Two pieces of Erol Otus art appear within Revolt On Antares.

The game showed great promise, particularly when viewed through the lens of the above Erol Otus art.

More Pathfinder Miniatures

Here are more images of the Pathfinder Heroes & Monsters miniatures being released in January 2012. You can find the images of the miniatures here, and on the Paizo blog. I like nearly all of the miniatures in this first set, with the exception of the humanoid monsters. Not because the sculpts and paint jobs are poor, but simply because I don't like the monster designs themselves. To see what i'm talking about, scroll down to the last three images, of the Ettin, Troll, and Goblins.

Winter Wonderland

We received quite a dump of snow last night, easily six inches or more. A significantly heavier snowfall than back on November 18.

A drive to the grocery store that usually takes 5 minutes took 20. I just finished shovelling for the third time, so I thought I'd take the above photo of the culdesac.
Here's the snow piled up on the handrail of the back deck.

Miniatures Done Right

One of my central compliants with the prepainted Wizards Of The Coast Dungeons and Dragons miniatures line was the lack of quality. It was a combination of average to poor paint jobs and uneven poses. As a result, my DDM purchases were almost exclusively in the after-market.
Paizo's upcoming line of Pathfinder pre-painted miniatures has me quite excited. Not only is Paizo staying true to their artistic source materials, but the miniatures paint jobs are much improved compared to the old DDM miniatures. You only have to look at the sample miniatures in this post to see the improvements.
I'm not a Pathfinder RPG player. But i've already pre-ordered the full Paizo Heroes and Monsters set and am looking forward to receiving it in January 2012.