Another extended silence broken

I'm still as hopeless as ever. Ten months of silence isn't good.

Anyway, in the time since my last post I have put in a great deal of time DMing 2nd edition AD&D. It started off with a pair of wild boars (juveniles) almost taking the party out on their way to their first mission. The same mission also created the famous shit-on-a-stick first aid approach to stabilizing fallen party members. Along the way one of the party members got taken out by another when affected by bloodrage. It finished with the group's mage (and budding arsonist) gaining access to what he needed to become one of the most powerful mages on my world.

I'm grateful to the guys of the group as they helped me explore the world I've been creating for the last four years.

Since the campaign wound up at the end of January, Owen has taken the reins of the group, and we are know in the Iron Kingdoms. This meant miniatures, and when Owen put an order away to Privateer Press, I asked for the Bastian Kinnet model. During march I worked on this mini, and made a start on a possible backup character for Owen's campaign. I believe I did a pretty good job of painting the mini (unfortunately I have not been able to take a decent photo of it yet, pics will follow when I do get some good shots), and didn't want to go with simple base. Searching the rulebook, I found the symbol of Morrow (my character is Knight, and priest of Morrow), and fashioned a flagstone base from plasticard. I etched the symbol into the flagstone, then painted it in grey, with a black wash in the carved area to bring out the symbol.

To try and get some motivation for painting I have decided the work on different armies each month. March was IK Minis. April is .... not sure yet.

Meantime, I'm looking at getting two more armies started:- A Dystopian Wars fleet, maybe Prussian; and an Infinity force, that is seriously looking like PanOceania military orders (Knights, backed by order sergeants and fusiliers).

Almost a year of silence

I've been silent for almost a year on this blog, and even though I haven't done lot in that time I have managed a few things.

With my interest in the Ambush Alley family of games I have mostly been working on projects for this. As I already have a set of buildings and a board for desert action I decided to make a modular board for urban warfare. So far it stands at 9 30 x30 cm sections, all double sided.

To go with this, I've started making some buildings.

After a trip to Christchurch in April I have also added modern British infantry, and Modern Russian paratroops.

More recent is a foray back into role-playing, as we put a new group together. I agreed to DM this group for a start, and as a result have returned to the design of an RPG world that has been brewing in my mind for years. Trying to find a time period for this, I started thinking about how things could have come about for my world (A fantasy version of the Roman Empire rules most of the world). retreating almost a thousand years from that time I was able to co-opt an idea from the series I was reading. So many thanks got to Anne McCaffrey for creating Pern, and both Anne and Todd for the plagues that ravaged Pern. Therefore, a Plague had ravaged my world, changing borders, reducing the size of nations, and allowing an obscure nation to profit from the disaster, and expand to become a mighty empire. The setting for the campaign is a recovering kingdom, that is finally able to reclaim lost areas, and the PC's are right in the middle of it.

More will follow on  the D&D campaign, and some of the events that occur, along with some notes on my world design process.