On March 31st, Strange Vistas logged its 20,000th Visitor! No fooling! To celebrate (or to see what the hoopla is about), click below…

What I’ve been (or will be) painting

The latter half of March included Easter, which really keeps me pretty busy. I had set as my painting goal for the month one measly unit of twelve Dwarf Warriors. Well, that didn’t happen. In addition to all the business, I also had a big screw-up with the priming, resulting in about half the dwarfs being covered with bumpy “orange peel” primer. Because they were plastic, the primer is also very difficult to impossible to remove. I’m a big disgusted with the whole thing, but will probably slog on and get them painted.

As I mentioned in my Easter weekend post, I managed to score a huge load of Starship Troopers miniatures at my local gaming store. To get an idea of the scope of the haul, here’s a pic.

I don’t know how long it’ll take to paint it, but I’m taking it slowly, first starting with the intro box set and moving from there. I’ve also begun to sit down with the rules and try to dope things out.

Note that I haven’t actually begun any work yet, so if you’re interested in swapping or buying this lot, I’m open to a good offer…

What I’ve been building

The next logical step for my sci-fi catwalks is a corner piece, one that includes a stairwell to allow access. After a lot of contemplation and planning, I managed to make what will probably be the first of at least two.

It really adds to the options for the pieces I have. As I said, I’m thinking of doing at least one more to start.

Obviously the Union troopers are about to ambushed by a Fantasy Chaos Horde off the distance…

What I’ve been playing

I’m back in the roleplaying saddle with my Castles & Crusades campaign.  We’ve actually gamed twice in a couple of weeks, but at the first of those sessions discussed the biggest problem with our gaming group.  Basically, my wife works all day Friday, and I work Sundays, so Saturday is our only joint day off.  That means I’m loathe to go off to my gaming group that day.  On the other hand, gaming Friday evenings only gives us a couple of hours, because most of the players have young children who need to go to bed.  So our game is done in lightning-fast sessions of usually less than two hours of real table time, which really dictates the pace.  After some discussion, we decided to go ahead and game on Saturday for substantially longer sessions but less frequently.  That has the added benefit of giving me more planning time.

I also decided to move my RPG campaign journal.  It had been on a wiki, which was a nice idea at the time because I envisioned the players all adding to it.  Instead, I’m the only one that really adds to it regularly, and each addition usually means me going in and changing two or three pages each time.  A blog format is more conducive to its primary purpose (journaling the adventure) and could still have separate pages for the fairly static information (character bios).  With that in mind, I started Strange Quests, a WordPress blog.   Hop over and check it out, if you like.

The wiki also contained campaign information for my Warhammer stuff, and I might continue to use it for that, since most of that information is on a single static page.

Finally, check back later this month for what will hopefully be a big surprise.

What I’ve been thinking about

I haven’t been wargaming these past few weeks, but I’ve been thinking about it a lot.  For one thing, the new campaign is coming up.  For another, I’m sitting on a ton of minis for a totally new game that would, if I were to actually ever play it, involve me getting a whole new night to do it.  I’ve also been tempted by the likes of Aeronef, thanks to this fine site.

I’ve noticed that I tend to drift one way or the other when it comes to painting and terrain building, like there is a switch on my back with one setting or another.  Right now it is on “terrain,” not “miniature painting,” and I’m trying to not give myself a hard time about that but just ride the waves as they come.  My problem with leaving the switch on “terrain” too long is that the projects tend to stack up in terms of storage space, and I just generally need to get back onto minis for size reasons alone.

Well, that’s it.  Thanks for 20K visits, God knows how many template changes, and of course loads of hobby musings!