Observations of the Fox

We're getting closer.  I bought a clay roller from an online craft supply store a few months ago, specifically with the intention of using it in this project. However, I misplaced it and only found it again the other day. I also bought some air-drying clay so that I could use it with the roller, but without the roller there wasn't much point opening it up and doing that part of the model.  The aim was to create cobblestone sectors for the inner courtyard, divided along segments that would centre on the temple, or whatever this particular tulou's centrepiece was.    On rolling out the clay, different plans emerged. I figured that it might be more fun to make a shattered courtyard, something looking more like a place that was regularly subjected to warfare. I had this idea because the clay crumbled and shattered a bit, so it wasn't the original clean flooring that I had hoped...and I didn't want to waste the bits that I had made. The plan still works, and now...

  They're here. I've been so busy with other stiff, while building the Tulou and Fortress on the side, that I didn't even realise that the Cathayan Miniatures have already dropped.  Now it's just a case of gathering together some funds, buying a battalion box, and a sky lantern box, and a shugenja riding a dragon, and... this is going to get expensive. Then finish the tulou before they get here.  

  So, while exploring an internet rabbithole, I've just found "The Housebooks of Nuremburg or the Twelve Brethren Books". On a project that bears some resemblance to Warhammer Fantasy Roleplaying, I was searching for a fairly comprehensive list of the types of occupations regular people might have had during the middle ages, and these books came up. In 1388, the wealthy merchant Konrad Mendel had an old people's home built to provide accommodation and meals for twelve needy old Nuremberg craftsmen and had it endowed with capital for permanent management. From around 1425/26, each ‘Mendel brother’ was portrayed with a full-page portrait in Mendel's Housebook. By the end of the imperial city period, it had grown to a total of 857 illustrated pages with 765 portraits of craftsmen in folio format.   The website for a project focused on digitising the work can be found at https://online-service.nuernberg.de/viewer/hausbuecher/ , and elements of it can be found at...

In my last cycle of LARPing, ending about 7 years ago, I was finding a whole heap of new "live action gaming experiences" popping up all over the place. I was finishing uni, without enough time to focus on the games I was running, let alone head to other games to check them out. They all seemed to offer a basic variation on standard boffer stuff, and I'd been in and out of that scene for a while. I started teaching, mostly away from the crowds that this sort of game requires. Then Covid hit, and many of the games ate themselves. I hadn't really looked back at the LARPing sphere until recently.  So now I'm doing LARP research again. Looking at which ones are worth getting involved with...and which ones are toxic as hell.

So I went to the regular gaming night at the local club again last night. It was the first time in 18 months that I haven't had a table of players.  The first few times the event ran, we had 30 odd players, three or more tables of games, I had regulars who would go out of their way to play the games I ran. I had enthusiasm for the whole thing, and I wanted to push the envelop with interesting ideas. With the right players this worked, but the numbers dwindled. We had some issues on some months, and the momentum was lost. It was still a case that every night that we ran, a couple of tables ran, but many of those nights had my number of players drop from the point where I had too many and had to turn them away, to the point where I struggled to get enough players to get a decent session. I started running games with 7 or 8 players, and more recently had a game with 3. This was the first night where there were only enough players showing up to run a single game.  There were two o...

We've got the basic frame of the Tulou, so now it's time to start filling in the interior of the model. I begin with adding some pillars which will hold the layers in place.    The pillars also form the end points of walls. For the walls I've cut some pieces of MDF to match the length between the pillars, I've also cut some gaps from them for doors and windows. I haven't specifically decided on the proportions here, or the design of the doorways and window shutters, I'll have to do a it more research for this, but having the holes for the doorways and windows is a good start.  The lights are working in there, so I'm happy about that. The next bit is to clad the mdf sheeting with wood panelling to make the walls look more like wooden walls than mdf walls. So I have some sheets of balsa wood that I'll be cutting into thin strips and gluing to the walls. Some kind of staining should be applied later, once the glued strips have dried in place. The whole thin...