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Tulou and Fortress - Update

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  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.  

Housebooks of Nuremburg

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  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...

To LARP or not to LARP

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.

Disappointment

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...

Tulou and Fortress (Part 14) - Filling in the layout

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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...

Tears in the Rain

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I wrote a post 15 years ago about Praxis . In this particular instance, Praxis was a sub-forun of the Story-Games community, which was quite vibrant at the time. I was only alerted to the post because I've had a high number of visitors to the blog this month and was curious about what pages those folks had been looking at.  So I looked at the post, then tried to follow the links in it... Praxis is gone, Story-Games is gone, and considering I was saying at the time that many of the old ideas were being repeated, it's sad that that these moments have also been lost in time.   It's great to see 1km1kt still around with it's archive of free games... rpg.net still exists too. It's interesting, and probably not surprising that the stable workhorses of the hobby have staying power, while the avant-garde who constantly debated and gatekept the community from newcomers faded into obscurity.  (Yeah, a bit of hyperbole, and a bit of sour grapes...it's just one perspective....

Tulou and Fortress (Part 13) - Adding some colour

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It's time to start applying some colour to the model. With the level of of texturing and detailing that I have added to it. The easy way to get the majority of colour onto the model is by drybrushing some suitably earthy tones onto the form.  This is done for the tulou and the little temple that goes in the middle. I found a brown ochre shade, but that doesn't feel quite right. So in order to get something that's a bit closer to terracotta I've adding in a mix of some red and some black to darken it down in a first heavy drybrush coat. The second coat is done lighter (in the sense of colour, and the sense of less paint going on)...for this one we just use the straight ochre paint. A final really light drybrush coat uses a 50/50 mix of the ochre and white. I'm still not happy with the result and there will probably be some washes and extra detailing to get to what I'm after, but it's really brought out the texture and that was one of the main intentions at th...

50 years... 50% off

 We're running a little sale over on the online store...  DrivethruRPG Vulpinoid Studios  

Tulou and Fortress (Part 12) - Further Texturing

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Hmm... I was sure I took more progress pictures before writing this... Anyway... The point of this post is that you often need to apply surface details before adding a texture over the top. These surfacedetails don't need to be much, they just need to add some visual interest and break up any large flat surfaces (unless that's the specific look you're going for, such as the outer wall on the tulou.  The next step will be adding some paint, so I'll try to make sure there's plenty of extra photos then.

Tulou and Fortress (Part 11) - Texture Beginnings

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Here's where we left things... It's a bit like the flat polygon models in 3D computer graphics, it only takes on a more distinctive and interesting appearance once textures and colours have been added to the model. I'm making the interior of the tulou with wood, building up a framework and staining it to look appropriately aged and lived in. However, the part that I'm working on at the moment is a stone wall covered with hard packed earth. So I'll be looking for something with a bit of texture, but not too much. The first step is to get the model into position, then apply a layer of a glue that will adhere to both the foamcore surface and the intended texturing material. I'd often use sand or dirt, especially if I were making castle walls built of stone, roughly textured ground, or roads. In this case, the wall is pretty smooth, almost like a cement render, so I need much finer particles. I was cleaning up one of the linishers in the school workshops and found s...

Tulou and Fortress (Part 10) - Let there be Light

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The shrine in the middle is looking alright. So it's time to head back to the outer shell.  I'd preciously cut and scored the foamcore so that I could bend it to the right curvature. Now it's time to add the electronics to the piece before construction work begins. It needs to be done now because it will be harder later to pull the model apart and wire in the lighting.     The next step here is the make some structural elements out of foamcore that will support the outer walls. Thankfullt for this project, the outer walls are circular so they're generally self-supporting. However, they'll still need to be able to support figurines on them because they're intended as miniature terrain rather than a model.    I've cut the end cross sections of the wall, and scored them in much the same way that I've demonstrated earlier in the project. Folding right angles, taping while glue dries, holding them to shape (this time with clamps), and gluing them to the base ...

SNAFU SRD

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    (Click Here) So I've been working on a single resource document for Walkabout and Familiar, and a bunch of those little side projects I've been working on. It was only meant to be a basic thing, maybe 16-pages, a zine. But it's kind of blown out a bit because I've tied in a lot of those old cookbook ideas, and really want people to understand what the game system is about, including knowledge about how the bits work and why they were designed to work that way.  Yeah, I've covered a lot of that stuff here on the blog over the years, but I'd like a coherent piece of documentation that ties it all together. I'm not there yet, but if I don't get something up now, I'll miss the TTRPG Game Manifesto Jam, and then it'll just end up as yet another unfinished backburner project. Hopefully I'll get the chance to update it a bit over the next few days.   

Tulou and Fortress (Part 9) - Roofing the Shrine

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I've actually done a decent amount of work on the shrine since my last post about it. However, in the meantime I've been in hospital and there have been a few other issues... So, where were we.. Oh... that's right. We've got the shape of the stonework building. Now to put a roof on it. We're doing that from pieces of wood to build a structure that can be removed as needed. First step is getting the angles. I could do this with trigonometry, calculations on a page, or tricks with compasses, but I'm just going to lay the pieces of wood against the existing structure, line them up and draw the bits I need. With the two pieces overlaid, I get where the shapes will be fitting together and identify where I'll need to be cutting. I've done some rough sketches and have got a good idea of how I want the general shape to look, but I'm allowing room for evolution and unexpected elements to guide the design as necessary. Needing some cross beams for structure, I...

2500 posts...

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April 2008... seventeen years ago. That's where it all began . 2500 posts ago. I never intended for this blog to become an exploration of two decades in my hobbies of roleplaying and wargaming...or for it to be an archive of my general musings over that time. It's basically been a third of my life, and in that time I've had a few jobs, completed two university degrees, moved house nine times (spending 8 years at one house, two years at a house I know pay a mortgage on, and a succession of other rental properties as my life shifted dramatically a couple of times). I've been bankrupt in that time, have scraped by (often needing two choose whether food, rent, electricity , or medicine were the priority from week to week...knowing I could afford one, maybe a second, while the other two would have to wait), and have occasionally had times when the only methods for survival were the kindness of charity groups, or the turnover of sales on my online gaming shopfront . I've ...

Tulou and Fortress (Part 8) - Focusing on the middle.

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As it stands, two halves able to be divided for better access to the middle, better display options, and easier storage... with a modular section in the middle.The middle section is an interchangeable 10cm x 10cm square.   I've cut a few of these already from 3mm MDF. The first two modular middle sections will be a small temple structure, and a "sacred tree". I haven't decided on the third, but it might be a well, a variant temple/shrine, or a statue to a hero...I'll probably do them all and use them as scatter terrain. For the moment, I'm working on the small temple. Like the wider building, we've got a layout to go onto some foamcore. This is cut out, with V-shaped groove in one side of the foamcore while the other side remains intact. his allows the material to fold well, while maintaining its structural integrity.  When folded, I just use PVA glue, which tends to work fairly well, and once texturing goes over the surface, this reinforces any joints. As...