Organized Memories

I've got a lot of Hirst Arts molds. I've had them for quite a while. Since making the modular dungeon back in 2010 I haven't done much of anything with them. I'm in the process of cleaning and organizing the hobby stuff - a never-ending process by the way - I decided to finally put them away properly.

These are photo storage containers from Michaels but work excellently for storing molds. Most molds. Some are a bit tight in there but not enough to worry me. They have squish points. Luckily I had exactly the right number of containers for my molds. I didn't count them first. Typical of me, I know.

It took me some time since I wanted to do it once, do it right. That meant pulling up my old page which had all my molds so I knew which ones were there and then correlating them back to the Hirst Arts store to get their names. My page only had their numbers since that's what is on the images I took.

But first they needed to have the excess plaster scraped off (I probably should have washed them thoroughly but they're lucky they got this much attention) and then powder them. The powder is just one of those extra steps that is more of a precaution than a necessity. It's on the site to do it, I was going to do it.

Then it was a matter of going out on the patio and working slowly through each mold. Finding the next numeric one, cleaning it off, dusting it, making the label, putting it away. Mold by mold.

To make it more interesting I have a number of molds that are no longer in production. I do have a printout of them so those were easy enough to sort out. I also have some third party molds that I pretty much guessed the names at.

Two of my molds are on loan. I know who and when. I left open spots for them where they'll go when they're returned.

And I seem to be missing one mold. I'll have a better look at where they were since it's a thinner one but if I can't find it I'll put out a message to the old group to see if anyone borrowed it and didn't return it. I'm not very fond of it but it was on my list so I might as well see about getting it back if I can.

For a bit of eye candy here's the modular dungeon set up for a convention game.

Several of the fancy floors are A&K molds that aren't on the market any more. They were fun to paint if slightly too small to fit in with the Hirst ones properly. The rest of the fancy floors are painted by me to be fancy. Mostly.

I Designed and Printed Something!

Ok. It's not going to be amazing. That much I can promise. But it's something neat.

My friend painted the two (very large) new monsters for my dungeon crawl. She's such a sweetie! She used bases she had on hand that fit the monsters which is fine.

She used round bases. I use square bases. Hrm. This is a problem. At least for me it's a problem.

OpenSCAD to the rescue! If you don't want to click the link it's a text based CAD program. It's great for learning how all this works and for making pretty much anything. All the plastic parts for my printer were designed in it. And I understand words a lot better than menu commands at the moment.

I wanted a square base with a cutout for the round base. I'd done similar things. So now it was time to do it again.

Meet Carol, the carrion crawler. Actually she's a cavern crawler from Reaper Miniatures due to IP stuff. And yes. That's a metal mini so it's darn heavy.

You can see her round base fitting very nicely into the square base. A bit of double sided tape and she'll be secure enough. And I can remove her from the adapter if I want a round base.

I did the same thing with the hydra. I'll post pictures of him some other time.

It doesn't sound like much of a design challenge and it wasn't since I've been playing around in OpenSCAD for a while. But it's so nice to be able to design something you need and then make it. AND have it work!

Is the Airbrush Worth All This?

So I have not just one but four airbrushes. I've never used an airbrush. Um. Actually I have five but one of them is going to be sold when I get around to it. So I don't count it.

I got the airbrush bug mostly for priming stuff so I don't have to be dependent on the weather and deal with aerosol fumes. Then I started seeing all the very nice things they can do with practice and foresight. Therefore I thought airbrushes were good things.

I didn't take into account my limited space. I really didn't. But I'm working around that. Or working in it. Whatever the phrase I'm still moving forward.

I have all the minis to paint for the dungeon crawl. I kind of neglected to think about that while I focused on printing up the dungeon. Whoops. Since these are full adventuring parties I need sixteen minis painted. Plus the three NPCs. I got them at the convention and they've sat in the bag since I got them home.

I ordered new triggers for all the airbrushes to make them more comfortable to use. Over Christmas I replaced the triggers on all four of them. I'm rather proud of that. I also took the time to completely disassemble each one and put it back together so I had that under my belt. All of them have the quick connect adapters as well. It's now a pretty sweet setup. Final triumph is that they all fit into the plastic bin I had gotten for airbrush stuff.

Last week I spent the time to find them, double check I had the right ones, carefully placed them in their parties, cleaned them up, assembled them, based them, glued them to 'bottle caps', sand based them, and added the gesso to the sand bases to glue it all in place. Overall they're ready to go.

Then I pulled out the air compressor for the first time and it does sit nicely on the kitchen counter where I planned to put it. Check.

I attached the pressure regular and moisture trap. I may have to use thread tape on it but for now it's attached. Check.

I looked for the air hose I bought that's brand specific and has the matching quick connect adapter. Um. No. Can't find it. And the search begins...

I looked for literally hours last night with no joy. I gave up and sulked. I also thought about where I could have put the stupid thing. There was a brief time when I thought about ordering a new hose and adapter but stopped myself because I don't NEED another one and can't use another one. That and they're not cheap.

Today I didn't get to looking again until later in the evening and dug through a lot of stuff. Finally, tucked away in a canvas bag, I found the stupid thing. Once I found it I realized that it was in the carry bag from when I took a fairly useless airbrush class at a regional game store. The airbrush was put away, the hose wasn't.

Check! Air hose on the compressor. Again it may need thread tape and I'll deal with that if needed. I know where the thread tape is.

The final thing was the photo tent I got to use as booth. I do have a portable booth but that thing is large and a pain to set up. I don't need heavy filtration for acrylic. A note on that later. The photo tent is one that folds down like the car sunscreens do so it's perfect for my space.

Except that it's not. I didn't think to measure so it's far too large to fit into the space I've allocated for a spray booth. Sigh. I needed a YouTube video to show me how to fold it back up (twist it all into the center and squish) and then I measured the space, converted inches to centimeters, and ordered the correct size. I'll figure out a use for the larger one at some point.

By the time all this happened it was way too late to consider doing anything. It was too late when I found the air hose. However I could continue to get it set up and that's how I found out about the photo tent.

Tomorrow I will be using a cardboard box as my spray booth because I have a very large number of them sitting in my living room waiting for a new home. There has to be one in an appropriate size in there. It's not perfect but it's better than a piece of posterboard or something.

Had I not found the air hose tonight I was going to use aerosol primer on the minis because I couldn't wait any longer. Now I can use the airbrush and I may even try putting down skin base tones with it as well. Those are always the first layer of paint and if I overspray badly it won't matter. I need to learn to do this and the best way is to just do it.

Ok. Some notes here. The 'bottle caps' are actually 3D printed ones that are supposed to fit the painting handle I haven't printed yet. It's a knock off of the Citadel one and was designed to fit these caps. The good news is that I can print as many of the darn caps and handles as I want. If they work.

I do have some other ones that use bottle caps and are on spools but I like this one better. While most people only have one that's because theirs cost a lot of money. Mine just take some printer time and a little filament. Plus I can print all the caps I need.

Churn Baby Churn

This poor printer is just running through kilometers of filament churning out dungeon pieces. I am personally very tired of grey filament. Very, very tired.

There should be two printers doing this, halving the time, but my other one is still down waiting for the replacement board I ordered this week. They haven't even shipped it. Sure, they're blaming the holidays but I need the stupid board. The printer is a doorstop without it.

And then I had a clog that was resistant to the normal methods of removal. It was kind of cool to see the filament extruding in two streams instead of one but that's not really the point. For the first time I used the acupuncture needle they include with the kit to try to move whatever little piece of gunk that was in the way to a place I could remove it.

Then it was a few rounds of cleaning out the nozzle (look up 'atomic pull' for the details) and then it looked like it was good. Although I didn't see the piece of whatever in the cleaning filament.

I 'lost' about twelve hours of printing because of this. I could have tried to clear it last night after the print finished but I was too darn tired to trust myself with printer maintenance. I know better. I'll give up the time to make sure I do it right. This morning I was there, swearing at the printer, doing maintenance.

I should do some calibration again and I think I'll do that when the other printer is ready to go. I will calibrate them both at the same time and then it's off to the races. At least off to 'printing the rest of the dungeon pieces'.

I have the lights for an LED torch wall section but I'm iffy on doing it now. At least I'm iffy on doing it for the convention dungeon. I have a legitimate reason. Hear me out.

The piece is rather clever. The part where the torches are is a separate piece you print in transparent orange (or yellow or whatever) and then there's holes in the back where you shove the mini LEDs. Overall it's a very efficient design using an off-the-shelf light string and battery holder. But here's the catch. That entire panel of torches is out of the transparent filament. So there's this line of orange in the middle of the stone.

This isn't a problem with the addition of that thing called 'paint'. But as of now I don't think I'll have time to paint it before the convention and I don't want to bring it primed because then there's fingerprints on the primer and I don't know how the rest of the paint will adhere. Right now it's all a consistent light grey. To use the LED torch walls I would have to paint the orange sections at least and then they'd stand out just as much as if they were still orange.

It's something I'm pondering. Once I find my airhose for the compressor (dammit I hate losing things) then I can figure out how long it would take to paint this. I can practice on scatter. I plan on using the primer as the main color and then just accenting it with some random bricks and overall drybrushing. And then there's varnishing. So it takes time. Time I could be spending painting the darn minis.

I might have to give up on the airbrush for priming and either use the rattle can or paint it on. I want to use the airbrush but I don't want to waste too much time looking for the missing hose. And before anyone suggests it I want this hose for a reason. It's brand specific so it's threaded properly, it's a braided hose so it's more flexible, and it has the quick disconnect adapter attached to match the quick disconnect adapter on all my airbrushes. It's not cost effective or useful at all to buy another hose and adapter. I'll look more tonight and if not tomorrow I bring out the rattle can and be annoyed.

Latest DungeonBash/Dungeon Crawl

I've taken to using the words 'Dungeon Crawl' when listing my game in convention schedules to make it very clear that it's a dungeon crawl.  The name DungeonBash is great but it doesn't say much about what the game is.  I'm trying all kinds of things to get people interested in playing the game.

I ran the game yesterday at Conclave of Gamers.  This is a new con that expanded from a board game focus into more types of games.  I thought I would pull a double here - help the con by having another game and see what the response was with a different crowd.

I ran it twice and neither time had what I would call a full table.  The first game had 3 out of 4 players (someone played 2 of the characters) and the other game was full during registration but only 1 (maybe 2) of them showed up.  The last seat was filled by someone who seemed to be guilted into playing and I'm not sure how much he enjoyed it.

This is the exact reason why I was testing the waters again.  I have yet to run the game at a convention and fill the table with enthusiastic players.  Even the last game at GengisCon had 3 players and 1 who seemed more interested in me than the game.  The 3 players were a family so 2 were kids.  Not what I wanted but I ran the game for them.

I've come to the decision that not enough people want to play.  The game is optimized for 4 people so not getting that many puts a burden on the other players.  Getting less than 3 is no fun at all.  I haven't canceled those games since 2 people showed up to play but its been tempting.

I changed up the rules for this convention and I'm considering more changes for the future.  Not that I have any plans at all to run it but it's nice to take the experience and use it to improve the game.

• Pre-built dungeon - I did this already.  Building the dungeon on the fly takes too long during a convention.  If I'm ever asked to run it for a group and we have time I can go the 'build as we go' route.


• Fewer rooms - When they're searching for 3 items having 9 or 10 rooms is too many.  Combat is random and takes too long for them to get into all the rooms.  Next time there will be 6, at most 7, rooms.  Items x 2.


• Different monster charts - I didn't like how the current monsters fit into the new format.  I'll change up the encounters to be more suited to the play style.  That means not using some of the minis and duplicate encounters on the chart.  I'm good with that.  I think I can mix it up enough to make it work.


• Faster multiple encounter progression - The progression feels slow and doesn't add to the tension of the game.  This is an easy one since I can pick from the existing cards to do the progression.  I already did some of that in the last game.

In a way it means making the game smaller.  Having a big dungeon layout is great and attracts attention.  It doesn't attract players.  So a big part of the modular dungeon pieces I made won't get used.  Sad but more effective.

I didn't sign up to run the game at the next upcoming convention.  I knew I could get in if I had success at this one.  I didn't have success.  I won't be signing up for the next convention.

It's a waste to pack it up (after fixing bits that need fixing) after all the work that went into it.  I'm very sad that the minis painted by my friends will get packed up with the game.  At this point I don't see a way to not pack it up.  It won't go out of style so putting it away for a couple of years isn't going to move it off the charts.

What's most disappointing to me is that I get a lot of "That's so cool!  I want to play!" and then when they get the chance they don't.  Or people sign up and don't show up.  I like running the game and I'm proud of what I built and that my friends helped out making it awesome.  Then I sit at a table with empty chairs all around and it's hard not to take it personally after a few conventions.

Anyway.  Here's a picture of the layout I built on the fly at the last convention.  I decided to use the space available to me to make a nice big dungeon.

Dungeon Crawl

I've been lax about posting pictures from the dungeon crawl in action.  Back in February.  But hey!  Here they are now.

I asked players to take pictures during the game since I've found that I tend to be too busy to take enough pictures.  They did so I have pictures!  Here's some of the better ones.

DungeonBash is active again

Well, it will be soon.  I'm working on it!



These are most of the unfinished minis.  OK.  Some of them.  I've got friends helping paint the monster and they have or are painting about 3/4 of them.  Props to Michelle B and Lyn S to doing this.



Michelle painted most of these.  I did paint the player characters!

I've got a few 1 inch dungeon sections left to finish painting and one piece to repair from the last time I ran the game.  Nothing some epoxy won't fix.

The most difficult part for me is getting all the new lists together.  There's very few spells that are appropriate for a non role playing game.  Everything has to deal with combat.  I'm scouring the books looking for those spells.

I've got a nice deadline for play testing now.  One of the gamers here has been after me to run this for his group and we've settled on next Sunday.  I won't have the final versions of anything since this is playtesting and we'll be using empty bases for some of the monsters but that's all part of the process.

I'll try to get some pictures of the new game in progress.  Depending on how much time we have I hope to run a full game (2 hours) and then spend some time running encounters to see how they balance.

Yes!  Once I get it all worked out and after I've run it at the convention I'll post all the rules.  I'll even post the list of miniatures I used for the monsters for those who don't want to hunt for them.  This is a fan derived work for DungeonBash (a copyrighted game) but I have permission to post it as such.  I've mangled the original game enough that I don't think I have any problem meeting the guideline for a derivative work.

A brief update

I've got almost all the navy Dystopian Wars ships painted.  I'm waiting on a replacement part for the carrier and in the meantime I've failed my roll against temptation for painting the airships that I have.  It's not many and the sky fortress seems to have some good tactical value against Russians.  The gaming group has a lot of Russian fleets.  I'll be posting pictures in batches in the near future.

This is the current state of my table.  I finally found the missing dungeon crawl minis that my friend Michelle is going to be painting for me.  We've done a barter and this means there's a chance that they'll get painted.  I'm only sending her the nasties and not even all of those.  Barter does have its limits.  We haven't done the final negotiations.  I didn't post a picture of the ones that are ready to be painted.

On a final note I'm getting the Hirst Arts kits to make the old WizWar boards.  I bought the wizard minis and I'm looking forward to doing a straightforward build again.  The painting seems to be tedious but I'm thinking it will be a good chance to try my airbrush.  There's also some fun accessories to make.

A quick status shows that I still have 6 1/2 armies to paint (the CoA one I've been painting counts as 1/2 done to me), the dungeon crawl and now WizWar.  Yeah.  Plenty to keep me busy.

Ships - Fini!

Gee, once I figured it out these painted up rather quick.  The trick seems to be KISS.  Good painting skills are still essential since brush control is important due to the amount of detail that doesn't get painted.  It makes sense, really.

Step 1 - Base coat and metal

I put a white base coat over everything.  Go with thin coats so the detail doesn't get clogged up.  Then I painted everything that would be metal.  And after that I touched up the white to clean up where the paint went awry.





Step 2 - Brown wash

The deck and the metal was given a brown wash.  The deck got touched up a bit where it dried spotty.  The brown wash also took care of lining those areas that needed it.  The last steps were using the brown wash in the details to make them stand out more and touching up the white.  Again.



Step 3 - Blue shadows

I wanted to do a cool blue-toned white.  That's why the first attempts had blue hulls.  I achieved the same type of effect by using a pale blue in the shadows.  And I touched up the white.





Step 4 - Element 270 (Sturginium)

The fluff has the magic rock as a glowing blue-green.  I wasn't going to do OSL on these so I put a dot of the color in the bottom of the smokestacks.

I've been such a slacker

I know there's a bunch of stuff I need to do for this blog.  Most of it centers around terrain.

So far the list is:

• Create instructions and pictures for making my modular dungon


• Write the dungeon crawl convention/single play rules.  (I received permission from the original designer to make a 'fan based' version.)


• Write the dungeon crawl convention/single play PVP rules.  Yep.  Two sets of adventurers.


• Write a whole lotta tutorials on faux stone painting.  I have 10 on my list.  I'm waiting on some smooth floor tiles from Naloomi's Workshop since they're the best thing I've found for the tutorials.


• Other stuff I've probably forgotten.

Bear with me and I'll get these done.  Eventually.

Let me know if there's anything else you've seen me make for terrain and you're interested in knowing how.

I built stuff

Yes, I built stuff.  And I painted stuff last weekend too.

I have a gothic arena that I started back in 2009, I think.  It may have been 2010.  Whatever.  It was a while ago and it has been sitting, rather forlorn, in a box.  I needed to feel productive so I pulled it out to paint.  I also have some additional pieces for my modular dungeon that I built almost a year ago and never painted.

While I was painting I found some of the arena pieces weren't as well constructed as I would have liked and some had been damaged in the moves.  Tonight I dug out the bins of appropriate bricks and built not only the replacements but a couple of new ones.  I'm mixing the basic and advanced arenas so eventually I need to figure out what's left to build.  I think I have all the basic pieces.

Here's proof I built.



It takes a heck of a lot more glue than you would think to build this stuff.  I probably should have thrown that out before taking the picture.

I do a lot of building on my homemade magnet board.  That's a steel baking pan sitting on a piece of countertop.  (I used to be able to buy the sink cutouts - fantastic for solid surfaces).  The pieces of wood have magnets glued into holes - you can see one of them upside down in the upper right.  I can't remember where I found the instructions to do that.  I do remember the time it took to align the radial arm saw to as close to a perfect 90 degree cut as possible.  That took a while but it's worth it.

I also build using my Lego as braces and alignment blocks.  To be honest mine are Brix Blocks, the Sears equivalent to Lego.  I've had them since I was a kid and I'm still playing with them.

I'll let these dry for a few days and then probably put paint on them this weekend when I do the touchups on the pieces I already base coated.  And the touchups on the pieces I touched up when I painted last weekend.  At some point I do move beyond the base coat.  Really.

I may be slightly active again

Don't get your hopes up too much.  It's all very much in the beginning phases of doing stuff again.

So far I have a local game store asking about Saturday paint lessons/sessions/clinics/etc.  I had to break away from the teaching I had been doing for a few reasons but oddly enough I enjoy it when I have eager (and teachable) students.  By 'teachable' I mean 'willing to learn'.  I've just contacted them to let them know that this might be possible so we'll see where it goes.

I also thought some terrain building classes might be fun.  The problem with terrain is that it generally takes at least 2 sessions due to setting and drying time.  My immediate thoughts were small Hirst Arts projects and the pipe cleaner trees I made in the past.  Useful and not too difficult.

On top of all that I'm making my very first attempts to sculpt minis.  There's a reason for this but I won't get into that now.  My first challenge is making the metal wire armatures.  "Twist the wire like this" doesn't sound that hard but for me it is.  Metal hates me and getting both a smooth twist and a twist that's the correct size in the correct place is not as easy as the pictures make it out to be.  I shall be twisting and cursing at more than a few pieces of wire while I get this right.

Until I can make consistent armatures I'm not even thinking of putting putty on anything.  I did take the time to find the sculpting tools I made when I still had access to the workshop.  It looks like between those and my standard sculpting tools I have enough to make a good start.  There's someone on etsy who makes similar tools so I can get different ones if I need them.

Lastly if I have a good relationship with this store and their customers there's a chance I could set up a regular time to run my dungeon crawl.  After I finish revising the rules, revising the encounters, and painting all the necessary minis.  I even have an idea for a PVP version but would need someone to help me run it.

Yes, Rastl may be back!

Rastl is on hiatus

I make terrain and paint minis to play games.  They're toys.

I'm not currently playing any games so I don't have a reason to make terrain or paint minis.

I may eventually pick up the project of the modular dungeon again but for now it's packed away along with all the other projects.  If so I'll post about it here of course.

Running Games at Conventions

My game club has a discussion going right now about running games at the local conventions.  We haven't really done so the last couple of times.

I had to cancel my games at the last one due to work pressures.  I was the only club member running games and mine isn't a game the club actually plays but I put it as a club game since I'm a member and wanted our name in the program.

Because of this I really had to think about why I run games at conventions.  Canceling was a hard decision.

I don't play games at the conventions.  I just prefer not to do so.  I don't know or meet many people there.  Since those are the two main reasons to go to a convention it seems a bit of a waste to go just to run games and then leave.

In the balance I think I would much rather run my games at local stores.  I can support the stores and run games when I want to.  I've also got much more of a chance of getting to know people since I know where they hang out.

The game club has a harder decision since it has to do with relying on the members to put in the effort.   I don't see myself running games for the club again.  I don't know that I'll run them at the conventions at all.

Discuss your thoughts on running games and where you like to run them.

Quick updates, no pictures

Sorry - no pictures right now.  Nothing really picture-worthy at this point.

I did base up some of the 15mm so they would be safe and take up less room.  Unfortunately the basing glue and flock shrank oddly so now I have to figure out how to fix it.  I'm still trying to figure that out since I'll need to make sure the rest of the army matches.  And there's no way to remove the minis from the base and start over.

I have over 100 minis prepped for my revised dungeon crawl but none of them are painted.  I canceled my games and my classes for the convention over Labor Day.  With everything going on there was no way for me to be ready enough to give value to the people who signed up.  So I'll bow out this time and try to get things going for the convention in February.

I feel bad about canceling my painting classes because the only other person teaching a number of classes also had to bow out for work.  There's a slim chance he can make it but he's not counting on it.  A few people have offered to pick up his classes.  The coordinator is thinking of not having any painting classes this year because of the two of us canceling.

Why did I back out of everything? Honestly, no time or inclination to prep.  I did build the additional wall sections for the dungeon but haven't painted them.  I prepped almost all the minis I could (missing bits and pieces for 8 of them) and they're ready to be painted.  I just have zero motivation to sit down and paint them.

I haven't worked up the new rules, the new tables, the new treasures or anything else for the dungeon crawl.  I certainly haven't play tested it.

I'm pushing the reason off on work since that really is taking up more of my time but I think there's more to it than that.  I don't plan on going to the con at all, honestly.  I have no reason to go.  When the only thing I do is run games and teach classes then go home it's hard to look forward to it.

Otherwise not too much happening in the hobby world for me. Our local game store was seized by the state for back taxes so we have no home.  A group of people is trying to get the capital and business plan together to open a new store with a new name in the same location.  But that's not certain and there's no dates.  What little interaction I had with the game club is going to be much more difficult as they move around the game stores for different days.

My gaming group hasn't met since April.  I don't miss it all that much. I didn't get the time to try and fit it plus this was a group that has been playing together for about a decade.  Very difficult to mesh.  That and trying to get used to how the GM runs his game made things hard for me to relax and enjoy.

The 40K hasn't interested me at all.  I think the pressure of wanting to get the dungeon crawl minis done killed a lot of motivation to paint at all.  They're off to the side so I don't need to see them.  Except for the ones still in the process of being assembled or waiting for parts.  I cleaned off the paint table pretty well.  That started when my friend came over to paint one evening and I needed to make room.  Then as part of a "tidy up" mood I worked on cleaning off more and generally cleaning up the hobby area.  It's pretty bare now.

I still have 15mm to paint but the problem with basing the ones I did have painted has discouraged me.  I know I'll figure out how to make it better but expecting 6 nicely finished stands of minis and getting what I got didn't help the entire situation.

So yes. Things are going on but there's not a lot of progress to show.  Maybe I'll post some pics when I have something to show.

Stupid weather...

I've been saying that for about a week now.  Rainy season, it seems.  That means spraying isn't possible.

The weather finally cooperated this morning and I got all my painted 15mm varnished.  I'm going to let them set up until tomorrow and then I can actually put them on bases!  My very first ones.  That will make room on the paint table for the next set but also brings up the question of army storage.

Also, I got most of the dungeon crawl minis cleaned, based and primed.  I still have to finish the ones that require assembly and in the hectic world that is Reaper boneyard shopping not everything was correct.  So I'll be sending an email to them so I can get the last ones ready.

I have a lot of painting to do and the dungeon crawl takes priority over the 15mm.  Sadly.  But it has to be done.  Luckily they just need to be tabletop quality and it looks like I'm going to have more free evenings than I had planned for.

Finally I bought a plastic storage container/shelves that should hold all my paint and a fair amount of my commonly used basing supplies.  Since my paints don't need to be portable any more I wanted to take them out of the plastic shoe boxes and put them into something more suitable for my paint area.  And it turns out they will still be portable since this particular item has separate plastic bins instead of drawers.  Of course the space where I want to put it is about 1/2 inch too short so I need to move the storage units out just a little bit.  Go figure.

DungeonBash Board Info

I'm running several sessions of the miniatures game DungeonBash at GenghisCon in February. I decided that a Hirst board would look way better than the cardstock tiles provided with the game. Perhaps I need therapy.

The (sadly defunct, it seems) game is a randomly generated dungeon built on-the-fly as are the encounters. This means I need to build enough pieces to cover every configuration possible, using every section. I know I'll have more than I need in the game but better too many than not enough. The sections themselves are pretty small. Walls are 2 tiles, 2 levels high. Corners are 3 tiles, 2 levels high. I finally sat down and figured out just how many of each I needed. Turns out I need 157 wall sections and 72 corner sections. And 23 doorways with doors. Doorways are 2 tiles wide and each door needs to be cast twice to make them double sided. So 46 door casts.

The floor tiles are actually twice what I thought I would need because I forgot to add the wall, corner and doorway bases into the mix. So instead of 60 casts of the floor tile mold I need 120. 10 tiles per cast - 1,185 floor tiles in all. That's not including the fancy bits to fill the room tiles. Since I'm making each one different I'm casting them myself but I still need 340 tiles of some sort to make the rooms.

Floor tile total - 1,525.

Walls are 2 rows high. Each wall needs 3 1" blocks and 2 1/2" blocks. 471 1" blocks. 314 1/2" blocks. Luckily there's a piece on a couple of molds that's 2 1" blocks in a single cast but I'll be mixing them. I could have made a custom mold and made each wall a single cast but that would actually have been more casting. I don't mind building.

Let's continue.

Corners are 2 rows high. Each corner needs 3 1" blocks and 4 3/4" blocks. 216 1" blocks. 288 3/4" blocks. The 3/4" blocks will be the ones I need to cast more since there's fewer on the molds.

687 1" blocks. 314 1/2" blocks. 288 3/4" blocks.

Doorways use separate types of blocks and while I have a custom mold to cast the uprights in one piece (each cast of the mold makes the base doorway) it's currently AWOL. Now that I know how many I need I'll take a little more time to look for it. Otherwise it's 6 pieces per upright, 2 pieces per arch. And I haven't decided on the finishing detail for the tops of the doorways so I don't know what I need there.

Casting!

If I use all the molds that just make the basic blocks I get:

• 17 1" blocks per cast. 41 casts


• 3 3/4" blocks per cast. 96 casts


• 9 1/2" blocks per cast. 35 casts

Yes. 96 casts to get the necessary blocks for the corners. Luckily I can cast just those blocks when I move into casting floors and other bits. Just because a block is on the mold doesn't mean I have to cast it. Only counting what I have completed I still have 600 1" blocks (36 casts), 268 3/4" blocks (90 casts), 266 1/2" blocks (30 casts).

Making this kind of game board takes a lot of patience and a LOT of casting. I did a bunch yesterday, probably 12 casts. That doesn't sound like a lot but if I keep up that pace the 1" and 1/2" blocks will be done in 2 more sessions. The 3/4" ones in about 8 more. But I still have a lot of floor tiles to cast and once I get the basics done for this board I can work on pieces for my arena and another project as well. So a little more than a week of casting left to get what I need and I'll be building at the same time.

Again, this is why doing up totals makes me sad. But it gives me a constantly reducing number of blocks to cast and that shows progress.

The pieces themselves aren't very exciting but once I get enough to make a small example I'll post a picture. They won't be painted but you can see what it looks like.