Author Archives: Clayton Oliver

Hell Comes to Cave City

Another ConCave, another unfortunate encounter.

In this instance, several of us had decided we were hungry and the hotel diner was overpriced. But that vaunted mecca of civilization, Cave City, was nearby! And our hero protagonist victim had a car! Thus it was that four people squeezed into my ’99 Mitsubishi Eclipse, truly the gothiest of goth rides, to seek sustenance.

Two of the witnesses shall remain nameless. The third passenger, he whose reputation burns in infamy even today, shall be called WB, he who sometimes was called “Wookiee” for his stature and lack of a volume control. WB was about 6’6″, not a small man in width, made mostly of metal from the knees down, and aggressive in asserting his identity as Louisville’s largest and most notorious Jewish goth punk gamer bookmonger.

So it was that the four of us sauntered into a combination Long John Silver’s/A&W (i.e., the Fish&W) restaurant. I was attired fairly nondescriptly, as was my habit. My companions… had only brought Vampire LARP costumes to the con.

Needless to say, we attracted some attention on this fine Saturday morning. Our kind was rarely seen in Cave City. There were murmurs of outrage and consternation.

I, being attuned to the ways of incipient redneck unrest, was uneasy. My unnamed companions, alas, were more sheltered. And WB… WB was aware of the attention and was feeling provocative.

As we dined, WB’s volume increased. Every French fry brought forth another bloody tale of in-game vampiric horrors, presented out of context for the Barren County public’s edification. I began gauging the distance to the exits.

Finally, our trays were empty. Could we escape without incident? Alas, WB had one more arrow in his quiver. As we discarded our waste and headed for the exit, his voice boomed out: “Hey, Clayton, you know the best thing about this leather jacket?”

I cringed. “No, WB, what would that be?”

And as the door swung shut behind us, the last thing the good folk of Cave City heard was WB’s proud declamation: “A little rain water washes the goat blood right off it!”

Decomposition Book

No shit, there I was…

This was in spring ’98 or ’99, I think. I was running a LARP at ConCave, a small local convention in deep rural southwest Kentucky.

I was minding my own business at my registration and logistics desk when a pack of prospective players staggered into the room in what was either a Fleshcrafted gamer-centipede mass or a consensual close-order formation of mutual support for upright locomotion. It was just past three in the afternoon and I could smell the liquor and questionable decisions from across the room.

“Heeeeey,” one slurred, fumbling in his pin-festooned leather vest for what I hoped was not a weapon. “I heard yer runnin’ a Vamfire game.”

Trepidatiously, I responded in the affirmative.

“Awesome.” He located the object of his search and withdrew, to my rmingled relief and slowly-rising dread, a small wad of paper. As he unfolded it like some non-Euclidean eldritch origami horror, I recognized it as a character sheet. It appeared to have been used as a placemat for last night’s pizza and this morning’s coffee, and under the layers of organic debris, the owner’s pen had left no dot behind. “I wanna bring in my home chara… chiro… character. I call ‘im ‘Roadkill.’ He’s a Samedi wererabbit Abomination.”

WIP X

Working on a second set of Spectre’s SAS Counterterrorism Response Squad figures. Back rank is the first set in desert colors; front rank is the second WIP set in more traditional green. For both sets, I went for a “dropped what we were doing and threw on the armor when we got the callout” look, hence the total lack of uniformity in shirts and pants.

Preparing for Winter

I’m hoping to have the motivation to continue grinding away at the Pile of Shame over the winter. With temperatures and winds here being what they are, the days between November and May that I can safely spray primer outdoors are rather limited. In expectation of that, I’m assembling and priming a large number of minis so I’ll have a decent selection ready to paint when the mood strikes me.

(Once they’re complete, they’ll probably have to hang out in the project trays until spraying season comes ’round again and I can hit them with a coat of matte sealant, but that’s not the hard part.)

Brush Workout

Yesterday, I wrapped up primary work on the Clan War figures I’m doing for a friend back in Louisville. (Photos will be forthcoming once I’ve sprayed matte sealant – which may be a while, given current humidity – and flocked the bases.) I’m probably starting to sound like a shill, but I really am quite taken with Army Painter’s self-shading Speedpaints. I used them exclusively for this project and, while nothing is what I’d consider a competition-ready or professional-grade figure, I think they’re all acceptably table-ready.

Speedpaints are not without their flaws. Because of their viscosity, it’s very easy to overflow the area I’m targeting, particularly if the sculpt’s contours encourage flow and pooling. I’m still learning to recognize and avoid that. Their limited opacity makes it difficult for me to apply light colors over dark, so I’ve gotta spent a bit more effort pre-planning, lay down the light colors first, and then avoid the aforementioned overspill with the darker tones. Finally, there are a few colors that simply don’t apply well – the paint runs like rain on a freshly-waxed hood, leaving noticeable areas of minimal or no coverage. I’m seeing this mostly in handful of blues and greys, and I’m uncertain if it’s a production issue or a formulation issue. This is one of those times when I really wish Dad was still alive because I’d love to get a paint chemist’s professional opinion on what’s happening.

Having said all that, for 95% of the painting I do, Speedpaints make the task easier, less onerous, and less frustrating. This means I’ve painted more figures in the last 12 to 18 months than in probably the preceding decade. There’ve been droughts and burnouts – but what the shift from ultramoderns to samurai has shown me is that at least some of the burnout can be mitigated by moving between genres and color palettes.

This batch of samurai wound up being 14 figures – six different sculpts, with some duplicates. Because their primary use is likely to be opposing NPCs, I decided to do a different paint job for each one. This should make it easier for GM and players to designate targets and track health and other statuses, and it’s a better representation of unwashed ronin. This was a fun challenge and it kept things from getting too samey-samey. It also let me tinker with some colors, and some color combinations, that I hadn’t approached in ultramodern figures who were intended to represent urban operators and opposition. In particular, Occultist Cloak turns out to be a great dark grayish-blue (“blackish blue grey” on the official Speedpaints color chart) that’s a solid midnightish option for something that’s supposed to represent black but will show more of the figure’s detail. Lizardfolk Cyan (“greenish blue” on the same source) is, to my eye, a subdued teal with a grayish hue that has a lot of visual appeal (he said, gazing contemplatively at the number of turquoises in his fountain pen ink stash).

WIP IX

On the workbench this week: a batch of samurai from the Clan War starter box (anyone else remember AEG’s twenty-plus-years-ago attempt at a wargame?). These guys and their friends are getting done up as a collection of scruffy ronin for a friend’s Legend of the Five Rings tabletop campaign:

Once again, Army Painter Speedpaints FTW. Despite rattling around in a box for a couple of decades, the sculpts are still crisp enough that the texture on the armor really pops when the self-shading compounds do their thing.

I’m trying to decide if I want to try to do eyes and risk fucking up the whole face.

Black Site, Light Box

Over the summer, I picked up an LED light box from B&H. This coincided with a major slowdown in painting and photographing my Pile of Shame, so I hadn’t actually used it for much yet. Around the same time, I also picked up a trio of building kits from Black Site Studios, whose specialty is pre-painted MDF – just glue and deploy.

Recently, I’ve had the free time to sit down and work on a few of my neglected projects. I went ahead and knocked these out. For what they are, and for the money and time invested, I’m pretty pleased with the results (and the light box works pretty well, too, even if these pieces are threatening to overflow it):

A few more photos and some notes on what’s what are over on my Flickr gaming photostream.

Expanded Hunting Results (Twilight: 2000 House Rule)

Although Kaserne on the Borderlands is on vacation right now, I still have campaign thoughts. One of them is that the default in 4e is to separate non-threatening-but-edible animal encounters (hunting results) and dangerous animal encounters (card draw results), and I mislike that. I’ve been wanting something a bit more in-depth for both random encounters and Pettimore’s hunting expeditions. Here’s a first stab at it, informed by Wikipedia’s inventory of Polish wildlife:

Yeah, that’s a percentile table. Don’t judge me. Right-click it and select “open image in new tab” to embiggenate.

Four Operators #4

Closing out the series after Brass, Fix, and Crashcart. Final thoughts about the team at the bottom.

Blank Path (Gaius Zimmerman)

Blank Path is a man of faith. What that faith may be is currently undefined, because I had no idea where to go when the dice gave me a Clergy background for my final operator, but this dude definitely believes in something strongly enough to be a militant street preacher of his particular truth. Moreover, with Voice of the People giving him Pop Idol 2, he apparently has a substantial following among the city’s underclass. Of the four characters I rolled up, he’s mechanically the least effective, and the most frustrating from a characterization perspective – a pure face with a cause. But I find myself surprisingly interested to see where he goes.

(Of the four, he had the objectively worst attribute rolls. The combination of a rolled CHA 7 and Clergy background pretty much obligated me to spend an edge slot on Prodigy to make him an effective man of the cloth.)

Attributes: STR 11, DEX 11, CON 8, INT 10, WIS 14 (+1), CHA 18 (+3 from Prodigy)

Skills: Lead-1, Perform-1, Stab-0, Talk-0

Edges: Prodigy, Voice of the People

Foci: Diplomat 1, Pop Idol 2

HP 6; attack bonus +0; saves physical 15+, evasion 15+, mental 12+, luck 15+

Contacts: see below

Equipment: Fashionable clothing; reinforced clothing; basic smartphone; sword; knife; trauma patch; $30 cash

Voice of the People and Pop Idol combine to give Blank Path access to a motley collection of the faithful (or those who are just entertained by his message). However, his inner circle contains a few regulars:

Athanas Kuroki, Gaius’ distant cousin, is a well-known counterculture musician and rabble-rouser under the stage name of Zen Bomb. They’ve worked together on occasion when the job called for their combined social and networking skills, and are frequently found enjoying the attention of their respective groupies. Despite his own fame and influence, Athanas thinks Gaius is the one who’s really going to make it big. His extensive network of fans feeds him all kinds of information, but he’s best at working those connections to find people who don’t want to be found.

Arlen Baggio is Gaius’ oldest acquaintance and first follower of the faith. Their friendship began when Gaius rescued Arlen from a gang fight, killing their childhood bully in the process. Today, Arlen works as an outlander smuggler under the handle Slice, and he can occasionally provide transport or loaner vehicles.

Sonja Porsche is a corporate middle manager whose ambition once led her into crimes against Gaius’ faith. Gaius spared her life and she’s still trying to make good on that (a random roll which suggests she may have undergone conversion at swordpoint). Perhaps Gaius spared her because of their childhood friendship (really, dice?). Her current job is in her corp’s government liaison office, and while she won’t betray her employer (yet), she has no qualms about siphoning off government data or getting official paperwork rubber-stamped or lost.

So is it a viable team? Well… I haven’t played CWN, which means my capacity to judge is limited, but it looks like the dice gave me a fairly balanced group of hacker, shooter, healer, and face. The only cyber on the team is Brass’ cranial jack and they lack any big-ticket vehicles or drones, but that seems to be the intent for starting operators. Fix will definitely have to carry the team in combat for a while, though.

I still have no idea WTF to do with Blank Path’s faith, though, or how to integrate that into being an operator. I have some vague idea that it’s a syncretic faith that appeals to operators in particular, and that demands action against the market forces that control society. That would impel him to action – and would make him a major target for corporate retaliation if he ever started getting real traction.

As I was writing up these characters, it occurred to me that CWN’s random creation system doesn’t yield much in the way of PC backstory. The brilliant one-roll generator for contacts implies a lot of shared history, so that’s one way to find those hooks, but I also found I had more writing prompts for the contacts than for the PCs themselves. If I were actually going to do something with these characters, I’d’ve invested more time in profiling them, but this really was just an urge to use the random creation mechanics that I needed to get out of my head.