Thank you Veri

I posted to Ao3 the entry I wrote for the 1 year vtuber debut anniversary of @VeriVixen on Twitter. Thank you Veri for bringing us heathens together. You encourage me to strive to be more than I am capable of. https://archiveofourown.org/works/51682021

You can find her on twitch at VeritheVixen or join her discord at The Forsaken Shrine

Station23

 There is a social media craze right now started by Sean McCoy dubbed Dungeon23. Dungeon23 is a framework for creating a megadungeon. You write up one room a day with the idea of having a completed level each month. At the end you have a 365 room dungeon.

Ihsan Rolls a One

I had a D&D character die while offscreen after leaving the party. I am not a writer, but I wanted to close the book on the character so to speak. This is that attempt.

Ihsan's Leters - 7th Day of the third ten day of Winterwane 1572 MP

This is part of a series of letters a D&D character I play writes and keeps on his person. This one is a bit longer than what I plan for most. The character was too sick to write a letter at a natural stopping point. I missed the following session so am basing much of the details on what I have been told along with following the journal of another player in the group found here on reddit.

Honey Melon,

Much has happened since last we spoke. Fortune is with us. The troll hunters that tolerate me hunt other things as well. I get ahead of myself however.

Ihsan's Letters - 5th Day of the third ten day of Winterwane 1572 MP

These letters are for a D&D character. This is the first letter Ihsan wrote after meeting the other player characters

Ihsan's Letters

I started a new character in an existing Dungeons & Dragons game. I wanted to have him write letters outside of the game itself. Ihsan Yima Rostami is a stranger in a fictional land which is sort of like how people picture a medieval Transylvania. He never sends these letters anywhere.

My Thirty Day World Part Three - Villain

This is for day two of #My30DayWorld Today’s question is, “Who is the most nefarious villain of your world?"

There are a few big bads. If limiting it to mortals, the most famous is the Necromonger. This necromancer never remains dead. His spirit seems incapable of leaving Tyar. it is probably the Necromonger that would spring to most people’s minds. There are big bads more powerful, and more purposefully evil, but the Necromonger is the known quantity by the populace. The other names that might come to mind are Unan and Talvi, the two heads of the Celestial Reclamation whom have consumed, chased off, or enslaved most of the deities that have set on Tyar since their rise to power.

Most of the big villains have goals they consider worthy. Nylva, the Goddess of the Shadowfell may be the one exception in that she wants to merge the Shadowfell with Tyar. The Chronomancers want to survive and ruling is a byproduct of that. The Sun Quenchers are working to prevent the end of the current age by stopping the sun from leading Tyar to the Purge.

Read more about #My30DayWorld at http://news.absolutetabletop.com/2018/03/15/my30dayworld-join-worldbuilding/

My Thirty Day World Part Two - World Name

This is for day two of #My30DayWorld Today’s question is, “What is the name of your world? Why is it called this?"

The world itself is called Tyar. This is the name of the creature the world encases. The people talk about Tyar the planet as a living thing even though they do not really see her any differently from other planets. In the view of the denizens, all planets are living. The magical energies Wizards and Druids tap into come directly from her.

The continent where the focus of the game occurs is called Mudar. It is thought to be the body of a dragon that grew old and tired. He decided to lay down one day. The continent the people call Mudar is only part of what was the dragon’s body.

Read more about #My30DayWorld at http://news.absolutetabletop.com/2018/03/15/my30dayworld-join-worldbuilding/

My 30 Day World Part Day One - Elevator Pitch

This is for day one of #My30DayWorld Today’s question is, “What is the thirty second elevator pitch for your world?”

Dragons soar the skies of Tyar, a world built on top of the bones of previous civilizations that are little understood by the scholars of today. Getting to the technology of the past is dangerous yet profitable. The continent of Mudar is cut off from the rest of Tyar by the Wandering Border to the East while travelers that venture far from the shores of Mudar by sea never return. The Mudar Merger does its best to seek out solutions to combating the Wandering Border, a rolling fog bank which spews forth monsters, but their resources and influence vary with the whims of the various rulers of Mudar.

How to Mudar a Game

This is the lead up to my attempt at #My30DayWorld. You can read more about My 30 Day World here, and find the kickstarter that it is tied to here. I am not affiliated with Absolute Tabletop or any of their affiliates. I have never talked to any of them. I do watch some of the youtube videos the various contributors make.

I have not blogged in a while. Last September I got back into tabletop roleplaying games on a regular basis. I was approached by a stranger to be a game master (narrator) for a 90s Marvel themed Mutants & Masterminds game using roll20. That game is closing in on five hundred hours actual play time and I love it.

I currently run two Dungeons & Dragons games as well. One is Lost Mines of Phandelver for kids which is the first time I have actually ran an adventure written by somebody else, and a mature adults only D&D game. I play in a Masks, Scion, and D&D game. The D&D game is the only one of the three I do not run that occurs on a weekly basis. This is all a lead up to talking about that adult D&D game I am running.

22 Jul 2017 - Art Update

I have not drawn much in the last two weeks. Some of it is laziness, and some of it is running around and some of it is using the time to do things like clean models and earn the Summer seasonal ship in Star Trek Online while cranking out my reputation. That said, I took pictures of my board today as it had been two weeks since I cleared it off. Here is some of the last two weeks.

I really should use reference until I have a better handle on anatomy. This was more about getting the concept, but good anatomy would have been nice too.

View from the waiting room of the Neurologist

Drawing Up a Storm. Picture of a statue used as reference.

Another Week

This week I had been playing with the charcoal pencils that came in last week. It is a new medium for me. There have been some graphite drawing as well, but not much. I took pictures of the charcoal drawings as I pulled the newsprint off my board today. Here are a couple of those sheets.

New Pencils

I drew every day since posting except for Wednesday. I ordered some pencils and newsprint over the weekend as I could see myself running out of materials. I can archive things on the computer before I toss them out. The pencils and paper arrived today. I had barely started on a warmup page so I decided to turn it into a pencil test page. The paper was a cheap 50lb pad I bought years ago. I tried not to smudge the pencils for this. Tones were attempted primarily via pressure.

Freehand Circles

I do not know how much art I will be sharing. If the blog in general is any indication then not much. I found my circles were really weak when warming up today so I did a page of circles in addition to the other pages. All but one circle are freehand and done with a bik pen so I could not erase. That one circle was me trying to spin the paper which shifted during spinning so looks as off as my freehand ones.

I need to work on photographing drawings. Ballpoint seemed a good medium for testing so the extra circle page from today is what you get. I did not use the clipboard when drawing, but needed something to hold the paper for the camera. I found that when laying the paper on a table or other flat surface I can not see the view window since I can not get over the camera to look down. The lighting was better with the table view though. I had to adjust this in Gimp using a gradient map to lighten the left side of the page some.

In related news, I used up the printer paper I originally pulled to practice on when I decided to attempt drawing again. Tomorrow I have to decide if I will continue using printer paper or move to the 50lb paper I have. I made a small sketchbook using that 50lb paper and drew my first Reilly head in it so it would not continue its existence completely blank. I am trying to decide if I want to order some newsprint and graphite, or wait and see how much my practicing will move to a Wacom tablet when I buy one of the enthusiast pads soon. If I can figure out the lighting and camera then I might focus more on the traditional. Either way I will be doing a mix of both, but how much of each will determine if I need to order supplies sooner rather than later and in what amounts.

I Suck

...and the only person that cares is me.

I have been wanting to try my hand at scultping for a while now. I've sculpted bits, but never a whole model. Like every wargamer, I have ideas for what might make for a cool miniature or alternate sculpt. The desire was great enough to where I picked up a pencil to bang out some concepts. It was then I realized the pencil is not my friend any more.

Election 2016

I have not posted in a while. My painting setup I had in Spring was not working in the long term. It was blocking a closet and the room was slowly filling up with stuff. I have been shifting everything around and realized I do not have the space for everything I want to do so sort of stalled out. While this is a personal blog, it had become mostly focused on gaming and miniature painting which have both been rather scarce for me lately.

The rest of this post is mostly political. I do not know when I will be updating the blog again, but wanted to acknowledge it had been some time before I launched into my spiel. If you are here mostly for the painting or gaming then this might be where you want to stop reading.

Wednesday in Progress - 08 Jun 2016

I just realized I forgot this week's WIP, so here it is.

I did not paint last week. The final round for this year's Iron Painter is "Critters". I DNFed (Did Not Finish) last round so I am completely out of the competition. This includes the raffle. I decided to follow along this round, but I am not submitting anything to the contest.

I went through a few ideas. The prominent one was Donald Trump being piloted by one of the creatures from the Critters movies. It felt like a bit too much work for the time frame as it would require me to sculpt and paint everything. Another idea was to paint anthropomorphic models. I can do the archery scene from Robin Hood using just mice people if I wanted to, and there are other animal people in my collection as well. The idea I settled on was to replace Star Trek tribbles with critters.

Iron Painter Round 4 - Wednesday is Paused for 01 Jun 2016

I managed to do a little more work on the Monstrosity since my last blog post. It's not finished, but I am done with it for now.

Round four of Iron Painter has come and gone. The theme this round was "Armed and Dangerous". The submitted entries can be found here.

Iron Painter Round 3 Ends- Wednesday in Progress for 11 May 2016

Round 3 of Iron Painter is over. I scraped together what I had to submit an image Monday morning. I was still painting half an hour before I had to have the image submitted and spent next to no time going through pictures and making the collage for this round.

My partner for the round,Neveroddoreven, submitted a fantastic piece. He sculpted the entire model aside from the head. I really enjoy the model.

Submission Image

Captain's Personal Log - Stardate 13016.128

Our destination is Ironius Paintorus III in the Wyrd system. Preparations are underway to present the representatives with a scientific gift that will interface with their technology, but not be of their own making. The engineers ensure me that all of the components are available and assembled. My Science officer will be calibrating the prototype model while the ship's Counselor will be overseeing the final preparations. We must arrive and present the model no later than the morning of 13016.130, or all is for naught.

This is a personal entry. It is a little bit on the long side. It is a post that many should probably skip. There is a bit of me feeling sorry for myself in this post. This post may contain Too Much Information (TMI). Consider that a final warning that you will not get back the time it took to read the remainder. I feel it is important to share life's hiccups on occasion, and I have the time to do so right now.