We'll see how long it lasts, but for the moment at least I feel much better. First off, we left work a little early on Friday, which always helps. I spent the evening painting miniatures and watching The Fantastic Mr. Fox, which had actually been given to me for my birthday and sat on the shelf for three months because I never watch TV any more.

Let's start with the minis, shall we?

Deven Thornoak and Arcangalad Narthalion take on Cap'n Barbossa and his giant bat, aided by an un-named but plucky halfling ranger!

I didn't paint all of these last night; in fact the only one I did last night was the halfling. But these have all been done over the past year or so and never got LJ posts, so I figured I'd lump them all in.


"I'm here to shove orcs into pits and eat lembas bread ... and I'm all out of lembas bread."

This was my miniature for Arcangalad the Eladrin Warlord in Josh's 4E tryout game. It was a bit of a rush job, which probably shows, but he's a Galadhrim warrior that I bashed by removing the glaive and replacing it with a spear from a weapon sprue, and adding a shield. I was quite pleased with the shield design, which was done with Sharpies. The color scheme was lifted right out of The Two Towers, 'cos hey, it was awesome. Arcangalad is a character I would love to revisit sometime, although preferably in a context other than 4E.


It can't be the Ghost Pirate LeChuck ... there's no beard!

This guy could easily be a Scooby Doo villain. I actually painted him up for my own 4E playtest game, but it ended before the players got to him. But you can't keep a ghost pirate down, I'm sure he'll be back again someday. To get the desired effect I painted him with straight-up colors, did an overall wash with a very thin dark brown ink to add heavy shadows, then alternated washes and drybrushing of the spooky-green and white highlights on the skeletal bits. This is a Reaper miniature if I recall correctly. But what's the deal with that base? Wood planks on seafoam? Buh?


"I like big swords and I cannot lie!"

I painted up this guy to be jamesbarrett's falchion-wielding crit-monster in my Revenge of the Giants game. The figure is Elladan from the Lord of the Rings line, but into some more "solid" colors to make him look human rather than elvish. The curved elven blade works well as a falchion, tho!


It's a bat. The size of a St. Bernard. Not a lot to say, really. From a Warhammer small boxed set that included a big honkin' minotaur (still unpainted).


"This way! Something that's not mud!"

My favorite of the bunch, actually, and one I hope to get a chance to use sometime. From the hood pulled tight around his head to the mud-spattered coat, this plucky little guy just looks like he's miles away from a comfy fire and still has miles to go. I used glossy clear-coat to suggest that he's standing on a muddy spit on the edge of a bog; it looks better in person than it does in the photo.

The Rest of the Weekend

Fantastic Mr. Fox was a fun little quirk of a movie. I particularly liked the use of "cuss."

Saturday was spent putting up the Christmas tree and doing a little cleanup around the house, followed by Pathfinder in the evening. The group attempted to get into a wizard's tower by luring away the giants guarding it, and were very close to pulling off their gambit until the dice gods frowned upon a concentration check, causing laurie_robey's dimension door to fizzle. That left the characters at ground zero for the giants' charge, so they ended up just killing the giants instead. But I gotta give 'em credit, it was a good try. Enlisting the help of the local guardsmen (of whom hantamouse's character is an officer, after all) was something I honestly hadn't thought of, but it made perfect sense so I let 'em run with it. (In retrospect, I believe the Lions of Brindol are supposed to be 5th level, not 3rd level, which would have helped a bit, but not that much. I'll have to go back to Red Hand of Doom and convert a statblock in case it comes up again.)

Once inside the tower, they took out one of the six hags leading the invasion of Brindol in a fight which had them worried but actually wasn't that difficult; they also discovered there is another interested party known only as "A" who seems to think of the giants merely as pawns in his or her own schemes. At the end of the session, the heroes had passed through a magic mirror into "the shadow realm" where the wizard they came to rescue is imprisoned, and we ended the session there.

Today

Today will be spent finishing off Christmas shopping and card-getting, getting the stupid heater in the car FIXED or else, and just generally dealing with all the piddly stuff that's been stacking up over the past several weeks. Hopefully we can start the week with a clean (or mostly-clean) slate, enabling us to start making forward progress again!

-The Gneech