I sometimes wonder if I would have been a wargamer had I found that hobby before D&D. I’m a highly visual role-player and I love minis and terrain. I find great joy in making little plastic figures fight each other on the tabletop. However, other than the Frostgrave family of games, I don’t play any wargames. Maybe I’ll have to do something about that in 2024.

In the meantime, much has been said about the “golden age of RPGs” that we’ve been in for the last few years. Both the number of participants in the hobby and the range and depth of their creative endeavors have grown in unanticipated ways. The miniature hobby is also in a wonderful era. Painting lessons and techniques are more accessible than ever online and virtually anything is possible with 3d printing. It really is amazing. I enjoy both 3d printing and painting, even if my skills are middling at both. I can get results that I’m perfectly happy using in my home games and I enjoy the process.

WARNING: spoilers for the Dark of Hot Springs Island ahead!

My main home campaign is a 5th edition D&D game. We play on Sunday mornings with a semi-open table, so if at least four out of our seven players can make it, the game is on. We started in Ptolus (except transplanted into Kobold Press’s Midgard setting, filling in for one of the Seven Cities), dinked around a bit, delved into the Scarlet Citadel (again, transplanted into the dungeon labyrinth beneath Ptolus. Modularity!), and then the players signed on to do a stint with the Martel Company and set sail for Hot Springs Island.

I’ll write more about this another time, but the Dark of Hot Springs Island is possibly the best adventure I’ve ever read or run. It is richly keyed and deeply interconnected, but it’s somehow never overwhelming, and the island is brought to life through procedural generation. It’s rare that I have to worry about getting something wrong or forgetting something as almost everything can be circled back to later.

This is in stark contrast to linear adventures that boil my brain as I worry how on Earth I’m going to get my players to agree to weak hooks to advance the story, or bore me to death as I shepherd them along. The DM is a player and they deserves to be surprised and delighted in the course of play too! This is a rant for another time, but I hold that emergent play is what made RPGs matter in the first place, and we should lean into it whenever possible.

Case in point: my players have met the majority of the factions on Hot Springs Island and most of them point to Svarku the efreeti as the cause of nearly all of the local problems. Svarku is one of the best villains I’ve ever read. He doesn’t have a world ending evil scheme. In fact, his primary desire is just to reestablish the status quo on the island so he can get back to be a lazy, self-indulgent, horrible person. It’s great! We all know that guy! My players hated him almost immediately. They didn’t need a quest giver to ask them to get rid of Svarku. They hate him, in a way that is rarely successfully evoked by a published module.

Of course, he’s also wildly powerful and out of their league, commanding wish magic and an army of fire salamanders (combat is war, there are no balanced encounters here). The PCs met Svarku face-to-face when they broke into the cabinet in his rumpus room, and he offered to spare their lives if they found the missing Gem of Zumakalis for him within four days (five for Jonty, who rolled exceptionally high on his Persuasion check). They came close to finding it once, but I came up with a bad mechanic for the search, and they gave up and went on to pursue other interests. While they were looking for the gem, they met Fatty Salamander, who told them about the upcoming New Moon Party, and he offered to do them a favor if they could bring him a broadback to barbecue for the party. They agreed, and after a couple days with the clock ticking down, finally went looking for one.

The hunt did not go well. The dice were against them and it took all day and most of the night. Only a clutch locate creature spell sped things up, and they finally bagged their quarry. But then they had to trek across the island to deliver it! By the time they got there, Fatty and all the other salamanders had already left for the party. This is where emergent play comes in: they had a decent plan, they were following an obvious plot lead, and in a linear game, they should have gotten the payoff. But the passage of time and the rolls of the dice were out of my hands, so things went a different way!

The group resumed the search for the gem in the salamander crash pad, clued in by a suspicious antimagic zone. I had a better mechanic this time (roll 1d6, (1) anger the albino ogre and it attacks, (2-4) nothing happens, (5) find a different discard treasure, (6) find the gem), and they immediately found the gem. After looting Spark’s multiplayer booze vault, they emerged from the caves and a player declared their character was inspecting the gem. The gem has magical powers, one of which is that if it is touched by a mortal, it summons the efreeti princess Seera. It was a sort of anti-theft enchantment that she had laid on the gem, but it was suppressed by the antimagic field until now. And so the session ended with a very angry but excited Seera being summoned into their midst.

Emergent play! I thought the broadback barbecue plan was going to work and that they could then renegotiate with Svarku and buy some more time. Instead, they’re running out of time, the broadback carcass is now taking up the entire (looted) booze vault, and they are likely to gain a tremendously powerful ally. I did not see this coming, and in fact, I was worried about the pacing of the session when the hunt kept turning up giant centipedes and tabibari. But now we’re set to have one hell of a New Moon Party when we resume play after the holidays.

So, miniatures! The mini I made for Seera is pictured above. The sculpt is by Artisan Guild, who I’ve been a patron of for ages. In fact, they’re one of the sculptors that inspired me to get into 3d printing in the first place. I love their aesthetic and they make highly textured, dynamic sculpts that take paint well.

I’m a lazy painter, so I love the slap chop method. I spray primed Seera in black and then dry brushed on grey and white layers before applying contrast paints. Then I finished up with a little more dry brushing and edge highlighting. The metallics were a traditional base/wash/highlight. I’m pretty happy with her! I may have used some Interference Purple for her eyeshadow, but I painted her months ago and can’t quite remember. It took my players longer than I expected to meet her! All together, she is a powerful figure, ready to punish this meddling jackass Svarku and reclaim her position in the City of Brass. We’ll see how it all works out!