I hit a writing deadline last night, so today I am celebrating with pictures of minis and terrain. The deadline was for an adventure that will run at Winter Fantasy. I ran Shrine of the Jaguar Princess by Sersa Victory last month for my home group, and inspired by that, one of my goals with this project was to similarly make each location a substantial, “sticky” set-piece. No, “six skeletons, fight?” There’s another angle to each encounter location and lots of opportunities for the players to push their luck. I think that works best when they have a good idea of the potential reward and consequence, or when they can see one and at least assume the other. It should be a good time at the table, and I can’t wait to get into the developmental editing. In the meantime…

I painted up a bunch of Dwarven Forge cavern pieces. I find the caverns to be easier than the dungeon pieces because any of my sloppiness tends to blend into the natural aesthetic. In contrast, the factory dungeon drybrush color and texture can be frustratingly hard to match, although it doesn’t matter much once the pieces hit the table. No one else is going to notice, and some natural variation is appealing. But caverns feel easier to match, and they have the fun final layer of clear nail polish on the watery bits to give them that sheen and depth.

I started running a Shadowdark play-by-post game, both to play some Shadowdark and to see if a play-by-post game would work for us. It’s been great. Shadowdark’s always-on, around-the-table initiative system keeps things moving in an orderly fashion. The gang has been exploring a dungeon primarily generated from the AD&D DMG appendix tables and the old Monster & Treasure Assortment by TSR. We started with this to get our play-by-post procedures smoothed out, as I intend to run Stonehell or something of that sort later, but we’ve kept going because it’s been quite enjoyable.

Shadowdark combat is so refreshing. It’s genuinely exciting and frightening, and the possibility of injury or death is palpable. The characters have cast spells, scattered hot coals, thrown eggs, and set fire to oil to turn the odds in their favor. Still, poor Alm was killed and eaten by giant rats (pictured above). So it goes, bring in the next character!

The play-by-post game format means things move slowly enough for me to regularly post clarifying photos using terrain builds. That’s been quite fun. Speaking of…

We wrapped up things on Hot Springs Island and headed back to Ptolus. There were a couple places they either never went to or explored in full, but over all, we gave the island a pretty thorough going-over. And what a great adventure it’s been. I’ve raved about it before, and it still gets my highest recommendation. They concluded their island missions by collecting the last of the missing portraits. One was below this lizardfolk stockade. The lizardfolk are curious, the players never quite figured out what their deal was. Maybe they’ll come back someday to pull on that thread. In the meantime, a pitched battle erupted that ended with many dead lizardfolk and the palisade in flames.

The lizardfolk hut covered up a tunnel that led down into the ground. The cave below was a nice place to have a fight, offering lots of cover and reasons to move around. The characters emerged triumphant and pressed on to one more location, where they found…

A purple worm! One of the characters had previously been swallowed by more than one creature (on separate occasions), so she was prepared with a new spell in case it happened again. The gang was triumphant and extracted the last portrait from the belly of the beast. I’d had that mini ready in the cabinet for months, but they kept veering away from this site. So it goes sometimes!

This past summer at Lakes of Fire, our regional Burn, we hosted a miniature paint-and-take. I printed and primed a bunch of EC3D minis and provided paint, cheap brushes, and keychain pop-its as palettes, and everyone got to keep the mini they painted. I base coated this guy during the event. I could have told you as much, but I really rely on the illuminated desk-mounted magnifying lens I have at home, so he was a bit messy. After painting the caverns, I felt like getting back into painting some minis, so I pulled this guy out and touched him up. I’m pretty happy with him, and he has a unique origin story among my minis.

This morning, I celebrated hitting my deadline by painting another mini. This is another one from Lakes, and it has a dodgy speckled zenithal spray prime, so I used it to work on some colors and highlighting. I had already basecoated the sword using some leftover silver paint from the previous guy. At first I left the fur on her boots and shoulders white, but I felt like the whole thing was kind of bland. The red sash on the sword should jump out, but it’s only visible from certain angles. I considered painting the fur black with a grey highlight, or a reddish brown, or even a foxy red and yellow, but I settled on this yellow highlight. I think I’m happy with it, and if I’m not, it will be easy to cover with one of those darker colors. I kind of wonder if I should do more with the sword, the edge highlighting didn’t come through and that blue is pretty subtle…

Last of all, I painted up a few of these Star Wars-ish terrain pieces from Skullforge to test out a color scheme while I wait for the Dwarven Forge Starforged campaign to fulfill. I painted three or four more pieces, I’m not sure why I didn’t take a picture of them. My son thinks the piping should be black, but I like the dirty bronze. We’ll use them in Stargrave, hopefully soon as the dirt bike riding season seems to have wrapped up here in Michigan.