Saturday craft time!

We did nothing today — nothing ‘productive’ anyway.  My wife did some sewing; my daughter did some painting, math workbooks, knitting, and watched an episode of Scooby Doo; I painted some minis.  We try to have ‘family craft time’ once a week, especially in the winter when we’re stuck inside anyway. Since my wife was a little under the weather we scrapped some major housecleaning plans and took it easy.  Craft time sprawled on and on, with breaks for lunch, laundry, and making pizza for dinner. Nothing recharges the batteries like spending time together making stuff.  Here’s what I painted:

Two Heritage “Knights & Magick” knights.

These two were painted fairly simply back about 1983.  The one with the sword my brother & I thought of as ‘Lancelot’ for reasons I can no longer place.  I was terribly frustrated with how I painted him, and tossed this mini in the brush water (I was about 11 then!) and when I remembered him later and took him out, somehow the ambient paint left him ‘stained’ with a very heavy black/green wash, that actually looked pretty good.  But not good enough that I didn’t strip him, like most of the K&M knights. The mace-man would make a good cleric if you overlook the sword hanging from his belt.

I also took some cheapo plastics and made some monsters.  One is a knight from a ‘Dollar Store’ set (the same one that provided the statues in a prior post).  This guy had a shield on a deformed, short arm, and I cut that off and transplanted a second mace.  As his helm has no eye slits, I thought he might make a good automaton or Iron Golem.  A knight is next to him for scale.  He’s mounted on a big washer for stability.

Lastly, I picked up a bag of skeleton warriors on Amazon to round out a purchase.  They are not great but are a step up from the Dollar Store crap.  There were six poses, and I did not use the ‘archer’.  I just painted one of each of four poses; I made do more some time, or save them to fight those dollar store knights.  A wash of burnt umber is practically all they need, but I went a few steps further and painted them completely.  Here are three of the poses:

The axeman and spearman both look very Egyptian, in terms of their weapons and shield, although all of the figures have a lot of extraneous skulls decorating them.  Here’s the spearman from the back:

The other two poses I used are more medieval:

The only conversion I did was to bend the flailman’s hand so that his flail is in a more natural position.  I did this by heating the arm with a lighter and bending when the plastic looked a little shiny (before it actually melts or bursts into flame!).  You can also submerge plastics in boiling water and then reposition them, but this was easier for just one figure.  For scale, here’s the flailman about to smash a knight:

Lastly here’s a skeleon, before and after:

These skeletons would be undead giants, obviously.  I like that some look kind of Egyptian…they will fit in as guardians of ancient tombs or ruins, and provide an option other than mummies as the big bads in a pyramid.

I also began work on repainting 30 or so Citadel snotlings.  They’ll see action in Telengard soon, I think.

Heritage games: Wizards & Heroes

Back in about 1980 or ’81, Heritage Models USA was releasing a lot of rules to go with their miniatures.  The “Paint ‘n’ Play” sets (Crypt of the sorcerer, Cavern of Doom) even made it into Sears and Montgomery Ward catalogs*.

They also released a much more ambitious system, Knights & Magick, which I’ve only seen in bits — getting a used copy of the boxed rules booklets will cost you something between treasure type G and H.  My brother got one of the “Paint ‘n’ Play” sets associated with it (Knights of King Arthur, which pitted Arthur and some knights vs. Mordred and his) so we probably saw a brief explanation of the rules there, but for some reason never tried them out — come to think of it, I think we had an incomplete set, lacking the rules, based on some stuff that I’ve seen online.  There was also a Merlin game with some simple magic rules for a game dueling wizards: Morgana La Fey and Merlin could cast spells at each other, and summon various servitors, to duke it out.  The rules of both of these have been scanned here or there online, and I guess you could reconstruct the core mechanics from those two samples (authored by Arnold Hendricks and Greg Sanford) although apparently the Knights & Magick  boxed set was stuffed full of awesome, and sounds like exactly the sort of game I’d like to run some time.  But those rules are are in a sort of limbo; no-one seems to know who owns the rights to them any more.

A pair of knights from the Knights & Magick line; the axeman's axe is a replacement. I love the simple but dramatic poses of the figures in this line.

They also released a series of mini-games,  some of which included plastic miniatures (!).  These included Woman Warrior and Cleric’s Quest; I’m not sure if there were others. The rules for these may have been based on their Swordbearer RPG.  The rules were credited to B. Dennis Sustare.

Another set of rules Heritage released was much less ambitious – Wizards & Heroes.  Coming in at just four pages, I was able to find the complete rules at a Yahoo group.  They are numbered “8210″ and priced 25 cents … I am pretty sure they either came with a catalog, or could be ordered for $.25 and a SASE.  The rules are extremely simple and designed to run fast skirmish-sized battles — perhaps a dozen minis to a side, although in principle you could also rune mass battles with the rules, if you come up with some rules for units moving in groups.

Each figure has three stats — fighting, armor, and missiles.  These are rated 1-5, and you hit (or save in the case of armor) by rolling equal to or under the stat’s number.  The turn has four phases:

1. player one moves, player two shoots;
2. both sides melee;
3. player two moves, player one shoots;
4. both sides melee

You roll at at the start of the game for who will be player one and two (high roll is player one).  Some figures might be Heroes or Wizards, and these have some extra powers — Heroes get two attacks in melee, and wizards can cast spells instead of taking another action in any phase.  Wizards can be level 1-4, and can cast one spell per level per turn (a level 4 wizard would have to forgo moving, missiles, and both both melee phases to cast four spells).  A neat idea in the rules is that wizards gain levels only by surviving battles, and start as level one, so you have to keep your wizard alive three battles in a row to make it to fourth level!  The spell list is very similar to the ones in the Paint ‘n’ Play games. There is also a rudimentary points system to buy troops, and optional rules for morale, parrying & wounds (so a hero might take more than one hit) and monsters (which basically use spell-like powers and are statted out like regular troops).  The rules, like most of the miniatures rules from Heritage, were designed by Arnold Hendrick, and they certainly resemble the presentation and ideas of the other sets. They were published in 1980, and remind me of the ‘free’ simple rules you’d find in Prince August catalogs and the Ral Partha “Rules According to Ral” — there is no question the rules exist mainly to sell miniatures, but they are so rules-light that I am tempted to use them the next time my gaming group gets together but for whatever reason we don’t play D&D.  The only problem is that the version I found is a pretty poor scan and in jpeg format to I’d really need to retype them for reference.

Given their simplicity, and expandability, they might be a good basis for the Dark Tower game I’ve been thinking about — begin with a hero, who builds up a band of followers, searches tombs and ruins for gold and relics, and eventually besiege the Dark Tower, ideally all on one table with maybe a side table for the dungeon crawls, Crypt of the Sorcerer style.  That could a day or two of epic gaming…

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*I am not sure if the “Famous Monsters“** and Superhero sets made it into the catalogs too but I think they must have, since they were an even more mainstream theme.  Unfortunately neither of those sets is very well documented online.  The two fantasy sets are available as scans at the Heritage Reference Yahoo group (my “Dungeon Delvers” rules are based on them too) — and of course Scottsz is still hard at work creating what I think of as an “Advanced” version, Sorcerers of Doom, which from what I’ve seen is a really awesome sort of combination of the original rules, plus a well thought out system to keep it DM-less while running more complex adventures than the random-table-driven originals…one could even run an old TSR module solo using these rules with a few tweaks.

**Apparently there was once an effort to re-publish this game, with Reaper minis back when they were recasting some Heritage minis, but the announcement page (link goes to Wayback machine capture) seems to have come & gone in a flash. Copyright/trademark issues?

Frost giants

I think I like frost giants more than any type of giant, even fire giants, probably because of the D’Aulaires’ Norse mythology books I read over and over in elementary school.

I painted the first three guys recently.  Left to right, a Ral Partha, Citadel, Grenadier, and another Ral Partha.

The last one I painted blue a long time ago, and repainted a few years ago, before the other three.

The first RP giant may be the first giant I ever acquired.  When I was a kid, there was a hobby shop in the “Berlin Farmer’s Market” (a sort of flea market/outlet mall, about 10 miles from my house when I was a kid, and the destination of one epic hike/bike ride for me, my brother, and a friend some time around 1983) which had tons of Ral Partha, Minifigs, and Heritage Models in their front window, and I found him there.  I was amazed at the time by the level of detail in RP stuff.

The three recently painted guys all have dead, white eyes.

The Grenadier giant was originally painted in a regular European flesh tone, with a black beard… I wanted him to be generic enough to be any kind of giant, I guess.  I like him much more now.  There was also a very similar version with s hammer instead of an axe.  The axe on mine was broken in the blister I bought — I actually assumed it was made that way to be assembled, but when I opened it up I realized it had just broken in the package. The repair I did here extended the axe’s haft a little, and unfortunately I didn’t realize how bent it was until I was finished gluing and pinning it.

The Citadel giant was a ‘donation’ that I took some time to identify, as he was replaced in Citadel’s catalog by a much ‘better’ Tom Meier sculpt when he visited England and did some work for Citadel.

The second RP mini has always been another favorite.  The mace-and-chain weapon, and the pose (he looks ready to charge head-first), make him look very menacing for a smaller giant.  I would be tempted to repaint him more in the style and palette of the other three, but there is nothing wrong with his current paint job, so he’ll just be a slightly different-looking member of the tribe, or maybe a visiting cousin. <Update: He’s the “Hecatron giant” according to the RP catalogs, so I guess I just made him a frost giant because of the horned helmet or something.>

Phraints in the pants: The OSR & “originality”

People with more time to think and write about this than me have already raised good points in the discussion about whether the OSR is stagnating because everything is so alike or whatever. You say “retread,” I say “let a million flowers bloom.”  I love reading about all the different things people are doing in their campaigns, from Jeff Rients’ “Surfeit of eels” to Planet Algol.  Retreads?  Whatever.

Not enough attention is being paid to some of the seriously innovative (and still Old School in all the right ways) stuff Scottsz is doing at The Sorcerers  of Doom.  Scott’s taking the four page rules for DM-less dungeoneering published by Heritage USA (a long defunct miniatures company) and making them into a cool as hell game.  It’s not exactly a RPG but it isn’t meant to be.  Here’s the mission statement:

Project Mission

Beginning with old Heritage Dungeon Dwellers rules, Sorcerers of Doom expands the game to be: 

1. A fun solo experience enhanced by more players.

2. A useful fast testing tool for RPG adventure writing.

3. An exploration of the middle ground between board games and role playing games.

4. A method of transitioning young people from board games to role playing games.

I can’t thank Scott enough for taking up this project and sticking with it (it’s been a lot more than year in the making…this is his third blog on it, in fact).

I’m doing the full-blown D&D thing right now but I love a beer & pretzels dungeon crawl.  Some time when I don’t feel DMing or we can’t “reach a quorum” to play I should break out the Cavern of Doom.

Anyway sorry about the post title…I came up with it when I was thinking it was “phrants” in Arduin but it’s “phraints.”

A ringing endorsement from John Eric Holmes

Heritage Company has marketed a series of boxed game sets specifically designed to hook prospective figure-using role game players into the hobby. Each box includes a complete short game with the referee’s map and attendant data, a box of lead figures (there are 8 in the Crypt of the Sorcerer set), and a box of paints and a brush. If one of these sets doesn’t get you completely engrossed in fantasy role-playing, nothing will!
– John Eric Holmes, Fantasy Role Playing Games.

Maybe Holmes garbled the packaging a little (the map and rules don’t require a referee, and everything was in one box) but The Crypt of the Sorcerer and the Cavern of Doom sets from Heritage USA were pure awesome. My brother and I each got one (I got the Crypt, because it included my three favorite monsters — an orc, skeleton, and troll!) and we played the heck out of them, adding rules for other miniatures and dreaming up new adventures. We had already been playing AD&D when these came out but to us they were all part of one hobby and we briefly tried to reconcile the differences (“why is the Black Pudding called a Slime monster in the Caverns game?” etc.)

Anyway I got into blogging and the OSR because I discovered Scottsz’s Sorcerers of Doom project (the current link goes to what I think is the third incarnation of the site*). At the time I was working on some games for my niece and some nephews (the boys will getting theirs a year late, because we did not see them last xmas) but the final product, I hope, will have something like the effect Holmes described.

*I guess it’s ok to move the SoD out of Valhalla now!

I hope everyone reading this has a great holiday. If you feel like leaving a comment, tell us about a gift you got that introduced you, or lead you deeper into, in the hobby, or else just a favorite dorkery-related item from yesteryear. Maybe something you’ll find in the “Wishbook“.

Morlocks and wights

I painted the “Beastmen” from Descent as Morlocks, as there are many Morlocks running around Telengard.  Maybe their underground city is connected to the dungeon somewhere.

The pose is a little exaggerated but they look OK.

You can see that they have little rag dolls on their belts.  I like that detail but who knows what it means?  Are the Morlocks child-like in some way, perhaps dim-witted and prone to tantrums?

They look a lot like my old school wights, with crazy hair after the Trampier illustration in the original Monster Manual.

The one in the center is Grenadier; the other two are Heritage. Ol’ Red Eyes on the left was one of the figures Scottsz sent me in exchange for for some 4e books.

In my Telengard setting, I’m changing Morlocks a bit from what the LL rules have.  They are more in line with AD&D Grimlocks — sightless, but with acute hearing and smell, 2HD, and very primitive… (well, these Morlocks are; they might have more advanced leaders).  2d6 will be the standard number encountered, so I’ll have to draft the wights if I roll a 10-12; there are only 9 Descent minis.

Baron Wars!

The Heritage Dungeon Dwellers line of miniatures were always one of my favorite old school line of figures.  Maybe they lacked the Trampier-esque grit of Grenadier, and the aesthetic beauty of Tom Meier’s Ral Partha sculpts, but they have a character of their own and the associated dungeon crawl rules that came in Crypt of the Sorcerer & Cavern of Doom had a huge influence on my earliest gaming experiences.  The Dungeon Dweelrs were sculpted by Max Carr, and the rules of the “paint & play” games were written by Arnold Hendricks.

So I can barely contain my excitement about the new line of medieval miniatures sculpted by Carr to go with a forthcoming set of rules called Baron Wars.

The figures I’ve seen on their web site look very nice, and obviously Carr has gotten a lot more skillful in the last thirty years (not to mention advances in mold making and metallurgy that have made all figure makers up their game!).  I’m surprised to see Arnold Hendricks has a hand in the game, as the last I’d heard he was completely out of the tabletop gaming field and attempts by myself and Scottsz to track him down have always met with defeat — I assumed he was not interested in the hobby anymore.

4e crap for old lead: Mission accomplished!

Monday night I found another package waiting for me. I knew Scottsz had just sent the minis he’d offered for my 4e books, and the address label confirmed it was from him! I’d already gotten email with images and a listing of his stuff (and two follow-ups as he found yet more figures).

They were all “buckled in” with heavy plastic ties. Scottsz was very concerned that they would get dinged up worse they already are in the mail, and came up with this way keep them all in place. Only the Yuan-ti was loose in the box, so it worked pretty well.

Here they are (sorry for the grainy photo taken on my phone!)

In the upper right, you’ll notice the thief with 10′ pole (broken to about 7′ — every example of this figure I’ve seen since BITD has his pole broken off at the hand). I NEEDED this figure badly, because it is damn cool and old-school and because my copy is lost. Similarly the Heritage barbarian woman in the lower right replaces my badly broken copy from the Caverns of Doom game. Score! There are also several Grenadier blister-pack figures: lizard men and a bugbear, which I’d never hoped to get to complete my collection in those areas… the Cockatrice variant #1 (I had variant #2, with a separately cast wing that never fit quite right, this one is one piece)… a drider from the blister pack to match my other drider from a boxed set. There is the lamia figure that was missing from my Tomb of Spells box! About 1/2 of these guys are “New” to me, and the of the rest, the “duplicates” either replace ones I lost or bolster the ranks nicely. It’s ok to have a third Umber Hulk, right? Also, with Khazan’s donation, I now have THREE Grenadier giant snakes. That really gives me the freedom to experiment in painting them up, or perhaps realize my mad dream of joining two together into one GINOURMOS snake!

There is also a nice Citadel troll (no base but clearly slotta-base era) and what I am tentatively identifying as a Minifigs giant of some kind (near the center, primered gray).

The “bonus” he sent is pure awesome, though, and I hope it is OK to mention it, as I know Scottsz has some secret projects in the works. Just as I’d been creating add-ons for the old Heritage dungeon crawl games, Scottsz had been tinkering with adapting old TSR modules to the same solo/GM-free rules, while adding his own interesting modifications to better simulate the RPG experience. He sent me a hand-drawn adaptation of the Hommlet moathouse dungeon (complete with awesome key and extra copies of the charts!) The whole thing is drawn on poster-board sections about the size of a standard letter sheet. NINE of them! Assembled, it looks thus:

This is about as big, or a little bigger than,the larger Tomb of the Pharaoh/Sorcerer’s Crypt map I did on on a single sheet of
foamcore last year. I will have to try this out soon!

Caverns of Doom figures, rebased etc.

I started this blog, lo these many weeks ago, to document a project of recreating the Caverns of Doom and the Sorcerer’s Crypt.  As I sought out information to fill in some gaps (Ihad lost some of the rules sheets and discarded the boxes, which had the character and monster stats in the case of the Sorcerer’s Crypt.  I found Scottsz’s Sorcerers of Doom project and was so impressed with what he was up to that I thought I’d start my own blog.  That’s when I put up most of the “static pages” too, as I was figuring out how blogs work.  The Caverns of Doom page just shows the map.  You can see some older, blurry pics on the Caverns of Doom post here.

So I touched up a few of these guys, and rebased them all on dungeon black.  I still have a few other original Heritage figures that came with the set to paint up, but in the meantime I’ve got similarly old-school stand-ins for the rest.

Left to right, a Grenadier wizard, a Prince August elf (cast from a mold), a Grenadier cleric, a TSR barbarian (the original figure in the set is a “barbarian woman”), a Heritage paladin, standing in for the knight, and the original thief figure, still one of the best D&D thieves I’ve seen.  They are standing on the map I made.

A slightly better shot of the wizard.  He is clearly using some sort of protection scroll, as it is pointed at his opponent!

Some of the monsters.  not pictured: the rats.  I have three of the original four rats, but usually use some plastic rats from the Heroquest game.  Back row, left to right, Grenadier vampire, original Heritage skeleton archer, Grenadier skeleton, original Heritage demon, a Standard Games mon-ogre standing in for the hobgoblin.  Front row, a Grenadeir slime and a spider made from a dollar store toy (you can get bags of dozens of these little glow-in-the dark spiders at Halloween…).

But the Caverns of Doom are deadly because of the Dragon most of all.  My Heritage dragon is mostly MIA (I still have the body section but not the head, wings, and tail!).  so I use a Grenadier that is the right size (3″ long) to fill the three squares.

Quite feline, actually.  This dragon is clearly the stalking kind.  I don’t like how the striped tail turned out but otherwise I’m happy with him.

“Light! More light!”

The latest batch of figures I’ve painted.

There’s a ton of good stuff at Philotomy’s OD&D Musings. One thing I’ve been intrigued by lately is that in OD&D, demi-humans could not see in the dark. The ability to see in the dark was a big motivation for me when I made nonhuman AD&D characters way back when. Because we rarely got to high enough levels to worry about level limits, there was usually no reason to be a human unless you wanted to play a human-only class like a Paladin or Monk. Being able to see in the dark (with “infravision” in AD&D, or with more logical kinds of night vision in later editions, which followed the lead of pretty much every other RPG in this regard) far outweighed the nominal benefits of being human. When I read about the original restrictions on infravision in Philotomy’s essay, it helped me make sense of the many several old D&D figures that appear to be demi-humans carrying torches and lanterns, not to mention certain classic illustrations of the AD&D Player’s Handbook .

What do AD&D dwarves need with a torch?

I really like the idea of denying demihuman PCs infravision. And not just because it would encourage the use of awesome torch and lantern bearers, but that is certainly part of it.

A Citadel Dwarf. He was actually made for their fairly recent boxed set of Warhammer Fantasy Battles (“Battle for Skull Pass“). There is a whole unit of miners with candles on their helmets in that set, which is totally awesome.  A lantern plus three candles on his helmet…this guy is gonna light up a hallway.  And with that beard, may spontaneously combust.

An old Citadel Dwarf. One of my favorites, although almost every Citadel Dwarf from the late 19080s is pretty cool, pumpkin-sized heads or not.

That’s one HELL of a nose, too.  Also n.b. that old school Dwarves are not always carrying those iconic* axes.  Why don’t more Dwarves carry swords?  They’re expert smiths, and making an axe is not exactly the high water mark of the weapon smith.

A Grenadier hireling from the hirelings set, circa 1980?

A Heritage Dwarf adventurer, circa 1979 or 1980, from the Dungeon Dwellers line. N.b. she has no beard. Sorry about the blurry pic.  She has a crossbow, which is not a bad idea for a hireling.  No sense rushing in to close combat.

The group from behind.  Note the backpacks.  All dungeon delvers should have backpacks.

The lone human, also a Grenadier figure from the Hirelings set. The camera is looking slightly down on all these guys, making them look a little distorted, but only slightly more so than they really are.

The quote used as the title of this post? Supposedly Goethe’s last words. And the last words of many an adventurer, I suspect.

*Every time WotC uses the term iconic character,  as if there is exactly one Platonic ideal for each race/class, I want to hammer a nail into the floor with my forehead.  I almost never actually do, though.