ABC: Always Be Cobbling!

Craft projects are big in my household, between my wife’s sewing and scrapbooking, my daughter’s myriad crafts, and of course my own constant painting and converting of minis. I was just taking stock of the half-started/partly completed projects I am working on, or planning to work on (although lately the garden and a tentative return to exercising and even this blog have been competing for time):

• 1/72 armies. I have several hundred plastic figures in 1/72 scale that should eventually be painted and based for wargaming (DBA), including several that are mostly conversion jobs since no-one makes Lydians, Neo-Hittites, and various others. These have been on hiatus for a couple of years now, since I’ve been more interested in fantasy and RPGs lately.
• Painting (and to some extent re-painting) my old D&D figures, of which there are maybe two hundred, if I don’t count the vast piles of plastic figures from BattleMasters, Lionheart, Age of Mythology, and other board game figures I’ve drafted for RPG and wargame use, and if I don’t count some newer figures…
• Several armies worth of fantasy type armies, including some complicated conversions (I’d like to take some of the Lionheart knights and make them into fully armored centaurs, for example).
• Completing the rules additions for “Dungeon Delvers” and the large new Egyptian tomb dungeon I made for it, which will require some playtest time.
• Photographing all of the painted figures for pet project (I’d like to create a series of booklets of NPCs and monster stats, assigning names and values to each figure in my collection, probably statted in D&D as well as “Dungeon Delvers” )
• Fleshing out the megadungeon and campaign world for an OD&D or Labyrinth Lord campaign to rune someday.
• Testing out the Chainmail rules as wargame and for OD&D to see if the it would be viable to run a convention game consisting of a skirmish, a short dungeon crawl, and a larger mass battle or siege in a semi-simulation of the old Dark Tower electronic bard game.
• Painting up hordes of zombies and a few modern figures for zombie gaming.
• Painting up a huge pile of plastic cowboys & “Indians” for use with Boot Hill.
• Painting my swashbuckler/pirates figures, including all those undead pirates I bought earlier.
• Painting my small collection of superheroes and sci-fi figures, just to get them finished.
• Rebasing some figures that I rather impulsively put on flocked “grassy” bases although they really would be better off on neutral black bases, since they are for RGPs and may be indoors as well as outdoors.
• Make chess set, and/or a hnefatfl set for myself (I’ve made both as Christmas gifts before but you know, the shoemaker is barefoot or however that goes.)
• Create a pair of Ragnarok armies (both sides of the Norse apocalypse) for the game Hordes of the Things. Not to mention a Chaos army, an Imperial Warhammer army, some Hyborian armies, and a ninja army, all for HOTT…
• Repair a couple of Grenadier “masterpiece” models…the Goblin War Giant, which has a number of loose goblins, and the Undead Giant,which is currently in pieces.
• Build a 28mm scale viking hall, a tavern, and a coach house that are big enough for RPGs & skirmish wargames.
• And a scale pirate sloop, and a galleon, and a merchantman ship, all for pirate games.

Good grief. I’ll be doing this when I’m senile.