Spring Cleaning: Hand-Made STCCG Cards

Here's something dating from the dawn of the CCG era, from the looks of it, just after the Star Trek: Collectible Card Game's Basic Set came out. From the off, it looks like I was interested in designing my own cards, a hobby that evolved into the graphically better made Unauthorized Doctor Who CCG. Of course, these were made using photocopies, colored and written in by hand. Here's a sample of the 16 I did find (click to double in size):
All of my designs were inspired by Next Gen tie-in novels:
-Idun is a bog typical Personnel card from Reunion (her lack of flavor is how I know it was made just after the Basic Set; today, she'd be dual aligned Federation/Klingon).
-The Devil's Heart is from the novel of the same name and works with the concept of "charges", which never existed in 1st edition.
-Q-in-Law likewise takes its title from a novel. It "disables" a skill and ties into Lwaxana Troi, which also appears with Q in the book.
-The Choraii Ship is from The Children of Hamlin and should be pretty easy to overcome (Basic Set again).
-Starbase 193 is an attempt at a different kind of Outpost card (for the time) and has game text mixed in with its lore. It is featured in The Devil's Heart.
-Primitive Society has a fairly fun anti-Equipment mechanic. It's from A Call to Darkness.

These and 10 others were found in a box with a number of graphical dream cards made by others and found on the Internet (but not printed in color), each slip of paper stuck to the front of an actual (common) STCCG. All made by hand. How quaint!

Spring Cleaning: A Romulan Christmas

I'm only assuming August 28th is Romulan Christmas. Or Elvish Christmas. Or whatever that Star Wars script is supposed to be.

This is a Christmas postcard I just found sent to me by Kathy "Major Rakal" McKraken when I used to contribute a lot of wordage to Decipher's boards and website re: the Star Trek CCG.
The silver doesn't show up very well on the scan, but the pure gold does. Man, those were the days! Back when I only had to write ONE article each day.

Spring Cleaning: Crazy Jane

More Spring Cleaning... Sometimes you're looking for one thing, and you come across another. Like this Linda Medley sketch of Crazy Jane sent to me by an old mIRC buddy.
(And now I'm looking for that buddy's name somewhere and can't find it. Bound to find something else instead.)

Best Communist Wishes

Rummaging through some old files, I came upon an old birthday card for Carolynn. Quite clearly, I made it for her not long after we watched the musical Silk Stockings. You have got to see this thing. So the front:
The interior:
And the envelope:
Robots of the world unite.

Propping Up Your Game

Over on Hero Press, Flea posted a dungeon map he fabricated, which sent us spinning into a nerd's debate on which hot drink could best be used to simulate old parchment. Read it and believe it.

While table top role-playing games are the domain of the imagination, there's nothing like an actual object the players can handle to give the game an extra oomph. Maps, pictures and era-appropriate documents can all be made with a computer and color printer (not even color, in many cases), and I will often craft those if I can, but the aforementioned discussion sent me searching through old boxes to see what I'd made and kept over the years. Not much has survived, I admit, though I still have a Deck of Many Things:
The first of the sample shows the back, meant to simulate some kind of blackened wood. This was in the late 80s, long before I had access to Photoshop.

Regardless of the prop's quality, it acts as a focus for the role-playing. It is a piece of the game world, somehow smuggled into your own, and brings the game away from "my character does this" to "I am actually doing this". From narration to acting the part.

And it's easier than people think. Scavenging is a skill GameMasters should cultivate. Shiny rocks can be handed out as talismans, ioun stones or runes with a minimum of fuss. A massive old book can be turned into a grimoire by simply inserting pages of your own making in it. An old circuit board can act as the McGuffin for your cyberpunk run. Perhaps you've marked it with a clue in some way. A chess board can be repurposed into an entirely different game by simply changing the pieces to your mom's crystal collection... or your kid brother's HeroClicks. It's not always a matter of finding the right prop, sometimes it finds you! I've built entire games around a found object.

And then there's the prop as atmosphere. Put up maps of the game world on your walls before the players arrive. Light the room with candles or muted lighting, or get some color bulbs. A simple desk lamp can turn a dark room into an interrogation chamber. A laser pointer will let a player know a sniper is on to him. A simple cardboard tube will create that speaker voice you need for your A.I. If you have a weapon or illness with a certain effect, make that effect visual or auditory, and give the players those cues. It's great to see the paranoia that develops through the judicious use of crinkly paper or, if your players are patient, some "sweaty" water spray.

It's all about immersion.

RPG Week Gets Miniaturized

As promised at the beginning of RPG Week, a look at miniatures. Do I use them? Not really. I mean, I have, but it's usually a special occasion, like a big, crazy, final battle we want to visualize. And even then, every piece is a stand-in. Who has the time, foresight and resources to have all the enemies he or she needs for every possible battle anyway? DC or Marvel RPG players now have handy HeroClix which at least don't have to be painted, but you still have to collect them, and you still can't have "Your Own Hero"(TM) without a lot of work.

No, miniatures aren't for the casual gamer. In fact, I consider them a separate hobby entirely. If role-playing is a "game", miniatures are "arts and crafts". In my youth, I sat down and fully painted maybe 25 or so miniatures, with at least that number again never getting much further than primer. And while there are a couple that look to be pieces I would have wanted to use, they were mostly chosen for coolness. The monsters I found most cool, the Forgotten Realms heroes (like the inescapable Drizzt), and quite a lot of comical pieces (parodies or silly puns). Most are Ral Partha products, which were (and maybe still are) the best quality in the business.

So let's talk about the craft. The majority of miniatures I've seen were painted in matte colors. Not mine. I prefer glossy. Call me crazy but for one thing, it makes them look like ceramic pieces (pretty than painted lead or plastic), and for another, I do love monsters with glistening skin:This mind flayer looks really slimy. Another technique I used was painting with single brush hairs. Usually to attempt eyes (extremely difficult), but in the case of this troll, to represent cuts healing super-fast.
But it's where you successfully give a character eyes that you think it's all worth it. I've botched a few, but my first and best success was Drizzt's companion Bruenor:
Now I admit that, especially in this light, there's too much gloss on such areas as the beard, but the eyes look great. Bruenor presents another technique I used a lot. I always kept a bottle of really thin black, mixed with paint thinner as needed. I would apply this "wash" on the metalic surfaces like armor and weapons and leave it to drip off. The paint is so thin that it can easily be wiped off any non-metallic part of the figure, but will get into every little crack and dry there, creating the perfect highlights. Note the chainmail above, and below on an orc's shield:
The same wash effect can be used (with different colored paints) on leather, rippling muscle and even cloth to create the proper highlights. As you can see from my holding up the orc above, I stuck green felt under all my miniatures. This allows them to smoothly glide across a table like a chess piece.

Going back to fluid paints for a second, in addition to thinned out washes, I've also experiments with mixing wet paint directly on a figure, sometimes in copious amounts, to get special effects like this one at the base of the figure:
Not quite as visible in the picture as I'd like it, the roiling air currents are simulated by improperly mixed white and blue, which gets finer detail than anything I might have been able to paint using brush strokes.

One final technique to share with you: How to make gore.
Though I clearly messed up this necromancer's face and since chipped his hair, the gore in his hand still stands up almost 20 years after application. The figure has a small heart in his hand, but I decided to get some arteries in there using my special ingredient: eraser shavings. White erasers are best for this, rubbing off into stringy rubber shavings that you can dip in paint and apply liberally. It's like you're Todd MacFarlane!

I hope you enjoyed this trip down miniature lane and that you, dear reader, learned something about this fine craft. Or maybe you can learn ME something...

Official Christmas Post

I've got another one planned for later, but let this be my Official Non-Denominational Holiday Post, one in which I wish Happy Holidays to everyone on the blogosphere and beyond. So if you've ever visited here, or if I've ever visited you, I hope you're having a good one. I am too, after a fashion. I'm doing laundry, and last night I watched 8 episodes of Slings & Arrows (hey, the second season is at Christmas time). Later, I'll have Chinese food with friends. My kind of Christmas really.

I was looking through old drawers and I found these Christmas gift labels courtesy of Wizard Magazine back before it was only for men. Click to Christmasize. My favorite on the first one has to be Milk & Cheese. Who can resist their overpowering ambivalence?But Bone, Hellboy and Concrete are nice too.

As for the second, I'd go for the Madman or if I had friends "like that", Strangers in Paradise.
So from Lady Death, Darkchylde, Avengelyne, Witchblade and all their friends, a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year.

Spring Cleaning: Neutron

My DCHeroes games have been using a superhero called Neutron since 1990. I make him team recruiter and coordinator, not unlike the Martian Manhunter or Mr. Terrific on Justice League Unlimited. He's a device to get the "party" into action and bail them out of all the boring stuff (i.e. contacting the police, getting stuff analyzed). He's a cross between Reed Richards and Maxwell Lord (but without the useless wife, nosebleeds or killing your teammates elements).
But 1990 wasn't his first appearance, and digging through my various piles of crap has unearthed some of his origins. I actually gave birth to Neutron in 1983, during boring 7th-grade classes. I was just discovering superhero comics proper, and I created dozens of characters, one of which was Neutron.
Basically a guy who's the center of a gigantic atom, he can use those electrons to stop bullets, kick you in the face, and according to my original sketch, destroy helicopters (since retconned out). By 9th grade, I was really deep in the Chris Claremont's X-Men, so Neutron was a mutant. In fact, he was a member of the Mutant Misfits, a one-shot comic I drew myself but that has since been lost to the ages. In '87, he was still a mutant and apparently his alter ego was ME:
Yep, that's the old registration card from Marvel's Fall of the Mutants crossover. Yeah. I registered. Let's just say my politics have since changed.

Cue role-playing games. In 1989, my friend Rob Tam and I were fighting the dearth of RPGs on sale in our area by attempting to create our own superhero RPG. Like all our homemade games (fantasy and SF), it was a mishmash of various other games' stats we'd gotten out of old Dragon magazines and was totally unbalanced. Neutron was revamped (first appearance of the first picture in this post) as a scientist called Michael Stern (after Roger) who got shrunk into a black hole-making machine which transformed him into the hero we now know. I had this whole supporting cast for him, which Rob promptly killed off in the first "issue". That was just the way he rolled.

I think Neutron was much better off as an NPC in the DCH games that followed (and that continue to this day), though I did try to give him a go as a PC after buying GURPS Supers in '91.
Like 75% of role-playing projects, it just never happened, and this 250-point version of Neutron never saw the light of day. No problem though, he's still active and I guess my longest-running character (now on his fourth player group). Missile Man, Jello Woman and Super-E.T. can't say that.

Spring Cleaning: My Ambush Bug Action Figure

Once upon a time, I wwas a regular ToyFare buyer, not because I bought any measure of toys, but because I really enjoyed those pictures of home-made action figures. These were made by people who didn't give a damn if there'd never been a fully-articulated Deadman or Melter, by golly, they were gonna make their own! And I thought I could do that too!

So I scoured yard sales and pawn shops in search of figures that looked like they could become other figures, and when I did, I attempted the ultimate action figure: Ambush Bug!

My basis: A really discolored Super-Powers Riddler figure.
My tools: A hobby knife and sandpaper.
The result before I stopped working on it due to (I believe) marital problems: A bald Riddler!

But you can sorta see where it was going, right? The antennae were my only real chalenge (bent toothpicks?). Anyway, I can't bring myself to throw him away now, just in case I ever decide to finish my Ambush Bug with Super-Powers action! (Squeeze his legs and he writes a riddle! - well, I can't very well change the mechanism can I?)
People who do that sort of thing well: Fat Sal! Charlieman! Bill Burns! Ah man, just Google it, there are plenty more to like.

Spring Cleaning: Slideshow

As I go through piles and piles of crap, I quite often lay my hands on old comics I drew, or started drawing as I was solidifying my mini-comics empire. Some of them I don't even remember doing! But I remember this one alright. Called Slideshow (I hadn't gotten to making the title yet), it was meant to be a backup strip in my Stripper #4. And obviously, it's part of my search for easily-drawn subject matter.

(click to enlarge, it'll read better)

I'll have more crap like this, not all of it "dirty", through May's Spring Cleaning. That's a threat as much as a promise.

Spring Cleaning: Thunderbird!

People hate to help me move. The dozens of boxes full of books and comics may have something to do with it. The sheer amount of CRAP certainly does. Here's an example of something I've been carrying with me for more than 20 years and which has no use whatsoever: My Thunderbird ashtray!I made this in metal shop in 9th grade, back in the days when smoking wasn't really frowned upon and it made sense to impose such a project on 14-year-olds. I was always failing shop, so this thing is complete rubbish, and I don't smoke, nor have I ever, and it's not deep enough a dish to hold rubber bands or baubles. I guess I just keep it because the image I made in it (by way of tar and an acid solution) is the Thunderbird from my old AD&D book, Deities & Demigods (American Indian chapter).

Maybe I should take up smoking, cuz I still don't want to throw it away.

I am the worst spring cleaner ever.

Spring Cleaning: A box of junk

Doctor Week ends, yes, but the end of something is often the start of something new. And as we soon head into May, it may be time to do some spring cleaning...

Or since I never throw a damn thing away, Spring Cleaning - capital S, capital C - a new recurring feature here on the SBG! In the next few weeks, I'll be rummaging through some boxes full of crap I've accumulated over the years and I'll be showing them off on this here blog. I'm almost scared of what I'll find.

But in the spirit of the present celebrations, I'll start with something Whovian, no?
These are Dalek lead miniatures made for the FASA RPG, and they are totally RUBBISH! Or as we would say on this side of the pond: They're CRAP! Tiny when compared to the hobby standard, a Dalek wouldn't be much taller than a dwarf paladin and about half as wide. The miniatures further had problems with what we call "flash" (pieces of the mold still on the lead mini that you must file off) and were extremely fragile. It was entirely too easy to break off the gun, the plunger or the eye, and they were nigh impossible to glue back on. As you can see from the picture, I never got very far painting them. Two are primed and the other has some metallic paint on which I often used as an undercoat before applying actual details.

But I don't keep this for the Daleks. I keep it for the adorable little box they came in! That little TARDIS is just too precious for words. Swear to God, the Daleks are in a drawer somewhere, but the box is right there on my nightstand.

You have been visiting the depths of my geekitude. Be careful on your way up.

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Doctor Who Week Celebration Extra! This space reserved for other Doctor Who posts today.
-Dorian finally got a chance to sound off about the new series over at PostmodernBarney.com.