The Most Popular Post For 2022, Tis The Season For Heat And Coming Projects

 The Summer is my favorite time of year as my daily swim leaves the indoor pool and now occurs in rivers or outside pool. My power bills also plummet as I no longer use central heating or radiators. The downside is that when there are a few 30C + days in a row the double+ garage (one of my war rooms) can warm up a little. Fortunately, although it has a tin roof it has brick walls, some roof insulation and my unruly garden of 'overgrown' trees and shrubs shades it and the house. But on those exceptionally warm days I do sometimes turn on my 'air-conditioning'. This consists of an old fan tied to the ceiling beam. It is located over my primary work bench area.

  MOST POPULAR POST

I enjoy checking out the most engaged posts, at least that is what I assume because the posts coincide with the most viewings. This year it was mid-November, 'The Undead Get Revenge On Chaos' so here are a few random pics I just now took of my 1/32 Undead. Smile, bony blokes!

   Why does the giant bony bat have bone ears? I guess it is just that this species is different to normal bats.

                                  That spawn creature is really a Chaos one. It was made from a sea worm casing and added on bits. Moving on, those greenish spooks played a big role in Undead success.

                                                              I think these are undead cats.

      He is not undead; he just smells that way. This was a conversion of a plastic 'Igor' type figure I did a long time ago. The cheapo bag he came in included the wonderful two headed mummies and a witch.

                                             I gave my skellies a new coat of bright blue paint.

                  This is an unknown metal figure. I interpreted him as a vampire but although his armor and muscles are cool I would have preferred an action pose.

WARGAMES

My reliable wargame sparring partner, Mat, and I got quite a number of games in this 2023. I am proud to say that they were some of the most unusual matchups of armies devised by Man. We had, for example, Ozzz, invaded by numerous invaders the most unusual being Barsoom.

Recently my daughter surprised me by suggesting we play a wargame. That is still in place as she lack's the resilience for a four or five hour game. However, I am confident we will complete the game and a report will follow. I am torn between wanting her to win and in countering her army.

CAMPAIGN

It has been over a year since Mat and I have restarted our Fantasy campaign game. I just avoided all the paperwork of preparation but now I am determined to organize it over the next two weeks. The main problem was that the record for Mat's surviving forces was not clear. That probably works out well for him as he did not have a lot left!

Recently we rolled a percentage die to see how many 'years' had passed and it was six! That meant all the heroes and characters aged by six years. I rolled for my older characters (those over 60) and one of them lost a 'life' from old age. (They have multiple lives, usually between two and three). Most of my characters are older than Mat's, perhaps matching our own age difference!

So what I am also doing is working out our map hex revenues. Last campaign, although I failed to capture any of Mat's capitals or castles I did capture some of his border hexes. Captured land yields only half the usual income but it still added to my revenue and lessened Mat's. Also, Mat's already small Bogavania is severely reduced. Fezia is vast enough that its loss of territory is less traumatic.

 I also captured enemy supply wagons and suffered fewer losses. I even came into possession of life sized gold statues that were created when Mat's wizard turned some of my men into statues! His army was retreating so I was able to place them on wagons and head back to Beerstein with them. I may thus add some additional credits to Beerstein's treasury, subject to discussion with Mat.

In addition we each get the 'free' troops and characters that survived our recent Dinosaur Egg hunt game. This was kind of separate from our campaigns but the back story ties it in. I am going to assume that the dinosaur eggs we have will take a while to hatch and then to train the hatchlings so we might not use the dinosaurs until the second campaign.

Another continuation is the POW situation. In our recent game Mat capture one of my heroes. In our last campaign I captured two wizards and some Fezian troops. We can try to convert our POWs to fight on our own side or use them in prisoner exchange or set them to work in the mines to increase production of much needed metals. I doubt very much, though, that I would want to free the wizards as they are too powerful. Fortunately, my own wizards were able to place restraining spells on them that worked due to the captives weakened state. (No, I didn't actually dice for that; I just made it up then!)

I'll be sending details to Mat of credit availability, heroes lists etc and then we can work out our new armies and dispositions. After that we will dice to see if we actually go to war or are invaded by third parties. Peace might even break out, in which case we will dice again for passage of time before the next war! The beauty of this is we don't dice for who we are at war with until AFTER our secret map troop placements. Allowing for third party incursions means we take a risk if we just place them to deal with the previous known enemy.

My long term plan is to carry on the wars into later periods of technological development. The next will be a transition from matchlocks to flintlocks. I have concluded that the main difference is the latter is somewhat more reliable in wet weather. However, I want to generally introduce the impact of weather on our little troops. 

Another, longer term plan is to introduce 'unknown lands' to colonize. We would dice to see what level of development they are at. Or we could invade our non-human neighbors. That would be a little scary.