Keeping it real

While sections of the ruined tower were drying this weekend I spent some time prepping this wonderful citadel I've had for years. Its an expanding foam-resin model from Hudson and Allen, and I've always been really excited by its simple classic design and clean lines. So excited that I've never painted it, even!

It is finally underway, and I'm pleased for to be able to say so.



Also, while I was doing these first drybrush coats tonight, Juno paid a visit to the game room, which is a rarity. We talked about the tabletop, somewhat RPG-ish game I want to run for her and some of our other friends. I've had the idea for a year or so, and having some interesting player character figs outside the idioms of my existing WHFB collections is what drove many of my one-off character painting projects last winter. It was really helpful to sketch out some ideas I had and hear what interested her. She's probably the least into rule intensive, chart heavy, math laden gaming of any of our friends, and yet has an incredible imagination and appreciation for a rich world laden with real emotions, motivations, and other facets of character and story development. She'll be a real bell-weather for guageing how well I'm strinking a balance between hack-and-slash, and heavy role play elements. I don't want an excessive amount of either, and the whole thing is intended to be fun and easy, and free flowing. A tall order, but I'm interested to give it a shot.

I've also been revisiting some of the rule sets I started investigating for these games over the last year or more. So far the top two contenders are looking like Songs of Blades and Heroes, and Broadsword Adventures. SoBH looks a bit too simple, and straight up fighty... BS seems to have better flexibility for a little character development, and a not too complicated, but diverse enough basic character concept to allow us to deal with some of the crazy and creative things I expect my friends will want to do during adventures. It'll need to be stripped down on some fronts though if I use it, as only one or two folks I know have the patience or interest in something even as complex as that. If anyone has managed to run a light weight RPG / dungeon crawl with either of these sets; something a step or two up from beer and pretzels, several steps down from D&D, I'd love to hear any opinions you might have on it.

Anyway . . . I hadn't really indtended to write all that... mostly it was all about, Hey, check out the grey drybrushing on that keep, yo.