Augmented Reality Sandbox

I recently received a call from an outdoor education school looking for help in creating an "augmented reality sandbox"... Now that was a voicemail that got my attention!  I ended up having to leave a message on their end and may have turned them off after saying I'd be happy to help if they didn't mind having it done in linux rather than OS X (as they wanted) for technical reasons. I'm guessing that they gave up on it or went elsewhere, I should probably try them back at some point (maybe they just don't know they can run linux on their Macs).

Poking around a bunch on the UC Davis site they'd cited as inspiration, I found myself wanting to build this thing for my own purposes, which would involve trying to recreate old TSR module landscapes a la my B2 Sketchup exercise, only maybe this time I'd be able to plop minis right down into the scene if I could get the scale right. I haven't researched this - I imagine a ton of table top wargamers are way ahead of me..? Mind you I reckon this would run a couple thousand dollars and take a lot more spare time than I have to put together. I really should call those folks back, huh?

East Carolina University's Geology department has a nice video of one of these sandboxes up and running.

Miniature Modeling and 3D Printing With Minecraft and Mineways

Minecraft players! Have you ever thought to yourself how cool it would be if you could export your creations into a 3d physical model to share with your pencil and paper rpg players? For visualization purposes, wouldn't it be great to hand them a small model of the dungeon, castle, or valley?

Meet Mineways, a free program that allows you to "interactively select a model from a Minecraft world map and render it, or send it to a 3D printer or 3D printing service such as Shapeways." Looks like a lot of potential here... Minecraft modeling is very intuitive - you could easily create your own miniatures. Even cutaway views are possible.

Miniatures for an Island Hopping Campaign

On a whim, I’ve been searching around for miniatures that would work well in an island hopping campaign with a Polynesian/Hawaiian feel. Here’s what I’ve found so far...

Bloodaxe Miniatures has a selection of 15mm “Ancient Hawaiian” figures. I suppose these might work opposite 25mm minis as pygmies. Detail is hard to find in 15mm. My favorite of this bunch is the priest with a carving held over his head.

I found a couple of brief reviews. They’re much better looking when painted (more examples here and here).


Eureka Miniatures has a similar line of Hawaiians, also cast in 15mm. Here’s their version of a priest holding a mask over his head.

Yet another is Mick Yarrow's collection. I couldn't find any decently sized pictures of them though.

Pulp Figures has a number of 28mm Melanesian Island Warriors available.

My favorite find was Crunch Waffles' selection which ranged in size from 19mm to 80mm. I really like their Ogre Mage (below) as well as their "gobbo"...
I wondered how easy it would be to find plastic miniatures that might be sold as souvenirs - apparently some of the older ones are very collectible. I didn't run across anything that jumped out as suitable though (at least not for what I had in mind). I did find some 3" tiki carvings that would work well as statues of temple gods or maybe as monsters themselves.

I'd be curious to hear if anyone knows of similar minis, especially in 25mm... there are definitely a lot of Amazons that could be reworked, as well as probably Native American or even Innuit figures that might do.

Valdemar Miniatures "Masterclass" series

If you're a fan of miniatures and haven't seen them yet, take a look at this great series of creations by Alex, cast in both plastic and metal at 1/72 scale. I really like some of his subject matter and expressions. A small sample follows...

Do-It-Yourself D10

Our video chat game was canceled tonight due to a player’s hard drive failure, so I had some time to goof around and made another paper die. I’d been thinking about how to make a d10 - definitely harder than my previous paper d8. I decided to make it a little larger than normal for ease of cutting and folding. It had to have 5 tabs to hold it together decently (the d8 only took 3) and I think the extra weight of these might have reduced its accuracy. It still did pretty well on a quick comparison test of 100 rolls:
Incidentally, greetings visitors from Metafilter, I see there was some interest in a picture I linked to quite a while back of a Gelatinous Cube. You might keep an eye on this seller on eBay if you’re interested in one or two of your own - cheap too. A big thanks to Bliss Infinite for pointing them out, I picked up a couple before they sold out and they’re killer (pic below).

DIY Gelatinous Cube: The Quick and The Dirty

I read Michael Curtis' post on his homemade Gelatinous Cube miniature and was inspired to give it a go. For some reason I always think of gelatinous cubes as translucent green even though I know they're described as "nearly transparent" - a google image search shows I'm not alone. I really don't understand it. Part of their appeal is the fact that PCs might walk straight into them. Still, maybe translucent green wouldn't show up with infravision or as much under torch light. Maybe the green version is a peculiar local variety in my game. Whatever.

The Quick: My first thought was: why make a mini? I can just take a plastic dice container, remove the bottom, turn it upside down, and voila! This has the added advantage of allowing you to put it over the top of your players' minis. If you like a green version, get out a green marker and use it to color the plastic container. If you don't want to permanently color it you can cut and fold some green acetate to the right size and put it in the container, taping or gluing it there if you like. I cut two sheets to try this since I couldn't be bothered to measure where to make folds.

Looks a little more like a gelatinous parallelepiped than a cube though. Not very gelatinous either.

Therefore, The Dirty: I really like some of the epoxy-resin mold produced versions of the Gel Cubes I've seen on the web. But there's something about being able to take another mini and put it inside the dang thing whenever you like that appeals to me. Plus, some of that stuff looked pretty toxic at the art store. So I decided to construct my own cube. First I got a length of balsa wood, about 3/16"x3/16" by 2'. I cut this up into appropriately sized pieces (I was going for a 2" cube) and glued them together in a such way that there would be some reinforcement.
Then I cut some green acetate into 5 squares slightly smaller than 2"x2" each and glued these to 5 sides of my cube. These gave it a little more strength. Too late, I realized that I should have painted the balsa before gluing it together as its pale color would be easily seen through the acetate once I was finished. Ah well, I painted it after the fact as best I could.

Next, I took some paper clay (since it air dries) and molded this around all the edges, leaving aside the open bottom face of the cube.


Then I painted it. The whole thing came out way more green than I'd wanted. Still, I've grown attached to the little monster... Here's our hero, before and after being swallowed by the creature.

Fun with Mushrooms

I was delighted to discover the king trumpet mushrooms my wife had bought for use on Thanksgiving, and immediately pulled them out of the fridge and went looking for miniatures to pose with them. I soaked some paper towels and put them around the bases of the mushrooms to get them to stand up straight so I could take a decent picture.One quick and dirty GIMP job later, I've a fairly decent image to complement a future game location's description. It could use some work here and there but it's a start. :P

Smegging Minis

My latest acquisition was purchased in the hope that it would finally satiate my Red Dwarf obsession, but it seems to have had the opposite effect... I'm consoled by the fact that my rank has gone up considerably in the process: If my wife had any doubts about whether she was married to someone in the elite Nerd Corps, they went out the window as I walked into the room merrily whistling the theme music to the show while “flying” Starbug 1.

Knowing there might be a few fellow members of the corps out there who would appreciate this achievement, I thought I’d share here and post a couple of pictures.

Update: X-Plorers stats for the beast:

Ship Class 3.1 Frigate (Jupiter Class)
Crew: 4-175 (can transport an additional 1000 for extended periods)
Hull Points: 500
Number of Weapons: 4
Weapon Damage: 1d6+2
AC: 11 (or 10 if mining vessel)
NPC Skill: 15/13/11+
XP Value: 500
Cost: 1000m CR
Special: Equipped with 4 Class 2 (Scout) Vessels

Soccer/Football Minis Game - Free Download

Here’s some news that might especially appeal to Gabriel at My RPG Characters. Writing from Uruguay, he's been tracking the World Cup games in the form of “encounter” posts on his D&D blog. If you’re on the MegaMinis mailing list, you may have already seen the new Golden Goal game they’ve posted as a free PDF download… It’s a soccer/football minis game complete with included paper minis.

"With the World Cup in session, we thought it would be a good time to release our first set of table top game rules. Golden Goal V1.0 is a FREE test version containing everything you need to start playing. Rules book also includes 2D paper minis and templates to help you build a quick playing field. We have also launched a Yahoo group (address found in the footer of the rules) for those of you with questions or suggestions."

I haven’t played it yet, but the paper minis seem decent enough if you actually take the time to cut them carefully (I haven’t, which should be obvious in the picture above). MegaMinis has also released a line of metal miniatures for the game - which would seem like a must have for any die-hard soccer/minis fan. Personally, I’d paint them up like the Rochester Flash… the only professional team I can remember going to see here in the U.S.

DIY Miniatures

Last week I was going through one of those drawers that has a ton of odd items in it - markers, tape, batteries, computer cables… For some reason there was a small package of Sculpey in there. I immediately began to think of easy monsters I could sculpt with it. Oozes, puddings, jellies, elementals, modrons, shriekers, piercers, and giant snakes all sprung quickly sprung to mind.

Then I remembered Rusty’s old Beer Ooze creature, which David helped me dig up again. So I sculpted this little terror, put it in the oven to bake, and after it finished and I turned off the oven, I left it in there to slowly cool down. Then I went to a work appointment, thinking I’d be back well before dinner. Big mistake. My wife came home and set the oven to pre-heat to 425 degrees, eventually smelling my burning sculpture in there. She got it out but it was petty messed up (pictured above). I still kind of like it, but it's no beer ooze.

I was a little attached to that first bugger, but I started from scratch, and made another one which this time survived. My monster is much bigger than Rusty’s write-up, or maybe it’s the mother of all beer oozes. I need to take another stab at the paint job, but what I was going for was the beer sort of rising up and getting ready to strike with a frothy white head of goodness. I mean evilness.

All this ridiculousness lead me to google how to go about making one’s own D&D miniatures - surely, I thought, someone out there took this a little more seriously than me. So here’s a little link dump of my quick findings…

Robertson Games has at least a couple of posts about sculpting minis with polymer clay.

StormtheCastle has a very comprehensive DIY guide to sculpting fantasy miniatures, complete with video tutorials to accompany the text.

MiniatureWargaming.com has a number of good links on the subject.

The Sculpting Tools blog will help seriously interested readers create their own modeling tools.

Finally, NewbieDM has an article about using plastic 3d printers to sculpt miniature parts. It's not really in the realm of frugal with 3d printers running in the thousands of dollars, but maybe one day that’ll come down like the cost of computers has over the years - an interesting glimpse into a possible future of do-it-yourself gaming miniatures.

Dragontooth 25mm Lead Miniatures

I was looking through an old Dragon the other day and saw Dragontooth's ad for their giant (pictured above). It made me curious to see the rest of their line - I found another couple of ads (below) and then Dave's Yahoo group with its great collection of catalogs and pictures. The LGS never had any of these when I was a kid...I think I would recognize and remember the blister pack. I get a sense that they're pretty uncommon (I couldn't find any on eBay). A lot of the designs are kind of trippy. Dig this giantess Big Meg for example. There's a lot of photos here too - apparently they put out some decent pig faced orcs.

Heritage Miniatures 1982 Newbie Guide

I've always played with minis, though with minimal involvement, and we never bothered to paint them. Since taking up the hobby again though, I’ve been rebuilding my toxic lead collection and now am interested in personalizing them with some paint. I follow a few excellent miniatures focused blogs, and have bookmarked a few tutorial sites, but the only printed guide I have is the one I only recently acquired after being gifted a Heritage set by a game store near Portland.

I decided to scan and make this available here - Heritage is no longer in business (as far as I know) and this 1982 document is definitely for beginners. If nothing else, maybe it will be of minor historical interest to someone. Due to the odd size of the original, the scan didn’t come out perfectly. It’s a bit squinty on 8 1/2 x 11, and the original is even worse, but you can magnify it pretty well due to the resolution here. Thumbnail above, download here.

Name That Mini

Here's a little fella I picked up for a dollar a few weeks back at the LGS...Poor thing's lead horn is a bit blunted from falling over because of the shabby base. Preslotta FTW!

Reminds me of an old Grenadier, but I don't know for sure. Anyone? An oriental dragon? It's slightly larger than a standard 25mm. Looks a bit like the Python Jabberwocky.

Cleric, Meet Anti-Cleric

Who else wants one of these? Totally cool, but since it’s the only Center Stage mini I’m interested in at the moment I'll have to see what else they come up with (though the $1.79 price is right I can’t bring myself to pay $6.55 for USPS priority mail shipping). Is this the only 25mm, upside down cross wielding cleric mini ever made?


I’d love to have my pseudo-cross bearing cleric on the table across from this guy... That’s a pretty loud “In your face, Jack Chick rabble!”

The Werewolf Limerick

There once was a werewolf from Dyvers

Who looked on the bright side of his curse:
"It's true I eat babies -
But I don't have rabies!
I mean, it could always be worse."

FLGS Score: Miniatures at Ancient Wonders in Tualatin, Oregon

I made my third ever trip to Ancient Wonders in Tualatin earlier this week. I have to head up to Portland on business several times a year and it’s not far out of my way. It’s a great store, with a lot of 1st and 2nd edition D&D books and modules. The prices range a bit, but are pretty much in line with what you can expect to buy them for on eBay (versus scoring a lucky auction win), although you’ll save on shipping and have the advantage of being able to examine the merchandise beforehand. I’ve been slowly replacing my long lost 1e module collection, but this time due to the aforementioned budget cuts, I only picked up two of them. I chose N1 Against the Cult of the Reptile God and U1 The Sinister Secret of Salt Marsh.

On checking out, one of the owners asked if I’d found everything I wanted, to which I replied that my only problem had been narrowing down my choices. Then I asked if he had any old lead for sale, like 25mm preslotta stuff from Grenadier or Ral Partha. He said that he couldn’t sell any of that any longer due to regulations having to do with the lead content. But he asked me to hold on a minute while he looked in back to see if he had “any weird stuff”. He came back with a box of old Heritage 25mm lead miniatures. It was the “Level 4 & 5 Monsters” package from 1982, and was complete with inserts: monster descriptions, color guide, and the Heritage Introduction to Painting Miniatures sheet.

“Oh nice, yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. Stuff like that.”
“Well, I can’t sell them to you…But I can give them to you. Here ya go.”

The set turned out to be complete, with a few other random figures (a Grenadier cleric, unknown MU, what appear to be two homunculi, and an orc or goblin.

I thanked him and promised I’d spread the word, so here it is. Get over there and give them your money, they’re awesome folks! Thanks again Ancient Wonders.

By the way, in looking at the box cover, I found it interesting that Heritage neglected to mention the cockatrice therein. Hmmm. 1982 mind you.

Mini Props - St. Martin's Shop

On our way out of the local annual Asian Festival yesterday, I saw a couple of items that seemed not too far off from 25mm mini scale. They were $3 each - at that price I thought why not? One seemed closer to scale than the other, but maybe I could make the lighthouse/tower thing be the abode of a gnome somewhere. Hmm, maybe that'd make it a pretty short and useless lighthouse. Anyhow, I'm guessing these were overstock, originally intended for sale at some super touristy shop on the island of St. Martin in the Caribbean. For our purposes, the shop could contain the holy symbol, incense, and healing potions (Ack! Selling potions you say?!) of a local religious celebrity.

Here's a quickly GIMPed photo, with an old unpainted Grenadier thrown into the mix. I guess it's either a statue of St. Martin or the shop owner's gone way over the top with his colloidal silver imbibing.
I love found props like these. I remember using styrofoam packaging (like Zak recently) after Christmas while all the boxes were still around, as various structures in D&D. Though the use of minis in our games has always been minimal to nonexistent, I continue to enjoy them just for their own sake.

VOIP Game Turns Into Remote Desktop Support Session & Misc.

I couldn't resist plunging into a remote support session to troubleshoot a hard drive indexing problem just before our game. Most of the time was spent just in getting the remote desktop sharing to work because of firewall issues. I finally got around that with a combination of Skype and Yuuguu. This kind of thing is fun for me, but I knew it'd eat up some time, so we just rescheduled. Will trade tech support for game materials! :)

In other non-news, I picked up some Game Color inks by Acrylicos Vallejos at one of the four FLGS's in the area. That's still amazing to me, considering how small a city this is...one of the blessings of the large University presence in Eugene. This helps to lessen the pain of the Ems baseball stadium likely being torn down and the team having to share the new on campus stadium with the UO team, but I digress. Anyhow, these Game Color inks are made in Spain, and I like that they're not made in China. Nothing against China per se, but I just feel like somehow there might be some crazy garbage in the ink made there. I also bought some Citadel brushes. I'd almost gotten the brushes from a downtown art store but the prices were too high, and though the Citadels weren't cheap, they weren't too bad in comparison. The primer was just a little too pricey for me at the game store, and they only had gray and white, so I picked up a can of Krylon flat black at True Value. I know next to nothing about mini painting, but thought I'd give it a shot as just another aspect of the hobby to try out. The black seemed like it'd be a lot more forgiving for a beginner. We don't really use minis in the game, but I still can't stop myself from buying a few once in a great while.

Sorry to see Destination Unknown go away, James at the Underdark Gazette put up a nice farewell post. I didn't see Christian's final blog post, but saw the title in my feed and confirmed what the largely self-explanatory "Back to the Zine" was about with an email to him. Thanks again Christian, read ya later on Iridia...

Update: Destination Unknown is back!

Dungeon Chicken Now Available as Miniature

Ok ok, so maybe it's just a regular chicken. Depends on how you paint it I guess. Anyhow, I had to laugh after reading Megaminis' recent newsletter announcing their chicken minis, only two days after my recent Dungeon Chicken write up. Serendipity! Only $1, or get 16 for $8! :)

Scary Potter Mini

I'm finding it hard to resist this 25mm zombie mini from MegaMinis.