Hobgoblins, Love Letters & Mixing Up The Medicine

The only Hobgoblin as far as many geeks are concerned

So, the inevitable question - what nerdity have I been up to the past week, and how go the Hobgoblins?

Let's start with my painting - I've made limited progress as I'm still on basecoating, but I'm hoping to fare better this week.  The block colours are mostly filled in b ut I've still got White teeth and Bronze bracelets to do, as well as a tidy-up coat.

Current progress: metals to front, cast to back

All figures have had silver added - my Runefang Steel just ran out so I switched to the pretty much identical to my eyes Silver from the Coat D'Arms range.  I've also done leather for shoes and wood for pommels via Khemri Brown. 

Close up of first and second batch figure as they currently stand.

To try and help the bronze which I often find a tough colour to paint, I've painted all the metal buits silver at this point and intend to go over it with bronze later.  I'm hoping that'll give it an extra layer of metal and a dark shade than painting bronze over white so add a bit more to it.

Moving away from figure painting, I had my friend Molly over last night for some chat and card games.  She turns up to my RPG group for the Star Trek game but as we're currently playing superheores, something she has little interest in, I haven't seen her for a while.   

First I taught her the My Little Pony CCG, a fun (and far smarter than you might think) game of solving problems in Ponyville; then she, Sister Superior and I all got together to play Love Letter, a rather smart and quick little game for 2-4 players.

There's several versions to this game - I own the European Renaissance-y looking one but it's had a few different versions including Japanese, Christmas, Wedding and the inevitable Munchkin version

Love Letter has some Poker-y mechanics in that if your opponents know what is in your hand, they can kick you out the round easilly - so I delighted in messing with Molly and Sister Superior's heads at one point by getting rid of a high card, convincing them that I must have one of a set number of cards to cause that to be viable.  (Inevitably later on I really did chuck that card for a sensible reason, but now doubt had set in.)  Molly had a poor start but won overall, 5 hands to my 4 and the missus on 3.  As mentioned it's a fast game so ideal for wasting time waiting for the rest of the RPG group to turn up.

And speaking of RPGs... we're six sessions into the latest block of our superhero game, Justice League Beyond.  Vaguely themed after my beloved Batman Beyond cartoon the players are members of a mid-21st century Justice League that must pick up the mantle of the superheroes and be the next generation of crimefighters.

Not shown: our League's more international members like Cormac MacCool from Ireland, Das Ritter Von Nacht from Germany, Saturn Girl from South Africa or Steel Shiva from India.

Superheroes is a genre that can do a lot of different things - one week they're in a knock down fight on board Air Force One with anarchist supervillains RIOT, the next they're light years away from Earth trying to negotiate with a super-powered teenager who has taken over his planet with his Doctor Manhattan-esque powers.  I can send them to the newly refurbished Arkham Asylum and use familiar DC Comics villains, or I can use my own creations like the Japanese maniac Sexy Ruby Joker Girl, the camp British superteam Carry On Stealing or the Indian mastermind Rani Rakshasi.  

Like our Star Trek campaign the individual adventures tend to be episodic - every session an issue of the comic, every two or three sessions the start of a new storyline - but things run through the block, and indeed multiple blocks.  People already distrustful of the Justice League meddling in affairs have gotten more unhappy when it turned out one of them has the power to cure people of otherwise fatal injuries - so Green Lantern can survive his punctured lungs and broken neck, but everyone else just can just carry on as normal?  Some of the more experienced heroes were unhappy with that and the younger ones will find there will be consequences for that action

Back to painting, I've been experimenting a bit with mixing colours after doing some basic reading on Colour Theory. 

Remember those cheap tubes of acrylic I got out of The Art Store?  Well, I got more - I now have all three primary colours as well as black, white and flourescent pink - and I experimented with making a mixing guide.  On the left I did a grid showing all the colours mixed one to one, while on the right are various more complicated recipes for colours.
 

Click to embiggen!

 As you may be able to see, I've written the proportions in question next to the more complex mixes.  Some are better than others - the flourescent pink mixes poorly with darker hues and it took a few tries to get the purples and greens to be more than dark splodges.  Artists acrylics aren't quite as high pigment as modellers paints so the paints tend to be a bit streakier than I'm used to and would probably take two coats.  Still, it's a cool thing to have on standby should I want a custom colour.

I particularly like that turquoise-y colour I mixed up