Why Peacock Has Cyclops's Eyes

In the olden days, cyclopes, favored by (and probably descended from) the Burning Hate, had half a hundred eyes each, all over their heads. Peacocks, favored by Sequoia, had only the regular two.

But once upon a time, there was a huge battle between priests loyal to the god Numiel, defending a town under their protection, against a huge band of marauding cyclopes.

Things looked grim for the defenders; the cyclopes came close to victory.

But then a flock of passing peacocks, who had a preëxisting grudge against the cyclopes (who were in the habit of raiding nests, not for food, but to smash the eggs out of pure malice), joined in, and turned the tide of battle.

The defenders defeated and drove off the cyclopes, and the town was saved.

As penalty for their wicked ways, Numiel struck all but one eye from each cyclops. As a reward for their assistance, he bestowed all the eyes upon the peacocks, instead.

This is why cyclopes only have one eye, why peacocks have many extra eyes on their tails, and why peacocks are among the creatures sacred to Numiel.

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What prompted this revelation? Well, it all has to do with the Reaper Bones kickstarter. (I was one of the silly few who didn't spend the whole $100, because I knew I wouldn't have the patience or sticktoitiveness to paint all hundred gazillion minis. Instead, I spent somewhat less, for a much worse value. Oh well!)

In particular, it has to do with this guy. (No human being can paint that intricately. Their examples are obviously painted by unseelie creatures of fey.) I took one look at him, and decided he's a paladin. And, of course, in my world, paladin means Numiel. (Even though Sequoia, Urmaggr, and Dalya are also compatible with paladinhood.)

But what's that on the back? A peacock? ...obviously, since this is a paladin of Numiel, peacocks must be sacred to Numiel. Done. But why? And so a little story struck me. So here you go.

And the moral of the story is: no matter how little and silly and nonsensical an idea might seem, add it to your campaign setting as soon as it strikes you. Campaign settings often seem generic and boring and soulless, and seemingly incongruous little details like this are a good way to combat that tendency.

Gelatinous Cube Mini

The gelatinous cube in its natural
environment: graph paper.

So, inspired by this guy, I decided to make a gelatinous cube mini of my own out of hot glue.

I did as he suggests, making a 2" square hole and flooding it with hot glue. It didn't work the way I expected. For one thing, I made the square out of cardboard, covered with wax paper. Fun fact: hot glue sticks to wax paper. Who'd have thought? For another thing, it didn't just run the way he describes; perhaps I was using an insufficiently hot glue gun. It turned out much stringier and lumpier than expected.

The gelatinous cube digests its prey.

So then I just ran with it, and went nuts applying stringly greebles and nurnies. It's hard to see in these images, but it doesn't look like a classic gelatinous cube is supposed to look. But it's a 2" ooze cube, it's slightly translucent, and it's more visually interesting than it's supposed to be, and that's what really matters. Gelatinous cubes in my world will just be greebly, that's all.

I've considered giving up on translucency, painting the interior of the cube green or blue or greenish-blue, and maybe putting it on an actual base (once I acquire some Large bases). But I don't know if I have enough hot glue left to make a second one if I mess this one up too badly.

Adventures In Rebasing 3: Doing It Right This Time

So, as I was getting into mini painting, I did splurge on ordering some actual black plastic circles and plastic-specific glue. So various minis that had broken off of their Lasertron tokens got much better bases. It was definitely worth the expense.

I wound up going with the Litko Game Accessories BaseMaker, buying 50 circular black acrylic 25mm diameter x 3mm tall circles. These are almost precisly the same, albeit less hollow and less bendy, as WotC mini bases. Perfect.

When I got them, they were all glossy and shiny and excellent and I oohed and aahed over them for a little while.

While I was at it, I got some Craftics #33 Acrylic Cement, which doesn't seem to glue the plastic together so much as melt it together. (I may mean that almost entirely metaphorically.)

You see the boxes of text on the front of that tube? That's all warnings. The entire back of the tube is taken up with warnings, too. Don't breathe the fumes, only use it outdoors or in a well-ventilated area, don't set it on fire, don't touch it, don't eat it, causes cancer, decomposes to poison when heated, et cetera. Sticks really well, so I recommend it, if you don't mind dying of it poisoning you in half a dozen ways at once.

I thought superglue was magic, but then minis started falling off their bases. With the plastic bases and the acrylic cement, they're not falling off anymore. Plus, they just feel much more like the correct weight now.

There was this one guy whose stance was way too wide to fit on a Medium base, and who was way too small to plausibly be Large (and anyway I still don't have any Large bases; that'll be my next Litko purchase.) He's pretty bendy, but also pretty elastic; his legs wouldn't stay together long enough to glue them. So I took an X-Acto Knife, sliced a little wedge out of each of his hips, glued his legs back on, glued him to a base, and now he's a good little mini. Should make a good warforged. (Also his eyes weren't painted, so I did them green, the same color as the little crystal of phlebotinum he's holding.)

All in all: I'd say doing it right is worth the expense.

Paint Your Minis

The first mini I did repainted. Original on the right.

I realized that I was resisting getting into mini painting out of fear of Doing It Wrong, because every "how to paint minis" website lists some gawdawful complex (and often mutually exclusive from site to site) set of steps and specific paints and brushes and glues and paint strippers and so on and if you don't use these exact products your minis will catch fire and explode and your family will catch the plague.

Original on the left. This one turned out... acceptable.

So, earlier this year, I just said "screw that", pulled out the paints I had inherited and bought for art class and the smallest brush I happened to own, and just went to town without regard for Doing It Right. (My family still has yet to catch the plague.)

The one in the middle is completely repainted. The one on
the left only has his quilted padding repainted. The one on
the right is the original.

The paint I happened to have -- mostly Galeria and Americana acrylics -- are apparently adequate to the purpose of mini-painting, and have served my needs just fine so far. When I run out of these, I may buy paints intended specifically for models.

Original grimlock on the right. Original goblin and
gravedigger on the left. Just repainted details, mostly.

Mostly, I've just been repainting the minis I happen to have doubles of. I repainted one of my dark-skinned minis with light skin, purely to make it easier to tell her apart from her dark-skinned doppelgänger, but I felt bad about it, because my mini collection has so few dark-skinned people (who aren't orcs) to begin with. But I repainted the next light-skinned double I got with dark skin, so hopefully it balanced out. I think I'm more concerned about this than is absolutely necessary.

Original on the left. The one on the right is black to make
up for repainting the earlier mini light-skinned.

I never noticed how many of my minis had eyes that are the same colour as their faces. Now they have actual eyes. The worst offender was my Tundra Scout, in part because each eye is as big as most minis' entire heads. Now my woolly mammoth has eyes instead of blank brown spots.

Original snake and beetle on the left. Original runespiral
demon on the right. Repainted the orangutan's rock, and his
Lasertron token to match.

So my advice to you: don't fuss about it, just get out your brushes and your paints and get painting. It's remarkably soothing. (Maybe if you don't happen to have brushes and paints, you can fuss a little bit about which ones to buy, but try not to fuss too much.)

I didn't repaint the Cap'n, but I did repaint his Lasertron
token to match the wave he's riding. I was pleased with
how closely I got it to match.

I also got a whole bunch of Ziploc bags and a Sharpie and organized my minis by Type and Subtype: "Misc Humanoids & Monstr Humanoids", "Animals, Plants, & Vermin" (because I only have a few of each), "Aberrations & Outsiders" (sometimes hard to tell apart, so they just get a shared one), "Oozes, Undead, & Constructs", "Humans & Elves" (again, sometimes hard to tell apart), "Dragons and [Reptilian]s", "Orcs & Goblinoids" (and also a cyclops), "Dwarves & Short Ppl" (including gnomes, halflings, and other human-like Small creatures), "Tokens" (leftover bases and Lasertron tokens), and "PCs" (so I don't have to go rooting through several different bags at the beginning of every session). So I recommend doing something like that, too.

Pi, Bursts, and Cones

About two Pi Days ago, I celebrated in the most appropriate way I could think of: I actually did some calculations involving pi.

See, at some point I had seen Paizo's Steel Sqwire templates. I judged them unnecessarily expensive, because I knew I could make some that were just as good myself.

So I went and I found some wire...

...and did some calculations.

I decided that all the fiddly little right angles and squarenesses in the RAW templates for cones and bursts were unnecessary, because I was making templates to represent actual cone and burst shapes. I decided my cones would be quarter-circles and my spheres would be circles! So that involved some math.

As everyone should know from elementary school, the circumference of a circle is 2πr. And, obviously, the perimeter of a quarter-circle is 2πr divided by 4, plus 2r, or r(π/2+2). And 1 inch for a mini equals 5 feet in-character, so we divide all our answers by 5.

radius (ft.)	cone (in.)	burst (in.)
10	7.1	12.6
15	10.7	18.8
20	14.3	25.1
30	21.4	37.7
40	28.6	50.3
50	35.7	62.8
60	42.8	75.4
70	50.0	88.0

(If you do this yourself, you might consider yourself well-advised to double-check my math before cutting.)

I elected to make a 20' burst and a 30' cone, because those are the biggest that would fit in my D&D stuff carrying folder, and anything smaller is easy enough to figure out on the fly.

So I cut my wire to length and affixed it to itself with a connector and...

This dragon's breath weapon is 10' too short for its size. Oops.

This changeling is casting darkness. Or fireball. Or obscuring mist. Or fog cloud. Or stinking cloud. Or cloudkill. Or solid fog. Or dispel magic. Or zone of truth. Or something. This is a useful size template to have, is what I'm saying.

Easy!

Bounties of the Megadungeon

The following is a list of the current bounties offered at my megadungeon open game table, as they are presented to my players. Well, they get everything all nicely printed out on individual half-sheets of paper, but you get the idea. I hope some of them may inspire you for your own games.

Part of this is a lesson I have heard, but not entirely completely internalized: whenever possible, have something physical to hand your players. Tangible objects are supposedly much more interesting to them than mere descriptions in the air. As one hears often in Westeros: words are wind. This particular technique, the bounties on paper, suffer somewhat from still mostly just being words, though if you can interesting them up by trying to get as close as you can to the actual handwritten documents (mostly with creative font choices), that helps.

A side story: one benefit to using LaserTron tokens for mini bases: I had a couple left over (which I did paint on one side, intending to use them for swarms or miscellaneous markers or something), so when my players tried to squeeze money out of a particularly unwealthy viscount, I had five coins on hand to drop on the table and say "This is all the money I can spare".

My next idea to liven things up is to include bounties that are just pictures, no words. Not everyone who wants to post a bounty is literate, after all. Even Sir Bigglesworth counts as literate, if only barely. But this is a major challenge for the DM to try to convey instructions without using words, and to the players to understand.

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Adventures In Rebasing 2: The Payoff

Though I closed out my last post on the subject with speculations about where to acquire suitable bases to rebase minis to, I kept searching for suitable options, as anyone who was following my twitter feed knows. In great detail.

I looked for blank, unstruck quarters, on the theory that they might be cheaper and less illegal to deface than completed quarters. But no, they don't seem to sell those, which makes sense. (In related news: Google thinks it's smarter than me, but it isn't. If I wanted to search for blankets or coin banks I wouldn't have searched for planchets and coin blanks.)

I considered high-end radiochemistry equipment, but they only seem to sell those in lots of a thousand.

I tried to find slugs punched out from junction boxes, which one produces as waste in massive quantities when one wires or rewires one's house's electricity, but nobody seems to sell (or even give away) the slugs. Though they do sell "Slug-Buster Knockout Punch Unit"s, which may replace "Robust Nuclear Earth Penetrator" as the best porn name ever.

I looked for washers, then I looked for holeless washers, and it turns out no, there's not really any such thing.

Then I suddenly realized I had a tin full of old arcade coins from LASERTRON (which I always intend to bring with me to spend when I go to LASERTRON, but always forget). Not being legal tender, I can only assume these coins are fair game for defacement. I compared them to Medium bases, and they are almost exactly the proper size. I counted them, and I had 42 of them, just barely more than enough for the minis I wanted to rebase (I had 41 minis, of which I ruled out the green army girl for not having any conceivable D&D use, the pillar-like object for being too difficult to separate from its base, and the lion rampant for being too clearly Large rather than Medium). I would have preferred to stack two coins on top of one another to achieve closer to the right height, but the heft of the bases wound up being satisfying enough. All in all: perfect bases.



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I was pleased with how easily all the Mage Knight and Heroclix minis popped off their bases, with hardly any prying necessary; they were only glued on. The Dreamblade minis needed a sharp knife, though, because they were molded right to their bases. If I were to do this again, I would probably mostly get Mage Knight minis. They're a little more generic than the Dreamblade minis, but they're su much easier to, uh, debase.

So there I was, with a bunch of baseless minis, and exactly the right number of coins of exactly the right size. I needed two more things: glue and paint.

The internet recommended superglue. I had somehow gone my whole life without realizing how mighty superglue is. Superglue, much like friendship, is magic. Holy crap is superglue aptly named. So that's that question answered.

I seem to have misplaced my craft paints, so we searched for a little while and eventually turned up some black Volvo touch-up paint. My parents recently arranged to bring a silver Volvo into our lives, replacing the last in a long string of several black Volvos, so we figured we would be unlikely to need it. Plus, your traditional Volvo is likely to be made of metal, so maybe this paint will stick properly to the metal coins. The main problem was perhaps that the brush was really too big for such delicate work, but we may not even have any more suitable brushes.

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In retrospect, I should have tried painting the coins before gluing the figures on, though the way I did it had some features to recommend it.

For one thing, the Internet recommended gluing, then painting. I didn't know why until my dad mentioned that glue can act as a solvent on paint, so I could well have wound up having to just repaint around the feet (the most delicate and difficult to paint area) anyway.

For another, it's very difficult to paint coins. This way I had something to hold on to (the mini itself) as I painted the bases.

Plus, superglue fumes leave little white residues, which I was only too happy to paint over (though in retrospect perhaps I should have tried washing it off first).

The main problem, of course, as you can see in the pictures, is that sometimes the minis got black paint on their shoes. They look like they're trudging through black mud. Oh well.



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So, the procedure, gleaned from common sense and various places on the internet, was very simple:
- Squeeze some superglue out into a puddle on the disposable sheet you're working on
- Touch the feet of the mini to the puddle of superglue
- Affix the mini to the coin (some of them didn't stand up on their own; you only need to hold these for a few seconds before the superglue takes properly)
- By the time you've glued all the minis, the superglue on the first few is well and truly dry. Squeeze a little paint into a puddle, hold the minis by their bodies, and paint the bases, trying not to get too much on their wee little shoes. Paint the edges of the bases, too, it looks better.



(Actually, there was one additional step before any of the others: glue the sword arm back onto one of the pirate wenches who lost it (In the above picture: second row, center and center-right. I can't recall which is the one who lost her arm). I briefly considered gluing it back in a different position, possibly brandishing it as a weapon rather than leaning on it, to distinguish the two minis if nothing else. But it just looked too weird; it's too obvious she's resting her hand on the hilt, not gripping it.)

I used very close to 100% of the remaining paint. (If there was any left, my procedures for eking the very last of the paint out would have rendered it dry anyway.)

I had four coins left over, so I just painted them black and left them mini-less. Maybe I'll use them for swarms, or else as miscellaneous markers.



Yes, the bell golem has a different colored base than the others. It's less evident in the photograph, but in person, the coin is almost exactly the same colour as that particular mini. I liked that effect, so I opted to leave its base unpainted.

Adventures In Rebasing

So I recently came into possession of some super-cheap Mage Knight and Dreamblade miniatures, plus some old City of Heroes and Villains Heroclix I got as part of a promotion, and figured I could try using them for D&D as-is, or else have a fun adventure rebasing them.

The minis themselves vary. Some of them are very close to your standard Medium D&D mini, some are Large, some are a slightly terrible size between Medium and Large.



You can pop the clicky outer/lower part of the base off some of the Mage Knight minis, and the inner base is about 1.25" in diameter. Very close to acceptable, but too big by a quarter-inch!



The Heroclix bases and some of the Mage Knight bases are of a slightly different design than the above mentioned bases. These minis are attached to the bigger portion of the base, which makes it a pain in the neck even to do the eponymous clicking thing, let alone pry part of the base off, and even if you did get it apart, you'd still be stuck with the wider base.

The Dreamblade minis are all on 1.5"x1.5" squares, which is even worse. If they were 2"x2", that would be fine for Large, but this in-between nonsense is unacceptable.



So, my aesthetic sense refuses to allow them to be used too regularly as-is. So, a rebasing quest!

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I'm a little leery of destroying the monetary value of these things in order to turn them into things that are more valuable by dint of being more useful to me, but they were pretty close to dirt cheap, and they're not as likely to appreciate in value as genuine 3.5e minis are. (Though the D&D Minis line has been discontinued, D&D will always exist, and even if it becomes though it has become almost unrecognizable (hoho, 4e burn!), it will probably always be played on a 1"x1" grid; Dreamblade as a game has been discontinued entirely, and soon nobody will be able to find anyone to play it with. Especially if madmen like me keep defacing the miniatures!)

Although (unsurprisingly, given their limited-edition nature) the CoH/CoV heroclix currently seem to be selling for more than your average D&D mini on eBay - maybe I shouldn't have taken them out of their original packaging. Oops! I could have made back all the money I spent on that CoV box (on which I already effectively made a $10 profit, because I paid $5 and it came with a free month of game time worth $15, plus I still get to keep the in-game badges and other goodies). Oh well.

The Heroclix and Mage Knight figures are simply glued onto their bases, and are easy to snap off, with a knife or sometimes just by hand. The Dreamblade minis seem to be sculpted to their bases, and will need to be cut free with a very sharp knife.



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The first step is to find new bases to which to rebase them. And the first step there is figuring out exactly how big the bases need to be.

Well, I figured it out, by measuring and then confirming on the internet: Medium minis use a 25mm base, though 1" would be close enough for government work. Large minis appear to use a base that is very close to 2". If you happen to find a mini small enough to qualify as Small, they use a base almost exactly the size of two US pennies stacked on top of one another (not that I would ever advocate defacing the currency of any country, that's a federal crime), or 20mm. If you find a mini large enough to qualify as Huge, that base is actually 3" (the smaller ones are presumably just shy of 1" and 2" to fit better in close proximity to one another, while you're not likely to have multiple Huges, there's enough space in the corners to have some maneuvering room anyway).

All mini bases appear to be 3/16" thick, but I'm guessing one can choose 1/8" or 1/4" without too much noticeable disparity.

I've got one mini that definitely qualifies as Large, and the rest are pretty firmly within the upper-Medium range. This is going to be irritating, I'm probably not going to be able to get one 45mm base (or even just a small number of 45mm bases) and a bunch of 25mm bases.



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The next step: acquiring new bases of the appropriate size.

We could just use US quarters. They're very nearly the right size, and you're likely to have them on hand. However, they cost you $0.50/base (or $0.25, if you're okay with bases half as tall as all your other minis, which might actually help slightly to ameliorate the problems inherent with the non-D&D minis being larger in scale than D&D minis), approximately the worst available value. Plus, as above, the federal crime thing. Also, quarters have ridged edges. So don't do this.

Gale Force 9 offers Econo Bases, with 125ish or 250ish bases for $10 or $15. The smaller amount winds up approaching $20 when you include postage, for about $0.16/base. (These guys make you create an account before they'll tell you how much shipping is, which makes me want to punch them and also withhold my dollars from them.)

LITKO Game Accessories offers Circular Miniature Bases. I probably won't need more than 50, because I only have about 42 minis that need rebasing and I don't intend to acquire too many more. (These guys let you get a number for shipping costs without making you make an account or fill in any information, which is nice.) This winds up being about $15, or $0.30/base. (If I wanted 100, it'd be $18, for $0.18/base, but that extra $3 is a frivolity.)

Warhammer and Warhammer 40k bases ("bits"? "bitz"?) seem to be going for much cheaper from various sources, but I can't seem to pin down an actual detailed description of what these are like. From what I can tell, their edges seem to be tapered in a way that D&D mini bases are not (a trivial concern, yes).

You could, of course, go to the nearest craft store and see if they sell small wooden circles of the appropriate size. But as long as we're rebasing because a circle (or square) is a quarter- or half-inch too big, we might as well get the new bases perfect, and good luck finding 25mm x 3mm circles at a craft store! They mostly seem to sell them by the inch, which might be close enough.



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Read the thrilling conclusion to this epic tale here!