A 3 Way Hook

It's Tuesday night and I am painting some Battlemechs. I like to listen to books or TV when painting. I have this funny trait that the thing I am listening to is the opposite of what I am painting.  For example, when painting mecha, I listen to fantasy books. 

While waiting for a basecoat to dry, I got wrapped up in Terry Brooks' Wizard at Large. This is the third book in the Landover series. Questor Thews, Wizard at Large attempts to transform his friend Abernathy back into a human. It seemed like the right thing to do because he was the one who turned the Scribe into a Soft-coated Wheaten Terrier. 

Things go sideways and hilarity and terror ensue. This is one of my favorite series because it incorporates 80s sensibilities into a fantasy story. Oddly, the series makes some nods to the 80s and 90s but doesn't dive in too deep. There is an odd simplicity to the stories that somehow dodges the passage of time and advances in technology that would normally break a portal fantasy story. 

This gave me a great idea for a D&D hook. Locate Object is a bunk spell, the range is far too short. If this spell would be useful, they get down on their hands and knees and do it the hard way instead of magic. Invariably, if something is far away, the characters look for a sage or high-level Wizard to help. Or a Cleric with Commune.

So here goes the three-way hook. The scenario is, the party needs an item to fulfill some objective. They don't know where it is so they hire a scribe or Wizard to do the job. The characters assume they will be given some trivia about the object and a direction to go to recover the item. 

Wrong!

The sage or Wizard does give them that information on how to find the object but decides to toot his or her horn by pulling out a scrying globe or magic mirror to show the characters exactly what the item looks like and its immediate environs. Pleased, the characters thank the sage profusely. 

And then it happens. 

The sage drops his or her magic item and it shatters. In the discharge of failing magic, the sage disappears and the item itself appears at the feet of the characters. 

Surprise! 

Now, here are the three hooks: 

A) The characters feel obligated to bring the sage back home. 
B) The characters take the item and leave, forgetting about the sage. The enraged sage escapes on their own and hunts the characters down.
C) The owner of the item brings the sage home, searching for his or her stolen possession.  

The beauty of this is the triple hook is, in no way are you pushing the players to pick a course of action. They'll do it themselves by word and deed. Also, it doesn't tie up the DM too much. The forces against the players can have many motivations and goals, so it doesn't turn into a targeted TPK. You can play it for laughs, for growth, for horror, all based on what you discover your players like. 

Imagine the look on your player's faces when they discover the sage doesn't want to go home because they accidentally found the love of their life. Or what if they ran home just days ahead of a demon horde. What if the sage stumbles home and into the party just in time to save them from themselves? 

That is so much fun. 

Let's get ready to paint some #mecha

 I do love a good Locust sculpt, but I have a few more figures queued up for painting. 

Usually, I do a light color as the base, but you can see I used black on the Mechs in the back rank. I've never tried that before. The Battlemaster and the Commando will be dark green, with red and white details, along with a bit of silver and gunmetal. 

The jars of dice are my next laser project. I'll be cutting some 3 mm thick lids for them. The next generation will have laser-etched glass, but I need to buy a rotating stand for that. 

Stupid Solution to Stupid Problem #MechaMonday

I've been working on a few Battlemechs for my Thursday outings to Kingpin Comics and Games. However, I own two 100-ton cats. They are beasts. They keep knocking my painted mechs off the shelf. 

They are savage. They skip the unpainted ones. 

I came up with a stupid solution to a stupid problem. I put the models in a terrarium I had in the garage. 

They've tried half a dozen times to get up there and they can't fit. Problem solved? 

Happy Accident - Fiend Folio times 2!

I made a point of getting Nathan physical copies of the D&D 5e rules. He has two different groups that play and it would be dumb if they couldn't do that due to an internet outage, lost computer, or other silly problem. 

Mechanically, 5e is very different than AD&D or any version of B/X but the lore remains largely the same. Drow are Drow, Goblins are Goblins, and so on. Sure some people would like to change that for everyone but once you put an idea out there, good luck changing it. 

Wayback in 2019, I had a campaign where elves and humans were hostile to one another. I couldn't sell it and no one bought it. 

Once an idea is out there, forget about changing it. 

Anyway, I mentioned to Nathan my world's main antagonist is a Drow named Magarven. You can read all about him here. 

Nathan was put back by the mention of Drow. He thought they were new to 5e. Nope. I grabbed my copy of Fiend Folio. His jaw dropped.

"Is that a Githyanki?!?" 

Hell, yeah it is. 

That was the last I saw or thought about my copy of Fiend Folio. Somehow, that struck me funny. I forgot I even had a copy and ordered one POD from DriveThruRPG. Of course, when it arrived, Nathan tried to return my copy. 

I took some pictures and made him pick one. 

The POD copy is a soft cover, but don't let that put you off. The pages are solid and crisp, the print is excellent and the binding is nice. It is a tiny bit smaller than the original, making it a standard-size book. The price for POD was also amazing, far less than the $20 I paid for the original copy back in the day. 

I hope you can tell from the images, the POD's paper is somewhat thicker and the black is very solid. The thicker paper is nicer from the get-go. The softer black ink in the original is likely due to the age. Even though I bought my hardcover 2-3 years ago, it was printed in 1981. No book will hold up over 40+ years.

Anyway, I thought I would share this title as it keeps bringing joy to new and old players. 

#Mechamonday for September 16th - Locust Again and Home Improvement

As mentioned before, Locusts are one of my favorite mechs. In the image to the right, the painted Locust sculpt is from the Battletech Alpha Strike Boxed Set. There is no official source for more figures, so I purchased a few from Etsy.

Here is the link I used. I am not an affiliate of Etsy or this seller. I just like the product. I gave it 5 stars, I honestly couldn't be happier with these mechs. 

You'll notice these are variants, with long gun barrels on the arms and no chin cannons. When they arrived, I thought of cutting the guns off to match the other model. The obvious bend in the barrels bothered me to. 

I couldn't do it. I want them as they are. 

I decided to fix them. These are obviously resin printed, so fixing them is relatively easy and the technique works on many types of plastic models. 

Step one: get a cup of very hot water. I've seen people say it must be X degrees and then they name some arbitrary number below boiling. 

Stop. Let me offer some free home improvement advice then tell you about using hot water to bend plastic. 

You have three basic choices of water heating: on-demand, electric, or gas. If you have on-demand hot water, you can skip this because that will make as much, and as hot as you like water until the fuel runs out. If you heat water by gas or electricity you have a hot water battery in your home called a hot water tank.

Modern hot water tanks have two heating elements, one at the top and one near the bottom. The cold water comes in from the bottom of the tank and is heated by the first element. The hot water rises and is kept at temperature by the upper heating element. Cold water comes in to replace it and the process continues. This is actually kind of neat. When not in use, the water starts as a column of cold to hot and turns into a column of nearly uniform temperature water. 

Have you ever noticed that your water comes out cool and warms up over time? That is two different processes at work. The obvious one is the water in the pipes is cooler than the water in the tank. The second process is as the tank replenishes the flowing water, and eventually, both heating elements turn on. 

This is very efficient. This is also why I say not to use the hottest water possible for bending plastic. You won't be able to control how hot it can get consistently because of the heating elements. 

If you notice you burn yourself at the sink when the dishwater or shower is running, turn down your hot water tank temperature. It's too hot. Remember, the shower will dump water over your head even if it's too hot. Second, turning the temp down can save you enough over a month or year to buy another mech. 

This ends my home improvement section. 

Ok. Get a cup of hot as you can tolerate water. You'll be holding your fingers in it for about 30-60 seconds. Plan accordingly. 

The reason for no specific temperature is, I don't know what kind of resin you are dealing with and I don't want you to melt it to slag. Repeating this process several times is better than destroying a model with very hot water. 

Also, get a cup of cold water. Again, not as cold as you can get it, but cool.  

Initially, I held my model in the water for a minute. Next, I bent the gun outwards and dipped it in the cool water. In the picture to the left, you can see the guns are less bent but not entirely fixed. 

I repeated the process. Since the water didn't damage the models, I felt comfortable dropping all three into the hot water and repeated the process. 

After the next dip, I thought they looked good enough. I might do it again before priming the models. 

This technique works well with bent airplane landing gear, drogues, and antennas. You may give it a try on slightly warped larger pieces, but only if you can press the model's complex shape against an opposing shape. I have yet to fix a model where 2 halves of the model are warped by pressing them up against each other. 

It is always too much flex to work but you may have better luck. 

As always, you can pick up a copy of this game on DrivethruRPG, but if you hit up brick-and-mortar stores, you can get the physical copy with minis. I will be doing a review of my favorite place to shop and play Battletech soon.