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How to capture a terrible picture of your brother.



My brother and Nephew at my mothers Christmas morning.

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3 for 1 on Cat Photos in the snow

A Weeking of Scampering Lightly

Last weekend was the last lrp event of the year at Unston and turned out good fun.

Not having two of my best friends along due to technical problems with health meant I had only myself to cook for, which apart from one meal I manage time for, lunch on Saturday was a whole packet of biscuits, I should have done better.

Living near by and having a cat to feed I travelled home each night, through some heavy rain both nights and Sunday morning which left the roads a dangerous place, with unseen puddles that tried to stop your steering working. Despite the rain during the day it was dry enough to get the players out for a fight or two, or three, well plenty.

The event was designed to be fun and non confrontational, which some of the players managed to conspire against, I hope it was all taking as in character, from those I spoke to, it seemed to be.

I got to introduce two new characters a wealthy cotton mill owning vampire and a Fey Lord who was meant to played by DaveP. The event ended with an already established character the Dark Rider running off as usual, he's no fool, he doesn't fight to the death when the odds are stacked against him.

I got to be rather silly playing a Monty Python style farmers wife in a dress and wig, standing on a chair screaming scared of 3 blind mice. The players turned out to be not very good at herding blind mice so the farmers wife could chop off their tails.

A few old faces returned, great to see Doug again, I think he enjoyed it, Alex Xian Chi and MattB also said they enjoyed themselves, may turn up to a few new events next year hopefully.

Now a few photos from the event.

2 players try their LRP sneak unseen skills on the resident cat, 15 minutes of sneaking got them a look of boredom from the cat before it walked through a bush leaving them stranded.


Cat can also count, well up to 2 paws.


Dan preparing to indulge his secret pleasure.


Dan has a colour string fetish.


Andy and Heather having strong words with the shop staff about making the tea just right.


Me in my new coat purchase on impulse from TORM, needs a better photo, but camera didn't like the cold.

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One of my lrp photos from last weekend.

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A bit of winter colour.

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The new egg shell paint.

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Decoration on the outside of my house that was once brightly painted.

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Detective Marlow

Fairs and battles

Over the past 3 weeks or so I have been to International Living history fair in Warwickshire, The Foreign Field LRP Kit Fair in Yorkshire with Julie and Dave.

At both fairs I bought very little, shirt, second hand sword, I was talked out of spending hundreds on other costume items which I think was the correct choice since as they where not what I wanted.
I did buy a cheap second hand top hat for bargain price and loved the steam punk kits the same store had for sale, but most of the content was stuff I already had.

I did buy the odd Christmas present though and enjoyed myself running into people I knew and just seeing all the interesting items for sale. I also got to encourage other people money spending.

This item was not bought by Julie she was testing the clasp



This weekend was the table top battle or should I say battles to conclude a season of many Ascendancy battles, to be bigger and better than last year we decided to run it over 3 continents which meant 3 battles
Never again will I coordinate 3 battle in one day it took 3 1/2 hours just to get started, with briefing people, placing the terrain and taking the figures out their boxes, luckily I had made the battles fairly small in scale so they could be played quickly.

Overall it was fun

Here are a few pictures

The commanders and their lieutenants.


Carnelium Battlefield


Frontier Battlefield


Stronghold battlefield


For one the battle was not that exciting.


Snow getting run down by Cavalry

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Rufus at the table top battle

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Cat Gymnastics. My cat jumping for a yellow and green ribbon off a packet of fudge that I threw in the air.

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With no photos taken this last week I thought I would play with a photo of week that never got used as I used another photo that week instead. So simply let Paint Shop Pro do it stuff here is a selection of the thousands of choices available if a simple photo is not good enough for you. Throughout the photos I've isolated Julie since applied to faces the effects don't seem to work well without lots of tweaking. (Images are best viewed full size)

This is called Topography effect



This is called Contour effect


This is called Enamel Effect



This us called Foil effect


This called Kaleidoscope effect


And this is the original image, a pretty shot looking over the town of Wirksworth

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When you haven't took any interesting photographs recently, time to resort to cat photos.

War gamers and reenactors

After all my previous weekend that were hectic, I had a really quiet one which was welcome, the only thing I did of note was go to a party in Nottingham at my friend Dave's.

He had got together lots of people I knew from the past for what ever reason not quite sure, re-enactors and war gamers, quite a few Games Workshop staff where he works in the design team and also does his own war games figures.

One of the Perry twins was there who I had just brought figures off by mail order and John Stollard who I went to Paris with to play Warhammer for the French in 1980something, he now runs his own war games company, Warlord Games.

Most people I knew even if a few names did not come straight to my mind, I suppose once in a decade its nice to see old acquaintances.

They say never far from a rat, well this one lost a argument with my car as I found it flattened on my drive, I say rat because of it size which was about 250mm excluding the tail, so I think just too big for mouse.



I think rats can be cute, but all I thought about was disease as got the shovel to carry the corpse to the bin, especially with the hundreds of flies buzzing around it.

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Fun with statistics and dice - table top games

Mole Machine and Some Painted Figures

I have completed several other projects during this month for use in various table top games

The 1st game was a repaint of space gorilla's provide by AndyL into cybernetic steam punk gorilla's controlled by a group of goblins



Then on a similar theme the dungeon in my previous post needed a way to get the player characters out, Von Dumas was the rescuer so we decided on mole machine coming up through the dungeon floor.



This was built in one morning before I went to work from a bit of rolled up cardboard, a cardboard spiral and some rocks from the garden. The cone at the top is a missile pod from a old air fix kit.



The rocks and machine were then given a quick paint and this is the result an hours work at the most.



And lastly a few new oriental figures acquired from Perry Miniatures.

Dungeon Build

This is my latest secret project, a dungeon for a table top skirmish role play game played yesterday.



Built from all sorts of bits, but mostly polystyrene covered in filler then sprayed black and dry brushed. It also included parts from a friends Van Helsing toy, cardboard tubes and old Citadel Miniatures (now Games Workshop) doorways.

I took photographs of the finished item in the dark with the flash deliberately so the depths of dungeon look lost in the dark.




This photo shows the steam punk machines the players found in the dungeon.



And the players enjoying the game.

My Cat in Bag Haven

Pity I missed most of the earlier fun

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Laser eyed cat

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Between my feet

Bites and Blunderbuss

I volunteered to help out at a Acendancy Lrp event on Saturday despite not really having the time to spare. The event organised by others took place in Shinning Cliff woods, which had received a major haircut since my last visit, the forestry commission had started a thinning out process to allow the hardwood trees to grow. [see photo below]



The other thing they had done was drain the swamp on the bottom, which I thought was nice feature, even if it did mean walkers were up to their ankles in mud.

The wood was full of flying insect life enjoying the last rays of sun before the autumn cold starts to set in, and they really wanted to bite anything they could find, which seemed to be mainly me. I’m feeling more bitten than I have in a long time, which since I was unprepared means I've itchy spots all over.

During the event we had a visit by the police, due to a concerned member of public spotting GarethP blunderbuss cap gun, which they reported has a shotgun, the police took our details and asked us how long we would be around in case of any more reports.

[Blunderbuss below]

The event itself was fun, Colin and RichS the writers had filled full of puzzles or puzzling issues which is their style, the players worked their way through them and seemed to enjoy themselves.
[Photo of Rich and Colin]



Got up 3am Sunday morning to take my Mother to airport, decided against coffee as wanted to get back and go to sleep, which was a mistake since I did not feel fully alert for the trip. I was surprised as I travelled through Nottingham at 4pm in the morning how many people were wondering the streets, some night clubbers, lots of police, teenage kids on bikes and folk that you just felt were up to no good.

I had said I could not help out with the Lrp Sunday since I was organising a table top battle, however I still turned up around 4.30pm at what I thought would be near the end of the event so I could join them at the Chinese restaurant later and found they were still in the middle of things so ended up helping out for another 2 hours.

After the event everyone got away about 7pm, some with long journeys back to Wales, while the rest of us went to a nearby Chinese restaurant for dinner before setting off home.

Me has a Djinn