i had been painting just one or two goblins every once in awhile, pacing myself, but then i was suddenly intent on building their little regiments and fitting them into the movement trays and magnetizing them etc and wow there are a lot of little tasks you can do if you are getting ready to play a game of warhammer fantasy battles. i still haven't played, but i'm More Ready.

you can't really see in that last picture because my hand weapon goblins don't have any repeats, but i also ended up converting some of my duplicate models with leftover milliput, sculpting beaks, hats, big noses, etc. i've really enjoyed this opportunity to mess with some of the goblin conventions that have been established in the warhammer world, and to push them in a more fey and twee direction. it is a source of...bother? to me that as much as i love fantasy conventions in rpgs, they really tend toward cataloguing and categorizing and diminishing monsters, taming them, putting them in bestiaries and stat blocks and such. one of my goals with my goblin army is to put things in that aren't really thought of as goblins (in the warhammer world) but definitely are. like fairies. fairies are goblins. an elf is a goblin too for that matter.

i was talking with max about this yesterday, how the desire to separate and define leads to a sort of 18th century rationalist fantasy world that gestures at adventure and mystery but really offers neither? a cold, urizenic machine, locking everything into types and hierarchies. i think it is so interesting to make games that are necessarily governed by rules, definitions, and measurements, and still trying to convey the unknowable and the sublime. i do not know if i will succeed in dissolving any of these imaginative barriers but it is fun to try.

so, a giant is a fairy. here is a giant i have been working on for a few weeks, for hill giant games's KING OF THE HILL GIANT competition:

this is the slowest i have ever worked on anything, averaging something like twenty minutes a day. i started with a wire armature and sculpey and blocked out the rough shapes, and then spent maybe a little too long trying to get them to be smooth and detailed before i just baked it and switched to green stuff? i changed the posture a few times - initially he was leaning wayyyyy over because i hadn't glued him down to anything so his feet were just kind of weightless, and i had a brief moment of despair when i finally did glue him down but then i broke his knees and elbows and resculpted them and actually said HAHA out loud - and now mostly what i am doing is adding very thin "skin" layers and gesturing at muscles, tendons, and veins. i was going to have his left hand be open like the ral partha cloud giant i am ripping off but now i think i want it to be curled back, holding a songbird or similar (a classic fairy pose, see below). i am learning so much about anatomy making this spindly monster (all evidence to the contrary haha). it's a very satisfying challenge.

goobin's grotto has some really lovely fairies for sale and i have loved watching them emanate from their instagram, @goobinsgitz. they did a sculpting challenge this month too (#CAVEMUNCHA), and i made the tufty fellow at the top of this post, which right now is my favorite thing i have every sculpted. it is a squig if you like, or a BALL WITH FEET, or: that's right, a fairy. i was for awhile going to make some multipart fairies using the prompts from FAIRYLAND (also HAGSTONE, which is a slightly modified list i submitted to the 1 PAGE GAME JAM earlier this year) and i still want to someday, but now i also really want to sculpt and cast some monopose oldhammery fairies for salt & pepper performance.

salt & pepper performance! or FAIRYLAND28 if you must. i have done so much work on this since the last time max and i played. the biggest thing i did is finally make some decisions and write some proper rules for movement. for awhile i didn't know if i wanted it to be diorama style, measuring inches to move, or if it should be squares, like chess, or if it should be hexes (NEVER. hexes are for battletech), but now i know: i want it to be squares. in general, if there was a way to make the game faster, more understandable, and more slippery, that is what i tried to do. i'll wait for another post to talk about it so for now here is a changelog instead. this is kind of incomprehensible without context but it's kind of fun so i'm going to do it:

- squares
- lasso spell rewritten
- items may now be consumed to add to attack rolls
- added 36 unique locations
- blobby thing summoning clarified
- after-game item use clarified
- extra items may be transformed between games to replace dead fairies
- fairy house generator
- SECRET THING

the fairy house generator was a lot of fun to work on. it borrows a little bit from the fairy tome generator in the zine to give each troupe a place to put all their extra items (and fairies, if it should come to it) in campaign play. here are a few examples:

the cavern of screaming mist
the den of broken songs
the neverending grotto
the leaden council

overall i am very very excited and eager to get some games in before i write more. until next time,

-doink pfeiffer