Which isnt that great, to be honest. There’s no use of having a website that costs money, if I’m not going to use it. That’s hopefully going to change soon, but.. We’ll see.
I did end up getting into the D4 beta – I’m not going to say I played the closed beta in November, because if I did it would consitute a breach in the NDA – but I’m allowed to say whether or not I played the open beta; which I did. I played both a Sorcerer, Rogue, and a Necromancer, got all of them to the max level. It was glorious.
There’s a new beta coming along this weekend, and I’ll be playing that one too. Last beta, if you got to level 20, you could get two titles and a back cosmetic item (I’ll drop the image down below), and this beta offers the same rewards, with one additional one; If you kill Ashava, the world boss, with a level 20 character, you earn the “Cry of Ashava Mount Trophy”, which is something you can hang on your mount. I’m dropping that image down below as well. Atleast this beta, Ashava will spawn on a fairly regular interval, which will start between 9 am PDT May 13th, and every third hour until 9 am PDT May 14th. Atleast that gives us good time to actually kill it – last beta I only got to kill it once because of scheduling at home, I simply didnt have time to play when the world boss appeared the other times.
Speaking of Diablo 4, by the way, I actually did end up buying the game. Twice. One for PC and one for PS5 – this way, I’m able to play the game more “seriously” when I’m at the PC, and I can play some melee characters more relaxed infront of the TV.
But enough of Diablo 4 for now. I’ll fill in more of the game as the time comes – especially during the next beta. Or when I play it as it launch in less than a month now! It launches June 6th!
As for other news, I’ve begun collecting some childhood memories! Mainly tabletop rpg-stuff, and finally after loads of time and – for me – an obscene amount of money, I’ve managed to collect the entire “base set” of stuff I was out to get – the complete published collection of the settings and campaign books of the edition I wanted! Now I just need the editions before and after this one..
Unfortunately, I’m not going to post a photo of it.
What I can say, is that the same tabletop rpg-publisher also published an entire fantasy book collection – 51 books – which I have begun collecting as well, and as of now, I own 36 of said books. The books I now search for are mostly about Conan, 10 books, and it’s proven difficult to find some of them. I did find someone who sold all ten of them, but he wants $250 for them..unless someone offers more, in which case, I have to bid more for them.
Look, I want to complete the set as much as the next guy, but for me to fork over that much in one go, I have to plan my budget a lot more, and save up money for a while for it to not hurt too much in one go. And this month is definitely not one of those, sadly. And even then, I still have the published adventures of the edition I’m collecting to buy – all in all, there’s just too much money pouring out of my wallet for me to actually pursue this 10-book collection of Conan for now.
At the same time, I’ve also begun buying miniatures to have around in my shelves. The excuse is that I might end up using them in some tabletop sessions, but honestly, I might not even get a session going at all. I want to, and the plan is for me to be a Game Master for a homebrew campaign with my oldest kid – potentially also my younger kids when they get older – and their mom. Perhaps someone else as well, who knows. But knowing myself, it might actually end up being either scrapped or tuned down to something not requiring miniatures, in which case, I’ll only end up with a shelf full of pretty minis – which isnt such a bad thing, really.
I got a couple of 3d-printed minis, and while they’re “cheap” to get in volume compared to some plastic minis that, say, Games Workshop sells, they’re also harder to work with I realized. Plastic glue doesnt take well on them, so if something breaks off I cant glue it in place with the plastic glue I had. I had to buy UV-glue and a small UV-light in order to glue those things, and it always tend to leave a small “bulge” around the glued area. Not super huge, but it is minis we’re talking about, so relatively, it’s huge. Also, I know I’m a newbie about this, but spray-priming it seems to just give a weird coating, like a thick coating instead of the thin layer I expected. So, while cheaper, and arguably a lot more costumizable due to it being print-on-demand for whatever thing you’ve got designed, the down side being that it’s harder to glue and prime, and honestly, it feels more brittle.
Ofcourse, I can do this comparison, even if it’s not universally true or in line with others experiences, because I also bought plastic injection molded minis, and wow.. the difference is huge! In my experience, priming it was a lot smoother, because it didnt get that thick layer, it was like the plastic just accepted a thin layer of paint, while the 3d printed resin stuff let the paint “pool” on the surface, requiring more priming to get a complete coverage. I dont know if that is what happened, but it felt like it. Also, while I have used UV-glue on the plastic miniatures – and it did work fine – I also used actual plastic glue and… well, it didnt “set” as fast as using UV-glue and a UV-light does, when it eventually does set, it’s really stick those pieces tight! I bought a Be’lakor and used the plastic glue on the wings, and despite the entire thing being as large and comparatively heavy as it is, I can actually lift it in the wings and not risk breaking the wing off!
Admittedly, I havent painted any of the plastic models yet, save for priming them, but I have high hopes. Priming the 3d printed stuff got some details obscured, like the faces – while not perfectly detailed faces from the start, it got almost lumpy in comparison with primer paint on it – but the plastic models turned out great. I can still see the small chain pattern on the loincloth of my Be’lakor with ease, and the faces of my plastic skeletons and Nighthaunt ghosts are definitely well detailed still.
I even got a couple of buildings – 3d printed ones – for fairly cheap. They weren’t actually cheap, since I paid over $170 for them, but considering they would’ve cost about $300 otherwise, you could pretend they’re cheap. My youngest son has already called dibs on one of them as a play-house, which was not really something I intended, but I have already resigned to that. I’ve got a photo somewhere of it semi-built, but before he gets to play with it for real, I’ll have to fit some pieces together better, glue them, use some greenstuff to fill in some gaps, prime it, paint it.. And my oldest called dibs on “any of the houses”, so I gave him the smallest to paint – I only need to fill in gaps there as well, and prime it before he can paint it. Now, my middle kid has asked for a building to call his own as well, but I’m not sure what to do about it. My oldest is fine with the smallest house, and sure, my youngest kid claimed the absolutely largest house for his, but two of the remaining houses are much to fragile to give him, and the third house is way too small – still larger than the house my oldest got, but compared to the house my youngest claimed, it’s tiny; which is almost certain to cause friction between the two.
I just need to get around to fix these up, paint them.. and who knows, maybe I’ll succeed in fixing the tower up and give it to my middle kid. While still fragile, I hope he can manage to fit the floors on top of each other if I just fix the “dowels” better, but the tavern.. each of the floors consists of several pieces, and lifting and dropping it will almost certainly break it apart. That one is too fragile, almost too fragile for myself.
But I ended up noticing a few things during my first steps into my new-found hobby.
The first being that I do not like priming with a spray-can. I quickly got onto the GW website to look around for priming paint I could dab on with a brush, and I was actually pleasantly surprised when I was told through the chat system, that the Citadel “base” paints would actually work like primer as well! I had a bunch of those at home already, so I can do that easily from now on with the rest of any miniatures I buy. I still think I’ll keep spray-priming any large stuff I have or get, until that spray-can is empty atleast.
The second is that I understand how important a proper workplace is. I painted 11 miniatures sitting under a bad ceiling light, on my sofa with my low coffee table as a work area, and the back and neckpain is still haunting me, almost a week later. The next set of miniatures, I painted on my PC desk, next to my large windows that lets in lots of natural lights. While better, it was still not enough – I need larger work area and better spot-lighting that I can control better, as well a better height for my work area. Being an old goldsmith, I’m used to having the bench pin at almost eye-height, as I used the filings-drawer as a place to rest my arms. Which means that even if I’m seated at my desk, I want the minis propped up at eye level, which is almost a feet and a half above the actual desk surface. These took a total of 16h to do, and it almost killed my back and neck to do them.
Thirdly, I also realized that this is actually fun as all hell, and that even if I’m not digging the spray-can, I might actually get myself an airbrush. It’ll be the first I ever use one, and the upkeep of it is dreading me. But, getting a cheap one for $200 might be a good thing, since most of the paint I already own are useable with an airbrush anyway, the only thing I need to get – besides the airbrush itself – is some sort of cleaning kit. The airbrush I’m currently looking at does include both the gun, a compressor and the hose, two basic colours, paint diluting, cleaning liquid, two glass jars, and two pipettes. While it seems like good value, I think I’m going to need more cleaning eventually so as to not completely destroy my airbrush – and that’s not mentioning some sort of air-ventilated booth of some kind.
Oh, the reason I think of getting myself an airbrush, is because I somehow ended up kickstart-backing a 280+ miniature – plus bits, like almost 100 bits which is mostly weapons – from Archon Studios, which is one of the largest plastic injection molding miniature manufactorer there is, apparently. They’ve mostly done terrain before, with a few miniatures as well, but this time they’ve gone all out in doing miniatures only. And it does look sweet.
Unfortunately, those wont come until next year. By then, I hope I’ll have a good portion of my shelves filled with miniatures and a bunch of painting experience behind my belt, as well as a proper setup to work at.
And having looked at some Youtube videos about painting, especially Lyla Mev, Whyloch’s Armory and WatchItPaintIt, I’ve decided to try to get ahold of some Speed Paints. From what I can tell of these videos, speed painting seems like it’s more up my alley – as fun as painting is, I’m too impatient and shaky on my hands to do it “good” anyway, might as well do it fast with paint that is meant to paint fast with. Apparently, these $200+ paints are supposedly really good and are now on my shopping list – but that will unfortunately take a while… Oh, right – a paint-shaker is on it too, because my wrists are not up to the task of shaking paint..
