Thunderdome is a format I invented a few years ago to kill time before an event. The details have evolved over time, but in short: 4+ players have an army consisting entirely of three warcasters or warlocks that share a battlegroup, with no other models allowed (eg, no Derelyss, no Goreshade feat, one Coven member with no ball, etc). Each player (we’ve run up to 11 people on one board) spawns at the outside of a ring, and then they run around for an hour killing each other. It’s pretty hilarious. 🙂

We’ve always played it as a casual time-killer, but for this year’s holiday event at my local store, we ran an organized Thunderdome tournament. I’ll post the event rules in a separate post, but for now, let’s take a look at the two boards I put together to support the event, one or both of which will be at Templecon this coming February.

Last year at my store, I came up with a neat new idea for a tournament: everybody enters by handing over a wrapped box containing a mysterious painted mini of their choice. The box has three clues as to its contents. Over the course of the day, the games that the players play earn them “present points” that they can use to unlock hints; at the end of the day, players use their standing to swap whatever they’re holding for presents held by other people, using revealed hints to guess the contents of other people’s boxes; the lowest-ranking player swaps first, then the second-lowest, and so on; the highest-ranking player swaps last, letting him or her secure whatever present they want without any chance of having it taken away.

2012’s event was a huge success with a ton of great models entered at prizes, and I was excited to run it again this year (though with the modification of running it as a Thunderdome event; I’ll have more details about this year’s event in my next post). Last year my contribution was a pair of festive Basilisks; this year, I went with something a bit more traditional by making an Iron Kingdoms rendition of Santa Claus. And naturally, the only place such a judgmental enforcer of society’s laws would fit in within our beloved setting is in a high post within the Protectorate of Menoth.

Here, now, is how High Naughtymonger Santa Reznik came to be.

First up: YAAAAAY CHRISTMAS GRAPHICS!

Second: Sorry for the extreme dry spell on the update front. The reason I haven’t had much to show this year is that I’ve spent easily 70% of my modeling time between March and October of this year working on a single large project. It represents the bulk of my productive output in 2013, but I didn’t want to reveal it until it was completely finished. I originally thought it would be done in May, then amended that to August, and then Christmas. It was finally looking like I would meet that last deadline, and then…

I burned it.

Well, not the whole thing. But about 30% of the Fimo project’s work to date was baked too hot and destroyed, and I’ve been too depressed to restart that component just yet. As such, I’ve deferred any further work on the project to 2014, and am using my time to work on holiday projects instead. As a result, I’ll have at least three projects to show you in December, including a holiday-themed conversion, a terrain project that I’ll be lugging down to Templecon this coming February, and finally, flat-out the best model I have ever sculpted. All three projects are in various stages of completion, and I expect to have all of them posted up by the end of December.

Next, I’m building an entirely new, heavily converted 50pt army to bring to Templecon, and I’ll post some updates on that during January.

And then, after all of that is done, I can hopefully work up the courage to rebuild what I ruined and finish the 12-Month Sculpting Project From Hell.

I promise it’ll be cool when it’s done, though. Maybe not worth a year’s wait, but definitely cool nonetheless. 🙂

-Spud

Every year on my birthday, I take the day off from work to do something I normally don’t get much of a chance to do; traditionally this meant drawing, but this year, the one thing I’ve been pining to do more of was paint. Specifically, painting random one-off models just because they look nice. I almost never get a chance to do that anymore, so I was really looking forward to it.

I took a four-day weekend to give myself lots of time to work. On the very first day of my vacation, my website was hacked. I won’t get into the horrible details, but suffice to say that I now won’t need to think very hard to come up with a “worst birthday ever”. Yeah, I know… first world problems. 😛

In the end I only got to spend about one day out of my four-day weekend painting, but in that time, I was able to finish a single model that I’m really proud of: Theodore, the snooty English paladin my fourth-best friend Tom is playing in our Pathfinder game.

…we ran a Who’s The Boss tournament today, and I provided part of the bonus prize.

Sorry for the crappy pics, this was taken in store lighting. Head by me, everything else by local painter Nick “Mr. Slippery” Tannous. I’ll try to get some properly-lit photos in the next week or so.

Also sorry for the very quiet couple of months– I’ve been working on a very, very large project, and it’s taking much longer than I’d anticipated. I’m hoping to have it done within a month or two, but I’m going to make a point of popping out a few smaller projects in the meanwhile so that the blog gets a bit of loving too.

-Spud

Do you know this man?

If you do, then you can take solace in the knowledge that I approve, at least in part, of the way in which you are conducting your life.