I’ve never been a gum-chewer. But in the last year, the gum needed chewing, so I got down to business.

That isn’t a metaphor.

About a year ago, someone offered me some gum, and I was intrigued by the vessel it was offered from— not a metallic bubble pack, but a plastic jar with a very interesting lid.

The lid is a truncated hemisphere, but the flat cut of the top isn’t parallel to the base– instead it’s angled, creating an interesting shape. The flap at the top is a separate piece that can be (permanently, and destructively) removed, and there’s a satisfying row of parallel indentations around the edge. As it tends to do, my brain took in the shape of this lid and filed it into the Terrain Scrap Archives, a filing system in my brainmeats where I track “stuff I’ve seen that could probably be used for terrain, someday, maybe”. I didn’t immediately know exactly what use the lids would have, but I knew in my core that there was a piece of terrain somewhere inside it.

This will eventually be a post about some space terrain.

But, quick tangent to talk about how great I am first.

I am, as the title of this blog accurately states, amazing. And the things that I build have a strong tendency to manifest that same property. However, such quality of output does not happen on its own. While my most amazing amazingness appears to be born purely out of brilliant ideas and skilled implementation, there is a crucial step whose importance even I tend to forget: planning.

I am a very good planner (in that I’m good at anticipating most of the elements of a future project that require preconceptualization, and most of the problems that I will need to solve along the way) and a competent enough concept artist, and a lengthy concept stage always dramatically improves the quality of my final products. For a few recent-ish examples…

I haven’t been terribly productive for the past six months. However, while I’ve generally failed to successfully make things, the rate at which I plan to make things has not really slowed down. Most of these plans take the form of vague outlines in the back of my head or excited-but-fruitless discussions with my friends and associates. A precious few plans, though, have passed the important barrier of being committed to paper.

A concept in my head has about a 10% chance of seeing the light of day. A concept that makes it to the drawing stage jumps to about 80%. The project might be tackled right away or it may sleep for a few years before I find the time and enthusiasm to begin labouring, but sooner or later, Spud Art usually becomes Spud Tangible Objects.

With that said, let’s take a look at something that I will probably build… eventually… maybe. ~_~

I ran an Infinity league at my local store this past summer. An ongoing narrative ran through the five weeks of missions, and that narrative frequently called for battles to take place in fairly specific locations that are difficult to represent with the terrain my store had on-hand. I didn’t want the players to have to play these missions with ill-fitting boards, so in the month leading up to the league, I spent some time creating new terrain pieces to match the environments I was planning to send them into. You’ve already seen one result of this effort in the form of the sewer board. A second one– a modular system of space station walls– was built enough to be played on during the league, but I never finished sprucing it up because I didn’t like how tedious it was to assemble each time we used it. (I may revisit that bucket of components at some point in the future, though).

The third board I built took the most work, but ended up being my absolute favourite. The inciting incident for the entire campaign was an alien attack on a Yu Jing cargo transport over Paradiso, and I wanted an actual ship for the players to play on. I traditionally build my Infinity terrain out of hand-cut foamcore construction with hand-cut craft foam detailing; this technique yields great-looking terrain that is extremely durable, but it takes quite a long time to build due to all of the precise manual cutting. I only had two weeks and change to build my spacecraft, though, so I had to figure out some shortcuts that would let me do more construction than normal in the time I had available.

I ran an Infinity league this past summer at my store, and as I was prepping one of the weeks, I realized that the story I was writing really demanded that a mission or two take place in a sewer.

This was a problem, seeing how my store does not have sewer terrain. However, this was not a large problem, because… come on. It’s freaking sewers, people.

Three short blasts of the Terrain Party Horn summoned my army to my side, and we proceeded to churn out our smelly battlefield in the span of an afternoon.

I have always opted to buy love. Really, it was the only option available to me– given my staggering menu of crippling personal flaws and blatantly antisocial attitudes, the only way I’ve been able to maintain any sort of social circle throughout my adult life has been through the balancing contribution of my works. My goal has always been to inspire in those around me, both in my physical and virtual spaces, a difficult moment of indecision.

“Okay, sure,” they say to themselves. “Spud may be kind of an asshole, and he does leave his crap lying around on four different tables wherever he goes, and the relentless bragging does get pretty f***ing irritating sometimes… but on the other hand… man, that blowfish was pretty awesome. Maybe if I put up with him for a while he’ll make me something pretty like that.”

And in that moment, they’ve unwittingly entangled themselves in my calculated cycle of grudging tolerance. Putting up with Spud does not, in the end, pay off for most people, but after years of practice I’ve perfected a manner of making it look like it might. I guess I’m sort of the lottery of human beings– a horrific investment obscured by really good marketing.