Lava so WARM and RED and WET
It’s Lava
LAVA!

…

…sorry.

Just a quick update today– the question of “how do you make lava” has come up a few times in the last week, and since I’ve made quite a bit of it over the years, I figured I’d toss together a quick infographic to explain my process. Hopefully someone will find this useful.

As promised, here are the rules for the Thunderdome format, taken from the event posting for last month’s event. Hopefully someone will find it informative. 🙂

-Spud

1.0 – Event Rules

• 1.1 – Thunderdome List Construction Rules
  • Thunderdome is a multiplayer format that supports anywhere from 4 to 8 players at a time.
  • Each player’s army consists of only three models: three Warcasters/Warlocks (hereafter  referred to collectively as “Casters”) from the same faction. There are no warjacks, warbeasts, solos, units, or anything else in play.
    • Warlocks use the mechanics for Focus instead of Fury– they gain their full Fury value at the start of the turn, and overcharge instead of transferring.
    • Ignore Pacts and Contracts when constructing your pool.
  • Each Caster choice can only ever bring one model to the table. No Halfjacks, no Keg Carrier, only one Coven member, Goreshade has no feat, etc. Yes, this makes some casters a bad choice in the format.
  • The Casters are considered to share a battlegroup.
• 1.2 – Additional Rules
  • Game Board: The board is a circle 3ft in diameter. The outer rim is divided into eight deployment zones; each player chooses a deployment zone through democratic elbowing, and may deploy models up to 3″ from that zone’s board edge.
  • Friendly Neighbors: Take note of the players who deploy in the spaces adjacent to you. You cannot damage or otherwise affect that player’s Casters in any way until that player has killed an enemy model. (In other words, you’ll need to walk a bit to find your first victim)
  • Combat Has Consequences: Models cannot be healed (exception: models with Tough can still heal 1 point on a successful roll), cannot be repaired, and cannot regenerate power fields in any way. Once damage is inflicted, it cannot be removed.
  • Spite Turns: Once all of a player’s Casters have been eliminated, that player continues to have turns. Whenever that player’s turn comes up, he may select one model anywhere on the board and place it anywhere completely within 3″ of its current location. That model’s controller may then turn that model to face any direction. If the owner of that model attempts to influence your choice of where to move that model in any way, you may instead place that model anywhere on the board and turn it to face any direction of your choosing. You are encouraged to put it in the most precarious and/or disruptive location you can possibly think of, and then smile coldly at the folly of the model’s owner.
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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.

-Spud

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