Tzeentch Daemon Prince (Hans)

I finally got started on the details of Hans tonight. His loincloth and then his tattoos got the fade treatment to match the rest of the army.

As for why he's named Hans, I happen to have a second deamon sitting to the side ready to destroy some army men. I was talking to Josh a while ago about the dynamic duo of two daemon princess leading my army (and eating up way too many points) when he jokingly said that I should name them Hans and Franz, and so they were named, ready to pump you up.

Either way, it's nice to finally get some detail into Hans. He's been sitting on my desk for far too long with the most basic of paint jobs. Most of him I'm not too afraid of, but his wings are what are frightening. I decided to do the color blend on the veins of his wings. They're thin, and surrounded by the flesh of the wing, so not too forgiving. Then I'm even thinking of throwing in a blue blend on the wings, but it depends on how masochistic I'm feeling when I get there.

Either way, it's nice to be back on the painting bandwagon. I'm thinking I'll post on here fairly often just to keep myself motivated to continue painting.

Finished - Thousand Sons Helbrute

Here he is finally finished. Only 100 points,  but easily one of the more challenging models. Notable fun facts, I had to give it a new face because the person I got it from somehow managed to lose the face even though the model was assembled, so thank you to my endless ghoul heads I have from fantasy for stepping in and being a helbrute. Also, unlike the entire army, this is also my first time trying to guess at what skin tone a monster demon machine taken over by tzeentch would look like. Apparently pale blue is the answer for that one.

Either way, I'm happy I got to finally practice horns thanks to this guy, and also ridiculously happy he didn't have as much armor as you'd guess so there was almost no need to edge highlight.

Now onto the first daemon prince.

Thousand sons helbrute

I haven't posted a progress picture of what I'm working on lately. Here's my helbrute that's going pretty well, tonight was my first try at horns with the brown to ivory fade, which didn't turn out half bad if you ask me.

It's Supposed to be Fun

We're going to take a break and have fun for a second, but with very rigid, boring rules. As long as you follow the rigid rules, you too, can have fun.

A person invited me into a D&D group, and we've only done character creation and I already want to shoot myself.

Let's remember, that making a level 5 character, should, in theory, take a grand total of about no time at all. 10,000 gold to spend, you roll a grand total of ten sets of dice (6 4d6 for stats, and 4 HD dice for HP) and you should be done. Buying things should just be letting people run around and get whatever they want, and there's a grand total of three feats that you should have to worry about getting.

That's it.

Nothing too complicated, nothing too mind numbing, and certainly nothing that should last for almost three hours.

Apparently, that's not enough "fun" because I didn't look at EVERYTHING at every single step.

The guy who's our DM thinks it'll be fun to invite our wives to play with us. I love Alicia, but there's not a chance in the world that she'll enjoy D&D. She did it once, when we were younger just because she wanted to hang out and have fun, but she didn't do it because she loves reading through text books of rules that do nothing but tell you about all of the rules you could follow. She does it to interact, laugh, and have fun. His wife, is in the exact same boat. They're not super nerds.

He is treating it like it is the most serious game that he is ever going to play, and instead of keeping things as simple as he can, he's making them more convoluted and complex than he possibly can handle.

Let's start work this out together, just so you can see the stupid that he ran last night trying to bore me to death. Honestly, if last night was my introduction to the game, I would never play.

The first thing you have to do is figure out what race you are. Normally there's only a few options, human, half elf, elf, halfling, gnome, dwarf, and half orc are your only options. When he asked his wife what race she wanted to be, she asked the response of what her options was. Instead of sticking her with those options and giving BRIEF summaries of who they are, he started with fayes, minataurs, pucks, pixies, half celestials, dragons, and pretty much anything else other than what anyone would consider normal. With each introduction of a new race, he would give a full historical background of who they were, what to expect out of both genders within that race, assuming that that race had genders, and the full social complexity that we would never worry about.

The same thing happened with classes. "What class do you want to be?"

"What are my options?"

"Well. . . " cue a montage of a detailed historical background of classes and talking about things that could only happen at maximum level with unlimited gold to spend on items.

And then he decided to build her backwards. "What skills do you want?"

"What does that mean? Just put them in whatever will help me the most."

Cue another montage of detailed descriptions of skill rolls that his wife will never use or see. The amount of useless information was at a new time high.

"What armor do you want?"

You guessed it! Another montage of going through every single armor option that he could find.

This went on through every single element of character creation. Weapon, feats, magical items, known languages, gear, and everything else that you ever wanted to see about dungeons and dragons was brought up in VIVID explicit detail.

He is basically setting things up for the most high of high adventures. In his mind we are living the ultimate extreme fantasy story of all history, and what he doesn't understand is that's not what his players want.

To put it into gamer terms, he's running a AAA game with a minimum of 40 mods on it, plus a full DLC patch, on the most updated top tier over clocked gaming system . . . and the rest of the people that he's playing with just want to open up Microsoft Hearts and play a few rounds, and any time that we're not on board with his view of how D&D should be played, he's not having it.

This lead me to setting up everything that I could, in my best way possible, to screw up his plan. If there's anything that a DM like him loves, it's character based rich background motivation. My character is a nomad that worships the diety of travel. My wife's character is a druid who also worships travel and seeing new parts of nature. Neither of us have a connection to any part of the story line that he's going to throw at us, and I will walk away from his forced story line in a heart beat because I want to show him that D&D is supposed to be player driven, not DM driven. Players want to have fun, relax, and enjoy a good time together. They do not want to be told about the stupidity that is trying to sort out whatever it was that he was doing. 

One Piece At A Time - Warhammer

I've been overwhelmed with things right now when it comes to the hobby. Instead of dealing with one thing at a time, I let myself start to see the big picture, and that's dangerous.

As you know, maybe, I got my army off ebay which means that I got a lot of assembled things, and only painted things as I needed them for the escalation league. I got my primary army, and instead of stopping there I realized that I had more figures to paint, and so I just dove in and started to paint. The only problem with that is that before I was painting with a purpose. I painted my terminators because I needed a terminator force. I painted my thousand sons because I wanted thousand sons. I did everything because I wanted to have it as part of my army.

Now I have figures, and they need to be painted, but I'm not painting with any purpose, so I'm just looking at this stack of figures and having no desire to ever paint them because I don't know if or how they'll even fit into the bigger picture of the army.

Today, instead of focusing on the mob of everything (1 hell brute, 23 CSM marines, 10 thousand sons, 2 daemon princes, 3 rhinos, some chosen, another terminator lord, and a few possessed) I stopped worrying about all of them and put all of my attention onto the hellbrute, and only focused on that.

In one day I've done more work on that hellbrute than I have in the months that it's been sitting on my desk staring at me. Instead of trying to understand it in the big picutre, the only way I've gotten any damage done on the figure is going piece by piece.

Take that for what you will.

Dragon Sleeping - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/137/the-book-that-changed-your-life

I knew that I liked writing, and I knew that I liked books for a long time, but I didn't know what I should do with them or if I was actually any good with it until about 8th grade. In 8th grade I got sick. Sick enough that my mom got in touch with my teachers and asked for homework for me to do while I was healing up.

For my English class I was given a book report that I had to write on a book of my choice. The only catch was that at the end of the report I was expected to do one of a few projects. The only problem was that when I read it, I skimmed things, or it was just poorly worded and instead of doing only one of the assignments, I did all of them. I wrote an interview with one of the characters, I wrote a chapter to the book from a different character's point of view, I even re-wrote the ending of the entire novel, and I did it because I was sick, and because I enjoyed it.

The book in question? Dragon Sleeping by Craig Shaw Gardner.
https://www.amazon.com/Dragon-Sleeping-Circle-Trilogy-Book-ebook/dp/B019UV7EE4#nav-subnav

That's the book that changed my life. That's the book that made me start to really like literature because it was a story that I understood, it was a story type that made me interested in what was going on, and it made me realize that reading could do a bit more than just spout out information at a teacher and get a grade on it.

The book itself is about a group of people from a suburb community and how they get sucked into a high fantasy setting with wizards and of course dragons. They get sucked into the world of magic and mystical creatures, and they look at everything like they're still part of their suburban world, and I loved it. I say that I write urban fantasy, and this book is the prime example that I give people when they ask what urban fantasy is. It's a perfect mix of things that are supernatural and weird, and yet perfectly average for the rest of us. It's suburban life and parents worrying about their kids, while their kids run around and get in trouble with elemental forces and magic, and I loved it.

This was the book that took all of my fantasies about day to day life, and how it was just a bit different than normal, and gave it a place to run around. My day dreams, my stories that I really want to write are always about the real world, but with just a hint of the crazy in there. I never want to write a 'typical' story, I always have to add in something different, I have to add in a different way to see the world because that's how I see it. I can't see a typical setting, I have to see something that's atypical, and this is the book that let me see it that way.

This is the book that put me into the world of literature and writing. This is the type of book that I want to write. Maybe not this exact style, and maybe with my own quirks and flavors on it, but this is the book that showed me that I can write my stories and maybe, just possibly, someone will read it.

Get Lost - My American Life

http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/136/you-are-here

I knew who I was, where I was, and what was going on in my life more in a different country dealing with complete strangers in a language that I hardly knew, than I do as an adult.

My time in Sweden was filled with a lot of times getting lost. This had a healthy amount of it dealing with the fact that my president, the guy in charge of telling us where to go and what to do, was known under the nickname of "Wildcard Karlsson" because he would do the most backwards, off the charts, weird things when moving missionaries around. His calling card move was the double transfer. This is when he would take two missionaries that had gotten to know an area, had worked with the people there, gotten to gain the trust of the investigators, members, and potentially the town drunks, and then rip them away and plop two new missionaries in the exact same area.

This happened often enough that I became used to the fact that the first time in any area was a guessing game from both me and my companion of where we were supposed to go, who we were supposed to meet with, and we were going to be lucky if we made it home anywhere close in time to get dinner in our stomachs.I got lost on my way to my own apartment so many times, simply because the area was new for both me and the guy I was with, and we got lost. We'd get turned around, sit on the wrong bus, not know the schedule for the buses on holidays and how they were different than normal days, and the list goes on.

Even though I got turned around, lost, and was living in a different world that wanted nothing to do with me, I didn't feel lost.

I think a large part of that not feeling lost even though I was physically lost, was the fact that there were rules. There were such strict rules and regulations for us as missionaries that I could be put in the weirdest situation ever and I knew exactly what I was supposed to do. If WWIII broke out and I had to abandon Sweden, I knew the exact rules of which train I should get on, which chapel to meet at, and where to go. I knew what I should do if my companion ever got lost without me. I knew what I should do if I got mugged. I knew what I should do, when I should do it, and how I should do it. I had rules about everything and in that light, I got to understand why people join the army.

I always hated the idea of the armed forces. In a way, I still hate it a bit.

I don't know what it is, but taking away people's individuality and 'breaking' them into something that you want and essentially taking away their idea to rationally process or answer anything for themselves is really scary for me. There is no room for questioning, it is only sir, yes sir. Say what you will about Hollywood actors that can ask for the permission to speak freely, in war you don't get to play that game. You have orders and you follow them, simply because some guy told you to do it. There are rules and you have to follow them or you, and the people around you die.

I used to wonder why anyone would ever want to have that life; why anyone would want to give up their ability to think, question, and understand the world.  I never understood it, but the brief glimse I got of it in Sweden, it makes sense. Places like that are comfortable. You don't have to ask questions. You don't have to think about where you are, what you're doing, or the difficulties of anything else. Your job is one job, and it is hammered into your head. There's no need to worry about your future, your life outside that job, or anything else. That one calling is yours, and that's comfortable because your world isn't big and scary. You have time settings to everything. Even in the worst days of combat (or on your mission) you can look at your deployment papers and hopefully see an end date, where you can say by THIS date, I'm done. It's just one day at a time and I can make it to that date.

You can drag me through the mud, spit at me, slam doors in my face, laugh at me, humiliate me, make me the most depressed I've been in my entire life, and make me feel like a failure, but I can get through it because I know that there's an end. I know that I can make it through just one more day. You can get shot at, blown up, cut up, torn up, and see the most horific things in the world, but hopefully there is that end date, where you know that at that date, you're coming home and you won't have to deal with it any more. You can do anything for just one more day when you know there's an end.

Those things don't exist in the real world.

There's no structure to real life, and that's where it gets scary. Instead of having a person moving you around, telling you where to be, how to live, and how long to live it, you get nothing. You're left with yourself, and that's scary. When you leave a structured place, be it school, family, military, mission, or whatever else, and you're left out for yourself, there's infinite possibilities, and no longer are there rules for everything because those rules don't apply any more. You can stay out as late as you want, wear whatever you want, do whatever you want, and see whatever you want, and there's no one telling you that you can't. There's nothing there to give you structure, other than yourself, and that's scary.

Trusting yourself is when you get lost, because there's doubt. You're only lost when you doubt yourself, or the structure that got you where you're at. I could be in the middle of Sweden in a town I couldn't pronounce with no idea of how to get home, but I didn't feel lost because I knew what got me there. Military members can be in the middle of a warzone in a teritory that no one has ever really mapped because no one lives there, and they're not lost because they know what got them there. But, if I got lost in the middle of Sweden now, in that same town with those same circumstances I would feel lost because I would doubt myself. How in the world did I get myself there? How am I going to get myself out? Before I trusted in the person and people involved with getting me into that circumstance that I knew they'd get me out, now I'm the only one left.

Now when I get myself lost, I'm the one that has to solve it. I don't have someone to lean up against. When I'm lost with my career and have no clue what to do, there's no rules that I can follow to get an easy out, I have to figure it out on my own and I have no clue what to do so that's really hard to do. When I get lost with how to have a happy marriage, I feel lost because there's no structure. There's no solution. There's no path that I can follow because there's no one that has set up a set of rules for me that I can just follow and know that it works.

I get why people stay in the military as long as possible. I even understand those people that want to relive their missionary, high school, or even college days, because those were the days where they felt in control. Those were the days that they didn't have to worry and felt like they knew what was going on in their life. They weren't lost.

You can't get lost when you don't have to be in charge of everything, and that's why you should get lost.

Go get lost. Get in a situation where no one can help you out of it. Go figure it out on yourself. You got yourself out in the middle of a forest in the middle of the night, now you have to figure out how to get back home. Go get yourself into a scary career, a major relationship, a life that you're not certain of, because that's when you have to grow. When you get lost, you come up with crazy solutions and get creative. When you get lost you push yourself to become better and find a way to make things work. When you get lost you come together with the people that you're lost with, and you create something better.

Feeling like you have no clue what you're doing, that you have no guide in front of you, and no one to help you doesn't make you lost, it makes you a trailblazer, an adventurer, or even a pioneer. That feeling where you're overcome with fear because everything is riding on you to come up with a solution and you're still stumbling around in the dark trying to understand which way is up is a frightening feeling, but it's in those moments that you can really do something great.

I get it. Avoiding feeling lost is a nice feeling. It's comfortable. It makes it so you have stability and never question yourself, but it's not worth it.