Greetings. I am Stebloke, and I am a bit strange. This website contains my blog, where you can read about the things I create, the games I play, and any other things I get involved in.

I make this blog mostly because I like to look back on the things I do and feel nostalgic, but also because it keeps me motivated to keep pushing on with my backlog of little projects and tasks.

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My terrain making marathon has been continuing, with my attempts to finish off my new forests.

For my scratch-built trees, I knew I needed some different coloured flock, so I tried to mix in other colours to my existing flock, to see if I could stain it a different colour.

This worked to a degree, but did not give me the bright, vivid colours I was hoping for.

Nevertheless, I trudged on, and attempted to apply this flock to the trees, by using that thinned down PVA I'd got left over in a squirty bottle from my board build.

I made a huge mistake when I came to glue on the 2nd layer of flock. This took place outside on a breezy day, and a huge gust of wind knocked over my pots of flock and scattered them across the decking. I'd only done the 2nd layer on about 4 of the trees, and I rolled my eyes at my stupidity.

However, it seemed multiple layers probably wouldn't have helped these creations much, as the flock would fall off with even the lightest touch or movement. So several days went by where I blasted those things with more PVA to try and seal them down, as well as one day where I emptied most of a rattle can of varnish over them.

But still the flock barely holds on.

To give me some backup in the tree department, I found a cheap bag of toy trees online, that are very cheesy indeed, but came in a wide range of colours and sizes. Just what I wanted.

After several days of monotonous effort, I think I've been able to create a bunch of interesting looking bases with which to form the forests with.

Sure, some of them look better than others. And sure, some of those toy trees, as well as the fish tank plastics, look pretty low effort if you focus on them too much. But I still think they look a lot better than my scratch-built abominations. That's why I barely ended up using any of them.
All that mucking about for nothing. Again.

So while they certainly aren't perfect, as a whole, I quite like the effect.

Overall, I think they will be adequate for our needs, and are far better than the old ones, for both playability and storage.

Another few days were on the horizon where I would have the time and space to work on my gaming boards again. And this time, I decided, I needed to make it count. It was about time these damn things were done.

Before I could finish off the boards I'd already started, I needed to go back to one of my old boards and modify it so that it would fit in with the new ones.

I peeled off some of the old grass sheet from down one long edge, and along one of the short edges where it had crinkled when I first glued it down many years ago.

I'd got one pre-cut strip of MDF left from last year that I glued and screwed down along the edge. Then I cut and attached some slightly thinner wood and some XPS to go around the corner. That wood was actually my old cutting board that I used for years before finally buying a proper one last year.

I then added a few little bits of wood and card to form the foundation of some "ramps" that would slope down from the high edge to the center of the board.

And then I went absolutely mental with home made modelling compound to try and blend everything together. Not sure whether it was a good idea, but I mixed in paint to the compound as I made it, so that it would have a more natural colour, in case anything on top of it got scratched off.

My first problem arose when I saw that I must have put too much water in the compound. Not only did it take way longer to set than last year, but a lot of the moisture must have absorbed into the MDF trim I'd screwed to the board. This meant it warped and expanded, and I had to do my best to correct it with filler and sanding.

The white filler pretty much covered all of my coloured compound anyway, so I slapped some paint all over the top of it.

Next up was the grout, and after gluing this down, I saw a big complication. I'd lined up one of the new boards against this one, to check the height. It was at this point, to my absolute dismay, that I realised that the new boards had warped pretty badly. The thinner ones were even worse than the wider ones, with the river section having what must have been a half inch upwards bend on it.

I guess it was either the layers of glue and paint that had gone down, or just the fact that I bought naff wood all the way back when I started. I felt so shitty and demoralised. All this time and work. And seemingly for nothing.

Maybe I screwed myself over by wanting to have some of the elements, like the river, sculpted into the board.
I should have just painted the boards green/brown, then put the grout mix over the top, then the flock and grass with basing glue. Then just use modular terrain, even for things such as the river.

Maybe if I'd stuck to the simple stuff that works, I wouldn't be in this mess.

I came to the decision at this point that these boards were not going to be the awesome gaming boards I'd always wanted, and that I would have to make some more at some point (preferably as soon as possible).

But I needed to decide whether to pull the plug now and save all my grass and glue, or see it through and see what other fatal mistakes I could make, and what valuable lessons I could learn.

I decided for the latter, and after some failed attempts with fulcrums and weights to see if I could flex the boards back into position, I went ahead with the basing glue and grass.

I'd got five full 50g bags of different shades, and another two half bags of random leftovers. I stuffed them all together in one big bag, and confidently decided that there was plenty for this task. That was, until I did my first couple of test corners, which seemed to gobble up the grass.

I'd bought two massive bottles of quite expensive glue, thinking this was the thing I was going to run out of, but instead, it seemed like the grass would be the problem.

Just in case, I thought I should only put grass around the edges of the boards, to make sure they would all fit together. And then, if it looked like I would run out, I could mix any new grass in with my leftovers to blend things in a bit better.

This proved to be yet another mistake. After trimming the first board, I got a bit more confident, and thought I'd have enough after all. Sure enough, I slapped grass down on the other boards no problem. But when I went back to the first board to finish it off, it ended up leaving a very obvious seam between the outer grass and the inner grass. And it's very unsightly.

Oh well. It's not like there aren't a load of other things wrong with these boards. What's one more?

After the grass was all down, it was out into the sunshine, or rather out into the shade, to slap down some hefty varnish passes from some rattle cans.

Now, there are still plenty of little things to finish off. The dirt areas need touching up with some drybrushing. The river needs re-painting. Some edges need tidying up. Things like that.

But ultimately, the boards are now playable. I can finish them off properly at any time, so that's what I'll do. Right now, it's game time!

It's been just over a year since I decided to make my own boards, and they're only just now in a state where games can be played on them. Shit, I move slow.

I knew I couldn't keep painting Blood Bowl stuff forever, so I looked to some other games for my next project.

There's so much to choose from, as I have so many unpainted models (1291 at current count, and 321 that need revisiting at some point because they suck).

With me hopeful of getting my new Epic rules to the tabletop again some time soon, I thought some more 6mm action would not be a bad shout. From there I soon saw what I wanted to tackle next - my Warlord Titans.

Ideally, I would be painting my Imperial Warlords along with the rest of their Titan Legion, in order to get them all done in one go.

But I also had 2 Chaos models to go with the 3 Imperial models, and all of them were in various stages of atrociousness, and needed work before I could even think about painting.

Tzeentch Titan "Zul-Belmanar"

I actually started painting this 14 years ago, and at the time, I got it to an almost finished state.

However, it has remained in that state all this time, as I always assumed I'd finish it off when I got around to painting the rest of my Epic Tzeentch.

This clearly has never happened, and now with my more critical eye and opinions, I came to the conclusion that more was needed than just finishing the paint job.

Firstly, I painted some matte varnish over the transfers I'd used. This technique worked well on the dwarf Blood Bowl team, so I used it again here. And boy did they need it, as those transfers went on bad. And to be fair, they still look pretty bad, with some air bubbles underneath.

Then it had a snapped banner pole which I removed, and filled in with some milliput, as well as taking off a few bits of flashing that had survived.

It is now ready for whatever new paint ideas I can come up with.

Imperial Titan "Mortem Dantis"

This is the Epic 40K era metal Warlord Titan, and the only Warlord I own that is not one of the old plastic beetlebacks.

Not only had several bits fallen off, it also still had lots of little bits of flashing do be rid of. Flashing seems to be something I didn't deal with very well back in the day.

I had to glue the large top armour piece back on, though I noticed there were lots of gaps between this and the main body. To remedy this, I decided I would use some milliput. However, before I got messy, I thought one of the top guns looked a little naff, so snapped it off and repositioned it.

After mixing up some milliput, I re-attached the lower weapon using a combination of super glue and putty, to hopefully really solidify the joint.

Then I made a massive mess with the milliput, which took a lot of cleaning up afterwards. Luckily, this doesn't seem to be that bad now that I've brushed some new black paint over the model, which not only covered the new yellow putty, but also patched up the really bad spray undercoat attempt I had done on it years ago.

It is now ready for the Legio Distor paint job.

Imperial Titan "Tigurius Finis"

This poor titan has seen a lot of action over the years. The legs, body, head and base of it are my original Warlord Titan from the 1992 Epic Space Marine starter box, and it was originally painted blue, grey and red.
After the release of Epic 40K, the carapace and weapons were removed, and it was re-fitted with a weapon set to fit that new game. While it also needed repainting, for some reason I chose the same colours as my Space Marine Chapter, the Storm Tigers.

At some point during the 2000s, maybe when I started to create my own Epic rules, but certainly when it was clear I was never going to play Epic 40K again, I removed all of its weapons and re-fitted it again.

And that's the way it has remained, all of these years, just waiting to get another paint job in the colours of the Legio Distor, my Titan Legion.

At first, I couldn't remember its original loadout except it had the quake cannon which is now on one of my Reaver Titans. But when I paid more attention to the current model I saw both the plasma weapon and the laser cutter still had the model's original paint job. Odd that they are now two of the weapons that have been returned to it.

Speaking of the plasma cannon, it was loose and fell off while I was cleaning up many little bits of flashing that still existed on the model. I took the opportunity to reposition it and tidy it up with milliput.

In addition, I clearly never glued the legs in correctly to the base, as there were huge gaps here, so I also filled these areas with putty. I had an absolute 'mare of a time with milliput during this whole project, as time and time again, it would stick to absolutely anything else but the model I wanted it to stick to.

It really should have received a damn good stripping before any more paint, but I'm well beyond the desire to do any more of that nonsense.

Imperial Titan "Ignis Variat"

Thankfully, this thing didn't need much cleaning up. There were just a few little bits of flashing, and a tiny bit of what could have been old paint or glue that I scraped off with a knife.

I did have a look at those lower two weapons, and thought they looked in a silly position. If I'd still got some old titan weapon mounts I may have tried to move them to look a little cooler, as the titan looks a bit derpy as it is.
But without any suitable parts, and eager to make this process as fast as possible, I left the weapons where they were.

I did brush over another thin coat of black, as the undercoat I'd put on it about a year ago hadn't gone down as well as I first thought.

Slaanesh Titan "The Onyx Voluphedon"

This was the last Warlord Titan I started putting together a few years ago, with the main body being from the Banelord Dave gave me over ten years ago now. The carapace on this thing was actually from my original Warlord Titan from 1992, which got ripped off its original model when Epic 40K was released.

It didn't really need much work to get it paint-ready, just a little milliput to smooth over the Imperial Aquila area on the carapace, and a little touching up of the grey undercoat here and there.

I found out a bit back that Black Sonata had a new expansion last year. Like before, the designer has released a print and play version for free, so I snapped it up.

To use elements of this new expansion, I would need to print a new version of the board. This is because, when I made mine, I took out some of the colours that would now be required.

After that, it was the remaking, printing and cutting of the darkest lady cards, the blazonry cards, and the new tokens.

My laminator definitely didn't help me here, as it scrunched up my first print of the new board, and also scuffed up several of the new tokens. Stupid thing.

A few of the indirections cards have colours on the back, but most have a compass, that can only be used in certain dark lady routes. I wanted all of the indirections cards to be usable in any route. To this end, I scrapped the idea of using the compass cards, and instead printed different combinations of colours to use instead. This led to me sitting down and working out where each card could fit in certain routes, and required changing the letters on many of them to account for this.

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After a load of printing and cutting, it was time to get back into the game, to try out some of these new modules.

For my first little foray, I used the darker ladies from the first expansion, along with the rendezvous module for the first time. In addition, I swapped out just 5 stealth cards for new indirections cards from the second expansion.
As it turned out, the random 5 I drew were all ones I'd edited myself, with three of them being harder than the official ones, as they give 5 possible locations instead of the 3 or 4 on the official ones.

I went around the city during the dark lady's first rotation, noting down her possible route, while learning about the rendezvous point. I was able to work out that the rendezvous location was a residence, but could only fully deduce part of her route without starting to search.

I hampered myself big style in two ways. Firstly, I got all the way up to six clues, but when I properly studied my info, I could have fully deduced the the identity of the dark lady after just 4. What a muppet.

The second big oopsie was during the end game, with just a few cards left in the stealth deck. I'd positioned myself at Bishopsgate, as I knew I needed to confront her at a residence, and this was the only place left on her route I knew for certain had such a landmark.

Imagine my horror, when I rotated the stealth deck, to see a fog card at the point she came to join me in Bishopsgate. This meant I had already searched for her at this point in the stealth deck earlier in the game, and I had not written it down to remind me. As you can only search for her once at each point, with that specific card being replaced by a fog card, this meant I could not confront her here.

There were just 5 steps left in her route before the game was over, and the only one of these that had even the slightest chance of being a residence was in two turns. The stealth deck card (one of my own concoctions, no less) showed a blue or green location, which at this point could be either Cornhill or Bishopsgate. With my only chance now to stay in place and hope she came back to me, I rotated the deck 2 more steps, and then confronted her.

Gladly, it turned out alright in the end, and she had come right back to me in Bishopsgate. Not the smartest dark lady. But I gladly took the win.

With just 4 cards left in the stealth deck, and 3 in the fog deck, this would have been just 10 points. However, I got 15 more for the rendezvous, and 2.5 points for adding 5 indirections. This meant I ended with 27.5 points, making me a golden lad.

But then it was time to get really dark, with the introduction of the darkest ladies from the latest expansion. In addition, I added in the blazonry module, so I would need to deduce the symbols on her shield before I could confront her.

To help me out a little, I went back to a simple route, and then promptly scuppered myself when I missed writing down one of the initial steps when making my notes. There was much confusion when I got to the end of the 26 card deck, and I'd only written down 25 locations.

As I needed to seed a lot of blazonry cards into the stealth deck, I had already replaced many of the cards, so figuring out my mistake on the second loop through the deck was also a bit of a challenge.

Nevertheless, early in the third rotation, I'd got 4 blazonry clues and 6 dark lady clues. I decided to knuckle down and see if I could figure them out.

Turns out, there was enough info to figure out what I needed, but it took some serious trial and error, and evaluating all of the possible options.

Though I'd got the solution far earlier in the stealth deck compared to my other games, it took so long to crunch the solution, that I spent far longer playing this one.

With 18 cards left in the stealth deck, and 3 cards left in the fog deck, plus the blazonry and darkest lady, this gave me 39 points, making me a golden lad again, just 2 points away from being a fair youth.

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I returned to the floor for my latest attempt at playing Crystallo.

This time, things went a little more in my favour, and instead of failing the first stage with just one bond left to release, I was able to succeed with just one card remaining.

In addition, I had managed to gain all of the battle items, so I went into stage 2 with 11 cards to trap the dragon with.

Luckily, my available cards all had plenty of the different coloured orbs, and a nice selection of different crystals, so I was able to defeat the dragon with one card remaining.

In the second stage, I'd also picked up an extra two treasure cards, making it 7 in total, and giving me the title of Wealthy Knight, and bagging me 1400 points.

A bit of a step up from my first attempts at the game.