NerdFest: show 'em how its done Old School

Every year in April, my college puts on a micro-convention, if you can call it that, called NerdFest. Last year was the first time I went. It was a somewhat disorganized affair, but they did have have a costume contest and ongoing video games. They had room set up for board games, but it was poorly attended. The games consisted of Scrabble, Trivial Pursuit (which I won), Monopoly, and a few other general audience games. I vowed that this year, I will run a table top game. I need to show the younglings (as my department chair calls them) how gaming is done old school.

It needs to be multi-player, so initially I thought of a zombie skirmish game. I dumped that idea as I would have a lot of work to complete my 25/28mm figures (lots of figures in various stages of completion to kill the zombies, but no actual zombies to kill), not to mention building some sort of urban terrain for them. Now, I am leaning toward 15mm fantasy mass battle with me being the ref. That would be far less work for me. I have not committed fully to it as it may conflict my daughter's weekend tennis matches. But if I do, I've got my work cut out for me.

I will probably make up my own rules to make life as simple as possible for the players. They will be a mash up of several rules with the core being something along the lines of Armies of Arcana. Models will not be a problem, but I will need to make up stat cards for the various units.

I have played in but have never ran a convention game, so this should be an interesting experience.

Armored Ogre Shield

I am trying to figure out what I need to make next for my first battle of my Gambusian campaign. I seem to be close to being done, but I am not sure. In the meanwhile, I continue on my eternal quest to clean my work table. I ran across a bunch of 15mm fantasy figures that I primed. They included some armored ogres from Splintered Light Miniatures.  They come with large blank shields. Part of the reason why I haven't painted them up was because I couldn't think of what to paint onto their shields. 

As fate would have it, I found the answer in one of my son's story books. My wife is reading to him a kid's version of The Journey to the West. Its a Chinese tale that seems sort of long and convoluted and features the Monkey King. If you remember the 1986 Eddie Murphy movie, "The Golden Child," it has the Monkey King in it. The Journey West is filled with a lot of magic and a whole lot of fighting. Fortunately for me, the book is heavily illustrated, otherwise, I would have no clue as to what is going on. In one story, he and his companions take on some sort of orc-like warriors that are heavily armored and carry big shields that have faces on them, at least that is what the picture shows. Bingo, I found my answer to the ogre shields.

So this is a test sculpt. I did it out of polymer clay. Somewhere, I do have some green stuff that I could use if I was more ambitious. I sculpted it directly on the shield and then baked it. 

Seem to be looking for a contact lens.

The face doesn't look all that fierce, but I didn't have my son's book in front of me when I sculpted it. The nice thing about polymer clay is that I can easily crack it off and make a new one.