Printer-friendly versionParagons of Freedom Session 2
I finally get around to describing the events of Session 2 of the first adventure from my Paragons of Freedom Game. Looking forward to getting to the next event shortly.
Joanna Barnum: Illustrator
I first came across Joanna years ago on one of the fan art sites. I'm going to say Elfwood. I don't go around making friends with artists on these sites but for whatever reason I noticed her fan art and noticed that she had a livejournal. As I had just started getting into that blogging tool, I added her and said hello.
Finding the Path
As someone who very often finds himself behind the GMs screen, I'm always excited to get the chance to just play. I had great fun at the last DC Gameday where I made a concerted effort to get in some dungeon crawling adventures. Recently, I was invited to play in a Pathfinder game. First game isn't until next weekend but I already have my character written up. Here, let me tell you about my character.
Resurrecting the Red Box
For whatever reason, when I first started getting into Dungeons and Dragons it was the AD&D Books that caught my eye. I remember using my allowance to pick up all of the old yellow spined 1st Edition AD&D books. My first experience with the original Red Box (which came out at the same time as 1st Ed AD&D according to Wikipedia) was when my next door neighbor inherited it. I remember that it was used because whoever had had it before had created a whole bunch of index cards for each of the rooms of their dungeons all in pencil.
Lady Bee
Once I decided what I was going to make for people, Lady Bee was the first one that I started working on. A while back when I created a poll asking people what their superpower would be, Leah had answered 'Self Healing'. This brought to mind pure regeneraters like Wolverine of Claire from Heroes but I wanted something a little quirkier.
I drew inspiration from an old (7th Doctor) aventure called 'Delta and the Bannermen'. In it, a young human falls for a human-looking alien queen bee and ends up consuming a bunch of royal jelly to transform himself so he could be with her. Continuing with the Bee theme, this got me thinking of the recent Colony Collapse Disorder. Going with some classic Marvel tropes, I put together the idea of a scientist working on CCD through an enhanced Royal Jelly that ends up in her system. This gives her wings, extra strength and tougheness as well as regeneration. I want to avoid the control of bees thing beause that's a bit too cliched. Instead I wanted to touch on the Spiderman web shooters by giving her a set of invented bee stingers.. basically a dart gun that can deliver different types of toxins or even cures.
For the figure itself, I used astraight forward Wasp Heroclix as the base. It was pretty straight forward to give her a bee themed outfit rather than the red one she came with. The real fun in modifying the figure was popping off the wings so that I wouldn't get the yellow and black paint all over the wings.
Galatea
This was my gift for Tricia and she was the hardest one for me to do. Over a decade ago now, Tricia played in a Play-by-Email Aberrant game I was running. Her character for that game was a native american powerhouse named Thunderbird. Basically that world's answer to Wonder Woman. My first thought in setting down was to try and recreate that character. Canabalizing my Hero Clix I took Jinx's body for the flowing skirts and general lack of clothes and mixed it with Arclight's head because it had the closest hair for what I wanted. The head was slightly too big for the body. I figured I'd paint it and that would cover up some of the imperfections. This unfortunately just made it worse and she ended up looking like and elderly fae character with exam. In the end I started over.
Introduction to the Craft Meme
A year ago on LiveJournal I participated in an internet Meme that was going around at the time. The basic setup was based around a craft exchange. Here, I'll just post the original text as I re-posted it.
The first five people to respond to this post will get something made by me! My choice. For you.
This offer does have some restrictions and limitations:
- I make no guarantees that you will like what I make!
- What I create will be just for you.
- It'll be done this year.
- You have no clue what it's going to be. It may be a song. It may be a something costume-y. I may draw or paint something. I may bake you something and mail it to you. Who knows? Not you, that's for sure!
- I reserve the right to do something extremely strange.
The catch? Oh, the catch is that you have to put this in your journal as well. We all can make stuff!
Website Redesign
It has been a while (almost a year) since I posted about the state of my website. I greatly enjoy my attempts to clean it up and make it work the way I want it to. Over the past couple of weeks, I gave the site a pretty major overhaul visually. If you are running your own Drupal installation or are just curious what I've done to the site you might find this a handy guide.
Christmas Letter 2009
Happy Holidays to our Friends and Family,
For at least as long as I've been writing these letters, Alyson and I have had a plan – every other year we put up our artificial tree and go to Massachusetts for the holidays, but on the opposite years we stay in Maryland and get ourselves a real tree. As I write this letter, I am fretting over our tree as it isn't drinking enough water. What are we going to do if it doesn't start? I am, however, looking forward to a nice quiet Christmas at home this year.
A Different Bill Olander
Bill Olander.. William R. Olander.. passed away March 18th, 1989. He died of complications resulting from AIDS. He was by all accounts an amazing man. I've linked to NY Time's obit below.
I've been vaguely aware of this particular Bill Olander who is not myself for several years. Its one of those things you find out when you google yourself to see what people are saying about you on the internet. Today someone came looking for this man on my site for the first time that I'm aware. I thought it was worth while to talk about someone who I would be honored to be mistaken for.