High Ambitions and Hobby Struggles

Before I jump into a hobby update, I wanted to let loyal readers know that I have created a page that contains a concise recommendation for scenarios I have played as well as any houserule suggestions I have.  I know my battle reports are long and some people might rather know whether a scenario is worth playing without all of the details or having anything spoiled.  So with this in mind, you can check out the Scenario Suggestions page conveniently located at the top of any page to easily access that information and quickly find the battle reports for a given scenario as well.  I hope this is useful and enjoyable for visitors of this site.

In terms of hobbying, I’ve been busy and made some good progress but it is hardly been smooth sailing.  Let’s start with some things that have gone well.  I made a second hill using some more slate and a cd and am unsurprisingly happy with the results.  This will be the last hill I make like this as I think variety is going to make the “board” look good.  I did try to select a bigger rock and one that a miniature can more easily rest upon.  I think I succeeded in that goal.

While perhaps a bit more on the good news/bad news side.  I’ve nearly finished painting up a box of the goblin town terrain.  It is pretty mindless to paint this terrain but thankfully not too time consuming overall.  The picture above is not great but what it shows is that I barely have enough terrain to get across the board I’m working on.  I had another larger platform piece and a couple of smaller ones left to paint when I took the picture so that is good but I will definitely need at least one and probably two more boxes of terrain to cover a 4×4 table and that is without a lot of two story platforms (which I will make more but I’m not too bothered about having tons of it considering the time and cost of the terrain).  I’m starting to feel burnt out on painting this terrain and I can tell that I need a break, so we’re more than likely months away from me playing the full Goblin Town scenarios which is a bit disheartening but also a reality of this hobby.  If you’re doing this on your own, you need to have some cash to burn and be ready to sink time into the hobby as well.  Not many people have their own Goblin town board I’d wager so this goal is still a worthy one and nothing remarkable was ever done by taking the easy way either!

Now the bad news.  I’m struggling with painting metal miniatures for some reason.  Or at least struggling with painting them at the highest level where everything is nice and smooth.  And this is after putting a lot of time, energy, and emotional effort into painting these minis as well as I can.  Why am I trying to do that?  Well I was thinking about painting the Breaking of the Fellowship set for the Golden Demon when it comes to Chicago.  Unfortunately, Boromir above and Sam below, while looking nice are just not up to the level needed for that prestigious painting competition and I’m going to have to set my sights on something else for that competition.  I will continue to chip away at the Fellowship as I’d love to play LOTR scenarios one day if I can ever track down a copy of the Fellowship of the Ring journeybook.  I just need a bit of a break from them for a while to let my frustration ease.

So that is the state of my hobbying at the moment.  A bit burnt out on a couple of projects mentioned above and it will be a while yet before I can play the next new Hobbit scenario.  The good news is that I am gathering up supplies to have a go at trees so once those are done, maybe I will finally get to play something new again!