Ruined Walls and Fighting Apathy

Like many hobbyists I've been struggling to motivate myself these last few weeks.  I know that some people have really grasped the current situation and got on with some great painting and building, but many others have found that the lack of structure to the days, and the lack of concrete goals or targets for finishing a project have killed the desire to get stuff done. There are other issues involving anxiety and depression, which the current times certainly don't help with.
I usually have a project (one of the five boxes) which is geared towards getting stuff on the table for the next battle with Merlin.  Now we have no idea when this is going to be, so that deadline has vanished.
I've tried several times to get one of my ongoing five projects finished, or even just a bit further along, but I've really struggled (I've not been idle - I've been playing a lot of music, but that's not what this blog is about).

Anyway, working on the theory that we will eventually be able to do some face to face gaming, I found a quick and easy project that I hope will get me back in the groove.

I've pretty much ignored the five boxes I try and stick to. I appreciate the system is designed to help keep me on track, but I've been so far off track that anything, especially something that gives a quick result that I can be happy with, is what I'm aiming for.

So, walls.  Ruined walls with lots of different applications.  I've made ruined walls before, but this time I wanted something maybe a little more substantial.  I was inspired by the following build from Black Magic Craft, but with a few alterations.
I chose a smaller block size, partly as I had in mind that these might work for both 28mm and 15mm, and partly as I think a lot of these sort of terrain pieces can look too large scale.  Fine for ogres, but if you look at the blocks next to a human mini they are pretty huge. Fine for grand fortifications or temples, but I wanted to use these for smaller buildings.
I didn't stick to the 3 inch units as I'm not looking to use them as walls for dungeon tiles as the video does.  My blocks are (approximately) half an inch long by a quarter of an inch high and wide. I cut lots of quarter inch square strips of XPS on my Proxxon, then cut bunches of them into half inch lengths. The wall sections are half an inch or two blocks wide.

Rather than follow the BMC method for texturing the blocks I used the 'stones and can' approach.  This is simply to put the foam blocks in a can or box, add some sharp stones and shake.  This provides a great texture for a lot less effort, and rounds the block edges suitably as well.
I also used crafting glue rather than hot glue, as my hot glue gun is on the hot side of hot, so easily melts the XPS. I was worried that the walls would take ages to dry, and that they wouldn't be very strong.  Fortunately its warm at the moment, and they dried nicely over night.

Four ruined wall sections awaiting painting etc.

The next stage was to trim the bases and then cover everything, including the underside of the bases to combat warping, with the BMC black paint and Mod Podge undercoat.

Once that was dry I used thinned PVA glue to stick a coarse mix of grit and sand to the base, then sealed that with more PVA watered down and with burnt umber craft paint added.

The walls themselves were given a base coat of a dark grey (actually a test pot for emulsion paint - it's what I had at the time, but coverage isn't great), then I picked out a few stones in light grey, tan and an even darker grey.

Once that was dry it was given an all over heavy drybrush with a sand colour, including the base.

A thin black wash helped darken everything, and then I sponged on some dark green, especially lower down the walls, for moss.

Finished ruins

Orc's exploring the ruins

I could add some vegetation to the bases, and even in the cracks in the walls, but they'll do for now.

I'm pleased with these.  The project was short (a few hours over two days) and I've produced something useful. They will work for many battle games, especially skirmish games such as Frostgrave and Lord of the Rings Strategy Battle Game.  One main factor in making them was the need for something to show ruins in my next face to face Dungeons and Dragons game.  A ruined fort features in the game, and I wanted something to indicate the outer walls.  These should do nicely.

I'll see how well 15mm minis work next to them, they may look good as the ruins of some impressive castle or something.

Remote Roleplaying

I tend to focus on here on my painting, modelling and wargaming, but I've covered role-playing as well. I've covered my slow accumulation of monsters for Dungeons and Dragons as well as building various types of terrain and floor plans, indeed, one of my five boxes is dedicated to just such projects.

In the current climate, face to face gaming is clearly impossible outside the household, so what is the answer?
For roleplayers there are several options, and I have been experimenting with some of them with/on my Thursday night group.

The most important requirement is a good way of communicating. Text only can work, but voice is better. Images are even better, but nothing will quite beat actually sitting across from someone. There is always a slight lag, that embarrassed pause straight after someone starts speaking when they realise someone else is also talking.

For our first session, which was mostly to introduce the game and create characters, we simply used Zoom. I offered the standard array method from the Players Handbook, though I was happy for players to roll ability scores if they wished. Some did, and no super powered characters emerged, I do trust them.

For the second session we tried Roll20. This seems highly thought off, and offers a lot of functionality. It's free too, though I seemed to need the subscription to add my own maps. Players only need the free profile though.

I didn't set out to use everything the system offers; my aim was to rely on it for communication, dice rolling and showing maps. I wasn't bothered about such things as initiative tracking or lighting effects. I may investigate these in the future, but I want a good understanding of the basics first.

I created maps for the first adventure using Dundjinni, a great tool for producing maps and floorplans (you can see it being used for my sewer tiles here). Sadly its no longer commercially available, though every so often rumours spring up that it is about to be relaunched via Kickstarter. I then exported them into Roll20. Since I had to borrow a laptop for internet access, this meant copying via USB stick. I then went back and trimmed the images and reloaded them, then realised I had them in the wrong layer, so had to correct that, then I realised the maps covered too large an area for the grid, so I went back and chopped the maps into smaller sections and reloaded them again. By this stage if I hadn't had players ready and wanting to play I might have quit.

But I persevered. Initially we had problems with the sound, faint and tinny. So we used Zoom again, much better.
Unfortunately, one of the players struggled to get Roll20 to load, so had to rely on verbal descriptions. Although since I couldn't get more than the first map to load, soon everyone else was in the same boat. The dice roller proved very useful, for those who could access it.

We managed the set up plus three encounters in just over two hours; quite a bit of time was lost at the beginning.  The adventurers are just about to explore a mysterious underground ruin in search of kidnapped tribesfolk.

Before the second session, I went through the tutorial again, and felt I had a slightly better handle on how it worked.  I re-edited the maps so that each room had it's own page.  This was mostly to avoid having to worry about the 'fog of war' feature.  Even so, I started without being able to display maps other than the initial village map (created on MS Paint).  Since I can't see what the players can, I was unaware of this, but was able to correct it.  Easy, once I had figured it out.

The rest of the session went well and all players were able to access Roll20 this time.  My decision to put each room on its own page wasn't so smart.  Once the party started splitting up I had to keep switching pages.  I determined to redo the maps (again!) and experiment with the 'fog of war' for the next session, learning all the time.  The steps you take don't need to be big as long as they are in te right direction.

For the third session the redone maps worked well.  Using the fog of war was fun but I still need to work on 'pinging' and I hope to use tokens for monsters and heroes soon.

I may have started this sounding rather negative, that just represents the frustrations of coming to grips with, to me, very new technology. The actual play experience was great fun; we have now completed the first adventure, and the characters are now 2nd level, though the rogue was lucky, nearly been taken out with the instant death rule (one hit point short) after a critical hit.

Unfortunately, the characters are all now under a taboo and must ritually cleanse themselves to be able to reenter their village.  This, of course, will be the next adventure, for which they will be joined by a fourth character.

If anyone is interested, I'll do a brief post about the design decisions I made when writing the adventure, just leave a comment below.