The following bit of sub-par Giant Days fanfiction has been wedged in my brain for several years. I have had vague plans of drawing it, but I suspect it’s not really worth the effort, so I will instead present it here as a script (along with copious apologies to John Allison).
SCENE: Daisy’s room, Catterick Hall, first year. Daisy is studying while music plays from a portable CD player.
Enter Esther and Susan through door (dramatically of course)
Susan: Daisy Wooton, what is this noise?
Esther: Did Enya find a mellotron?
Daisy (picking up and displaying The Mollusk CD case): It’s not Enya, it’s Ween. Ed Gemmel lent it to me.
Esther (while Susan takes and examines CD case): You shouldn’t listen to people weeing Daisy, it’s not healthy for developing young minds!
Susan (looking through CD insert): It appears to concern a grown man talking to a young boy about his ‘mollusc’…
For my own reference I shall now attempt to list every unfinished 40k model and/or project I have lying around. Hopefully this will motivate me to get some of them finished, or at least stop me from starting any more.
(Ha!)
Tanks and APCs 1x Kitbashed Church Tank 1x Scratchbuilt A7V Tank 1x Kragmeer Ice Chimera 1x Malcador Defender 4x Chimeras 1x Leman Russ 1x Baneblade 1x Buran Class Chimera 2x Scylla Light Tanks Imperial Guard Bastiladon with 3 Crew
Aircraft Avenger Strike Fighter Valkyrie
Infantry Kitbashed Valhallan Colonel Giant Ogryn with Ratling sniper in a crows nest 9x Penal Troopers and 1x Overseer Kill Team Veteran Guardsmen Box 23x Kitbashed Conscripts Commissar Cadian Standard Bearer Valhallan Standard Bearer 3x Psykers 1x Primaris Psyker 8x Ratling Snipers 3x Assorted Inquisitors Vindicare Assassin (Metal) Calidus Assassin (Metal) Culexus Assassin (Metal) Eversor Assassin (Metal) Venenum Assassin (Kitbashed) 11x Kitbashed Veterans 3x Tankers (Metal) 2x Astropaths 1x Tech Priest 5x Weapon Servitors 2x Cawdor Gangers (Metal) 1x Crusader 2x Valhallan Officers 2x Ministorum Priests 62 Assorted Metal Valhallans 3x Medics 2x Ogryn Cyborgs 2x Imperial Soldiers (Metal) 2x Death Cult Assassins 1x Metal Sister Dialogus 😮 3x Acolytes 1x Daemonhost 2x Fleet Officers 2x Artillery Officers 1x Knight Pilot 10x Orlocks Various Cadians Valhallan Artillery Crew (inc. Ammunition Bear) 1x Space Marine (Just the One!) Various Kitbashed Squats Several Forge World Death Korps of Krieg 10x Naval Breachers
Artillery and Special Weapons Imperial Thud Gun Valhallan Heavy Mortar Team 2x Basilisk 1x Deathstrike/Manticore 1x Hellhound 2x Valhallan Bolter Teams 3x Valhallan Autocannon Teams 2x Valhallan Lascannon Teams 3x Valhallan Missile Launcher Teams 2x Valhallan Mortar Teams Various Unspecified Valhallan Weapon Teams
Kitbashed Inquisitor and Retinue Ordo Malleus Inquisitor Andreus Eldrict Astra Militarum Medic Dr Jeep Death Cult Assassin Lucretia Adeptus Mechanicus Pilot 2-5-0-0-0 Weapon Servitor Doktor Avalanche Crusader Brother Torquemada Bound Psyker “Alice” (AKA The Vision Thing) Cyber-Mastiff Napalm Cherubim Servitor Icke Navigator Marianne Cedd Savant Aegypt Hwaite Inquisitorial Shuttle Soror Misericordum
Special Characters Knight Commander Pask Saint Sabbat (Kitbashed) Inquisitor Eisenhorn Sly Marbo (Official) Sly Marbo (Kitbashed) Inquisitor Obiwan Sherlock Clouseau (Kitbashed) Commissar Severina Raine Sister Superior Amalia Novena 5x Gaunt’s Ghosts (Plastic) 6x Gaunt’s Ghosts (Metal) Vermin Supreme Junith Erutia (on foot) Space Marine Pilot 2x Last Chancers (Metal)
Others 16x Metal Seraphim 1x Imperial Knight 4x Sentinels Bear Cavalry (BEAR CAVALRY!) Kitbashed Walker/Stomper 1x Man of Iron 5x Servo Skulls 1x Giant Servo Skull 1x GheistSkull 1x C.A.T Unit Kitbashed Squat Trike Entire Space Hulk set Metal Chaos Dwarf
Not long ago someone posted the following image (which I have shamelessly stolen) to one the Tengwar subreddits, asking for a translation.
I nicked it. When you let your guard down for that split second. And I’d do it again.
(For those not in the know the Tengwar is the writing system devised by J.R.R.Tolkien for his Elvish languages. It’s very pretty but horribly impractical – the Elves were probably plagued with dyslexia.)
Two facts were quickly established. That the squiggly bits above the eye are the logo of the Tolkien themed, Austrian, atmospheric-black-metal band Summoning, and the writing is complete gibberish, a repetition of something like ait-h dom a chon. Case closed.
Except something about the whole thing nagged me. The photo is obviously of a manufactured item, probably a promotional item for the band, and likely made of metal. It seemed unlikely that the band – either as professional musicians or Tolkien fans – would go to all the trouble of making such a thing and then just stick a bunch of random letters on it. Surely it’s meant to mean something?
Fool! Purple Wyrm writes as he pleases!
The first possibility was that it’s written in the Mode of Baloneyland. “Mode of Baloneyland” is a very funny pun, but you need to understand a few things about the Tengwar before you can understand it. Now, I could skip over this in the name of not boring the hell out of you, but this is my blog, and I write as I please!
Tolkien was a linguist (specifically a philologist), and he made his Elves linguists as well. As such the writing system he invented for them was not simply an alphabet, it was system that could be used to write any language. Each individual consonant (tengwa) is built out of components indicating the basic sound it represents, but it can be reassigned to another value depending on the needs of the language being written. The exact assignment of letters to sounds is called a mode, with examples in Tolkien’s works including the General Mode, the Classic or Quenya Mode, and the Mode of Beleriand.
This flexibility means that the Tengwar does not easily map to a computer keyboard. For a start you need to know what mode you’re writing in – the tengwa súle for instance represents “s” in Quenya Mode and “th” in General Mode. What key should that be mapped to? Also there’s two ways to represent vowels. In General and Quenya mode they’re indicated with marks (tehta) above the tengwa, but in the Mode of Beleriand they have their own dedicated tengwa – so should the ‘E’ key put a dot above a letter or print out the character yanta? It’s a nightmare!
As such, tengwar fonts don’t try to set up a correlation between the letters on the keys and the tengwar they print. They simply make all the tengwar available and rely on the person typing to know what they’re doing. Inevitably many people don’t know what they’re doing and try to write in “Elvish” by typing in a phrase in English and then switching it a tengwar font. Among tengwar enthusiasts the resulting gibberish is referred to as “The Mode of Baloneyland”. Get it? Like the Mode of Beleriand, but absolute baloney. See? I told you it was funny!
(Please laugh)
Now, if the text was written in the Mode of Baloneyland there would be no way to decipher it without knowing the mapping of the specific font it was written in. I decided to ignore this dead end and assume that whoever wrote it had some idea of what they were doing, but were just really bad at using the tengwar. So, I hopped over to Summoning’s Wikipedia page to look for any clues. I quickly discovered that in 2018 they released an album named “With Doom we Come”. Hmmm, not unsimilar to ait-h dom a chon…
A closer look at the image shows that the Redditor who translated the inscription as ait-h dom a chon missed a few things. Firstly the questionable quality of the metal casting makes it a bit tricky to tell for sure, but the final númen (‘n’) could actually be malta (‘m’), rendering it ait-h dom a chom. Secondly there are marks above the space before chom and the divider between repeated spaces – ait-h dom a’chom‘. These are clearly orphaned ‘e’s – when a tehta cannot be written above a letter it’s supposed to have a carrier (like a lowercase “i” without the dot) placed beneath it. This makes the phrase ait-h dom ae chome.
We’re making progress! The “t-h” on the end of the first word is clearly a result of the writer not realising that there’s a single tengwa for the “th” combination, but what’s with the ‘a’s? A consultation of a tengwar chart gives us the answer. While the character resembles osse – used to represent ‘a’ in the Mode of Beleriand – it’s actually not a valid tengwa at all! It’s the character vala (‘w’) printed backwards! So we’ve now decoded our way to with dom we chome.
Consulting a chart also solves the problem with “ch”. Whoever wrote out the phrase forgot to add a line to the tengwa calma (‘ch’), which would have transformed it to quesse (‘k’). Fix this and we have with dom we kome.
There’s still the issue that the first ‘o’ should have been doubled, but we’ve successfully demonstrated that the inscription is a really incompetent attempt at writing With Doom We Come.
For purposes of comparison here are the inscription as written, and how it would be written properly in both the orthographic (based on spelling) and phonetic (based on sounds) English Modes – all generated via Tecendil which is the only Tengwar transcriber you should use!
Incompetent Mode – “?it-h dom ?e chome”Orthographic mode – “Wið doom we come”Phomenic Mode – “Wið duum wii kum”
So in conclusion, perhaps get someone to check over your tengwar before sending merchandise for production, Summoning!
Severn Horror – my homemade expansion for Arkham Horror 2nd Edition based on the works of Ramsey Campbell – is done.
After three solid days of documenting, revising, documenting, revising and documenting again I am too mentally shattered to write anything witty or interesting, so I’ll just blurt the finished product onto the net and worry about promoting it later.
I happened to take a wander through Northbridge today and as is my wont took a bunch of photographs of things that looked interesting or cool. Among these was the old factory now in use as a Wilson Car Park (That’s “parking lot” to you North Americans) on James Street, just adjacent to the freeway.
Note the Google Street View car. I may show up on an update! Also, those dark bits are inside the lens array so I can’t clean them out 🙁
While looking for good angles and lighting and such my attention was drawn by the curvy bit poking up behind the facade. It looked like the factory was constructed around an older building. Curious and with plenty on time on my hands I decided to go in and have a look.
Inside I indeed found the remains of a previous structure with rather fancy – albeit badly abused – columns and some nice surviving detail on the internal part of the pediment.
I took a bunch of photos, poked around the place a bit, and went on my way.
Half an hour or so later, down the Horseshoe Bridge end of Roe Street, I stumbled over a newly erected historical marker talking about the street’s seedy past as Perth’s red light district (a past I already knew about thanks to my dad’s stories of earning pocket money by holding places in brothel queues for visiting American sailors in the late ’40s)…
Did you spot it? Let’s try a close up…
It’s the very structure entombed in the car park! How’s that for a crazy coincidence?!
It turns out that it was a service station that acted as a secret back door to the notorious “Josie Villa”. Which I guess means that visitors to Northbridge are parking their cars on the site of early 20th century Perth’s best known knocking shop!
My walk also spotted an old horseshoe that I presume has been dug up as part of the extensive roadworks talking place all along Roe. I considered nabbing it, but I’ve already got enough junk lying around here.
UPDATE! Version 6.0 of the icon set is now available, but it’s a radical departure from previous versions, so I’m leaving version 5.0 here for those who might prefer the old style. Version 6.0
Many years ago I purchased the rulebook for the now sadly defuct Fantasy Flight Warhammer 40k RPG Dark Heresy. While I thought the game was great I was rather annoyed by the poor quality of the planet icons used in the provided map of the Calixis Sector, and being the kind of obsessive nerd I am I couldn’t help but make my own version of if where you could tell what planet was what without having to use a bright light and a magnifying glass.
One thing led to another and by 2019 I’d produced an entire library of icons for 40k maps, free for anyone to use, which could be found on Reddit.
Recently someone contacted me having problems downloading the icons, so I decided it was time to make some updates, and post the files here where I know where to find them without having to sort through my rather chaotic Reddit history.
So here it is – Version 5.0, for your downloading pleasure!
SVG Version – This is the version to use if you know what you’re doing with Vector graphics. If you’re making your map in a vector editor such as Illustrator or Inkscape this is the superior option. If you’re not, then one of the PNG versions will probably be more convenient. DOWNLOAD
Transparent PNG version – A PNG export of the SVG icons with transparency enabled. If your graphic editor works with transparent PNGs (which pretty much everything should these days) you should use this one. Each icon is rendered into two versions. One with no glow and one with a white glow suitable to paste onto a dark background. DOWNLOAD
Flat PNG Version– A PNG export of the SVG icons with no transparency. This is the last resort version for really old or simple graphic programs that can’t handle PNG transparency. There are two versions of each icon, one with no glow on a white background, and one with a white glow on a black background. DOWNLOAD
Gonna be partying with the agents, all night long…
One of my major personality defects is that I tend to get really excited about some random project or thing, expend a huge amount of time and effort on it, then get bored and/or excited about something else and drop the whole thing. As such my home and computer are littered with half completed projects and ideas, some of which might actually be really cool if I ever got around to finishing them.
Autism? Yes, why do ask? ADHD? Well I don’t have a formal diagnosis…
Anyway, when I actually do manage to complete something it is cause for at least a little celebration, and a posting of the results.
My obsession of late has been content for the Hellboy board game. I invested in the Kickstarter and have managed to acquire just about every expansion (I don’t have Drinking with Skeletons, Giant Robot Hellboy and Unexpected Plot Twist) including the most recent “Big Box of Doom” which I completely forgot I bought – its unexpected arrival being the catalyst for my current episode. The game contains plenty of content from the Hellboy universe, but there’s also a bunch of really cool stuff that isn’t included, either due to copyright tangles or simply because a game that included everything would take up a rather large room and be wildly unplayable.
“Wildly Uplayable” being my middle name I decided to rectify this by adding some of the cooler stuff that Mantic elected (or were forced) to leave out. And wonder of wonders I’ve actually finished some of it!
AGENT BEN DAIMIO
During the Kickstarter for the original game there were a lot of requests from the community to include ex-marine-with-a-dreadful-secret Ben Daimio (AKA Captain Zombie). To everyone’s disappointment Mantic made it quite clear that they couldn’t because they only had the rights to the Hellboy comic and not the spin-off BPRD in which he exclusively appears. Curiously the expansions have since included plenty of BPRD content, but Ben is still AWOL -possibly they haven’t been able to figure out a way to make him playable without being either useless or horribly overpowered.
Being unrestrained by issues of copyright or game balance I have attempted to correct this anomaly by making a playable version of Ben complete with starting items, a Deck of Doom card, and rules and cards for when his ‘little problem’ gets out of hand.
Click to download – but you knew that…
VAMPIRES!
Baron Konig. He’s a happy chappy! (Ask him about owls)
One of my favourite Hellboy series is 1947, which chronicles the early BPRD’s attempts to deal with a vampire by the name Baron Konig who didn’t take some of the Nazi’s more esoteric WWII experiments very well (to be fair, who would?). Naturally everything pretty quickly goes to hell and the consequences extend into the sequel series Vampire where things get even worse.
There are other vampires that show up in Hellboy, the most prominent being Vladimir Giurescu and his exploding horse (note: no matter how hard you hit them horses don’t usually explode). He’s in the game, but apart from that vampiric content is conspicuously lacking – a situation I feel it necessary to correct.
My Vampire kit adds three new Bosses, a new minion, a bunch of re-organised Boss Behaviour cards and a collection of vampire hunting equipment to give your agents a fighting chance against the undead.
Later: And now version 1.2 is up, which adds a new minion, renames a minion, adds a couple more unexpected threats and allows you to equip your agents with garlic – which I can’t believe I left out in version 1.1!
Click to download -if you dare!
TRACKERS
One of the few flaws of the game is the way it implements tracking of a number of agent statistics (another is the way they’ve implemented Roger – go get Saduhem’s Thematic Roger rebuild – you’ll thank me). To keep track of, say, Liz Sherman’s flame level you need to keep a tiny plastic cube precisely positioned on a half sized card – which on a table with models being moved and dice flying around is no mean feat. To fix this I’ve created a set of print’n’build tracker dials* which should make your games a lot less frustrating.
You know the ‘click to download’ drill by now. Also I’m only previewing one page for this one because they’re all pretty much the same
I have a number of other Hellboy projects on the boil, which I may or may not complete before I lose interest, so stay tuned!
BPRD Archives Box
And here we go with one of those projects, a print’n’build box for your B.P.R.D. Archives cards – assuming you have that add on, naturally. The design is blatantly ripped off from Matt “King Friday” Sturm’s case file envelopes – I really should give him a heads up.
As usual, click to download
Make Your Own Agent
And if you’re feeling inspired to make some content of your own I’ve prepared an SVG Agent template with icons and cards layouts and such. Enjoy!
*Not to be confused with print’n’build crocodiles, which are another thing entirely…
