Well yes, once again I disappeared, only to pop up where and when you least expect it.

Tonight I am popping up from the Travelodge in Sale, south of Manchester England. Why you might ask, well this was the closest and earliest training venue we could find before Christmas.

Getting here was a bit of an epic, including cancelled flights, getting to Aberdeen instead of Manchester, 06.40 flight that left 40 minutes late, losing an Uber driver in a carpark, finding said driver, getting dropped off a mile away from where I needed to be in a rainstorm…and that was only part of it…

I have been meaning to write a post for ages, but just never got around to it.

So if you remember I got five leagues from the borderlands, but as my son prefers sci fi to fantasy then I went for Five Parsecs too…

We have had some pretty light shows recently too…

Well according to my daughter her not LEGO is fake and therefore FLEGO was born.

She bought herself a preying mantis, took one look at it and had the collywobbles.

First off, the bricks themselves are a quarter of the size of standard bricks, and to be honest I think I am being a bit generous there.

They were in three bags, now in my mind bag 1 would make a bit, bag 2 a second bit but no, you need to be in all three bags.

So as she was struggling a bit I bravely took over. Somewhere between two and three hours later I achieved success!

Miraculously I didn’t drop a single bit.

So Dad kudos refilled as she is very happy.

Well I have been discharged by the specialist as he is pleased with my progress after the MRI to the brain. I have continually improved and am off the steroids for the polymyalgia too.  So as you can imagine I am pretty chuffed.

I am up to 20 hours this week and had a split day with some training at 16:00 to 18:00.

After Dinner and doing the horse I wasn’t in much of a mood to do much so I decided to glue 3mm magnets into 3mm holes… Well this probably would have worked fine if I hadn’t stuck miniatures on the bases. Now I am not an expert but based on my faffing about it would seem that my magnets are too thick to work the way I want them to. So being undeterred I found some 2mm ones and superglued them in.

These worked enough  for what I wanted… Aka to stop them flying about when I undercoat them with a rattle can ( I hope).

After messing about in a notebook I decided to get the warband onto their sheet.

I have written these down, but this actually a print out of an online sheet, which  in the long run will save a lot of time with an eraser.

Well I decided I wasn’t happy with the original map and did a new one.

With this one I rolled up the built up areas  I split the map into six areas and added the settlements based on the rolls.

This gave me two military outposts, two manor houses, a monastery a number of towns and Hamlets. Three of the towns were trading hubs.

I had to decide where to start, choosing the port bottom right as it seemed  an appropriate place to get going.

I then rolled on the internal and external threats.

The two internal threats were the ruin within and whispers from beyond… basically criminals and murderers  compelled by a dark power for the first. The second is a sickness lies upon the land caused by unnatural sorceries…undead and cultists.

The threat without was: Curse of War… An imminent invasion by ghouls and cultists which I felt had a nice tie into the first two. Basically the land has been infiltrated by agents sowing discord and dissent.

I then had to choose the location for a Delve. This is an old ruin or underground complex that we can explore. The other is an unexplored location. These have to be travelled to to see what they are.

There are three enemy camps that are placed on the map and then three enemy hideouts that are not.

Finally I had to decide on a threat level for the three. I have two level 5 threats and a level 6 one.

I felt that the external threat would only become more dangerous if the internal threat worked. So  sickness got the six and the ruin within the second five.

I now have to build some more miniatures for the rest of my troops and bandits.

I also got the big rig off the printer…

Wellllll I decided that I needed to be creative and as I said I was going to paint another Sky with more purple and green in it…. Well I totally failed… Talk about set in my ways lol…

Tomorrow will be purple and green…I hope.

As we are in the midst of a snowy spell I decided to have a go at a bit of a snowy scene…

I tried adding rock salt to this but really didn’t go into it fully. Most of it landed on the left hand side lol.

Now I always seem to add trees… This is a photo on the way into Lerwick…

A distinct lack of trees… We do have some though…

I am a bit obsessed by this one in my garden…

Tomorrow I may even paint a miniature…

Well I am a bit pooped this evening. This being back to work is a bit tiring 😂.

The doctor and occupational health did warn me that it would be likely. I have gone from doing sod all and seeing nobody for about a year and suddenly am in an office working 15 hours per week over three days.

So instead of having a bit of a snooze I went for another painting…

I am still peeved about the bleed under the tape. Time for a different type I think.

Not very original, but it is that time of year when the Northern Lights Appear.

Time for more purples and green banding on the next one.

Well I decided to make a little card for a lovely ex colleague who got me a new job card and sent me some lovely things when I was ill… Out came the water colours…

Sadly two minutes after this photo was taken I put the card down in a small puddle of water that hadn’t been there two minutes earlier.

I also grabbed some more vehicles off the printer…

There is a truck printing right now and another waiting to be put under the UV lamps.

Finally a big box arrived… Full of Alien Goodies…

Now these miniatures are a lot smaller than the Prodos ones, I will have to see how they compare with a ‘Glorious Day in the Corps’.  As I already have a Ripley in a loader miniature from them I should be able to compare.

Some of you may remember I already did the first Kickstarter but we hardly played it and as this is the updated rules I felt it would be okay to replace them.

I did the same with the One Ring RPG. But in that case I had played the original for about four or five years and loved it, new it inside out. When I got the new one I was confused as the rules in some place had minor tweaks and in other places totally different. So when I started playing with the kids I reverted back to what I believe to have the best artwork at the very least.

I am a bit knackered today otherwise I would have had a good old read of the Alien Stuff.

This evening I faffed around a bit too much so I only managed to have a watch of some Five Leagues play through’s and worked a bit on the map.

I think it might be a bit big. Each hex is about 5 miles across. The towns etc are not to scale. Git a full day at work tomorrow so not sure how much I will achieve tomorrow evening.