Season 3 from The Outpost is here...

...and I feel a great relief. I expected a collapse of the production due to the Corona crisis. Never seeing a solution to the Cliffhanger from Season 2 would have made me really sorry. And a little bit angry I must confess. I feel more relaxed today. Nerds. They are all crazy.

I really like the show. And not only because I want to see the extremely attractive (big understatement) Jessica Green. No, I like the style. The fantasy elements of that world are not so prominent (means : not everybody flies around and pretends to be an elf or a super hero) and it has a good mix of action and humor. Story and the setting are understandable without having to refer to a flowchart of characters and events. A series that is solid and straigthforward screen entertainment where not everything is big and shiny and comes out of the computer. 

Finally and very important: whithout a mental breakdown of one character in every episode. That's a problem with a lot of TV today.

(My proposition to all fictional chars:  If you have mental problems : Stay out of Fantasy and Sci-Fi series. And especially stay away from zombie apocalypses. Please. We have all seen you run around and it wasn't funny. Stay home next time because... if we meet in the story I would not shot the zombies first... Yes, Rick, I mean you and your bunch of psychos. And wash your hair! There is plenty of shampoo in all the empty houses. And clothes.)

The third season of The Outpost is now available and 13 more episodes have been announced. Because these additional episodes are not referred to as a season, I'm afraid that the show will be over then. That would be a real loss and I hope the end of it lies far away in the future. I would like to watch it for many years to come if it remains true to itself.

The Outpost has a Facebook page : Klick here. I would also like to link to the show on the website of 'The CW' but here (outside the USA) I can't even open their website due to 'licencing restrictions'. Wherever you live you will find it in your TV program or streaming channel. And if not : Season 1 and 2 are available on DVD now.

Is there any landscape renderer?

A landscape in Retrosia. Made with the landscape renderer 'Vista Pro'  (DOS). An old picture.

Are there any tools like that nowadays? Maybe something for Linux? Any suggestions?

Shall I stop selling stuff online?

Why do I ask that? Its simple. I am doing this for a long time now and sales are going down, down, down. Nobody buys anything from the miniatures I offer. Corona did not start it but it made the situation worst.

And if a sale happens I can only sell for ridicoulus low prices. Yes, I need the money and I have too much of the stuff. But do I have to sell it super-cheap? Below the price for the metal? Old rare mithril minis for example? Don't feel like that anymore.

NOT leaving: EM4 painted heroes. Now forever prowling the steppes of Retrosia.

I see myself doing the following: Sell minis for 2.50 Euros per piece that are worth 5 and then, after a while, buy some other stuff that has (of course!) the full price tag on it. That's like splitting my money into two parts and then throw one half out of the window. 

Whenever I look at a piece in the boxes I have for the sales stuff, I see opportunities. I see how I could paint that piece and what I can use it for. And I see another one: Being in the state of simply having more than enough hobby stuff. And absolutely no reason to spend a single Euro, Dollar, Pound or Banana on miniatures 'n stuff for years or maybe a complete decade...

Still running well?

What I can't understand is : why do I hear in the news how great things are going for Ebay? And yes, also during the Corona crisis, a time when a lot of people are having panic and some have no or low income. I use the plattform now for 16-18 years or longer (must dig out my first account to find the exact date) and I can't see a growth or creative changes. And where are the really good sales that I had when the plattform was new? And cheaper by the way.

Or a redesign? When I am in my account and klick on an entry in the menu, every subpage looks completely different. It looks like they tried to redesign parts of it some years ago, switched the plan several times and then forgot about it. In fact, it looks the masterpiece of an webdesigner who has no clue what he/she is doing or someone had an accident and was the only one who had the password or the plan.

When I see a website that has 'glitches' not fixed for a long time and things look 'un-professional' for years, especially from a company that has the money to fix it and that is one of the frontrunners on the web, my alarm goes off. Loud.

A billion dollar company that can't get their website ready? A standstill is normally a sign for the beginning of the end.

Ah, found just out that they ended support for the infamous 'Turbo Lister' software this July. That was fast. The software was nearly braindead for about 15 years or so. But today - month later - I can still find the help sites for that discontinued tool on the ebay website...

Of course it is not easy (without great technical effort) to see what's going on on the site. But think of this : I hear nobody saying anymore that he or she bought or found something on Ebay. Never. It's really true : I haven't heard that for several years now! And there was a time when you would have heard people talk about that very often.

A bubble? The history of the web is full of once invincible but now dead dinosaurs.

The knights who made the new beginning

And so it begins. I wanted to organize all the existing fantasy figures. Seperated into the good, the bad and the ones in between. Sorted by 'species' or 'race', nation, armies and units.

A handful of knights on horseback made the start. A friend had given them to me because they had been lying around for ages and he couldn't get up to paint them. For these guys I finally had to decide which color they should get. At first it was difficult for me not to drybrush the guys with silver color. Then I simply took the risk and decided that every knight had to get his own main color (yellow, red, green, etc.), which was to become part of his coat of arms and that of his soldiers. So these knights became the starting point for an organization scheme. I decided that these knights are the rulers of earldoms and leaders of the human army.

The weapons are not original and the decals are from Games Workshop.  I am using what's lying around.

The Miniatures are very old and from Essex Miniatures (Late Medieval Period). Just took a look at the series and found they are still available. I think if I am going to add minis, I buy there. I like that style.

Fantasy invites you to fantasize. You sit, glue and paint, your head goes empty... and names, places and these things come to your mind. I named the following earldoms or hometowns for my knights:

• Blue : Bluewater
• Light Blue : Isenstein (Isen = old german for iron = Ironstone)
• Gray : Blyburg (= Bleiberg = Lead Mountain)
• Green : Greenwood
• Yellow : Löwenstein (=Lionstone)
• Red : Zornburg (Zorn = rage. A city located near to a volcano.)

And I can tell you, once the head is clear, and you can create new things, the fun comes back. Feels a bit like in the past when the genre was new: An "unknown country" that had to be discovered. A form of fascination that is coming back now. 

Now these earldoms have to be located somewhere on a map. And soldiers have to be attached to these Warlords.

Old map of my first fantasy world

 

Just to take a look. An old map of a fantasy continent that I once created. The name wasn't Retrosia, it had the working title 'Askalon' until I found out that there is a city that has this name. Made for a campaign but never really used. I take this as an inspiration for the new world. But the new one should have more sea and islands because sailing and seafights will be an important part of the rules. Maybe I can break this continent in into pieces?

Empty your head and go back to the start

So there I was. A lot of old fantasy and medieval characters. Remnants of this and that. Very old stuff, middle-aged stuff, something newer. Individual figures and also larger groups, some painted and many unpainted for ages. Lots of old lead, a bunch of plastics (from the times of Heroquest and Battle Masters), troops of Normans painted poorly or half finished, and finally a horde of SAGA Vikings, that I (a novelty for me) had bought already painted (in a large bag!) on a convention.

For the few role-playing games - actually "dungeon crawls" - that we played now and then over the last years, I had prepared a lot of old minis. So some monsters, heroes and enemies who lay forever in a drawer were finally painted and used. But nothing else had been going on for ages. A SAGA group, started with a lot of wind and the usual babble, did not materialize. So ​​much for the above Normans and Vikings.

Glossy Oldies and Dungeon-Folks

 

The next boiled-up project was a 'Frostgrave' setting but it never materialized. But I knew that beforehand. Then there was was 'Congo. All great games. But the only one doing something was me. Last year my complete african project (a village, 70 Africans and Adventurers and lots of plastic palms etc.) ended up as a complete set on Ebay. Too much is just too much. No Congo Bongo.

For me, fantasy (battle) wargaming ended on December 11th, 1999. After that, our group of that time never played again. The decision to change the ruleset from 'Phalanx' - the brainchild of a local games store owner - to Warhammer was the fatal blow. We played a few battles but the fun was going away.

The reason was obvious. That version of the Warhammer Fantasy Battle rules (4th or 5th edition) had some quirks that were quite unpleasant and it later got the nickname 'Herohammer' for it. It enabled you to have some extreme powerfull characters or units that made every game practically pointless because they were so effective and hard to kill that they could destroy anything and everyone. And one of my favorite enemies was also able to 'fly high' and land everywhere on the battlefield. So much to your carefully planned deployment. That was like fighting with a wooden stick against an F-18 jetfighter. Or the other way around: if you lost your 1 or 2 powerful special characters, your army was practically nothing but cannon fodder. I understood that at the time, others didn't want to or couldn't understand it.

Today it's on Wikipedia:

"The fifth edition in particular became known pejoratively as "Herohammer" because of the imbalance between the very powerful heroes, monsters and wizards in the game and blocks of troops which existed effectively as cannon fodder."

After that game - if I remember it correctly - the group dissolved silently. A shame. We would have had a lot of fun and over such a long time each of us could have built up a large and impressing collection. But some people prefer to stick to the words in books instead if thinking for themselves. A common problem.

The Area in the Wolf Hills

The Battle

The Battle in the Wolf Hills on December 11th, 1999. Three armies meet and fight for the possession of magical artifacts. A 'Capture the Flag' scenario. This is the only battle from which I made a kind of battlereport and I was happy to find it in an old notebook. I couldn't remember it, but the text speaks of destroyed elven and dwarf troops and ends with 'I took the 2 elven rings and one from the dwarfs.' So I still have them I believe. Somewhere. Lucky me.

Time passed. I was constantly involved in the miniatures and wargaming hobby - especially when I ran a brick and mortar games store and an online business - but with very few real gaming. From time to time I made some historical miniatures but fantasy wargaming was never really gone for me.

So a while ago I made a list and I counted more than 600 fantasy and medieval miniatures and creatures that I could use for a new start. And there are still some minis to come because I want to cast some from Prince August molds. And because I will never really stop collecting minis. There are also sorted out pieces from my private collection that may never find the way to Ebay but to the battlefields of Retrosia...