Any Day Now

 Been a bit distracted lately - no complaints really, just things to be getting on with and the odd storm to add excitement. The storms are losing novelty value now - maybe that's a good sign; if they become interesting again, it will probably be because of damage, so I'll settle for boring. Boring is good.

 

Boring

 

I've done hardly any soldier painting over the last year - a couple of jobs touching up bought-in figures, other than that I have two boxes of not-quite finished WSS chaps that have been hanging around since the start of last year. That seems a sensible place to get started again; I can work up to the freshly-reorganised boxes of raw metal later. As a token of good faith, I have put my painting mugs in the dishwasher, and am about to wash out my wet-palette container. If I make a flask of tea, tidy up my brushes, shift the small electric radiator into the painting room and try to get the DAB radio working, it should be just about bedtime.

Ha! - caught myself. No, I'll sit down with a couple of unfinished infantry units this morning, have a good look at them and decide what needs to be done to get them ready for duty. I suspect the house base-green paint may have gone off again, and I'm not confident about the state of my current pot of gloss varnish, but I can get on with the job until I reach the last stages. 

Right.

I have been working recently on the development of a campaign system (designed to work for solitary gamers, such as myself) to accompany my WSS rules. This has been time usefully spent, I think. The testing is presently on hold, another thing I have to get back to. I had a New Year exchange of emails with my friend Dominic, and he was very interested to learn of my campaign ideas. He was enthusiastic, in fact.

He asked, how was I dealing with sieges in my campaigns? I said that I wasn't really addressing sieges at this stage, though I intended to come back to them later, and my current target was just to be able to generate miniatures battles. Wrong answer. Good Old Dominic sort of snorted (via email), and pointed out that a WSS campaign which ignores sieges is a poor show. He was correct, of course - I have known this all along.

Thus there has been a two-week blitz on developing a siege add-on. If you are alarmed at the potential quality risks of adding sieges to the system in two weeks, I must explain that the siege game-within-a-game is a close relative of something I developed 12 years ago, so there is an underlying thread of sanity in there. Looks OK, anyway - it's added to the testing programme.