Doppel - Are we ready for Digital Miniatures?

My social feeds have been bombarded recently by ads for this hi-tech alternative to a piece of plastic.

Doppel Digital Miniature

No idea on the price for this as it looks like a kickstarter type of deal.

I know this is not aimed at me as I'm not the type of gamer who needs this kind of distraction in their life, but I see a few issues with this.

1. It's yet another gadget that will require updating and making sure that you have a compatible device so you can have the app to control it.  How long before the manufacturer goes belly up and your digital mini quite literally becomes a brick?  How long before the app ceases to be compatible with your new mobile OS.

2. Price, I can't see this selling for less than £100 which is about 100 times what I would pay for a miniature these days.

3. Resin 3D printers are fast approaching this price point and among my gaming circle of 30 their are at least 5 of us who have one or more printers which means we print out minis for our mates.  Even if you don't have a 3D printer custom 3D printed miniatures from the likes of HeroForge et all are all the rage among the non-crafty members of my gaming club Dragonskeep.co.uk.

4. Online Play - With online becoming more of a thing every day, these doppel minis are superfluous.  We will need to see what happens with D&D 2024 (The one, or whatever they are calling it these days).  I suspect there will be an outcry when players can't upload their D&D Beyond character into their Doppel box or they have to pay extra for a compatible download.

5. Sounds, really are we taking all the human interraction out of the game at this stage.

6. Tactile play, there is a lot to be said about movingthe little fellows around on the board and how much it ads to the sense of immersion when you are playing the game.  When I DM a game and I have to break sessions across a combat, I often take photos of where the PCs and bad guys are on the map.  If all my players had doppel minis I wouldn't have a clue who is who.

7. Shelf appeal.  No little white box is going to look great on my minis shelf at home no matter how you tart it up.

Still it wouldn't be the RPG Hobby if someone wasn't trying to sell the latest greatest accessory you never realised you couldn't live without...

Vallejo Shifters - It's all Dust Baby!

In 2023 I managed to snag an absolute bargain of an eBay joblot. I got a metric ton of airbrush paints including this trio of Vallejo Shifters sets.

I've used them on a few models so far but my main gripe is that the supplied swatches don't at all marry up to my experience.  I decided to make my own swatches and to test if it using a gloss black undercoat made any difference to the effect. 

Before anyone shouts "You should have used spoons!", I probably should but my main objective was to have something I could tuck into the box as a handy reference and not have to dig out my cutlery drawer.  Some of these paints don't look anything like what is in the bottle and their names are no help either.

Galaxy Dust

• 77.002 Light Violet Green - A minty coldish green which flips to a greyish purple at about 20 degrees.
  
  
• 77.008 Green Gold Cold Blue - A nice verdant green which flips to a dark blue.
  
  
• 77.009 Turquoise Violet - A really nice 70s blue flake flipping to a solid purple with flecks of irridescent blue. This is the standout colour of the set.
  
  
• 77.010 Emerald Green Mauve - a darker more blueish green flipping to purple.
  
  
• 77.017 Green Silver Blue -almost identical to 002 but a bit more opaque to begin with before flipping to a much greyer colour.
  
  
• 77.018 Dark Green Tin -a really nice warm green which flips toward yellow.
  

Magic Dust

• 77.001 Violet Old Copper - nah, this is definitely a purple to blue shift and it's really quite good doing multiple flips the further away from 0 degrees you get.  Nice.
  
  
• 77.006 Gold Pale Blue - this was way too subtle for me.  It's a greeny gold to begin with and it pretty much stays there.
  
  
• 77.007 Pearl Violet - Purple to a dark grey.
  
  
• 77.011 Old Silver Pale Violet - Another super subtle shift which just goes black to my eyes.  I will chalk this up to a faile in application even though this was the most successful swatch of the three.
  
  
• 77.012 Silver Pink - Is it? just looks Greeney Purple to me.
  
  
• 77.015 Gold Yellow Burnt Orange - Green to a very nice Gold.  Just pipped into second place by 001.  I used this on the cockpit glass of my Swordfish II model and it looks great even if it has a propensity for spiderwebbing.
  

Space Dust

• 77.003 Orange Violet - This is the colour I chose to use on B'lakor's wings and over a curved surface it works quite well.  However, this doesn't cover great and will need multiple coats to get a really pronounced effect.
  
  
• 77.004 Electric Blue Intense Violet - Blue to a sort of purple, just not as successful as 001.
  
  
• 77.005 Green Blue Velvet - I think I might have messed this one up, I'm not getting an effect at all but it is a really nice metallic green.
  
  
• 77.013 Bright Gold Brown - Very subtle but a transition from green to an orangey brown is there.  Perhaps on a larger curved surface this will work quite well
  
  
• 77.014 Old Gold Grey Violet -  I'm just not getting the gold here.  It's another green to purple transition.
  
  
• 77.016 Red Gold - this is definitely a green to gold transition but it is green for a long time..
  

To Gloss or Not to Gloss, That is THE Question. 

I have to say I can't see any difference myself.  However, airbrushing the paint onto a gloss surface made a huge difference when you are actually spraying.  The gloss is a barrier and makes the paint much more likely to pool or to spiderweb.  There is a lot of acrylic medium in the mix which is what suspends the metallic particles, but this takes an age to dry and if you are like me patience is something I have yet to learn...

Overall Opinion

There are a lot of colours which basically look green.  I imagine that there is some perfectly reasonable physics paper which explains how the light refraction effect works.  I will continue to use them and these swatches are going to help a lot in the choices I make.  However, it really does depend on the miniature you are painting and the exact curves on the model to achieve the best results.  

Space marines or any character wearing pauldrons or other similarly curved armour pieces is going to look great using shifters.  Large Armoured Fighting Vehicles (AFVs) with flat panels I'm guessing less so, but I am intrigued to see what it looks like on a windscreen of a car.

Jessie's Prints - Episode 16 - Maxing out the print bed

 

This week, I are mostly been printing...

Ticket to Ride Trays - Thingiverse 213031

Nothing gets a board gamer with OCD riled up than having their rolling stock scattered all over.  How do you calculate your progress? How do you know at a glance if you have enough to snatch that last minute route?

Wonder no more with these wonderful Train Trays.

Judge Dredd Film Badge 2012 - Thingiverse 114711 

I am a big fan of the Savage Worlds RPG system and it's a perfect fit for my Judge Dredd RPG Campaigns (see Sector 55 Blues).  Savage Worlds uses the concept of "bennies" to effect rerolls, soak damage or to introduce a bit of player story enhancement.  What better way to encourage player engagement than with some Judge Dredd badge shaped bennies.

 

I also managed to max out my printer bed in the process... which was nice.  It's heartwarming to know exactly what the maximum available print space you have on your printer.  In my case for this Geeetech Prusa i3 Pro W it is X 185mm and Y 187mm.  Settings have now been adjusted and so there is zero percent chance of a carriage collision... fingers crossed.

Printer Upgrade Time

I've had my printer for almost a year now and I must say that I haven't been using it that much until recently.  Getting back into printing has been great but the experience has been marred by the absolutely ludicrous location and orientation of the SD Card.  On my printer it is on the back of the control board and mounted transversely. 

 

This doesn't seem like a big deal until you've dropped the SD card a bagillion times whilst trying to insert it in the slot and then had to fish around under the printer to retrieve it without disturbing the delicate karma that makes the 3D printing magic happen.

 

Clearly a first world problem but a quick scan of ebay threw up a solution in the form of an SD Male to SD Female card extension which should allow me to move the whole shebang to somewhere more esasily accessible.  I might even print a cover to go over the board now I don't need to access the onboard SD Card slot.   

Birthday Wishes and Resin Printers

As regular readers of this blog will know I am a 3D Printer owner, hobbyist maker and novice designer. 

I've owned my cheap as chips FDM Printer (a CTC i3 Pro B) for over 2 years and it has served me exceptionally well given the limitations of the technology.  With my birthday coming up I am feeling like I should take the next step and buy a Resin 3D Printer so I can printer higher definition and smaller scale objects.

What budget Resin Printers Can I Buy?

There are 3 main models that seem to be popular at the moment and are within my price range:

Creality SLD-002R Buy it on Amazon	Anycubic Photon S Buy it on Amazon	Elegoo Mars Buy it on Amazon
SPECS Vol: 120 x 65 x 165mm XY Res: 2560 x 1600px Z Res: 20-50 microns Speed: 50-70mm/h Price: £253	SPECS Vol: 115 x 65 x 165mm XY Res: 2560 x 1440px Z Res: 25-100 microns Speed: 20mm/h Price: £280	SPECS Vol: 120 x 68 x 155 mm XY Res: 2560 x 1440px Z Res: 10 microns  Speed: 22.2mm/h Price: £230

I am leaning towards the Creality SLD-002R on the basis of the print speed and the print volume so if anyone has any real world experience of this printer please drop me a comment below.

Coping with COVID-19: Online Gaming - How Low (Fi) Can I Go?

Some people call it a "Shelter in Place" others " Self Isolation" but we all know it as "Lockdown".

Whilst many might accuse us roleplayers as being sad loners, nothing could be further from the truth.  The vast majority of games need to be played with at least 2 people and most RPGs don't function without 3 or more.  That puts us roleplayers in a dangerous position.

Alternatives to Illegal Assemby

So you want to continue your normal (insert day of the week) roleplay session and still want to stay safe and legal?  What are your options?

You could sign up to the usual suspects, the Benicio del Toro of Roll20 or the Gabriel Byrne that is Fantasy Grounds.  Playing D&D? Then you probably already use D&D Beyond.  There are other smaller players such as Astral Tabletop, Beyond Tabletop, Tabletopia or Tabletop Simulator.  All of these services are more than up to the task, but the question is are you?

In my experience these offerings don't replicate the sitting around the table experience and come with an Everest of a learning curve.  Pre-game setup is also arduous just for simple encounters and the nice things typically sit behind a subscription paywall.

Do it for Free

The thing is most of us, thanks to corporate homeworking,  already have the necessary kit at our fingertips.  Video calling software such as Whattsapp, Google Hangouts, Facetime and Skype can all manage group video calls. The chat and game streaming services such as Discord and Twitch are probably two of the easiest services to use and are available across the spectrum of devices from iphone to laptop.

You will need to do some initial trials to see what works best for you in your situation but the last three weeks has seen my group using a combination of Twitch / Discord for the video & chat and a second service such as skype for the audio.

Virtual Game Setup for Games Masters

The setup for a GM is trivial.  You already have all the maps, minis, rulebooks and handouts that you use in your regular game all you need is:

1. A mobile device (or preferably 2) - capable of being used as a video camera and don't forget the charger(s), you are going to be on a video call for a couple of hours.  If you are using a second device make sure that you mute the microphone on this one so it is only capturing the video.
   
   
2. Wi-fi - don't blame me if you rack up a huge data bill hosting your game.  Make sure that you connect your device(s) to your wi-fi.
   
   
3. A tripod or selfie stick - to get that high level over head view of the battlemap.  If your location allows position it on a hig shelf with a good view of the map.
   
   
4. A headset on a second device - a headset is essential to cut down on any unwanted noise from appliances and feedback from speakers.  Using a second device logged into a different account or a different service to handle the audio is ideal.
   
   
5. An arms length indication device - AKA a stick!! The more tech obsessed (and cat lovers) will no doubt possess a laser pointer which is a suitable alternative.
   

Set Up For Players 

The setup for players is even more trivial and just requires you to have a mobile device and a headset.

Add-Ons and Resources

Here is a list of services which you might find useful to enhance your sessions.

• Dice Logger - free dice roller service which creates a read only log of every roll you can share with your DM or vice versa.
   
• Sketchup - you can quickly create 3d illustrations of rooms in your scenario using the warehouse of free 3d objects.

Clarke's Third Law... Librarians Style

Clarke's Third Law is a popular trope amongst GMs particularly for those running Sci-Fi games and stems from this famous quote:

Arthur C Clarke

"Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic."

You've seen examples of this in the movies include:

• Star Trek Into Darkens - When Kirk orders the Enterprise to move in order to save Spock, he breaks the prime directive by revealing the ship to the volcano worshipping Nibirans, who immediately begin worshipping the ship.
  
• Star Wars - On seeing C3-P0 the primitive Ewoks believe him to be a physical manifestation of their long prophesied deity "The Golden One" and do his bidding.
  
• Apocalypse Now - The primitive tribesmen are easily swayed by the imposing god-like Colonel Kurtz, and become followers of his own personal army/religion.

However, in the The Librarians episode "And the Rule of Three",  writers Paul Guyot and John Rogers  flipped the trope around, making a magic spell indistinguishable from a mobile phone app.

The central premise of the episode was that each time you played a wishing game on your phone you actually cast a wish fulfillment spell and were rewarded by things happening in the real world.  This instant gratification becomes addictive, just like Candy Crush or Angry Birds. 

A Conceptual U-Turn

This conceptual U-Turn opens up all sorts magical and supernatural possibilities for modern day games like Cthulhu Now, Shadowrun and The Laundry RPG which take place in our current technology obsessed world.  Even though we use these devices every day, very few of us really know how they operate, ie: at the machine code level, for all I know 4G might just be the fourth gate to Hell.  Is it a coincidence that the Steve Jobs chose "Apple" as the name for his company?

We put a lot of trust in our tech, we don't really want to know how it works, just that it does.  We are okay with that, our devices enrich our lives and make things easier (mostly). 

Our global IT Networks are central nervous system connecting us all together through our devices, much like the Ley Lines of myth, through nexus sites like Stone Henge.  Why wouldn't modern mages piggyback this global telecoms network in some way, harvesting energy from the unsuspecting masses, or feeding energy into it or even just piggybacking on the signal.

Arthur C Clarke - The Father of Global Telecomunications

Arthur C Clarke died on this day in 2008 at the ripe old age of 90.  Coincidentaly, Arthur C Clarke is most famous for inventing the concept of the geostationary orbit used by telecomunications satellites and underpins the whole shebang.  Is it a coincidence...

Dazzle Camoflague for the Future

Back in WW1 artist and Naval Reservist Norman Wilkinson came up with the idea of covering ships in bizarre geometric paint schemes to make it harder enemy submarines to target them.

HMS Kildwick in Dazzle Camoflauge

Fast forward a hundred years and we are fast approaching a minority report scenario where we are all subjected to face recognition scanning to some degree as we pass through public spaces.  We even carry these devices with us every day (it's in the software of most digital cameras in our smartphones). 

Thankfully we're not at the stage where you are scanned by GAP as you walk past their billboard at the tube station, but I'm sure that I'm not alone in thinking that things like facebook's face recognition software are a bit creepy, So here's a free app idea for some enterprising mobile developer.
 

Muppet face recognition

Enter the guys at CV Dazzle who are developing simple makeup and hair techniques to fool facial recognition software.  The only downside is that it makes you look like some uber futuristic cyberpunk cosplayer or Lady Gaga fan depending on your perspective (and age).

CV Dazzle Makeup and Hair Techniques

Which brings us back to Sci-Fi and RPGs in particular.  The most common party concept for Sci-Fi games is the band of misfits sticking it to the empire/corporation/man and engaging in lots of covert ops where your ability to hide your identity is crucial.  Unless there's been some sort of utopian revolution there is likely to be some form of mass surveillance at work. 


R Talsorian's Cyberpunk 2020 had a plethora of fashionware items such as light emitting tattoos, colour changing hair and contact lenses squarely pitched as mere character affectations.  The 2006 adaptation of Philip K Dick's "A Scanner Darkly" had undercover cop Keanu Reeves in his hi tech "Scramble Suit" to prevent his identity from being revealed.  Even Milla Jovovich got her identity fooling fashion camo together in the visually entertaining "Ultraviolet".

Put these all together and you've got a really sweet combo which should keep those algorithms busy.

When Will this Plastic Film Revolutionise my Gaming Experience?

Unless you've been hiding in a deep dark cave for the past couple of years you can't have failed to notice the advances that have been made in Virtual Table Top technologies.  Microsoft captured peoples imaginations a while back when they demo'd their Surface project.  Since then there's been an explosion in VTT software offerings from the likes of Battlegrounds, Fantasygrounds, Maptool and a host of others (far too long a list for this article but this wiki has them all) but the display technology has been lagging behind a bit.

For me the VTT has always been about the marriage of old school play with new technology.  It's no good having a great bit of software if you have to carry a 50 inch LCD screen around with you when you want to play.  Likewise I don't really want to push virtual miniatures around on the screen I want real ones which interact with the display.

Cambridge based research lab, Plastic Logic, is aiming to produce its flexible plastic display in their Dresden factory sometime in 2013.  This display meets half of my needs in that it is incredibly robust as demonstrated in this video, but it really needs multi-touch or RFID to be a success.



As the iPad has demonstrated, people aren't content with just watching their display anymore, they want to touch it, and the real market for this type of display is to be an inexpensive e-reader capable of displaying your daily newspaper.  I for one will quite happily jump on that bandwagon when it arrives.  Once they've successfully integrated the multi-touch capabilities into the plastic film (which shouldn't be that far away) you really would have limitless potential for the display to be used as a portable VTT.

In the meantime I guess I'll have to satisfy myself with Dungeon Mapp Lite, my iPad and a good quality screen protector.

Dungeon Mapp Lite on iPad

P.S. For a more indepth look at the technology, watch as BBC's Spencer Kelly gets to look inside the lab to see how Plastic Logic's flexible display is made.

Fantasy Mass Transit - A Technology Too Far?

A warforged hangs from the gondola of an airship as a
Lightning Rail loco passes below (artist unknown)

In his recent article, The Architect DM: Seven Wonders of Your World, Danny Rupp highlights the Lightning Rail from the Eberron setting as an example of a World Wonder.  As I was largely ignorant of the detail of the Eberron setting I did a little more research and was both intrigued and horrified in equal measure by this concept.

As I've written before, in a quasi-medieval fantasy setting personal mobility is generally restricted to a couple of days walk and even those who own horses don't tend to travel long distances unless they have a pressing need.    Long arduous journeys or quests to find this artifact or that magical location are the stock-in-trade of the fantasy novel and it is often the journey itself, not the final destination that defines the hero.

In Charlie Jane Ander's round-up of the 10 worst mistakes that Alternate History Authors Make, author Terry Bisson states that "if you don't bring your alternate history up to the reader's present, then you leave out half the fun".  Whilst I agree that this often the case with Sci-Fi and especially with the alternate history subgenre, it is not the case with fantasy literature.  In fact introducing some relatively mudane modern day solutions into a medieval setting can have disastrous effects.  

Although attractive as both a plot generator and as a mechanism for swiftly moving PCs from one location to the next, a system like The Lightning Rail (even if access to it is heavily controlled) opens up a whole new can of worms in that it also ushers in an age of mass transit in the same way that the real railways did in the 1830s.  With mass transit comes huge socio-economic upheaval as people inevitably migrate towards cities and goods suddenly become cheaper as transport costs are reduced.  Consequently cities will gradually expand in size, usurping nearby land which no longer needs to be used as farm land because produce can be brought in just as cheaply from further afield.  This is just the start. 


As always there is the "exception that proves the rule" and in this case it would be a setting which has suffered some form of technological regression.  There are often pieces of working ancient technology to which access is heavily controlled and the knowledge of its operation is usually forbidden by some form of techno-priesthood and the population will often rationalise this as being magical or divine.

A couple of good examples of this being:

Orson Scott Card's Memory of Earth features an Artificial Intelligence (which the population call the Oversoul) which uses mind control to prohibit access to ideas which will ultimately lead to the development of self destructive technologies.  In this way he allows access to things like electricity and magnetism but avoids the wheel and the industrial revolution arguing that they ultimately lead to the development of war machines.

In his novel Cat Karina, Michael G Coney uses a sail driven monorail concept, which utilises the remnants of technology left behind by a previous human civilisation.  A religious belief system prohibits the use of manufacturing and power systems which would ultimately lead to the development of faster, better "trains" and stems the onset of any transport revolution that might ensue.

Quadrotor Swarm: Evil? or am I just being paranoid

Don't you just hate it when someone invents something with the best of intentions and all you can think about are it's potential evil uses.

FBI Tracking Device Torndown on ifixit

For those of you interested in modern conspiracy games, the guys at ifixit.com and wired have teamed up to teardown an alledged FBI GPS vehicle tracking device which has come into their possession. 

Now I'm not for one moment going to get all high and mighty debating the pros and cons of one nation state surveilling its own citizen's, I just think that it's fascinating from an RPG stance to see the sort of technology, which if the claims are true, is current issue.  Apart from the industrial strength casing for the battery pack it sure looks a little "Radioshack" to me...