Super-Robot Sculpt (Scratchbuild Really)

~150mm tall

I finished this guy back almost eight months ago but I'm just now getting around to showing him.

Sometimes I just want to make things with no relation to gaming, just craft for craft's sake. Actually, this guy did have a purpose, as I was trying to draw some robots and realized I didn't have a good grasp on the light and shadows. So, I decided to make a maquette, to help me understand how the light falls on a robot from various angles.

The figure was also an experiment to answer a couple of questions: 1) can I make a robot purely out of polymer clay, without kit-bashing any plastic refuse into it; and 2) can I make a figure without an armature? The project answered those questions definitively: Yes to the first, a loud and clear NO to the second.

The sculpture is purely polymer clay, but calling it a sculpture is a bit pretentious; it's more of a scratchbuild. I wanted to ape the super-robot style of Go-Nagai, so I started making simple polymer clay shapes, individual spheres, cylinders, cones, etc. After joining them all together with CA glue, I wrapped it all with thin sheets of polymer clay and styled it to shape the outer body. I did sculpt the head and face "traditionally" and am happy with how that turned out.

The lack of armature means the robot now lies in pieces on my hobby desk. He's served his purpose though. Not only did I get a number of good photos from a variety of lighting angles, I also learned some valuable lessons for the next robot I make.

Creative Pallet-Cleanse (New Scratchbuild Spaceship)

I've got a lot of creative energy recently, but I've stalled out on each of my projects.

A creative pallet-cleansing should help me refocus my hobby-brain. And that means going back to my old favorite and making a spaceship.

Back to my old techniques: pasta for the master shape, impression molding, then dental plaster casting.

I'll clean it up with files tomorrow, then plan to add some extra details/fix air bubble blemishes with epoxy putty. The ultimate goal is to get back to pewter drop-casting. 

World-Building via Letter Tiles: Last Example Round (Solo RPG)

This is, mercifully, the last post recording my playtest of using letter-tile prompts.  I carried it through the fourth oracle question in order to show just how malleable the emerging story can be. 

Speaking of emerging story, I’ll forgo the complete recap and attempt a two sentence summary.  “An aged Nazi attempts to arm his warlike Hollow-Earth patrons with a Wonder Weapon from WWII Japan, the weapon itself adapted from Hollow-Earth technology.  Only our heroes can stop him”.

OK, so learning about Roswell-in-the-Pacific from the oracle dice, I now fill my hand back to ten tiles and get on with laying down more words.  Hitting two orange squares gives me two hand refreshes and I complete four words before triggering the next oracle question: IDENTITY, GUSHER, MOTOR, and GUARD.

I'm not sure what to do with IDENTITY and GUARD, but since one is oriented horizontally and the other vertically, I'll say they're a word-pair.  So, the IDENTITY of a GUARD at the fringes of the aforementioned royal wedding might be in question?  Or, even better, perhaps it’s the phrase GUARD IDENTITY, with someone trying to hide their true nature.  I like this a bit better, and since IDENTITY is actually built off the previous word NAZI, I think we know who this refers to.

 

The new word MOTOR plays nicely into threads already forming, especially since it's indicated as Goal-related.

 

The word GUSHER gives me some initial ideas about introducing an NPC from the surface world.  I researched oil and gas exploration in the Indian Ocean and read that Japan was a key player in the late 20th century, in roughly the timeframe of my game.  Synchronicity!  Hmmm, maybe I'll change the narrative from last post that the "moon-rocket" is actually a super-science nuclear powered-borer?  Or possibly that there are two vehicles, somehow related?  I’m leaning toward the first option, but this is about letting the universe push us into unexpected directions, so let's ask the Oracle.

 

4th Question: Did a second vehicle from the surface world recently wreck in the Inner World kingdom?

 

Result: 5 "Yes, and…"

 

I can work with this!  Yes, a second vehicle from the surface world recently wrecked in the kingdom, and it has a close connection to the WWII spacecraft!

    

As the picture shows, I still have 37 tiles remaining in the bag and I could keep going.  In fact, I did continue on to a fifth oracle question, but I think I’ve demonstrated the process.

Does it produce a Hugo-award winning narrative?  No.  Does it produce any narrative at all?  That’s debatable, but since there’s no structure, the answer seems no.  I’d say the letter tile process is an idea generator, and a slow one at that.

Still, I find it a fun mini-game and the tile/dice oracle combination does inject unexpected inspiration.  Personally, I would have never introduced World War II elements into my subterranean fantasy world, but now I have an adventure arc featuring just those things.  I’ve got NPCs, their potential motivations, technology that could offer the PCs a way to escape back to the earth’s surface… lots of angles to explore and interpret after only four questions.

The playtest documented here was essentially adventure creation, like a GM getting ideas to build an entire session or two worth of material for a group of players.  The next time I use this technique, I’ll integrate it real-time with a true solo RPG adventure to see how that works.

Steps for solo RPG integration:

1. Start with generalities defined: the PC(s), setting, premise, etc.
2. Run the board set-up as in the intro post and play the tile process through the first oracle question; the intent is to set the solo RPG opening scene and, in Mythic GME terms, define some open threads.
3. Refresh the tile hand and lay down additional words, continuing until the next oracle question is triggered.
4. Leave that question unanswered and return to the solo RPG proper, using the newly generated words either to interpret an altered/interrupted scene, or as additional threads/NPC details; play the solo RPG scene as normal.
5. Between scenes, use the events of the actual play, amplified by the existing tile words, and answer the still outstanding Oracle question.
6. Repeat steps 3 to 5 above.      

I used 76 tiles over five questions during my playtest, so that suggests about 15 tiles per question.  A bag of 100 tiles would therefore yield six, maybe seven questions with the first one occurring prior to play.  The tile-based word prompts therefore only last for the first five or so scenes but honestly, that feels about right.  After five or six scenes, there should be plenty of threads to explore. 

World-Building via Letter Tiles: Example Round 3 (Solo RPG)

Last round of the emerging story of the subterranean Inner World suggested two warring factions, including one guided by Nazis!  The tile-formed words also hinted that a royal wedding could end the fighting.  The oracle dice confirmed this, stating that:

Yes, the marriage is part of a truce between warring factions, but the bride's (or groom’s?) people were never truly threatened by the Nazi-influenced kingdom.

Seven more tiles drawn to fill the hand back to ten, and then another round of word-building.  If I were playing Scrabble, I could have racked up an impressive score on a longer word.  Generating story connections by hitting the desired colored squares and then triggering an oracle question, have me laying down three short words instead: MOON, ODE, and ACE.     

It's coming together!  This shows how the entire story can morph and how it's OK to jettison big portions of previous ideas.  Look at it as if from a character's limited perspective… maybe the previous brainstorming reflects what appeared to be going on, but then more is revealed.

 

The Japanese vessel that disappeared long ago into the Inner World was not a submarine but a MOON-rocket (more of a spaceplane maybe?).  Originally designed for peaceful purposes (Goal), the rocket's development was hijacked to support the war effort.  The NAZI who advises the primitive kingdom was not a scientist but a test pilot, part of a two-person crew with a Japanese ACE fighter pilot turned test pilot.  Their test flight ended in the Inner World, with the German surviving.  Did the Japanese pilot live?  Unknown, but the cryptic Haiku (ODE) he left holds the interest of more than one character (Connection). 

 

Why have we never heard of Japan's WWII-era moon ambitions before, or since?  I'd say this points to a unique vessel; perhaps the HULL of the rocket utilized one-of-a-kind alloys and/or a special propulsion system…

 

3rd Question: Did Japan receive help from the Inner World to build their World War II rocketship? 

 

Result: 3 "No, but…"   

 

No, Japanese scientists did not receive help from the Inner World to build the rocket, but they did reverse-engineer a wreck of an Inner World craft!

The story’s getting more focused but no less weird.  Stay tuned…

World-Building via Letter Tiles: Example Round 2 (Solo RPG)

Continuing the demonstration of my tile-laying method of world building, we ended last post with the following question posed to the oracle, and its answer:

Question: Are elements of the subterranean world's nobility actual German Nazis? Answer: Yes, elements of the Inner World nobility are actual German Nazis but acting as advisors, not in charge.

Getting to that question exhausts my hand of tiles, but since the last word built over a "?" square, I refresh back to a hand of ten letters (see previous two posts for a rundown of the rules).

The next hand of tiles looks promising, especially the Wild tile.  Although I used the 100 tiles included in a basic Scrabble set for my story-creation system, I replaced the two Blank tiles with two “Wild” tiles, labelled “|+|”.  The player uses Wild tile as either a traditional blank tile, i.e. representing any letter desired, or the player can cash it in for 3d3 additional tiles.  As seen from the picture below, I choose the latter option, the additional letters allowing me to make five words this round: VEX, JAPAN, WEAPON, MARRY, and HULL.

Interesting… so both Axis powers from WWII are somehow involved.  VEX shares a Goal story element with VAULT; someone is frustrated by failure to access a sealed area/container, but their failure is someone else's goal.

 

Since MARRY is a Setting element, the scene is a royal wedding!  The background of The War Inside says the inhabitants of the Inner World are advanced, with technology beyond current understanding (anti-gravity, beam weapons, etc.).  The assumption however is that there are different factions, maybe even nations, with disparate technology levels.  Who could be advised by Nazis?  Certainly not high-tech utopian people but instead a more primitive kingdom.

 

The JAPAN-WEAPON pairing suggests that maybe this has to do with Japan's nuclear weapon program in WWII.  JAPAN is an Obstacle here… perhaps a Japanese submarine was lost in the war while carrying heavy water to/from a collaboration with German scientists?  Of course, the submarine did not sink to the depths but disappeared, sucked into the Inner World.  The Nazi adviser to this kingdom here in the present day (1978) Inner World wants to build an H-bomb and knows the wreckage of the submarine holds the key ingredient.  Is that what's in the VAULT though?  Or is it scientific notes?  Perhaps he's already accessed the heavy water and made a dud?  Or perhaps he hasn’t even found the submarine yet?

 

A narrative is starting to form, but I don't want to box myself in.  I’ll explore one of the other words then…

 

2nd Question: Is the marriage part of a truce between warring factions?

 

Result: 4 "Yes, but…"

 

Yes, the marriage is part of a truce between warring factions, but the bride's (or groom’s?) people were never truly threatened by the Nazi-influenced kingdom.

 

How were they not threatened?  Superior technology I assume, but it could be another advantage.  Why give one of your nobles in marriage then?  Who is this new faction and what are its motivations? 

  

Like most solo games, each answer just seems to create more perplexing questions.  The fun lies in interpreting the mess, and we’ll do more of that…. next post.

World-Building via Letter Tiles: Example Round 1 (Solo RPG)

Stepping through the fourth, and final playtest of my Letter-Tile-Worldbuilding technique is the easiest way for me to explain the process.

First, before we start pulling tiles out of bags, we need a general overview, a light scaffolding to hold everything together. If this was a video rental store (remember those), or a library, in what section would your story be found? Is it science-fiction or fantasy? Or maybe science-fantasy or horror? Within those choices, is it fantastical, or gritty-realistic? We’ll use the letter tiles to help us fill in details, but we need some context to bound things. 

I suspect, for solo RPGs, this context is easy to describe, since presumably most players would start with a preferred system or setting. 

My current solo RPG project could best be described as science-fiction, specifically in the “hidden lands” sub-genre. The setting imagines spies from both Cold War superpowers stumbling upon a subterranean “Hollow Earth”-type world in 1978. The likely PCs are the spies themselves and other travelers from the surface world wrapped up in the web of espionage. Player Character motivation is chiefly returning to the surface world, while preserving or gaining an advantage for their side in the East vs. West ideological struggle. The Inner World consists of many different lands and peoples, allowing all sorts of bizarre encounters, from dinosaurs to advanced technology beyond comprehension. 

While that helps set the stage, I see I still have a very wide playing field and nearly anything could happen in the opening adventure. We have a blank page before us, so let’s use the letter tiles to fill it up! 

Picking up from the set-up detailed in the last post, the board sports five randomly placed letters and a random chit-draw has determined the functions of the colored squares (picture repeated below for clarity). 

Set-up complete

I draw the first ten letters and begin building off of any of those five initial tiles. The first three words come quickly: REIGN, VAULT, NAZI. I play the tiles in that order making sure I save NAZI for last, as it will be built over a “?” square and trigger an Oracle Question and hand refresh. Building those three words uses all ten of my tiles, so after I answer the question I also get ten new tiles! 

First round complete, including oracle roll

Now the fun part: interpretation. Systems like the Mythic GME and Ars Magica have taught me that interpreting word-pairs can be easier than divining the meaning of a single word. One technique I therefore use here is splitting the new words into two categories based on orientation, vertical and horizontal, to limit the number of possible word-pair combinations. If words actually share a letter tile however, I honor that as a link. 

So, getting back to our words here… well, no need to try to form the best horizontal/vertical pairing, REIGN and NAZI both share a letter, so they are obviously linked. Even more so, the letter shared sits on a blue-colored cell, indicating this link has strong Connection to something in the story (likely a character or characters). The word REIGN features two colored squares, actually, the second being a magenta Setting indicator.  The word VAULT also overlays a colored square, in this case a green one, which indicates a Goal-related story element.

First thoughts: the scene obviously opens in a palace where the nobility have some sort of connection to the German Nazi party! A VAULT of some sort has significance to someone's Goals but I don't need to work that into the question directly. 

First Oracle Question: Are elements of this nobility actual German Nazis?

I use a custom oracle method where I roll 5d6 and rank order the dice by score, using the middle (third rank) die. 1-2 indicates “No, And…”, 3: “No, But…”, 4: “Yes, But…”, and 5-6: “Yes, And…”. The oracle gives a 50/50 chance for “Yes” or “No”, with the “But” modifier favored over the “And” roughly 60/40. 

Result: 4 "Yes, but…" 

Yes, elements of the nobility are actual German Nazis but acting as advisors, not in charge. 

That’s the example done, to the first question. I’ll carry through these posts all the way to the fourth question, where I stopped, having gained sufficient detail for an opening scene. 

If this example doesn’t make the process clear, hopefully the follow on posts will. A big thing I wanted to show here is how the process is a mini-game in it own right, with word-building not just based on what seems interesting for the story, but also trying to hit those colored squares to get hints how the words play into the story.

The results seem “from the ether” to me, and not forced. I certainly didn’t anticipate Nazis in my subterranean world, but honestly, it fits with the whole Hollow Earth conspiracy silliness. And it gives me some immediate baddies for the PCs to punch. And who better to punch than Nazis?

World-building via Letter Tiles: Intro (Solo RPG)

Uncharacteristically for me, I actually followed through on both the brainstorming ideas I recorded last post.

The map idea evolved into my Town in a Pizza Box technique almost effortlessly, but developing a method of letter tiles for story prompts took a bit more work. I’m pleased to say that after three iterations I closed on the final form, and the fourth playtest produced an unexpected but fun narrative framework, with virtually no further mechanical tweaks required. 

I created a custom, narrative-focused board to use in place of the normal Scrabble board. As the picture below shows, the board eliminates all references to scoring, instead showing a pattern of blank and colored squares. Tiles are placed from a hand of ten tiles, but refilling the hand back to a full complement occurs only when tiles overlay certain squares on the grid. Tile placement on the various colors suggests different clues to the narrative, and can even trigger narrative questions. 

I start by drawing five chits, in a separate (virtual*) bag from the normal bag of Scrabble tiles. Four of the five chits represent story elements: Connections, Goals, Obstacles, and Settings. The fifth chit bears an “R” to signify that one color offers additional Refresh opportunities. The five tiles are drawn from the bag and placed on the color index track to the left of the board. As shown here in the example picture below, for this story the colors represent the following: 

Orange: Refresh 
Yellow: Obstacle
Green: Goal
Blue: Connection
Magenta: Setting 

*NOTE: I use the website Playingcards.io to host my custom board and tiles, all of which were created by me; no copyrighted material used.

Next I draw five starting letter tiles and place them randomly on the board. The board has 225 squares total, with 81 squares split into nine central regions, each designated by dashed borders like a keypad. Rolling a d33 (two different-colored d3s) twice identifies first the region and then the actual square itself to place the tile.

Playtest #4 Set-up; Story Elements defined and five tiles randomly placed

Next, I start the story generation in earnest by drawing a hand of ten letter tiles. Unlike with Scrabble, I’m not trying to earn points, but rather determine significant story aspects. A number of constraints therefore drive tile placement.

A word formed with tiles overlying colored squares gains hints on how to interpret the word within the story context.

Placing a tile on the specific color marked Refresh allows an immediate refill of the hand back to 10 tiles. Since there are a finite number of these spaces, it pays to empty one’s hand by forming other words, while still being prepared to build a word on Refresh color.

Placing a tile on a “?” square triggers an oracle question, pausing the tile-laying (after the full word is laid down). The player reviews the words placed so far and any associated story elements indicated by colored squares, and asks a question to be answered by the game mechanism of their choice. As shown here, I use a 5d6 dice oracle; it’s a custom method that generates four possible answers: “Yes/No” each with a “But” or “And” modifier.

Triggering an oracle question also refills the player’s hand back to 10 tiles. Building over the “?” squares is therefore a key focus, but best done only after enough words have been formed to both guide the questioning and empty the hand of tiles. I find I get about three to four new words between each question.

The best way to explain further would probably be to just step through the rest of my fourth playtest as an example.  I'll do that, but in the next post... this one has gone on long enough!

Letter Tile Prompts (Solo RPGs)

Originally posted by me over on RPGG

If this seems eerily familiar to my one or two non-bot readers out there, I actually wrote this up before the Town in a Pizza Box setting-builder post; this was the primordial ooze from which that idea sprang.  The text below only slightly cleans up my brainstorming notes, which started around the concept of Scrabble-like letter tiles and quickly progressed to examining the modification of the underlying game-board to better interact with the tiles, from a solo RPG perspective.

We all have our ways of getting adventure (or dare I say it... story) prompts: from random tables, picture cubes, to grabbing a passage from the nearest book. Personally, I always used the dictionary, rolling a random page, then random column on that page, then scanning down and finding an interesting word (or three and letting one last random roll decide).

Starting Abandoned Solo RPG Campaign #1023 last summer, I decided to try prompts from Scrabble-like letter tiles and it worked pretty well. I grouped the letters into two piles and played against myself, alternating between the two piles with high score as the only goal to help me choose between which tiles to lay down.

Making sense of the resulting mess of unrelated words, framed by some very broad assumptions about the background, led me to an unexpected but surprisingly meaty adventure hook. The first of the following two pics shows my tiles and board.

I used my tablet to host the virtual game pieces, and then took a screen-grab to take notes on. The white erased regions aren't hiding anything naughty, I just wanted whitespace to write on. The second pic zooms in on the notes I took in one of those whitespaces. For context the setting is the far future Pax Galactica framework described in the (highly recommended) Fate Space Toolkit.

The Universe gave me this to work with???

A glimpse inside a weird mind...

(The 🥩 of the post) Tile-based word association is useful for prompts, but I keep having this nagging feeling that the Scrabble board itself could be pulling its weight more. Perhaps it could be replaced with something specifically designed for solo RPGs?

My first idea was to replace the colored markings on a traditional Scrabble board with RPG specific markings. Instead of “Triple Word Score” or “Double Letter Score”, certain squares on the grid would state things like “PC-NPC Connection”, or “PC backstory”, or “Important Place”. Perhaps the colored blocks could be left blank (but still different colored), the words filled in with tiles, and then each color defined randomly with a chit-draw. Finally, for this variant, I’m thinking that a number of tiles could be placed randomly, at the start, to help prevent lock-up in the middle.

My second idea was, how about just replacing the board with a gridded map? It could be a literal map for an RPG set in a rural town or on a space station or similarly “local” campaign. A more wide-ranging setting could instead employ a concept map, that shows perhaps major players and ideas with proximity implying strength of association. Regardless of the map type, a handful of letter tiles could be dropped from height, leaving those that land upright (i.e. readable) on the map to indicate not only the initial germ of a word, but exactly what in the setting (by map position) it relates to. Perhaps instead of dropping tiles, the solo player drops a six-sided letter die, one for each PC and maybe a few for significant NPCs. Each die would have a discrete color to identify to whom it belongs, and words would then be built off these with normal tiles. And if words from two different characters cross… perfect, that implies interaction.

I imagine this only as world-building or adventure design prompts, as it would be too time consuming for use as an oracle. I like the second idea more but the first idea would take far less production effort and I could be testing it today.

Anybody who has read this far… have you ever done something similar? How did it work for you? Thanks for reading!

Town in a Pizza Box (Solo RPG Prompt)

Or: An inspiration tool for lonely fun.

I love “quantum game prep” techniques, where players or GMs can flesh out an RPG (or wargame) setting on the fly. The brilliant RPG Weird Heroes of Public Access uses this technique, charging the players with imagining localities in the fictional town of Fairhaven. I played (unfortunately only) two wonderful sessions of Brindlewood Bay a few years back and the GM employed a similar technique, having us answer leading questions to fill in the details of our PCs’ little burg.

How then can a solo RPG enthusiast, or maybe a GM looking for inspiration during prep, replicate the unpredictable responses of a group of diverse gamers? As always, the dice have the answer.

I made up a quick way of generating a map of small rural town, with the dice indicating not only the spatial positions of the landmarks, but the relationships between them. I generated the landmark category table by referencing the Yellow Pages for my own hometown. Modifying the die roll table could conceivably generate a different setting: a space station, a neighborhood in a metropolis, or a fantasy settlement for instance.

I playtested the idea just this morning and I’m happy to say it works well, at least with my overactive imagination. Only three rounds of rolling (and only the d8, d10, and d20) yielded a couple of juicy relationships that could spawn adventures and NPCs, including a direct relationship between the police station and a financial business over by the local dam.

A quick roll on my homebrew oracle answered “Yes, And…” to the question “is the relationship shady?”; in fact, not only is the relationship shady but it is also a well-kept secret. The nearby presence of the (randomly rolled) dam immediately spawned thoughts of flooded lands drowned by a controversial reservoir project. Illegal seizure of private land? A convenient way to hide the bodies? An inconvenient discovery of a sacred archaeological site? Who knows why the land was flooded and why the police helped hide that reason… it’s a meaty adventure hook that I can leave vague enough to branch off in a number of red herrings.

I haven’t posted this to my downloads page because I plan to expand the tool, adding at least another page to provide examples of each landmark category and include some additional rolls I use to further define certain features (like quantifying elevation changes).

Pasta Bot Activate!

125mm tall

I finally finished my unsanctioned “fan-fic” entry for the 2025 Big Bot Bash. The deadline for the real participants was a month ago, so talking about it now I kind of feel like Jim Gaffigan doing his bit about bringing up old movies around the water-cooler: “I just saw Heat!” 

I made a lot of mistakes on this build and picked up some good experience. For every genuine lesson-learned I had two or three lessons-already-known-but-not-heeded-because-I’m-too-cheap/impatient. 

First off, the fragility of the build made me glue it to a base early in the process. I then proceeded to finish the robot before going back to work on the base. Not only was texturing and painting the base around the completed figure a pain, the glue bond on his feet seemed inadequate. So, lesson-relearned: spend as much effort designing and building the base, including a solid mounting plan for the figure, and get it maybe 95% done before joining the two.

Secondly, and stupidly for someone trying to meet a self-imposed deadline, I decided to try two different paint techniques I’ve never done before, namely the hairspray chipping method and an oil wash for weathering. The fact I no longer have an airbrush made the hairspray weathering decision extra silly. More on that in a second.

I primed the based figure in black, as shown last post. The rattle-can of Vallejo primer cost €12 but delivered beyond my expectations. I would’ve just got the cheapest black spray paint at the hardware store but I’m now living without a car and “popping down to the hardware store” is no longer the trivial activity it was.

The universe works in mysterious ways. I did a quick internet search for places with spray paint and discovered a plastic model kit store within 150 meters of my new apartment. I walk over there and I swear I could hear the angels sing… hands down it’s probably the best model shop I’ve ever been in, anywhere I’ve traveled in the world. It’s quaint and packed into like a 10 meter square space but the nice owner has everything I could need. Seemingly every color of acrylic paint from multiple brands, every variation of tool, etc. Amazing.

Anyways, the Vallejo primer went on incredibly smooth; like buttah. Zenithal highlights followed via dry brushing Vallejo Bone White from the top down. I brush-painted the entire build with a Gunmetal glaze mix, trying to preserve the highlights, and at this point, it looked pretty good. I hit it with a light coat of hairspray and let that dry for a few hours.

The plan was to paint it all bright red (Vallejo Blood Red), like a Kubota tractor, and then use the hairspray chipping method to make the metallic base coat show through at dings and dents. Missing my airbrush, I took a makeup brush normally used for dry brushing, and did the “overbrush” technique with slightly damp bristles and very little paint. While I’d rather have my airbrush back, this still worked surprisingly well to coat the robot in red; the coat was even but thin enough to let the metallic sheen through.

I rubbed off a little test patch of red paint with a wet toothpick, and the Gunmetal showed through. Perfect! Then, real-life intruded and I set the project aside for days, maybe a week.

I finally got back to the project and wet the toothpick to start weathering. Sadly, all the acrylic paint rubbed right off, all the way down to the black primer. Apparently, the long wait between the hairspray application and the weathering attempt allowed the hairspray to somehow integrate with the acrylic paint, instead of remaining a barrier between the Gunmetal and Red.

The inability to do the chipping took the wind out of my sails. I was already behind schedule so I skipped most of the planned detail paint work: insignia, bands, hazard stripes, etc.

The penultimate step before finishing the base, the oil wash, was also new to me so of course I made some mistakes. I slathered the wash, a thinned mix of black and burnt umber oil paints, all over the build and let it sit. I seem to remember different guidance depending on what internet resource one consults: some say wipe off the excess immediately, some say wait 24 hours and wipe. I let the wash sit for about 40 minutes before getting nervous and attempting to wipe it down. A little oil wash wiped off but the staining seemed permanent. Tips from the Discord group indicate that I could just use more white spirit thinner and reactivate the wash, in order to clean it up more.

I plan to leave the bot as it appears in the pictures. Yes, it turned out much darker than I imagined and the paint job lost its metallic sheen but I like the griminess. 

Half-ass attempts at insignia

I enjoyed this build immensely, even though I miss not having many of my tools.  I'm really looking forward to starting something new.

Making something just for the sake of making it, and not intending it for gaming, was refreshing.  I'm contemplating making a spaceship next, but not a ~60mm gaming piece like I normally do.  I'm thinking a vessel at least the size of this bot, maybe more.

Then again, making robots is just plain fun, and I'm really tempted to make something 50-80mm tall that I can use in a Mighty Monsters game.

What to do? 

Handy Hobby Tip: The Secret to Glue-free Hands…

…is to not use your hands.

Of course you have to use your hands when crafting. So, take the advice of one of my favorite YouTube crafters, the Crafsman, and “wear you some gloves”. We’ll come back to this.

Great glue!  But not on my hands

I bought 16 oz of Starbond Heavy Thin CA Glue‡ back in November. It’s great stuff but quite runny (by design). The glue arrived in a large shipping bottle, accompanied by four 2 oz refillable applicator bottles and a pack of micro-tip applicator attachments. I quickly found that bottle-to-bottle glue transfers and poorly seated applicator tips meant a crunked-up, gooey bottle. 

So, the post title may be click-baity, but I mean it when I say don’t use your hands when using super glue. More accurately, make a DIY, disposable glue brush.

Take a piece of thin steel wire and pinch it into a tight loop maybe 20mm long. Insert the wire into an Exacto-knife handle and form the “bristles” by wrapping the loop with masking tape. The masking tape extends about double the length of the wire, with its tip shaped by a couple of snips from some scissors. 

DIY Glue Brush

Once I’m ready to start bonding stuff with CA glue, I’ll put a couple of drops on a piece of non-porous scrap and then dab it with my DIY glue brush. The flexible masking tape tip makes it easy to apply tiny amounts of CA glue just where I want it, without the frustration of gluing pieces of the build to my fingers. I’ll make two or three of these masking tape brushes at the same time, and when the tip of one gets gunked up with glue, I’ll swap it for a new one. By the time I’m on the last brush tip, the CA glue on the first one is cured, and I’ll snip off the fouled area and be back to a fresh, if slightly shorter, glue brush.

Using this little glue brush I’m able to keep 90% of the super glue off my fingers. Repositioning a freshly glued piece, or handling a leaky glue bottle means I’m still going to get sticky fingers though, so it’s back to the gloves discussion, nitrile gloves specifically.

Pasta Bot says "half gloves still count."

I’m probably not alone in feeling that I lose some dexterity when wearing even thin nitrile gloves. My technique to preserving some dexterity is to leave a couple of fingers ungloved, preferably a non-dominant finger I don’t use reflexively, like the pinky or ring-finger. I find I don’t need to cut up my nitrile gloves to customize them; the poor quality control in their manufacture means that a glove is almost guaranteed to tear on the first doffing. Instead of tossing a torn glove, I’ll salvage the finger tips and reuse them repeatedly.

‡I don't get any kickbacks from Starbond, I just want to give praise where its deserved.  Great glue.

Big Bot Bash for Amateurs (Pasta Bot WIP)

A few years ago the YouTube Algorithm fed me the Bill Making Stuff channel when I was looking for terrain-building ideas.  The BMS channel introduced me to a number of other wargame-adjacent crafters, most notably Bill’s twin brother Dan, who runs the Dan Does channel.‡

Bill introduced the Big Bot Bash last March, and brought it back this year.  The BBB showcases a number of invited YouTubers, who each contribute their own unique take on the “Junkbot” concept exemplified by Bill Making Stuff.  As the name implies, a junkbot is a robot model scratchbuilt from “junk”, i.e. generally unrelated and repurposed objects.

The BBB challenge introduces a random element, by having the participants roll a d20 six times on the “Junkbot Generator”, found on Bill’s website for his own sci-fi setting, the Gutterlands.  Each roll on the Junkbot Generator assigns a specific aspect to the five different body areas and an overall robot “flavour”, with each die result vague enough to allow wide interpretation while still providing enough constraints and inspiration to prompt the scratchbuilder to start gluing.   

As a Patreon patron of the Dan Does channel (sorry Bill, money’s tight!), I have access to that channel’s Discord server, which hosts a slew of creative and lovely people.  A number of us patrons decided we’d unofficially join the BBB; while none of us run our own YouTube channel, we tried to stick to the same 28 March deadline that the pros were bound to.

***As an aside, you don’t need to be patron of either the Dan Does or Bill Making Stuff channels in order to join their respective Discord servers (Dan Does; Bill Making Stuff).  If you do toss them a few quid via Patreon however, you can get access to each server’s members-only section.  Either way, it’s a great way to meet like-minded crafters and I recommend it.***

A couple of the other Discord members made the deadline and their creations look awesome!  I’m truly blown away by the creativity and totally different perspectives and techniques everyone brought.  Obviously, based on the date of this post and its “Work-in-Progress” title, I’m way behind and still not finished with mine.  The build is done though and only the painting remains, so I feel safe enough to talk about it.  Posting now should hopefully give me some accountability to fully complete the build.

Anyways, let’s get on talking about my build.  I don’t feel too bad about missing the deadline, as I didn’t commit to making a junkbot and download the generator until around 15 March.  

OK, so anyone who’s seen this blog knows I like to build little spaceships out of pasta.  I’ve wanted to make other mechanical constructs from pasta for years and figured the Big Bot Bash was as good a time as any to try.  That meant, in addition to the constraints from the Junkbot Generator, I also forced myself to use pasta for a majority of the build.

Here’s my list of six rolls, followed by my initial thoughts/interpretations:

Section	D20 Roll	Result
Body	7	Heavy Smoker
Head	5	Hole
Arms	13	Fancypants
Hands	14	Two-handed
Legs	14	Centipede
Flavour	4	Beaten

I wasn’t exactly in love with a lot of the rolls but knowing the various pasta shapes I had on hand, coupled with Bill’s guidance to “Interpret the results how you like”, a few rough ideas immediately sprang to mind.

A “heavy smoker” body seemed easy enough, with all the tubular pasta shapes readily standing in for exhaust pipes.  I wasn’t sure what to do with “hole” for the head, so decided to come back to it.  I immediately decided that “fancypants” arms just meant overly complex, instead of frilly or ornate.  Hmmm, “two-handed” most obviously meant the robot bore some kind of two-handed weapon, but I rejected that.  Instead, I planned on each wrist ending in two hands.  I did not like “centipede” legs because it sounded like so much more work, a real pain.  I also didn’t like the idea of a long lower body with a lot of legs.  Turns out I went with the multiple legs configuration anyways.  Rolling “beaten” for flavour made me smile though, as that meant I could treat construction and painting mistakes as blemishes.

An idea formed quickly and I started gluing together pasta and wire in a vaguely humanoid shape.  I decided to make the overly-complex arms using three separate tentacles (each) that joined at a wrist unit.  The same wires for the arm tentacles passed through the body and splayed out into six separate tentacular legs.

The robot started to take shape and it screamed “mining bot”, like some piece of titanic but mundane equipment in a Chris Foss painting.  The “hole” result for the head could be the robot’s gaping maw, occupying its entire face (making for an easier build).  And a mining robot doesn’t need delicate hands, so the wrist units could feature claws.

Other than the wire armature and much baking soda accelerant, the entire build was, so far, various pastas held together with CA glue.  I started bulking it out using standard office paper and some vinyl sheeting, creating flat and smooth surfaces for later greebling.

The nature of those greebles caused me a bit of consternation.  I feel using anything other than found objects violates the pure spirit of a junkbot build.  The junkbot generator even states “no 3D prints”.  If you know me and my feelings toward 3D printing, you know there is no danger of printed parts showing up here.  Yet, I had to trash all the contents of my bits boxes in our recent move.

My second most favorite scratchbuilding technique, after gluing pasta, is casting my own greebles and nurnies in homemade, often single-use, impression molds.  I even took up valuable luggage space and weight during our move to hand carry my mold clay and casting plaster.  Still, I was reticent to use this technique, as it seems like an analog version of 3D printing.  I made peace with myself though, as I was doing all the mold creation from simple found-object shapes.

Keen-eyed readers will note that I strayed from the Junkbot Generator prompts in a few areas, most obviously the hands.  I wanted desperately to meet the (non-existent) deadline, and started cutting corners.  The first thing to go was the two claws per wrist idea. 

So, here’s the bot now, covered in greebles, secured to a base, primed, and waiting for paint.  Unfortunately, my airbrush set-up also stayed behind with our big move, so this guy will be purely brush painted.

‡All ideas from the Dan Does and Bill Making Stuff channels are the copyrights of their respective creators, used without permission, and with no intent to challenge.  I hope by featuring links to their channels/websites here, I can convince the reader to go check them out and maybe even support them on Patreon.  Thanks!