Miniature Motivation

As a wargamer trying to build a new set of city terrain, miniature painter with tons of unpainted Reaper Bones sitting around, or Dungeon Master with writers block, sometimes it takes a little extra push to get the brain-juices flowing enough to set aside time to continue your projects.  Often because your projects require you to access the Creativity part of the brain, and yet also require you to buckle down and get the Productivity part of the brain going.

For instances like this, I have invented something that will revolutionize the way you do game prep. Here's the idea behind its formulation: as is well known and researched thoroughly by well-respected agencies, alcohol sparks the creativity neurons in the brain to let loose their inhibitions and think about stuff like spaceships and sorcerers. On the other hand, caffeine sparks the productivity part of the brain to get you to pick up the pen or paintbrush and start working and maintain focus on things you need to get done, like corporate spreadsheets and TPS reports.  So in a flash of genius, we here at VC Labs thought... "Why not combine them?"

I call it: Cyberninja's Cyberstonishing Producto-Creativity Juice.

Contents:
1 pint glass printed with appropriate inspirational graphic
1 can "zero-carb" Monster Energy Drink
1 Bottle Appleton Dark Rum
1 Maraschino Cherry

Put the cherry in the glass, and fill with ice. You fill the glass with ice because things that taste horrible taste better when they're cold.  Then you put in 3-4 hefty 'glugs' of Rum from the bottle. A 'glug' is a unit of measure officially recognized by the Hemingway Foundation. Finally, you top it off with zero carb Monster Energy drink. Zero carb because, let's face it, we're all getting older and we've been nerds our whole life, so we really need to watch the calorie-intake. Plus this is the morning, and who drinks sugary soda before noon? The cherry is in there not for flavor, but so you'll know when you are done and need a refill when you find yourself suddenly choking on a small piece of fruit. Keeps you on your toes.

So readers of the Vorpal Chainsword will recall that I recently picked up the Core Sets for Shadows of Brimstone at GenCon, a kickass new quasi-rpg board game from Flying Frog Productions.  Those readers will also be aware that the miniature construction element of this board game is fairly involved, and requires a good amount of effort to get ready for play. This was mentioned in my previous post about the SWAMPS OF DEATH set. Well, this weekend I decided to tackle unpacking and constructing the other Core box, CITY OF THE ANCIENTS.

Thing is, I didn't really feel like doing it. All the clipping and gluing, getting your fingers all glued up and crunchy, really not looking forward to it. So you see, dear readers, that's where the Creativity Juice comes in. I took one look at the sprues and mixed myself up a glass.

After taking a good swig, things went a lot faster. Here's a pic of some tentacle mouth guys. An arm and each damn tentacle is a piece I gotta clip and clean from the sprue? This sucks!

*swig*

I mean... no problemo!

As you can see below, things got shakier in the camera department as the "work" continued. Here's some big furry yeti guys and a boatload of spiders. I appreciated the spiders since there was no gluing, but there was six points of contact on their legs with the sprue you gotta clean flash off of. Still, I'm glad you don't have to glue each leg on.

I finally got them all together. Not too bad a run if I recall correctly. The big guy has a lot of parts to them but they're always fun to put together because there's only one in the set. Its the eight zombies from the other SWAMPS set that really bored me to tears. This set wasn't too bad. However, I had to take this next picture three times to get a non-shaky one.

In any case, the CITY OF THE ANCIENTS minis are now all constructed! Soon we can play a game of Brimstone with both alternate dimensions available for exploration by our cowboy posse.

Well, once I sober up, that is...