Scrum in Miniature

The gentleman whom I have commissioned to paint nearly all of my miniatures since embarking on this hobby in 2016 has had to reluctantly retire. He's about my age (around 50), but his rheumatoid arthritis has worsened in the past year to the point that he can no longer paint straight or fast, much to both our sadness. A pile of lead he has been hoping to get to for almost a year as he waited to see if his condition would improve is going to be returned unpainted. I'll confess that there are many things I love about this hobby, but painting figures is not one of them, ironically (assembling multi-part plastic figures from sprues ranks below that). I love owning and playing with beautifully painted figures, but I have such deficits in time, patience, and skill that I would have been more than happy to keep paying my commission painter to paint the hundreds of miniatures I've been stockpiling since falling in love with miniatures gaming. He painted to a standard with ...

Artist Alex Nuckols made what disappointingly ended up being a minor yet still evocative contribution to the visual history of D&D with a series of paintings he was commissioned to produce for a school supply company named St. Regis. It seems he painted nearly a dozen pieces that graced the covers of D&D-themed notebooks, folders, and three-ring binders in 1980-81. As a D&D-obsessed kid of 10-11 years old at the time, I owned three or four of these and have never parted with  them.  Here are some examples I found online. I’ve always regretted that Nuckols didn’t produce work for any actual gaming material released by TSR (or any game company) because to this day I think he captured the gritty feel and texture of how I imagined these fantasy worlds in my mind’s eye. He was certainly a more accomplished artist than many of those who ended up in the stable as staff at TSR at the time. Artistically, his compositions are always compelling and typically eschew...

Historicon is turning into one of the highlights of my summer. I've developed some fond friendships over the past three years of attending and feel like I'm beginning to be more a part of a community and less a neophyte or spectator. It was at the first Historicon I attended in 2017 that I met future fellow Scrum Clubbers Walt O'Hara and Steve Braun, and the circle of gaming friends has expanded significantly from there to include great guys like Ivor Evans, Miles Reidy, Jeff Allen, Joe Bloch, Eric Schlegel, and a bunch of the HAWKs gaming group (Don, Duncan, Buck, Chris, Greg, Bill, et al.). The two hour trip up to Lancaster Friday morning made for a lovely drive with the convertible's top down and Spotify blaring out a summer tunes mix. I had found a great Airbnb condo five blocks from the convention, but I decided to go straight to Historicon without checking in (which finally happened a bone-weary dozen hours later and well after midnight). I spent most of t...