On Doing Things in Parallel

My wife took the kids out of the house today. We had Thanksgiving at her brother's house this year, so in order to provide ourselves with enough turkey to make our favorite fall dishes (turkey-and-cranberry sandwiches, turkey soup and turkey casserole...yum!) I'm going all "hobbitish" and cooking a "second Thanksgiving dinner" for this evening.

In between chopping vegetables, brining, browning and turning the Great Bird, and prepping various side dishes, I managed a few minutes to work on the campaign project.

Looking back on my painting plan, I overlooked something. Each set of figures involves a few steps, some of which necessitate a long wait before the next can proceed. Gluing the figures to painting strips/bases and priming them, in particular, each require time to dry before I can take the next step. Given a half hour to work on the figures at a time, I'm left with nothing to do after the first ten minutes or so, if I keep to one set of figures at a time. This hobby time is precious and rare, so I'm bending the plan to fit.

Today I finished priming the first squad of southern auxiliaries, then washed (in detergent) a first unit of Molotonik militia and mounted them on their washer bases. I've given up on the painting sticks, by the way. The washers are plenty big enough to hold onto while painting. Left with a few more minutes, I glued about a dozen of my trees to fender washers.

Speaking of trees...I was digging around in my garage and discovered, to my surprised delight, that I'd purchased, socked away, and forgotten all about a few dozen flocked model trees at some point. These look MUCH better on the table than the plastic trees from the local craft store. And, aside from the bases, they need no paint. A major time saver.

I'll get some pictures of all this up in the next couple of days.

The writing of the first dispatches proceeds slowly. Here's the "trouble:" I used Mythic to generate a number of backstory elements for each of the main and secondary characters. The creation of some of these secondary characters was inspired by the backstory elements, as well, leading to more characters and more events. Each of their character sheets have these events written on them. From there, I wrote up a lot of notes about each character's past and present, and how they know each other, driven by these events. The first week or so of the campaign evolved out of these notes. But, as they are organized by character and not chronologically across all characters (i.e. as a campaign narrative), it's taking some effort to order them and organize them into a cohesive story.

Please bear with me...I think the story that will lead to the campaign itself is compelling and fairly interesting. It's certainly FAR richer than whatever I'd have dreamed up without the intervention of the Mythic prompts. Hopefully you'll agree once you've seen it.