Update

I feel like I owe an update, and so it's not just me journaling about my private life, I'll add some new Hero Forge images that I've made. I just got back last night pretty late from close to two and a half weeks out of town. I would have made a post earlier, but it's so much easier to type one on a regular keyboard than on my phone, so I didn't.

As I mentioned a few times in my last several posts, I've gone through a bit of a personal life transition, and how that affects my blogging is still TBD as the ramifications of the change continue to roll out. I got laid off in late August, I was very stressed about my income for a few weeks, then I had loads of bites on my resume and relaxed quite a bit. I ended up, within six weeks of being laid off, with four job offers and probably more on the way had I not decided to stop pursuing more of them and settle up with one of the ones that I had. This will be comparable in almost every way to the job I was laid off from, except hopefully with a better working environment where I don't keep my head down with low morale and little confidence in the leadership. As the saying with the boiling water and the frog goes, sometimes you don't realize how bad a situation gets until you find yourself with a new perspective to appreciate it. The only thing that I was forced to give up which I'll have to manage on my own now is my retirement; my old job had a pension. I am still vested in it, but it won't be as big as I'd hoped since I got laid off, so I'm not going to be able to rely on it to fund the majority of my retirement income. I also have a 401(k), but I honestly haven't paid a lot of attention to it. I will have to now! And I'll probably work longer than I would have liked, unless I write big hit novels in the next few years and come into money that I'm not expecting.

And I'm not even relocating! Which is a two-edged sword; I would have loved to relocate out West to the Rocky Mountain states, but nobody in Idaho called me back, the Utah jobs either fell through, ghosted me, or are just taking too long to materialize, and I never really found a good opportunity in Colorado, Wyoming or Rapid City. It'd be kind of funny if I still hear yet from the DOT job in Albuquerque at the end of the year. Considering that it would probably have even better security, benefits and maybe better pay than what I took and Albuquerque is a relatively cheap place to live, I might even consider it if they call me back in a few months and want to talk. Sheesh. That also depends on how well I hit it off with my new job.

Anyway, I start my new job on Monday, a week from yesterday. Again, how busy I am for my hobbies and how much mental energy I'll have to devote to them is still up in the air, but I'm positive about the future. Of course, maybe blogging will take up less of my time than other pursuits. We'll see.

I am also somewhat flattered and encouraged at the reception my resume got in certain circles. Not that I crave the validation of others, but it's still encouraging to get sometimes nonetheless.

Anyway, I've gradually gotten rid of a lot of the library minis that I got from Hero Forge, finding them not really adequately portraying either my style or my setting, or even correct proportions for human beings sometimes. I've also further modified many that I did keep, either fixing some of their proportions, or dirtying them up with the splatter decals using (usually) one of the stone colors to represent dirt or fading. It does kind of tend, after a while, to give most of my minis a kind of grimdark look, but that's OK given that I'm going for an analogous tone to the WFRP game, which is kind of Call of Cthulhu meets the Daredevil show in a fantasy setting.

In any case, the majority of these in this post will be new unique minis, however.

An updated model for Ampelius Pictor, the sorcerer from Lomar who was fomenting trouble among the Haunted Forest Tazitta tribes.

Although the year is almost over, I do recall that Hero Forge promised us print patterns for cloth. This historical Gallic warrior, with limed hair, would look better and more historically realistic with a tartan pattern on his pants. Maybe the body paint is a bit much too. That's actually more of a Pictish thing than a Gallic thing anyway.

Someone made this small image using the new stump stuff that dropped last week. It's kind of silly, but I found it whimsical and charming. (Speaking of which, today we got a few new staves.)

Speaking of whimsy, here's a Skeletor model that I made.

A basic adventuring swordsman type, but with funny boots. I wanted to use as many of the (then new; now three updates back) Mad Max stuff in a fantasy milieu as I could.

A jann who's pretty assimilated into the southern lifestyle, or at least southern clothes. Although it doesn't really show in this image because of the dirt spatters and whatnot, his skin is actually more red than it looks here. But a darker variant is hardly unheard of.

I called this the bog beast; it was actually someone's attempt to make a fantasy Chewbacca, which I modified somewhat.

A new angle on my camping knight model.

A new angle on my veteran Waychester city guard.

Meant to represent your typical country gentry. It's fair to say that, as in the Shire, there isn't really a nobility in the Hill Country per se, especially not in Southumbria, but rather landed gentry that take on the airs of nobility. This guy is gentry without the airs, if you will.

Not sure. An armored bad guy, obviously, but beyond that, I don't know what to make of this other than that I like it. Also, an early use of my custom brick color with weeds growing through the cracks; my favorite use of the bases.

A decadent wealthy daughter or maybe even wife of a nobleman, or a very wealthy landed gentry.

I didn't create this duelist, but it's a pretty good use of a lot of the Mad Max elements in a fantasy setting too.

Mostly I just wanted an excuse to copy this pose.

Ghost Riders in the Sky. Of course.

A Hillman or Timischer who's kind of "gone native" and dressed like he's from Simashki, or something. I also included, although I've included it before, my own proto-Ragnar model, because I think it's interesting that this first model here is one that I found in the library, the second is one that I created myself, but both obviously use the exact same pose. I use a lot of APR poses that I import out of my folders, but I'm obviously not the only one.

The Herald of someone important. Reminds me of that line from The 13th Warrior.

Nobody will ever accuse this battered Hyperborean warrior of being a perfumed useless simp, on the other hand.

I was playing around with mimicking what I had seen as a Kowakian monkey-lizard, and came up with this alternate view of an imp.

A jann mercenary

A prosperous jann trader, or maybe a dignitary.

A kemling action grrl

A monkey familiar, kind of based on Abu from Disney's (original animated, not the pointless live-action remake) Aladdin.

A less "civilized" monkey familiar or animal companion.

Another Hyperborean warrior.

One of the orc pirates from my recent (well... before I went out of town a few weeks ago, anyway) 5x5 entry.

A primitive tribal slinger. I have no idea how this would fit into Dark Fantasy X, but when I saw the image in the library, I had to have it.

Kind of the Prince of Persia, but I like him too much to not consider him a Dark Fantasy X compatible character model.

I may have posted these before, but there's two renditions of the Paizo character, The Red Raven. I kind of like the grungier look, but the brighter red is probably more accurate to the Wayne Reynolds artwork.

Just a random thug or bandit or something.

I liked my earlier snakeman cultist, who was kind of based on someone's interpretation of Mortal Kombat X's Reptile in Hero Forge. So, here's an alternative to the idea from two angles.

Another thug or brigand, using the same pose as the above.

This tax collector model came out with too-broad shoulders; from this angle at least, his head looks too small. I'll probably need to make a few minor modifications.

Two angles of an urban drylander thug, a race that I hadn't quite explored yet. They're not really a separate race, they're just drylanders who live in the cities instead of in tribes in the wilderness. Sometimes individuals can pass back and forth between both groups, depending on their background and knowledge.

Another urban drylander. I didn't mean to imply that they were all criminals, although based on these two images, they kind of look like they would be.

A dignitary from Loma of the Zobnan caste.

Another Zobnan; a researcher, probably into highly illegal thaumaturgy.

Plague Doctor. I don't have a specific place in Dark Fantasy X for this kind of thing yet, but they're always super spooky, right?

I had a guy I'd found in the library called "Medieval Vigilante" (or maybe that's what I called him in a file rename. Can't remember.) I remade him from scratch, though, including using only my library (and a few standard) colors, and now call him Street Crime.