Friday, December 07, 2007
For fans of Victorian Science Fiction gaming, here’s your Steampunk Christmas (or anytime) gift guide.
via BoingBoing
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Friday, December 07, 2007
An ancient Mesopotamian sculpture of a lioness (above) has sold at auction for a record $57 million dollars.
I think its a beautiful piece of work, and the top of the sculpture at least, would look good in one of those Wargods of Aegyptus armies. The article is below:
NEW YORK (AFP) - A tiny and extremely rare 5,000-year-old white limestone sculpture from ancient Mesopotamia sold for 57.2 million dollars in New York on Wednesday, smashing records for both sculpture and antiquities.
The carved Guennol Lioness, measuring just over eight centimeters (3 1/4 inches) tall, was described by Sotheby’s auction house as one of the last known masterworks from the dawn of civilization remaining in private hands.
“It was an honor for us to handle The Guennol Lioness, one of the greatest works of art of all time,” Richard Keresey and Florent Heintz, the experts in charge of the sale, said in a joint statement.
“Before the sale, a great connoisseur of art commented to us that he always regarded the figure as the ‘finest sculpture on earth’ and it would appear that the market agreed with him,” they said.
Five different bidders, three on the telephone and two in the room, competed for the sculpture. The successful buyer was identified only as an English buyer who wished to remain anonymous.
The sale easily broke the previous record for the highest price for a sculpture at auction, which had stood at 29.1 million dollars and was set just last month at Sotheby’s in New York by Picasso’s “Tete de Femme (Dora Maar).”
It also beat the 28.6 million dollars paid for “Artemis and the Stag,” a 2,000-year-old bronze figure which sold also at Sotheby’s in New York in June and held the record for the most expensive antiquity to be sold at auction.
Described by Sotheby’s as diminutive in size, but monumental in conception, The Guennol Lioness was created around 5,000 years ago—around the same time as the first known use of the wheel—in the region of ancient Mesopotamia.
The piece was acquired by private collector Alastair Bradley Martin in 1948 and has been on display in New York’s Brooklyn Museum of Art ever since.
Keresey described the work before the sale as “one of the oldest, rarest and most beautiful works of art from the ancient world.”
“This storied figure, in its brilliant combination of an animal form and human pose, has captured the imagination of academics and the public since it was acquired by the Martins in the late 1940s,” he added.
The figure depicts a standing lioness looking over her left shoulder, her paws clenched in front of her muscular chest.
Experts have speculated that the figure may have played a role in some ancient belief system or mythology in Mesopotamia, which today lies in parts of modern day Iraq, Syria, Turkey and Iran.
The proceeds of the auction are to go to a charitable trust formed by the Martin Family.
I hope that the high price of the auction doesn’t encourage even more looting of ancient archaeological sites.
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Monday, November 26, 2007
A Christian sect in Ethiopia claims to have the Ark of the Covenant. For an article for Smithsonian Magazine, reporter Paul Raffaele travels to Askum, Ethiopia to see the temple where it’s allegedly housed and covers the basics of the story:
According to the First Book of Kings, King Solomon built the First Temple in Jerusalem to house the ark. It was venerated there during Solomon’s reign (c. 970-930 B.C.) and beyond.
Then it vanished. Much of Jewish tradition holds that it disappeared before or while the Babylonians sacked the temple in Jerusalem in 586 b.c.
But through the centuries, Ethiopian Christians have claimed that the ark rests in a chapel in the small town of Aksum, in their country’s northern highlands. It arrived nearly 3,000 years ago, they say, and has been guarded by a succession of virgin monks who, once anointed, are forbidden to set foot outside the chapel grounds until they die.
This isn’t the first time I’ve read that the Ark is in Ethiopia. The connection seems to be between the son of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba, named Menelik. Late in Solomon’s reign, Memelik returned to Jerusalem to visit his father. Solomon gave him a copy of the Ark, along with the first born sons of Israel’s elders to take back to Ethiopia. The first borns, however, did not want to live away from the original, however, so they pulled a switch. It was not until they got to Ethiopia that Menelik discovered the ruse.
He had to be a bit worried, considering the Ark’s reputation as a weapon. But when he wasn’t destroyed, Menelik decided to keep it. The Ark then remained in the keeping of the Ethiopian royal families down through the ages. The last Emperor of Ethiopia was Haile Selassie. Interestingly, his official title was “His Imperial Majesty Haile Selassie I, Conquering Lion of the Tribe of Judah, King of Kings of Ethiopia and Elect of God.”
On a Miniature Wargaming note, there’s a lot here for a pulp adventure in Ethiopia.
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Friday, November 16, 2007
Over at Again With Comics, they have a truly twisted mashup of Batman and Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
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Tuesday, November 13, 2007
Over the last few years, a disturbing number of my gaming friends have come down with eating and weight related diseases: diabetes, gout, heart disease, hypertension and sleep apnea, among others (not to mention the weird outbreak of brain tumors).
It’s not hard to understand. Our hobby is a sedentary one, and for some reason encourages the eating of fast food and large amounts of unhealthy fast foods. If we were playing tennis or racquetball instead, we probably wouldn’t have these issues.
I recently found a website that may help us to make better choices, though. A Calorie Counter compares the offerings at various fast food restraurants and lets you sort their nutritional data for things like calories, fats and carbs.
I found it very interesting.
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Sunday, November 04, 2007
Every year, I run a horror themed game on one of the weekends close to Halloween. This year’s scenario involved groups of monster hunters—a strike force from Zenda, a squad of WolfenJager and the Vatican Hit Team—who have descended on a central European town that has been overrun with monsters. To stop the infestation, the teams needed to find six books of spells that have been stashed throughout the town.
For this game, I used the Rippers miniatures rules from Pinnacle. They are uncomplicated and have and RPG feel (not surprising, considering they’re a subset of that company’s Savage Worlds RPG). You can find a free version of the basic rules, called Savage Showdown.
The game was run somewhat like an old school dungeon crawl. As the game master, I played all the monsters. The players moved through the town, entering and exploring buildings like rooms in a dungeons, fighting monsters and picking up useful items.
Each turn, there was a chance of a wandering monster appearing. These were pulled from a deck of monster cards, and then randomly assigned to a starting position. During the monster turn, I rolled a GW scatter die to determine the direction that they travelled. When the wandering monsters had a line of sight to a group of good guys, they rolled a skill check to determine if they noticed. If the good guys were spotted, the monsters would make a bee-line toward them.
As it turns out, the monster hunters had little difficulty in finding the books and destroying them. I had bad luck rolling for wandering monsters, and when they did arrive, they always seemed to head away from the players. In games past, the wandering monsters were very effective in slowing down the players and picking off the occasional figure. If the players did not move toward their goals quickly enough, the monsters would reach a critical mass and the players would have no chance.
This time, I just couldn’t get a break.
A modification that I’ll make in the future is to have an increasing chance of a wandering monster with each failed roll. My base has always been a 1-3 on a six sided die. In the future, if one doesn’t appear, on the next roll a monster will appear on a 1-4, then a 1-5, etc. Once a monster appears, the chance falls back to 50%.
A few notes on the terrain: All of the buildings, and the castle walls are home made from foam core. The town houses were coated with colored gesso; the half-timbers are balsa. The wood siding on the buildings is made from strips of cardboard, glued in rows. Roofs are either made from strips of cardboard, cut to resemble shingles, or from a plaster casting.
The castle walls are made from foam core, painted with black latex paint, into which sand was mixed. They then were drybrushed. The stone effect was made by randomly gluing rectangles of cardboard onto the surface before painting. The brick houses are made from foam core. I used Corel Photo Paint to make sheets of brick patterns, which were printed and glued to the surface.
The panes on the windows were made by cutting plastic canvas of the sort used for needlework.
Figures are from a large variety of manufacturers, including West Wind, Ral Parthal, Grenadier, Heritage, and a few others I can’t remember. I’ve been collecting them for twenty years now.
You can see more photos of the 2007 Halloween game in the gallery.
Please leave comments and questions below:
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Miniature Wargaming is part of the "adventure games" hobby, which includes r ole p laying and board games. Wargamers recreate battles on the tabletop with toy soldiers, like a more complicated game of chess. Models range in height from 6mm to 28mm tall, with 15mm and 25mm being the most popular. There also is a growing interest in toy soldiers and military models, such as the 1/32 and 1/35 scale plastic soldiers from Conte, and Marx.
The most popular miniature wargames are fantasy and science fiction based, such as Warhammer, Warhammer 40K, Warmachine and The Lord of the Rings. World War II games such as Flames of War and Axis and Allies are new favorites. Other favorite historical periods include Napoleonics, the American Civil War, and ancients, such as Romans or Greeks. Other gamers enjoy miniature naval wargames, recreating battles like Trafalgar, Jutland and the Coral Sea.
Hobbyists research historical periods and paint their tiny soldiers in accurate uniforms. Others develop "historically realistic" rules sets or build scale battlefield terrain using model railroad techniques.
For pictures, visit the gallery.
Some of the bigger hobby companies are Games Workshop, which produces Warhammer, Wargames Foundry and Old Glory Miniatures. Wizards of the Coast produces several lines of pre-painted miniatures games, such as the Star Wars and Dungeons and Dragons miniatures games, and a historical game with pre-painted miniatures: The new Axis and Allies game. Wizkids produces a fantasy collectable miniatures game, such as the Mage Knight and Heroclick fantasy games, the science fiction games MechWarrior and Rocketmen, as well as the quasi-historical Pirates of the Spanish Main.
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