April Fools Day - Gaming Themed Whiskey

Yesterday was April Fools Day, and as I explained last week, I enjoy creating pranks for the holiday. Since 2006, Hawgleg Publishing has honored the spirit of the day by announcing the release of a fake product.

This year, our product was gaming-themed whiskey. That is to say, a boutique line of whiskey with a 25mm Western miniature in each bottle. We release the story at our Website (www.hawgleg.com) and TheMiniaturesPage. The story is a bit naughty, but for the most part it's workplace safe -- and it was a BIG hit at TMP. In fact, since April 1 fell on a Sunday, we were apparently the only company that took the time to create a joke (some years at TMP, there are easily a dozen fake products, but this year we were the sole provider, which actually helped us pull the wool over people's eyes more effectively than usual).

I also think the quality of our artwork helped sell the joke:

I created this image in Strata 3D, which is a 3D illustration program I've been working with for a long time (probably more than 10 years). It's a powerful, but lesser-known tool with a lot of horsepower there waiting to be unleashed -- as I hope you can see in these images.

I think this time I came very close to achieving photo realism with these images. They're not quite 100% perfect, but they definitely do a good job of looking like real product artwork. I also got several complements on the quality of the label:

I even had a few people ask for a full-size label so they could print it out and put it on their own whiskey bottle. As one guy said, he wanted to see if anyone would notice. If you'd like to see the full-size label, you can get it by clicking here. I wish I could take all the credit for the label, but I did start off with an existing label from a Chivas Regal bottle. You can compare them by clicking here to see what I started with.

See ya Wednesday for an update on the Blackmark review.

My other hobby: Gutshot

I'm still reeling from the weekend and am not back on schedule. I am just too far behind schedule to do justice to the second half of my Blackmark review, so please forgive me while I take a detour to tell you a little something about myself and my hobby outside of comic books.  That hobby is historical miniatures gaming. Yeah, I play with little metal men... as though I wasn't geeky enough before.

Of course, I'm not just a geek. I'm an award-winning geek with a very minor level of celebrity (if Kathy Griffen is on the D-List, then I'm probably on the Z-List). You see, I don't just roll dice and play with tiny metal men, I also publish a rule book on the subject. And yes, it won an award. A big award, but I'll get into that more in a minute.

In 1999, my old buddy Mike Murphy approached me about joining him to develop a Wild West miniatures game called Gutshot.  For the next five years we worked on it, and in due course dragged in my friend Paul Mauer. Together we completed and published a historical miniatures game and released it on Feb. 4, 2005.

Here's the official description from our Website, www.hawgleg.com:

At its most basic level, Gutshot is a game where you put toy buildings on a table and move around little metal cowboys, pretending they are shooting at each other. It's a lot like playing "Cowboys and Indians" when you were a kid. Except now, of course, there are rules to govern how far figures move, how fast, what kind of guns they have, different kinds of horses, and all sortsa fun stuff like that. Rules are good. After all, it'd be pretty embarrassing if someone walked in on a group of grown men and women who were pointing their fingers at each other shouting, “Bang bang, you're dead!” “Am not!” “Are too!” The rules in this book will spare you from that fate, and open up for you a whole new world of Miniature Wargaming.

In more advanced (and fun!) terms, Gutshot is a fast-paced, easy-to-learn game that has you slappin' leather and blowin' away the bad guys in a matter of minutes. Using 25mm miniatures and some dice, this game is a simple system for running one-on-one and small-scale combat set in the American Wild West. By one-on-one, we mean that each miniature represents one person. There are no armies or mass combat here - everything stays up-close and personal.

I'm still not sure what Gutshot is, exactly...

Even after explaining the game to people, I'm still sometimes met by blank stares, or by people who ask if it's a computer game. At that point I have to explain that Gutshot is a book that has the rules. In addition to the book you will need paper, pencils, dice, miniatures and buildings/terrain. Most of this stuff you can buy almost anywhere, and the buildings and miniatures are readily available online (and we even sell some of them ourselves).

The book retails for $25 in our online store or you can buy it from one of the many stores that carry it. We also have a lot of free material online: Character Sheets, Horse Record Sheets, Game Marshal & Player Handouts, injury tokens and more: http://www.hawgleg.com/downloads.asp.

Right now we are also running a contest for our readers/players to submit ideas for adventures for use with our game. We had about 50 submissions and we published 12 of them online as free PDF downloads. If you're interested in learning more about Gutshot, these would be a great place to start as they really demonstrate how our game is played (objectives, Characters, maps, etc.). Plus, if you vote in our online contest to help select the second-place winner, you could be eligible to win a prize.

Oh, and as for that aforementioned award... In 2006 Gutshot was won the Origins Award for "Historical Miniatures Game of the Year." This is the longest-running industry award and the most prestigious. In short, it's the Oscar of the gaming world. Murphy and I were very fortunate to be able to actually be at the Origins Convention in Columbus, Ohio to accept our win. It was the highlight of my gaming career.

So... that's what else I do
Gutshot takes a lot of my time, as does trying to promote it and develop new projects. It's also the reason I only blog here three times a week. Tuesdays and Thursdays are dedicated to working on the Hawgleg Blog. I hope that interests you enough to mosey on over to the Hawgleg site and poke around a bit. There's a lot of fun stuff there.

See ya in two days for the latest installment of Netflix Fridays!

D&D: I wonder... do I have any great adventures left before me?

The cat was raising a ruckus in the other room down the hall, so I went in to investigate. Miss Kitka was up to an unusual shenanigan (at least for her) and was knocking over a stack of DVDs, which had fallen on her water dish, which had splashed the side of a box full of magazines.

It was one of those white boxes you get at comic shops in which to store oversize comics and magazines. Naturally, I opened it to make sure it wasn't wet enough to seep through and damage anything inside the box. This particular box was a mishmash of things: Comics, gaming magazines, graphic novels, old MAD Magazines, Doctor Who Magazines, etc. And a few oddities, including some of my old game journals, nestled right up against my copy of Snarf Quest.

I'm a prolific note taker when it comes to gaming. Back in the day, I was lucky enough to play in campaigns that ran for years. Every Saturday, like clockwork, I'd be over at Murphy's house or at his barracks in the day room, slinging dice and slaying monsters.

Those were some of the heydays of my gaming life. I was working, married, then returned to school, and was having a blast. Then I looked at the date and realized that those adventures were from 1994!  That was 16 years ago!

Wow. The time has flown. Yes, I've gamed since those days... and had some great times (both with Gutshot and with other games). But I don't wax nostalgic for them. When I think of my other games, I remember the friends and a few exciting highlights (perhaps that's because I was GMing in those later games, not running a character).  Whatever the reason, when I look through these old notes and mementos, I feel like an old adventurer -- who has long since settled down -- and is going through one of his old trunks only to find a haversack with some of his old gear, tucked away... mostly forgotten.

Most of it came rushing back when I read the pages: The epic details of the haunted island, our role in the war to the south, but it was the little things that I recall best: (the cold camps, the bandits we fought on the road and executed,the widow whose solider son had come back from the war and we used our healing gifts to save his life in exchange for a warm barn to sleep in, and the nightmare when we washed up on the shore of that haunted island, only to realize that one of my bottles of whiskey didn't make it). It's all there, like a forgotten life. Parts of it were crystal clear (Lena, Airth and Rikus), but for the life of me, It took me a moment to remember who Dargon was. It came back to me, but it took longer than it should have.

Maybe it's the beer that's made me a little wistful tonight, but this journey down the pathless trail of my past heroic adventures in the worlds of Dungeons & Dragons made me wonder, do I have any great adventures left before me? Will I ever again sit at a table, dice in hand, ready to go in search of the unknown? Are there any giants left to kill, or ghosts to quiet? Or have do my best days of gaming lie behind me now?

And what about you, fellow dice slingers? Are there any dragons left in your future, or are you like me, a tired ex-adventurer sitting on a backside that's broader than it used to be, sipping a brew and thinking of his gaming glory days?