MartinRalya.com has been online since 2009, and has included a blog since 2012. Over the years, the focus has shifted back and forth between blog posts and static pages. When I last overhauled the site, in 2020, the focus was solidly on blog posts. A single-column layout with a discreet hamburger menu made sense, since […]
New year, new look Read More »
I wrote my last #dungeon23 room today! I have no idea what I’ll do with the Black Furnace next, if anything, but I’m proud to have finished it. This is only my second or third dungeon ever, and by far the largest I’ve ever created. It’s a rough draft, but everything starts out as a
My Black Furnace #dungeon23 project is done! Read More »
I haven’t written about the end of the world in Godsbarrow, but the entire setting — everything I’ve ever created for it that doesn’t live here, on Yore — nearly vanished today. I woke up to a corrupted hard drive, which Windows helpfully automatically recovered for me…but without hundreds of gigs of files, including my
Godsbarrow apocalypse narrowly averted Read More »
Driving home from running a DCC RPG session, I was noodling about why I love dungeon crawls so much. My usual line of thinking is that I love dungeons because they’re basically sandboxes, and I love sandboxes. With a dungeon, we agree on the boundaries of the sandbox, we discover toys therein, and we play
A dungeon is like a pinball machine Read More »
I’m coming up on a movie milestone: Given that A) it’s spooky season, B) my default cinematic comfort food is MST3K, and C) I’m working on some anime-watching challenges, my money’s on my 3,000th film being from one of those three buckets. It’s also a coin flip whether I blow past it by accident, or
What will be number 3,000? Read More »
YouTuber DM Tales did a lovely highlight feature on my first Godsbarrow book, The Unlucky Isles [affiliate link], on his channel in Skipping Lunch Episode 8. The segment starts at 8:00. (I sent DM Tales a review copy.) This is the first time anyone has covered The Unlucky Isles in a video, and it was
DM Tales highlights The Unlucky Isles Read More »
After trying to play my first 10th Edition 40k game out of my phone, which was handy about 1/3 of the time and a pain in the ass the other 2/3 of the time, I put some time into prepping for my second game. I thought about coil-binding the core rules, but didn’t feel like
Warhammer 40k 10th Edition USRs in readable font size, and my binder Read More »
Here’s a little old/new paint job comparison. It’s not night and day, but I can see the benefit of experience! From left to right, the Infiltrators are July 2023, May 2020, July 2023; Chaplains are July 2020, July 2023. The biggest changes are attempting proper edge highlighting, pin washes rather than all-over washes on armor,
Hobby philosophy: old and new paint jobs Read More »
I committed to learning to pin wash when I started painting BattleTech minis again, and since my first outing I’ve added it to my toolkit. That also means it’s time for an updated Blood Angels color guide, since pin washing is a big part of my Space Marine painting process now. The pin wash on
New baseline Blood Angels color guide Read More »
“I’ll get to play with these” has been a powerful motivator since I got rolling in 2020, and I’ve always speculated that “I played and I like/didn’t like X, I need to paint some Y for my next game” would be similarly powerful. Kill Team has produced that cycle for me, except instead of X
The paint-play-paint motivation cycle (and a Chaplain color guide) Read More »
