About Me

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My name is Gavin McClements. I am a wargamer and family man, living in Los Gatos, which is a suburb of San Jose, CA. Building terrain is one of my favorite aspects of the wargaming hobby - in fact, lately I've become more interested in making my battlefields "pop" than in actually playing.

Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Im alive...promise!

I have been out of the loop for two months now, so I wanted to put the proverbial pencil to paper and remind myself what's been going on recently.

I manage a motel in an amazing town, and the property has never done justice to the setting in which it sits. All that is changing now, however, as the owners have finally begun a massive renovation that will make it fit in, thankfully.  How does this affect me? I live onsite, and my apartment is slated to become office space, so I will be moving offsite shortly (within a few months, it looks). So I am in this horrible limbo and have been since Christmas, because the house shopping being done could have come to fruition at any time.

Now it looks ready to be settled - a small townhome (more like an apartment) across the street is opening on July 1, and the owners have all but closed on it. Let the packing begin!

This also means that I havent had the craft space to do what I want, and my game room has become a repository for all the household crap that is also in limbo, so just getting the game table and terrain out has been a huge task in and of itself. Thus, no tabletop gaming for the past few months, and maybe not till after the move. Bummer.

I do, however, have some games I am really looking forward to playing, once the move is done. Strike Legion is on the top of my list, as are more games of Epic: Armageddon. 6mm is still my first love. In the 15mm realm, Strike Legion just published Platoon Leader, and I helped edit and playtest it a bit, I received a complimentary copy. Super cool, and I want to get it on the table. Brent over at Bombshell Games, the maker of OP4S, is also working on a new version of a game called The Battlefield and I hope to put some editing work to that as well.

Why havent I done more 15mm? After all, Im pretty sure thats what I opened my blog with!  Well, Tomorrow's War just wasnt what I was wanting, as it didnt have the Army Builder aspect to it, and it fried my brain while playing. Gruntz was fun, but a friend of mine didnt dig it...but now Robin is working on his Army Builder program, so I'll likely give it another shot once that comes out.

I started work on an Excel sheet for building units in KJ's Strike Legion game, but the formulas were complicated enough to give me pause. I found a volunteer to help from the TMP forums, so we'll see if he is able to deliver.

What have I been doing recently? A whole lot of no wargaming, but Ive been idle!

I bought a metric ton of World of Warcraft TCG cards around Christmas (I LOVE CCGs) and have been sorting and cataloging them. Ive played some Battletech, been kicking around with Mechwarrior 4 in anticipation of Mechwarrior Online coming online this summer (I even bought a Logitech G940 Flight System in preparation of this, on crazy sale!), and even have started up Tera Online, my first MMO in years since World of Warcraft. I love MMO's also, but tend to get addicted to them, so Ive eased up over the past few years. Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 on my PS3 has been getting a lot of play time as well.  In short, Ive dabbled in most every medium except miniatures. I even got a big shipment from England of Exodus Wars 6mm stuff, so I can finish my Death Korp of Krieg and start a Harakoni Warhawks army for Epic...but alas, it'll likely wait till after the move to get finished.

Of course that's not all I've done. Ive been in a weekly D&D 3.5 campaign, and I've even begun working on a fantasy setting for my own Champions/HERO game (combining L5R, WoW, and a lot of other fantasy genres into something fun), but am highly annoyed that most of the basic books I need for HERO arent available right now. /frustrated!!

So fear not - more work will be done on this blog coming this summer. I'll get more terrain done, post painting updates on my Krieg list, and try to get some Epic and Strike Legion batreps posted. Hang in there. Im not done yet!!!