Of walls and magnets

 So it is going pretty slowly to getting the walls put together and those tiny magnets in place. I do have a technique finally that helped: once I got one of the wall pieces set up correctly (and basically there are north and south pole orientations, so one edge of the wall has north, and the other south). As one edge of the wall is a column, and the other not, you have to make sure the non-column edges are opposite of the column edge magnets. Let us just say I've had to take apart more than one wall to re-orient the magnets!

My current technique is to have my base and correctly aligned magnets in a wall, then attach a column of magnets to the wall. This lets me know which side needs to be facing out on the opposite wall edge. Having a column of about 10-15 magnets means I don't drop these tiny 5x3mm magnets, and allows me to slide in the top one into the hole and bend off the rest. Yes, wargamers with a history of using magnets probably already know this. But it does seem to be working. Then I sand down the edges where I've clipped them off the sprues. Eventually these will get painted, just not sure how I am going to do this. Probably a base coat of red for the Cobalt Factory walls, and I may just paint the stone base and details on the Kazumi Temple as the yellow they came in looks a lot like sandstone.

Regardless of my trials, I have enough of the temple walls to make the big room we last left our valiant characters in, and with the two doors in about the right place as well. I think this does help set the scene a bit better, though I'll have to finish up some more full walls:

I've also been reading dome reviews on published adventures, and think I'll follow up with some of those suggestions. Essentially have some of the descriptive paragraphs with bolded descriptions for the immediate feel of the room, maybe the 1st one or two sentences. And I have started connecting some of the rooms with recurring themes and small puzzles that may help them in other rooms. Not that I am planning on publishing this, though down the road that may be something I pursue. I always did want to be a writer, after all. It just may take a few more decades than I thought.

And Happy post-Christmas everyone. I got carried away with family stuff, so that is a good thing! I hope everyone has had a great celebration no matter what you are actually celebrating (if all else, hopefully a day or two off work!) We had a white Christmas which was nice. Though the storm came up fast and iced up the roads in an amazingly short time period - there were cars abandoned all over as they had no traction. It was like a post-apocalyptic scene in some ways!

I also followed up on what I had as a child: sticky rolls for breakfast. Homemade yeast sticky rolls that I ate far too many of, but growing up, my mother made these and we had to wait for them to be ready before we could open presents. Oddly enough, my son will just sleep in and we finally had to wake him up!

Not that you could make these on the trail for our adventuring group, but a bakery in a town or inn may have so really nice sweet rolls! Maybe I'll add sweet rolls to some inn or something along the way - nothing like waking up to the small of homemade bread!