More Buildings Moved to the Complete Column

It's summertime.  No soccer coaching.  No homework.  No marathon training.  This is supposed to be the busy time for catching up on a year's worth of miniature wargame stuff.  And yet, thanks to a big move and work and other boring real world stuff, progress has slowed to a standard holiday season crawl.  BUT!  Progress continues...

Just a couple more to go...

Update on Painting the Town

Work on the home front and my home on the work front finally slacked off enough to let me paint up two more buildings for the Pocketmunda terrain board.  When done, this board should work just find for the scenarios included in the Tomorrow's War main rulebook as well.

Bright, clean, pulpy buildings.  Hopefully I can even use these is a Pulp Ally/Fantastic Worlds/.45 Adventure game someday, too.

Bio-Haz Warriors

Today we have just another, "Look what I painted," post.  This time around in Khurasan's Troopers in Hazmat suits.  This brings my yellow suited warriors up to nineteen, although the one on the far left is unarmed. 



Here's a comparison shot of the Khurasan troops (inside) next to Rebel Miniature's zombie hunters (outside).  Rebel's troops have a bit more armor and gas masks, but the two go together quite well.  The different face masks give more variety to otherwise faceless troops.

Tomorrow we'll have some more urban scatter terrain from the same manufacturer.

Three Bridges

Put some color on three bridges for Notromunda this week, and they sure are bright.  Starting to worry that my pulp sci-fi urban terrain might wind up being downright garish. I think that the red pearl stickers help bring these together, even if the primary colors I'm using clash at times.   Here they are in isolation, but really, I'm probably going to break out the full table and see how things look when put together so far.  And if it ain't working, then I've still got seven buildings left to paint, so there's time to salvage the table if it winds up too four color comic book.

Long and thin and exposed.

Shorter, fatter, and no exposure.

Longest, thinnest, and plenty of cover and plenty of sniper hideouts.

Rooftop Scatter

Before we get to today's scatter terrain, let's review, shall we?  Your humble editor has been whiny about how 'dark' his tabletop looks.  For once, he decided to run a test paint job before getting too deep into painting the small city's worth.  Here's how that worked out:

Still needs some color, but it's clean and bright.  With that out of the way, let's look at an experiment in rooftop scatter terrain.  Rooftop scatter is important when you've got rules that encourage the use of cover AND the use of the third dimension in the form of lots of ladders and bridges.

Ordinarily, you can just glue rooftop cover (A.C. units, chimneys, and whatnot) to the roof, but this stuff is getting nested, packed, and stacked, so it's imperative that the stuff on the roof can be removed.  Enter the chimneys:

Those are plastic...not sure what they are called.  They are knobs that you can buy to replace the spinner knobs that you turn to turn on the lights.  They run about 40 to 50 cents each, but they provide decent cover for your figures, and all you have to do is prime them black and dust them with silver paint.

These have been attached these to washers, again, for added stability.  The gray painted washers just look like some sort of flange, so it's all good.  Probably going to need more than four of them, but they are cheap and easy enough to make in those lulls between shipment of figures.

Barrels - The Quintessential Scatter Terrain

It just wouldn't be a miniature wargame without a few barrels on the table.  Check that one off the list:

Nothing too novel here.  Those are all electronic doo-hickeys ripped out of an old and irritating childrens' electronic piano.  They are glued to a base for added weight and stability, then painted up largely as is.  The one little box there breaks up the monotony a bit.  White barrels with colored logos helps brighten up the table and keep it at least moderately pulpy.

Brightening Up the Place

Getting out of the GW all-dark-and-gothy-look is proving harder than anticipated.  I'm just so used a dark palette that my work keeps ending up not nearly as bright as anticipated.  There is one way to brighten up the table though - lights.  These look like streetlights, don't they.  I found them as wooden pegs for some furniture use or other, but they looked like some of the street lights used in the streets around these parts.

They are mounted on washers for weight and stability.  Otherwise, all I did was paint them.  These represent the first of the new phase of work on the project - lots and lots of scatter terrain.  Guess what's on the table for tomorrow...

Most Boring Gang Yet

Rebel Mini's BioHazard Zombie Hunters are great sculpts with a lot of potential, and at $6.50 for a full 12-man gang, too hard a temptation to resist.  As it stands, this pack gives me a shooter force in body suits armed with only a couple of pistols (can you say "House Van Saar" boys and girls?  I knew you could).  No leaders or heavies, but that's okay - that's what Khurasan's Hazmat Suited figures are for.  Once I score those babies we're looking at less than twelve bucks for a full 17-man gang.

Man, it would have been nice to go crazy and paint those suits in multi-colored flames or something way outside the ordinary, but you never know what the future brings.  Boilerplate yellow leaves the door open for future modern day anti-zombie games.  The only nod to personality made is the colored hoods.  It may be boring, but it's functional, and sometimes that's worth the sacrifice.

Lock Up Your Sons

Meet the Electric Knights, my daughter's Not-romunda "gang".  She picked the colors, the font for the bases, and named them all.

While trimming the old leader's pistol down, things went south, and I had to make a new one.  So I pressed a Laserburn crew member with a law officer head into service.  Until I find a decent rifle to replace it, unlucky 13 there is unarmed and useless.

Leader on the left, heavy on the right.

Khurusan's Grave Monitor Crew.

Rebel Mini's MERCs.

As the campaign stand, the Knight's leader is being held captive by the Mangalorcs, and the heavy (#2, Boom-Boom Betty) has stepped up to lead until these lovely ladies can mount a rescue mission.

Goldilocks and the Three Scales

A funny thing happened while teaching my kids how to play Necromunda in 15mm.  We played two different games, one in the big rocket using the standard movement and ranges in inches, and one in the urban terrain converting all measurements to centimeters.

We test drove this WIP terrain - not a fan of playing
on unfinished terrain, but sometimes you takes
what youse can gets.

Oddly enough, the inches worked fine in the rocket ship, and centimeters didn't work in the urban terrain.  Obviously, converting to centimeters essentially 'grows' your terrain, and the rocket is meant to be a small, confined space.  As it turns out, using centimeters wouldn't work in the rocket, because you'd spend two or three turns just crossing one room.  When you use inches, the confined space favors the pistol packers and the melee specialists at the expense of the long range shooters - as it should be.

On the other hand, we didn't much care for the use of centimeters in the wide open city.  It made the city feel  way too big.  It took too long to get anywhere, and moving your little doods a whopping 8-cm per turn running?  It didn't feel like you were accomplishing anything.  Instead, we scaled the game down by cutting the ranges and movement in half.  And that scale was juuuust right.

Turns out scaling down by 50% instead of 60% makes a big difference in the feel of the game.  Who knew? At any rate we're going to stick with halving all ranges...

Sort of.

There's one aspect of the game we're going to leave as-is - templates. 

Hand-painted and way cooler than the black
and whites in the rulebook.

Here's where things get interesting.  I honestly don't know how close to the RAW these templates get.  I just printed up the page from the rulebook onto a 5-inch by 7-inch card and used what the printer spit out.  These could be too big for our half-sized rules, and are certainly too small for our full-scale fights, but we don't care.  They are too big or too small for everyone, and that's how we balance things out.

Working on The Ladies

My 12 year old daughter decided she wanted in on a little bit of the Not-Romunda action, and after a bit of shopping she settled on an all girl force composed mainly of Rebel Miniatures Black Widow Mercs and Khurasan's Gunboat Marines with a sprinkling of Laserburn adventurers.  That keeps us well away from the bondage-slash-S&M look of Necromunda, which my daughter doesn't even know that she's not allowed to like.

The challenge is adding a little more personality to these figures.  The MERCS are all packing pistols and the Grav Monitor crew carry future-tech-rifles.  The good news is that these two packs give us a variety of rifle armed and pistol armed ladies, all of whom wear body suits.  The challenge is that this leaves us with 12 figures carrying 2 different kinds of weapson.  Bo-ring!

 

This looks like a job for conversions!  Not an easy task in 15mm, but not in surmountable.  In many ways, the smaller scale makes converting easier because it limits what you can achieve, it lowers expectations, and it lets you focus more on big picture stuff without all the fiddly details.  The figures are so small the big picture items are fiddly details.  So far I've just done simple head and weapon swaps, but those two alone give you a wealth of options.  Here are three of them:

That's a MERC with an axe cut from a 10mm Pendraken gnome adventurer. Once I trim the pistol down and round it off, it'll look less like an axe-gun and more like a proper power-axe.  [Editors note:  After one game, I tried to do just that, and it failed miserably.  The figure looked terrible so I had to start over with a new figure.  I'll post an update later.]

The gal on the left is a Laserburn heroine with the head of a Laserburn Law Officer.  Her pistol was trimmed off and the front replaced with the rifle and grenade launcher donated by one of GZG's new Tomorrow's War figures.  That's two figures from five lines of figures from four different companies - now that's what I call bashing some kits.

These two figures started out as identical twins. Ms. Lefty had her arm bent back and a small piece of plastic trimmed down to a vague sword shape attached.  To add even more variety, I twisted Ms. Righty's head a little to her left.  Ten minutes of work, and now I've got two unique figures.

The Big One

That building is crazy big...

 But it has to be in order to hold the bridges safe and sound...

Both of them, for now...

Solutions Everywhere

Retro-future-cities should look something like this:

My buildings are too boxy for that.  A complete overhaul would blow the ability to pack it all into one tidy box right out of the aetherium.  What to do, what to do?  We're gonna need the right paint scheme and some baubles on those buildings to retro-fy them. There's a great example of the sort of styling that I'm looking for over at Lead Doesn't Bleed (take a look).  All those spires and pointy bits will prevent this terrain from packing into its box, but we can still mimic the overall aesthetic with the right baubles and paints.

 

We can also use architectural features like bridges to add flavor.

Like so.

That's a nice sweeping bridge with plenty of potential for some 1950's style sci-fi crystals or some such.  This bridge also includes a clever solution to the stability problem.  Here's a close-up:

Pegs and flats make a snug 90-degree fit against the tops of the buildings.  They also give more detail to paint and liven up the bridge.

That gentle arch is delicate, too.  You won't see a bright swoopy bridge like that in the Underhive, amirite?  There's only one problem:

I didn't check the bridge size to verify that it would fit in the cookie tin designed to protect it.  We're gonna need a bigger tin.  That's actually not a problem, though, because in retrospect that tin wastes a lot of room.  We can build a box that will hold the bridge, and one that will double as another building.  Woot!  Look at all these solutions, they're everywhere!

Next up, uhhh...I better get cracking.

Shoots and Ladders

Before we get to the ladders, we're going to let the suspense simmer for just a few more minutes to look at another little trick.  In addition to the ladders, this terrain has three staircases.  They are made from art matting board and use the "figure base sized stair treads" convention we wargamers have seen a dozen times before.  

So what's new here?  What's new is that your humble blogger took his head out of his butt long enough during construction to look ahead by 20 minutes.  Specifically, he made sure that the new stairs would be small enough that the small buildings would fit into the larger ones for storage, like so.

In your face, lack of foresight!

Not only that, but I paid attention to the ladders as well.  This stuff is modular, right?  And that means you want it to look good however you stack it, and that means no ladders that start in mid-air.  So I made sure that the ladders could line up in a lot of different ways, too, like this.

Or this.

And that last one is double slick because not only does the ladder goes all the way to the top, but the stairs don't drop off into space.  You can set these things up in a whole mess of different  ways.

Now if only I could figure out how to build bridges that fit on both types of rootops - with and without balconies.

Next up, bridges!

Strategery, Blog Style

Here's the thing.  I'm working on a new urban terrain board at the moment, and for the most part using standard construction and detailing techniques.  Rather than repeat what others have said numerous times, I'm just gonna chime in and point out new little wrinkles on the old stand bys.

For example, here's a shot of the cereal box details that will make mache boxes from the craft store look like actual homes and buildings.  Nothing spectacular here, except for the black circles - those are the covers to ear-plug style headphones.  They should make decent vent covers.

Hey look, they are glued to the walls now.  What's new here is the use of stitch fabric (aka "granny grating") for ladders.  These look so much better than the zip ties used in the rocket, and were a lot easier to attach.  The position of those ladders is a whole blog post in itself (watch this space).

One thing that I'm struggling with here is how to make this terrain really unique.  The world has enough spiky-skulls-and-industrial-decay terrain, and we've all seen a number of different desert colonies or martian terrain.  These look boxy right now, and pretty typical.  I've been googling sci-fi pulp novel covers for a while, looking for a way to pulp these up.  I figure they'll be concrete or white with some bright colors and trim, but haven't decided on a final color scheme yet.

Here's some ground scatter cover counters with drums made from bits yanked out of an old electronic keyboard.  This isn't a new trick, so this is the sort of thing I'll avoid for cool stuff, like the ladders, coming tomorrow...

Next up, ladders... (surprise!)

Pocketmunda - The Adventure Begins

Pocketmunda is a side project for those times when work on the big spaceship is on hold for one reason or another.  A small table of urban terrain in the Necromunda style for 15mm gang fights.  As an easy kickstart to the terrain build, I picked up ten paper mache boxes from the local craft store for about two bucks each. The lids of the smaller boxes can be flipped over to serve as guard rails.  Probably won't use the lids on the bigger boxes. 

The beauty of these little numbers is that they nest inside each other like so:

Which leaves plenty of room for dice, a ground cover cloth, CDs covered with soft cover terrain and difficult ground, and whatever odds and ends crop up during the course of construction.

Still wrestling with the overall look of this terrain.  I know it won't be the classic Necromunda decayed gothic and skull look.  Since my figures will all be proxies, the terrain can be whatever makes sense - or doesn't make sense but looks pretty cool.  I'm flirting with the idea of replicating a giant cargo bay...some clever blogger put together a slick table with that theme.  

Maybe a lost and buried and recently un-buried desert city on a sparsely inhabited alien planet.  That way you could keep the clean lines and softer palette, and still justify fights in uninhabited areas with lost archaeotech and what not.  It would also serve double duty if I ever decided to build up a PocketGorkaMorka game, too.  The mind boggles at the possibilities.