New Project: Back to the Roots

With the latest car wars debacle still fresh in mind, it’s time to completely jump genres and scales.  It’s time to get back to my dungeon crawling roots. It’s been a few years since I’ve hosted a dungeon crawl, and this is as good a time as any.  Some thoughts on planning:

What rules?

This ranks as the most important question and the least important question at the same time.  On the one hand, the rules drive the miniatures.  On the other hand, there are a lot of rules out there, and they all operate from the same basic perspective with respect to the physical aspect of the game.  Every rule set worth its salt uses a square grid, so until we’re ready to really start rolling dice…we don’t need to answer this question just yet.  We will later, but not today.



A selection of Pendraken hero types in 10mm. 



What scale?

The big 25mm to 28mm miniatures are widely available and in a huge variety of styles, but they are so darn big.  You can only fit a few hundred in the box that I’ve got, and that’s assuming flat terrain tiles.  Which are boring.  They are also really expensive, on the order of $3 to $10 each, and they take an hour or more to paint.  Each.  Without the time, space, or money these are flat out wrong for me.



There are a lot of nice figures out there in the 15mm range, but most of those are sold in lots of 40-50 figures, the better to build an army.  You get a lot of personality, but wind up with a lot of unused lead in the bargain.  So that’s out, too.

Considering the three critical variables, there is really only one scale that will work for my dungeon crafting purposes, and that’s the not-quite-too-small-10mm range.  They are cheap – less than fifty cents a figure, and you can buy them in small enough lots for dungeon delving.  As if that’s not enough, Pendraken make a line of dungeon furniture in 10mm, too.  And if you don't think figures at this scale have enough personality, you haven't seen what Copplestone Castings can do:

Copplestone Casting's brilliant hero pack in 10mm.

What figs?

Here’s a question to which there is no final answer.  I can tell you this, though: I was able to pick up almost 20 heroes,  30 orcs, 16 ratmen, 3 bases of rats, a couple of food tables, a sewer beast, fire, pack animals, and a crate of food for less than 25 bucks.  That’s not a bad start.  For the record, I ordered one pack of heros and one pack of bad guys from each of Copplestone Castings and Pendraken Miniatures.  They'll be shipped out from the UK which gives me plenty of time to get started on a dungeon for them to guard and loot.

What dungeon?

That's the fun of this whole project.  I'm looking at all the various and sundry ways of building a 10mm dungeon from print your own to pre-cast walls and floors, and none of them look like as much fun as scratchbuilding my own.  At this point I'm still browsing the craft stores and kitchen drawers to see what looks cheap and effective.  At any rate, that's what you can expect from this blog over the next few months.

Kid's Stuff Redux

It's a travel week for me, and that means no update on my late, lamented project.  Time to cut my losses and move on from the car wars highway.  While I figure out what to do next, here's a quick shot of my son's latest acquisition:

Warhammer 40K Cadian Imperial Guard Command Squad

Personally, not a big fan of the Warhammer rulesets.  The one positive, that you can always find an opponent, is offset by just too many weaknesses in the overall system.  Gotta give the GW boys credit, though.  They know how to craft figures with a lot of personality.

Incidentally, there may be a use for my much too large to fit in a box urban terrain after all.  The locals have a semi-monthly-ish wargaming swap meet slash local trade message board.  It didn't sell on ebay, but might be worth some 40K loot for somebody locally.  If it can score me some Impies for the boy he might just start to show me a little respect.

Leaping Lizards!

This post is the big reveal post.  Here's where we see exactly what the highway of death will look on the table, complete in all its miniature wargaming splendor.  Cars, terrain, the whole shebang.  This is the culmination of weeks of effort.  It's gonna be so satisfying.  It's gonna be great!  It's gonna be...

In the wrong scale.

These car lanes are half as big as they should be.  Way back at the start of this project, I decided to stick with the Division 5 cars.  The problem is that Division 5 cars are rated subcompact, and the 1" wide bases are too small to hold a m1:64 scale How Wheels or Matchbox car.  So I upsized the scale by fifty percent to make it work.  When I started the highways I used the old 1" = 1 lane rule.  

Like an idiot I didn't check the terrain against a reference figure.  I just plowed ahead with base measurements.  When your miniatures don't meet the terrain until two months into the project, you know what you get?  A lot of useless terrain.

The trees and billboards can be salvaged, but the boards themselves?  All that time and effort and paint and static grass (which ain't cheap)?  Wasted.

Maybe I can pawn them off on some sucker at a swap meet.  Anybody know any suckers?

Still In A Box

The addition of 8-square feet of highway terrain requires an upgrade in the box department.  They won't fit in this one:

So we have to move up to one of these.:

The trees and billboards and smoke fit into the metal can in the left. We now have room for even more local kine terrain, too.  Like a shave ice stand or a surf shack or plate lunch wagon.

This time for reals, yo.  Tomorrow we'll totes see what the cars look like wit the new terrain.

Eight Feet of Duelling Ground

Finished!  Using the wrong kind of dip meant this project took twice as long as it should have.  But now, at long last, here's a full eight feet of Hawai'ian roadway just waiting for some auto-duelling mayhem.  Look upon my works ye mighty wargamers and despair:

It's still a bit glossy - I couldn't wait for the dullcoat to dry before showing it off.  Tomorrow I'll put the cars and terrain down on it and see how well it all hangs together.

Quick Update

Quick update for now.  The post-crash Hawaiian highways have some paint back on the ground and some trees based up.  

Nothing fancy.

Not a fan of that greenish plastic for the fronds on the trees, but it'll do for now.

The Grass is Always Greener

That took a lot more static grass than I'd hoped.  Static grass is probably the most expensive part of this terrain, and with all the non-playable surface on these tiles, it took a lot of it.  

Two lane divided highways are possible with this set up,
but only very short ones.  I can only lay two feet of that
much pavement on the table at a time.

Halfway through the landscaping I realized that I did this backwards.  I should have re-painted the stripes in the road before planting the grass.  That stuff sheds off the boards when you don't have a decent varnish coat on top.  And painting the lines is going to mean a lot more handling before the varnish.

Now that's a hair-pinny curve.  "Hair-pinny" is a real world
that I just now made up.

The shoulders look a lot better now, and the random splotches of grass help break up the straight seams between boards.  This might just work out okay after all.

One other mistake hit me while greening up these boards.  The local guys are going to complain that my roads aren't authentic - they don't have nearly enough pot holes in them.  Like parking at college, this is probably a universal complaint, so if you ever make roads and tell people they are the local roads...remember that one.