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.

Power Core and Life Support

The lowest level of the big ship now holds the central power core for the craft.  You are looking at (from bottom up) the cap of a gallon of milk, three dowels used to secure wood furniture (think Ikea pegs) between a couple of wooden disks, the cap of a tube of superglue, and a bit of automatic pencil.  The plastic sheath around the three rods was clipped out of the packaging for an iPad cover.  I have no idea where that black bit of pipe came from; it was floating around my bits-box.

Also installed tonight was the small copse of trees featured previously, along with a single palm tree yoinked from my son's toy box.  If memory serves, that came in a desert themed Matchbox car toy.  The toy was already colored, but it needed a paint job to match the rest of the trees in the ship.  The plnater base for the palm tree is a 20mm diameter hex-style base for a 28mm wargame figure.

This whole level will wind up as a hydroponics level. What you see is what we've got for now.  As suitable plants crop up (heh), I'll stick them wherever they fit.  Whatever it takes to shut Bruce Dern up, you know?

Game On!

The game isn't on for me yet, but it's getting closer all the time.  The game is on for my little mans, because the game room is officially open.

Anyone up for foosball?

Maybe some ping-pong?

And on the table in back you can see a couple of magazines.  Oh, and somebody left out the X-Box controller again.

Most of this stuff is painted on, but the controller is a half a grain of rice glued down to the table.  That table is constructed of two legos - everything else is built from cardstock, balsa wood, and a bit of copper wire for the foosball bars.

Are We Learning Yet?

This blog was supposed to keep me grounded.  It's called War In A Box for a reason - that's supposed to remind me that I've got no space and that every game needs to fit into a tidy little box.  The spaceship I've been working on is super-kewl, but it is a clear violation of my own ground rules.  In an effort to get back to basics, I picked up a small tub for the express purpose of designing a Pocketmunda set-up - a full table of 15mm terrain (by which I mean a 2-foot by 2-foot square of terrain - that would fit into a small and portable case.

One exactly like this.  Note figure for 15mm scale.

Bear in mind that work on the big ship continues.  With a bit of free time and a need for better lighting to work on additional furniture (which looks great, but will wait for the final paint job before posting), I bashed together a few buildings for Pocketmunda.

Old almond tins, Christmas styrofoam, and various bits and bobs.

The plan was to fit everything onto old CDs for ease of basing and storage.  For once, I stopped progress early to check on the fit.  The results were...

Less than stellar.

That's only four buildings so far.  You can't fit more CDs in a second row, and there's not going to be enough room for a drop cloth.  That's unacceptable.  Looks like I'll have to go with square buildings that nest inside each other in order to get enough buildings to satisfy that urban-decay look.

So that didn't work, but let's not lose sight of the important bit - this time, it didn't work after 30 minutes of work, instead of after 30 hours of work.  That saves me mor ethen 29 hours of labor, and it saves my face from another epic palm slap.

Break On Through

Finally.  The Doors.  You may have noticed that half the doors on the spaceship are really, really tall.  Like this:

There's a reason for that.  I wanted doors that open and close.  This week I built the doors that slide up and down.  Here's a look at the finished product:

The doors go down.

The doors go up.

These are bog standard pocket doors.  They stay open on their own because the fit is so tight.  At the end of the day they wound up a little short, but not enough to make the thing unplayable.  We can half-ass up an in-genre explanation (they are blast door or some such nonsense), but that isn't really necessary.  They look fine as is.

Merry After Christmas-Sale Day!

Happy Boxing Day!  In honor of whatever is those kooky Canucks celebrate today, let's all point at Warren and laugh at how he still hasn't learned his lesson.  Remember way back earlier in the year when I spent hours building roads for Car Wars and when they done it turned out they were the wrong scale?  Yeah...welcome to the second verse of that song.

We're gonna need a bigger box.

Whoops.  Finally checked the height of the starship against the tub that it was supposed to be stored in and it ain't even close.  Even if I take off the decorative spire, it still won't fit.  Le sigh.  Oh well, a bigger box will leave more room left over for a second ship, right?

Starship Crew, Part 2

More starship crew members today.  Ran out of heads so the twins on the left have to stay that way.  The guy with the big gun...that started life as a GW pistol in a holster.  The guy in the trenchcoat is the only one not from the 'Law Officers' range - he was an adventurer.

While painting these guys up, I realized that they are armed mainly with pistols and close-combat weapons.  The whole unit has one heavy, three rifles, and the rest pistols.  That should help maintain a unique flavor for these guys.  In the confines of a ship, the pistols may work better than rifles - we'll see how it plays out.

Merry Christmas - have a great night and a fun tomorrow!