All posts by Brian Burger

Started this site way, way back in November 1998, when the web was young. It's still here, and so am I.

An Easy Arc Measuring Widget

Infinity has, for most troops, a 180° front arc for Line of Fire and almost all actions. Other games have similar arc requirements – Full Thrust uses six 60° arcs on it’s starships, for example. To help me do the 180° arcs on my Infinity bases, I’ve whipped up a simple little measuring widget in Inkscape.

The two PDFs below (one Letter, one A4) are designed to be printed out to help with marking arcs on the bases of figures; there’s four quadrants for 90° or 180° marks and Full Thrust/hex-side 60° lines as well. The rings are to help centre your bases accurately; they start at 20mm and go up by 5mm then 10mm all the way to 60mm; the rings are 20mm, 25mm, 30mm, 35mm, 40mm, 50mm, and finally 60mm.

Arc Measuring Sheet PDF — Letter

Arc Measuring Sheet PDF — A4

Use should be fairly obvious – centre your bases on the marker, put small marks with a pencil or fine paintbrush at the arcs you need to specify,

Arc Marking Tool - grab this graphic or the PDFs linked to above.
Arc Marking Tool – grab this graphic or the PDFs linked to above.

In Which Things Get Primered

We have an Infinity weekend event coming up in just over a month (Facebook event link, if you’re in the area and interested) and I want to have both all my current buildings basically finished and the Haqqislam/Hassassin Bahram force I field fully painted.

I’ve been concentrating on the buildings for the last week or so, just to get them done and out of the way – they take up a lot more space on my workbench than the figures will!

Here’s the warehouse finally complete and primed, as well as the antenna. I’ve also been working on more graphics for various things, including new ads & signs as well as hazard labels and such.

thing
28mm warehouse for Infinity gaming, six antenna, and the box of LEDs.

Also, the LEDs I ordered off EBay a while back, waiting for me to break out the soldering iron and add lights to the objective room I built recently, which is currently out in the sun room with fresh spray primer on it. More on that soon.

Post-Labour Day Update

Last post was in June, I’m getting really lousy at keeping this poor blog from getting dusty and neglected. It’s been a busy summer for things like bike holidays and being out in the real world, not so much on the gaming front although our Blood Bowl league season is drawing to a close (my poor Rodents of Unusual Size got blown out of the playoffs in the first round) and some good games of Infinity.

On the modelling front, about all I’ve gotten done is a some progress on the various Infinity buildings I’ve started this year. We’ve got an Infinity tournament coming up on October 24th weekend, so I’m pushing to get the current group of buildings done and finished before then, as well as having my entire Haqqislam force painted and finished to field that weekend!

Recently I’ve been pushing on the mosque (shrine?) seen previously here. I’ve put a few of the recent pictures of that building up below! Click on any of them for full size, and enjoy.

Taking The Summer Off?

Apparently I’ve basically taken most of the summer off from blogging and doing wargame-related things I felt the need to blog about… last post was June 10th!

I’ve been playing a lot of Infinity and Blood Bowl, but doing basically no painting or terrain building at all until this weekend, when I’ve finally cleaned up my workbench and gotten a tiny bit of progress on the mosque roof for my Infinity terrain.

Drum dome on mosque roof. Click for larger, as usual.
Drum dome on mosque roof. Click for larger, as usual.

I’ve run with the “bright hexagonal future” jokes about Infinity with the one, and tried to incorporate some Islamic themes as well because I run Haqqislam forces in Infinity. The main footprint is a hexagon, there’s a hexagonal tower as part of the cupola/minaret on the roof, and I’ll probably use some hex-patterned origami paper I bought recently as part of the decoration scheme as it looks a lot like some Islamic tile patterns.

What else have I been up to this summer, anyway? Riding my bike over mountains, for one, and lots of other bike riding and other good warm weather activities!

Antennas for Infinity

A number of the stock scenarios in Infinity need some sort of antenna or console for the troops to interact with/hack/seize/blow up/etc. You can use basic tokens on the tabletop, but real scenery looks better!

Antenna and consoles in Inf are supposed to be on a 40mm base, so I had a go at cutting 40mm circles with my circle cutter. The stubby blade won’t go all the way through the mattboard I build with, though, so I wound up basically scoring circles and then finishing them as carefully as possible with a new Xacto blade. It’s not an ideal way to cut circles, and for larger and more visible ones like a round roof I’ve started since building these antennas I’ve gone with multiple layers of light card, which the circle cutter handles very nicely, and glued them together in layers.

in-ant
Six antennas for Infinity on 40mm bases. Each is roughly 4″ high. Click for larger.

The antenna themselves are more mattboard, generally offcuts from other recent projects. No particular design ethic to these, beyond “angular and futuristic”, which is easy to achieve.

Even for scenarios that don’t require antenna on the table these are likely to put in an appearance as general futuristic clutter, which is always in high demand on an Infinity tabletop!

Billboard Ads for Infinity

While building another piece of scenery for our Infinity tables I built a roof that didn’t turn out; it just wasn’t working out physically the way I’d pictured it in my head. Turning the partially completed piece on one edge, though, I realized that what I’d created would work quite well as a display board for two big billboards – presumably video or holographic displays, this being a bright hexagonal future!

Here’s the basic structure, front and back views.

bb front
Front of the billboard. The whole thing is 6″ tall and 4″ wide.
bb back
Rear of the billboard. There’s enough space to balance a figure on the very top, if you’re so inclined…

To get something colourful on the two displays, I fired up GIMP and then went looking through Flickr and Google Image Search for source materials. It’s easy to just rip things off when you see them around the web, and far too many people do that. Both Flickr and GIS allow you to search for images that people have specifically licensed to allow free reuse of, though, and generally you have to pass on your graphics made using their images as sources – what is known as a Creative Commons Share-Alike license.

Haqqislam billboard - Kufic Arabic for Bismallah (God Bless) and various hexes, because Infinity...
Haqqislam billboard – Kufic Arabic for Bismallah (God Bless) and various hexes, because Infinity…
Tyrell Corp - one of everyone's favourite (evil) megacorps!
Tyrell Corp – one of everyone’s favourite evil megacorps!

For the full size, high quality, and uncompressed images, please use these two links:
Arabic billboard – 2.7Mb
Tyrell Corp billboard – 2.7Mb

Creative Commons License
These works by Brian Burger/Wirelizard Design are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Basically, this means that you can use these images as you see fit on the web or printed for use, including commercial use, but if you modify them further you have to share your version too.

Creative Commons sources:
Neon on Ferrari
Chevy grille
star twist origami
Blade Runner screenshot
Tyrell Corp logo

I didn’t wind up using either of these two (yet!) but they’re too cool not to share: 2nd Life cyber-art, and another by the same artist.

Necromancer Beer – a Blood Bowl Sideline Ad

Something quick and silly to break the month-long dry spell in posting!

On our local Blood Bowl league’s Facebook page one of the guys made a joke about “Necromancer Beer – one taste will revive you” and while I was waiting for dinner to finish I fired Inkscape up and cranked out the following bit of fluff.

Necromancer Beer - one taste will revive you! Feel free to print this for personal use!
Necromancer Beer – one taste will revive you! Feel free to print this for personal use!

This is the same height as a number of other BB sideline ads already floating around the internet, so should mix nicely with them.

Enjoy, and if you do use this, please send me photos of your pitchside scenery with the Necromancer Beer banner on it!

Sci-Fi Warehouse for Infinity

After building the first building to use on Infinity tables, which turned out to be a complex shape and two storeys plus roof, I decided the next building needed to be simpler and quicker to build, but still interesting.

Going through my building supplies I found a sheet of corrugated craft paper that became a feature of the new warehouse, both for the two large rolling doors and on part of the roof. The rest of the building is mattboard/picture framing card, which is cheap, easy to work with, and makes good durable buildings.

The whole warehouse is 9″ long, 5″ wide, and about 6″ to the highest point of the “sail” that divides the roof up.

More details on the picture captions below. There’s still some structural work to do on the back wall and on the roof, and a lot of detailing still to do. Paint will happen eventually, as well.

Links of Interest, 26 April 2015

A few links to get us through the weekend!

I have a moderate font-collecting addiction. Dafont is my go-to source of high quality free fonts, but I’ll pay money for the right font. Remington Typewriter is probably one of the right fonts, and it’s very inexpensive over at DtRPG for four weights, depending on how short of ink you want your typewritten text to look. Great for player handouts, props, or other documents for pulp gaming or anything WW1/WW2/early 20th C!

Dinosaurs are always pulpy, and now Antediluvian Miniatures are doing some models based on the really early concepts of what dinosaurs were thought to look like. No fast, sleek, feathered raptors here, these are big chunky cold-blooded alligator-y critters, and they look great.

Having wandered into playing Infinity a few months back, I’ve started finding and following Infinity-related blogs. Bleached Models has some good stuff, including this really nicely illustrated tutorial on blending and layering colour.

Ending on a Russian Civil War related note, the Russian-language page AviArmour has a page about the Armstrong-Whitworth armoured car with some interesting text (in Russian, but Google Translate will give you the basic idea) and some great period photos of Armstrong-Whitworths in action. Would have been nice to find that page while I was working on my own 28mm A-W from Copplestone a couple of years ago! Lots of interesting information on AviArmour, it’s well worth a browse.

Finally, Trumpeter Salute 2015 Photos!

Realized a few days ago that I hadn’t even taken my photographs from the Trumpeter Salute 2015 wargame show off the camera, never mind looking at them and choosing which ones to publish. This for a show that was at the end of March, three weeks ago and counting!

The whole collection is over on Flickr, as usual. Here’s a couple of highlights.

Whippet Tank vs Zombies

We started off with “Russian Civil War + Zombies” or “The Undead Are The Ultimate Proletariat”, which was fun and silly even if All Things Zombie isn’t my favourite set of rules. I got to blunder around in this great papercraft Whippet tanks, attracting zombies just by leaving the engine idling (thing is LOUD!) and then running them over or machinegunning them. Good fun!

Missiles Away!

Saturday morning and afternoon were both full of Tomcats, MIGs, and other Cold War planes as we ran two sessions of Air War C21, which is a fast, fluid, great set of rules. Tomcats are scary aircraft.

Actual Russian Civil War

Saturday evening I ran my actual Russian Civil War game for four players. I had two signed up as “spares” and had to turn a seventh away, which is always disappointing but it beats having nobody show up for your games! (which I have had happen at GottaCon here in Victoria…) It was a closely fought battle but the Reds succeeded in keeping the Whites out of the village in the end.

Crash and Splash

Sunday at Trumpeter is the long single session, so we get the “big” games out. I participated in the gloriously goofy Lego junkyard race game, with half of the other players under 14. The red-and-yellow pointy looking vehicle at the very back of the photo above is my racing machine. Good fun, I can’t even recall who won, to be honest!

Somewhere near Kursk

Next table over was Thomas’ absolutely spectacular Kursk WW2 game in 20mm, hordes of Russians trying to push the Germans out of the Motherland. I spent a lot of time between my racing turns gawking at this game.

Already looking forward to Trumpeter Salute 2016. I might bring Russian Civil War back, or I might go back to my pulp gaming and run some sort of pulp adventure game. We shall see!

Thanks again to Jon for the ride over, Martin for the hospitality, and the Trumpeter Salute club for putting on another amazing weekend.