A bit later than the Russian Revolution/Russian Civil War-era Russian history that I usually post about, but it overlaps so beautifully in our pulp interests here on the Warbard that I can’t resist. Behold, a poster urging Russians to build airships to glorify Lenin’s memory!
Via Paul Malon’s Flickr account, where he posts all sorts of awesome scans, from Soviet propaganda like this to western consumer advertising. The graphic arts of the pre-WW2/post-Revolution early Soviet era was fascinating, all sorts of very creative things happening in Russia at the time, despite all the problems the country was facing. That creative modern art was actually one of the things that first got me interested in the interwar period and Russian history of the time, as back in college I had an art history teacher who had done her Master’s on Russian art and graphic design of that era and passed her enthusiasm on to her students.
I haven’t posted one of my “World More Pulpy” graphics in ages, but here’s something that’s been lurking on my harddrive for ages and needs some fresh air.
Here we have the luggage label for a piece of First Class Cabin Baggage on the American-Pacific Airship Company’s famous “Luxury Airship to the Orient” routes.
Luxury zeppelin to the Orient! Well, in an alternate world, maybe. One without a fireball at Lakehurst, perhaps.
There were supposedly American companies considering trans-Pacific airship routes at one point; the Great Depression scuttled the first round and then there was that fireball at Lakehurst…
Here’s a couple of real photos from the actual Graf Zeppelin herself just as bonus content. These are once again from the spectacular Flickr Commons account of the San Diego Air & Space Museum Archives. The GZ’s cabin in profile and plan, from a postcard:
…and a detail shot of the elegantly streamlined engine gondolas of the Graf Zepp:
I actually have a couple of pulp figures on the painting table currently, the first in far too long, so perhaps I’ll get back to some pulp-flavoured posts here soon, in amongst the blizzard of Russian Civil War material recently!
It’s been one of those weeks around here, hobby-wise and otherwise. I overdid a black wash on the Armstrong-Whitworth armoured car and am having to redo a significant amount of the basic green painting, the top wing of that Nieuport for the Bolshevik forces won’t damn well stay attached, and real life has been busy. Oh, and I’m getting ready to build a new computer and replace my nearly-seven-year old desktop, so much time has gone into planning and buying stuff for that.
So here’s a blast from the past. This was one of the first big pulp games we ever ran, a five- or six-player gongshow with several groups of competing explorers, spies, Neanderthals, cannibals and dinosaurs. Cultists and giant apes, too. Damsels in distress, doomsday devices, villains both outright dastardly and simply misunderstood but noble, every pulp trope you can think of packed into a huge 9’x5′ table. The game predated the rebuilding and rebirth of this website, so it never got written up here.
These figures are by a gaming buddy, I can’t recall exactly, but I think they’re Lord of the Ring GW figures repurposed as cannibals. The gorge and rope bridge piece was built by another friend, and haver appeared in several games since.
The rest of my photos from that game are over on Flickr. Enjoy!
I am, as mentioned in the last post, neck-deep in prep for my Russian Civil War game less than a week away at Trumpeter Salute 2012. Nevertheless, something near and dear to the very core of the Warbard’s raison d’etre needs to be linked to…
Via the excellent Dieselpunk, who in turn got it from kitchener.lord’s spectacular Flickr stream, this Red Airships photomontage poster:
I’ve long been a fan of pre-WW2 Russian design; there were some very talented people doing great stuff even in terrible conditions.
Anyway, back to final drafts of initiative cards, then painting the last 16 White Russian infantry for the game!
Bit of a quiet week here on the Warbard. I’ve been burning up all my available hobby time painting Russian Civil War figures. There’s two dozen Cossack infantry finished, another three dozen regular White riflemen nearly finished, twenty Red infantry in progress, and a new unit of ten Red sailors well underway. Yes, if you total that up, it’s nearly 100 figures, all 28mm. I’ve been a busy chap. There’s six or eight half-written articles in the Drafts queue here on the Warbard, but I haven’t touched any of them in days!
Nevertheless, a short Saturday evening diversion from the painting table… we are well known to love zeppelins here. We have to bow down to the gentleman featured in this Popular Science article, though. (via Bayou Renaissance Man, who has more photos)
Even better? By my quick admittedly rough calculations, a 20ft-long model of the USS Macon is roughly 1:56th scale, ie 28mm… the gentleman in California has created a wargaming model, possibly without knowing it!
Tomorrow we game the Russian Civil War again using the Mud & Blood rules, photos and a game report tomorrow evening!
This has minimal bearing on the 28mm pulp gaming we usually do that might involve a zeppelin, but it’s such a cool and masterful technique I have to share: Creating Zeppelin bodies with foam insulation.
Basically, take long billets of foam, run a hot wire knife across a profile, and rotate the billet to create that distinctive “faceted” look of a Zepp body. Very cool.
Of course, I once calculated a 1/56 (28mm) scale of Graf Zeppelin would be about 19 feet long (nearly six metres!), so doing the gondola and a bit of the body in 28mm is (marginally!) saner. Only marginally, mind you. The small-scale foam zepps in the first link are a lot smaller and saner; they’re still about 3ft long, though.
If you are minded to do some zeppelin construction, in whatever scale, you could do worse than following the useful links from this Propnomicon posting called “Zeppelin Goldmine“, which has links to high-quality scans of a book of speculative 1920s designs for a Graf Zepp-sized trans-Atlantic zeppelin. The gondolas of those look fairly buildable as 28mm skirmish terrain, actually. One of these days…
Back one of the before-Christmas sales, I picked up a Fiskars circle cutter on deep discount from one of the local art supply stores. It’s been on my toys-I-want list for ages, and a chance to get it at 40% was too good to pass up.
It’s proven to be a useful gadget, although with some limitations. It will cut paper, light card and styrene up to about .020″ or .030″ thickness no problem; anything heavier than that it’ll score but not cut. With thicker styrene you can score then clean up with a file or sandpaper later, but this obviously means cutting heavier card is out.
Exact alignment of the circle to be cut out can be a bit tricky, but the central rubber “foot” does pull off to reveal a more compass-like needle foot which makes alignment easier. Of course, I only realized the needle foot option existed a few days ago, when I finally got around to reading the “Instructions and Tips” PDF from Fiskar’s site. Amazing what you learn when you read the instructions, isn’t it?
The other work-around for imprecise cutting is to design graphics that don’t have to be cut terribly precisely, of course. That’s what I did when I laid out the graphics for a batch of 1″ circular markers for use in our Russian Civil War games.
On the right, the Fiskars Circle Cutter. Central, the prop disc and M&B markers cut with it. On the left, the sheet of markers I made in Inkscape.
The markers will mostly be used for showing which Big Men & units have activated in any given turn, as we noticed it can be easy to loose track of which units have been activated with multiple Big Men running around in Through The Mud & The Blood. They can also be used to mark things like sustained fire lanes for machine guns or similar, of course.
On the left of the photo, notice the sheet I laid out in Inkscape for the markers; except for the star the solid colours are fairly forgiving of cutter placement. A few of the Red star markers have had their tips clipped by the cutter, but they’re still obviously Red Army stars, so I’m not fussed. Now that I’ve discovered the cutter’s needle foot option, I should be able to cut out the remaining marker discs perfectly.
The SPAD’s prop disc was cut from leftover heavy clear plastic from a blister pack, then put down on a sheet of 600 grit sandpaper and spun by hand to get the hint of motion blur in it. I wound up taping the piece of plastic to my cutting mat, then the cutter worked nicely on it.
So, the Fiskars Circle Cutter. A useful piece of kit, within it’s limits. I’m sure I’ll get years of use out of it — but wait until you find one on sale before getting it!
Ran a very good game of .45 Adventures, lots of dinosaurs and mayhem. Four cars started the Jurassic Pulp race from the wrecked camp, and by the time they’d reached the safety of the river, all four cars were wrecked, one person had been stepped on by a T. Rex, another eaten by same, one had fallen off a bridge to certain doom, and other pulptastic mayhem had taken place.
I actually remembered to take my camera out of my bag during the game, but true to form, only got a couple of shots worth anything.
Here’s the best of those shots. The girl is the daughter of one of my pulp players; she was awesomely patient while the strange adults shot at each other, blew things up, got trampled by dinosaurs and generally acted silly.
The cliff on the left is Corey’s latest scenery extravaganza, and it proved awesomely lethal during the game, although nobody actually drove off the top of it, which I had hoped to see!
GottaCon reported record attendance and sales numbers, so Victoria’s “big” convention really is growing up. Now they just need to get better airflow in the sports hall the convention runs in, it gets hot, loud and airless. The non-tournament miniatures area was far better (and more flexibly) managed this year than in previous years, though, so that was a huge plus. Looking forward to GottaCon 2013!
Because I happen to have a stockpile of them around the place, several years ago I started using pre-punched Avery business card sheets as gaming cards – Encounter Cards and vehicle cards in .45 Adventure, stats sheets for minor characters, more recently the Russian Civil War initiative cards for Mud & Blood. Even if you haven’t got pre-punched sheets around, the 2×3.5″ size is easy to use and handle printed onto ordinary cardstock and cut out.
There is of course a Microsoft Word template available right off Avery’s own website but I created my own templates from scratch in Inkscape, first because Word is a lousy program for actual graphical work, and secondly because the Avery templates are set up with vertical (portrait) orientation of the sheets, while for most gaming cards having a landscape setup makes more sense.
Accordingly, I kicked Inkscape to life, took some measurements from the Avery sheets and from their template and created a new template with the cards set up on a landscape (horizontal) sheet, which makes laying the cards out like small playing cards much easier.
I’ve uploaded three versions for people to use: a PDF version, a PNG version (probably the most generally useful) and finally, for those of you who have taken up Inkscape, an SVG version, which is in a ZIP file as WordPress doesn’t like SVG,
If you’re not sure which version to use, grab the PNG version, any modern graphics program should read PNG. Most should also be able to import PDF, which might get you a more accurate template.
To the extent possible under law, Brian Burger/Wirelizard Design has waived all copyright and related or neighboring rights to Card Template Blanks (various file formats). This work is published from: Canada.
The little grey block basically means that whoever downloads these can do whatever they like with them, including use them in commercial products. Go nuts. And if you’re from that rather large part of the word that doesn’t use Letter-size paper, sorry, but you’re going to have to come up with your own templates!
