Category Archives: Science Fiction

Posts Infinity by Corvus Belli, and about Stargrunt II, Dirtside II, and Full Thrust II by Ground Zero Games.

Fantasy, Infinity, Painting, Science Fiction

The Workbench This Week, 4 November 2015

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Quick and dirty late night snapshot of my workbench!

workbench4Nov2015
Troll surgery and various other things on the bench. Click for larger, as usual.

Front and centre is a Reaper Bones troll (in white plastic still, hence kind of blown out in the pic…) next to his orange-painted buddy. I’ve cut both arms at the elbows, repositioned them, and gotten started on puttying to cover up the damage. He’s for my goblin Blood Bowl team, eventually, so the rather rough putty work will be covered with football pads similar to the ones worn by the right hand figure, who has just had pads added to his basic pose.

Most of the rest of the clutter is also Blood Bowl related; there’s a wizard and a doctor just mounted on their bases to the right, a couple of goblins lurking, and two Bribe counters in the left foreground – the plastic sprue will eventually be painted to look like gold bars.

The background is mostly Infinity stuff, a pair of new figures for my Haqqislam forces and six consoles from Warsenal. More on the consoles sometime soon, as I’m writing up a review of them and the Supply Crates I also got from Warsenal.

Infinity, Science Fiction, Terrain

Giant Billboard Tower for Infinity

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I’ve previously shown off big (5″ tall by 3″ wide) advertising graphics intended for use on an Infinity table – Weyland-Yutani, a travel poster, and Blue Sun; on Friday evening I decided to sit down and crank out the structure all three of those graphics will be shown off on.

The basic structure is actually very simple, being two vertical strips of mattboard with some cuts to make it look more interesting and some simple details added with scrap card. The frame is 2 inches wide, with the base being 3″x2″. There’s various horizontal pieces at several levels up the structure, although the structure is (deliberately) not optimized as a sniper nest. You can use it that way, but you are going to have compromised lines of fire no matter where you set up on the thing, and a number of the positions are also very exposed.

Weyland-Yutani & Blue Sun advertising on this side. Click for larger.
Weyland-Yutani & Blue Sun advertising on this side. Click for larger.

Total size is about 11.5″ tall with a footprint of about 3″x4″ or so; the dark blue figure at the base is the Fiday that has been seen in other photos.

Travel to Varuna on this side, and some more open structure above. Click for larger.
Travel to Varuna on this side, and some more open structure above. Click for larger.

Incidentially, the three blue things on the left are Tri-Ad Advertising Stands from Antenocitis Workshop; I picked them up recently along with a few things from Warsenal and at some point I’ll probably do quick review articles on them and some of the other pieces. Nice solid pieces of small urban clutter, anyway!

Conventions, Infinity, Science Fiction, Terrain

Infinity in the Jungle

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Somewhere along the way the default tabletop setting for a game of Infinity became “futuristic urban/quasi-urban environment”, which is as true of most of our tables locally as it is anywhere else, but the game does have a full and interesting set of terrain rules and even tries to include things like zero-g, hazardous environments, and similar.

With that in mind, I finally pulled the box of jungle terrain that I’d built a few years ago for pulp gaming out and we set that up for Infinity this weekend for our first tournament event around here.

Looking across the jungle toward the Tohaa positions. Click for slightly larger, as usual.
Looking across the jungle toward the Tohaa positions. Click for slightly larger, as usual.

The platforms are lasercut MDF from the collection of one of the other local Infinity folks, and they look good adding a sci-fi touch to the jungle. Jungle is hard to move through, obstructs shooting but does not block it entirely, and makes things like spotting a bit more difficult. It makes for a great change from our usual urban jungle, and I’ll be taking the box o’ jungle terrain to many more Infinity sessions in the future.

Going back to talking about our grandly-named “Vancouver Island Open” Infinity event, we wound up with six of us playing, with a decent mix of factions represented. I came a solid third with a Hassassin Bahram force; here’s the rankings:

  1. Jeremy – 2/14/337 Nomads
  2. Jaime – 2/10/397 Yu Jing
  3. Brian – 2/7/353 Hassassin Bahram
  4. Nicholas – 1/10/390 Nomads
  5. Stewart – 1/8/468 Tohaa
  6. Chris – 1/4/344 Caledonians

The numbers are Wins/Total VP/Total Surviving Army Points. Total Wins determined basic standing, with VP and then Points being used to break ties. One thing I thought was interesting is that only two of us ran Sectorials, with four of the six opting for “vanilla” Faction lists.

We’ve got another event scheduled for the end of November, about a month from now, and hopefully we can get a regular round of events up and running locally!

Allow me to end with some 80’s hair and music with a highly appropriate title!
[su_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1tj2zJ2Wvg”]

Infinity, Science Fiction, Terrain

Infinity Ad: A Bit Off-Colour

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Yeah, so this one is based on a very, very juvenile joke. I’d apologize but I wouldn’t mean it!

It’s also smaller than some of my other recent graphics, designed to print at roughly business card size (2.25″ x 3.25″) to go over the backing cards used in the Infinity blister packs, which I’ve been reusing as billboard surfaces.

Enjoy!

Uranus Wreckers & Salvage. They'll fix your pressure vessel, all right! Click through to grab the full-size image from Imgur!
Uranus Wreckers & Salvage. They’ll fix your pressure vessel, all right! Click through to grab the full-size image from Imgur!
Infinity, Science Fiction, Terrain

Infinity Ad: Making Better Worlds

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Everyone’s favourite terraforming/engineering/evilevilevil megacorp needs a giant billboard ad too! Third and (for now) last of my big 3″ wide by 5″ tall 300dpi ads. This one is also released under a Creative Commons CC-BY-SA License.

WY Recruit
Weyland-Yutani looking for recruits to some place called LV-426. What can go wrong? Click on image to grab the full-sized image from Imgur!

Mars image via Wikipedia, released under a CC-BY License. Weyland-Yutani image redrawn in Inkscape from various images found online.

Infinity, Science Fiction, Terrain

Infinity Ad: Blue Sun

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Borrowing from another popular science fiction universe to provide some graphical fodder for Infinity terrain, here’s another big (5″ high by 3″ wide, as designed) advertisement. This one is being released under the CC-BY-SA License for reuse as you please.

Blue Sun ad
Blue Sun Corporation ad, designed to be printed at 300dpi, 3″ wide and 5″ tall. Click through to get the full-sized, much more detailed image from my Imgur account.

Background graphic from monaeberhardt on Flickr, CC-BY-SA. Blue Sun graphic redrawn in Inkscape by me from smaller images found on the web; original is copyright Josh Wheadon or whichever studio produced Firefly.

Infinity, Science Fiction, Terrain

Another Infinity Ad: Travel to Varuna

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I’m home with a stubborn cold that won’t go away, so decided to kick GIMP and Inkscape to life and create another couple of billboard-sized ads for my Infinity terrain. Here’s one advertising the PanO ocean world of Varuna as a travel destination. It’s available under a Creative Commons BY-NC-SA License for (limited) reuse.

Travel to Varuna
Travel To Varuna – click through to my Imgur account to see the full-size PNG file. Designed to print at 3″ wide by 5″ tall at 300 DPI, hence the size.

Sources: Tropic water background via Flickr user tahitipix, CC-BY-NC-ND Licensed. Turtle Clipart via the OpenClipArt Project, Public Domain Licensed. PanO logo by Vyo from his awesome Infinity Logos in Vector Format project.

Infinity, Science Fiction

An Easy Arc Measuring Widget

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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.
Infinity, Science Fiction, Terrain

In Which Things Get Primered

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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.

Infinity, Science Fiction, Terrain

Post-Labour Day Update

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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.