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.
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!
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.
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!
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.
Front of the billboard. The whole thing is 6″ tall and 4″ wide.
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…
Tyrell Corp – one of everyone’s favourite evil megacorps!
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.
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.
I’ve previously shown my urban scatter terrain for Infinity, and after getting that assembled I decided to tackle something more challenging and larger.
Quite a bit larger, actually. It’s a two-storey building that wound up being about 10″ long, 6″ wide and almost 7″ tall!
The building is entirely made of mat board, usually used as picture framing board. It’s good quality cardboard, easy to work with and it takes paint and glue well. Our local art supply place, Island Blue, sells the offcuts from their framing business off cheap! The roof and second storey come off to allow full access to the entire building during games, and I think I’ve managed to make the building tactically interesting for games of Infinity.
Check out the gallery below; the captions have a lot more detail.
If you’re interested in doing similar buildings for Infinity or any other skirmish game, I really like the ongoing “Cardbuilding” series of articles over on the Infinity news site Data Sphere: Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 3.5, Part 4. Errhile is much more organized than I am, designing a whole system so that his buildings nest and stack for storage and reconfiguration, and he’s got lots of great techniques and ideas in his lavishly illustrated articles. I might well do some similar modular buildings, but for now it’s fun to just bust out a big, complex building — I haven’t done much terrain building recently!
James Ernest of Cheapass Games has a short video on three ways to make cards. Nothing earthshaking, but a good short video laying out three easy ways to make cards for your games.
Corrugated metal from disposable roasting pans, via Rusty Robot, which has all sorts of fantastic modelling posts. A lot of his stuff is too detailed/too fragile for wargaming, but the roasting pan thing looks like it would survive gamers if given basic respect!
I’ve gotten into Infinity recently, which is a game that uses on-table markers quite a lot. Corvus Belli has PDFs of the markers available to download and print, and the idea of using 1″ clear epoxy stickers (Youtube video link) to make tough and easy-to-handle marker tokens is inspired. (Clear epoxy stickers on EBay.ca. They’re a crafting thing originally, apparently.) I’m actually considering doing some tokens for Chain of Command up as 1″ rounds with epoxy stickers on top now too… might have to fire Inkscape up!
Also from the Infinity side of the gaming world, Toposolitario has a great website with all sorts of paper terrain and some tutorials. Great stuff and all free.
I’m mostly painting up Infinity models these days, getting ready for Trumpeter Salute at the end of March, and considering entering the 9th Lead Painter’s League over on the Lead Adventure Forum – I’ve been in the 3rd, 5th & 7th LPLs, so continuing the “every odd LPL” streak seems like a good idea. Plus it’ll be a kick in the butt to get painting again, I’ve done far too little actual figure painting in the last year or so!
Short links of interest post while I buckle down and get more cavalry painted for our Russian Civil War games — why is it that six damn horses take as much effort as two dozen infantry, anyway?
Burn In Designs do paint racks, buildings and other laser cut stuff. I rather like the vertical paint racks that minimize the footprint they take up.
Mad Mecha Guy do more lasercut stuff, this time 15mm science fiction buildings and bits. The chap behind MMG is also apparently the sculptor of Ground Zero Games’ awesome new engineering mechs.
Terrain For Hippos is an entertaining blog with loads of photo tutorials of short, straightforward terrain projects, all presented by a semi-literate cartoon hippo named “Grot”.
Speaking of painting horses, I just discovered this huge infographic JPG via DeviantArt, which goes into all the many variations of horse colour, including useful information like which colour of mane, tail or hoof is usually seen with which coat colour.
Finally, the interesting folks over at Naval & Military Press have just started their Easter Sale which means 20% off across the board on a huge and fascinating array of specialized military history titles! I’m saving this quarter’s gaming budget for Trumpeter Salute in ten days, but NMP’s booklists are always full of tempting items!
Just updated the Ground Zero Games/Dirtside II/Stargrunt II/Full Thrust Links page, which has, like some of the other resources on this site, needed updating since the early 2000s. I’ve killled off a bunch of dead links, replaced other URLs, left a few favourites with plantive notes for assistance in finding up-to-date URLs, and finally added a note to contact us if you have suggestions for new or replacement links!
Over on the excellent 15mm science-fiction focused Dropship Horizon blog, a rather startling notice that Mark, the blogowner, is planning to “bring the tyres to a halt and turn off the engines for the final time“.
The pace of posting had slowed slightly over on Dropship recently, but with interesting developments still going on in 15mm SF, it’s unfortunate to see Dropship Horizon shutting down so abruptly.
Hopefully Mark leaves Dropship up and running even if he isn’t actively posting, as his links and articles are an invaluable resource for 15mm SF gamers. Having done basically nothing with this website for quite a number of years before reviving it late in 2010, I certainly understand that people’s gaming interests wax and wane and sometimes it’s time to move on, but even a somewhat dusty resource is better than nothing — Dropship’s collected information can still help 15mm SF gamers for years, as this site was doing even during the years I was neglecting it.
Best of luck to Mark in his other gaming interests, and here’s hoping that some day in the future he relights Dropship’s engines, brings up her running lights and starts posting cool 15mm SF things again!
Another revival from the old Brian’s Wargame Pages version of the site, and one that I should have brought forward ages ago! You can see the Esquimalt Drydock on Google Maps for a sense of scale that wasn’t available ten years ago when I first posted the photos. — Brian, 22 Feb 2011
In the summer of 2001 I was roommates with a guy who worked in the drydock here in town. He turned into a real asshole after being laid off, but while he was still working he gave me a tour of the yard. I brought my camera, and these pics should inspire people looking for new industrial modern or SF scenery projects!
One thing that would be very difficult to reproduce on the gaming table, except maybe in 6mm, would be the sheer scale of the place. I didn’t have my wide-angle lens with me, so I didn’t even try for some real area photos. The drydock itself is 1100 feet long; the two big cranes pictured below are several hundred feet tall. There were two fair-sized ships in the drydock when I was there, and they could have accomodated a third with no difficulty. And this isn’t even that big a drydock, by maritime engineering standards. The ones that can accomodate nuclear-powered aircraft carriers are even bigger…
Wargamers interested in industrial scenery or future-tech industrial landscapes (Necromunda style) should find plenty of inspiration here! Even if you can’t reproduce the scale, the clutter, details and fixtures should provide some ideas.
Click any image below for a (slightly) larger view. Keep in mind these are refugees from the Old Web, when 600px wide was a Big Image.
The blue-and-yellow tower in the centre is one of the two massive cranes; this photo is also impressive for the amount of clutter visible!
One of the massive cranes alongside the drydock; the two big cranes are similar, but the details differ.
Workshops, office cubicles, supplies and random equipment and parts compete for space alongside the drydock. Great, colourful clutter for scenery ideas – lots of cover for skirmishers.
When they need to section off the drydock, the big cranes lift these huge steel bulkheads into the dock. For scale, those yellow railings along the top of the photo are about waist-high on a person.
Ships are big too – this guy is spray-painting the primer along the hull of that Russian deep-sea fishing boat. The travelling lifting-basket truck he’s working in actually looks pretty cool too.
The pale blue crane is the second very large one at the yard; the ship at centre is a Russian deep-sea fishing boat in for overhaul. Again, lots of clutter and stuff filling the place up…
The two big cranes ran on these massive railroad-style track assemblies. To give you an idea of the scale here, each of those big blue cylinders (brake machinery) are about five feet tall. (1.5m or so) These are seriously large machines….
The other crane. Made by Krupp of Germany, at least in part.
