I’ve finally finished another module for my 1/1200 scale coastal naval terrain. This is another 12″ long by 4″ deep piece with part of a reasonable size town on it, and has been sitting around for two years or possibly a bit longer, so it’s nice to get it finished and out of the way!
New coast module from one end, looking into the industrial part of town toward the church. Click for larger.
The other end, looking into the harbour & bridge and down the main street. The breakwater is a bit of sprue from plastic figures, which got me that nice round end and curve. Click for larger.
The construction is my standard setup, written about previously (see other related posts at the bottom or my naval scenery summary post) with a base of 1mm styrene sheet, a mix of materials for the basic ground forms, and a lot of different flocks for ground cover.
The Shapeways trucks, a small military convoy driving into town.With a toothpick for scale.
The one thing I might still add is some more of the marvelous Shapeways vehicles here and there…
Left end, looking from seaward, mostly industrial.The centre, looking over the old Martello tower toward the church and centre of town.The harbour, stream, and bridge end.The whole module from seaward.
I don’t have any immediate plans for more coastal modules… but I do have a lot more buildings and vehicles to put to use, and I was thinking that a coastal gun battery would be an interesting addition – the British coastal batteries seem to have had a pretty quiet war, mostly engaging aircraft, but the Allies reported regular engagements with German batteries especially along the occupied French coast… so maybe a half-length 6″ module with a bit of a headland, some gun pits, and a couple bunkers? We shall see…
Conversion bits for strange projects can be hard to come by, even these days when high quality plastic figures make kitbashing and bits-finding easier. One of the staples of a certain flavour of folk horror, though, is folks with antlers, either on their helms or straight up growing out of their heads, and nobody has done horns, antlers, and such… yet.
Some of the planned bits. Image ganked from the Kickstarter page and cropped.
His campaign video is also over on YouTube and is nicely done, and one sprue will give you enough related bits to do whole units up similarly, which is always nice.
The Dead Animal Bits intro video
I’ve backed for a pouch of bits, 3 full sprues, and I’m really hoping to see this funded and produced so I can get inspired to get back to my weird folk horror 17th C stuff sometime in the new year!
So, if antlers and horns and bones and teeth and feathers and other gribbly conversion bits are an interest, have a look before December 18 2023 and consider backing Dead Animal Bits.
Not a paid endorsement or anything, just one of those chance finds via social media that slots very, very neatly into some of my specialized wargaming interests!
In the course of adding masts and other details to ships earlier this year, I collected some useful links on various WW2 ships, and leaned hard on the work of some of the amazingly talented ship modellers out there.
Meanwhile over on the gloriously named Last Stand on Zombie Island, a really cool article on how navies made smoke (deliberately). Lots of other cool WW1 to WW2 naval stuff over there too, well worth a look.
Sometime in November 1998 I sat down in one of Camosun College’s computer labs, signed up for a Geocities account, and created my first wargaming website.
Since then, in one form or another, I’ve had a continual wargaming web presence ever since!
I routinely game with folks younger than my website, which is… kind of weird to think about.
It’s been quiet around here lately, I’m gaming regularly but hardly doing any painting or building, busy with other stuff, but here’s to many more years of this nonsense!
We played a lot of Gaslands in 2020/2021 when COVID restrictions meant we couldn’t game in person, because Gaslands is fairly simple to organize overwebcam, and we kind of burned out on it.
Then we took Gaslands to Trumpeter Salute 2023 back in April, because it’s also really easy to set up pickup games for, and our pair of great chaotic games re-ignited our interest!
I’ve cranked through a trio of new cars since Salute, and then moved onto a new set of three cars. Two of the first set had been partially converted back in 2020/2021 and then neglected (and apparently I took no photos of them…) and the ’34 Ford hotrod was a new purchase while we were in Vancouver for Trumpeter.
’34 Ford hotrod being Gaslanded.Spikes!Yellow basecoat – paint was Reaper’s Hearth Fire with FW Acrylic Ink Indian Yellow over that.Weathering – mostly FW Acrylic Ink Sepia.Rad symbol wet transfer on the door, just for fun.The right hand side of the critter.’34 Ford conversion.
The second trio of cars include another sports car all spiked up, a rally car up-armoured, and a Jaguar D-type converted into a monster truck. The Jag was the most complex conversion I’ve done for Gaslands yet, and started with a set of 3d printed monster truck wheels.
Conversion finished on the rocket rally car and spiked sports car.Underside of the Jag D Type monster truck.Monster truck suspension under the D Type.The D Type in progress.Assembled, just missing the armoured panels on the sides.Paint started!The second batch – spiked sports car, rocket rally car, and the Monster D-type.
The basecoats are coming along nicely. The Jag is starting as British Racing Green, the spiked sports car is a gloriously weird yellow/green that Reaper calls Dungeon Slime, and the rocket rally car seems to have gotten trans pride colours, because why the hell not? Lots of weathering to do still, of course!
These three done will give me eight or so cars, a buggy, and three bikes for Gaslands just in my own collection. I have ideas for a heavy truck conversion starting with mashing together two big American 60s/70s Yank tanks, but I think I’ll switch gears slightly after this trio is done.
Brian and I (plus friends) attended Trumpeter Salute 2023 last weekend. No, not the UK one, the smaller one in Vancouver, Canada. We all had a great deal of fun, our first major miniatures convention since 2019 – after Bottos Con, which is primarily a board game convention, in Nov of last year.
Under Alien Suns (working title) – Coop scifi rules under heavy development
Friday afternoon in the first slot I ran another public beta test of my under development coop scifi skirmish ruleset, Under Alien Suns (the working title). It was a great deal of fun, autonomous vehicles got used as weapons, and there were many laughs. Also lots of great feedback.
Players were fighting in New Antares – against a mixed enemy – zombies from the former townsfolk & Halite Confederation soldiers
Vikings vs Saxons – Aftermath of the Raid
There were a pair of linked games both using Ravensfeast (a free online ruleset)- one of a Viking raid and then a 2nd of the Vikings attempted to get their stolen booty home. I missed the first game, but caught the second one. Also a chance to try out my new camera – a Canon RP with my older 60mm macro lens!
It ended up being a minor Viking victory, as they got the major loot (the laden donkey) off the table, and took down both my lord and the local bishop with his
Gaslands pickup game – Death Race!
As we were late getting back to the main hall after dinner on Saturday, we ended up running the first of a pair of pickup Gaslands games. This death race ended up with the leaders taking each other out and the person in last place at the start claiming victory.
But the most glorious moment was the double jump – jump, slide, spin, jump again. Amazing to watch
Operation Sea Lion – Bolt Action
Sunday is one big slot, but we ended up having time to play a pair of games. First up, a four-table Operation Sea Lion, the start of a larger Bolt Action Campaign. On our table, it is a very minor German victory, as we cheeseweasled some troops off at the end.
It all started badly, however, as the Brits took out 1/3 of our force on turn 1 and we failed our prepatory bombardment roll. But our crowning glory was storming the ruined house held only by Dad’s Army types, who inflicted huge casualties, but we did more.
One last Gaslands game – Flag Tag
We had one last Gaslands game – Flag Tag. Team red vs the other colours, which also happened to be the younger players, including a friend’s son, against the older players (Brian, Martin and Tony).
All in all, twas fun but you never get enough photos. I did also have a participatory art project this year – I asked players to graffiti my buildings for my scifi terrain. Photos of those shortly and thanks to all that participated, I got some great stuff.
Til next year!
Update! Martin has uploaded his photos to flickr – he played many of the same games as Brian and I and even has shots of Brian’s boat game – something apparently Brian himself failed to get
My first gaming weekend since 2019 has come and gone and it was good. And as is often the case, I took far too few photos, including exactly none during my own game!
Friday evening Corey ran the sci-fi co-op game based on Sellswords he’s mentioned here a few times, while I played a mid-war What a Tanker game and traded my Sherman for a MkIV panzer.
Saturday morning I got a sturdy crew of Norsemen wiped out to a man by Saxons who were somewhat offended that we’d looted and burned the local monastery.
Saturday afternoon I ran a Coastal Patrol game, four German schnellboote attacking a British coastal convoy defended by a Hunt-class Destroyer Escort and a couple of plucky trawlers. The Hunt crippled one of the S-boats but then got shattered by a pair of torpedoes, and the big ocean-going freighter the Brits where shepherding down the coast also ate a pair of German torps before the S-boats roared off into the night.
Saturday evening we wound up doing a scratch game of Gaslands for eight players, a gloriously chaotic Death Race with lots of wrecks and some amazing driving – both amazingly bad and amazingly good!
Sunday morning I defended the shores of England from the German’s Operation Sealion, which was interesting (I’m not the biggest fan of Bolt Action, it’s a very cartoony rule set…), and then because we had time to kill before we headed off to the ferry, we ran another Gaslands game, this time a Flag Tag game for six players. Explosions, mayhem, and lunatic driving ensued!
I think I have a few photos on my phone, will pull them out. It’s been a weird and complicated week since then, hence the delay in this after-action post!
Sellswords & Spellslingers, like a lot of similar games, often has bad guys (foes in Sellsword parlance) appear at random locations or randomly along the board edge. This process can slow down the game, so I’ve been dreaming up ways to speed it up for a while now. Given I own a 3D printer, I decided to do some designing FreeCAD to create some board edges for Sellswords, Warcry and the upcoming scifi Sellswords variant I’m working on.
Screenshot of the edges in FreeCAD
As I knew I was designing these once, I took some short cuts with my FreeCAD and just bodged it together. The base is a pair of 3″ Openlock templates, with Oxanium font and some ticks extruded onto them. Once printed and with the border corners designed and printed, I got a finished product, numbers from 1 to 35, as a Sellswords board is usually 36″x36″.
Printed but unpainted board edges and corner piece, with an empty 6″x6″ tile
And that is how they sat for many months with little action. I had a convention (BottosCon 2022) in November, so I spent a bunch of time painting up buildings but didn’t get to the edges. So they were black for that first con. Only after the con did I get a base coat of rust on them.
The rust is mostly Liquitex Burnt Sienna Acrylic, with some Liquitex Raw Sienna and Red Oxide, all sponged on to provide texture.
Which brings us to this week, where I finally got the paint job finished. I gloss coated the edges, then put down Vallejo chipping medium with an airbrush. After that was dry, I added blues – mostly Reaper’s True Blue, but also some Sky Blue and Brilliant Blue for accents – all by airbrush
All the many colours of blue!
After the blues were down, I chipped them using a tooth brush, then hand painted on some a cheap craft titanium white and rechipped them. The white nicely toned down as the chipping medium + water means the paint runs a bit.
Just before I finished, I also added some 18 to 21 edges, as we also play Warcry, which has the very strange board size of 30″ by 22″.
Where can you find the files?
I haven’t uploaded them anywhere yet, but will get them on Thingiverse shortly!
In all of the coastal naval rules sets that we’ve played, spotting and situational awareness are among the most important factors. Doesn’t matter how many guns you have or how good you are at shooting them if you can’t accurately spot and ID the enemy!
With a bunch of fast-moving boats on the table and a lot going on, it can be hard to keep track of who’s got a proper target spot on who, though, especially with things like the rule in Coastal Patrol that means if you fire automatic weaponry, the tracer glare off your own guns causes you to lose all your spotted targets.
We bounced a few options around, and among the simplest is that each ship or boat has a “Spot Card” and a dry erase pen – just mark the ID of who you spot down on it, if you lose spot on them, wipe their ID off.
I already use 3×4 plastic card protectors for ship record cards, so it was easy to take the same template and whip up a Spot Card to fit a 3×4 card sleeve. With that done, saving in both Letter (for North America) and A4 (for the rest of the world) PDF was trivial.
Way back at the very end of 2020 I contacted Misc Minis about decals suitable for 1/1200 ship and aircraft miniatures. After a couple of rounds of email, Kevin sent me a PDF proof sheet with a mix of 1mm and 1.5mm insignia for the Luftwaffe, RAF, and USAAF, as well as some hull numbers as used by the Royal Navy. He’d started with the smallest size of decals for his standard 1/600 ranges, done some tests, and figured out what would work (and what wouldn’t!) when taken down that tiny.
I mentioned the decals in passing in an April 2021 post here, then tucked them away in the dreaded ‘safe place’ and did absolutely nothing with them until this Easter long weekend, two full years later!
With the various Luftwaffe aircraft seen on my last Workbench post based and painted, I sat down with the tiny 4″x2.5″ decal sheet, carefully cut out even tinier individual crosses, and began putting them on the wings of the Me110 heavy fighters and Ju88 Stuka divebombers.
The full decal sheet, with finished Stukas behind and Me109s still waiting for their turn. Click for larger.
The bulk of the Luftwaffe crosses on the sheet are the black outline/white fill style; there’s also a row of pure white crosses as used (I think?) primarily on night fighters. The lower left has no fewer than six different RAF roundel variants, upper right has a bunch of US Army Air Force winged star roundels, and the lower right has RN hull numbers in both white and black. There aren’t any pure black outline Luftwaffe crosses, but honestly I’m OK with that as the black/white ones stand out a bit better and help ID these tiny, tiny airplanes more clearly!
The best closeup I could manage with my cell phone camera. That’s a Stuka with one wing done and the other waiting to be done. Keep in mind that wingtip to wingtip, that entire airplane is about 12mm across! Click for larger.
The Misc Mini decal sheet is full-film so each roundel needs to be cut fairly close to the printed outline. I worked with fine-tip tweezers, a sewing pin, and MicroSet decal solution to get each cross in place. They’ll get MicroSol decal conforming solution next and then matt spray varnish to seal everything in place.
Two Me110 heavy fighters with their roundels in place. Not sure if I’m going to bother doing the insignia on the sides of the fuslage or not – I might just do them with a fine-tip paintbrush as on the Ju88s I painted a couple of years ago for this project. Click for larger.
If you’re in need of tiny decals for tiny aircraft, drop Kevin at Misc Minis a note and ask! This little sheet was thoroughly reasonable for a custom one-off print run (under $10 including shipping) and will last a good long time at the rate I’m using it up. Misc is an American outfit but regular envelope mail for decal sheets is still cheap over the border to Canada at this point!
