Misc

Two for Remembrance Day

Leave a comment

I’ll be off to the main downtown Cenotaph for the ceremony and two minutes of silence today, but after you do your own two minutes, here’s a pair of relevant songs for today.

I first heard “Green Fields of France” at ten or fifteen years ago, after a backpacking trip through Europe that had included time at Ypres, including a walk out of town to see John McCrae’s grave. Here’s the Dropkick Murphy’s cover.

At our main cenotaph ceremony here, we always have both a Royal Canadian Navy band from nearby Esquimalt naval base and the pipes and drums of our local reserve infantry regiment, the 5th (Princess Mary’s) Canadian Scottish. If massed pipes and drums don’t make your hair stand on end, I’m afraid you have no soul. Here they are with our local symphony orchestra doing Amazing Grace.

Pulp, Terrain

A Motor Yacht, Part Two

1 Comment

Part One is here, for those of you just joining in. The project is a small 28mm motor yacht for pulp gaming, based loosely on real motor yachts from early in the 20th C and built entirely out of styrene plastic sheet, because I have a lot of it hanging around!

I finally got the hull sides done this weekend, using one long strip of .020″ styrene plastic per side. To accommodate the slight rake of the hull side and the curve of the bow, I cut the strips slightly too wide and wider toward the bow of the boat. After gluing one side at a time, I trimmed the thin plastic down with knife and sandpaper to match the actual lines of the boat.

boat1
Adding the hull sides. Right-hand side glued all the way to the bow but not trimmed; left side glued along the stern and cabin. Click for larger.

The stern and cabin area was simpler, except for being careful where the curve was placed that fits the higher bow deck into the hull side. Initial glue was quick-acting Plastruct Bondene solvent; after that set up I used superglue along the bottom seam to strengthen it.

boat2
Boat from the stern quarter, with cabin roof in place. Door frame and ladder in progress. Click for larger.

I’ve also gotten panelling into the cabin (see the first photo), door frames on either side of the door at the rear of the cabin, and started in on the ladder up to the flying bridge on the cabin roof.

boat3
Boat from bow quarter. Lots of putty work and detailing to do, but it’s structurally complete! Click for larger.

There’s a large amount of cleanup and detailing needed with Milliput and modelling putty to get everything cleaned up and smoothed out, a bunch more details to add, then the first spraycoat of primer to show up any glitches and things that still need to be fixed. The cabin roof needs some weight on it to get it to sit properly on the cabin walls; the seams all need cleaning up, especially around the bow deck and the bow itself; and I might yet put another layer of styrene down on the bow deck, as the single layer there currently is quite thin and I worry about it standing up to the wear and tear of gaming and transport.

Still, it’s great to have the major structural parts of the boat complete!

Links

Links of Interest, 4 November 2013

Leave a comment

Just a few links to start the new month off. Hope everyone had a safe and excellent Halloween, for those of you who live where it’s a thing.

Black Army Productions are a company with a small but interesting selection of things, including a few WW1/Interwar armoured cars. The fantastically pulpy-looking Romfell is certainly eye-catching; my pulp-flavoured German FreiKorp might need one of those… They’re having a fall sale until November 15th, so there might be a Romfell and a few other bits enroute to me after next payday…

Just a week or so left in this, but the excellent J & M Miniatures is having a (Canadian) Thanksgiving Sale, 15% until 10th November (so it lasts until the Yanks have their late Thanksgiving too, how about that?). You put the code “Thanksgiving2013” in during checkout to get the discount on everything they stock. Which reminds me, it’s been a long while since I fired some money at J & M, perhaps it’s time to have a look at their catalog again…

Acheson Creations is another one of those interesting companies that’s got a wide range of interesting bits and pieces, mostly resin scenery and such for a wide range of eras & locations. Their Primeval Designs line includes a bunch of unique 28mm & 15mm dinosaurs and other prehistoric beasts. They’re also running a Kickstarter to fund creation of some new, larger pieces, including a big ape who looks just right for transporting from some Lost World to the nearest skyscraper! The Kickstarter is about halfway to it’s modest funding goal and runs until November 20th, so hopefully this one funds!

Finally, via Paleofuture, this 1929 American air travel map over at the awesome David Rumsey Historical Map Collection — apparently flying across country in the late 20s actually meant spending most nights on a train…

Pulp, Terrain

A Long-Neglected Project Gets Dusted Off

4 Comments

Back in the long-lost days of mid-2009 (OK, four years back…) a contest called “Build Something” was held over on the excellent Lead Adventure Forum, with the contest theme of “Transportation”. I decided to build a small motor yacht/large powerboat sort of boat for pulp gaming, taking inspiration from and got as far as cutting the base of the hull, the cabin walls and the sides of the stern out of styrene plastic before inspiration fled and I moved on to other projects.

boat plan
The now-lost original plan, from October 2009. Click for larger.

Lots of other projects, in the intervening years, but I never actually threw out the barely-started boat, it just gathered dust and got used as an impromptu container for scrap wood and other bits. Late last week I finally got around to cleaning up my long-neglected hobby bench, didn’t feel like painting, and decided to dust off the motor yacht instead of starting an entirely new project. I still have a large amount of styrene plastic (plastic card) hanging around, so it was still the material of choice for this project.

I’ve added frames to the bow and a deck, then added a removable roof to the cabin and a flying bridge on top of that.

boat1
The boat restarted, October 2013. Click for larger.

The hull sides will be the next big step. I’m planning on doing each side with a single long strip of styrene, and then use putty up at the bow to properly form the actual point of the bow.

After that there’s still a lot of detail work and cleanup to do. Door and window frames, a ladder up to the flying bridge, and a lot of putty to smooth things out and hide seams.

boat2
From the stern quarter. Scale provided by 28mm Pulp Figures reporters. Click for larger.

This last photo shows the curves in the aft end of the boat quite nicely. I’m going to use steel wire for railings on the sides and back of the flying bridge, and might put a removable canopy over the rear deck. Also need to come up with a name, to be painted across the stern in large gold letters!

Pulp

The Dread Thuggee, A Pulp Alley League!

1 Comment

First, on a quick administrative note, the Warbard was offline for part of last week due to an attempted attack on the WordPress installation that runs this site. I was able to work with the my webspace providers and get everything sorted and up and running, I’ve made some behinds-the-scenes changes and tweaks, and hopefully that will be the first and last time I have to worry about crap like that! No content was lost and we’re fully back up and running, at least!

On a happier note, I’ve been very gradually upgrading our pencil-marked handwritten Pulp Alley League sheets to spiffy-looking word processor documents. This also gives me the ability to share them more widely, of course, so here’s the Dread Thuggee stranglers for Pulp Alley (PDF, 80Kb) for everyone’s enjoyment.

Adding Thuggee stranglers to a pulp universe is obvious enough, and was actually something I started thinking about in relation to the pulp-horror game Strange Aeons. There was a thread I started over on Lead Adventure, to which several people contributed excellent links, both to miniatures suitable for India and other related resources. The Thuggee figures are from Pulp Figures. The first of mine appeared way back in LPL5, a more recent batch appeared in LPL7, and I still have a few left to paint to round out the cult and add some variety.

In Pulp Alley, the stranglers re-use and re-brand the useful and flexible Animal skill to show their lack of firepower and dedication to strangling and other brawling skills. The Stealthy Agents perk lets the whole League skulk in the shadows more effectively, but does mean it’s a small League at merely four stranglers. They’re good at what they do, though, and have had a fair bit of success in our games, especially in tight terrain or limited visibility where they can really put their melee skills to use!

Pulp

Blank League Roster for Pulp Alley

Leave a comment

As a followup to last week’s posting of four of our Pulp Alley Leagues, here’s the blank PDF version of the roster I created. Pulp Alley is of course © Pulp Alley; this roster sheet is my own work but anyone can print or modify it for personal use. Enjoy!

There’s a very nice blank roster in the Pulp Alley rulebook, but being able to type one out and print copies as needed is also useful!

We’re probably getting back to some Russian Civil War action this Sunday at gaming; I’ll probably try to get some photos and get a game report of some sort up here to help compensate for the tragic shortage of activity on the Warbard recently…

Pulp

Four of our Pulp Alley Leagues

2 Comments

Although things have been quiet on this blog (too quiet…) we have been gaming fairly regularly! In fact, this long weekend is the first weekend in quite a while I haven’t gotten a game in. It’s been a Canadian Thanksgiving long weekend filled with museum visits, bike rides and food instead, which is just fine.

Anyway, most of what we’ve been playing has been Pulp Alley, a fast and elegant set of pulp skirmish rules. Teams in PA are called “Leagues”, and we’ve created six or eight that appear regularly. Rather than have one person always playing the same League, we’ve got a “pool” of Leagues that we all take turns playing as the mood strikes us. I created most of the Leagues when I first bought the rules, although most of those early Leagues have been rebuilt and tweaked at least once since then, as our understanding of the rules improved!

I’ve done up a few of our Leagues as proper PDF files thanks to LibreOffice, and I’m putting them up here for inspiration or to use as-is in your own Pulp Alley games. All four of these files are free to print or reproduce for personal use only.

First off, Sir Charles, Aristocratic Investigator (PDF, 81Kb). He may or may not be secretly doing the bidding of His Majesty’s Government in London, but this wealthy, well-connected character, his staff and hangers-on have the habit of turning up in some remarkable places.

Second, Count-General Vladimir Drunkovich and his White Russian Exiles (PDF, 80Kb). Being on the losing side of the Russian Civil War meant exile from Mother Russia and has made these ruthless, dangerous characters even more desperate and daring. No-one is sure anymore if Drunkovich is still fighting for Russia or if he’s gone entirely mercenary… and only a suicidal fool would ask the Count that sort of question directly. If he didn’t kill you himself, the deadly Natalya would skewer you!

Third, the scarred, ruthless and mysterious villain known as “Stahlmaske” or “the Teutonic Schemer” (PDF, 80Kb). A veteran of the brutal trenches of the Great War, Stahlmaske and his flunkies bring ruthless violence wherever they go… but Stahlmaske is nearly as deadly to his followers as his enemies!

Finally (for now…) we have the mysterious, mystical Shadow (PDF, 80Kb). He can cloud men’s minds… and possibly read them! He knows many things, but his opponents know very little about him…

Note that the Shadow is built from the “Weird Abilities” in the first Pulp Alley supplement, Perilous Island; the first three Leagues need only the main Pulp Alley book to use!

Links

Links of Interest, 6 October 2013

Leave a comment

Far too quiet around here lately, a post a month or so for far too long! I do apologize; I’m still gaming regularly but my painting has dwindled to a terrible ZERO figures finished since May of this year and since I finished the buildings in August I’ve done no scenery work, either!

I’m going to get the painting desk dusted off and back in production fairly soon; I’d hoped for this weekend but real life and work got in the way. I’ve also got a pile of small and medium-sized partially-finished scenery projects to complete, so I might re-start the whole process by clearing some of them up.

In the meantime, here’s a pair of links, both map related!

Someone in Hungary has digitized a huge collection of 1910 Austro-Hungarian maps of Central Europe in 1:200,000 scale. It covers the entire Austro-Hungarian Empire and nearby portions of neighbouring states, so the whole thing covers from Istanbul in the lower right up to southern/central Germany (around Cologne) in the top left. The quality of the scans is very good, and the relevance for World War One or Russian Civil War gamers should be obvious!

In a pulpier vein, via the always-awesome Propnomicon, this 1885 map of Chinatown in San Fransisco. I’ve linked to both Propnomicon and the David Rumsey Historical Map Collection websites before, but they’re both well worth exploring!

Links, Pulp

Links of Interest, 3 September 2013

Leave a comment

Quiet around here recently; I’ve been gaming regularly through the summer but not doing a whole lot of painting, scenery building or much of anything else!

Here’s a few cool links to share, though. They’re all, mostly by coincidence, on that perennial Warbard theme, zeppelins! First off, some notes, sketches and other cool stuff from Kevin Conran, the lead designer of the movie Sky Captain.

Over on Dark Roasted Blend, there’s Airship Dreams, Part One and Airship Dreams, Part Two which both, especially Part Two, have some awesome photographs of real and imagined airships & zepps.

Actual substantial blog posts soon, I promise…

Pulp

Added Peril & Weirdness in Pulp Alley!

Leave a comment

Sunday’s five-player Pulp Alley game set a number of “firsts” locally, as our biggest-ever Pulp Alley-powered game with five players and about thirty figures on the table, and as the first appearance of the “Weird League” rules from the new PA supplement, Perilous Island. It was also the first on-table appearance of my newly finished urban buildings from Sarissa Precision.

Sean pulled out his half-painted The Shadow figure and quickly thrashed together a League based around The Shadow, using the “Dark Pact” League Perk to add a number of powerful and creepy Shadow-like abilities, notably the ability to vanish from the gaze of men (and women…), and the ability to seemingly teleport straight through solid walls, among other things.

Neither of us have built Leagues with the new “Weird” abilities, but as far as I know The Shadow & friends are properly constructed and we used the rules correctly. The “Weird” abilities certainly add a very cool flavour and some great new powers to the Pulp Alley game, and I’m looking forward to future outings of The Shadow, and to building new Leagues (or re-building old ones) to incorporate more of the “Weird” abilities.

I’m also pleased to report that Pulp Alley moves along just fine with five players and thirty figures; it’s naturally a bit slower with that much stuff going on and that many people, and the tabletop can be gloriously crowded, but the system works just as well for a big crowd as it does for two players with six or ten figures total!

I took a few photos, but only one of them turned out OK. Here’s the setup right near the beginning of the game; only Dale’s Red Air Pirates are visible on the rooftop they arrived at; the other four Leagues are lurking behind buildings or off the edges of the photo! I like how the buildings look, but they really show how I need to crank out a bunch of alleyways, sidewalks and other urban filler/background scenery bits now…

pa_4aug2013
A Pulp Alley game setup, before the action starts. Click for larger, as usual.

Wargaming & Such (formerly Brian's Wargaming Pages)