Sci-fi terrain

I haven't really had many sci-fi figures in the past but since I've been playing Perilous Tales, I've bought or been gifted quite a few figures like aliens, robots, and characters from the major sci-fi franchises.  I've played a couple of games of away missions on dusty planets but wanted to get some scenery for sci-fi or spaceship interiors.

Back at Salute in November, I'd looked at terrain from Battle Systems.  They make very detailed double-sided printed cardboard terrain.  I bought just a reversible road and river set at the time but came back and looked at their sci-fi terrain, and selected their Galactic Core Set.

Over a third of the 334 pieces are the plastic joining clips but that still means over 200 pieces of cardboard terrain pieces and scatter.  These come in 18 cardboard sheets to be pressed out.

The set also comes with a highly detailed 2 foot by 2 foot neoprene gaming mat.

There's a huge amount of material here - dozens of walls with different configurations like small or large removable/replaceable doors and windows, gantries, ladders, stairs and lots of scatter like consoles, chairs and cargo.

 Here's an overview of what it looks like all put together.  I'm really pleased with it.

It will of course all come apart and fit back in the original box but that means fitting everything back together again to play with it each time, so my compromise was to keep it mostly together but break it into a small number of parts, stored across three boxes.

Mosque Compound

More MDF scenery from eBay seller banksjohnedward.  This is a mosque compound comprising a large building with veranda and steps, a small building, a domed tower and a surrounding wall.  It was a lot of MDF and excellent value.

I did a dry test fit and it went together well.  I made a slight notch in the staircase to fit better with the veranda and I also filled in the holes where the walls were supposed to connect in the middle, as connecting it completely would make it very difficult to store.

I thought I'd experiment with textured paint on this model and after priming white, sprayed it with Rust-Oleum Stone Spray Paint in Bleached Stone.  The results are pretty good, the textured effect is reasonably consistent and the colour looks right (not quite as bright white as it appears in these photos).

The large building has interior rooms and all the roofs are removable.

It should be suitable for a range of games, especially if the tower isn't used.  Here's some examples, which also show the finish more clearly.

Rolling, rolling, rolling

I've wondered about dice towers in the past, mainly when I was under a table trying to find my die (why are they always sixes when they don't count?!).  I finally succumbed to one from TTCombat that was so decorative and such a bargain, that I couldn't resist.  

The kit comprised two and a half A4 sheets of MDF plus some cardboard for detailing.

And the finished result looks like this:

I made a few mods, obviously.  I cushioned the internal pieces that roll the dice to reduce the noise.  The edges of those pieces where they slotted into the external walls were supposed to be covered with a plank as a repair but I filled and sanded the holes instead.

I also printed out tiled flooring for the courtyard and main balcony.

The main balcony was supposed to have just two windows but it made no sense to me to have a big balcony without a proper access so I fitted a door and two cut-down windows instead.

The final modification was to add a couple of pieces of MDF to support the roof element so that it could be a piece of scenery when not in use as a dice tower.

Chain Home radar array

 

Another little kit from Sarissa Precision.  This is a coastal early warning radar array, part of the system codenamed Chain Home.   This was the first early warning radar network in the world, and the first military radar system to reach operational status, built by the Royal Air Force (RAF) before and during the Second World War to detect and track aircraft.  A nice objective for WW2 games.

I added some barbed wire around the structure to deter people from climbing it but it didn't put off that stupid boy.

Mausoleum

Another MDF kit from Sarissa to enhance the graveyard encounters in Perilous Tales and other figures games.  Just 9cm square (plus the steps) so nice and compact, and perfect as a small temple or mausoleum.

The MDF kit uses cardboard for the roof and for the middle columns on the three walls, building up the base and capital using a few pieces to give it more depth.  The kit ingeniously used narrow pieces of MDF along the corners to represent fluting on the columns.  After priming, it looked like this.

I drybrushed with greys and white before adding separate washes of umber and green to represent dirt and moss/lichen.

I added a strip of cardboard along the pitch of the roof, painted it copper and then tarnished with a wash of turquoise.

The vines are embroidery thread soaked in watered-down PVA and then teased apart with tweezers to form thinner branches growing along the brickwork.  Two different shades of flock form the leaves.  Tufts of grass were applied around the base with some fallen leaves collected around the steps.

Using image software, I created small mosaics and printed them on to glossy card and fitted them to the door and building pediments.

The larger has a pair of dragons in the foreground, the smaller a capital D.  So who on earth could be resting in this mausoleum...?

The roof is removable so the occupant of the crypt can be hidden inside ready to leap out on our unsuspecting heroes.  Back to painting figures now ready for a game using this piece of scenery.

Action!

One conceit of Perilous Tales is that the games are Episodes.  The rules don't go as far as Crooked Dice's 7TV in having stars, co-stars and extras for the characters but it is very much a homage to classic TV and B movie tropes.

So I figured I needed a film crew to record my adventures.  Bob Murch sculpts a range of excellent Pulp Figures, including a film crew comprising director, producer (described as "script girl" but she deserves a better credit), cameraman and clapper loader.

I created some "Perilous Pictures" stickers for one of the Lledo vintage vehicles I'd bought for Dad's Army games so that they would have their own transport.  I mounted the figures individually (and the camera) so that they can be used as characters in their own games but also created a diorama for them to be displayed in whilst I'm playing other Episodes they can film, and I can move them around together more easily.

Gaming Mats

Continuing my lockdown policy of Pay Now, Play Later...

In recent years, more and more companies have been producing gaming mats with very detailed images printed on vinyl, cloth and (best of all I think) mousemat.  I keep coming back to them and had been looking recently at Deep Cut Studios.

They provide a custom service where you can provide the images for them to print.  I was interested in a set of 2x2 feet gaming mats for DBA, Perilous Tales and other 28mm skirmish games.  They aren't cheap but then I had a cunning idea.  How about ordering a double-sided 6x4 feet mat and cutting it up myself?

I bought 12 very high resolution gameboard images from DriveThruRPG and then stitched them together using an open source graphics package into two images with 6 maps each.

This was uploaded to Deep Cut and in just over a week my double-sided mat had been printed in Lithuania and delivered to the UK.

Inevitably (and in fairness, as warned by Deep Cut) the two images didn't precisely line up so when the mats were cut (by my expert resident fabric wrangler) there was a little bit of wastage - but to all intents and purposes, I now have a set of twelve 2x2 feet mats for a range of scenarios.

I have (left to right, top then bottom) Lonely Road, Badlands, Snow Field, Wasteland, Desert Outcrop and River Valley.

Plus Borderlands, Ice Wastes, Cobblestones, Deep Desert, Lowland Plain and Highlands.

I'm really pleased with the quality of the printing and definition of the images (the photos above don't really do them justice) and this approach was less than half the price of ordering them as pre-cut 2x2 mats.

Samurai pond

I made a koi pond for my Japanese Samurai project.  I started with a kit from wonkyhead3dprinting.

The kit had so many elements, it seemed a shame not too use them all with the small pond provided.  So I cut the pond up to make a larger one by placing edges on a thin piece of plasticard and adding some Tetrion.

I painted up the pond and placed the koi, turtles and stepping stones.

The dents mark the position of the MDF bridge I planned to use instead of the small one that came with the kit, which was too narrow for the bases I use with my figures.

Next step was my first foray with mixing and pouring resin.  I did a trial run in a plastic lid first and then poured the pond the following day.

I then decorated the pond with moss, flowers, reeds and grass, and added the lanterns and lilypads that came with the kit.

Bugs and crystals

A couple of quirky purchases from Bad Squiddo Games.  The first is a set of 93(!) assorted bugs.  Somewhat preposterously, I chose to cut them all out individually and collect them into bug types on a set of 2p coins.

But the end result is a colourful collection of creepy crawlies which can be used as additional hazards in games like Perilous Tales.

The second purchase is a set of crystals growing out of the ground which will provide interesting scenery for sci-fi games.  I painted them in a few shades for depth and then drybrushed the edges in a lighter colour to highlight the facets of the crystals, finishing with a gloss varnish to make them shine.

Egyptian Ruins

More scenery!  A set of plaster cast Egyptian scenery from eBay seller charlesglenis.  This excellent value set includes a wide variety of pieces - columns, sphinxes, palm trees, even a mummy in a sarcophagus!

With some 28mm soldiers to show the scale: