[Misc] Another Project Update (games-related)
Custom Bases:
I've updated my Google+ album with more photos of work-in-progress on custom bases. Right now, I've got 4 30mm "clockworkpunk" bases put together, with the intention of making a fifth later on. I've also made a larger 40mm round "clockworkpunk" base, and I've started working on a 25mm cogwheel shape that could be used as a stylized 25mm base -- or portions of it could be incorporated into a fifth 30mm base.
My latest step has been to use Instant Mold to make temporary molds of the base designs made so far. My purpose for this was because I'm having difficulty seeing what the end-product will look like when I'm using so many different materials to make the "masters." One thing I've discovered by making a temporary mold (and then a press-mold casting with Magic Sculpt) is that, to my chagrin, dried "super glue" has significant thickness. Maybe it's only a fraction of a millimeter, but it's still noticeable that there were "puddles" of super glue around the "rivets" I made for certain pieces, despite my attempts to scrape the excess away. I'm going to have to devote an evening to using the Dremel to do some more cutting and buffing. I'm rather anxious about this because, as someone once told me, "The Dremel can be your friend ... and the Dremel can be your enemy." It could be the right tool to get the job done, or, if I'm not careful, the instrument to destroy all the work I've done so far. Still, if that happens, I'll just have to chalk it up as a learning experience; if I don't take the risk, I will not get anywhere on it.
Super Dungeon Explore Boards:
Yesterday, at JoAnn Fabric, I got some help from a store clerk and found that they actually had tiny glass bottles with cork stoppers, used for charms in sizes only 0.75" and 1.00" high. Digital_Rampage had sourced some other bottles of similar size that actually had "potion bottle" shapes, but they were far more expensive than the JoAnn bottles. Now, he has enough for the potion bottle markers; all he has to do is to figure out how to put some colored liquid in the bottles. Colored resin might be an option, but I'd vote for just adding food coloring to water and sealing the bottles shut.
As for the boards themselves, last night I put the finishing touches on the "lava" effects for the two lava boards, with a bit of red paint drybrushing, and some black wash for areas that needed it. I still have to put together the "killer bunny" diorama that Digital_Rampage wants in the "dead space" in the middle of the board. (Basically, there are areas on the Super Dungeon Explore boards that figures can't be put in, representing solid wall/rock, but instead of filling the corresponding spaces on his 3D boards with solid plaster, Digital_Rampage is opting to make closed-off rooms/scenes to add more visual interest to the boards.) For the lava board with the central "room," I've carved and scored some pieces of craft wood to "board off" a passage leading to a central chamber. The plan is to put some bones and cartoon gore in there, and have a little bunny, while on one of the outside walls there will be a reference to the "Beast of Aaaaaaaargh!" once we can find an image of the actual wall-scrawl from the Monty Python movie.
I started painting on his "Egyptian-themed" board, doing some dry-brushing and then starting to detail some of the lotus-top columns and some inset hieroglyphs and scarabs. It's a long way off until there's anything photo-ready, however; there's a lot of detail.
The other board he's working on is a "gothic" board (we're going very video-gamey here and not sticking to a single theme at all) with four "dead spots" in the corners. He's transforming those into closed-off rooms with barred windows and such, but still hasn't decided how to furnish them. I've proposed things such as a mini-library, a mausoleum, torture chamber, summoning room, armory, etc. He had an idea for a barracks with some sleeping monsters, though that'd be a little tougher to pull off (since the monsters would all have to be "chibi" to fit the theme).
We might get in a photo-session with the partially-completed boards sometime this weekend.
Miniatures Sculpting:
I haven't gotten anywhere on miniatures-sculpting yet. I've been devoting most of my crafting efforts lately to working on Digital_Rampage's "Super Dungeon Explore" boards, and on the custom bases as of late. Plus, I need to either find my old stocks of blue/yellow epoxy putty (if it's even still workable), or find the cheapest source I can for the newer stuff. It's a real pity that, once upon a time, Duro/Kneadatite was cheaply available in any hardware store -- until Duro changed their formulation to one that's grainier and less pliable. Now, the "green stuff" is a pricey art supply.
I also need to find a source for Magic Sculpt. My last resort would be to buy it in bulk directly from the maker, but even then the shipping/handling increases the price (since the maker of course sells it at list price) quite significantly. I wish I could find a local store that carried it. (For that matter, a local store that carried Instant Mold would be nice, too, but no such luck.)
Wonderland No More Online:
Due to one of the potential players going through a house move, my "Pub Crawl" adventure won't be starting until April at the earliest. In the meantime, my "to-do" list for getting ready keeps expanding, as I keep thinking of new things to work on. The pity, I suppose, is that there's absolutely no way all of this material will be USED, or else this one adventure will take years to actually run at the rate our online sessions go. ;) However, I've been dutifully marking everything down in the working document I intend to use for the published version of the adventure.
I suppose it will be ironic if I end up with an adventure book that has as much of a page count as the first edition of "Egg of Seven Parts," but which only covers a single adventure instead of an entire campaign. I won't be surprised, however; what I'm doing is covering breadth instead of length: options that the players might explore, rather than a sequence that the players must go through. My hope is that even if only a fraction of the material will be used in a single adventure, it can still be of value to a GM, as the unused portions could be inspiration for encounters and challenges in other adventures.
And another factor is that I'm actually making full-color/full-sized map tiles, illustrated treasure cards, figure flats & tokens, and other accessories that I believe would make the GM's job much easier (saving a lot of work) that aren't typically included with these adventures. If anything, that's one reason why Egg of Seven Parts bulked out from 48 pages to 84 pages when I went back to revisit the layout. When you go and actually add maps of locations in an adventure and detail them, that takes up space, compared to just summarizing an adventure in a text-heavy, largely illustration-free document and vaguely hand-waving details on the locations. As a GM, I want to SEE some maps and illustrations to help me envision what the writer had in mind, even if my own version as delivered to the players is likely to undergo some serious modification.
I've played in games where we'd be exploring office buildings that had no mail room, no stairwell (elevator only!), no rest rooms to hide in, etc., because the GM had not thought of such things before roughly marking things down on the wipe-off mat we were using with our miniatures. In his place, I could have overlooked such details as well. This is one reason why, as a GM, I find it valuable to have some sort of resource where someone else has thought some of these details out, because something might be covered that I would have overlooked.
Er ... back to the point. I'm not making the adventure longer with the added time. I'm using the time to make more custom illustrated tokens for encounters that might or might not happen (depending on where the heroes go and what they do with the available time), to put some more work into the maps, and to make more plans for how to handle different actions the heroes might take. I hope the game will be stronger for the extra time put into it.
Diversions:
I am not likely to run a sci-fi or near-future game in the near future, but that hasn't stopped me from occasionally painting up some minis that might be used in some theoretical sci-fi game. In some previous games I've run, I've stumbled when it came to the point of needing a military-esque transport for the PCs -- either a wheeled APC (I ended up making a papercraft Stryker for my zombie campaign when I couldn't find a toy in the right scale), or a "dropship" (for my "Doom: the Board Game" escape scenario, for my "Superior City" campaign, and others).
Digital_Rampage has pointed out that he has two perfectly good 40K Valkyries I could use, and those WOULD be perfect if I were to run an Imperial Guard campaign ... but I wouldn't mind having something small, easy to store, and MINE, so that I'm free to modify it for the needs of the current campaign. (There's no way I'd even want to repaint one of Digital_Rampage's airbrushed-and-carefully-detailed Valkyries.) I think the other reason this idea has stuck in my head is because I've had a few resources that would ALMOST work, but NOT QUITE. Also, I've been inspired by some sites I've seen where someone found a proxy for some of the AT-43 transports that never actually came out (because of Rackham's collapse), by using modified toys or models from other lines -- such as a GI Joe "Ghosthawk" toy that worked rather nicely as a UNA transport due to its blocky shape (reminiscent of the UNA walker designs), and the fact that the "cockpit" was abstract enough that with a repaint it didn't read as such, so the gross difference in scale wasn't such a problem. (If only I could find one of those, cheap -- but the problem with following tips from some guy who "found this on clearance" is that it's very unlikely I'll "find it on clearance" in my area as well.)
I got a partially-melted Tau APC at a previous Armadillo Game Bazaar. The previous owner said something about hating the Tau and melting the thing with a hair dryer to show how much he hated them or some such. It's really sad (Who really has the money to blow on these things just to MELT THEM?), and I had the idea that I'd turn it into some sort of battlefield wreckage piece, or salvage some of the "good bits" off of it for conversion. The rear hatch, engine pods and most of the cargo compartment are actually more-or-less intact. It just starts to warp at the point of the top hatch/turret, and then gets pretty ugly as one moves forward (the side hatches are really gone). I had some crazy ideas that I'd try heating up boiling water and see if I could straighten out the basic shape a bit, and start building over the melted portions with other supplies, but no such luck; I guess I'd need another source of heat to try to bend anything back, and even then I would likely just make things worse. I've been thinking of just Dremel-cutting off the whole front of the craft at about the point where the warping starts, and then building a new front section.
The trick will be that Tau craft have a strange hybrid "sort-of-blocky-yet-sort-of-aerodynamic" look that has lots of mostly-flat-but-subtly curved surfaces, and even the corners are slightly rounded. Anything I attach to the front is going to look jarringly different if I just try to build it from sections of plasticard (or equivalent), and I don't happen to have any spare sci-fi cockpits lying around of the right size that I could fuse onto the front that would have a matching look. I thought of getting a Robogear "Condor" or "T-Rex" model to provide an alternate cockpit, but I don't think the styles would mesh well. I might end up just trying to make a fairly boxy front end to the craft with materials at hand, then use some Magic Sculpt to make rounded corners (but, again, my supplies of Magic Sculpt are running kind of low). Rather than trying to make a glassed-in cockpit, I might just have some sort of "viewport" element, suggesting that the pilot has the sense to be in a completely-enclosed armored cockpit, relying on external cameras/sensors.
For a wheeled APC, I briefly considered the new Hasbro "Avengers Stark Tek Goliath Battle Tank," which is painted up in blue, as an armored vehicle for Captain America. It has no immediately-identifiable cockpit that would make it patently obvious I'm using a toy intended for 3.5" figures to "carry" a bunch of 30mm miniatures, which is a plus. However, the thing is $22 or so, and I'd still need to craft a back end with something to represent a rear hatch for troops to file out of. Maybe I'll keep an eye on this and hope it goes on clearance some day. (I had a much better chance on that sort of thing back when K-B Toys was still around, however; Toys 'R' Us doesn't mark down their clearance items nearly as drastically -- more often, the items just disappear to make space for new products rather than lingering on the shelves with sale stickers.)