Stargrave: Hope Eternal Mission 4 The Magnificent 10

I played, but didn't do write ups for The Great Maglev Robbery and Dramatic Exit. The TLDR version are as follows:

Great Maglev Robbery - Finding the right train car went as poorly as it could have. The flying drones were more than a nuisance, and while Chelle Ren was recovered, everyone was forced to jump from the train, as the skiff was too far away to be reached due to the drones and the large mutants crawling over the tops of the cars. 

Dramatic Exit - Chella's partner Drix was being taken across town to be loaded up onto a transport shuttle and taken away. He was rescued from the guards, but only at the last moment, and I got lucky with the rolls for additional bad guys coming onto the board. 

 The Magnificent 10

The crew needed info from a dude in a small village, but first we needed to save the villagers from slavers before he'd give it to us.    

Pregame setup the villagers are scattered around the table, and the crew set up to try to protect them. The Captain commando, gunner, red, and rocket on the tower, the mate, saw and gobbo near coner 2, Chella and Drix in corner 4.

The initial groups of pirates came onto the board in the four corners. Corner 1 two ruffians one trooper one slaver. Corner 2 two ruffians one trooper one flavor. Corner three four ruffians corner four two troopers two slavers.





Turn 1
Captain coordinated fire on the Gunner troll. Gunner troll shoots at ruffians. Kills 1. Commando kills one ruffian.

Mate shoots wounds and stuns ruffian. Saw shoots and kills ruffian gobbo kills wounded ruffian

Pirate trooper shoots troll for 10. Trooper shoots gobbo for 12 

Rocket damages one slaverbot 

 

Turn 2
Two ruffians a trooper and a slaver bot in corner 2.

Troll shoots ruffian for 3.

Saw wounds trooper

Trooper injurers first mate.

Drix & Chella kill trooper


Turn 3
4 ruffians, corner 2

Saw kills wounded trooper. First mate wounds ruffian

Trooper kills gobbo


Turn 4
Trooper 2 ruffians corner 3

Troll kills injured bot

Chella kills injured trooper. Red and rocket trap slaver bot with Vel



Turn 5
Captain kills slaverbot in hand to hand. Commando injures slaverbot. Troll kills injured bot

Mate kills wounded ruffian. Saw kills ruffian

2 ruffians leave board with villagers. Trooper wounds Saw. Trooper injurers and rocket down against slave bot non lethal. drix kills ruffian


Turn 6
Captain shoots fragmentation grenade at ruffians, injures 1. Commando wounds bot. Troll kills ruffian.

Bot takes out red trooper (non lethal)

Drix kills bot w/ Vel.


Turn 7
Captain miss with grenade. Move into combat, commando joins against ruffian. Troll kills ruffian.

Saw kills wounded bot

Slavers take 3 more villagers. Trooper wounds mate. Ruffian kills commando.


Turn 8
Captain kills injured ruffian with villager. Moves into melee with trooper.

Saw wounds ruffian

Drix wounds ruffian in melee


Turn 9
Captain wounded in melee. Chella kills ruffian.

Drix injured by ruffian


Turn 10
Troll injured trooper. Mate wounds same trooper.

Drix kills ruffian. Chella wounds trooper


Turn 11
Trooper hurts Chella. Drix kills trooper

Last trooper takes villager off the board.

 The captured villagers and their captors. 

Epilogue:

The needed info is given to the crew, and the next stop is a crash landed ship under an ocean on another planet... but first, to rescue the 6 villagers taken. 

Rescuing the villagers isn't officially part of the campaign, but it feels like the right thing to do. 

As an aside, it was great to play on my own board with minis and terrain that were all painted by me. Of course now I need to make the crashed space ship... which is half the reason I'm going to do the rescue mission first! It'll give me more time to build it! 

Stargrave Trashbash Fuel Tower part 1

Following hot on the heels of the foamcore farmhouses, I got right to work on my fuel tank tower workshop. The only appropriate basis for the fuel tank was of course a coffee can. Digging through my bits boxes to find things to make it look less like a coffee can and more like something discarded from a passing spaceship, I grabbed a crevice attachment from a long broken vacuum cleaner, a peanut butter jar lid, and a plastic 6 pack can carrier. 

There was still a long way to go before this was going to be table ready... but I liked the start of it.  Except the crevice attachment was a little too tall. So I cut the bottom of it off, and stuck it on top of the main tower.

Of course there needs to be more to this... it' supposed to be the home and workshop of the main NPC for the scenario! I don't have any good tools at the moment to be cutting metal, so the can is going to remain intact. This means that everything I do to it will be adding onto the can. 

If this is a workshop that all the locals come visit to get their tech things repaired, he might have build out a shed/store front to work from... and a balcony because what's the point of having a big terrain piece like this if there aren't multiple elevations to put your minis on?

 I "built" paper mockups for what i was thinking, and... yeah. I like it. Originally I was going to base this on a bit circular 5" base, but the more I worked on it, the more it felt too constraining, and hindering what I wanted to do. So at this point I'm planning no base. I got a little ahead of myself and build the first support for the balcony out of match sticks. 

I then realized that I needed to do more work on the can before building the balcony, but... I might as well check to make sure it's strong enough, right?

 Yeah, that'll hold up ok it seems. 

 

So I started working on the can. The first thing I did was to cut out strips of cardboard box and wrap them around the can, and also to make some to wrap the crevice attachment to the can. At this point I started wondering how he's going to get out onto the balcony... So back to the bits boxes, this time checking out all the various tank bits I've collected, and I pulled out a bunch of hatches and doors. A Rhino top hatch will work for the ground floor doors, and a round tank hatch for accessing the balcony. 

Yeah, the Rhino hatch works. I made a frame for it out of corrugated cardboard and then framed out the build out structure from foamcore. 

I also added 2... handles? brackets? flanking the chimney that I imagine are used by the ship to help secure the tank in place. They are made from the tubes at the center of dog poop bag rolls with foamcore braces wrapped with zip tie, with the zip tie clasp on top.

I then started to build out the rest of the braces for the balcony. You'll note that the balcony and the door are no longer on the same side of the can. It started to feel too busy on the one side. There are also some clamps added to the opposite side of the can from the chimney. I found them in the street years ago, and I don't actually know what they're from.
 

I then added the stir sticks to the build out to match the wattle and daub I did on the farm houses. 

And finished the balcony. I decided that I'd skip the railings, as there isn't an OSHA to enforce safety regs. 

 I decided to add a satelite dish. Originally I was going to put it on the chimney tower, but decided to use a chopstick, topped with a bit from a lotion pump, some wires, and bits of matchstick and stir stick to secure the dish. I don't actually recall where the dish itself is from. I used various wires twisted together to make cabling running from the dish down to a box on the side of the tower, with one twisted wire cutting behind the vacuum attachment down to the front door.  

 I took some mesh from an old screen door out in the garage and cut a circle out for the top of the peanut butter lid, and glued it down with superglue, adding the little tube on top built from a can cap from a 6 pack of beer and the cut off bit from the vacuum attachment. As a decoration I added the same 3E shape as on the main body, and unseen, is the cap from a used tube of superglue inside the tube. Oh, and the little decoration? It's actually the carved out bit of the grey clasps so that I could bend them enough to glue onto the can. Literally just the scrap bits leftover and reused. 

 

Next (and last) up is the hatch for balcony access. Using a combo of match sticks for the outer frame, and stir sticks as the hatch itself, I glued them all together on a bit of paper, added the green wire to indicate the hinges and the handle. And because the tower is rounded, I added a pair of stir sticks to either side to accommodate the curve. 

And once installed, I realized that I still needed a ladder to get from the balcony to the roof, so taking bit from the bits box, and adding to it, I built a simple ladder.  It was then I noticed the grey hook wasn't quite big enough for my Sgt. Forscale to stand on, so I added another little platform so a mini can stand on it, which brings the usable elevations on this tower to 5! Not bad for a coffee can.
 

 And now, it's time to paint... but that's for next post, as this one has gotten way too long! 

Simple Foamcore Farm Houses

 Sometimes you just need some quick and decent looking terrain. 

 Scenario 4 of Stargrave Hope Eternal campaign is set on a world far out in the boonies of the galaxy, and as such is a little lacking in tech. The settlement is described in the book as being a combination of prefab structures, homes made from locally available materials, and one tower made from a recycled fuel pod. You need between 6-10 structures for the scenario. I own 2 small 3D printed prefab huts and so need at least 4 more structures, one of which needs to be a tower, so I need to make at least 3 houses. The game is played on a 3'x3' board, but the village needs to be at least 8" away from any board edge so none of these should be very big...

 Keeping the size manageable had me laying out a couple of different size bits of paper on the board, and placing some minis in and around them. 2"x3" was tiny, and 4"x6" was too big, but a 3"x5" note card felt just about perfect. Big enough for a full sized door and a couple of windows, but not so big that they'd dominate the table.  

 Not wanting to spend a lot of time or money on them, I grabbed a scrap of foam core that I'd been saving, and got to measuring. Prior experience reminded me that I couldn't just cut out 3" and 5" wall sections because then the footprint would be too big. I opted to trim the long edges by the thickness of the foam core so that the walls would fit neatly on the 3x5 piece that would serve as the base/floor of the huts. 

I kept the height of the walls at 2" knowing the roof would greatly increase the height of the finished builds. I measured out the doors and windows using a 1" square base, then cut them all out. I opted for one door for each building, and 3 windows. 

I turned on my glue gun to get it hot, then I pulled out some aluminum foil, rolled it into a ball, and rolled it all over the exterior sides of the walls and the floor. It really is a fantastic way to add texture to cheap foam core. Once done, it was time to get gluing. 

 

Not perfect. My measurements were not exact, but close enough. I do like how it's possible to shoot through a building. Then it was time to grab the cardboard recycling and dig out a cardstock box and start cutting thin strips. I was actually more careful with this part than I was cutting the foam.  I framed out the corners and all the windows and doors. 

 All told this was about 2 hours worth of work. I then brought it down to my painting desk and slapped on a heavy coat of mod podge mixed with black craft paint, and once dry, followed that up with a heavy drybrush of antique white.

 I was unsure at this point whether I wanted to paint the interior walls or tint the exterior... I decided to try tinting the exterior using just a tint bit of watered down speedpaint.

 And then onto the roof! My original plan was a standard sloped roof, but my cousin suggested an asymmetrical gable with offset ridge, so that it might look a little less average medieval fantasy 

Once I had the foamcore frame I used cardstock to make the roof, and then started cutting and gluing the shingles... This was a pain to do, and messy.  

I was finally reminded that you can do whole strips and it's a much easier process! Also less messy with the glue and looks neater. It was almost enough to make me redo the other 2... almost.  

Then it was time to put a hole in the roofs for the chimney pipes. These were made from the tubes inside dog poop bag rolls. I also added some trim to the gables under the roof line.  

 Then it was back to the mod podge, and onto painting! The gables were painted just like the walls with antique white and the zealot yellow speed paint, with the brown for the trim.

 The roof was done with a sponge leftover from a mini blister pack and a soft blue craft paint, with a gentle dry brush of antique white to give them some highlights. 

 

Overall, these are great. Not perfect, by any stretch of the imagination, but solid looking and usable for the games I want them for. I still want to make little HCAV units to fit over the chimney pipes, but that's going to be its own little project. For now, it's onto the fuel pod tower!

The kid decided the houses needed a little something extra, so they all got some stickers. 

 And credit where credit is due, a hefty dose of inspiration came from this video. 

Sci-Fi Terrain: Transfer Unit

 

Another of my trash bash terrain pieces, this one started back in April of last year, after making the Chemical Processors. The body of it was the cap for a set of sidewalk chalk. I added a pill bottle lid that I embellished with some thin plastic from a blister pack. 

 

On the top were several other bottle caps and small lengths of thin straw, and I used the same hair elastic from my other build to make a pipe running from the top down the side. Since I didn't want the pipe down the side to be the only thing on it, I used 2 more lengths of the thin straw and a bit of sprue to add more detail. 

 

On the back side I used another small length of the elastic, a bit of zip tie, and a couple of cut up pieces of leftover gun from the Reaper Black Star Corsairs that I converted a while back. (This is why I save all those bits of trash!)

The final side of the build I left blank, mostly cause I couldn't decide what to add to it.

One thing I quickly noticed was how unstable it was. The big bottle cap on the front was too heavy. That was an easy fix, I just glued in a wall fastener I had saved from some IKEA furniture.

Some time later, I primed it black, then in December I based it with the metal tone airbrush primer. As with the Chemical Processors, I painted it with the same green craft paint that seems to be the color bulk purchased by the owners/operators of the industrial zone I'm assembling. 

Feeling that the blank side was missing something, I decided to paint a number on it, and as I'd been gifted some paint pens, I decided to try them out.

 Gotta say, I think it looks good! And I've already started on my next one! 

I think its an incinerator. But more on that later!

Sci-fi Terrain: Chemical Processors

 The construction and painting of these 2 terrain pieces was amazingly simple, once I got around to actually doing it. I built them at the end of June in 2023, primed them sometime in the fall, and then didn't get around to painting them over a sessions until just a few weeks ago. 

They're based around a set of support structures for a 3D printed piece of terrain, something designed to be tossed away, but the shape was too cool to trash. Digging in my recycling/bits box I grabbed a pair of lids from peanut butter jars to give them a more solid structure. There were holes at the top of each of them, and I used a pair of heroclix base inserts to make lids for them. I thought about leaving the bases flat so that figures could stand on them, but I didn't think it looked very good, so back to the bits box, and I snagged a pair of arms from some Reaper CAV minis (The Dictator B) along with a few other random bits, and used an old stretched out hair elastic to make the tube. Zip ties added some necessary texture to the sides, and I drilled holes and threaded some garden wire through for more visual interest.

And because I wanted these to look pretty gnarly, and also cause my super glue wasn't holding great, I slathered it with baking soda. 

Then, like I said, it was a year before I painted them. 

I don't have any WIP pics, but I can tell you the process. On the one in front, I painted it with a quick coat of Stynylrez airbrush Metal Tone primer, and them splotched on craftsmart Lush Foliage. The tubes/hair elastic was painted with Reaper Cairn Stone, and the red was Reaper Seoni Scarlet. The rust effect was painted with Reaper Numeria Rust.

The one in back I forgot to use the metal tone primer, and just painted the lush green straight onto the black primer, but was otherwise painted exactly the same. I did go back and dab on some of the metal tone here and there where the green didn't completely cover the primer. All in all I like the front one better, but both look good on the tabletop.

Making Mirkwood Trees for your tabletop games

I decided a while back that what I desperately needed for my game board is enough trees to make a forest. This was a silly thought as I haven't played a tabletop game in months. Nevertheless I decided to embark on this project, and so watched a whole bunch of YouTube videos, and dug through my terrain making books, and settled on making them with aluminum foil. This decision was based in part on the fact that it was a material I had plenty of, was cheap, and easy to work with. 

Then I needed to figure out how many trees to make. I set up my playing space and pulled out my 2" bases. It took about 18 to convincingly fill a 3*3 play area. 

The final decision at this point was to decide how tall I wanted the trees. Using Sir Forscale, I settled on a 4 to 6 inch range to make the trees feel big enough, but not so large that they would totally dominate the board even if there were just a few. 

 

Please note there is nothing in this tutorial that can't be found elsewhere, but this has the advantage of not being a video!

It was time to start making the trees. I pulled out sheets of foil and started wrapping. 

 

I started with about a 14-16 inch long piece of foil, which I then folded...

  

 

And started wrapping. Why 14-16 inches? Because as I twist the foil, it gets smaller, so that by the time I'm done the tree fits in the 4-6 inch total height that I was looking for.

 

 

Then I'd take another sheet and wrap it around the first to bulk up the trunk, and start to make the branches (not pictured). I then used hot glue to stick it to a 2" base. Sometimes I'd stick the second sheet of foil in the folds of the main trunk before I did the wrapping. Honestly, there was a lot of experimentation in making these, which resulted in a lot of different tree shapes. 

The nice thing about working with foil like this, is that if a spot needed bulking out, or filled in, or whatever, it was easy enough to take an extra bit of foil and wrap, stuff, and glue it where it needed to go.

 

 

I then took a sheet of foil and made one long roll, and cut it into small pieces to serve as roots, and glued them to the trees and bases.  Some roots were small, but I made some really twisty and large. After that, I used the glue gun to put a layer of hot glue all over the trees, both to seal the foil and to make some texture. I missed some spots, and others ended up smoother than I'd have liked, but the variety makes for a more interesting, and even more realistic set of trees. 

 

 

Then it was time to paint. I mixed black craft paint with Mod Podge and gave every tree a thick coat. Then I went back and gave them a second coat, cause some spots didn't cover the first time. 

 

 

Then I realized I forgot to texture the bases. So I did that, using a mix of sand and gravel. Then painted the bases with the same mod podge and paint mix. If I am ever to add more trees to my forest, or make another one, I'll remember to add the ground cover before I prime them.

 

 

Then it was time to add some real color. I started with a heavy brush of craft smart (Michaels brand) chocolate brown, followed by a nutmeg brown, and then a dry brush of antique white.  

 

 

You'll note I didn't make any smaller branches. My initial plan was to add foliage to these trees, so I only needed the main branches to hold it. You'd never see the smaller ones. 

 

But once I was done, I started to think that they look good like this. And maybe they'd work better as dead spooky mirkwood style trees. While I was still deciding on the foliage, I used some green and purple paints to splotch on some color. and gave the trees another final dry brush of the antique white. The green and purple are only a little noticeable if you're really looking for it, but it adds some more visual depth to the trees that made the effort worth it.

 

You have to admit this looks pretty good. The bark texture is way overstated and looks delightfully diseased. This is not a healthy forest by any stretch of the imagination.

The trees are wonderfully flexible. I can dump the lot of the from the table to the floor and they're going to bounce. My toddler can manhandle them, and they survive just fine. The biggest danger is them popping off the bases, but you have to work really hard to make that happen. 

I do think I'll do 1 or 2 more "character" type trees. I'm especially thinking about one tree growing over a dungeon entrance, maybe a gulthias tree? And the other I'm thinking off is more of an evil grandmother willow type tree with a face. We'll see if and when I get around to ever making those.