The Battlezone scatter stuff....

 .... and this really is the last of it!

Below is a big piece of Battlezone pipework, which will fit in anywhere, seeing as one end rises from below ground and the other end has a couple of closures. The piece at the back is a length of 2cm plastic plumbing pipe stuck on a couple of little legs capped shut at one end and with a connecting piece at the other. It is designed to come out of the side of a building. Why might that be? Who cares, but it'll look good.

Here are a couple of large generators with attached pipework. These will fit in anywhere, ideally with a building at the end of the pipes.

There is also a platform made up from a few odds and ends and a pallet of some kind of cargo.

Finally, I've made a few barricades/roadblocks from a few odds and ends of doors and wall sections, held up with braces. These are bound to be useful. Everyone and everything needs to hide or shelter from getting shot at. In all of these pieces, I've chosen a grimdark colour palette, especially for the generators. Maybe how they work is an obscure and arcane secret, but so long as the initiates/operators chant the correct prayers the things will keep on generating whatever they generate?

Once again, my Bad Squiddo Ghost of Gaia is here to provide a sense of scale.

So, that's it for the Battlezone stuff.

The last of the Battlezone buildings

These are the last of the actual buildings. There are a few pieces of scatter that I'll put in my next post.

Above we have a nice piece that gives players the opportunity to put figures above street level. Below is a similar piece, with some nice railings added on, obviously for Health and Safety reasons. Once again, we have mysterious plumbing emerging from this building.

The final piece below is a complicated two-sided creation, with an upper gallery running along its length and a crawl space below that because nothing horrible ever lurks in crawl spaces in science fiction films, does it?

These last two pieces have a lamp post like the first one, but I had to cut that off in the photos to get sensibly-sized and shaped images.

The eagle-eyed will notice that the electrical panels on these buildings are all orientated differently. The ways of electricians are clearly as inexplicable as those of plumbers in the grimdark future.

I'm really pleased with how these pieces have turned out. They will be really useful on the table.

Some more of the Battlezone buildings

Here is the next tranche of my grimdark sci fi buildings and installations. Once more, my Ghost of Gaia is here to set the scale.

I have no idea what the plumbing here represents. Who knows the workings of the minds of boiler engineers in the grim darkness of the future? Anyway, the windows offer some firing opportunities.

This above is just a wall, albeit a wall with some strange machines attached. What are they for? Maybe they are vending machines or 41st millennium ATMs? Anyway, walls are useful in skirmish games. Bad things can hide behind them. Maybe bad things like giant spiders with rayguns?

The final piece below is definitely a building, another one with some more inexplicable plumbing. I'm sure it'll look fine on the table. It's perfect for Xenos Rampant etc.

Mantic Battlezone sci fi buildings

Ages ago at the club's tabletop sale, I bought a big box of Mantic Battlezone plastic buildings, which I never got round to assembling until now. Here are the first few pieces. Scroll down to see them all.

The Bad Squiddo Ghost of Gaia is for scale purposes.

I'm showing two views of this final piece for today. This is because there is some nice detail on in interior. The down pipe in the interior photo isn't Mantic. It is a piece of 2cm diameter plastic plumbing pipe cut to fit.

I have to say that the separate components are tricky to put together and I eventually resorted to using model glue to ensure a nice strong bond. I didn't want my buildings coming apart in gaming use. In hindsight, I should have used greenstuff or Milliput to fill the more obvious gaps, but it is too late now.

Having said that, I am really pleased with the painted and based results. These pieces could be used in so many settings; gang warfare in the depths of a hive city, scavenging the remains of an abandoned mining base on a forgotten planet, post-apocalyptic survival against mutant or alien hordes, Games set in a wretched hive of scum and villainy or just on a battlefield between implacable enemies. The possibilities are endless.

I decided to go for a grimdark, worn-out and run-down feel to everything. That kind of look and feel appeals to me when it comes to science fiction gaming. There is plenty of rust on the walls, grimy floors and a general appearance of a civilisation fallen on hard times or outposts on hostile planets or moons.

I've finished everything off - a couple of weeks of hard slog, I have to say, and I'll post everything over the next week or so. 

I am planning to use some of these pieces with my Jon Hodgson sci fi backdrops to create some nice little dioramas. They will obviously have lots of uses in Xenos Rampant and with my own Reivers Of The Outer Rim rules, which I am currently planning to simplify and re-write.

I've been away for a week, but now I'm back

I was away on a short break to Italy, Bologna and Ravenna to be precise, but now I'm back and I've got to restart my painting mojo. Before I went away, I completed some plastic 28mm scenic pieces that the club bought as part of a Kickstarter, Mantic's TerrainCrate one, unfortunately. Anyway, the pieces are all on a dungeon and fantasy theme, so great for a lot of different games, Frostgrave, Ghost Archipelago etc. There are a couple of us painting things up, and this is how I approached my share (note that the figure is mine, and shown for scale purposes only). First, we have some piles of treasure, the kind of thing that no self-respecting dungeon, cavern system or ancient ruined city can afford to be without;

Next, some distinctly martial pieces, including a sword in a stone for aspiring Once And Future Kings to have a go at;

Various scatter pieces, including a treasure map for a lost treasure island, and a crown on a cushion on the bedside table. Surely we've all got one of those at home?

Finally, more scatter, useful for hiding behind when the sound of "Fee Fi Fo Fum" starts echoing around the place.

These were all pretty straightforward to paint. A case of spray undercoat, touch up with paint where necessary, paint in the metallic bits, dry-brush and ink to bring out the textures. Quite nice pieces, and very useful. 

By the by, when I was in Ravenna, somewhere I totally recommend visiting, I had a look around the Domus dei Tappeti di Pietra, the House of Stone Carpets. The stone carpets are, of course mosaic floors. These date from between the 1st and 6th centuries CE, and for the purposes of this comment, I want to show you these two. The upper one is the Dance of The Seasons and the lower one a representation of the Good Shepherd, a pagan image which was adopted by early Christians to represent Christ. The thing I want to point out is the tunic decoration. In both mosaics, you can see decorations (e.g. disc-shaped patches and shoulder markings) on the tunics which are often claimed to be "military" in wargaming and re-enactment circles, but which were actually commonly used by everyone across the empire of Late Antiquity and the Early Mediaeval period. It is more likely that soldiers adopted what was a common style rather than the reverse, but perhaps we shall never know definitively. It does seem unlikely, though, that a representation of Christ as Good Shepherd would be shown wearing an item of military appearance.