Gateway to Mayhem

I seem to have been on a theme recently, the last five posts from the Castle have all been about Gaslands. This is to make it six in a row...

The last little while I have been consumed by both getting some freelance work finished and completing my school reports, outside of that I managed to squirrel away a little time to finish off a set of four gates for my Gaslands table (I want to make some billboards next, and I think I'll be done). These gates are from an Australian company called Module-R Terrain, they went together very easily, and look great; you get six in a set (I have the last two near finished, but needed four done for an upcoming event). Well worth the price of admission!

The six gates from Module-R went together very easily. The car is to give an idea of the scale, you can comfortably fit three cars side by side within the gate.

With all of these I undercoated them with a silver metallic spray. After this I heavily dry-brushed with a lighter silver paint. The next step was to paint the black and yellow stripes. I used a piece of ragged foam to stipple on the red for the signs. Once all that was done I washed it heavily with a black wash (Dark Tone from Army Painter). Lastly, I dribbled a fair bit of brown wash over them to give them a rusted look. The tire marks and oil stains on some of the gates were made with pooled black wash - the Army Painter stuff from the tin is quite viscous, I watered it down when painting the gates, but used it straight for the tire marks etc.

So, four gates finished! All ready for an upcoming participation game I'll be running at the local game convention ShepparCon, which I am greatly looking forward to. I was also blown away that Sebastian of Module-R Terrain offered to support the event, and I'll have some packs to hand out for 'spectacular happenings' and 'ludicrous carnage' over the course of the weekend!

I also managed to finish off the cars I had on the workbench. One was a buggy, the other a monster truck...

With both of these I used plenty of Vallejo textured paint to make them look like they have a fair amount of mud caked to them. Other than that, I followed the same method as for the other cars I have completed: an undercoat of Indian red, water and salt in patches, an undercoat of the base colour, get rid of salt, detailing, wash, highlight, rust effect and finally varnish. I am fairly happy with how they've come out. Now I need to do a couple more cars for the participation game coming up, and I'll be fairly well done I think...

These are all the vehicles I have completed so far. I need to add a couple more cars, and I should be good to go... and paint the bikes I have... and do some billboards... and...

Lastly:

I managed a quick game of the Death Race scenario with my son and daughter the other day... It was hilarious. I was neck and neck with my son (who sped to top-gear and spent the rest of the game trying not to wipe out).

That is until an unfortunate slide had me going through a gate the wrong way, my son rammed me, and the results were not pretty. Straight after the ram my car flew forward, slid and flipped off the table.

A combination of high speed and being rammed got me in this pickle... My son won by technical knockout.

Well, those are my Gaslands travails till now. I am greatly looking forward to the upcoming participation game, and until then, I have a few more bits to do, and I should be done!

Well, I say done...

A wreck!

More Gaslands terrain! My last posts have been consumed by Gaslands, and this one is no different. The simple fact is that the terrain and cars I been putting together and painting, are just fun to do.

This time, with the explosive gas tank and concrete piles behind me, I decided to make one more piece of terrain: a pile of wrecked cars. The materials required: a MDF coaster, cheap cars, a hammer, hot glue, and paint.

So, taking the cheapest toy cars I could find outside, I found a suitable hard surface to sit them on, and then belted them with a hammer several times. Given the intended outcome, it ended up being visually appealing and quite cathartic at the same time. Next I hot glued the cars together and onto an MDF coaster I had laying around. Be aware: cars hit with a hammer have holes through which hot glue can travel, I noticed this as I also managed to hot glue my fingers. It turns out hot glue is not 'marketing speak', trying to make warm glue seem edgy, it really is hot.

After this I painted the base with PVA and sprinkled sand all over it. An undercoat of Indian Red was next.

The car on the right of frame was a rubber one that came with a monster truck, the paint never fully dried on it (damn chemical reactions), so I pulled it off and replaced it with another cheap car mauled beneath a hammer. Next the base coat - some metal dry brushing, the few windows in blue, the tires in black (and hubs in metal), and ground in brown.

I washed it heavily with an Army Painted Strong Tone, and not happy with the result, again with a Dark Tone, allowing it to pool in spots on the base to look like spilled oil etc. Lastly, I broke out my Tamiya weathering kit and dusted the whole thing down heavily with rust. Lastly I sprayed the entirety with the last drops of a flat varnish spray - which came out patchy, and caused a wrinkled effect I would have been furious about if it had not been a car wreck.

The wrinkling in the paint is due to the flat varnish coming out of the can poorly, and the pock marks in the surface from bubbles in the wash (which I would normally remove). Overall, the effect is solid I think. A car wreck, for other nearly wrecked cars to get wrecked on.

The next items on the docket are two more cars for the teams, a set of gates from Module-R terrain, and some bikes that just arrived from Ramshackle.

Module-R Terrain gates

Ramshackle bikes

Edited in response to Wouter's question below, about how the bikes scale with the HotWheels:

I think the scale fairly well, it should be noted of course, that some of the HotWheels cars are chunky and exaggerated, but on the whole they sit nicely alongside them and will work a treat once based and painted. I did notice the resin is a little brittle, so take care when trimming them. But the detail is solid. I'm very happy with them so far!

Obstacle Course!

In between getting the various teams ready for Gaslands, I have also been working on a few pieces of terrain to liven up the board. Last post I wrote about the board I made, and a few piles of concrete to provide things to drive or slide into.  This time I took a few of the cheap plastic city pieces that came with one of the car kits I bought and made them more post-apocalyptic-y (it's an adjective right?).

First were some witches hats, because in the smoke, gas, and blood fueled ultra-violence of this post-apocalyptic roller derby, someone spent time before the starting horn to set out traffic hazard cones. Getting ripped apart by .50 cal shells or having a 2.75" rocket detonate your fuel tank is one thing, losing traction on a slippery part of the course though? Not on!

Garish plastic cones, stripped of the sticker, stuck them to a washer and added some sand, and finally masked with some thin tape.

A spray of black undercoat, in retrospect I should have bent a few of these up.

Peel the tape off, and now we have added safety!

Next up I took a plastic gas tank, glued it to a MDF coaster, added a plastic street sign (which I bent up with a pair of pliers), and some left over pieces of MDF railing from my Spartan Terrain sets.

Stupidly I undercoated the whole thing red. Realising shortly afterwards this wasn't what I was after I resprayed in black.

I

That's better...

Brown and drybrush with a lighter brown on the base. The tank, fences and sign were heavily dry-brushed in metal. The fence and sign were dry-brushed again in a lighter metal. Following that I applied white to the tank using heavy to light stippling with a torn piece of foam.

The rust was a light brown wash dribbled over the top and around all the edges and valves. With a final coat of Tamiya rust weathering powder in patches all over.

Originally I did a cross on the sign, but wasn't thrilled with it. I decided to paint over it...

That seems more appropriate.

A Post Apocalyptic View

My last few posts have been all about Gaslands, the post-apocalyptic demolition derby where roll cages and machine guns are minimum requirements for entry. It's a fun game, and I've thoroughly enjoyed messing around with some Hot Wheels cars making them look the part (you can see more here and here). Well the nest two cars are done, I have two more to do next, and then I'll be waiting on some bikes from Ramshackle, after which I'll be done (yeah, that's what I tell myself).

Next is a monster truck and a buggy, after that the bikes, and then... well... I need a war-rig right?

As well as getting the cars done I remembered I had some 4x4 boards sitting in my shed for use with Infinity, and after some careful deliberation (it may have been pure impulse), I decided to paint one up all post-apocalyptic. It was pretty straight forward stuff - a large quantity of cheap brown paint and three quarters of a plastic cup of sand mixed together and then rolled onto a 4x4 board of 3mm MDF (yes, I did mix my Imperials and Metrics in the same sentence...).

Ok, so doubtless a big open space is fun if no-one is about and you can let the car go a bit, but this is Gaslands! I need some things for cars to crash into!

From previous terrain building I had some left over pieces of cork-board floor tiles. I broke them up with the idea of making them into heaps of concrete walls etc - nice and tough objects for the cars to bounce off.

Ripped up bits of cork floor tile, glued together using PVA or white glue...

A black spray undercoat...

We don't need no Jersey Barriers in the POST-Future! No! We smash up Jersey Barriers and pile them up to make POST-Jersey Barriers!

After undercoating, I dry-brushed thickly with a blue-gray craft paint, followed by a light gray, and finally a very light dry-brush with white. They're not the best, I should have gone easier on the light gray step to let the darker tone beneath come through a bit more. But they look reasonable, and were quick to do.

The new cars with the new POST-Jersey barriers...

The board, as well as the various vehicles I have finished so far... I think I need some gates...

By the by, the latest episode of my podcast, On Minis Games is up, and in it we review Gaslands! Oh! If you're interested you can find it here, the link to subscribe can be found on the same page, or you can find us in iTunes...

Variety is the Spice of Life...

In the lull of waiting for various pieces of writing to pass through the editing process and back to me for revision or rejection (hopefully the former), I have been chipping away at various hobby projects. I have come to the conclusion that I have far too many projects I would like to be working on, and far too many games to really give any of them justice. Naturally, and like any good wargamer, the projects I am working on are all for new things.

Aside from recording and editing episodes of the On Minis Games podcast (which I wrote about last time), I also managed to assemble my British force for Sharp Practice; I won't be writing anything more about them this time, I'll cover them in a later post.

In addition to these things, I have started refining a dice system that I think could work nicely with a Dungeon Crawl style game I have been working on in fits and starts for a while now, I have been putting together some scenery, and finally, mulling over which Ancients force I should collect for Sword and Spear.

The scenery I have been assembling is from the Spartan Scenics line of MDF 28mm scale sci-fi buildings. The Starter set is a extremely large and heavy box, full of a variety of buildings, corridors, doors and so on. The instructions leave a little to be desired, but everything does make sense if you group the MDF sheets by the letter codes. 

So far I have managed to assemble two buildings, and have a metric ton of MDF waiting to be put together. The scenery is very nice, with good details, and goes together rather well. All the buildings are designed so that the tops may be removed so the interiors are exposed, and everything is very modular. The Starter set is an excellent purchase, with a lot of stuff crammed in the box.

One of the two buildings I have constructed so far, with some 28mm Zanshi (Yu Jing models, from the Infinity Miniatures Game) added for scale.

As the photos attest these buildings are quite large, spacious, and have plenty of doorways, which may be blocked up by doors, or attached to corridors etc. These are not the two largest buildings in the Starter Set, and I still have a huge pile of stuff to get through (before I open any of the other boxes I may or may not have as well).

All the other stuff from the Starter Set, waiting for attention...

I also got some of the Spartan Scenics resin scenery sets - they have a whole collection of things to fill out and add detail to the rooms, from tables and monitors, to medical beds, cryo-pods, munitions cabinets, crates and even a pool table. I added some pieces to the room to see what they'd look like, and all I can say is that they are amazing.

The detail is spectacular, and they really add a lot of character to the rooms. I'm under no illusions as to whether they will get painted, but who knows... one day perhaps!

Lastly, the other hobby project that has been chewing away at my mind is what force to collect for Sword and Spear. Sword and Spear is an ancients set of miniature game rules, my good friend Quinton (whose blog may be found here) rather likes the idea of Romans, which leaves me indecisively trying to pick between Gauls, Britons, Dacians and Parthians, oh, or possibly Carthaginians. 

I have heard excellent reviews of this rules set, and being a sucker for historical games it has piqued my interest for some time. I am thinking of collecting a force in 6mm, partly because they are relatively cheap, and partly because I have always liked the idea of having a force in 6mm. Decisions, decisions...