Monday 18 March 2024

Here's a small diorama I've put together

I've been playing around with my lightbox, DSLR and tripod.


In this photo, a group of Pirates from Bad Squiddo and North Star run slap bang wallop into a mysterious masked figure and his Stone Troll. Intent on finding plunder in the old ruins on the hill above the bay, they didn't think that anything nasty might be lurking up there. Things may not turn out well for these intrepid, if impetuous adventurers.

The Stone Troll is actually a North Star Frostgrave Coal Man and the mysterious masked figure is Malcor from the Maze of Malcor Frostgrave collection, also from North Star.

The background for this shot is a scene from one of my Jon Hodgson books and a small scenic piece I recently made using Renedra plastic ruins on an A4 MDF base.;


I primarily made this to use in photos but it should also be useful as actual gaming scenery. The twisting plants growing around the ruins are model railway wire foliage branches. The grass, gravel and earth are from a variety of sources.

For those of you who are interested in such things, I took this picture with my Pentax K-70 DSLR and Pentax  DA 1:3.5-5.6 18-55mm AL WR standard zoom lens. The picture was shot using aperture priority with an aperture of f25 and an ISO 400 film speed. I've recently bought a JJC TM electronic remote shutter release (cheaper than the Pentax model) which makes slow shutter speed photography a lot easier. I'm thinking about using my Sigma 50mm 1:2.8 DG Macro lens in future lightbox experiments.


Sunday 17 March 2024

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.

Wednesday 13 March 2024

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.



Sunday 10 March 2024

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.

Monday 26 February 2024

More Wargames Atlantic giant spiders

About a year ago, I posted about the excellent Wargames Atlantic Classic Fantasy Giant Spiders. Back in January I decided that I really had to assemble and paint the rest of the box, and here are the results. I've taken two pictures of them. Firstly a simple shot showing the spiders against a plain backdrop and, when you scroll down a second picture set up as a small action diorama.

As you can see the six big spiders are absolutely huge posed with a Bad Squiddo Freyja's Wrath female Berserker (who I use as my Barbarian character for D&D). The smaller spider is the Barbarian's latest acquisition, Fluffy the giant wolf spider.

I wanted to use a simple but menacing dark palette for these spiders. After assembly, a tricky job,they were glued to 5cm MDF bases which were then covered with a mix of PVA glue and calcium sand (which is used in reptile vivariums). 

I undercoated the spiders in Halford's matt grey spray primer and, once dry, gave them a wash of Nuln Oil. Next I set about a series of dry-brushed layers in dark, medium and pale grey and then set them aside.  Once dry, I then finished off the spiders with a wash of diluted W&N Indian ink and, when that was dry, I picked out the fangs and eyes in a pale grey. The Indian ink had dripped down onto the bases, which was what I wanted and I finished the bases off with a simple wash of lightly diluted Agrax Earthshade

I should have made seven giant spiders and one large one, but somewhere over the last year, I seem to have lost the head/thorax part for one of the big guys, I might have to look at some kind of human/arachnid mutant at some point.

Anyway, as promised above, here is the diorama;

I'm pretty happy with this picture. I think it has come out really nicely.

The scene was set up in my lightbox, using a Jon Hodgson backdrop, a selection of my 3D printed ruins and a floor made from my Warbases dungeon tiles. I took several shots with aperture priority using different light intensities and different apertures, shooting at an exposure range between ISO 100 and ISO 800 with my Pentax K-70 DSLR. 

Wednesday 21 February 2024

Egyptian ruins, plus a fountain.

 First, the fountain;


This is another 3D print from Dungeon Scenes. The murky green water has been given a coat of acrylic gloss varnish. I allowed the green paint to go up the walls of the fountain, hoping to create the effect of algal growth. I think it looks OK. The 28mm guy is for scale only.

Next a number of resin pieces from The Square, who can be found at many trade shows. These are all based up for desert-based gaming;


Spot the 28mm guy, he's looking pretty small against these pieces.

These were easy enough to paint; base coat spray, dry-brushing in lighter colours, a wash here and there to bring out the details, a few bits of Gamers' Grass and lots of sandy ballast. Job done.

Hopefully these will get plenty of fantasy, pulp, VSF and eldritch horror use.

I'm going to have to get back to painting actual minis now. Sadly, the painting mojo is still hiding somewhere.

Thursday 15 February 2024

More 3D printed stuff - this time science fiction

This time it is sci fi terrain pieces.


 Once again, this is all from Dungeon Scenes. The figure is for scale purposes only.

I thought that I would go for a Grimdark theme for these pieces rather than shiny clean advanced technology or a Mandalorian-style dusty Cowboys in Space look.

The big rusty blue thing at the back has been painted to be an abandoned installation of some kind, mainly because I had previously dropped it and one of the sticking up pieces had got broken. The two generator type pieces are clearly the kind of ancient technology that suits a degenerate and xenophobic civilisation that doesn't really understand how its machines work, or maybe it is alien tech that does abominable things in strange and incomprehensible ways?

The hexagonal sensor array (or whatever else it might be) at the back isn't as Grimdark as the other pieces, especially the bronzed tower.

I'll get these in front of some of Jon Hodgson's sci fi backdrops at some point.

The two generators could definitely feature in Pulp or VSF games, as well as more conventional science fiction settings.

Overall, I am pretty pleased with how they have turned out, even though this photograph doesn't really do them justice.