Showing posts with label grimdark. Show all posts
Showing posts with label grimdark. Show all posts

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.

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.