Spodding

I’ve got the basic landforms done now and I’m just covering the foam with polyfilla and building up the cliff faces bit by bit. It’s coming along pretty well, but i am behind schedule and am starting to look for places where I can take short cuts to save time.

As usual with me, nothing ever gets finished and this table is no exception. I will take it to Melbourne ready for playing on, but far from finished in my mind. Ah well, at least I can bring it home again and work on it to my heart’s content (that is, until the next project comes along).

Here are some in-progress shots (they are quite large):

The blinding light of an atomic blast fills the skies over New Mexico. The intense heat from the blast instantly vaporizes everything within a one mile radius. A deadly cloud of radiation falls over the land causing most living things to sicken and die an agonizing death. But some creatures survive, mutated by the atomic fallout to become gigantic monsters – the stuff of nightmares.

The sunset of man’s dominion over the earth has begun.

I watched a few 1950s classic (b-grade) sci-fi films over the weekend and thoroughly enjoyed myself – The War of the Worlds and Them!. I used to watch these films as a kid and seeing them again brought back a real feeling of nostalgia, but also opened up my eyes to the gaming possibilities it presents.

Imagine the 1950s “duck and cover” mentality (commies under the beds, giant mutant bugs, flying saucers), the “googie” architecture of the times (Art Deco meets the Jetsons), and the gung-ho military attitudes of the post-war era. A host of great gaming opportunities – National Guard troops rolling through the streets of Los Angeles with WWII-era Sherman tanks and halftracks, setting up a defensive line against the hordes of ants that are pouring out of the sewers.

Or a zombie attack at Disneyland! Atomic waste spilled from a train crash near Disneyland contaminates the food in the staff cafeteria, which causes the employees to mutate into Zombies who then go on the rampage attacking the patrons. I have images in my mind of Zombie Mickey Mouse or Donald Duck shambling through the wreckage of Tomorrowland.

Cool stuff!

I’m hooked! Are you?

I bought the base for the game table today and thought it might be a good idea to spread out all of the terrain pieces on it – to get a feel for their placement in the landscape.

It brought home just how much work I still have to do on this to be finished by May! Panic time…

Here’s a photo of the table:

“Metal Tail” It’s a (somewhat cynical) term I have heard used by staff of a large gaming company to describe a range of models that supports a ruleset. The metal tail in this case is quite literal however.

I went away on a vacation for a few days before Christmas and when I returned, I had a package waiting for me on my doorstep from Nic Robson at Eureka Miniatures. Inside was this wonderful little model sculpted by Kosta Heristanidis – the start of the Jurassic Reich range (to be released in July I believe). I have just this minute finished painting it.

I think the only things missing from this model are a few saddlebags and ammunition pouches.

I have been working on the castle over the past month or so, but progress has been slow due to a strange lethargy that has been hanging over me. I can’t explain it, but I’ve just had no energy for so many things that I have committed to, and they all languished in the background while I wasted my time on Facebook.

Anyway, here are a couple of shots of the castle as it stands at the moment: The images suck a bit because I am doing this late at night and I’m too lazy to get my tripod out and set up proper lighting so I have to rely on flash or holding the camera dead still.

The Jurassic Reich table is to be divided by a small river that is crossed by two bridges. The river is impassable by vehicles but can be crossed by infantry and dinosaurs. The first bridge is high up the hill near the entrance to the castle and spans a deep gorge. As such, it needs to be imposing and give the impression of height (since we can’t really recreate a 200ft drop to a raging torrent below). The second bridge is down on the plain and should appear a little more homely and rustic. Both bridges need to be wide enough to take the widest vehicle I own (a Panzer IV) and should be removable so that I could swap them out for other structures in the future (such as a ruined version of each).

I spent the weekend making the first bridge and it’s almost complete – just needs a little more stone work doing and then it’s ready for painting. The second is on the workbench and I expect to start cutting it out today or tomorrow.

These pics will eventually be incrporated into a ‘how-to’ guide.

Well, I have discovered exactly how addictive Facebook is. For the past month I have been hooked on the damned site and its simple but highly playable Flash games like Farmville. Damn! “Spodding” at its worst – to waste time doing something that is ultimately useless while you should be doing something else.

Time to put that behind me and get back to doing what I really love and that is making wargaming terrain (detect any irony there?).

So I made some progress on the castle recently. The curtain wall has been sitting languishing for about two months, so this weekend I made the last of the battlements and started finsihing off the stonework. This bit is nearly finished and so I’d like to get it out of the way by the end of October. I also did some work on the tower roof:

Painting is a bit ’sporadic’ at the moment, but i will get it done a bit more once I do the windows of the tower and finish the crenellations at the top.

The Last Alliance website (www.thelastalliance.com) suffered a major blow last month when the hosting company took the drastic steps of deleting the source-code and database backups. Not 100% sure of the reasons for their behaviour but I can make some guesses.

Anyway, there are a couple of thousand LOTR gamers who feel betrayed and abandoned as a result of this. A number of TLA refugees began to trickle in to the One Ring and I could see that several established members of the site were starting to feel disgruntled at the newer residents. It’s a common and predictable reaction to an influx of ‘newcomers’ into an established community and one that I see repeatedly here in Australia and read about in other parts of the world all the time.

So I have spent the past couple of weeks attempting to resurrect TLA. My intentions in doing so are an odd mixture of philanthropy and selfishness. I feel compassion for those who have been abandoned and betrayed by the thoughtlessness that led to the collapse of their site, yet I really don’t want 2000 newcomers overwhelming the One Ring.

I could see that the people who most wanted to rescue TLA didn’t have the right skills to do the job, nor did they have any real plan of action. It seemed to me that all their eagerness was going to waste because they didn’t know how or where to begin.

So I have arranged for some webspace and put a temporary forum there for people to gather and keep abreast of the developments. While this is in place I have begun building a new version of TLA using a different approach, more in line with tabletop-hdr.de or belloflostsouls.com. It’s odd though, because I have somehow become the key player in two large LOTR websites now and yet I never intended to have a major part in any of them. And on top of that I have offered to assist thepalantir.org with their technical problems too (haven’t heard back from them yet).

Maybe I should start charging people.

Patiently waiting upon my doorstep last night was a large brown parcel.

I knew what it was as soon as I saw it and rushed it inside in a state of child-like excitement. Inside was “Space Hulk” – a 20th anniversary re-release of Games Workshop’s classic miniatures board game. The package weighs in at a whopping 4kg and is literally stuffed to the brim with its contents (after taking everything out to examine, I couldn’t fit it back into the box again).

The cardboard terrain pieces are about 3-4mm thick, glossy, and slightly embossed. The artwork on the pieces is simply beautiful – photo realistic images with superb detail. They interlock like a jigsaw puzzle and appear to be compatible with the original board pieces too. The miniatures are multipart plastic with the highest level of detail I have ever seen on GW’s plastics. They click together tightly and don’t need gluing (although that’s not a bad idea). I cannot wait to start painting these guys – 11 terminators, a Librarian, 22 Genestealers and a Brood Lord. Fabulous!

Games Workshop have gone all out with this product. It has been done to the highest standard I’ve ever seen and is worth the money in my opinion. I am in geeky heaven. Now, can I afford to buy another one so the kids can play it without me freaking out when they drop one of the models?

I will take some photos later when the light improves.

(some days later, here’s a photo of my first game)

Very much a Work-In-Progress, so excuse the crappy paint job etc. Lot’s to do still – I had hoped to get it finished this month, but it turned out larger than I was expecting and I ran out of time, so it will spill into September now. Good job I’m a bit further along with the castle eh?