Another Pleasant Valley Sunday......

Hey folks we have started working on Pleasant Valley which is a small town near Station 42 for our generic Sci-Fi setting.  This is a basic "test" layout.  We are going to build a raised shuttle landing pad in the bare front corner of the table.  Of course we will be using vehicles, barrels, crates, and other scatter terrain to fill in as needed.  I hope we can wrap this one up in the next couple of weeks so we can use it for our Station 42 War campaign.  

100 bottle cap barrels

Sometimes we do something completely insane for our games.  This last weekend we put together and finished 100 bottle cap barrels.  Before we had about 35-40 so this will provide us with a lot more scatter terrain for our games which is important because our Station 42 table is 5'x12'.

Our other barrels are all generic so we decided these should have corporate labels as well as warning labels. Cutting out and pasting on the labels was by far the hardest part of the project.  We cut and pasted literally hundreds of them.

You might recognize some of the fictional corporations we used.  Not bad for a weekend project I guess.  These are part of a larger supply depo project we are working on.  Next up will be some other containers and we hope to have some large shipping crates as well.  We already have a lot of labels printed out.

The Advantages of Playable Terrain

 One of the things we have been doing with the Station 42 project is that we are making all of the buildings as playable as we can.  That is we have buildings that can be opened up and furnished so we can put miniatures inside.  We've found this is extremely helpful in making the terrain more useful for different types of games. 

 There are a lot of excellent terrain products and scratch built projects that look amazing but are not very playable.  For some items that is ok but for larger buildings especially that can make a beautiful piece of terrain far less useful.  I've got a number of buildings on my terrain shelves that look cool but aren't that fun to game on because they just become big blocking pieces of terrain.  Like square cliffs. 

 Big non-playable buildings are especially frustrating when you are playing skirmish games or role playing games.  Having interiors can be a lot more dynamic and fun when you are doing small scale battles.  If the heroes duck inside a building you can just open it up and continue to play rather than move to a map or try and just position the minis on top of the building. 

 However even in larger scale battle having buildings that can open up for play can provide for my interesting situations for snipers, scouts, and skirmishers. 

 There are some things to keep in mind when designing playable buildings.  For one thing you need to make sure you can get enough miniatures in them and that the interior details and furnishings allow enough room for a reasonable number of miniatures to move around in.  A good thing to do is to keep most of the furniture up against the wall in smaller buildings.  Doorways should be larger than is realistic to better accommodate based models although sometimes you will just have to pick a model up and place them on the other side of the door if the have too large a base. 

 Multi story buildings get pretty complicated.  The upper floors need to be more simply furnished than the lower floors because you will have to move them around more.  Also on very large buildings you may want to only make the lower and upper floors playable or perhaps every few floors.  It can be assumed that the floors in between are of a similar layout. 

Remember to keep your construction simple and durable.  Playable buildings are going to be handled a lot more and they aren't going to be as supported as a non-playable building.  Furnishings and interior details need to be small enough that they don't hinder play.  If you keep your interiors simple you can change out finishing to change the look of the building.  Wall details can be held in place with sticky tack as well as floor details like rugs. 

More Sci-Fi signs now at Station 42

 Well I made several more signs from trading card holders and I put them up around Station 42 since I was setting it up for a game anyway.  I even made some signs for some of the buildings which I think turned out pretty good. 

 Here's a close up shot of some of the advertisements and a building sign.  Hopefully I'll have stage 2 of Station 42 done soon.  We are trying to get all the signs done and finish all their interiors.

Speaking of interiors here is a shot of Rosie's Workshop with furniture and some data screens I made using the same method as the signs. 

Here's another shot.  I tried to make the displays look as if they had several windows open on them.  I'll try and get better shots of the screens up soon.  I'm really happy with the way they turned out. 

Sci-Fi Billboard update!

 I knocked out a couple billboards from the trading card display protectors I picked up.  I glued the protectors to some cheap shaving razor guards to make bases for them.  I'm even thinking about gluing them to magnets so I can stick them to metal railings and signpost.  I've used parts from these cheap razors in a number of projects. 

 I found some "Futurist Fashion" images from a quick google search then made a simple logo for the fake fashion design company "Alejandro of Titan" in photoshop.  This isn't my most futuristic set of buildings and I know that these ads in particular look a bit out of place but you get the idea. 

I printed these out on some luster photo paper then cut them out and slid them into the protectors.  I made two "posters" for each billboard.  In the future I plan to glue the images together to make them a little easier to deal with and look a little cleaner but These are just test subjects.

One word of warning.  You need to be very careful that you keep your work surface clean when using these card display protectors or any other clear plastic items.  I messed up one of my heavy duty protectors because I accidentally laid one of the pieces in a small drop of super glue that I got on my work table.  I think I can salvage it as a distressed display or I might set it up to be one sided and mount on the side of a building or something. 

Sci-Fi Terrain bits

 The Station 42 project has all but spiraled out of control which was to be expected.  Instead of doing one big spaceport project we are doing one big spaceport project and a number of other locations around the spaceport creating a mini setting.  I guess this is to be expected and it's kind of a cool thing.  After all the big project is coming along nicely but it's still a 5x12' table so it's not the most practical thing to have regular games on.  Still because of the modular nature of the designs we are working with it is providing us with a lot of use.  One of the things we have been needing to work on though are detail bits.  We have managed to put together a lot of buildings but we don't have a lot of smaller detail bits or furniture for those buildings.  We have some that we have purchased and scratch built but we need more.  The goal is to make these bits as modular as possible too. 

 We have a number of these smaller adobe structures we built out of cork tile we are working on.  We plan to use them for a lot of different locations.  They are very plain however and we were looking to spice them up with some tech bits.  Here is an example of some tech bits made from junk.  We built little platforms that we can slide right up against the building so it will look integrated and be highly modular.  Also we can put these pieces out as stand alone terrain bits.  On larger buildings they can even be set on top. 

 Here are four that I made that have identical construction.  I often use the design principle of unity and variety when thinking about miniatures and terrain. 

 Here is a shot of a number of our adobe buildings with some work in progress modular tech bits as well as some of the other storage/chemical tanks and other smaller terrain bits we have been working on. 

 Stage one of the painting.  I hope to make a large number of these for use with my terrain sets.  I want to make some larger and some smaller sets to add to the versatility of my terrain.  Little projects like these can add a lot of detail without adding a lot of storage problems.  It's easier to make one building with several modular bits than make 10 buildings that only look one way when you set them on the table. 

 Here are some simple wooden tables we made.  All of our buildings open up for play so we need a lot of furniture.  There are several lines of pre-made furniture out there but we are going to need a large volume of furniture so we are going to have to resort to scratch building to fill in the gaps.  These are for a sci-fi setting even though they are wood.  They could represent either nicer actual wood furniture or fake wood furnishings.  That brings up another thing.  Don't discount any fantasy or historic furniture you might have in your collection for Sci-Fi settings.  You can find uses for it because furniture designs have a long life span.

 Another detail I'm working on is signage and billboard advertisements.  I was looking for a way to make them highly modular and easy.  I got the idea to pick up some cheap acrylic photo frames and some plastic trading card sleeves.  I plan to make adds using photoshop and them sliding them into the frames.  I'm going to use different methods to attach them to my buildings and also make some stand along billboards.  Being able to change out the art will make them highly modular. 

Here is a detail shot of the two types of card protectors.  The one of the left came in a pack of 35 for less than $3.00 and the acrylic one was $1.29.  They are designed to hold collector cards like sports cards. 

Legends of the Gold Sea Costal town tavern WIP

 We started working on the "Legends of the Gold Sea" project.  The first project will be a small costal town.  This is the tavern we are working on.  It will have a small staff. 

 It measures about 8x6" and it's about 3" tall.  Most of the buildings in the town will not be overly large.

Next up will be a small temple.