sho3box

The vulture model to sit on the sign is in the post.

I warbled about getting my post apocalyptic town ready for gaming with just over a year ago.  The setting and my conceptual plan are loosely detailed in that post.

I finally got around to working on the town itself over the last few weeks, only one year later than I intended…

The first thing that I did was assemble the lovely resin shacks that I got from Pardulon and then base them on cork tiles.  I have based a lot of my non-urban terrain this way for the last few years as its cheap, surprisingly sturdy, easy to work with and the broken edges give a rocky, wild west feeling.   Its a quick, cheap and easy solution to something that has always previously been a hassle for me.

As is apparent from the photo I also stuck some barrels, crates. wheels and other bits and pieces down too.  I tried to include enough to at least give a vague feeling of the buildings being lived in, but without clogging up the pieces so much that they limit figure placement to an irritating level.  Only time and gameplay will tell if I succeeded at balancing that.

I made five shanty buildings back in 1996 (above).  They were largely built from corrugated plastic poster board that I took from a skip on my way home from college.

Note the chipped edges on the old shacks shown. They will be either repainted or obscured in some way later on.

I decided to press these old stalwarts into service in Standard Falls and so I stuck them to cork bases too.  I didnt bother trying to blend the slightly battered existing card bases to the cork.  I would rather just assume that it is a sheet of scrap that the shanty builders built on top of.

I left enough room on the building bases to add bits of balsa, card and textured styrene sheet at the front.  That sort of thing can give a little context to terrain pieces and help them to look a marginally less like they were dropped from orbit into the setting.  Also I hoped that the addition of a post apocalyptic boardwalk would evoke a little of the western frontier town feeling.

Note the GW ork barricades (rear) and the Pardulon junk piles (fore).

Next I stuck half a set of Renedra plastic gravestones and a set of Pardulon junk piles to cork bases (I hope that the other half of the Renedra gravestone set will eventually be stuck to greener looking bases for use in zombie and Buffy type games).  I cleaned up a set of Games Workshop Ork Barricades at this stage too, but figured that they didnt need to be based.

Finally I got a some popsicle sticks, burned “STANDARD FALLS” into them with a soldering iron and hot glued them to cork bases.  I forgot to WIP photograph those at that stage but via time travel technology a picture of one of the finished signs is at the top of this post.

Lastly, for no reason other than I feel like it I will show you what two of my cats were doing right then as I managed to take a photo of them while forgetting to keep track of the miniatures…

I made two signs, once with each of the two sizes of popsicle stick that I had available.  I was trying to get a western feel and make signs reminiscent of the sign for the town “Redemption” in The Quick and the Dead.  I think that it worked well.  Scorching the letters in was fun too.

Next: painting.

Filed under: Terrain | Tagged: 2011, Gorkamorka, Post Apocalyptic, Sci-fi, Standard Falls |