Category Archives: Terrain

Wargaming terrain & scenery posts.

Infinity Space Station Hangar Walls

I’ve posted a test print of some printed space station walls previously but after finding a nice batch of Sintra (1/8th foamed PVC plastic board) in the offcuts bin at my useful local plastic supplier I decided to start that project with some larger, more space-consuming pieces and started building a set of six big wall modules.

These are 12″ long, 6″ high, and designed as hangar or cargo bay walls. Six of them plus a couple of pillars will allow me to section off a 2′ by 2′ area of table, run a line of wall clear across the table, or do a number of other interesting arrangements. I’ll also do a few end-cap pillars so we can have stub walls if desired.

The design incorporates an “access tunnel” across the top of each wall that is 30mm wide and 30mm deep; there will be hatchways on each wall module to access it. I wanted to provide alternate ways of getting around the table and give players options for moving through the walls aside from the doors. Similarly, each module except the one with one single huge 6″x4″ door has at least two doors in it. Doors are always going to be chokepoints in scenery like this, there’s no avoiding that, but at least with multiple doors and hatchways per module that effect is somewhat limited.

Basic construction is done on five of the six modules; the sixth is going to be a variant of the very first, with a huge 6″x4″ door in it. All of the large doorways will have built-in sliding doors installed, and I’m planning some freestanding doors on small stands for the human-sized doors. After that it’ll be on to the more human-scaled portions of the space station terrain, but this is a good start!

Review: Impudent Mortal Near Future Elevators

I picked up a pack of Impudent Mortal’s Near Future Elevator Set, as mentioned in a previous post, and thought I’d put a few pictures up and do a bit of a review.

First, I have to say that Walt, the man behind Impudent Mortal, is awesome to deal with. He’s incredibly quick to reply to emails, worked with me to figure out the best way to ship his stuff to Canada (the US Postal Service having recently cranked it’s foreign rates to moderately silly levels) and I look forward to doing more business with him and his company in the future!

So on to the elevators. They’re laser cut from a mix of 3mm MDF and 1/16th cardboard (greyboard), which gives them some nice details and makes them slightly finer-grained than some of the scenery out there that just uses MDF. The base, walls, and door frames are MDF, while the doors are layered cardboard and card is used for details on the interior walls and floor as well as around the door frame.

Each elevator — you get two in the pack — is 3.75″ wide across the doors, 3.5″ long, and 2 1/8″ tall. There’s 11 pieces of MDF total and about 28 total pieces of greyboard, that count being inflated by the fact that the grilles that detail the floor are all separate pieces, 16 of them.

There are also eight small control panels of laser cut acrylic, which go in the openings on either side of the doors. They’re not visible in any of my photos because I haven’t installed them yet; they’ll go in dead last after I’m finished all painting and weathering.

Everything fits together with the ease we’ve come to expect from laser cut scenery, and while most pieces are pretty obvious in their placement and function, dry-fitting and testing as you go (before applying glue!) is always advised.

The doors slide in and out of the door frames vertically and fit very well, loose enough to actually move but snug enough not to fall out while transporting or handling the piece. Each door is three pieces of cardboard, so it has details on both the inside and outside and they’re reversible, which is nice.

One thing I couldn’t initially find on the IM site is the actual instructions for these elevators; turns out they’re tucked into the ITS and Paradiso Scatter Terrain Instructions PDF as that was the set they were originally part of.

I’ll post more pictures on a future post once I’ve gotten some paint on my elevators. Two is probably enough for any single tabletop so I’m not sure I’ll order more, but I’m very pleased with them; they’re unique cover items for an Infinity table and provide more options and opportunity than the classic packing crate or cargo container. They’ll look great as scatter on the space station terrain I’ve been working on!

If IM ever decide to do more of this style of terrain, the sort of thing you might find in a space station or cargo facility, I’d be very interested.

Space Station Walls for Infinity

I’ve been kicking around ideas for an interior table setup for Infinity for several months now – that is, a table that instead of being buildings and regular terrain, is entirely or mostly the interior of some large structure. A big starship or space station setup was an obvious choice, especially as the faction I run in Infinity, Haqqislam, is described as the premiere merchant marine power with a very strong space presence throughout the Human Sphere.

The idea percolated in the back of my head for ages, a few planning sketches were made, but no actual concrete work was started until Captain Spud posted his spectacular Yu Jing “Space Truck” transport starship (Infinity forum thread here, Youtube video tour here) and his link to the really cool Creative Commons-licenced science fiction textures from Philip Klevestav that he posted as part of his online portfolio.

I had already planned on doing the station walls & bulkheads in mattboard, my usual building material, but finding those textures and realizing how easy they would be to modify and change has actually prompted me to get started in GIMP on creating wall panels and other graphics.

inf_wall01
First panel, a 6″ wide by 3″ high bulkhead, with two Haqqislam troopers propping it up. Click for larger, as usual.

I’ve created a multi-layer GIMP image that should make it easy to create lots of variations and slightly different wall layouts for different areas of the space station. The basic module above is 6″ long and 3″ wide; I’m going to use a 3″x3″ module as standard, expanded to a 3x3x3 cube if required, with 6″ and 12″ long wall segments for the most part, with some 9″ and 3″ long pieces just to break things up a bit. These are the same dimensions as the Objective Room I built for Infinity earlier this year, which wound up with a total footprint of 9″x9″ and 3″ tall.

I’ll also do some 6″ high units, especially for very large cargo doors and the walls of cargo areas, hangars, and similar large spaces. Most of them will likely have catwalks partway up the walls, just to add a bit more of the 3rd dimension back into the playable parts of the scenery.

More as this project progresses, and eventually I’ll figure out how to share some of my images, although the working GIMP file is already 7.8Mb and growing!

Blood Bowl Sideline Ads, Sheet The First

Finally got a sheet done with most of my Blood Bowl sideline ads to date, arranged in strips and sized for 1″x3″, which is a good height for sideboards or hoardings.

There’s a mix of Blood Bowl-inspired ads, almost all parodies of real products. There’s Haterade, Croak, Plopsi, Goblin Sweat, and DorfAde (in new Stunty Tears flavour!) for starters, as well as the Necromancer Beer ad I’ve posted previously and a Blood Bowl ad/joke.

Later on I plan on doing different sized/differently proportioned versions of most of these, but I needed 1″ tall for the sideline scenery I’m currently building so here it is!

A4-sized PDF, single page

Letter-sized PDF, single page

These are all my own work; I’m sure some of the ideas or parody names have been done elsewhere by other members of the BB community but these versions and this artwork is all my own. Permission is granted for personal, non-commercial copying or printing. Enjoy, feedback appreciated!

Goblin Dugout Started

Simple dugout for the goblin-themed Blood Bowl pitch-side set I’m doing; there will be another dugout similar to this for the other team, and the turn- and reroll-trackers will be done up to look like spectator terraces/stands.

Coffee stir sticks, mostly, over a plastic base. Click for full size, as usual.
Coffee stir sticks, mostly, over a plastic base. Click for full size, as usual.

The basic structure is coffee stir sticks over a plastic sheet base; the hoarding along the back will have ads on both sides, similar to the ones used on the scoreboard and some others I’ve been working on.

More soon, although I’m packing up all the gaming stuff before the end of the year to move into a new apartment with my girlfriend, so that will (among other things!) disrupt the finishing of this set of scenery. Also, Christmas, New Years, all that holiday stuff. Still, updates will appear here when I can!

A Goblin Scoreboard, Part Two

The base of the new Blood Bowl scoreboard is now covered in sand, painted, and flocked. I might still add some additional foliage or other details to the base, but it’s perfectly usable as is and I’m willing to declare it finished and move on!

gobthing
Base finished on the scoreboard. Click for larger.

Instead of puttying around the strip of plexi in the centre of the base I used matchstick-sized wood strips and made it look like rough timber foundations. I also put a wooden boardwalk across the front; I figure that’ll be a good hangout for markers or sideline figures for the stuff like cheerleaders, apothecaries, wizards, or other BB sideline addons.

I’m still brainstorming how to do team dugouts and turn- and reroll-tracks to match this scoreboard, but I should the details figured out by this weekend and then they, like this scoreboard, should be fairly quick and simple builds. After that, the more involved project is going to be doing a new fabric pitch, probably on the back of the current lizard-themed fabric pitch I made last winter.

A Goblin Scoreboard, Part One

Decided that my Blood Bowl Goblin team, currently glorying in the name of T.U.R.D. (what that stands for changes every single game they play…) needed a scoreboard, to use as substitute to my existing Lizardman temple BB setup.

Goblins have an reputation for being clever but not smart, and for lunatic behaviour at the best of times. This presumably explains why they attempt to play Blood Bowl at all, and excuses all sorts of things like really shoddy carpentry. With that in mind, I broke out the craft wood and set to work!

goblin-thing-one
Goblin BB scoreboard in progress. Three billboards for colour, and the actual scoreboard part two-thirds of the way up. Weather indicator will go between the two score placards. Click for larger.

The main structure is coffee stir sticks, with basswood strips for the big vertical beams. The eventual plan is to have small rare earth magnets behind the scoreboard, embedded in a wood beam, to hold magnetic strip score number placards in place, and to have a smaller weather placard in between the two scores. There’s still some details to add, like “US” and “THEM” labels above the two score areas, and possibly a small announcers stand right at the top of the whole thing, some sort of rickety crowsnest with a raving goblin announcer howling away.

The base has a strip of scrap acrylic with two holes drilled in it to support two bits of wire that go up into holes in the bottoms of the legs, holding everything solidly, and then some scrap plastic to expand the footprint a bit more. I’ll putty along the edge of the acrylic to blend everything together and strengthen things further.

gob-thing-two
Three trolls and the scoreboard. You can see the rickety walkway in front of the actual scoreboard part here.

The second image has all three of my trolls, all still very much works in progress. Left and centre troll are the same figure, with some fairly extensive arm surgery on the left hand troll to give him a different pose than the stock centre troll. All three are Reaper Bones plastic figures, which are awesome for Blood Bowl conversions! You can see the narrow walkway in front of the score panels nicely in this shot, which might get a gobbo scorekeeper perched on it eventually.

More soon; I’m currently out of rare earth magnets and need to restock before I can finish this project the way I’m planning it. That should take place this weekend and then it’ll be fairly simple to finish the rest of the thing!

Giant Billboard Tower for Infinity

I’ve previously shown off big (5″ tall by 3″ wide) advertising graphics intended for use on an Infinity table – Weyland-Yutani, a travel poster, and Blue Sun; on Friday evening I decided to sit down and crank out the structure all three of those graphics will be shown off on.

The basic structure is actually very simple, being two vertical strips of mattboard with some cuts to make it look more interesting and some simple details added with scrap card. The frame is 2 inches wide, with the base being 3″x2″. There’s various horizontal pieces at several levels up the structure, although the structure is (deliberately) not optimized as a sniper nest. You can use it that way, but you are going to have compromised lines of fire no matter where you set up on the thing, and a number of the positions are also very exposed.

Weyland-Yutani & Blue Sun advertising on this side. Click for larger.
Weyland-Yutani & Blue Sun advertising on this side. Click for larger.

Total size is about 11.5″ tall with a footprint of about 3″x4″ or so; the dark blue figure at the base is the Fiday that has been seen in other photos.

Travel to Varuna on this side, and some more open structure above. Click for larger.
Travel to Varuna on this side, and some more open structure above. Click for larger.

Incidentially, the three blue things on the left are Tri-Ad Advertising Stands from Antenocitis Workshop; I picked them up recently along with a few things from Warsenal and at some point I’ll probably do quick review articles on them and some of the other pieces. Nice solid pieces of small urban clutter, anyway!

Infinity in the Jungle

Somewhere along the way the default tabletop setting for a game of Infinity became “futuristic urban/quasi-urban environment”, which is as true of most of our tables locally as it is anywhere else, but the game does have a full and interesting set of terrain rules and even tries to include things like zero-g, hazardous environments, and similar.

With that in mind, I finally pulled the box of jungle terrain that I’d built a few years ago for pulp gaming out and we set that up for Infinity this weekend for our first tournament event around here.

Looking across the jungle toward the Tohaa positions. Click for slightly larger, as usual.
Looking across the jungle toward the Tohaa positions. Click for slightly larger, as usual.

The platforms are lasercut MDF from the collection of one of the other local Infinity folks, and they look good adding a sci-fi touch to the jungle. Jungle is hard to move through, obstructs shooting but does not block it entirely, and makes things like spotting a bit more difficult. It makes for a great change from our usual urban jungle, and I’ll be taking the box o’ jungle terrain to many more Infinity sessions in the future.

Going back to talking about our grandly-named “Vancouver Island Open” Infinity event, we wound up with six of us playing, with a decent mix of factions represented. I came a solid third with a Hassassin Bahram force; here’s the rankings:

  1. Jeremy – 2/14/337 Nomads
  2. Jaime – 2/10/397 Yu Jing
  3. Brian – 2/7/353 Hassassin Bahram
  4. Nicholas – 1/10/390 Nomads
  5. Stewart – 1/8/468 Tohaa
  6. Chris – 1/4/344 Caledonians

The numbers are Wins/Total VP/Total Surviving Army Points. Total Wins determined basic standing, with VP and then Points being used to break ties. One thing I thought was interesting is that only two of us ran Sectorials, with four of the six opting for “vanilla” Faction lists.

We’ve got another event scheduled for the end of November, about a month from now, and hopefully we can get a regular round of events up and running locally!

Allow me to end with some 80’s hair and music with a highly appropriate title!
[su_youtube url=”https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o1tj2zJ2Wvg”]

Infinity Ad: A Bit Off-Colour

Yeah, so this one is based on a very, very juvenile joke. I’d apologize but I wouldn’t mean it!

It’s also smaller than some of my other recent graphics, designed to print at roughly business card size (2.25″ x 3.25″) to go over the backing cards used in the Infinity blister packs, which I’ve been reusing as billboard surfaces.

Enjoy!

Uranus Wreckers & Salvage. They'll fix your pressure vessel, all right! Click through to grab the full-size image from Imgur!
Uranus Wreckers & Salvage. They’ll fix your pressure vessel, all right! Click through to grab the full-size image from Imgur!