Tag Archives: Build Something Contest

Fantasy, Terrain

Build Something 2017: The Bloodyear Blomp

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Every year or so over on Lead Adventure Forum they hold a friendly Build Something competition. There’s a theme that imposes some restrictions; one year it was “your scenery must be based on a CD”; we had “marine/watercraft” once, and this year the theme is “flight”.

I’ve been a LAF member for years and it’s an awesome forum, but I’ve been fairly inactive over there for the last year or so. Joining the Build Something 2017 Contest was a good way to nudge me back into being an active member of this awesome online community.

The theme being “flight” I thought of doing a cargo shuttle of some sort for Infinity, but with only a six week timespan to complete the entire contest entry in, from start to finish, I shelved that tempting idea in favour of an entertainingly silly piece of Blood Bowl sideline terrain: the goblin-crewed Bloodyear Blomp, which carries magical cameras and announcers over Blood Bowl fields all over the known world!

To give it some actual in-game purpose, I’ll put a pair of Reroll counters on the base of the thing, to go along with the goblin scoreboard I made a while back.

Being goblin-engineered (to push the term “engineered” very near it’s breaking point!) the Blomp can be a bit ramshackle, so I just started building! I picked up a pack of craft foam spheres as the balloon/envelope structure of the Blomp and started jamming them together and then covering them with bits of scrap fabric.

Here’s the first building session’s progress.

Blomp! First construction of the blimp envelope, and a few of the goblins who will eventually crew the thing! Click for larger.

Since then I’ve added a fourth sphere to the tail end and done some more fabric.

More Blomp! Fourth envelope sphere in place and more fabric. Click for larger.

I’ve got a build thread over on LAF that will generally be updated faster and more frequently than I’ll do blog posts on the Blomp, in keeping with the spirit of the contest. I still need to figure out the gondola design and a bunch of other details, but it’s been a fun build so far!

Historicals, Pulp, Reviews, Terrain

Sarissa CityBlock Buildings, Finished

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Finally have the Sarissa CityBlock 28mm lasercut MDF buildings to a table-ready state, including another hand-painted advertising sign on the side of one of them.

Here’s all seven buildings (six CityBlock plus one Narrow Townhouse from the Gaslamp Alley range) stacked up somewhat awkwardly:

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All seven MDF buildings, ready for the tabletop. Scale provide by three 28mm Pulp Figures reporters. Click for larger.

In one of my earlier posts, Chris had asked in comments about how these buildings came apart, so here’s the Hotel Atlantic spread open:

hotel_parts
The Atlantic Hotel spread into it’s constituent parts; three floors and a roof. Click for larger, as usual.

You can see I haven’t (yet) done anything with the insides of any of these buildings; beyond possibly splashing a coat of plain paint in, I’m not sure how much I’ll do inside them.

So, having built seven of the things but not actually written a full review, what did I think? First off, I like them, and will definitely be ordering more of Sarissa Precision’s buildings at some point. They’re solidly built, well designed, have enough detail to look good right out of the box, and are also easy to add extra detail to. Everything fits together very well, the laser-cutting is crisp and precise, and the CityBlock & Gaslamp Alley buildings are good generic city filler buildings, similar to thousands of real-world buildings all over the world, pretty much anywhere Europeans influenced architecture. Use them as-is, you could be nearly anywhere in North America, the UK or much of Europe; add a few “local” touches (different street furniture, a few different buildings for flavour, etc) and you could be in Shanghai, Cairo or Singapore just as easily!

I’ll do a couple of things differently on the next batch of MDF buildings I build, though. First of all, painting MDF is like painting a sponge. The stuff absorbs paint and water like crazy, and is actually quite hard to paint as a result. You go through a surprising amount of paint to get decent coverage; and because of the absorbency you can get streaky or blotchy paint coverage very easily. A couple of my buildings required a second coat of their base colour, and painting details like windowframes and the signs was harder than it should have been because you needed thin, wet paints and a well-loaded brush to get good coverage. So I’ll be doing as much painting as possible before assembly next time, instead of rushing assembly this time just for the joy of having complete buildings sitting around!

Spray cans or an airbrush might actually work better than brushes for basecoats on MDF, if you have access to an airbrush or a better selection of spraypaint colours than I do currently.

I’ve got a whole pile of small scenery detail bits that have been building up on the edges of my painting desk recently, so with these buildings out of the way it’s on to them to get them done and into play, then onto more figures! We’re having a Pulp Alley game tomorrow that should feature all my new buildings, so look for photos of that soon too.