We’ve had a couple more Gaslands-by-webcam sessions since Corey wrote up his how-to and that’s inspired me to finally get the first few cars built up properly.
I’d primed and painted these cars months ago and they probably even appear in a few of our game photos, but I’d rushed the painting so the primer was scratching off far too easily, and I really hadn’t done much conversion.
I dropped the metal car bodies back in Simple Green to reset them to bare metal, then set about properly converting them into post-apoc Gaslands armed cars! Some time ago we’d done a group order to North Star for a bunch of their Instruments of Carnage plastic accessory sprues and those plus bits of plasticard from my parts box has gotten me three armed, up-armoured cars, all Gaslands Refuelled legal designs.
Vlad the Impala in progress. The huge absurd exhaust stacks, bulldozer blade ram, pintle mount gunner, and sheet metal spoiler are all from the North Star accessories. Click for larger.
The first and largest of the three cars is Vlad the Impala, with a turreted MG or HMG, ram plate salvaged from a bulldozer blade, huge exhaust stacks coming directly off the engine block, and “spoiler” on the back hacked from a piece of sheet metal. The windows also got barred off with plastic strips.
The school of Barracudas. Dual MG/HMG on the left and in-progress bar armour over the windows; the right hand ‘Cuda has an air scoop, single front HMG, a rear dropped weapon (not yet fitted), and sheet metal over the front and rear windows.
The two Barracudas are slightly smaller. One of them got an air scoop on the hood, a single HMG mounted alongside, sheet metal on the windows, and a dropped weapon (usually mines) off the back. Barracuda 2 got metal bar armour over the windows and reinforcing the front and back of the car, and a pair of MGs or HMGs on the hood.
Vlad the Impala all primed and ready for paint, with the bar armour over the front window nicely visible. I scarred up the ram plate with files, an Xacto knife, and a tiny drillbit a little bit, because it’s such a prominent feature of the car. The exhaust stacks stick up so high as to get in the way of the gun mount, but Rule of Cool prevails so I’m sure the gunner can work around that little detail. Click for larger.All three cars all ranked up ready for painting. Click for larger.
I’m pretty sure that one reason I had trouble getting paint to stick to the metal toy car bodies the first time I tried painting these cars was because I rushed off to paint before the primer coat had properly cured, so I’m going to put this trio aside for a couple of days to give the primer a chance to really properly dry and cure.
Rear quarter view of all three cars. Very pleased with all three of them, and looking forward to getting paint on them soon! Click for larger.
I haven’t actually finalized a paint scheme for any of them, although I suspect Vlad the Impala will wind up red and black, with one of the Barracudas mostly purple and the other blue, just because. There are driver figures on the North Star sprues, but with all the window armour none of the driver seats are particularly visible, so I think I’ll save them for other projects with more visible crew positions.
Given that our current COVID restrictions are running until at least mid-February at this point, I am probably going to finish all three of these and then drop them off at Corey’s place, along with the jumps and other terrain I finished late last year so they can appear in our webcam games as lockdown drags on!
The second wave of COVID-19 is here and with it, new restrictions on in-person events like gaming. While in British Columbia we don’t have a strict lockdown, we are limited to our “core bubble” aka our immediate household. Which means no in-person gaming. Our little gaming group (myself, Brian and our friend Sean) took a break, we wanted to get gaming again and preferably avoid fully-online solutions like TTS. Enter the webcam.
Attempt 1: Ancient webcam + gotomeeting
Our first attempt used an ancient webcam that spits out low resolution image, plus using Gotomeeting. I shared my screen, which had the default Windows camera app up on this. It worked, but was very difficult to see.
We were also challenged with how to track stats – gear, hazards, damage, etc. Brian tracked it on his computer and I tracked gear phase and hazards on the gaming board. Neither really worked – we couldn’t see what Brian was tracking and due to the webcam, nobody could see the hazards I’d placed on the board.
Attempt 2: Phone as webcam + OBS + Discord
Having tried the old webcam and realized it didn’t work, plus the need to track stats, I decided to download and play with OBS Studio. I figured I could overlay a Google sheet to track stats, plus bring in the camera feed.
To deal with the poor image quality, I downloaded #LiveDroid, an Android app that streams your phone’s camera over a local server. To help with low light, I used my new ring light that my wife had bought me for Christmas.
At the end of the third game. My phone was in the light ring holder, hence why OBS is showing a blank image right now.
Setting up Open Broadcast Studio
OBS sources
OBS is pretty easy to setup – this was my first attempt at using it and it ran flawlessly. I had four different sources: cam link from phone (as a browser source), read-only Google sheet (as another browser link), white image for a background and the Esquimalt Thunderdome branding image. Note that I didn’t run any audio through OBS, as we were talking via Discord.
For stats via Google sheet, I first setup the needed columns and then cropped the source down using a Crop/Pad Effects Filter to only show the key part of the stats. This method is easy to change on the fly, which we did when I forgot to add Gear Phase to the initial sheet.
Streaming from your phone
I downloaded #LiveDroid, a free Android app that streams your camera to a browser on your local network. You will need to set the resolution for both the camera and in OBS. I set the phone to be 1920×1280 and the OBS source to 1280×960. For me, Camera 0 was my rear camera.
#LiveDroid setup
OBS setup for camera
I also tried DroidCam, which has an OBS plugin, but that stuck an ugly watermark on the image.
Connecting it all together
Finally, I shared the OBS window out using a virtual webcam. On the bottom left of the OBS window, it is labelled Start Virtual Camera. We then started a video call in Discord and I changed my webcam source to OBS Virtual Webcam.
If you’re the presenter, don’t be alarmed when your webcam looks like this:
Discord helpfully flips the webcam image, which works great for your face. Not so much for this.
But for everybody else, the combination works well. This was Brian’s view of the final hit of the game.
Modifying Gaslands to play via webcam
For those playing remotely, the hardest challenge is spatial sense. A lot of Gaslands is about choosing the right template. Also, play will be slower, so plan for that.
Adjusting the template rules
The touch it, use it and no pre-measuring rules from Gaslands assume you have a good view of the table, which remote players really don’t. So we changed the template rules a bit. They could ask me about what a template would look like and sometimes I would even lay it down after they’d described what they wanted to do.
Keeping the cars and game simple
In order to keep the game from bogging down, we decided to institute a few simplifications to the game:
Everybody drives the same car, in our case a car with a single HMG forward facing & a mine layer aft
No sponsors
Easy scenario – we ran both a modified flag tag and arena of death
Have a record keeper (and track stats locally and remotely)
The person moving the cars and running the feed doesn’t have the time to deal with record keeping that others can see. So we ended up tracking the key stats both on the game board (so I could see them) and in the Google sheet. So Brian, sitting at his computer, could track the stats for everybody, leaving me free to move cars and keep the game moving
Be ruthless about whipping people along
In order to complete a game, you’ll need the person who is moving the cars to be a ruthless GM. They need to keep the game moving via ensuring each player moves, constantly asking all the key questions like “How many dice do you want to roll”.
What’s next?
Overall, the second game ran really well. OBS made it a lot simpler for everybody to see all the stats.
One of the key problems we ran into was seeing the dice. Instead of an online dice roller, I rolled everybody’s dice in person. For the next game, I plan on using the crappy old webcam as a dice cam – set it up vertically over a dice rolling box.
I also need to play with the colour balance, contrast and saturation of the webcam. Unsurprisingly, all the various pieces of software being used tried to do some sort of correction and not all of it worked.
Where to get the software
OBS is free and runs on most major OSes, while #LiveDroid is Android-only.
It’s the pandemic. We can’t meet in person, we can’t meet in each other’s houses, the university and board game cafe we sometimes use locally to host games are all closed for that sort of thing. What’s a gamer to do to get their fix?
Zoom, zoom zoom… and I’m not talking the Gaslands cars, but of course webcams. Gaslands is especially good for webcam gaming, it turns out, as all movement is template based and there’s relatively few stats per car to track.
Corey has promised to write a more technical post here in the next while on the setup at his end as he hosts and runs these games, but the most recent game used Discord for the video feed and voice chat with some OBS voodoo at his end for the game table feed and Gaslands stats tucked into a Google Docs spreadsheet.
From my end, it looked something like this. Well, from the cat’s perspective, that is. (If Cat is your copilot, you shall fear no hairball!)
Cat, beer, computer, all the components of online tabletop gaming in late 2020!
We actually got three games done in about two hours in as we were only running one car each and the Death Match arena setup (last person standing) is pretty straightforward.
One of our Gaslands games in progress, screenshot showing the Discord view. Corey acting as Ivana White (a very hardworking lady!) and game host.
With Discord for voice chat and the OBS integrated video feed it worked out really well for Gaslands.
The ending of our third game featured the most spectacularly destructive head on collision we’ve seen yet. The screenshot below captures the dice rolls; the left hand pile of ten (!) damage was what I did to Sean, and he in turn did seven points to me, destroying both of us and leaving Corey the overall winner, best of three games!
Crazy high dice rolls for the collision over on the left there between the white car and the blue one. My white car did ten points to Sean’s blue car but took six in return, destroying us both and leaving Corey in the silver car with the win!
There’s a few other games we think would work well with this basic setup; the current GW airplane game being hex based and having simple maneuvers would be one, as would some of the naval games that have written orders with templates, although there’s more recordkeeping for that sort of game.
Hope everyone has been having a good, safe holiday season, however you celebrate, and that you’re able to get some sort of gaming fix in somehow!
Reading through the rules, I realized that Gaslands Refuelled has rules for jump ramps and jumping, so naturally I had to scratchbuild a pair of ramps to make a dangerous lunatic game even more dangerous and lunatic!
Scrap plastic and bits for a couple of pieces of Gaslands scenery. Click for larger.
The two ramps are about 4 inches wide. They’re based on scraps of 1/8th plastic board and mostly made of random bits of styrene plastic. The big beams are from Plastruct and I’m pretty sure they’re leftover from the model railroad we had when I was in junior high in the first half of the 1990s… that’s more than long enough to have something in your Bin Of Interesting Parts before using them!
The other side of the ramps. The left hand one is actually reddish but came out looking very purple in this photo from some reason. Click for larger.
The great thing about the mostly-post-apocalyptic Gaslands setting is that nothing has to be really cleanly constructed or painted, so I just layered sheets of styrene up until it looked right, and used pliers and a knife to attack various bits, warp them, and chew the corners off.
Crash barrier thing, with random hazard stripes because why not?
The billboard/crash barrier piece started as a way to use up the leftover stub of heavy I-beam I had left over after the ramps were done; it’s based on more scrap 1/8th plastic board and roughed up the same way. It got orange and white hazard stripes on the fronts, because, well, why not?
All the scenery together, plus one of my in-progress cars. The motorcycle is from the North Star Gaslands accessories sprue. More in-progress cars can be glimpsed in the background!
I’ve got four cars and a motorbike in progress; the first coat of primer on several of the cars didn’t take so they’re in paint stripper to get reset back to bare metal. I’ll probably fish them out this weekend to scrub them down and reprime.
We’re back in lockdown here for at least another ten days and realistically probably longer, because the second wave of COVID is well and truly here. Stay well, stay safe, ignore the goddamn idiot ratlicking anti-mask morons, and when we’re able to game in person again, hopefully there won’t be any gaps around the gaming table.
Oh, and happy American Thanksgiving to any American readers!
No posts for a month? Sorry! The irony is that I’ve been gaming more regularly than ever, as our little COVID-compliant pod of gamers are now meeting every Monday daytime (all three of us are on reduced work hours, again due to COVID…) and on Thursday evenings due to my lovely wife’s heartfelt desire to kick me out of the house every so often.
We have gotten into Gaslands, and been running through the Perilous Island campaign for Pulp Alley with a fantasy flavour to it instead of the classic early 20th C pulp we’ve done in the past.
Gaslands cars in progress. Mostly stock and no weapons for now. Click for larger.28mm Saproling from Reaper Minatures. Really neat figures, roughly human sized. Click for larger.Giant weird mushrooms for fantasy scenery. From a recent Kickstarter. I’ll do a review of that KS sometime soon, I promise. Click for larger.
Anyway, I’m going to try to get back to August’s regular blogging schedule, or something like it. I spent September and most of October gaming but hardly doing any painting or scenery building, and have now painted or built more stuff in the past week than in the previous two months!
I love a big terrain project and a few of us here got into Gaslands recently. So I decided to create a racetrack. A big one, at 5′ by 3′. So off I set to do that.
Initially, I wanted it to be portable, so I did some experiments and found that acrylic caulk will peel off of wax paper. I ended up regretting this decision, but I am going to use the technique for a future project.
Racetrack laid out on wax paper
The track is 36′ wide and 60′ long, with the track itself being 8′ wide. All of these widths are approximate. The cars on the track are either older Hot Wheels or Lledo.
Once the caulk was added, I added quite a bit of texture with a rough caulk knife that I had roughed up on a previous project (oops). Here was another error I made – the wax paper was not fully taped in the middle, I ended up with ridges.
Fresh caulk on the racetrack
One note about drying acrylic – it loses a lot of water, so you’ll want something underneath your mat like another drop cloth to catch that water.
Once dry, I inked it using and then heavily dry brushed it with a variety of browns. Overall it works, but I was aiming for a slightly different brown than what I ended up with.
Painted race track
We used it a few times like this, but it really didn’t work that well. The edges of the mat were thin and a tear started developing in one curve. So onto a canvas mat it went, with more acrylic caulk to stick it down. Should have done that first…
Now that it had a permanent home, I decided to add some concrete pads with thicker grey caulk, mostly as an experiment. It worked well, I would do this again.
Large concrete pad, using styrene as a mold
Dry caulk, showing the thickness
Small circular concrete pads, using 3D printed circles I designed
Then it was time to flock the rest of the mat. I decided a dead grass theme fit the post-apocalyptic Gaslands well. The dog decided to come and leave his mark on the mat (good thing acrylic caulk is non toxic, as it ended up on his pads too). And thus Crater Dog Paw 1 came to be.
Once the mat was fully flocked, it looks pretty good. This is the 85% stage done project – I need to cut the mat down to size and paint the concrete pads. I may also add some more bushes or other flock.
Final mat, showing the whole caulked area
Close up of the concrete pad
Crater Dog Paw 1, after the grass has grown into it
