Tabletop Terrain

Mobile Frame Zero – Game One

May 022013

My Kickstarter funded official Mobile Frame Zero rulebook arrived last weekend and it is a beautiful piece of work. Despite having the PDF of the same rulebook in my hands for months now I haven’t got around to actually playing the game, due to a lack of green, blue and yellow coloured dice. Fortunately Dustan was able to hook me up with 36 coloured dice from his local $2 shop down in Gisborne. Thanks man!

Armed with the Gisborne dice, and three groups of Mobile Frames I’d thrown together fairly randomly we played with Lego toys rather than toy soldiers at the last gaming night. Everybody enjoyed themselves and I think the general consensus was that it was an interesting game that is worth playing again. Seeing MFZ in motion certainly lets you appreciate the simple elegance of the system. The basic rule set is minimal compared to some other ‘phone book’ rules we use, and yet the game is tactically rich enough to entertain you for hours. I plan to teach the rules to my 9 year old son this weekend and see how he finds it.

If you’re an AFOL, or just a Dad with some Lego you can borrow from your kids, and enjoy board games or war games, then I heartily recommend trying out Mobile Frame Zero. The PDF version of the rules are free for download, but I’d also recommend purchasing a physical copy of the rulebook because it’s very nicely put together and reasonably priced.

Sculpting a 15mm Building III – Tutorial

Flames Of War, Tutorials 2 Responses »

Feb 032013

This post continues from the previous Sculpting a 15mm Building Tutorial post.

Almost the end of January 2013! This year I resolved to knock some of the multitude of incomplete projects lurking in my garage on the head. This particular building facade was started as a tutorial back in late 2011. I made the mold and several casts back then but haven’t got around to doing anything with them until recently.

In the last post, you saw the completed master made from a plaster body with resin parts attached. Here’s the ‘Ultrasil’ RTV mold made from that master, using the one sided molding technique I’ve discussed here before.

Once I’ve got a mold created and tidied up, the rest is really downhill. Large one sided molds like this are easy to cast with ‘Ultracal 30′, a hard casting plaster which will pick up the flat surface details nicely, with no shrinkage. I cast these molds using the ‘wet water’ technique and covered with a sheet of glass from cheap photo frames to ensure the back side of the cast is flat.

Here’s a cast of the mold standing next to my earlier, larger 15mm Facade which now looks a little over scale for a 15mm building. The older building is three stories, but I can’t see myself putting more than a couple of buildings this tall on a wargaming table as they’d probably be a liability while you’re gaming around them. The newer facade is a much more reasonable size for a Flames of War table.

I’ve based and painted a damaged cast of the new facade, which I’ll show in the final post of this tutorial.

Pulp: Panzer 38(t) Assembled

Pulp 2 Responses »

Jan 082013

Here’s the Warlord Panzer 38(t) I reviewed recently assembled and detailed with some bits and pieces from EBob miniatures and my own personal collection of crates. The jerry cans are in a small box built from plasti-card and the resin crate has a crudely sculpted tarp over it. Hopefully a bit of careful painting can hide the sub-par sculpting there. I’ve also added some simple straps over the 40 gallon drum and the jerry cans.

The tank looks quite nice put together and I’m looking forward to painting it up, probably with the ‘Marmite technique’. Although I do notice the hull and coax machine gun metal parts are alarmingly flimsy and prone to bend – in fact the hull MG is bent in the photo. So you have to be a little careful when you handle the tank turret. I’ve also magnetised the turret. I only had some tiny 2 x 3mm magnets in my bits box so just drilled fore and aft holes under the turret and magnetised it there. That means the turret is really only held on when pointing directly forwards or backwards, but that’s fine for transport.

It’s a nice looking little tank and I’m glad I expended some minor effort to add a little stowage as I think it makes the model look more ‘lived in’ on the table.

Pulp: Warlord Games Panzer 38(t) Review

Pulp, Reviews No Responses »

Dec 292012

I haven’t played Pulp .45 Adventure for a while now but still find myself sporadically buying 28mm miniatures for the system. My most recent impulse purchase was the interesting looking Panzer 38(t) from Warlord Games.

This is the first and last tank I’ll add to my pulp vehicle collection which already includes an Opel Blitz from EBob Miniatures and a Bolt Action German Sdkfz 222 Scout Car, both of which eventually got painted. The .45 system doesn’t include any rules for armored vehicles but I couldn’t resist this inter-war Czech tank with a profile familiar to any WWII buffs or war-gamers. This first photo shows the tank next to the Sdkz-222 scout car and a couple of Artizan Designs DAK 28mm soldiers for scale.

With the strong exchange rate against the Euro, the 18GBP price came out to a comfortable $40NZD including shipping, and despite the fact I ordered it just before Xmas (something I typically avoid), Warlord Games were able to deliver it well packaged and undamaged to New Zealand in a little over a week.

The kit is a mixture of four large resin parts and two small sprues of detail pieces cast in a very soft white metal. You can see the de-sprued but largely uncleaned pieces in this second photo (barring one small metal piece which I believe is a headlight). The white metal parts also included a tank commander torso to drop into the open turret which is a nice bonus – although I’ll probably just model mine buttoned up. There was some minor flash and a few small damaged points and bubbles on the resin parts which I may not bother patching prior to painting. Five minutes of trimming and filing cleaned the model up enough for assembly and it dry fitted together well. Overall the riveted and detailing on the tank body is nice, as are the tracks and road wheels and I’m happy with the overall package. It’ll look great once put together and painted up on the table and rolling slowly towards a bunch of hapless pulp adventurers…”I say Maude, they appear to have a TANK”.

After doing some research via google image searches I think I’ll build up some stowage on the back deck. The 38(t) had such a small interior it seemed fairly common to store tarped over personal kit and trays of jerry cans on the flat back deck, as well as the turret bustle. Fortunately I have some Ebob 28mm jerry cans and 40 gallon drums I bought years ago with the Opel Blitz. Time to finally put them to use!

Mobile Frame Zero Atmospheric Fighter

Mobile Frame Zero No Responses »

Oct 222012

I built this Mobile Frame Zero scale ‘atmospheric fighter’ a while back as another terrain piece for the ‘landing field’ table I’m putting together. It has been kicking around in our Lego collection since then, and has come close to being broken up several times so I thought it was time to capture the ship and a MLCad plan.

I’ve also bought a new laptop recently and was keen to see how MLCad performed on it, so I spent a couple of afternoons working in MLCad this long weekend. I think it’s also worth capturing any models you build as plans like this because the Mobile Frame Zero game includes rules for incoming fire damaging terrain, so players will basically rip apart your nice terrain during play! Click on the image to the right for the ‘.ldr’ file that you can load into MLCad. I haven’t quite mastered the art of producing ‘build plans’ from MLCad yet, but the model is broken down into small groups internally that will hopefully lead to a logical build if you want to replicate it.

Pulp: EBob Opel Blitz with Wooden Flatbed

Pulp 1 Response »

Oct 162012

I painted this Ebob Opel Blitz several years ago and it has featured in a number of Pulp .45 games, as terrain or a player driven vehicle.

However I’ve never got around to painting the back deck that comes with it. The deck is historically accurate, well modeled and textured, but it is very cramped. It is hard to get more than a couple of based 28mm figures into the back of the truck. Odd criteria I admit, but more often than not players want to get figures into the truck if it is on the table.

So this weekend I put together a simple ‘woodie’ flat deck that drops on top of the Opel chassis. It’s made from some balsa off-cuts glued together with PVA. The paint job is just some Vallejo brown with a lighter colour drybrushed over it, and then varnished with my custom ‘chestnut dip’. It works well, blends nicely with the vehicle and you can get a handful of figures on there too.

Pulp: Morroccans and Pulp .45 Second Edition

Pulp 1 Response »

Oct 062012

The second edition of Pulp .45 Adventure has been out for a while now, but I’ve only just picked up a $15nzd PDF copy of it. Having a quick read through the basic rules and it’s nice to see everything has been streamlined and cleaned up. The basic rules look familiar enough, but there are some obvious tweaks. In particular the ‘hero point’ system seems to be more powerful, but at the same time more random, giving your heroes extra 1D10′s to roll per hero point. Hero points in a Pulp .45 scenario can really give it a cinematic feel, and we’ve had some memorable moments under the old system, so it’ll be interesting to see how it works now.

The second edition rule book is also chock full of optional sections like Flying (with jet packs), The Occult (“Ph’nglui mglw’nafh Cthulhu R’lyeh wgah’nagl fhtagn”!) and Super Science (with lots of unreliable and deadly devices and robots). Many of these great Pulp ideas were scattered through the extensions under the old system so it’s nice to see them folded into one reasonably priced package.

I was so inspired reading the rules I dusted off my old half painted Anglian Morroccans and finished them up with some dipping. Not the best paint job, but they’ll do for tabletop quality. I’ve had these figures so long that Anglian appear to have gone out of business, and their figure lines sold on. I’m not sure where you can get them now, which is a shame because they’re very nicely sculpted figures.

The grass on the crewed machine gun base is some ‘Highland Tuft’ I purchased a while ago from Slave to Painting. It is incredibly easy to use, just lift of a patch with some tweezers and glue it to a finished base – I used PVA. It adds a nice solid clump of vegetation to an otherwise bare base.

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