I’ve finished building the major structures on my scratch built Pulp tramp steamer. I have a few concerns about the structural strength of the cabins considering their walls are mainly 2mm cardboard, but fortunately they don’t have to support that much, just themselves and a handful of figures.

I think the gentle curves on the front of the cabins and platforms works quite well, despite being something of a nightmare to create. Look carefully and you can see several pieces of plasti-card have been glued around the bottom wall of the main cabin, basically just as formers to hold the curve in place. The curve on the wheel house is held in place by the curve in the foam card roof, and all those dress makers pins you can see pretending to be rivets.

The wheelhouse is free standing and I think I’ll keep it that way because then at least you can move figures around the viewing platform easily as well as get them into the wheel house itself. The viewing platform is also removable for the same reason.

I have some basic finishing to do on the superstructure - really just gluing a few more pieces of card here and there to hide some of the uglier construction details. The smoke-stack is actually a cleaned and primed deodorant bottle. Jonathan pointed out it looks a little out of scale, but I don’t find it that bad. It may be a little tall vertically, so might get attacked with a dremel again. I plan to build simple cargo cranes fore and aft, so hopefully they’ll mask the vertical effect of that large smoke-stack.

In terms of detailing I need to master and resin cast two things: a round porthole cover and a dogged sea door which should be possible to do before the 15th of September deadline rolls around. Mind you at the moment it just seems to be myself and another British chap that are actually paying some attention to the rather informal competition! Ah well, it’s been a fun learning exercise at any rate.

Overall the vessel is passable and should be reasonable fun to game over. Painting it will be interesting though. Aaron was kind enough to give me half a spray can of satin white so I’ll probably be using that to prime the cardboard cabin areas before trying my hand at weathering them. My major concern is that the card will warp once it has some paint applied to it. I may go through the interior and apply a reasonable amount of balsa wood battens before breaking out the paint…

One of the benefit of running this blog is I get to chat with like-minded gamers from around the world. One regular visitor is Shawn, who’s been kind enough to show us several draft versions of his own moderns rule set ‘Ambush Alley‘.

He’s shortly going to launch the game and has started the Ambush Alley blog as well as recently posting a ‘Quick Start’ PDF that gives you a completely playable sub-set of the full rules along with an interesting scenario to try them out with. The rules are designed for both 15mm and 28mm scale Moderns figures and vehicles.

I have to say it looks like a promising system that treats regular forces like the US Army very differently from irregular militia and ‘insurgents’. Regular forces naturally have the training and support from the rest of their command structure and battlefield technologies, while the irregulars have the numbers and charismatic leaders to drive them forward as well as friends in vocal parts of the local populace.

The full rules include all sorts of interesting things like UAVs and vehicles (from soft skinned Humvees to an M1 Abrams if you’re lucky) while the insurgents get the ability to cajole and recruit from the local populace while moving quickly through the dusty streets to surround the regular forces. The ‘Fog of War’ can also help or hinder either side during the game with the same sort of dramatic events unfolding that you periodically see on the evening news…

I’m looking forward to getting a few games under my belt to see how the system plays, it might be time to paint up those Flashpoint Moderns I nabbed a while back!

I’ve finally got around to working on one of the Ebob Opel Blitzes that has been lurking on my paint station for over a year. I’ve finished and varnished the cab, but the back tray still needs a little work. Mind you I like the model without the tray. It looks like an abandoned junker - perhaps street Arabs have stolen the wood for their cooking fires?

The windows were done with blister plastic, unfortunately I glued them in before varnishing the vehicle and of course the matt varnish fogged them up nicely. This is a little annoying, particularly since I’d painted the interior but it’s not bad enough to drive me to re-work them.

Next vehicle off the block (hopefully before 2007 closes) is at least one 1/56th Bolt Action Sdkfz-222 armored car. Then I can stage a lovely Pulp .45 Adventure scenario with the heroes fleeing through Cairo with Germans in hot pursuit! The number plate is also a nod to George Lucas (of the Lucas/Spielberg partnership that bought us the Indiana Jones movies). In Arabic it’s meant to read ‘11380′. I had to add the zero to fill the plate!

This weekend I’ve also knocked off two more figures for my Cairo crowd. A seated swami playing with his snakes (or noodles? hard to tell) and a suitably attired Egyptian woman. Not the most stellar paint jobs but fine for the gaming table.

Continuing on from my earlier post, here’s the latest progress I’ve made on scratch building a 28mm scale tramp steamer for Pulp gaming. I’ve started building up the cabins on top of the flat balsa decking from foam board, 2mm card and balsa wood.

The cabins look rather plain at the moment. I intend to decorate them with a few cast resin pieces if I can get around to mastering them and casting them before the 15th of September deadline for the friendly competition on the Back of Beyond forums. That’s a month away, so I hope at least to create a simple round port-hole and a dogged steel door to fill the empty doorways.

There’s several other forum members working on their ‘tramps’ too, and it’s interesting to see the variety of methods used to scratch them up. Check out this post on the forum for images. I was particularly impressed with Overlord’s hull which is cut from a slab of polystyrene foam using the balsa decking as a template for the hot wire cutting.

If I was starting again I’d use this method myself with the high density Dow Chemicals blue foam I still have in the garage. The advantage of a solid foam hull is I’d have a decent base to pin the 2mm card too. The foam board hull I’ve built up has some annoying voids that means the card hull may be easy to damage in the finished piece.

I’m planning to have simple internal rooms and make the two layers of upper decking removable, just to make the whole ship more interesting in terms of gaming opportunities. For the same reason I intend to keep the deck areas pretty devoid of detail. Probably the most deck detailing I’ll have is the railing made from cut down chicken wire (thanks again Dustan) and some balsa stair ways and ladders.

As the inspiration for this ship is the ‘Sirius’ from Herge’s ‘Red Rackham’s Treasure’ I also want to add a couple of simple deck cranes. Years ago I bought some model ship making wooden pulleys and brown ‘rope’ that I’ve used for a few Mordheim terrain pieces, hopefully I can find them in the garage because they’d be just right for 28mm scale deck cranes. The trick with the cranes is of course going to be making them look reasonably useful without turning them into deadly eye gougers for anybody gaming over and around the ship!

I’m a fan of indie self-published games because many of the games I enjoy these days I’ve downloaded from the web for free or for minimal cost. So when Andrea Sfiligoi and Ganesha Games recently released Song of Blades and Heroes, a set of fantasy skirmish rules available for a whole $4us I picked up a copy.

On opening the 34 page PDF I was presented with a sensibly arranged set of rules scattered with fantasy black and white line art of mixed but acceptable quality. Even scanning the first few pages I was confident my $4us had been well spent. The game rules appear simple but fun and overall it seems to border on the ‘beer and pretzels’ genre of gaming. Mind you there is some subtlety involved, particularly in the way the individual figures are activated in a turn.

SBH seems reasonably well supported too, with upcoming additions (Songs of Gold and Darkness, ie. dungeons) planned and a Yahoo Group forum frequented by the author and play-testers. There’s also a freely available preview PDF which takes you through a couple of rounds of combat.

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Artizan Designs recently released another batch of figures in their Pulp Thrilling Tales range. Amongst those figures were these two chaps who are clearly ‘inspired’ by Rick Blaine and Captain Renault from that classic film: “Casablanca“.

As a long standing fan of Humphrey Bogart, Film Noir, and Casablanca in particular I couldn’t resist picking up these figures. Although to be honest I’m unsure about what use they’ll be to me in my Cairo Pulp setting. Perhaps I should start thinking about building nightclub interiors! The first thing I’ll need is a 28mm scale upright piano of course. Hmm actually that wouldn’t be too hard to master either…

Two figures seemed too modest an order so I threw more figures into the mix. In particular I grabbed a selection of suitably evil metals as I feel my Pulp games have been lacking a demented arch villain who repeatedly escapes burning staff cars, collapsing bunkers, falls into bottomless ravines etc. Hopefully one of these chaps (from left to right) will suffice once painted:

• A syringe wielding mad scientist with metal face plate and prosthetic fist (the details are hard to see in the photos but are well done on the figure).
• Artizan’s ‘Herr Todt’ figure, straight out of the first Indiana Jones movie.
• A stern German officer that looks a little like Colonel Klink from Hogan’s Heroes. Although hopefully he’s a little more competent than Klink!

As always Artizan Design’s figures are superbly sculpted, finely cast and a joy to receive in the post. Figures from several of their ranges form the bulk of my Pulp gaming collection and I fully expect to be purchasing more from them in the future. I can’t recommend Artizan enough really!