Necromunda | Tabletop Terrain

Sci-Fi Tank Released

I’ve released the 28mm Sci-Fi Tank kit on the following resellers:

– DriveThruRPG / Wargames Vault
– CGTrader
– Cults3D
– Gumroad

This vehicle was designed over three months on my Patreon, with feedback and suggestions from Patreons on our Discord server as well. It comes with a ton of options including:

– Two options for turrets, allowing an RWCS/CROWS system or a crew-served gun.
– Three bow weapons, and nine main guns for the turret.
– Multiple hatch options, including a commander and loader hatch that can be positioned open or closed.
– Multiple options for the driver, engine, and exhaust details of the vehicle that can be mixed and matched for different looks.
– Movable turret and gun that elevates up to 25 degrees.
– Storage compartments and resin tools that can be glued to the vehicle sides.

Build instructions and photos are included. This kit also combines with our ARV and LAV Kit for more options as well.

Light Armored Vehicle (LAV) – 28mm Released

I’m releasing the 28mm Light Armored Vehicle kit today on the following resellers:

– DriveThruRPG / Wargames Vault
– CGTrader
– Cults3D
– Gumroad

This vehicle was designed over three months on my Patreon, with feedback and suggestions from Patreons on our Discord server as well. It comes with a ton of options including:

– Three options for turret and crew compartment armor.
– Multiple hatch options, including a driver, commander, and loader hatch that can be positioned open or closed.
– Two bow weapons, and five main guns for the turret.
– Movable turret and gun that elevates up to 25 degrees.
– Details like a turret-mounted machine gun, spotlight, and TOW/ATGM launcher tube.
– Storage compartments and resin tools that can be glued to the vehicle sides.

The LAV has already been expanded on too by the Patreon, with parts that will eventually make it into a released upgrade kit as well.

Review: Crooked Dice Cyberpunk Hover Car

Crooked Dice were kind enough to send me copies of the resin Hover Car they’re selling based on my design. They’re available on the Crooked Dice site here, and here for 16GBP each. Here’s a quick review of the sample vehicles I received and photographed.

First I have to say these are lovely resin casts. They’re clean, have minimal flashing that’s easy to trim or file away and go together well. The parts are also very crisp, and capture all of the detail from the original 3D designs. Some minor changes have been made to improve the ease of casting – they are very subtle though and I only noticed them because I was comparing them to 3D prints of the original files.

Each car consists of 7 separate parts. Three of them are new ‘jet exhaust’ pieces that Crooked Dice created for the vehicles. They fit into the underbody and the front vents and give the vehicle a solid base as well as a lovely flying look on the table. The remaining parts are the main body, a separate front bumper and the jet nozzles that sit in the front wheel wells. The bumper is separate because that’s the pour point for the resin I believe.

I’m impressed at how successfully Crooked Dice converted a set of 3D .STL files into a physical model, particularly since I was not considering casting when designing the original files. It’s a testament to the skill of their design and casting folks, particularly when you see they managed to capture all the detail, including the (possibly excessive) underbody with no casting issues!

I’m a little biased of course, but I would definitely recommend these resin vehicles if you need some sci-fi vehicles. I also have to say the Crooked Dice folks are a pleasure to deal with generally too, and their customer support is excellent.

Military Truck on DriveThruRPG

The Military Truck kit is now available on DriveThruRPG.

This kit lets you build a 28mm-32mm scale SciFi Military transport vehicle that comes with several options for the cabin, back tray, and chassis. The tray walls and tail are also hinged so they can be opened.

The Military truck parts also works with all our other released Truck kits.

Mixing and matching the parts in each kit allows you to build even more vehicles. For example, here’s the Military Truck cabin combined with the Prospector Rover parts.

Review: Titan Terrain Warehouse

I commented at the end of the Vendorum review that Titan Terrain’s Factorum also looked quite tempting. I splurged and bought their larger Warehouse building instead. This building is also part of a good bundle deal Titan Terrain offer.

The above photo shows you my final, assembled Warehouse and it is a commanding piece of terrain which will make a great centrepiece to any industrial Sci-Fi or Cyberpunk 28mm table. It’s around 45cm long and 30cm at the widest point, and from above it’s roughly ‘L’ shaped.

This photo shows the 10 sheets of laser cut MDF and corrugated cardboard that comes in the kit. It’s a fairly hefty package and I think it’s good value for the price of NZ$54.90 (excluding shipping, at time of review).

Instructions are emailed separately as a PDF which shows how it all goes together. This is a reasonably large build and it took me around 4 hours to assemble. That does include giving the glue time to bond the MDF parts together. You’ll need some PVA, a sharp Xacto and a decent file or scrap of sandpaper to clean off the small cut tabs. I also had a bag of long rubber bands handy to hold the large pieces together while the glue cured. Painter’s masking tape also works well to keep things together temporarily.

The build steps are as you expect: there are two basic structures in the ‘L’ shape which you assemble and then join together. Additional pieces add surface detailing, and there’s a sheet of white trim parts including door frames, control panels, and building lights.

One side of the finished building includes a long loading dock with two large roller doors, and a smaller garage door (shown above), and the other side (shown here) features a back door and the building generator. Although it occurs to me you could turn that generator into a sort of back office/staff room if you painted the gridded side with windows. The building has three separate ladders to get to the roof area, so folks with sniper figures will be happy with the commanding view from the top. The corrugated cardboard also helps to hold figures in place on the sloped roofs as well.

Overall I think a very pleasing piece of terrain for a reasonable price, and I’m looking forward to painting it up and gaming over it.

Review: Kreative Scenery Gothic Office Building

Kim from Kreative Scenery has just released a laser cut 28mm scale Gothic Office Building. He was kind enough to give me a discounted copy to review here.

The kit comes as a series of pre-cut 3mm MDF pieces, and a set of 3D-printed parts for the window and door detailing. This first photo shows my assembled kit and the gray parts were 3D printed. They sit very nicely into the laser cut MDF framing, and Kim sensibly recommends you paint them separately before gluing them into place.

The parts are fully cut, which means the larger pieces are shipped loose in a box, and the smaller pieces included in a set of envelopes. This reduces the shipping weight for international buyers and means you can build straight out of the box using the emailed instructions. You can see the pieces I’ve scattered across my building table in this photo. The parts were assembled with PVA, with any excess being removed with a damp brush. That’s why some of the MDF looks a little pre-stained in these photos.

The build instructions are easy to follow, the pieces go together well and the resulting building is strong and light. It’s built in three sections: a ground floor, a lift-off middle floor, and roof. Each section is also built in two stages, the basic structure and then a layer of exterior detailing. This photo shows the basic structure prior to adding the roof and external detailing. There’s plenty of space inside too which means you could go to town with interior detailing if you’re playing skirmish games using the building.

Overall the finished building looks good. It definitely has the High Gothic Warhammer 40k feel but at the same time is restrained enough to fit onto pretty much any sci-fi table as an Administrative, Office or Apartment building. I could also see it sneaking onto a modern or WWII table with a few additional period buildings around it. The combination of the basic MDF structure, the external MDF detailing and the finer 3D printed window frames combine very nicely in the finished builing.

The front and back of the building are detailed differently as well which is a nice touch. It gives you two options to use depending on how you position the building on your table and also means you can place two of the same building next to each other with different facades. The front shown above has a nicely recessed doorway, with a set of smaller overhead windows, while the rear has a more industrial feel with a roller door and smaller side window.

Overall a very nice kit, that builds into a strong building that will look great on your table once painted.

Printed Platforms and Ladders

I’m continuing work on my post apocalyptic table for This is Not a Test. I’m trying to improve the vertical possibilities of the table by adding some height and climbing surfaces to game over. TnT’s rules are fairly brutal, requiring a lot of game time to make unaided climbs – so I’m also printing and painting lots of simple ladders to make getting vertical easier.

I’ve created a set of 3D printed platforms, that can be printed with legs or with angle brackets. Both variations are shown in the photos. The platforms with legs are the right height to rest against the large number of shipping containers I’ve already assembled and painted. They’re the diving board looking platforms on the right of the photo. The platforms without legs have 45 degree pieces that help them to rest on free standing terrain, and they’re shown on the left between the tanks.

The platforms work with a clip system that involves a some work with a needle file to get a good fit. I deliberately left them a little tight so there’s a friction fit between the pieces before I glued them. The design was inspired by some similar pieces I found on Thingiverse, that were bit lacking in surface design for my tastes, and somewhat tricky to print on the Anet A8. My designs are simplified for ease of printing, and only require light rafting for the joining pieces. They’re also available on Thingiverse here.

The tanks and some of the other terrain is constructed from very old Urban War ‘Hexagon’ kits. These are still available from a few places online.

Barriers from 3D Printed Parts

It’s been a month since I last posted, and in that month I have been continuously 3D printing all sorts of terrain pieces on my Anet A8. I’ve had some technical issues with the printer too – the extruder heating element failed ($2 to replace) and my control board appears to have suffered some damage as the hot bed temperature is reading wildly incorrect values (despite the hot bed sensor operating as expected) – so I have another board on the way ($32 to replace). That means I’m limited to printing smaller PLA items on a cold bed. However that’s still ideal for 28mm terrain pieces.

I’ve been cranking out pieces from Thingiverse, as well as some of Kim’s Kreative Scenery designs, and a bunch of my own stuff too. I’ve burned through at least 1.5kg of filament and now have an old shoebox full of various small parts. So it was time to start gluing them together and painting them up!

It turns out to be very easy to make barriers from a mix of barrels, drums and corrugated plastic-card scraps. That’s handy because I need a bunch of barriers for a This is Not a Test table I’m making steady progress on. Also, because I generally print on ‘rafts’ I tend to have a lot of spare pieces of mesh plastic laying around. It seemed a shame to just throw these away, so I’ve been cutting them up to use as wire fencing, and with the additional of a simple printed bed-frame they also make horrible old mesh bed frames. You can see several of these above on the two barriers I’ve painted and varnished.

The barriers are also pretty good fun to paint as you can throw around graffiti for some light detailing. I have several more on the go and plan to try and crank out at least a half dozen of them for the table. I’m also working on a bunch of scatter cover terrain in the form of 1980’s style ‘spacies’ machines. You can see the first one painted up in the background.

This is Not a Test: Chemical Factory

I’ve been slowly adding terrain to my collection for This is Not a Test since I was introduced to it a few years ago. On a recent trip through the dustier parts of my gaming cupboards, I found several boxes of “Urban War” terrain from “Urban Mammoth” – both a game system, and a company that seem to have ceased to exist in the 11 years since I bought these kits.

As all of the terrain I’ve put together so far is single level, I was looking for something a little more elevated, so I built and based the “Bio-Toxin” plant.

This design is based on one of the possibilities illustrated in the very simple one page instructions: an elevated platform surrounded by tanks and piping. It seemed like the most interesting option because it gives figures a firing platform with a nice mixture of cover. It’s also high enough off the table that you can move figures around underneath it with some care.

The kit is rather painful to assemble because every pipe run has to be glued together from two halves, which takes quite a bit of prep work. However you do get a lot of piping, and that gives you plenty of options for building crazy pipe runs connecting the tanks.

I’m pretty pleased with the end result, which used most of the kit, but still left me with enough bits and pieces to building something else, or use as scrap for ruined terrain. The Imperial Guard Sergeant is for scale.

The assembled kit is epoxied down to a couple of pieces of cut 5mm MDF. The stairway is based separately from the main platform for ease of transport. I’ve also found that large pieces of MDF tend to warp pretty easily by the time you’ve covered them with PVA, gravel and over-painting.

To paint the main structure I plan to resort to either a can of Army Painter primer, or try to find a cheaper option like a plastic automotive rattle can. After that the usual weathering and ‘dipping’ with tinted floor varnish will be applied.

This is Not a Test: Painted Raider Warband

The TCOW war gaming club told us last club day there was a This is Not a Test campaign starting up, so for the last two weeks I’ve been painting up ten figures as a TnT Raider warband.

This is Not a Test is a sci-fi skirmish game played on a 4″x 4″ table. It’s independently published so you’re free to use any suitable post apocalyptic or science fiction figures you have to hand. The 400 point Raider warband I put together using these figures was very easy to play as WYSIWYG thanks to the flexibility of the TnT warband construction rules.

The warband is made from a mix of old Necromunda Scavvies, who have been in my gaming cupboard of shame since late 2008, and three Hyenas from Obelisk Miniatures who have been sitting in that same cupboard since early 2007. I started 2015 vowing to knock off some of my half finished projects, so these guys nicely fit the bill. I’ve got a few spare as well, which will let me expand the warband slightly as I play the TCOW campaign.

They hit one of the five TnT tables at TCOW last Sunday and through a combination of dumb luck and some unusually high dice rolling (for me) managed to triumph in their first campaign game, with only the three mongrels being knocked out of action.

TnT was pretty easy to play, feeling very much like a modern take on older systems like Mordheim or Necromunda. It’s D10 based and uses opposed rolls. It is also mercifully free of the awful ‘I go, you go’ turn order GW always insisted on using, even in skirmish games. TnT has an interesting model activation system that’ll see you trading activations with your opponent several times in a single turn. It’s also possible to support multiple players using this system (although I’m not sure it’s recommended).

It also has an experience and campaign system that reminds me strongly of Necromunda, which is a good thing. Post the first battle my three knocked out mongrels took a variety of wounds, and I earned 80 points to spend on a few more figures for the next game in a fortnight!