Daily life in a capitalist dystopia.

This weekend I finished the cyberpunk food stalls. And I couldn't resist dusting off (literally! what mini's and terrain I already had that could be used for cyberpunk skirmishes.
And I couldn't resist setting up a little scene:

Another day in the Snafu Estates food market. Celene was among the crowds of sprawlers, seeing who was being sloppy with their gear or cred sticks, as her twin sister Lunae stood at the edge of the square, eyeing up a mark. Lothar was working his side gig as guard for "Sloppy" Joseph's Cajun Ramen stand, and Bruiser was at the local CAT terminal, shooing sprawlers off as it was downloading whatever VR-anime he was was into this week.  Boss Rogan was about to order a can of "Chemisty" powerjuice from Bunny's stand when "Cheshire" his shadowbacker's avatar popped up beside him: "Look lively, trouble's here" it said, a moment before the twin doors to the plaza slid open...

Boss Rogan receiving warning from Cheshire, his shadowbacker's AR avatar, as Lunae and Bruiser (their decker) can be seen in the background.

Lunae (just at the left edge of the image), Bruiser and Lothar. "Sloppy", with his sixth sense for trouble, has already ducked behind the counter of his food stall...

 Celene was just about to grab a fistful of creds from a sleepy salaryman's open tote when, just in time, Rogans warning came in her earpiece. A split second after, a CorpoSec squad walked in. "Citizens, please remain calm, this is a routine patrol. Please be ready to present your idents!"  "Routine patrol my ass!" Lothar thought, seeing them in full combat gear and on guard.


As I had them all out, I thought I might as well take a pic of the whole collection:

 The whole lot (Not all are suitable for Reality's Edge though... The back rows especially fall outside the scope of the rules.)

The sprawlers/operatives and a Gov.Mil heavy combat section in powered armour behind them. At the  top right you can just see "Cheshire" an avatar of one of the many Shadowbackers operating in the Sprawl.

At the rear a trio of Exo-Frames, two Police riot suits flanking a military grade special ops unit.
To the front:  a pair of special ops operatives, considered to be loose cannons by many, and a 10 man SWAT unit. I've also got a crew of mini's and a second crew of CorpoSec troopers, especially to build and paint for Reality's Edge.

I'm currently reading through Reality's Edge rules, and so far I'm liking what I'm seeing. The way the rules are written are rather inspiring, so I'm looking forward to seeing how they perform in an actual game!

Seen you next time!

The faceless crowds

Yesterday a bag of 1/50 scale railroad  passengers arrived at my home.
Today, they are finished... It must have been the fastest turnaround I ever had for mini's!
Well, mini's, tokens rather.
I've been looking forward to getting my hands on Reality's Edge, a cyberpunk skirmish wargame from Osprey. For certain scenarios in the game you need up to 3 "mobs" of bystanders on a 4" diameter base and up to 6 separate ones on 1" bases.

 Yesterday I set to work with some plasticard and a circle cutter. Luckily the figures are styrene, which means I can glue them to the base with regular plastic glue.
Today I had a quick session with the airbrush, to get them finished. I wanted them to represent the "faceless, grey masses of humanity" that often feature in cyberpunk fiction. So, I decided to do them monotone grey, a simple zenithal shading job, up from black primer, followed by two tones of grey. The base I painted with the darker tone of grey, followed by a rough pass with a ivory sand paint, to get a bit of contrast between the cold grey of the figures, and a slightly warmer tone for the base.

Cleaning mold lines and attaching them to the bases (The Space Marines are there to ensure I leave space for a miniature in the base: the rules allow for certain figures to hide in crowds):

All assembled, ready for primer:

 Painting done. Monochrome and anonymous, so the terrain and operatives can shine:

 And with two of the food stalls I'm also still working on.

Maybe, just maybe, at some point in the future, IF the monotone does turn out to clash with the painted terrain too much, I may add some muted colours with washes here and there. But at this point, I'm considering them finished.

Can't wait go get my hands on the rules themselves and dig in!

See you next time!

High-tech lowlifes street food.

I had a long weekend this weekend, which gave me a bit more time to do hobby stuff. As a result the airbrushing stage of my three Cyberpunk food stalls has been finished. They are made by Micro Art Studio for Infinity. But they will work for any cyberpunk setting. Mine aren't quite as gaudy as the originals, though I did add some decoration. What is left now is adding some washes, detail painting and weathering/chipping/grime by more "traditional" painting. As I was at it, I also did a set of data terminals and an info hub. Because you do need something to hack at some point. ;)

Here are the WIP pictures:

The info hub is a first attempt at airbrush OSL, but I'm not as neat/skilled as I would want to be with it. I think it's acceptable for a scatter terrain piece, though. 

Roofs and doors are kept separate, so mini's may make use of the cover they provide. 

I may add some bits and pieces to the stalls in the future. To show they are food/tech/whatever vendors. Perhaps as loose inserts, so I can get more functionality from them. Now to find a source of tiny sauce bottles, takeway cartons/bowls, etc...

See you next time!

Post vacation update.

Well, that took me a while now...

Lots of stuff took my attention away from the hobby for a bit:
-Studying for a qualification that would net me a "permanent" contract at my workplace. (I succeeded on the exam, so now I'm once more in permanent employment. Yay for financial security!)
-Work was busy, so often in the evenings my batteries were drained.
-The efforts to get my mother into the necessary psycho-geriatric care are still ongoing. But there seems to progress.

But I've now arrived at the last day of my three week summer leave, and have remedied the lack of hobby progress...  I had to spend the first week of it studying for the qualification exam. After that was done I could get down to serious relaxing.  I had brought my painting kit along on vacation, plus a squad of my Word Bearers and a squad of Chaos Cultists I'd paint for a friend. I figured I'd finish one or the other this vacation. That's not exactly how it went.....

I finished both! As well as a second squad of Word Bearers, when we went home for a day in-between!

Here they all are:

The gunnery squad. Both the unit champion and the specialist have been partially magnetized, to give them a measure of flexibility in their loadouts.

The assault squad. Here only the specialist is magnetized.

The cultists are un-based, as my friend will handle the basing himself.

Part of the reason they all went so fast is because I had a clearly set out goal to paint these to a tabletop standard and not lavish too much time on them (I will be taking more time for centrepiece models, but rank-and-file I'll be focussing on speed and looks en-masse.)
I had taken a headstart on the basecoat a while back with the airbrush, giving them a zenithal primer and airbrushing on the red of their armour. After that it was mostly just basecoating the details, giving the models an all-over wash and adding some selective drybrushed highlights here and there. Basing was done equally quickly with a GW basing mix (Agrellan badlands, I believe) followed by a wash and a drybrush.
I've currently got an Aspiring Champion, a (Finecast) Dark Apostle and a Master of Possessions ready for primer. Those I'll spend some more time on painting. And I'm building a unit of 10 possessed and a Hellbrute to be the second batch of rank-and-file models to speedpaint.
That should get me the core of a Word Bearers army in a relatively short amount of time.

My goals for this project are to:
A. Get an army done within a (for me) reasonable amount of time spent. (Not counting the occasional hiatus. Like the one the past few months, between doing the basecoat and actually finishing the models this month....)
B. Finally do something with the stockpile of Chaos models I've had since 4th/5th Edition 40K.
C. Actually, finally, own a fully painted, functional army, other than my Orks, which are now 3-4 editions behind the times. (They still work, but I lack all the fancy gear from the Post-Stompa era...)

Ofcourse, this throws a spanner in my plans to work on preparations for the release of Reality's Edge, the Cyberpunk skirmish game from Osprey... But eh, the muse flies where she flies.

See you next time!

A Derelict Citiplex, continued (aka part 6)

Still awaiting suitable battery holders for the food stalls, so why not get going on the Multiverse Vault Builder terrain set? It's been a while since progress were made, and seeing how I intend it to form the backbone of both my Necromunda and Cyberpunk gaming indoor terrain, I'd best get on it!

 A while back I built a double-length wall, as a test of concept (I don't remember if I showed that one at the time?). It was meant to prepare myself for the second lit feature of this terrain set:  A wall with two malfunctioning lighting units. Well, this weekend, that one got completed:

The modification involved a fair bit of hacking the wall system, as you can see above. First to make the wall double length, and then to drill the holes for the leds (below) as well as saw out the recess for the battery pack (above).

 Here you can see the leds, with their transparent resin hoods glued in place:

 

I mustn't forget to mask these before primering!

Additionally, I also built a regular wall section, and using the left over parts from one of the double-length sections, I made a connector wall with two "male" ends:

Great for keeping doors in place, relative to pillars, or connecting larger sections of walls together.

Here are the non-lit walls, all together:

The pieces of mdf you see there are offcuts from the "sprue" the walls and floor connectors came from, cut to size and fitted with a strip of magnetic sheet, so they can attach to the steel strip some wall sections have. I will paint these as signage.

See you next time!

Just a quick update from the gritty urban future..

Not much hobby this weekend, as the past week has been a non-stop rollercoaster with regards to my mother. Saturday we cleared out her cabin in the woods, so a professional company could remove the asbestos roofing before demolition. As the cabin has laid neglected for nearly two decades, and had been squatted in by a vagrant/crook with no sense of sanitation/personal property, this was a rather gruelling task...
As my mother is currently being diagnosed to see if she is still capable of living on her own, we had an update meeting with the diagnostic centre where she had been committed the past two months. The confirmed that she could no longer live on her own... But during the meeting it came to light they had forgotten to tell us that she would be released on the sixth of june, two days after the meeting!
So a few days of lots of stress and anxiety, followed by news from the centre: they could extend her stay until july 1st at the latest. Giving us a lot more time to arrange things. What a relief!

And then, this weekend, CD Project Red went ahead and did this:

And immediately, my mind went back to my Multiverse Vault set (still unfinished...sadly) and the Cyberpunk additions I bought for it. So I built those, as they are a relatively quick project.
So here I am tonight:

The lights are temporary, circuits I had already soldered for other terrain items, yet to be built. Hopefully over the next few weeks, I can build the lighting to mount on the inside of the roof and get these painted, and maybe move forward on the Multiverse terrain as well.

See you next time!

Knights and hovels

Time for another update:

Work on the farm has stalled a bit, as I need to start doing things in Balsa, and I need to dig out my balsa stash and get used to working with the material again. Also, I've been out of the running with a bad cold/mild flu the past week (I need to be able to talk all day for my work, so not having use of my voice effectively puts me out of commission). I needed a project I could easily pick up and put down to make use of the time I wasn't actively being ill.
Inspired by a Twitch stream of someone painting their Adeptus Titanicus stuff, I decided to use the bursts of time where I could do stuff to continue building my Imperial Knight.
I do want to continue working on the farming village, and working on the Knight gave me an idea: Imperial Knight worlds are usually Feudal worlds... I could, ofcourse, build some "40K-ified" additions to the farm to use it as a Feudal World setting. Put an Ambot in a shack, an agricultural servitor somewhere. A data-shrine in a corner. Just enough to add some Grimdark to a very pastoral medieval setting. I'm still having this idea fermenting in my head, so any pictures will be some time out. For now, I'll just focus on finishing the first farm.

Also, I played a game of "What a Tanker!" the week before that with Gunbird and that was quite a bit of fun. So I'm looking forward to playing more of that in the future.
Also BFG is still on the books somewhere, and I really should be completing the terrain set for that. Build some gas/dust clouds and markers for solar and radiation flares as well as a sunward edge markers and I should have the essentials, giving me more time for extras such as Warp Rifts and fleet support vessels. (Oh, and I really should start working on that certification for work...)

Anyway, here are some pictures of my activities:

The base frame of the Knight, with the carapace on top, but unglued.

 And all the additional parts that will be painted separately. As you can see I've magnetized all the weaponry. For heraldry I want to go with a more medieval/Bretonnian style, so the shields will bear individual heraldry instead of just the house crest. I also want to add pennants and streamers to various parts of the model, just make it look more noble and knightly. Here and there I will also hang shields displaying the heraldry of honoured allies that Knight fought alongside. These will include, among others the Space Wolves and Howling Griffons (the chapters I build/collect), the Scythes of the Emperor (as an homage to Shas'El Tael/Sebastian) and the Cardinal Archivists, the homebrew chapter of the Snipe and Wib community.

This will be the crest of my Knightly House (blatantly stolen from the Darkest Dungeon game...):

 

 Still undecided about the name, thinking of going with House Dravion (named after a DnD character I'm currently playing... Yes, I'm a Nerdus Universalis. :D ) Ofcourse I won't be freehanding this across the entire Household-to-be, so I'll be dipping my toe into home-made transfers... Plus I'm seriously considering lighting up the next Knight I build.

This was the final outcome of the game of What a Tanker! My tank rammed Gunbirds, but caused so much damage we deemed it a Monster Truck style run over.

Oh, and I forget to mention last time, that due to a purchasing error, I had only bulls and oxen for my medieval village. So half of the oxen found themselves modified to have udders, giving me a mixed population of bulls, oxen and cows: 

 The lengths I go to....


See you all next time! (No telling what the project will be then, focus is non-cooperative at the moment...)