Caernarfon Castle

During the last "clean out" drive of old wargaming junk (how long can you hold on to styrofoam hills or old cardboard houses that haven't been used for years ...?), I also wondered whether I should toss out my paper model of Caernarfon Castle.

I still remember very well when I got this model.  I was 12 years old, and we were on a family holiday in Wales. It was exciting, because this was the very first time I would cross the channel and set foot in Britain. I was also doing a lot of plastic modelkits at the time - mostly Airfix, Revell, Heller, Tamiya, ... I ditched almost all of my models during subsequent moves (those colour schemes that looked exciting as a 12-year old do look a bit garish several years later, and invariably there's a lot of accumulated damage), but this paper model castle always survived the cut.

Enough nostalgia! So yes, let's keep it for at least a few more years! :-)

Gedemco "The Keep"

This weekend, in between sessions of working in the garden, I started putting together one of the Gedemco sets I reported on before.

Assembling a resin kit from the 80sis quite a challenge compare to the MDF plug-and-play sets of today. Nevertheless, the discerning wargamer is not put back by a few hindrances along the way.

Step 1: straightening out the pieces. Some of the wall sections were warped. Since they are made of resin, put them in hot water, straighten them again, and leave them to dry on the kitchen sink. Ignore the cries of horror of other carbon-based humanoid lifeforms in the house. The pieces below are from the Tower set, but the idea is the same.

Step 2: Start glueing together the kit. These old kits are not, shall we say, made to fit. Several tries, a lot of cursing, and using various wooden beams to keep everything together, did the job in the end.

Step 3: Admire the final result. Some period figures are shown for scale. The stairs form a seperate piece, I won't attach it permanenly to the keep, so I can still use a ladder in some scenarios.

Step 4: Fill up the cracks and holes with some filler, but this still needs to be done. Painting as well, of course.

Simple scifi buildings (6)

I finished my simple cardboard building. It is a cardboard packaging shape. I added a cardboard tube, and put a polystyrene ball on top. I also delved in the bits box and added some smaller items to give it some more detail.

The whole was quickly spraypainted. The dome was gridded using the layout of a D20. I painted in some of the details with Boltgun Metal, and added yellow/green tape for an industrial look. The whole should serve as a communications station ...

It is a simple and crude building, but it goes together well with my other scifi cardboard buildings. Moreover, it has a nasty old-school feel to it, not unlike the old modeling projects for "Oldhammer 40K" or Rogue Trader.

For size comparison, I dug out a few old Rogue Trader era miniatures. An Ogryn is defending the comms station against an attack by a pair of Ambulls. And yes, I know Ambulls are supposed to dig underground ...

Simple scifi buildings (5)

A few months back I reported on how I made some simple scifi buildings using cardboard packaging for our scifi skirmish campaign.

I happened to come in the possession of another cardboard shape last week, and my creative juices took over to create another building. The bits box came in handy. The plan is to transform this into a communications station, with the disc and the sphere acting as futuristic comms devices.

Simple scifi buildings (4)

For a number reasons my painting and wargaming has slowed down significantly the past couple of weeks. As usual, blame real life,

Anyway, today I found some time to continue working on my simple scifi building I reported on before. I added some details in the paintjob. Nothing spectacular, but more effective to make the buildings come to life. Since these are meant for one or perhaps two appearances on the table, a few more numbers, letters and so on will be painted on, and that will be it.

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Simple scifi buildings (3)

A quick followup to my previous post.

The cardboard contraptions that will serve as scifi buildings are now spraypainted brown. I also added some grey and yellow spraypainted spots, such that they now look a little bit more weathered. The colours are not terribly realistic for let's say a concrete building, but for scifi, that adds to the "weird" visuals.

Next is to paint in the details, add some markers etc.

Simple scifi buildings (2)

I wrote before that I started constructing some simple scifi buildings, probably for use in our Antares campaign.

Due to the Crisis 2015 preparations, I couldn't work on them any further, but yesterday I had a dozen minutes to kill so I "pimped" them with some simple plastic parts I had lying around in my bit's box (actually, some of them are parts from disassembled computer mice, a clock radio, etc.)

Next phase is to spraypaint them, after which I might add some more painted-on details such as markings etc. I tend not to put too much effort in projects like these, because most likely they will be one-use only.

The nice thing of compiling a complete magazine index of my wargamining magazine collection is that I can quickly locate a similar modeling project that was published in issue #30 of Battlegames magazine. Although the project in that article made some colonial-looking buildings, it was still useful to take a quick look and see how Diane Sutherland had done it.

Modeling project in issue #30 in Battlegames magazine

Simple scifi buildings

By sheer coincidence I bought some items last week (computer equipment ...) that came in boxes containing those pre-shaped cardboard forms to hold everything into place.

For some reason I saw this as a good opportunity to make some additional science fiction buildings for the next installment of our Antares campaign.

I trimmed the rough edges a bit, and added two spires from an egg carton, as well as some polystyrene half-domes I still had lying around (and that once served as chaos vortices in my Warhammer 3rd edition games over 20 years ago). I think they look convincing so far :-)

Next I should add some details (raid the box full of plastic bits), then spray paint the things and add more painting details such as numbers, decals, some weathering ...

I tend not to spend too much time on such projects, since the likelihood is they will be used once or maybe twice, and then end up as giveaways at the next con for whatever player thinks he can use them for his own games.

Making Mountains (4)

I managed to finish the mountains today for our Crisis 2015 game featuring Woodens figures.

As explained in my previous posts, the mountains are in the style of the Major Tremorden Rederring mountains: plywood, crumbled brown packing paper, steps to place figures on (a wooden corner profile strip). Green flock was added to break the monotony of the brown color. Some lichen are added to break the ground line.

Cool website ...

Sometimes one stumbles across a wargaming website never seen before. The site of Irrational Number Line Games is a site I discovered yesterday. One of the nice things is that they have a "good ideas archive", many of which are conversions and clever modeling. Some highlights (pictures from their website):

• Under The Sea Conversions

•  Wormmen

•  Shadow Monsters

• SciFi Complex