More (Mostly Pointless) Messing About

 

I thought I would try an experiment: I re-scaled one of Bergman's 1:100 Char B-I (bis) models to 1:200 and printed it on my Mars Pro. It's the yellow one in the middle.

The one at the back is a 1:100 Flames of War model from Battlefront that I painted many years ago, and the teensy one in front is (I think) from GHQ, or possibly C-in-C, which would make it 1:285, also painted many years ago.

The re-scaled model printed pretty well, and should paint up fine.

I'm attracted by the compactness of 1:200 as a wargaming scale, but I am very very heavily invested in 15mm (and 6mm, though I seldom even look at them these days due to my increasingly crappy eyesight) and building a couple of armies in a whole new scale would be a considerable effort — I'd have to do a whole lot of new terrain as well. And I'd have to do at least two armies, because I know nobody local who plays in 1:200.

Not that I actually do any wargaming these days anyway — my gaming is pretty much purely theoretical since COVID Times put a stop to it. I probably should make more of an effort to get down to the club once in a while.

A bit later on...

I've got it painted up now.

It does take a bit less painting than a 1:100 scale model, but not all that much less really.

Steampunk in GURPS-ish Style

 

Quite a few years ago, I printed a PDF of GURPS Steampunk, as I had some idea about running a late Victorian 1890s campaign involving an alien invasion, weird scientification, and the rescue of Queen Victoria. I did run that campaign, but I used the Hero System, not GURPS.

Until now, that printout has just been sitting in a rather bulky plastic sheet display book, and since I have the capability, I thought I might as well turn it into a proper book.

The bookcloth is some stuff that I made a few days ago; some printed cotton impregnated with a paste/acrylic medium mix. It works pretty well.

I used Affinity Photo to cobble together a vaguely Steampunky illustration for the front cover, using bits and pieces snarfed off the internet. I laminated the result and glued it in place, along with a spine title cartouche.

I used a retro poster on heavyish matte paper for the endpapers. The illustrations have nothing whatever to do with the book's subject matter, but they're bold and colourful, which is mainly what I wanted.

The pages were edge-glued in a double-fan, but I also drilled and cross-stitched the spine for extra strength. That means the book will never lay completely flat, but since I'll probably never be using it as a reference book at the games table, I don't care too much about that.

It doesn't show in this photo, but the original printout was single-sided, so each printed spread is followed by a blank one. That means that the book is twice as thick as it really needs to be. I suppose I could have reprinted it double-sided, but I really couldn't be bothered.

The cover boards have an issue: the piece of 2mm grey board that I cut them from had its grain running the wrong way. That means that with all the moisture from the gluing, they bow horizontally instead of vertically, making the book look distinctly tubby.

The condition has been somewhat ameliorated as it dries properly, and with ruthless pressing, but it will never be permanently 100% flat — it's likely to show itself again with changes in ambient humidity. However, since it's unlikely to spend very much time out of the bookshelf, I doubt that it's going to be a major problem.

Replacement Star Hero Books

 

The two Star Hero books I ordered to replace two that I thought I'd lost (but had merely misplaced) arrived this morning.

I got the shipping notice from Hero Games on March 30th, so transit time was about three weeks — not the fastest I've had, but very very far from being the slowest. The actual order confirmation was a couple of weeks before then, so I suppose that was the PoD production lead time.

Together they cost me about twenty YankeeBucks, plus about the same for shipping from the US.

So, now I have two copies of each. Hey-ho.

And Now, This...

This arrived too.

It's a manual of guns for those who like to fetishize them in their roleplaying.

Personally, I don't care enough about guns to really need all this information: my information requirements generally boil down to whether a gun is a Big Gun or a Little Gun, and whether it goes dakka-dakka-dakka or just dak dak dak.

However, the whim took me, so now I own it.

Playing With Dollies In Space

 

I've given the party in my revived Space Opera campaign a Far Trader, since I like my players to have more or less unfettered access to a ship. It makes my own life as a GM much easier. There's so much that can go wrong with a spaceship.

To that end, I found some deck plans for the Empress Marava class Far Trader (from Traveller) on the internet, and recreated them as a vector file in CorelDraw. I rescaled it so that it can be used with the old 15mm Traveller minis I have, and printed it out on tiled pages.

I don't know how much use we'll get out of them — I may just have to arrange a hijacking or two, or maybe an invasion by some kind of inimical Space Baddies.

In this photo it just shows the lower deck; there's another sheet for the upper deck as well.

I'll probably get them laminated at some stage, when I have a little bit of spare cash.

ADDENDUM

I've been fiddling around with the old Star Hero campaign pages on my website, removing purely Hero System relevant stuff and converting other stuff where and when I can. There's a campaign diary there too, for those who may be interested in reading about somebody else's roleplaying games.

You can find it all at https://mojobob.com/roleplay/hero/sci-fi/terranempire/campaign_notes/campaignindex.html

ADDENDUMDUM

Here's a comparison of some 3d and 2d minis for gaming purposes.

The 32mm mini on the left is from Reaper, while the paper mini to its right is from OkumArts.

The little paper mini is another one from OkumArts that I've recoloured and resized to roughly 15mm, while the 15mm 3d mini on the right is an old Traveller figure from RAFM.

The 3d minis are better, there's no doubt about it. But the paper minis are perfectly adequate for TTRPG purposes, and they're much, much less trouble to prepare and store.

NOTE: OkumArts paper minis, unlike most that I've seen, have both front and back sides illustrated. That's important for games in which facing might be relevant.

Renewal

 

Many, many years ago, about the turn of the century, I dismantled a couple of RPG sourcebooks because I thought it would be a good idea to put them in a 3-ring binder. Sheer madness.

Anyway, zoom forward to the present and I have rescued them and re-bound them. Their covers are somewhat more restrained than they used to be, and also they're now hardbacks instead of the softcovers they once were.

I thought I'd lost them, maybe loaned them to somebody and never got them back, and since I wanted to use them for an upcoming BRP space opera campaign, I ordered replacements from Hero Games' webstore, where they have them for cheap — twenty yankeebucks for the pair of them (PoD plus PDF), and about the same for postage. Naturally, the instant I ordered those, I found the originals.

So now I'll have two copies of each. Hey-ho.