10,000 Hits & Shelldrake's Zombie Wargame Blog

The Lead Will Walk The Earth reached one of 'those' milestones today.

10,000 hits! Blam!

One good hit is all it needs. You're got red on you.

Colin over at Down Among The Zed Men recently nominated me for a stylish blogger award, thank you Colin. As it was so soon after a previous nomination, rather than follow the rules to the letter and take up the whole post with more tedious facts about me, I wanted to share the zombie love and pimp out the work of an Australian zombie game blogger that I've recently discovered.

Shelldrake's Zombie Wargame Blog is putting out some fantastic work on the development of a new zombie gaming project. He's been moving at a fair old pace and, most notably, innovating. He's experimenting with rules and initiative systems, coming out with some great modelling suggestions (his road sign is inspired) and even designing some of his own custom card/paper terrain which he is offering up for free to other zombie gamers and bloggers. Fantastic! So visit Shelldrake's Zombie Wargame Blog and click follow when you get there.

I couldn't finish this post without saying a massive thank you to everyone who has followed, commented, contacted me or otherwise supported the blog. Special thanks have to go to Matt (who got me stated on the whole thing), Bryan (The gentleman superstar of zombie gaming) and Fran (for the awesome blog, the additional traffic and setting such a superb 'how to' example), and OK, if Ray reads this little bit, sorry dude but your buddy does kinda rock! :). It is wonderful to do something you love and find that other people enjoy it too.

Thanks to everyone for the ideas, the inspiration and for sharing the journey so far. I've been busy of late on a little project that might be of interest, some of you might have picked up on it already, but more on that in the next post. In the mean time here's a teaser of a soon to feature All Things Zombie Batrep.

Just when Troy and Hank thought their day couldn't get any worse...

60 Minute (times roughly 6) Makeover

With city development fully underway the interiors of Outbreak City’s buildings were looking rather bland, empty and lifeless (but not in a good way). Time for a lilliputian Llewelyn-Bowen touch.

I don’t currently have a vast range of interior items to fill the buildings that are done, let alone the others planned. The Ebbles archive DVD is on its way which I am reliably informed contains some great interior items I can’t wait to get started on. I began with something simple and chose a single storey unit – a generator service and repair shop. This was also the first building I cut the doors and windows from.

Luxury swag - result!

As Vampifan has commented, each additional step in a build adds to the total build time and adding an interior is likely one of the most significant. This simple interior took a few evenings. I am glad I chose something this small as I am now have realistic expectations on the time required for the larger ones.

I added a partition wall to create a backroom and split the retail space and a workshop area. The walls were painted (I’ll try to use more printed textures in future) and the shop unit floor is a Google search for tiled floor textures. The image was re-sized and tiled to fit. The workshop floor is simply coloured paper, cut to size.

To fill the rooms I relied heavily on the superb freebies from TommyGun and re-scaled items from Jim's Dolls House Pages (more in a future post) I selected some shelving units, a workstation with keyboard and monitor. I added a wall clock, a welcome mat and a few boxes. I was mindful that the space had to be playable but needed enough interesting touches to create the illusion of a real place. I am happy with the current status but it deserves another session’s work. I would like to add a couple of generators in the retail unit and one on a workbench out back with some oily stains on the workshop floor among other small details.

Zombie free - time to snaffle generator spares!

Yup, I know - something is missing. Almost every building should actually include toilets, washbasins and a separate sink, somewhere to make drinks in a commerical unit or a kitchen in a residential property. I'll look at including those in future builds, when I have some models to make up for them.

I am guessing that replicating porcelain thrones over and over again might be a bit of a pain in the proverbial but perhaps it will help keep in mind rule # 3. Beware of Bathrooms.

Zombtropolis

Pulling together less than half a dozen buildings wasn’t exactly going to provide a highly flexible gaming environment representing Outbreak City for my All Things Zombie games. I knew that to create something more than just the small town feel that I was going to have to get my hobby face on.

I continued with what I had, among others I added another WWG flat from Downtown Mayhem, this time adding a removable roof so that I could add an interior in the future and I also progressed on to more buildings from the Mircotactix range and even doubled up on one, changing the signs to represent a hairdressers (inspired by Dead Rising Case Zero).

Downtown Mayhem - with removable roof

Microtactix - Re-signed Deli

With inspiration from Vampifan’s interiors I decided to try my hand at removing the windows and replacing with the coloured plastic filing sleeves. Quite a challenge, especially with foam core. As per Vampifan’s comment on a previous post, this took considerably longer than just skinning a foam core box. I made a few simple changes to the build process, such as printing the edges of the foracore in dark grey, so that I could either leave it bare or it would mask mistakes more easily if I was skinning the tops of walls.

Mayhem Biege Brick - This will have the first interior

A little more on MircoTactix stuff - The Twilight Street Basic Urban Environment set is available for $20 and the Urban Buildings Expansion for $15, if card buildings are your chosen route and you are looking for some interesting variety and have access to an A3 printer, they are well worth taking a look. Following on from my previous post, if you don’t have access to an A3 printer, they also produce a Twilight Street Heroic Scale range. Further note to my last post, their free download of Horseman’s Deli is in Heroic Scale and therefore prints onto A4 with no need for scaling.

Their Strip Club and Pawn Shops were fun and the second was a larger building than some of the previous ones. However, I noticed that as the buildings got taller it was going to be more problematic to fit and play in interiors on the ground (1^st in USA) floor.

Microtactix Voodoo Jake's - Opens at 11:00am

Microtactics Pawn Shop

In response to this problem I moved into a MicroTactix apartment and sliced the top floor off, building it as a separate unit so it would be easy to build and use the interior.

Microtactix Apartment

Microtactix - Apartment dismantled

My favourite Microtactix build so far is the Twilight Street Expansion Set Theatre, the largest footprint of my buildings so far, it was a fun build and the addition of the all zombie movie posters was an obvious cliché too good to miss. I am looking forward to the interior of this one.

Microtactix Theatre

Slowly and surely the set was coming together and there was now enough for me to play my first game of All Things Zombie in a few years, a quick brush up on the rules to get me back into the feel of things. There was however something missing. The streets seemed remarkably clean and uncluttered and I felt it was time for some street furniture and other urban terrain to give the place a more lived-in (or died-in) feel.

Things didn't look good for Shaun, cheesefeast aside.

Marconi Plays The Mamba

Mullets and moustaches are no place to hide from the raging hordes of the undead and my internet research revealed that most zombie gaming terrain was, unsurprisingly, not built on Rock and Roll but was based on printable card terrain, plastic railway buildings or scratch-built masterpieces. After finding the incredible ZombieTown initially thought I was going to go down that route but the discovery of Vampifan’s Blog revealed the wonders of printable terrain and I figured I would be able to put a play set together a lot quicker that way.

It probably goes without saying that Worldworks Games produce some of the finest printable terrain suitable for modern settings. I decided to tackle a basic ‘flat’ first, something that would look good on a table but wasn’t going to require too much time to create. I settled on the Mayhem Downtown set and with a ludicrously plentiful supply of foamcore at my disposal I decided to make shells and simply print to paper and ‘skin’ the buildings. To keep cost down I settled on Tesco’s Glue Sticks for the large areas and Power Pritt for the edges and details. I printed and cut out the ‘skins’ first and measured and cut foamcore from those. The shells were glued with PVA and I used a little sellotape to keep them in place whilst drying.

Mayhem Downtown - Beige Brick

The first building worked out ok and only took a couple of hours to build and does the trick although I thought I could do better. For my second building I chose to add a parapet wall and simply cut up some test prints to skin the inside of the parapet wall. Note: I did 'miss' skinning the corners, as in the pics below, but I do plan to go back and fill them in.

Parapet Wall

It is worth noting that most of the Twilight Street range is designed for 20mm scale (although they do produce a ‘Heroic’ scale range), great if that’s your chosen scale but a simple trick for me, wanting 28mm compatibility, was to print to A3 and select ‘fit to page’. A3 is 1.5 times bigger than A4, therefore 20mm x 1.5 = 30mm; it worked out fine and what’s a couple of mm between friends? They are a little on the small size, so I ‘sealed’ the roof of Drakes (a bit too tiny for a full interior), but they add some superb character to the terrain set.  I couldn’t wait to move onto other buildings in both of these retailer’s ranges.

Microtactix Free Download - Drake's

Matt over at ‘Too Much Unpainted Lead’ pointed me in the direction of the Microtactix Twilight Street ranges available through RPG Now. Their superbly evocative models have a more cartoony style that Worldworks but I felt they suited the theme perfectly and would bring some welcome variety to the table. Three Buildings, Drake’s TV and Video, Horseman’s Deli and Stinky’s Pizza, are also all available for free download, result!

Microtactix Free Download - Stinky's Pizza, Yum

My First Survivors

One of the many things that appealed to me with this project is that fact that I did not have to paint many, many, many, many, and did I say many, miniatures of the exact same pose to be able to play. Sure, there’s that horde of zombies, and who doesn’t aspire to amassing a fully painted horde the size of Vampifan’s? But from a survivor point of view, I knew that I could simply paint up just enough to get started and add to them whenever I felt like it.

I was instantly drawn to Hasslefree Minatures Survivors range. With dynamic poses, an assortment of armaments, a cheeky nod to movie tie-ins and a good mix of male and female characters it seemed difficult to go wrong, so I initially opted to order just four miniatures with different weapons to get the ball rolling.

My survivors of choice were Eve (My other half yelled ‘Oooh, get Lara’), Ray (Shaun), Suzi (You can see her knickers, why wouldn’t you?) and Ken (Kenneth from the 2004 DOTD remake anyone?)

The purchase went smoothly and hand-written note and the sweet made me smile, which was nice; it is good to know the personal touch is not lost, thank you Hasslefree.

I wanted to try a different basing technique and having seen the Tengu Models advice I decided to give milliput a try for the first time and attempt a paving slabs effect. Thank you also to Jim for the pointers. I was pleased with the results however I think I will add a little extra ‘detritus’ and mix elements of milliput, gravel and other scattered randomness to future bases as the project progresses.

Milliput 'flagstone' bases

I think the painting turned out ok however, although the models are playable they are not quite finished, requiring a little more highlighting before they finally get a coat of matt varnish.

Hasslefree Adventurers, almost finished. L-R: Eve, Ray, Ken and Suzi