Kickstarter - Iron Empires: VOID

Christopher Moeller has been one of my favorite artists for as long as I can remember.  Of course I had not known who he was, nor where he had hailed from until his vision of the Iron Empires had entered my world.  I had been ceaselessly expanding on and submerse myself into this background and to use the visions presented in his artwork.  I had been lucky enough to get into contact with Christopher several years ago where he had shared with me many documents and files that helped to expand my love for this setting and give me more weeds to climb through when it came to Traveller games set within the Iron Empires.

Christopher Moeller is an artist who had done art for many role playing as well a comic books and the Iron Empires is a series of stories of his own creation.  His artwork and the background make for fantastic immersive reading with a background so wide and covering such an area that one can only imagine what other stories abound for such an environment.  This kickstarter is a project to get the latest of these Iron Empires stories published and to give us, the fans, another wonderful story to help expand our visions of this diverse background.

If you are new to the Iron Empires stories, now is a great chance to get your hands on these fantastic stories which I guarantee will have you wishing for more!  Iron Empires: VOID is a kickstarter that get you involved and supporting this fantastic artist/story-teller in one go.  It is easy to see the correlation of Traveller within these stories and it is also plain to see it if you own the Burning Empires RPG which Christopher indicates how he had been inspired by the Traveller game within the forward.

Have a look-see and notice that it is a minimal investment to get involved in the Iron Empires setting and to allow you to have your imagination soaring to new heights!

The much anticipated sequal to the department - The Ghosts of Hefei kickstarter has finally launched.  This is a great miniatures gaming system based on the Goalsystem skirmish miniature gaming engine.  I highly recommend these rules as they have proven to be very flexible and suit many genres.  With a small amount of tweaking, this system can also be used for Traveller combat games.  I am hoping that I can soon share some of the mechanics and suggested Goalsystem Traveller mechanics that I had been working on as of late.

The Goalsystem is the engine behind The Ghosts of Hefei and many other successful games such as: Blasters and Bulkheads (Sci-Fi - $9.95), Super System 3rd Edition (Supers), Goalsystem Delves (Fantasy - $15.00), Chaos in Carpathia (Historical./Fantasy - $10.95), The Department (Sci-Fi - $11.95), Chaos in Ciaro (Pulp Adventures - $10.95), Chaos on Chronos (Sci-Fi - $9.95) and Labor of the Gods (Historical/Fantasy - $6.95).

The Goalsystem Fantasy ($2.95) rulebook is designed to allow players to play fantasy skirmish games and to design their own characters and monsters.  Essentially this rulebook gives you all of the core rules for the Goalsystem as well as a good set of abilities, powers, skills and spells that can be a great source of miniature gaming goodness at a very reasonable price.

I highly recommend that everyone have a look at The Ghosts of Hefei kickstarter and consider adding your support behind this project - it is going to be a fantastic system with many proven and talented people working to make this game a success!

Vader!

This is one of the two 'Vader' figures I have from the Martian metals line.  I have several other versions of Vader that will be posted on this blog and better photos when I have proper lighting for shooting this model properly.

Front-right

Front

Blast walls

After about four hours of work on the proxie models 28mm scale street barricades, I have managed to complete 18 of these beauties for use in both 30mm and 15mm scale games.

I had cut 2mm styrene sheets into 0.5" x 2.5" strips. These styrene strips form the bases for the blast curtains (I consider them the blast curtains that you might find at the periphery of a star port launch/landing field). These devices would be common in order to avoid small particles from damaging equipment or other vehicles from thrust born vehicles.

In hindsight I would have liked to have cut the corners of the strips at 45 degree angles so that it would be easier to match the pieces up at 90 degree angles.

Each of the barricades were then welded to the styrene strips using tenax-7 plastic welder which works fantastically well on styrene and PVC type plastics. Once the barricades were welded, I then proceeded to add super glue to the strips and spread it around using a kabob skewer point and then allowed the sand mix, that I use for basing, to flow over the glued surfaces.

A liberal coat of testers flat euro-1 Grey was then sprayed into the barricades en-mass. A light dry brushing of Vallejo game color ghost grey was applied with a large soft house painting brush. Next came a black ink wash to collect in the crevices and nooks of the model followed by another ghost grey dry brushing.

The sand mix base then had a wash of Vallejo skin wash ink then a Vallejo model color dry brushing of Iraqi sand.

My daughters had wanted to try their hands at doing some 'tagging' as space jacker had done with his excellent versions of these models.

Barricades after initial dry brushing with Ghost Grey.  The tags were simple to perform on these models since they already had a lighter background color, the letter outlines were simply painted on in black then the interior spaces were then painted in with standard color combinations.  A final white highlight was added to a few in order to give them a bit of a gleam.  Seeing as that these were the first attempt to paint such things, my kids had done a fantastic job!

Tagged blast walls.  Models by GZG, Khurisan, 15mm.co.uk.  The Weyland-Yutani logo for good effect.

Drybrushed wall example

Traveller imperial sun burst

My daughter wanted to make one with a portion of our dog's name.

Two nobles behind the cover of the baffling blast walls.  'Dumb' had a deliberate misspelling.

Magistrate and his droid companion

Shuttle blast wall examples.

Weathering cargo containers

I had found these pre-fab HO scale cargo containers at my FLGS/hobby town store. They are made from a sturdy plastic and are pre-painted with company logos and container numbers applied as well. Unfortunately the containers look out of place right out of the bag/box.

I had simply applied a bit of thinned Vallejo wood grain in streaks where I thought water or other corrosives would pool or drip down the container's corrugated surfaces. It never hurt to look at train cars as they passed by either...

100 Ton Scout-Courier

This is another ship design that I really like as it provides several corrections to the original Type-S scout courier design.  The Type-S had issues with the deck plans because there was not enough volume near the 'point' of the triangle to house the bridge and the other components.

You can see another fantastic rendition of this star ship in the blog banner above as well as the conceptualized art work for the T5 rulebook.  This is a wonderful ship design that only suffers from one flaw on the deck plans - that is both an overhead/dorsal exterior hatch.  I would assume that ships of this size and shape would need a way to dock/connect with an umbilicus to other ships easily and this plan is missing that very thing.

Never the less, this is a wonderful ship layout and it can provide a bit more interesting layout for those 'interesting' boarding actions in Snapshot.

Image by Brian Gibson - 2002.

Landing craft for gunners

I had used the pack of Khurasan Miniatures partisan pack (ttc-1401) for the door gunners.

Step 1: Remove pintel mount for the miniature figures.

Step 1a

Step 1b

Step 2: Use a pin-vise a hole in the base of the gun mount. I had used a .032 bit with a .031 brass wire. Glue long brass wire into gun mount on the miniature(s).

Step 2

Step 3: remove the original beam ball turret and cut the armature from the ball turret hinge.

Step 3a

Step 3b

Step 4: pin vise the armature to allow the door gunner's weapon to fit within. Slip the door gunner's brass rod through the armature and snip off the remainder from bottom of armature.

 Step 5: file the cut end of he brass wire to allow it to pass through the armature without too much effort.

Step 5

Step 6: Glue pins into miniatures

Step 6

Step 7: Paint and enjoy