Wreck Age: Post-Apocalyptic Wargaming Done Right

For me, the gold standard for a miniatures game has little to do with the fiction that created the world where the game takes place, and even less to do with the miniatures. Miniatures are awesome, and I have a lifelong love affair with them, but I don't think that the quality or look of the miniatures has anything to do with whether the game is good or not. The fiction might augment a game that's already good, but if the game is bad, it's like putting beautiful, fresh cut flowers on top of a festering garbage can. In short, many things can aid a good game and make it great, but the window dressing is just that: something to augment the game. 

To that end, everything that surrounds the rules themselves, from weapons and equipment, skills and perks, and the most important factor - campaign rules - are what make any miniatures game worth playing, in my opinion. It's what makes Strange Aeons so incredible, for instance. Now, I've held  "Wastelands 3: Total Meltdown" up as the gold standard for any post-apocalyptic miniature skirmish game because its campaign is so well devised and executed that everything else that I have ever played prior to that looked like a rotting horse carcass in comparison. Well, to a great extent, the new miniatures game, Wreck Age, has trumped it because of the level of depth involved while remaining understandable and playable for experienced miniature gamers.

Wreck Age, simply put, is an RPG with deep skirmish rules as the core, driving mechanic for the game. To me, it's not unlike Robotech RPG in that many people buy the entire rulebook, but only play the skirmish rules. This book is every bit of 244 pages long, and is full of beautiful artwork, charts, and little flavor text sidebars that give examples of play. It reminds me a lot of Bablyon's Burning in that much of the book is written in the form of stories, and that just the stories alone make it worth reading, despite the fact that there's also a game. The artwork adds to that, because it is some of the best artwork I've ever seen in a post-apocalyptic game, and it adds so much to the reading, since storytelling has become such a visual medium these days. If nothing else, the art makes it easier to explain the scope of the game to players, since a picture is truly worth a thousand words.

The theme of the game surrounds this very rich fiction about the depletion of the world's resources, the plan to leave Earth, and a giant lie told by the aristocrats that left much of Earth's populace left behind to wither on the vine. Not only is it plausible, but the story and rules were written in such a way that the story is integral to the game play, therefore making your adventures in post-apocalyptic Earth fit seamlessly into the narrative presented in the built-in scenarios and characters. 

One of the things we all really dug about this game is that it has a very strong "western" influence on the theme; sure, there's plasma weapons and laser rifles, but there's also revolvers. The art exudes this and everything about the game is linked in some way to the theme of humanity rebuilding itself after we, essentially, mined the planet dry and the richest folks got the hell out of Dodge. It's really irrelevant to the game itself, but with the whole kind of "space-faring age mixed with western frontier sensibilities" vibe to it, we really kind of dug it. I'm a Firefly guy; not a superfan or anything, but I like the show and the theme, so this kind of hit that same note with me.

A major difficulty we faced in reviewing this game as a whole has everything to do with the fact that while I am a former RPG player, none of the others in my group are, or ever have been except for Mickey, who would never admit to it. The first 33 pages are nothing but story that develop the narrative, and it is an amazingly well written and engaging read that frames the game. This was primarily meant for RPGers, so that GM's can give the context to players the sessions and explain "the reason" for the situation, as well as provide a backdrop to the campaign. For me, all it did was give me a really great story to read while sitting on the commode, and give me a lot more paper to print and bind. In fact, the rules themselves don't actually come into play until the 50th page, so from the standpoint of reviewing the "game", that's where I'll start. Before I go any further, I need to divulge that I got the PDF sent to me by the publisher, Hyacinth Games, and furthermore, I did some editing and writing work for them, pro bono, because I believe in the game. I elaborated more on this and my experience with it, which can be found at the bottom of this review for your amusement.(*) The short version is that I got one Adepticon promo model and the PDF download version of the rules from them, and it's worth mentioning this kind of stuff because it's important that my readers know everything about these sorts of transactions so that you can weigh this information against the review. Anyhow, let's carry on.

As far as mechanics go, at its core, it's a simple D6-based game that has you chucking small handfuls of dice at one another, with the central goal of passing tests. If you're looking to shoot someone, you need to pass a shooting test which entails rolling the amount of dice equal to the shooter's skill at shooting, and rolling above the weapon's target number at the given shot range. There are modifiers to the target number, such as the target being under cover, but the long and short is that each die that hits the bogey is counted as a success. If a hit was scored, the attacker and defender roll against each other, with the attacker rolling his weapon's power value against the defender's; if more attacker's dice succeed, the damage done is equal to the number of dice that were not "blocked" by the defender's successes. 

Combat, for that matter, is wholly brutal and swift, which makes the game sail along at a brisk pace. One wound damages a character's abilities, two wounds put a character out of action for the rest of the encounter unless they can make a very lucky roll at the end of a round, or if someone else stabilizes them, which downgrades them to wounded status. Now, a third wound essentially delivers a mortal wound, and without prompt help from a friendly, they will absolutely die; no lucky rolls can save them. If a fourth wound is delivered, that character is immediately killed in action, dead on the spot, and is FUBAR. Wounds are cumulative, so an out of action character who is unable to defend themselves is a very, very delicious soft target. I cannot tell you how many times I've placed an improvised mine on a downed figure, just to watch him roll that lucky 6 on his end-of-round saving roll and subsequently to burst like a ketchup-filled water balloon thanks to my unavoidable mine. Watching the hope disappear from an opponent's eyes when he rolls that first 6 to get back up from death's doorstep, but then fails to block the explosion....that's fucking priceless, right there. That's what Ameritrash is all about - standing on the brink of the pit where hope goes to die, and watching your buddies fall down it. Even more so when you're the one who pushed them in.

Anyhow, all of the game's actions are resolved in this manner, by either a test against the character's abilities, skills, or traits, or in the form of an opposed test where another player is actively seeking their ruination during the endeavor. This is a simple, very fast playing system that is not really all that novel, but the fact is that even though this is a "me go, you go" alternating activation system, it really seems to be faster playing than many other skirmish games. There's just not that much fucking around with Wreck Age; you can surely min-max "power game" to try to be more competitive or something, but at the end of the day, it's much more of a narrative game than a tournament game, although they are having some promotional tournaments at the Harry Carey Ballroom during Adepticon this year.

What sets Wreck Age apart is that it integrates a great many of the RPG elements into skirmishes, so that instead of simply being pigeonholed into an "accomplish X task or kill all the bad guys" kind of game, it can be as deep and complex as you want, and there's underlying rules to support it. This allows huge flexibility in actions taken by a character, and the framework of the rules allow people to do off-the-wall shit, agree on the difficulty of the task if it's not specifically in the rules, and then perform a test to see if it worked. 

As an example of the system's ability to create varied scenarios, one I recently played, which incidentally was the first I ever played, has you attempting to send suicide-bomber boars into a settlement to destroy a gate. In contrast, another stock one I played has you attempting to infiltrate a village through ancient sewer tunnels in order to subdue and kidnap the opposing force's players and their patrons in order to harvest their organs...while they're still alive. This kind of richness allows for players to have widely varied experiences in a campaign, and the book includes several skirmish scenarios which are all quite different. Additionally, you can download a short, 3-scenario campaign which we used to review the game, amongst others found on their forums, such as the aforementioned kidnapping scenario.

The beauty of the system is that players such as myself, who just want to engage in skirmishes or skirmish campaigns, can easily put these together because there are a sea of character archetypes, complete with point values, to drop into play. To a great degree, if you want to create interesting and plausible scenarios, this is where all that potty reading comes into play, because you have numerous locales and "motivations" to draw from in order to craft them. Thus, players and GM's alike can create these on the fly, without really thinking too hard about it, choose a point value, and outfit their crew using the point values, expressed as "resource units" to fit their play style. There is a very broad range of weapons, weapon classes, skills, and traits to choose from, and the rules allow for after-action cleanup which allow a player's crew to advance in skills, change archetypes, or purchase and craft new, better equipment.

Additionally, there are numerous factions to choose from, ranging from stoic settlers to desperate raiders and from technology worshiping ideologues to drug-addled, hedonistic sociopaths. Every faction has its strengths and weaknesses, and there's a sort of "faction purity" mechanic that disallows cross-pollination between factions to a great extent, so games are generally played as a force-on-force skirmish between two or more factions. At one point we played a five-player skirmish I came up with in about 10 minutes, where the goal was to explore an abandoned military base and recover its caches of supplies, for example. Each player took command of two to three members of a faction, using pre-built characters, and we had an incredible time. It was a bloodbath, to say the least, and in the end, only four characters survived and most of the battleground was littered with half-recovered supply crates and bodies.

The one thing that I'd caution prospective players on is that this is not Heroscape. It's not a simple, cut-and-dry skirmish game by any standard, and for a group that plays many skirmish games it was quite accessible and easy to play, for someone unfamiliar with deeper skirmish games it will take a few games to really get their head wrapped around it, so to speak. There are a great many charts and tables in this game, although much of it is more tuned for the RPG referee/DM/narrator, but there are complexities in the game that makes it special, and I'd argue that it's worth the slight amount of extra time to learn them. One example is that weapons and equipment have a quality rating that represents the level of maintenance done to it. A cheap, homemade rifle is not going to be as resilient or accurate as a factory, out of the box assault rifle, for instance. There's also weapons malfunctions, morale checks, and other factors that come into play which all add up to it being a very good simulation of a skirmish. 

If there's one truly egregious failing of this game, it's that while there's random scavenging rules, there's not really any random campaign or scenario rules. I know this is asking a lot, and I begged them to include something, but as it rests, you can't sit with a group and roll some dice to figure out what you're going to play that session, using their crew to drop into the scenario. This very thing is what set Wastelands 3 apart from the pack, and the fact that there's 244 pages in the book, but very few that would allow players to just sit and play a random scenario, is an oversight in my opinion. One redeeming feature is that If you want to get your feet wet with an entry-level scenario that you can just sit down and play, you can download the quick start rules (once they've revised them...right now it's a 404 error), download the character cards, and throw whatever models you have lying around onto the table to have a go at it. 

Now, this company will likely not make much money on the books, because there's not much money to be had in it unless your initials are "GW". What they hope to make money on is on their line of models, which are incredible. They've contracted sculptors such Tom Mason, Michael Jenkins, Pierre Francois Jacquet, and Sylvain Quirion to create their models, and I shit you not, they are amazing. I've purchased three of the box sets and several blisters myself, and while I've only painted a few, I can't wait to get the rest of these done. Thus far, I've been playing with the now-defunct Mega Miniatures models I bought during the last days of their reign, as well as some "Nova Corps" Reaper models from Kickstarter. 

While they originally sold packages of models ranging from $40-$50 for 5-9 white metal models made up of a faction per box set, they're in the middle of changing their box format to "scenario packs" which contain several figures from one faction and then several more from another. Each box will contain a scenario or campaign, the cards for the models, and a set of quickstart rules. On top of that, they're going to be selling a package deal with the softcover rules packed with a starter set of models, although I'm not privy to the price at this point. All I can tell you is that you're not going to find a collection of metal, post-apocalyptic models that are this nice anywhere, except maybe from Lead Adventure's "Last Project" line, and even they are far too "GW cartoony" for my tastes, although I appreciate that they're very nice models.

They also have a bunch of terrain and scenery, which will be packaged into some of these packs, not the least of which are their resin crates and vendor carts, which are very, very nice. In fact, one of the owners just announced today that they'll be launching at some never-before seen terrain at Adepticon, this week in Chicago, and from the look of them they're easily on par with Armorcast and others as far as quality of the models.  

The long and short is that this game is nearly flawless, in my mind, and if you're interested in a great skirmish game that has depth and accessibility, this may be the one. The models are fantastic, the art in the book is mostly very good, and we all really enjoy playing it. Unlike so many reviews where after we've undergone the process we're ready for a break from the game, we'll probably be playing this next weekend or the weekend after. That's pretty telling, since it's a pain in the ass to get my game room rearranged to allow our big six by three table out to play these kinds of games. 

Why I'd Stick Around After The Exodus:
- The models are outstanding, and most of the art is wonderful
- Of 244 pages, maybe 40 constitute skirmish rules, and it's easy to learn and play
- The use of sidebar stories to explain mechanics is genius
- Built-in scenarios and "quick start rules" make this easy to get to the table often

Why Wreck Age Might Be A Train Wreck:
- The lack of randomized campaigns and tons of scenarios really chaps my ass
- Where the artwork isn't outstanding, it's dodgy as fuck, and doesn't fit in well
- Of 244 pages, maybe 40 constitute skirmish rules, and the rest are fluff and RPG content
- The lack of randomized campaigns and tons of scenarios really chaps my ass (**)

Overall:
I can't recommend this enough to fans of the post-apocalyptic genre, or really, any miniatures gamers who prefer narrative games over Warhammer 40K-style mass army deployments. Although I know absolutely fuck all about what a modern RPG should look like, from the standpoint of a richly detailed skirmish game, I can't recommend it enough. I put my money where my mouth is, and all of the Circus folks really enjoy it. Hell, Dave Roswell from Fortress: Ameritrash liked it, and he's a hard sell on anything. 

Rating:
4/5 Stars

Check Hyacinth Games out here... 
http://wreck-age.net/

...and be sure to check back regularly (after 2 weeks) because a lot of changes will be made to their web store, their product line, and the whole shebang. Also keep an eye out for the PDF on BitTorrent, because it will eventually be seeded there by Hyacinth Games in order to get people into the game. 

(*)While I receive absolutely no money for it, I did some writing for the Hyacinth Games guys. I've been following this game and its development for over a year, having found it by sheer accident while looking for an heir to my previous favorite post-apoc game. I got to preview the rules in a closed Beta, or something resembling one, and it was a fucking train wreck for the most part, but the good parts were so good I wanted to get involved. The fact is that these guys were frustrated and spent, and if someone didn't help them soon, the game would never be "released", and I would be denied my new favorite shiny, so fuck that shit. I volunteered because I wanted to see the game for sale at some point in my lifetime. The "rules guy" had great ideas and a great game, but he seemed to lack the skill set to effectively communicate them in writing, which is what I do for a living, and so I stepped in as an editor/writer to help them, on a pro bono basis. Turns out that I'll never do that shit again, as long as I live, because it's thankless, tedious, demanding work.

After almost a month or so of working 8 hours a night on it, going back and forth via Skype text messages, I sent it over to them and was utterly shit on by the guy who did the original rules, primarily because I re-wrote and formatted them in their entirety. The original was what amounts to a poorly-devised flowchart that he was actually going to clean up, then publish as-is, which would've looked like all kinds of ass and been totally fucking unplayable unless he was there, explaining it to you as you played. Anyhow, it was a total blow-up with cursing, and yelling, and nastygrams, and so I walked away from the gig at that point. To reiterate, I just re-wrote the existing rules up and moved sections around to be better organized and more understandable, and I rewrote some of the other content so it made sense, or sounded better.

As it turns out, all the fussing was for naught, because the final version contains almost all of my edits and most of the writing changes I made (and fixes to my text where I got rules horribly wrong, to be fair), so I am a little biased, to say the least, despite the writing/editing/dealing with the Hyacinth guy being one of the most painful, frustrating experiences I've ever had in this life or lives past, and one that should've totally soured me on this game and had me plot to destroy them wholly and utterly, forever. I explained the experience to my wife like this: It's like giving a kid a car for his 16th birthday and having him tell you he hates it, subsequently pouring gas all over it and burning it on your lawn. Then, the next day, that same son steals your wallet, buys the EXACT SAME CAR, but with a different color and some different options, and parks it next to the smoking ruins of your gift. Just fucking ugly all around, but it worked out OK, and many months later we're friends. They're good guys, but they were just under a LOT of stress. Shit, they still are, but now at least they have a bad ass game to play with their bad ass miniatures.

Because of my involvement, I have recused myself from the scoring of this game and as an added insulation, I didn't divulge to the Circus that I had been a party to the writing; I simply told them that Wreck Age was finally out, and I wanted to try out the new rules with them. Now, they knew I was working on ~something~ but I was working on 3 different games at the time, one of them for a well-known publisher, and I don't share the details on what I'm doing until it's ready for play-testing. So, when taking this review into consideration, please remember that while I was a party to the editing and formatting, and only then in the rules sections, this review is unbiased from the scoring perspective given by the rest of the Circus group. As I said, I received no money for this endeavor, and I have not received anything from Hyacinth Games that other reviewers have been offered. In fact, they are going to be seeding the PDF, for free, on BitTorrent to get more people into the game. Finally, I did put my money where my mouth is, spending almost all of my GenCon budget last year buying Wreck Age models, scenery, and markers. So far, I've spent around $230.00 on their product. If I had been able to vote in the scoring sessions, though, this would be a 4.5-4.75, with the real bitch being the lack of randomized campaign rules. I'm currently trying to integrate the Wastelands 3 campaign rules into the Wreck Age world, solely because they are simply the most extensive, awesome set of rules I've ever seen.

(**) This is NOT a typo. This fucks me off so much that I had to list it twice.

Post-Apocalytic Wanderers Need Fast Food Too!

I've been spending a disproportionate amount of time creating terrain and painting models to play Wastelands 3: Total Meltdown as well as my new love, Wreck-Age. I love post-apocalyptic (PA) games quite a bit because the sky's the limit with the time-frame and the circumstances around the "end of civilization".  It really makes for interesting games with odd mutations, home-made and futuristic weapons, and myriad adventures that depict desperate raiders laying waste to towns defended by future farmers. I've talked about Wasteland 3 to several people and it is, at this point, my favored campaign-based PA game. Wreck-Age is definitely a better system, but the rules aren't out yet, so I'm still playing Wasteland as it's no slouch.

Anyhow, I was perusing the Wreck-Age forums and found a conversation about "raised bed planters" and how in desperate times, people might carry their produce with them, or simply raise food in mobile gardens in case they need to bug out quickly. A lot of good ideas came out of that thread and I kind of had to see what my mind eruptions could conjure and, subsequently, engineer.

So, here's what I've been doing over the Labor Day Weekend, aside from partying, going to the local pool, taking my youngest to the playground, and taking my eldest from party to party and sleepover to sleepover. It's worth mentioning that people can get really caught up in these projects, but never forget the most exciting adventure of all: finding ways to occupy your children so that you can have sex with your wife.

Anyhow, here's the veggie cart:

The body of the cart is made from Evergreen Scale Models V-groove Corrugated, in 0.030" thickness. This was to exude a corrugated metal look to the walls.

The I-beam below is also from Evergreen; it's a bitch to cut, even with a sharp knife, but I wanted it to look uneven and rust-eaten, so it actually was OK.

 The wheels and axle were "harvested" from a cheap ATV toy I got at the aforementioned indoor playground, which also boasts a small store area for cheap shit to sate your kids' need for new shit. Unsurprisingly, I was the only one who got to buy anything.  Finally, the hitch was made from two 1/4" balsa sections with a toothpick section thrust in between and square-cut. All of it was secured with cheap CA glue. The animal in the picture is a Wreck-Age Pack Boar, and I had initially planned to create a yoke to attach to it from the hitch, but in the end, I thought it better not to as if the boar was killed, the yoke would just be lying on the table, and probably would be easily damaged. So, it's free-standing.

One of my concerns was that I'd have to load the wagon with a lot of expensive scenery materials or something, so I opted to raise the height of the bed using Scrabble tiles. I use them in almost every project, somehow, and every time I see a copy at the local thrift shop, I buy it, because you can use all of the parts for all kinds of things. In a recent group of projects, I used the tiles as a "tile floor" for a ruined command center, and I used the little tile racks as a sign post for my "Mark's Junk" junkyard project. In any event, these things take all sorts of glue very well, and are almost identical in size, which makes them a shoo-in for all kinds of things. I've thought about even cutting grooves in the sides to make a magical tome or book of some sort, and the tiles scale very well for things of that nature.

After that was done and it was primed with Armory Grey primer, I had my eldest basecoat the entire thing with Vallejo "Mithril Silver", except for the hitch, which would later be painted with two Vallejo brown colors and washed with Coat D'Arms Brown Ink Wash, I truly believe it is the single best brown wash on the market, and all of their washes are superb, although the black needs to be watered down a bit as it is REALLY dark. The rumor is that this is the same paints Citadel used to use, and this company mixed them for Games Workshop until they went "in-house". In any event, the paint is pretty good, but Vallejo is easily better, with the washes being the exception. I have a ton of Cd'A washes, and I use the flesh wash exclusively for all of my models. It's simply brilliant. 

Anyhow, back to the cart build. After the basecoat dried, I applied the best stuff in the world for rusting things: Modelmates Rust Effect Fluid. This stuff should be in every modeler's stable along with some of their mud and oil washes, because it's both easy to use and gives utterly spectacular results, as you can see from the above. The final touch was loading the bucket with my "Superfly's Super Secret Sauce", which isn't secret, but is super:
2 parts water
1 part Titebond II PVA wood glue
1 part Mod Podge (satin or matte) PVA glue

Now, this mixture is not only watery enough to soak down into substrates, it's incredibly strong and durable. I dropped some Woodland Scenics "fine brown ballast" in there for dirt. The beautiful thing about the Secret Sauce is that the material becomes so hard that you can dry brush over it without loosening little bits of debris, thereby avoiding the ruin of your expensive brush.

I added a few more coats of the rust fluid to really make the thing look old and beat up, and then I put a drybrush of Vallejo "Beastly Brown" on the tires. I was pretty satisfied with the final product, so then I went on to finish the model by adding some Noch static grass as foliage for small plants in the front, and some Woodland Scenics fine green turf as a bed to cover the dirt for the larger produce.

I used Super Sculpey, a cheap and easy to use modeling material, which hardens in the oven at low temperature with no odor, to make the produce. Normally, I use Milliput for this sort of thing but it's sticky, makes a bit of a mess, and is more expensive.  In any event, I simply rolled some oblong balls for small turnip-style root vegetables, or perhaps tomatoes, and then I made some larger ones for watermelons. I figure that in the wasteland, you'd want to get as much water as possible captured in the fruit so that you can re-absorb it when you eat it, and I know people who grow them in Las Vegas' searing summers, so it seemed a proper idea.

Painting small things like this is very hard, but I have a method that always works: I roll the balls in a small palette, really more of a drop, of whatever color I want, and then slide them off to the side to dry with a small tweezers. If you don't know who Excelta is, you should check them out. I used to sell them to factories and they're the top of the line, lifetime tweezers and cutter company. Anyhow, I rolled the "turnipmatoes" in red paint and slid them off.

The melons were not so bad, but I knew I'd end up painting them and inadvertantly rolling them off of the cart onto the floor, so I opted to simply glue them to some scrap plastic and then paint them. I started with a dark green with the intention of adding lighter stripes, but that was harder than I thought, so I re-painted them in the lighter green after two attempts at the stripes. Happy with the results, I finished them off with a drybrush coat of the original, darker green, and what you see above is the product of that endeavor. 

I used some CA glue to affix the melons in place, but I used the Secret Sauce to affix the small red produce as they were so small that using CA glue would probably kill the paint job due to "frosting", a phenomenon that happens when CA glue is allowed to dry without actually bonding one thing to another. In any event, once they were down I used a small paddle tweezers and some more Secret Sauce to add a little more of the Noch static grass, and to add Woodland Scenics "coarse turf", which was comprised of a mix of both the light and dark green variety, to give some depth of color.   

As you can see, this thing turned out amazingly well, at least in my opinion, and it's a perfect fit for any PA game setting. I'm thinking it could also work well with a modern or pulp setting as it's designed to look like it was made from harvested materials, something farmers do fairly often due to necessity, especially out in the sticks.

Hope you enjoyed the tutorial!

How To Remove "Frost" From Models Sprayed With Matte Finish In Humid Conditions

We've all done it - we paint up something and think it's the bee's knees, and want to immediately seal it to protect the finish. Sure, we could use brush on sealer (Winsor & Newton Gallaria, Daler Rowney Soluble, Or Liquitex Matte are best choices, in that order) but that's a lot of work. So, we go outside in the humid-ass summer weather and decide to squirt some Dullcote, Krylon Matte, or other spray sealer, and you invariably end up with a model that looks like it has been covered in a sheet of ice. Now, if you WANT that effect for some sort of glacial snow monster, God bless you, but in most cases, you're spewing a stream of expletives that would make George Carlin blush.

The reason this happens is that when you seal the model, atomized micro-droplets of water will become trapped in the finish. If you try to seal a model in high humidity, you are an asshole for tempting fate, just as I have been so many times, living in the South. You should know better. But, alas, I have compiled the wisdom of my own lessons learned as well as those on the internet and have decided to provide you some sure-fire methods to sort that shit right out, restoring your model to its initial magnificence:

1. Rubbing the model with a cotton wad soaked in olive oil can remove the frost. This is particularly effective for scenery with flat surfaces. Not so much if you can't get into the nooks and crannies (TM). The oils drive out the surface water droplets, and then when you wash the model in soapy water, the oils wash away and your model should be restored. This doesn't always work, but it's a simple first line of attack.

2. Future Acrylic Floor Polish is the most underrated and unknown sealer on the planet. The shit is magical. If you brush on a coat over the model, or even airbrush it (thinned), it will put on a super-durable sealant, and then when winter comes and there's no humidity, you can spray dullkote over it to regain that matte finish. Now, if you DON'T have this in your stock already, it's clear you're an amateur, because as I noted, this shit is magical. Use 50/50 Future and Water and then add small amounts of color (read: paint) to create incredible washes and inks that seal as well as pigment your models. Incredible shit.

3. Use a hair dryer or heat lamp! You can SOMETIMES remove frost by using a hair dryer, heat lamp, or household small room heater. The frost is actually water micro-droplets that get trapped in the sealant, which causes that hazy effect. If you use a heat source and get the model up to high temperatures, you can steam off the water vapor and restore the model. I shouldn't have to say this, but I will: Don't do this on plastics unless you want it to turn into a pile of melted plastic. Also be aware that some paints have a very low smoke point and you can literally burn black marks onto your models if you're not careful.

4. Toss that bad boy in the oven, set for 225F, in order to achieve the same effect as using a hair dryer. The boiling point of water is 212F/100C and thus you can put a model in the oven for 10-15 minutes (preheat the oven!!) and drive off the water. The downside to this method is that plastic bases, flocking, and other wee bits can melt. This should be a last resort on a competition-quality model, and remove the base when you do it or you're probably going to melt it anyhow. Again, ONLY METAL MODELS, and be aware that you run the risk of blackening or charring the model's paint job.

5. SEAL THAT BITCH AGAIN! You can spray right over the model once it's dried for 24 hours, and it completely removes the frost effect. This is the obvious one, but people get scared that they'll seal on the frost and irrevocably fuck their shit up. Nope, just reseal and you're good. I shouldn't have to say this, but again, I will: Don't spray it again in humid weather or you'll just repeat the results and add more layers of frost. Either spray it outdoors and then bring it into a humidity controlled environment, or just wait for a good spray day. You can wait years to respray, too; it's not as if time somehow makes any difference in the impingement of water vapor under the sealant. Patience is absolutely your friend when it comes to the hobby of miniatures painting.

For me, I think the BEST POSSIBLE METHOD of sealing a model is to use brush on sealant, because you never over-spray, and you can control the thickness. Brush on sealants are also always a better protective coating because of the viscosity and the thixotropic nature of the varnishes on the market. An urban legend exists that says that matte sealants are inherently weaker than gloss, but allow me to dispel that myth in one word: BOLLOCKS. The best way to seal a model is with a brushed-on gloss coat of Liquitex Gloss Acrylic Sealant before getting sprayed with Dullcote or Krylon Matte. 

Brushed-on coats are thicker and provide a better seal, and on top of that, the gloss finish brings out some of the colors better, especially blacks and metallics. They're also  easier to spot if you miss an area, especially under bright light. The matte spray-coat over the top of that adds an extra layer of protection as well as removing the shine and making the model look more realistic. That, and the multiple layering of sealants cause rough handling and dude-drops to bounce off my models' paint like bullets off of Superman's balls.

Hope this helps you out, I know I struggled with this damned Kentucky humidity for YEARS and finally realized that you can't fight nature...it's simply better to wait until night when the humidity is lower.

Strange Aeons Campaign - Watchers in the Woods

Hey there Circus fans! This coming weekend the Circus players are going to be engaging in a Strange Aeons campaign that I've been working on for a while, and I wanted to share it with you as it's pretty bad ass, if I do say so myself.

Take a look at the PDF if you wish, and if you're an Strange Aeons player, enjoy!

Download the file HERE

Beware Armorcasts Bearing Stores

There are very few companies I'd publicly scorn, but today, I've had about enough of this one: Armorcast. For those of you who don't know them, Armorcast is one of the many companies that produces 28mm (and other scale) miniatures and terrain. The quality of their product is top shelf, without a doubt, but they have one quality that is beyond comprehension: they do not know how to communicate. Now, were they some nickel and dime operation, that's one thing. But they have thousands of models in several ranges, and they aren't some little, unknown operation. Customer service is apparently not in their vocabulary.

So, here's how it is: I ordered a very, very small order from them on April 24. I got my "processing" notification five days later. Now, I understand that these things take time, and I'm the pinnacle of patience when it comes to getting an order delivered; it's not like I don' t have 200 miniatures to paint anyhow. But not a word from them came my way since then.  I sent them three emails and got nothing in return, no response, not a "fuck off, we're busy", nothing. So, after another week I put in a PayPal dispute, because this is the first time I've bought from them directly.

Within a day I got a note from them through PayPal that they're really busy, they've had family problems and illnesses, and that they're essentially a two-man operation. Further, he noted that if he took time to respond to emails, that's more time he'd be spending not casting things. Well, I work 10-12 hours a day, and I respond to every email. That's what I like to call "customer service". Maybe it's just me, but if you take 100+ dollars from a guy and don't ship him stuff, quoted at 10 days delivery, mind you, for a month, I think I'd email the guy. 

Anyhow, it's exactly two months out as of today and I have seen and heard both Jack and Shit from them. Now, according to some websites that have I've been researching them on, they're just slow, but they will eventually ship. Well, golly-fucking-gee, buddies, isn't that great. I pay for something and WOW, I'll eventually get it. If this was some Kickstarter thing, hey, I get it. But at least Kickstarter project managers provide updates. Even those fucks over at Pixel Lincoln managed to tell people what's going on with their project from time to time, albeit very late. But these folks at Armorcast can't seem to manage to squeeze out a form letter to customers, "Sorry, we're backlogged like a muh'vugga and we will get to your order ASAP."  Something. Anything. 

In any event, consider yourselves warned that if you buy from Armorcast, you're going to hear absolutely nothing, you'll see absolutely nothing, and maybe, with some luck and wishing upon a star, you might actually see your hundred dollar order at some point. I guess the good news is that you WILL get your order, it will just take a tortoise's lifespan to do so. I can't verify that, though, because I'm still waiting on mine.

Mega Miniatures - Making Reaper's Kickstarter Seem Rather Passé

www.megaminis.com

If there's any one thing that keeps people from jumping wholesale into miniatures gaming, it's the time and the money required to purchase miniatures. If you're not born to paint, it's a daunting enough task just to figure out what you need to buy, especially with every Tom, Dick, and Harry telling you that if you don't buy Citadel-branded paints and miniatures, you're deficient. Well, and I say this with the deepest amount of respect, fuck them in their Cheeto-encrusted lips. Games Workshop may be the most well-known miniatures company, but they are not remotely the best. Not remotely.

You see, there's maybe three hundred companies that produce high-quality miniatures, there's maybe ten companies that produce hobby paints that are made specifically for painting miniatures and other hobby items. So, there's a lot of selection and you can literally find anything you want, from a Fallout-style Super Mutant to a juvenile with a teddy bear to a naked zombie stripper. The best part is that you can get most of these miniatures relatively inexpensively, cast in metal or plastic, and you can pick and choose whatever you like.

Now, this rolls back around to me telling you what to buy, like those Tom, Dick, and Harry fellows, or at least I can recommend something that I think you'll like. Enter Mega Miniatures, a company that is 13 years old and has been producing made-to-order metal miniatures the whole time. The best part is that they have pretty much anything you can imagine, from skeletal cowboys to warmongering robots to the best dungeon dressing parts I've ever seen. Well, actually, the best part is that they're dirt cheap. The bad news is that the inimitable Johnny Lauck has decided he's had enough of competing with the Kickstarters, Games Workshops, and Reapers of the world. Apparently, people would prefer to pay ten dollars for a miniature they don't have the skill to paint appropriately than a two dollar miniature that's 80% as detailed and far more easily painted. 

As you may have read in my Pegasus Hobbies piece, I'm endeavoring to create a lovely wasteland set to play some Falloutesque battles on, and I came across Mega Miniatures during the research phase of the project. It baffles me that with all the miniature research I've done over the past three years that I hadn't given them a solid look. I've spent maybe two hundred dollars of late on several companies' miniatures, and I recently placed an order for about a hundred dollars in Mega Miniatures product. When you get them side by side, there's no doubt in my mind that I should've held off and spent the lion's share of that money with Mega, because their selection and quality is simply the most astounding value in the miniatures market that I've found.

They have an online store that has several ranges, such as sci-fi, fantasy, and scenery, as well as some very unique ranges, of which I bought more than my fair share; I got 28 miniatures packs (some of which contain multiple miniatures, so it's more like 35 miniatures total) for that $105.00, which included shipping. I'm talking about getting miniatures of the quality shown for around three dollars a piece. It's insane! I am simply unable to comprehend why more people haven't started getting some of these things based on the quality and price alone. Sure, they're not the same level of detail as something from the giants of sculpting, such as Murch or Copplestone, but they beat the piss out of RAFM and most of the Blue Moon line, for less than half the price.

In the end, if you're a miniatures enthusiast, you should really consider Mega Miniatures as a viable option for almost any game theme. Gangs, orcs, goblins, robots, dungeon furnishings...they have it all. The bad news in all of this is that you need to get in on the deals before December 31, 2013, or you're going to miss out.

Check them out at their website.

Some photos lifted from 52minis.blogspot.com, since the paint jobs on the Mega Miniatures website are less than indicative of the quality of the miniatures.

Pegasus Hobbies - Making Your Table Shine Without Eviscerating Your Wallet

Circus friends, I've decided that I've been remiss in not sharing with you the vast pool of knowledge that I've learned over the years regarding tabletop miniatures gaming, and so this is the first of many articles that will pass on some of the laborious research I've carved out of the Internet. The tag will be "Miniatures Gaming 101" and I'll be putting articles ranging from figure sources, game rules, painting tip sites, terrain building help, the best books to buy, and all manner of things relating to all things miniature. I'm not a great figure painter, though I can hold my own, but I am a very capable terrain builder, so I'll likely share some of my projects with you fine folks as well. So, let's begin with a great source of material to quickly and cheaply get a table going for a skirmish: Pegasus Hobbies (PegasusHobbies.net).

There was a time, so long ago, that I was playing Battletech, Mage Knight, and all manner of miniature game on paper mats. Yes, they do serve a purpose, but why would you want to if you didn't have to, and further, if it wasn't prohibitively expensive? It's because I didn't know just how many miniatures companies are out there, nor did I know just how inexpensive miniatures terrain can be if you know where to look. Well, I was at a game store just before I got sick a year and a half ago, and I saw this wonderful, detailed church sitting on a Warhammer table. After inquiring, it turns out that the guy spent all of two hours painting and assembling it, and the amazing part, he spent just over twenty dollars on it.

I immediately got online and found that this company's products are both inexpensive and ubiquitous, and so I jumped in with both feet and got both a Gothic City Ruins and the same church set that I had seen at the store. As soon as I got it home I realized just how easy it was going to be to turn the box into what would be the ruins of the Esoteric Order of Dagon church, an ancient, decaying factory, the burned-out hulk of an old apartment building, and so many other terrain features. Within an hour I had glued it and assembled it, and because I tend to overthink things, three hours later I had the whole thing primered, painted, blackwashed, and three-color drybrushed. It is simply amazing how wonderful these things look once you've got them painted. 

I'm never one to do something half-assed, so I took it further once I'd had it for a year and really got interested in making beautiful landscapes to play on, so I then based the entire set, flocked it (including adding moss to the model), and put another ten dollar Pegaus set of rubble in the center to create the illusion that the top of the building had fallen in long ago. In all, it looks just like I hoped it would, and I'm out maybe a total of 6 hours time and forty bucks in materials. That said, it was very nice looking with a simple blackwash/drybrush treatment, and the flexibility of the sets are such that if you were to buy two, you could present them on the table as four sides of the same ruined building. 

The second set I got was, as I noted, the church itself. The beauty of these sets is that you can make them in a great many configurations, and so I made mine a little non-standard, since I'm a pretty non-standard individual myself. I ended up making it an "evil church", airbrushing the entire thing flat black and following with a grey drybrush treatment. I also airbrushed ~flame light~ on and around the lanterns but it didn't turn out as well as I liked. It's still got some work to go, a year later or so, but it's been good enough for my table so I haven't put effort into it to get it to what I consider "quality work".

About a month ago I downloaded and printed the free rules for "The Skank Game", otherwise known as Warlords of the Wasteland 2085, which is a post-apocalyptic skirmish game that includes vehicles and very light RPG elements. I was looking for a Fallout-esque game and therefore I needed to have some post-apocalyptic game pieces. Well, a forum member at Fortress:AT was talking about Pegasus' Syberclicks terrain, which is the Warhammer 40K equivalent of the Hexagon terrain (shown left), so I bought both the large and small packs, which cost a total of $32.00. Well, let me tell you, it's really quite modular in that you can build virtually anything you can imagine, much like Lego products, but with a very "hodge-podge", scavenged feel to the buildings. As usual, I couldn't follow the directions as listed, so with the small set I made something not remotely resembling the shown product, which integrated into the walled wasteland outpost I

created using the large set. The wife likes it, and she's a tough customer to please, so I'm content. It's very lightweight, so I think it really will need to have a base on it to sturdy it up. It snaps together with these clips that I believe were sent by the Devil himself, because after 2 hours of modelling, my fingers were LITERALLY bleeding. They're a real bitch to assemble, no doubt, but it's worth it. As you can see from the photo of the frames, there's a bazillion little rippy bits and each one is sharp as a razor, even after you've removed them from the frame. The clips come in six styles, from 90 degrees to multi-angle three-way, and there's a lot of flexibility in what you can do. Again, these things bite into your hand like a spur when you assemble the buildings, so be advised that you will not get out of this without some serious finger damage. I'd argue that it's worth it.

I spray painted the assembly after I glued it, and while you don't need to glue it, I wanted this to be a permanent structure so I used some CA and with a fine needle tip, dispensed a small drop at each joint and let the capillary action draw it into the connector. It's very durable now, and I left several joints unglued so that I can break it into two pieces for storage. I'll base it using some small lengths of plasticard epoxied to the bottom and flocked with sand. I may even use some modelling clay or Sculpey to create small berms along the base to make it look as if the structure has been there a while.  What I was going for, in all honesty, is something like a scaled-down version of the"juice" refinery in The Road Warrior. This photo shows what I built, and in retrospect, I really should've primed it, but the Rustoleum Hammered Copper spray paint usually sticks to pretty much anything. This is just the first coat, and only sprayed from top down. I ran out, so off to the store I go after work for another to finish the job. Once I've got it coated, I'll airbrush several layers of brown, grey, red, orange, and yellow on it to create a very rusty metal look, then I may or may not hand-paint some "hot spots" of dripping rust effect.

Along with the Hexagon stuff I also got the Pegasus Technobridge, which runs $15.00, and will save me a ton of time having to scratch build it out of Plasticard and balsa. It's the same as the church stuff, very simple to construct and looks great right out of the box, although I'll be painting it, probably to match the outpost, and then putting some sand on it here and there to give it a more realistic look. 

Now, Pegasus also creates some pre-painted stuff as well. For fantasy, or even some early American settings, you can buy a lot of small buildings that come ready-to-play. These are made of a hard stone material, perhaps even dental stone, so they're really rather heavy for their size compared to the Gothic stuff. This Small Stone Cottage cost me $13.00 and its larger brother cost me maybe five dollars more. They're a single, solid cast piece, so these are really only good to create the feel of a village rather than actually allow you to have door-to-door fighting. I've used these for Strange Aeons, and they fit in passably with my 1920's period pieces fairly well. It beats having to build and paint a Plasticville O-scale building, which I'll get into in a another Miniatures Gaming 101 article, when all you want is a prop piece to sit on the table as a thematic line-of-sight blocker.

In conclusion, you can get a lot of really great terrain, and I mean an entire city block's worth, for around a hundred dollars with Pegasus, and the stuff is so easy to assemble, aside from the Hexagon finger-scourge stuff, that it's a no-brainer. My only complaint with any of it is that they have only a few "lines" to choose from. I'd love if they moved into doing something like Plasticville, but in different time periods. It would certainly save me a lot of time in sourcing parts to kit-bash into what I want. Hope you enjoyed the article, and there's much more to come.