Tricol, Tect-priest Darrow's Dream

Dream's are like snowdrops in the wind they flutter about until the randomly land, beautiful or terrifying we have no control over where they lead us, but just like snowflakes they can quickly fad away.

The Tech-priest Darrow night's have be restless over the last while, a repeated dream disturbing his sleep, visions of an old abandoned house ,with hints  of untold treasures in a distance far away place, followed by a the image of a man in front of a great eye & the name of a place repeatedly called out over & over again.

                                       

Awaking from yet another nights restless sleep Tech-priest Darrow now knew what he had to do if he was ever to be rid of these dreams,

Bellinter House was where he must go, reaching for his data-slate it didn't take him long to find out where it was.

I must send a massage to Elaine he thought to himself to let her know where I'm going or she'll have a search-party out looking for me I've no doth.

Well that's it for this post, as always my thanks for dropping in & if you care to leave a comment it would be welcomed.

Comet the Preacher

This a model I've had for a long time & has been sitting there half painted, it's a FW Preacher of Nurgle the set contains 2 Peaches the other one was painted a long time back & I used it as my HQ at Brocon.

Not looking for a 40K model but something to haunt a house I didn't go heavy in the Nurgle direction.

Oddly enough the model for some reason put me in mind of the ghost of Christmas yet to come from Scrooge, well it is getting near that time of year.

It's always nice to get a model painted & ready to be used, so a haunting he will go.
Well that's it for this post as always my thanks for dropping in & if you'd care to leave a comment it would welcomed.

Manor Hall

The last PA campaign book has one of the game's take place inside a old manor house, so I set about building something like it myself.

Now I've often talked (waffled) here about building sets kind of based off what they do for movie's & TV shows, so with that in mind I set out to kill two birds with one stone.

As you can see in the picture above I've made it so that the two side walls are removable, main that when I need I can get model eye level pictures.

You can see the heart of the fireplace in the picture above & were at the eye level of the models but we can only do this because the wall is removable.

I like to as much as I can keep the picture with in the model's world, something that can't really be done if you'r taking picture's from above,

Even if you do manage to keep only things that in the model's world (which I didn't) you end up with all the picture's been looking down on things.

Through window's & doors opes can also be a good way of getting pictures at the model's level, I have to say that making this was a nice change of pace & challenging & it's something I'll be doing a bit more of.

Well that's it for this post as always my thanks for dropping in & if you'd care to leave a comment it would be welcomed.

The Jellybaby power-plant & a monument

I seemed to have been in one of my working on lots of things & getting nothing finished stages for a long time now so it was nice to see something finally finished, the jellybaby power-plant came about because of my sweet tooth as last Christmas I got a plastic jar/bottle of jellybabies.

Needless to say the jellybabies are long gone but the container that they came in I'd kept with the intention that I'd do something with it.

One of the great things about sci/fi is that anything is possible & at 10" high this thing stands out.

The yellow panels are just off cut of mdf from the line poles that I used 4 of to add some detail

& to reinforce the idea that it's a power/plant not a sweet jar.

Cities are not just made up of buildings so I made up this little monument

That's it for this post as always my thanks for dropping in & if you care to leave a comment it would be welcomed.

Tricol building better worlds, a different level

Something I've been wanting to do for a long time is to improve my gaming table, the cork tile one was fine but it's only 2D & what I want is a 3d one, but not one that's cast in stone so to speak.
In the picture below you'll see a river but on a flat table the river is always at the same level as the land, by adding little built up banks a long the river we hide this a bit but it never look's just right imo, this also stands for anything we want to do that is below the board level.

So what to do ? fair question & here's part of the answer  in the link
 http://pulpalley.com/viewtopic.php?f=22&t=60&sid=d9b1191237886d6499b9992d141280ea
Right hoping that your back I'll push on, as you'll have seen in Dave post he created levels both above & below the base line (ie the gaming table's greater area) which really help to add to the over all feel of things.

As I said above I don't want the table set in stone, so using 12"x12" tiles I decided to make some 2" thick tiles & some 1" thick tiles & will just use terrain to do the rest, meaning that my table can just be changed at will.

The two pictures above show the different height tiles working very well, with a wall & some steps down all adding detail to the scene, but I can do even more as long as I keep the blank canvass.

Now as you can see from the pictures above the scene has change to a waterfront setting & all I did was change the terrain on the lower tile.

By adding a wall I've now created a river that unlike the one in the first picture is at a lower level, would this look the same as a river running through any city around the world ? I know Dublin's river Liffey  is like this as are many others that I've seen.

This is only the start of what will be a long term project, & I'll use similar tricks when setting the scene up to be outside a city, but I'm sure you will agree with me that even from these simple mock ups that it does take things to a different level.  

Well that's all for this post, as always my thanks for dropping in & if you'd care to comment it would be welcomed.

Tricol, building better worlds roads

Roads: we don't needs roads where were going, well actually we do as they add a lot to the setting which is for me very important, this is going to be a strange post  so bear with me & feel free to laugh at some typical Frank moments.

This story starts a long way back as I started to take note of printable terrain & even more so when I came across Mean Streets  http://www.thevirtualarmchairgeneral.com/610-Mean-Streets-Main-Page.html over on The Virtual Armchair General run by Patrick R Wilson. The printout above is part of a little house that was a freebie on some site I'd come across at one time, first cock up I should have printed out two copies of the door's & windows, lesson number one learned.

Anyway not to be deterred I decided I push on with it as I'd never done anything like this before ( what could possible go wrong ?) so it would be good experience  for things to come, assumption the mother of all cork ups as I'm so fond of telling people, well no one is fool prove certainly not this old fool.

So I cut out this part of the page with some of the windows on it & pasted it to a piece of cork assuming that the windows would be placed in the same places as the ope's on the other page, cork up number two.

Of coarse they weren't stupid Frank, lesson number two learned, this really is an excise in how not to do things.

 A little disheartened & with one of the window ruined which left me with just one window left I decided I wasn't going to build this house, but what about the roads Frank you ask ? yes I know & we'll get to them.

Until then how about some sidewalks ? have I ever told you dear reader that my computer hates me ? well it does & does all kind of nasty shit to me, if Doctor Grant in JP though he had it bad with them compered to me he's a techno Greek, the sidewalk above is of course meant to be in colour, but anyway I'm going to push on using some of it as this is all just a learning process.

Up against one of  my buildings with Lady D on it, it certainly adds detail to things even if it is in black & white, now if you don't mind I'm going to go back a bit as their are a couple of things I learned from my mistakes & I'd like to share with you.

In the picture above (yes there's a road) Lady D is coming under attack from some foul thing & in fairness nothing looks out of place with the picture, apart from the B&W sidewalk, but look below when I changed the lighting.

There's air bubbles like you can get in wallpaper, now tbh most of these dried out notice I said most but not all, another thing learned,& the fix is simple

I used a little kids rolling pin to do the next bit of wall, but you could use a piece of a bush handle pipe or even a wallpaper roller that's for taking out bubbles if you have one.

Much better not one bubble but still I learned something else, I would suggest that where possible to leave a bit extra on the paper so that you can fold it around the edges of what ever your mounting it on to, another lesson learned.

As you can see with this section of sidewalk which is upside down btw you need to fold over the front part & one end to get the 3D effect.

I used the roller to make sure there be no air bubbles, but to my shame when letting it dry I forgot all about shrinkage & me a carpenter, another lesson dear reader if doing this kind of thing put a heavy book or something on top of the things until the glue dry's or it will wrap.

I'd made up all the road sections & was on the intersection's before I remembered to take pictures, but as you do them the same way it's fine, I'm sticking them to the tile you see beside it,

 the joy of these tiles is their self adhesive so no need for glue or to worry about shrinkage

just cut out your road sections

stick them to the tile & then cut around them, the great think about these tiles is that they are very tin & don't tend to warp so you just lay them down on your table.

As you can see there's very little of a lip.

I think we can agree the roads add a nice bit of detail for very little effort & once you have bought the PDF you've free to print out as much as you need & with there been a couple of different styles of roads to choose from  & only 10 USD's a pop, sidewalk's 2 USD's & the tiles at 2euro's for 4, I think it's safe to say there will indeed be roads where were going, on the print out buildings I'm not sure yet.

Well that's it for this post I hope you found it useful, my thanks to Lady D for the help & as always my thanks to you for dropping in & if you'd care to leave a comment it would be welcomed.