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I like the look of that middle one. For some reason it reminds me of the old Flash Gordon movie. There's a pod that looked like a sweet gum ball that they reached their hands into.

Yeah that happens when you chip away the outer layer, it's easy to reproduce but not quite the shape I'm going for. I'm putting a pin in that form for later. I took some bits closer to the smallest carved one shown and attacked them with the hotknife and now they're looking suitably gnarly. I need to work in some wire for supports/tentacles and I think they'll be nearly ready for paint. Just some gobs of hot glue first. If these three trial successfully, then I can make a few more to fill out the building.

I think I'll make two or three of them separate on bases. I know the Cadmus Shasvastii need pods on turn one at the very least, and there could be the odd situation where a seed soldier gets revealed and needs to have a pod on the table in place of a token. May experiment with some spawn-embryos (basically a unrevivable marker that you have to kill to truly kill most shasvastii, in those situations where you need to kill things to win scenarios) but those would mostly be fleshy chunks with tentacles trying to burrow into the ground.

So here's a prototype with wireframe tentacles, both to support it and to probe the environment. The plates will be green and the creases and tentacles will be shasvastii purpink. Or pinkle, whichever you prefer.

I think it will work quite well. Pod people give me the creeps. Are you going to putty up the tentacles or do you have suitable bits lying around for that?

You have a great foam base there but did you think of using a walnut shell or similar wrinkly nut instead? May be a bit too big though.

Hot glue! Doesn't work for everything but its usually one of my first attempts.

I don't like to model with organic stuff, even like shells. Making s mold is one thing, but I don't wanna deal with it rotting out sometime.

Gonna paint this one before I make any more but I'm pretty sold. Gonna need like half a dozen for the building and maybe some more for the army.

Good and gribbley glue.

Think I'm done tinkering with this for now. Gonna go prime it white. White? Ehh it's probably gonna be grey, maybe primer grey then.

I've got some more alien pod things made too, total of six now. Gotta finish the tentacle bits which I may get to do tonight. Anything beyond that is gravy.

I think I'm gonna call the place Taco Mars with a little red planet next to the words wearing a sombrero.

Gonna need a lot of posters and graffiti to do the blankest walls. May even look up a tagging tutorial, I think Cam did one a ways back in his blog.


Kind of having buyers remorse for my Bones3 pledge. There are a couple of small things I'd rather have now and the rest I would probably feed to bills. Anyone have much luck cancelling kickstarters after the fact? I kind of hate to do it to them but at the same time I kind of hate to have 1-200 more models show up next year just as I'm potentially getting a handle on the pile (you can laugh, that was a joke and is probably impossible ).


Oh, if I get some time I'll de-bag and photograph my wave 3 DBX and wave 1 KoW stuff.

Epic looking building. I can think of no finer establishment to fend off a horde of zombies/pod people/angry wives what with all that sugary processed food for the taking mmmmmm reminds me I haven't had takeaway for almost a year now. Damn it.

Looking forward to seeing it painted and Cam definitely does spectacular graffiti in his blog.

Thanks. I'm working myself up to doing *far* too much for the 7th installment of the dakka monthly painting challenge. The theme is 'Never tell me the odds!' so basically one or more models overcoming adversity.

So I'm gonna paint a Nomad or three, as many zombies as possible and... I really would like to shoehorn in that 2x2' project panel full of buildings and scatter terrain... I had to build this from scratch as it is also being entered into the current LoeR terrain competition, but Paradigm's comp is just painting so I can throw in some already built and even primed/basecoated structures that are laying around and have been in need of finishing for some time.

I'd really like to do a small space station/megacity slum constructed from cast off materials, complete with more stalls like a noodle stand, and a couple of other things. Oh yeah a happy-pill micro-factory. Kind of like a tiny building with a vending machine set into the wall and a deposit site for materials. Basically a truck comes by and dumps in materials opposite of mechanical armed trash trucks hereabouts and then the microfactory crafts pills on demand from the interface on the outside. Fun quotes like:
Credits go in, Happiness comes out.
Well adjusted bliss, only a keypad away.
etc etc
Something like Paradigm Pharmaceuticals Wellness Station. I intend to work the names of some Dakkafolk into the graffiti and business names.

I may fail to finish this by the challenge but then I can just put down a deadzone mat and fill whatever portion of it that I can with zombies, terrain, and Nomads.

I may not be programming like I thought I would, but I can still benefit from the use of Agile Development


Getting a moment to myself tonight, playing some music. I have to have fast music, I can't do with anything slow these days. I find myself listening to a lot of J-pop, vocaloid stuff, you name it. Carameldansen always makes me smile:


Judge me if you will, but it's so damn catchy

The pods are an interesting development... I like the building WIP as well.

Thanks Someone complained that there were no entries in the current LoER competition with tentacles so I fished around until an idea clicked.

Some WIPs:



Gonna start on posters soon, and some tagging. Need to airbrush the signs to white and then I'll get started.

Is that some kind of pit trap with a tentacle pod thing at the bottom?

It's a roof access hatch. Instead of one of those quaint little enclosed stairwells, this building just has a hatch for emergency roof access/whatever. It probably should be more aligned with a corner/wall to better imply that a working ladder used to be there but.. meh. There's basically a man-hole cover that goes over it 90% of the time.

The tentacle things down at the bottom are alien seed pods that have been hidden in the building.

Also, it got some paint:

Taco Mars needs a big red spot (maybe one eye poking out under the sombraro)

otherwise the gribbly seed pods are looking great, looks appropriate for the combined army

Taco Mars...excellent. Brings back memories of late 80's WWF Wrestling and Mexican wrestler Tito Santana, basically before Taco Bell Mexican food was the byword for an upset stomach...no idea why I have always loved it.

Lol I like Taco Bell too, but the quality seems to have slipped several notches in recent years.

Had a thought.

I was gonna have zombies (or aliens, but probably zombies) swarming my poor defenders but, what if...

Instead of a bunch of tiny gribblies...

I use the single biggest gribbly I have?

This guy:


Humorously, I went to steal a scale photo from the interwebs and found one of my own on the first page so I guess I can't call it stealing

To do battle with this guy... hell I could throw down the entire breach team and they'd still be screwed.

Seriously considering it now.

Another possibility would be to whip up a bunch of Mars Attacks Martians, giant bugs, stompy robot #2, a saucer or three... and have a few survivors and a handful of soldiers trying to hold out against the onslaught. Honestly more excited about *that* idea than working on the scifi zombies (I dunno why, just don't feel like building anything right now), but Nomads on the other hand could be really fun too. Especially with the Kanjira route as I could paint several of them. Also if I do Mars Attacks I'd want to paint the redbrick battlezones and not scratchbuilt scifi terrain which would mean losing the synergy from already having the Taco place done.

HALP.


WHAT I DO!?

I vote Kanjira.

Put him in front of Tack Mars with a miniature if a chihuahua. It'll be like a flashback of the Godzilla movie commercial for Taco Bell from years ago.

Bwahaha. I think I've decided to do Mars Attacks! Bare minimum goal for the month is to get the core box set done. Having done that I'll have both Mars Attacks and Imperial Assault 'finished' in terms of the core sets. This way, I won't feel so bad when I dive knife first into Dungeon Saga when it shows up in a month or two. Only 16 or so models to the core but the extended pre-DS goal is to hit a fully painted 2x2' MA board before it shows up as well.

But you guys like pictures, so have a look at everything I got from DBX wave 3 and KoW2.0 wave 1. Well, minus the books and ruler/tokens.


Forget what I'm supposed to call them.. but I'm going with Dino-King Blaine and Ronnie the Bard. Blaine is very crisp, as long as the spear straightens in hot water I'll be pleased. I didn't pay anything in particular for the bard so I won't complain too much that his instrument and cap-feather broke off just looking at them funny. Easy fixes.


DBX from here on out. The Rush Tracker and one of the extra/bonus/whatever sponsors. Don't expect me to remember their names, I barely followed the campaign


Here's my Rebs team. I don't think they'll be playing much Dreadball, Xtreme or otherwise. The Soraks would make great sword spawn by just adding blades to their arm guards. The centaurs just need guns or spears. The four armed guys and frogdudes could probably be weaponized too. Downed Soraks make good casualty/objective markers as well. I think every optional team came with it's own dreadball, neat!


Brokkrs! The working caste of the Forge Fathers. Again, I will probably raid bits from my classic forge father models to weaponize these dudes. I may wait on a few till DZ:I hits and I can give them proper rifles/heat hammers too. They'll join the ranks of the other Brokkrs who comprise the cheapest forge father troop type in Deadzone, and often come in big units for warpath.


Left to right... The initial sponsors, The Warden and Blaine. Then two zees and an Yndij ravager (may get stolen for rebs!), then a spinepede or something, nameless bloodsucker, pig-lizard pusk something or another, plant monster, dreadball thrower and blocker robots. I've got two of these sets. My other warden will probably be painted Caucasian and used as a crime Kingpin for Pulp alley (the time period is kind of unsuitable for anything but white dudes being in charge of stuff, sadly).


The giants from DBX. I think you could get more in an expansion I didn't get but oh well. San garr giant shark dude, krastovor giant spider robot monster thing, berserk Chovar thing, Iron Ancestor in dire need of a re-positioned right arm (preferably for a gun ).


Extra DBX sponsors, Shojynn or something (looks like his hand is broken), terraton dude... krato gon maybe? Forge father dude, maybe from the same caste as the helfather. Doctor something or another, handles the mutant team. The last one on the right is another MVP, Eclipse, looks like a werewolf or something.


Lookit all the MVPs! Left to right by memory... Brickbat Vogner, a marauder. Useless Ada lorana mvp as it's not see-through to match, tiny tsudochan mvp (maybe like yoda?), useless crystallan MVP as he doesn't match, excavator forge father MVP/attack robot, leaning on him is uhh.. i forget maybe deadman davitz? Then I think it's lyra the fixer with the hand claw and what appears to be a monkey face? Anchoring the center is the space ogre Grak, with a clipped-wing flying guy (really drawing a blank here, one of the rebs races) and the Nameless sort of sexy she squid lady to the front and right. Next is the koris 8-limbed mvp, then brute force in her loader suit thing. Asylum in his creepy mask (and he'd do well in a lot of settings, just generic enough), then I think the Kalyshi mvp, some kind of odd slug man, and then the werewolf lady again.


This is the robots team though I'm sorely tempted to just claim all the parts for the bitz box. The little 4-wheeled and mono-wheeled units are particularly fun, could mount guns on them or monitors or cameras... or robot torsos I guess. Pneumatic punch arms, chain flails, claws and so on. Neat stuff, maybe too neat for it's own good as it's probably all gonna get ganked for conversions


Plague team. Or I should say 3rd gen plague conversion bits order Got some claw and tentacle arms, big meaty arms, skinny arms, three types of tails for representing plagued Yndij, Spyhr, and Veermyn (looks like), some vestigial wings. Two who would be dreadball guards have chitinous armor like maybe they were even Zzor before being plagued. There are some light weight guys too (strikers) and then some middle weights with yndij tails. I'm gonna mix n match this set with my remaining 3rd gen mutants and use them all as plague.


Tsudochan or something. I wasn't very interested in this team so I'm not sure what their deal is. Psychic dudes I guess? Work out alright as creepy alien masterminds too probably.


The Koris, creepy 8-limbed aliens with a bizarre mastery of portal technology. Basically a general d-bag race that goes around and messes with anyone they feel like. Portal your ship way off course? Yep. Portal nasty aliens into your cargo hold? Why not!


Cool transparent blue crystallans. Will have to do some thinking as to how to paint these guys. I would like to paint the rock/cloth/whatever portions of them as normal, but leave the fancy transparent blue alone for the crystal parts. I guess I could always do it quick and dirty and then scrape the paint away from the obviously crystal bits. We'll see. Not sure what I'd use these guys for other than DBX, or possibly a random alien encounter.


With some light behind him. I think the crystal parts would look a bit better with a dark blue wash.


The Ada Lorana (i think). These are some kind of justice-seeking energy beings who kind of take it upon themselves to police the galaxy, or so I remember. They're especially interested in catching Blaine. I think these dudes could work out just fine as they are as a random alien encounter or what not. They can phase through solid walls and stuff so you may just find them on your ship accusing you of wrong doing you may or may not have committed Like the crystallans, probably a dark blue wash. Maybe some light airbrush work on the circles in their heads and chests, some light drybrushing on the whispy fire parts.

Looks like plenty there to play Dreadball populate a Deadzone with!

Right? That's pretty much all I backed DBX for, to get DZ fodder. I should have gotten the fans though, that was a neat set. Will wait for a retail set.

I may have some teams I don't do anything with to use for DBX... Ada Lorana dudes will work for either without modification.

Did you get any kind of shipping notice? I'm still waiting for my stuff.

None at all. And then it was a DHL van of all things.

I should have been in the *very* first wave of packages, what with having the small KoW pledge + DBX pledge combo, those went out first.

Congrats, I'm still waiting on my KOW2.0 stuff as well, but I only did the$50 pledge. I like the transparent blue dudes, and the robot chop shop parts . Can't wait to see your Mars attack stuff come together. Also did you get the new e passion for imperial assault that came out a couple weeks back?

That is a haul and a half there Grim, so many useful generic sci-fi parts and minis for Deadzone too.

A shame about Ronnie but I always found Mantic metal to be quite soft and oddly malleable. Also weird that the relevant DBX MVPs are not the same translucent blue as the teams.

How have you found the casting quality of the DBX minis?

When does the Mars Attacks project start then?

You're a better man than I, or at least you have a more tolerant wife. I took one look at my untouched wave 1 and 2 DBX stuff, threw in the stuff from wave 3 and sold it at a loss because I know I will never get around to it.

Wow while I typed my mini-rants I had two more posts pop up! Editing this post to reply to those first as they should be shorter questions!

@Thraxas Yeah, I'm really looking forward to having a random miscellaneous scifi horde. Not even sure what I'll do with it, but I'll think of something! The RonnieBard I wasn't even expecting, so I'm not disappointed. I have some plastic feathers I can glue to the cap from old Empire dudes, and I'm pretty sure I can fix the banjo thing. The botched MVPs though, they're useless. I didn't pay to get them separately, but if I were gonna seriously play DBX and with either of those factions... I'd be sad. I'm sure I can repurpose the rockman into some kind of D&D elemental by removing the clothing parts and sculpting more rock parts back in. If I ever bother. The not-blue elemental guy I dunno. I guess he'd make a cool fire elemental for the same purpose, probably. DBX is pretty solid. It's softer than Deadzone restic, harder than mars Attacks Plastic. Still gotta mostly cut the lines instead of scrape them, I think, but you can probably get away with a bit more of that than on the DZ stuff. Pretty decent quality overall.

@Josh We just purchased a fairly large home. I've got my own little idunno 8-10x8-10 ft office with most of my active stuff, and a room off the garage that I've appropriated as my 'game room' for displaying scenery and for playing on the game table if it ever happens. Space isn't too much of a premium so that's not an issue. We've also got our separate bank accounts and beyond cooperating on bills and stuff we spend our money however we like. We make about the same and spend roughly the same on bills so y'know. She tends to like to buy stuff like curtains or new running shoes (and probably saves better than me to be honest) but yeah anyway. As long as I don't leave stuff laying around and what not...
I'm sure I'll have problems getting around to the DBX stuff too. I'll probably cherry pick a bit to get to sooner, but a lot of it will languish for some time.


@Theo:
I have not expanded Imperial Assault. I think the expansion which costs what...googling... $39.99$29.99 for 10 boardgame quality plastic figures and a bunch of cards/tokens/tiles/books/whatever other potentially useless things they decided to cram into it....is not a great deal. When I got 36 models for what, 60 bucks as the Deal of the Day? That wasn't so bad. And I got the game to play. And there's a crapload of scenarios to play in the core set. I've only managed to play 2-3 of them. There are like 30. Until I've played all 30 of those scenarios at least once... the expansion holds little interest to me.

Just rationalizing it, but Imperial Assault is a lot easier to talk myself out of Pokemoning than x-wing is. I'm doing pretty good so far with X-wing too (since the initial 'gotta have em all!'), still haven't caved on the dorky looking assassin droid ship for Scum, bought the imperial raider, or started nabbing wave 7 stuff like it's going out of style. Yet. We'll see. Wave 8 is pretty forgettable too as its all ships from a show I never watched and probably won't. Though I'm sure my inner power/gamer wants the cards.

Same with the new Hoth expansion, though it seems a bit meatier--it costs more to show for it. If I got to play Imperial Assault every week, I'd probably be after the new stuff. I may still go after the Han Solo and Chewbacca ally packs just to have them. And I guess C3P0 and R2D2 too, for collection/nostalgia sake. But I'm not really interested in spending time squadbuilding for the skirmish version and have so much of the core game left to explore anyway.

Sorry for the rant lol. There are seemingly dozens of ally packs too, but even Miniaturemarketed paying 7-8 dollars for a single 28mm mini meant for a boardgame is kind of meh. Even though they're cool Iconic star wars figures. Again, if I played more I'd be ok with the inflated price because missions and stuff, like I'm ok with X-wing costs due to the cards/dials/whatnot.

My pledge for KoW was the $50 set too. I got mine sooner because they decided to ship backers with both DBX wave 3 and KoW2.0 wave 1 and certain other criteria together. I think they told me I shouldn't be worried till september hits but then there was the whole Blaine being slowed down and the hardback being a thing that was getting waited on...etc etc. As long as MM doesn't have one on the shelf before you get it right?


Man. Sheesh. I must be cranky or something. I really went off on Imperial assault for almost no reason. Poor game. It's a damn fun game. Probably not as simple as Zombicide or as immersive as a proper D&D, but pretty fun. I'm hoping Dungeon Saga is more or less just like it but fantasy. Hmm... that's another angle to look into as well. While I'm loathe to spend proper hard earned bucks on those things... using my credit card does slowly build up credit with Amazon. I usually blow out that budget on Miniatures. But... Infinity stuff is high there. Most miniature stuff is under represented and therefore high. Sometimes you can do ok with X-wing but meh, can't paint it, well... don't need it. Maybe I'll ply my amazon credit to get those Han/Chewie/whoever packs..even the expansion. If it doesn't drain my bank account to do it, I wouldn't mind painting more of the models. Much like Mars Attacks!, they are simple and easy/fun to paint for it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, Mars Attacks thing is going on now. Cleaning models at the moment. Gonna try to get a bunch done for the monthly dakka painting contest.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Cleaning the Martians is kind of a pain... the way their suits are made, clearing the mold lines is tedious. Not really anyone's fault, it's just like mold lines through hair are usually nasty, but if a model has a full head of hair there isn't much avoiding at least one rough mold line.

Allow me to weign in on Imperial Assault. While each expansion provides a mini, and some missions, the reality is that the base game provides die-cut counters for most of these miniatures, and you have PLENTY of gameplay in the base game.

Really, the expansions are just not needed and, frankly, hard to justify in my eyes, and my wallet.

Nice haul there, Grim!

Thanks EyamRai

@Brian, pretty much where I stand. The core game is too good to *need* the expansions. The token characters are plenty viable if a little boring. And there's just too much there to want to Pokemon the whole set. May pick a few Iconic characters out with spare amazon credit, we'll see.