My Stargrave project continues at pace, and I’ve taken a break from building and painting miniatures to get some terrain together. The Stargrave setting has the idea that a vast central interplanetary authority has collapsed, and so it’s sort of a post-apocalyptic environment. Or perhaps more like a post-Roman setting where people are living in the ruins of a lost civilisation.
I find it useful to keep this in mind when I’m building the miniatures for the coteries, gangs, and crews that I’ve been building and doubly so when thinking about the environment they will be fighting over. I don’t envisage an environment of bright, shiny, new structures, but rather a ramshackle place, with generators held together with multiple jury rigged repairs, structures bolted together from scrap, or crumbling ruins barnacled with later add-ons.
It’s a dangerous universe out there so I figured folk would congregate in close-packed shanty towns and tight-knit communities for easy defence and mutual support. Stargrave, as a skirmish wargame, also has the core conceit that conflict is everywhere, and therefore the effects of battle will be evident in the landscape, with ruins and wreckage surrounding the dwellings of most folk. In fact, it’s possible that many soldiers simply settled on the battlefields that ended society, and their descendants now live in those places.
So, this got me thinking of something like the brightly coloured Brazilian favelas, and this is where my ideas for buildings settled. The human spirit will always seek colour and light and joy, even in the most desperate of situations.
These buildings will be scratch-bashed from household junk and model bits and off cuts. I recently moved house and in doing so, acquired a large amount of polystyrene. Most of this I threw out of course, but the more interesting shapes made it into a pile of “useful modelling material”. Armed with this, a newly acquired hot wire cutter, some PVA glue and a selection of carboard cartons otherwise destined for the recycling bin, I set about building some dwellings.
One of the advantages of building “ramshackle” is that its far easier than making something that looks nice and new. At least I find it easier.
I started by cutting these interesting “L-shaped” polystyrene blocks into rough buildings sized to be simple structures against the 28mm minis.
So, half way through I switch streams and while only some are finished I get stuck into the painting on what I have done. And…er…I forgot to take photos of the work-in-progress stages. But I sprayed them black, and then give them an overspray of a dull metal paint that I happen to have lying about. I don’t have an airbrush (yet), so all my spraying uses rattlecans.
Once dry, I then set about putting on some random colours, layers of washes, and finished up with a liberal daub of Dirty Down Rust. My thinking was that these buildings are mostly tin or iron constructions, but really I just wanted to use more of the amazing DD Rust!
This process was relatively quick, compared to the tortuously slow construction, and its crude and slapdash, but I think the final result is fine for a Stargrave board. they can be laid out in a "compound", or to make winding alleyways, or even stacked on top of each ther for a bit of height (I could do with a lot more for this, If I want a full settlement board).
I’ll finish the rest of the buildings, and then look at getting some wreckage, oil drums, and similar scatter terrain sorted too. I feel like a generator, and other utilities like water tanks would suit the setting. Maybe a rusty sci-fi Torii gate might be good too.
But I may switch streams to a different project for a while. “A change is as good as a break” as they say…and Warband Romans need finishing off.
Stargrave 002 - Capran Prospectors
The netting looks good - what is it - bandage material?
ReplyDeleteThanks! I think its some old model netting (it ws in an unmarked bag). However, medical gauze would work just as well wouldn't it. Great idea sir!
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