12/25: The Greebling Effect
Hey, everyone. Dutchmogul here, back with a post for December.
Junk Building (with greebles!)
I’ve always had a knack for seeing the model potential in garbage. When I was a kid, I would use foam packing inserts as fortresses for my action figures and cheap plastic figurines. The weird shapes and contours always sparked my imagination, and where others saw non-recyclable blobs of trash, I saw Mos Eisley-esque hives for assorted scum and villainy. After recently getting my hands on some modern versions in the packaging for a new vacuum cleaner (made from compressed paper… much better), I decided it was time to get back into some junk building.
The first thing I did was glue down a bunch of greebles. I was a bit worried that the glue wouldn’t hold, but nope. Standard superglue works just great and affixes really quickly. These bits came from a set that I’ve been designing for our subscribers (available through December), but you can definitely make your own greebles from trash and various knickknacks. Empty model sprues are great for this kind of thing, and if you do 3d print stuff, hold on to your failed prints when they look like they could be useful for this kind of work.
My next worry was that the material wouldn’t work well with spray primer. A lot of cheaper materials warp (or straight up disintegrate) under the accelerant or wetness of the paint. My worries were for naught (again), as this stuff took the paint well and didn’t need much of it to get a solid coat.
Finally it came time to paint and, yet again, any worries I had about that process went out the window. I laid down a coat of a dark red as the base, then drybrused a sort of clay red, then an off-white, allowing the leftover red to carry into that highlight color a bit (no need to wash the brush between steps). The texture really took to the brush, and I was really pleased with the results. I did a dark and light metallic drybrush on the greebles, painting some areas (like lamp bulbs and consoles) in a bright, nuclear green. And that was it.
I have a few more of these kicking around, and I’m looking at getting a full table based around these structures. They provide lots of interesting topology, nooks and crannies for miniatures, and really bring some volume to the map. The only downside is the lack of interiors, but (especially as I see these as the tops of subterranean complexes) you can break to tile-based tunnel maps on the sidelines if you want to explore within.
As an aside, if you’re into 15mm miniature gaming, these things are really, really perfect for that scale, and you can get a full city block out of one of these, with windows, balconies, and other greebles giving you a great sense of the size.
OpenTactics (soft launch)
We just did a soft launch of the core OpenTactics rules for our subscribers and this will all be going public before too long. We made a couple of starter factions (Cult of the Gouger and Nexus Security Firm) to go along with the rules, plus a couple of multiverse mercs. We’ll have more news on this one soon and, like Crux and Pocket-Tactics, this new version of the OpenTactics core rules will be free (and the starter factions will be available for sale to non-subscribers at some point as well).
December Free Miniature: Nexus Inspector
For this month’s free (and support-free) STL, here’s an inspector-class agent from the Nexus Security Firm. This guy works as a great alternate for the one included in the faction set and there’s a pre-supported version included as well for those who want to print in resin. Happy gaming, folks,
Dutchmogul and the Ill Gotten Games team