More Rats

I'm not a big fan of having several identical figures on a 8 man team so I had to do a little bit of work to change the look on these two Strikers. I swapped their arms between the two of them and also bent them around to change the pose somewhat. This also included changing one of the legs on each, so after filling the gap I sculpted some shorts onto them. The other rats have a rather unfortunate diaper looking thing on made of straps or bandages. I guess mutated ratmen aren't real found of pants in the future.

The one on the left got a stripe on his shorts. 

I also finished up the background piece. This was a straight forward build. Foamcore base with pieces of cut plasticard on top for detailing. I went with a neutral grey color so it won't distract from the figures but livened it up with some paint stripes for playing field markings. These were done with some masking tape and stippling on the paint to give it a worn look. Last thing was painting up the glass which I used a serendipitous post from Spaceman Spiff as a guide, then it got a coat of gloss varnish on top.

Gateway Under the Hill

This is going to be the start of one of my new tangents. With the release of the newest edition of D&D, Mantic's Dungeon Saga ( I didn't buy in as I just couldn't imagine trying to clean the mold lines off that many figures made out of that horrible resin/plastic stuff they use), and finding a great post on making dungeon terrain by DaggerandBrush my mind has turned to making my own dungeon delving set up.

The overarching idea is the adventurers going deep underground to confront the forces of the Fae lords. I'm holding off on who the adventurers are going to be until the miniatures arrive which might be a couple more weeks as they are being shipped across the Western Sea. But my initial set of pieces are going to be one of the entryways to Faerie through an ancient monolithic burial mound, like Newgrange or Maeshowe .

As this is going to be part of what might be an elaborate set of dungeon pieces so I figured I might as well start at the beginning and make the gateway first. Not sure how useful as a gaming piece it will be but it could be plopped down on the board to form a link between the interior sections and a more open set up outside.

The stones have all been carved out. Still need to work on the ground around it. 

 Since this is a big piece I also decided to make a few smaller ones to try things out on first. I figured hallway sections would be a perfect start. I'm not entirely sure how I'd like to make them at this point. So I'm gonna try out a couple of different styles and see which one I like the best. I think in the end it is gonna be a battle between playability ( not my first concern as I'm unsure I'll ever game with these) and looks. 

This one is a simple test piece and will be used a backdrop for taking pictures. First stage is carving the stonework out of the insulation foam and then sanding everything to knock off the rough edges.

Next a coating of wood-filler, a little more light sanding, and then a mix of sand and matte medium to fill in the dirt.

With basic paint job. I wanted to avoid the usual grey and liked the brownish color you see in a lot of pictures of sarsen stones. After this I need to add a bunch of little details.