Day: February 7, 2011

The next (and probably last) GASLIGHT book will be The GASLIGHT Compendium.  The Compendium combines the original GASLIGHT book, Battles by GASLIGHT, To Be Continued… by GASLIGHT, and Adventures and Expeditions by GASLIGHT into a single volume.  In addition there are new rules for Aeroneuf-style fleet actions, personal zeppelins, etc.  Finally, the book will include a few new scenarios.

This weekend we spent all day Saturday shooting new illustrations for the book.  Most of the text has been done since before Christmas.  When adding art to books, I find that it’s best to start at the beginning and work toward the back of the book.  If you start anywhere else, adding art earlier in the book causes all the layout and pagination work after it to get screwed up.  You end up laying out  pages multiple times.  This weekend we got to page 65 of a book we think will be about 150 pages long.

The book will have some of the old clip art and photos that players will find familiar, but it will have many new illustrations.  There are only one or two pages that don’t have a chart, figure, or illustration.  As we are looking at printing this with color throughout the book, we think the final, archival, comprehensive GASLIGHT book will be very attractive.

Above is an example of one of the new illustrations.

Our goal is to have the book read for printing by the end of March so that the book will be read for sale by Historicon in July.  Stay tuned.

Well, I didn’t get much sleep this weekend, but I did manage to finish painting my first pack of zombies for our club project.  They are actually fun to paint.

These were multi-part, hard-plastic figures from Wargames Factory.  I also mixed in a few torsos and legs from some ancient Germans to beef up the “unit” a bit.  My only complaint with the figures is that they come with the left arm molded to the torso.  This means you have to cut off the arm if you want a pose other than the left arm hanging to the side.

Here is a closeup of three of them.  I took an extra arm from one of the sprues and gave it to the zombie on the right for both a club-like weapon and a mid-afternoon snack.

This group features a flowered shirt.  On the figure in the middle, I cut off the arm holding the foot, which was hanging at the zombie’s side, and re-glued it up in the air.