Only Seven Days Until Christmas
Author: Buck
Anything But a Twenty
Greg Priebe, one of the guys in our gaming group, sent me a note about a toy available at Target stores from the Disney movie, Planes. It is a good size for 28mm figures and looks like a C-119 cargo plane. I’ve always liked the look of the C-119. Before I could take action on his suggestion, I saw this blog posting: http://www.inlgames.com/c119.htm.
My pulp games involve Duke Morrison and his buddies, “Wrench” Web and “Boats” Morgan along with his love interest, Gianna Nannini, daughter of the great scientist Serafini Nannini. Duke Morrison NEEDED a plane. So within a few days, I had ordered one for me and one for Greg from Target.com.
My son took up the challenge of removing all the red stickers while we watched television one evening. After a lot of elbow grease and a fair amount of Goo Gone, the plane was ready to paint.
I first sprayed the plane black and then with a silver paint. This silver color was brighter than I wanted, so I gave it a third coat of paint, this time an aluminum color. I then mixed silver and brown paint to make a metallic rust color, which I applied liberally with a wide brush.
In the picture (above), you can see the difference between the un-weathered engine cowlings compared to the rusty finish on the rest of the plane.
I decided to keep the centers of the propellors silver, but painted the tips of the propellers white. I like that look.
Then came the challenge of coming up with a name for the plane and appropriate nose art. After I had considered several names, including Duke’s Duchess and the Granville Gal, Chris suggested Anything But a Twenty. Granville is the town in which most of my pulp games take place. “Anything but a twenty” is a reference to the fact that in G.A.S.L.I.G.H.T., rolls of twenty often cause bad — and usually dramatic — things to occur.
Below are candidate nose art I built from some Varga pin-up pictures I found on line, some image editing capabilities on my Mac, and a few other elements.
Below is a closeup of the nose of the airplane with our heroes posing in front of it. I printed the nose art on clear, matte address labels. The artwork didn’t have the vibrance of glossy paper. At first I was a bit disappointed, but in retrospect, I like the washed-out look. It seems closer to photos I’ve seen after the plane has had a lot of hard miles. The faded look seems to fit better with the rusty appearance of the plane.
I chose a tail number of NC-61326. Since “Granville Gal” lost out, I chose to use the zip code of the real Granville, IL, which is the town on which I loosely based my town for pulp games.
And here is one last look at the plane from a slightly more distant viewpoint than the previous close up. The border around the nose art didn’t quite disappear, but it’s not too obvious either.
This was a fun project. I rarely build or paint airplane models, as I don’t have much luck with them. In this case, I think the end result was quite good.
Labels for Bear Yourselves Valiantly
The Look, Sarge, No Charts family of rules uses special dice to take the place of chart cards. During development of the first set of rules, Look, Sarge, No Charts: World War II, I used wooden cubes from a craft store for play testing. Those cubes are a little smaller than the blank dice that you can buy. I have been using the store-bought blank dice, but I haven’t updated the size of the labels.
At Fall In a couple of weeks back, the guy who works at the “Dice Lady” booth mentioned that there are die-cut labels that fit the dice. I found them from On Line Labels. The company tries to sell you a proprietary software package to make labels that requires periodic updating (and fees). They also have a template that works with Microsoft Word. It took several hours (and a call to the On Line Labels help desk) to reformat the labels for Bear Yourselves Valiantly and Fate of Battle. Previously I have been printing the slightly smaller ones on full sheets of sticky labor paper and then cutting them out, one at a time. With the newer pre cut labels, once they are printed, they can be easily peeled and stuck onto the blank dice.
From the picture above, you can see that the new labels are slightly larger. This has allowed me to increase the point size of the fonts by one or two points, making the labels much easier to read.
While these are much easier to use than the .pdf files that I have posted to several Web page, I am very hesitant to post these new labels. The Internet has create a worldwide culture of people who expect others’ intellectual property to be given away for free and will complain and kvetch in public forum when free stuff isn’t perfect. With these new labels, you have to move them every so slightly left or right on the page to account for slight variations in printers. That amount of effort will surely illicit complaints on TMP and inquiries into the nature of my parentage. I’ll make labels available to my co-authors, but I probably won’t make them available to the general public.
Northwest Frontier
Some years ago, at one of the HMGS East conventions, the giveaway for all attendees was a small sprue of four or five 25mm plastic British colonial figures. Most of the HAWKs handed me their sprues, because they didn’t do any colonial gaming in this scale and thought I could use them in a GASLIGHT game. I painted several GASLIGHT units in red jackets to use for service on Mars.
As noted in earlier posts, I’ve been picking away at my unpainted lead (or in this case plastic) collection. So, to finish off these free plastic figures, I decided to paint them for service in the Northwest Frontier. The sprues only came with rank and file, so the officers, standard bearer (currently missing a flag), and other special figures are Empress Miniatures, ordered from Age of Glory.
Disney Goes Team Punk
I was in Orlando last week for a conference for work. I had an opportunity one evening to spend an hour or two at the Downtown Disney marketplace looking for stocking stuffers for my kids and wife. In the art store I saw this picture and had to take a photo of it.
Additional 10mm Figures Completed This Weekend
This weekend I continued to pick away at unpainted 10mm figures. The three units I finished this weekend were Copplestone 10mm figures. I like the way the archers are mounted in pairs. They are easier to paint than individuals, but not as easy to paint as strips of Old Glory or Games Workshop 10mm figures.
Are Outfits from Sci Fi Outlandish?
I used to think that the women’s outfits in science fiction movies were outlandish and that women wouldn’t dress like that in real file. While they were sexy, these outfits never seemed very practical. (I still think that chainmail bikinis are absurd, but lately I’ve begun to think that the outfits in the science fiction movies and shows of the 1950’s through 1970’s foreshadowed today’s fashion in the same way that the Star Trek communicator foreshadowed flip cell phones.) My kids go to a school that requires a uniform in which the girls’ skirts are at a modest length. What do these teenage girls do? They “roll” their skirts, rolling up the waist band to raise their skirts three or four inches higher than the dress code requires. And as soon as school gets out, the girls start waltzing around the malls in outfits more fitting for prostitutes than high school girls.
I will admit that my tastes are a bit dated. I think the pinnacle of womens’ fashions was reached in the 1940’s and 1950’s. This post is not meant to offer an opinion that the world is going to Hell, but just to point out that I had a recent epiphany. Fashions that I thought were ridiculous (though often alluring) in old science fiction movies and television shows were probably not that ridiculous after all.
Here’s what I mean. In the far future, would women want to wander around in outfits like this?
Or this?
Well, I did a quick search for “skirts” using Bing and looking at “reputable” Web stores, like Target.com. I wasn’t looking at porn sites or Fredericks of Hollywood, but below is what I found. Without looking hard, I found these examples below. People must be buying them!
These are outfits I’ve seen girls wearing at shopping malls or social events with their buddies. Admittedly, these are not outfits I have seen worn by professional women in office settings, but they are outfits worn in public.
So how about form-fitting outfits like this one? As sexy as this is, would women really wear such a thing except while scuba diving in cold water?
Or these…
Again, a quick Web search found these examples:
Frankly, I have never understood women wearing leggings that leave nothing to the imagination and then wearing seven layers of long shirts and coverups. Why not just wear something a bit more modest?
Or how about see-through blouses? Aside from the odd phenomenon in which women reveal more leg and cleavage in formal affairs than in other settings, no one would wear those in public, would they?
Except for the purple outfit, which I think is meant for someone on the prowl at a dance club, the other three outfits are things I have seen in stores and other public places. As someone on the downhill side of 50, there are things I know not to wear anymore; however, most of the women I seen wearing these outfits in public are NOT fashion models from catalogs who can pull off these looks, but they wear them anyway. So those costume designers were prescient after all! (By the way, the costume designer for the UFO show pictures above was a woman.)
So the next time you are oggling Jeri Ryan (Seven of Nine), Marina Sirtis (Deanna Troi), Gates McFadden (Dr. Crusher), Carrie Fisher (Princess Leia), Anne Francis (Altaira Morbius), Erin Gray (Wilma Deering), or some other science fiction heroine, thinking, “Wow, the twenty-fifth century will be great!” remember that the twenty-fifth century might not be that far off with respect to women’s fashions.
Last Weekend’s Painting
In my continuing push to get all my unpainted lead out of the unpainted lead queue, I have been working on 10mm fantasy figures that were sitting in my project box. In this case, I worked on 60 Copplestone orcs. I really like these figures. They had a little more detail than the Games Workshop Battle of Five Armies figures, but still came on strips for easy painting. I think these turned out nicely. I also finished six strips of Copplestone orc archers. I have half orc archers and human archers on the table now and hope to complete them over this coming weekend.
More 10mm Fantasy Figures Knocked Out
No pictures today, sorry.
I haven’t been ready to start a new project recently. Nothing has jumped out at me lately, and I have a lot of projects that haven’t been put on the table lately. Games I want to run in the foreseeable future are:
- My weird WWII game with Germans on pterodactyls, Americans on giant eagles, and Brits on griffons. I still have a little work to do on the griffons and the German “bomber” before this is ready to put on the table.
- A Robin Hood game to try out Howard Whitehouse’s Outlaws of Sherwood rules.
- I haven’t had my French and Indian War stuff on the table in a while, and I am just about done painting all the Acheson Creations terrain from their Kickstarter project.
- I haven’t put my Mexican American War figures on the table in a long time.
- I have been collecting Plasticville buildings to flesh out my town of Granville for some pulp gaming.
- I haven’t had my cowboys on the table in quite a while.
- I haven’t run a Victorian science fiction game in a long time.
- I haven’t put the zombies on the table in a while either.
So with all those projects ready to play or nearly ready to play, I haven’t felt compelled to start a new project. So, I have I have been whittling down my unpainted lead mountain. (Actually compared to most gamers, my unpainted lead mountain is more of a mole hill.) Two weeks ago I pulled the last of the Battle of Five Armies figures out of their hiding place and began painting them. I have recently finished another 12 bases of goblins, some giant spiders, flocking bats, and giant bears as well. I also primed and mounted on popsicle sticks several sets of Copplestone 10mm figures that I bought from RLBPS a couple of years ago. The orcs, half orcs, and goblins are on the painting desk along with two units of 28mm plastic British I will paint for the Northwest Frontier.
While there is no danger of this occurring in the near future, I am really whittling away at the unpainted lead.
This winter my daughter and I are going to finish repainting a bunch of Plasticville and Litko buildings and also work on our stores for the club zombie shopping mall game.
10mm Terrain Bits at Michael’s Craft Store
This weekend, I found one of the “Toobs” at Michael’s that I thought had use in a 10mm ancient or fantasy game. It is a set of famous world landmarks. The ones shown on the right of the picture will fit nicely on a built-up area on the table. The ones on the left are probably not usable. Big Ben is in the gray area.