Interstellar Pigs

Silt pigs of Kwiell
15mm scale

 

The Ikwen of Kwiell were first assumed to be, like Terran hunter-gatherers, a stone-age society.  But the first scientists to discreetly observe them were shocked to discover they possessed a wide variety of metal tools and ornaments, without any apparent mining activity.  It turned out the answer to this riddle was their domestication of "silt pigs", a species of humble grazing creatures.

Silt pigs eat vegetation, but a major part of their diet is a constant earthworm-like processing of rich mud, ingested through their extensible snout.  Mud passes through their elaborate gut, emerging as silty casings.  But periodically, the pigs expel a dense, dark-colored stool the Ikwen call the "fire pellet".  This stool contains a high concentration of bio-accumulated metal oxides.  The Ikwen smelt these in small forges to produce substantial quantities of copper, tin, and iron.  

These silt pigs have been grazing on soil rich in copper, hence the greenish hue of their dorsal spines.  Their tender carries a bioluminescent staff, and waves a coloured cloth to signal back to their village.

The silt pigs and their tender are from Loud Ninja Games via Alternative Armies.

An Ikwen herder, with their signature bioluminescent staff, checks
on silt pigs grazing in an estuary near a large fungal dome.

Water of Life

Moisture vaporators
28mm scale

Water, water everywhere, nor any drop to drink

Not an easy life, farming on a desert planet.  In fact, there's really nothing to farm.  A few hardy souls make a living at it though, running vaporators that concentrate water out of the air and pump it to underground cisterns.  On such an arid world, that earns enough cash to own a cozy home and maybe even send a kid to the Academy...

These great laser cut MDF models are from Multiverse Gaming.  

On a remote farmstead, a duel to the death: bounty hunter vs. mystic warrior.

The New Mutants

Wasteland mutants
15mm

Nothin' left is sacred
So I've changed my point of view
You're the ugliest thing I've ever seen
And I think I love you

Ah, the apocalypse.  Mushroom clouds, fallout poisoning the air and land.  Maybe the disaster wasn't a nuclear war, and yet the world is still laid waste, survivors left to wander a bitter Earth seeking whatever remnants will help them survive one more day.  Crumbling reactors and chemical factories have disgorged tons of teratogenic waste; adults manifest tumours and growths, while new babies emerge with bizarre and horrific mutations.  In this new world, does the term "human" retain any meaning... or value?

This mutant gang and the Wasteland Witch (below) are Loud Ninja Games figures sculpted by Eli Arndt.

Raiders attack the witch's hovel!  The mutants, while outgunned,
are inhumanly tough and quick... who will prevail?

Cetacean cyborg

Jones
28mm scale

Jones heaved half his armored bulk over the edge of his tank, and I thought the metal would give way. Molly stabbed him overhand with the Syrette, driving the needle between two plates. Propellant hissed. Patterns of light exploded, swarming across the frame and then fading to black. We left him drifting, rolling languorously in the dark water. Maybe he was dreaming of his war
in the Pacific, of the cyber mines he'd swept, nosing gently into their circuitry with the SQUID he'd used to pick Ralfi's pathetic password from the chip buried in my head. - "Johnny Mnemonic"

Jones is a cybernetically enhanced dolphin, used by the navy to sweep and hack sea mines during the last war, and addicted to amphetamines to ensure his obedience.  He somehow left the service with his implants intact, but to feed his addiction he now lives in a tank at a grubby fun park, as a low-rent attraction for the children of Nighttown... "Talk to the War Whale!".  One day, razorgirl Molly Millions comes to him with a challenge: a data courier with an encrypted program in his head that only Jones' implanted superconducting quantum interference device can unlock...

 

He was more than a dolphin, but from another dolphin's point of view he might have seemed
like something less. I watched him swirling sluggishly in his galvanized tank. Water stopped
over the side, wetting my shoes. He was surplus from the last war. A cyborg.
He rose out of the water, showing us the crusted plates along his sides, a kind of visual pun,
his grace nearly lost under articulated armor, clumsy and prehistoric. Twin deformities on
either side of his skull had been engineered to house sensor units. Silver lesions gleamed on
exposed sections of his gray-white hide.

I first read "Johnny Mnemonic" in high school in the 80s and poor Jones stood out to me as one of the great characters in a story crammed with delicious cyberpunk detail.  I clearly wasn't the only one; Jones made a memorable appearance in the cheesy Keanu Reeves movie (loosely) based on the story.  I opted for a sleeker look here than in the film when I converted a WizKids dolphin.

"Why are we here?"  "Because Allison doesn't really have any
cyberpunk minis.  Also the dolphin was lonely."