Wizarding Lookout

Town Wizard's Tower

28mm scale

"Knock, loudly."

Not every student of the magic arts dwells in a cryptic spire the mountains, or a guarded dungeon lair.  The town wizard occupies a converted watchtower or station house, secure from unwanted interruptions, but able to conduct business serving the magical needs of urban dwellers.  Magic doesn't come cheap but, for the right client, modest spells can be exchanged for clean laundry or a roasted pig.

This terrain piece (slash fantasy dollhouse 😁) is an original design by me, using printed terrain resources mostly from Crooked Staff Publishing and Dave Graffam Games.  The rugs are from a Wayfair ad 😄.  I had a lot of fun putting this together, adapting parts which were intended for completely different buildings.

I can't recommend Crooked Staff Publishing enough. He's absolutely brilliant, this is someone who can design a paper kit for almost anything, and thoroughly encourages people to branch out and use his kits in ways that are creative and unique.  The bookcases, table, and stools here are all his paper designs.

A local courtesan stops by the wizard's office for a contraceptive cantrip and a sympathetic ear.

Life and Death on the Nekroplanet

"Nekroplanet Grob" is an incredible, spooky, and grimly whimsical sci-fi setting created by Ana Polanšćak, also known as Gardens of Hecate.  It's a tomb world of red sand and mysterious ruins, protected by terrifying skeletal automatons and bizarre phenomena.  Nevertheless, raiders travel from off-planet to risk everything in search of the treasures of the long-ago tomb-builders...

Tomb Raider 

28mm

Raiders arrive on the necroplanet with heavy weaponry, power armor, and advanced scanners, in the hopes of uncovering mysterious and valuable artifacts, and detecting the planet's defenders before they arrive.  It's always a deadly game of chance, as weapons and sensor technologies you don't always work the way you expect, and the planet has defenses that even the most skilled adventurers have never encountered before...

An EM4 miniature.

Traveling Hexahedron and Hedral Pillars  

Traveling Hexahedrons are black cubes of unknown composition and apparent indestructible nature, which slide across the planet's surface seemingly at random.  As they move, they will indiscriminately crush any creatures in their path.

Hedral Pillars exist in sporadic clusters on the planet's surface. They seem to attract traveling hexahedrons, but a space in between at least three pillars is the only place on the surface a creature cannot be crushed by the Hexahedrons' movements.

(The Traveling Hexahedron concept is created by Ana Polanšćak.  The Pillars are my idea.  Both are created from cheap puzzle toys.)

Nekroplanet Blitzer

The Nekroplanet's Grobnik infantry are lethal and resilient in their own regard, but their heavier support can be truly terrifying.  Although Annihilators are more heavily armed, Blitzers move across the treacherous nekrolith at high speed, seeking intruders on their own or rapidly arriving to reinforce Grobniks in battle.

The Blitzer is made from a dollar store Halloween decoration and the wheels for a toy car.  And it's definitely inspired by the band Megadeth's mascot "Vic Rattlehead"...

15mm terrain goodies

Shipping containers

 

My Instagram buddy @winnipegmichael generously sent me a bunch of nice corrugated craft paper, so naturally the first thing I made with it was that classic terrain piece, intermodal cargo containers.  If you own something manufactured, there's a good chance it once traveled in one of these...

I tried to make them look used but not totally abused.  The graffiti was fun, I did some of it with my child's Posca paint markers.

Wind turbine and solar unit

These two pieces were surprisingly easy for how good they came out looking. They're made from cardstock, corrugated paper, printed papercraft designs, and some toy parts.  The techy turbine blades are from a Kinder egg toy; there's a bit of Lego in there too.

Graveyard Watcher

"Angel of Death" Statue

28mm scale

Not a ghost bloodied country
All covered with sleep
Where the black angel did weep

A deserted churchyard... neglected, moldering headstones and blowing leaves.  And a tall, masked figure, its wings spread ominously behind the scythe looming in its grip.  "Just a statue", you say... "Just the moonlight", you say...

This was my utterly non-seasonal pre-holiday project from a few weeks ago.  It's a really old Ral Partha figure, dating back to 1979 and sculpted by the legendary Tom Meier!  It was part of RP's original extensive and characterful lineup.

 

I threw together a few old graves with mossy headstones to go with it, they should make good scenery for some ghoulish character at some point.

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.

Ye Who Enter Here

Gothic Gateway
28mm scale

The gargoyles slumber through time
With patience they wait for the sign
These demons of obscurity
Shall fly once again, soon they'll be free

In the abandoned ruins, you come across a shattered arch.  Flanked by blocky pillars and carved grotesques, it once had an elegant crest, now lying in ruins below.  Nothing remarkable seems to lie beyond, but as you pass through, you sense that something has awakened...

When my son gave me a set of Nolzur's Marvelous Miniatures gargoyles for Christmas, I knew immediately that I didn't want to just paint them grey and base them.  The arch is blue insulating foam mounted on an MDF base, with dabs of moss made by mixing flock with Mod Podge.  Nice and atmospheric, I think...

Jungle Patrol

Jungle Patrol and monolith
15mm

 

The galaxy is filled with mysterious relics: the structures and artifacts left behind by long-lost peoples on a thousand planets...  Some are crumbling ruins, others are active and even dangerous technologies waiting to imperil the unwary explorer.  This squad of troopers have discovered such a relic in the deep jungle... crumbling ruins, but holding a huge crystal glowing with some inner power...

These figures were a gift from @winnipegmichael, they're apparently "Yenpalo troopers" from Brigade Models.  The CO's "fish head" is from CP Miniatures.  The monolith is just made from an aquarium gem and chunks of cork, with a light dusting of very fine foam flocking (so fine I rarely use it, actually, but it makes good moss).

"Fan out and scan for EM spikes!  There might be more of them!"

Chernobyl Man

Pripyat intruder
15mm

I'm nuclear
I'm wild
I'm breaking up inside
A heart of broken glass defiled
Deep inside the abandoned child

To enter the Chernobyl Incident Exclusion Zone is forbidden.  But some do it anyway, out of curiosity, desire for adventure, or to scavenge any remaining valuables.  It's certainly a risky venture however; while radiation levels are now low enough that exposure doesn't mean certain death, there are other, more immediate perils lurking within...

This is an Alternative Armies figure with a bit of detail added to the rifle and gasmask (giving it an oddly spider-like appearance).  The fences and sign are scratchbuilt, with model barbed wire.

"Good you are here, tovarisches!  They are escaping!"

 

Note: this figure and terrain are inspired by fiction like the PC game "S.T.A.L.K.E.R.", depicting the Exclusion Zone as a bleak, sinister, apocalyptic landscape full of savage, mutated horrors.  While this is a cool fantasy, the real Zone is actually what many areas abandoned by humans rapidly become: a safe haven for wildlife and flora to flourish without disruption:

The Exclusion Zone can even be visited safely, without automatic weapons and creepy, grotty Soviet-surplus gasmasks, via professional guided tours that visit highlights like abandoned schools, parks, and even the plant itself.

Sorcerous Spitfire

"Zeppelin Down"
Mixed scale

Beneath the starlight of the heavens
Unlikely heroes in the skies
Witches to attack, witches coming back...
As they appear on the horizon
The wind will whisper when the night witches come

1915, the Great War... England watches the skies in fear of bombing raids from the Kaiser's mighty Zeppelin force, striking with impunity from above the clouds. An ultra-secret arm of the War Office makes contact with a terrifying and reclusive group of mythical inhabitants of the British Isles. Unmoved by appeals to patriotism, they are however outraged  at the technological monstrosities raining destruction on "their" countryside, and respond accordingly...

I've toyed with the idea of using forced perspective in a miniature piece for ages, but never found a good subject.  The inspiration for this probably goes back to a similar composition I once saw on CoolMiniOrNot, of a 28mm Orc Stormboy launching off of an Epic vehicle "far" below. But this vignette ended up more like some things seen in traditional military modeling. And it has four different "scales" in it, which I'll admit was an ambitious first try.

While I'm hardly ashamed of my painting chops, I'll definitely admit my traditional modelmaking skills are pretty... rusty, in as much as I ever had them.  This project was a definite learning exercise: I had to completely redo the Zeppelin after a disastrous attempt to shade the underside, and getting the base to look remotely plausible took a lot of work.  On the upside, the clouds came out exactly the way I wanted them! And a near-monochrome palette with strong contrast really gave the witch a sinister look.

“A witch ought never to be frightened in the darkest forest, Granny Weatherwax had once told her, because she should be sure in her soul that the most terrifying thing in the forest was her.”

Upcycled tribal terrain

So at work, we recently started receiving solvent bottles in paper fiber packing, replacing styrofoam.  Huge environmental improvement aside, this immediately gave me ideas.  I knew that something could be done with them.

I trimmed the top couple of inches off the "lid" piece:

... and voila!


Ikwen hogans
15 mm scale

Ikwen warriors confront corporate mercenaries on the home front.

Forest Ikwen often live in large huts or hogans, made from pulped and enzymatically-cemented plant material over a frame of megafauna endoskeletons or branches.  As the Ikwen come into conflict with offworld resource-seekers, their hogans often conceal entrances to escape tunnel networks and caches of weaponry.

Also just painted:


Wrecked Adder armored car
15 mm scale

Despite being cheap, fast, and agile, "Adder" combat vehicles are extremely vulnerable to virtually any mid-heavy weapons, from portable railguns to spider mines.

This mangled heap makes for a nice objective or knock-out marker, or just some interesting cover for squishy infantry.  From The Ion Age.

The Sentinel

Ominous Xenoartifact
65 mm tall

I can never look now at the Milky Way without wondering from which of those banked clouds of stars the emissaries are coming. If you will pardon so commonplace a simile, we have set off the fire-alarm and have nothing to do but to wait. 

I do not think we will have to wait for long.

- Arthur C. Clarke "The Sentinel", 1951

A Fenris Games resin model.  It makes an impressive 15mm piece, or a merely disturbing 28mm one ;)

Addendum: a better idea of the scale here...

Space Cannon (finished)

Ion defense cannon
15 mm scale

It took a little while to get back to this project, but I finally fired up the airbrush and quickly painted it up.  I used a not-very-SF "woodland" camo scheme to match my Multiverse Terrain MDF command bunker; the result is, I think, a mid-near-future or mid-tech look.  Or something.  I added a few hazard signs and some weathering to break up the greeny brownyness a bit, and also "fix" the scale to my 15mm figure collection.

A truly remote outpost...

Space cannon WIP

Ion defense cannon
15 mm scale (?)

Someone on the 15mm sci-fi gaming Facebook group posted a link to this set recently, and I cavalierly commented that it'd be cheaper, and easy to just build one.  Normally when I say things like this I'm full of crap wishful thinking, but this time I thought "Don't be that guy", and decided to put my hobby tools where my mouth is.

The inspiration: $40 USD

I wanted this to be a cheap project; partly to prove a point and partly because I don't really have any use for it.  So it's made out of bitz, card stock, and repurposed items:

One Canadian craft beer, one papier mâché Xmas craft ball.

Can end cut down and tabs folded over for stiffness.

 

Decorated with bitz and card.  I went for a longer cannon; size matters.

The result, even when just spray-primed, is surprisingly decent-looking:

At 15 mm scale this is much smaller than the famous "Hoth cannon" from The Empire Strikes Back, but I was careful to avoid any obvious scale-betraying details, so it could be used as a turret for 28 mm, or a planetary defender for 6 mm.  I anticipate the rough papier mâché texture being a bit of a problem when I go to paint it, but my plan is to obscure it with painted-on details if needed.