Monday, July 25, 2016

Preparing for September: Update 1

At the end of September is our local convention RECRUITS. I will get on my soapbox, like I do every year, and call out RECRUITS as one of the best wargaming conventions around. It's geared towards, you guessed it, new recruits into the hobby. It's fairly big, there are some quality games, lots of vendors, very kid friendly and dirt cheap!
This year I'm not only one of the Guests of Honor but will have a vendor table myself, selling all things Fistful of Lead including (fingers crossed) the new Wasteland Warriors rules.
If you live anywhere in the Midwest, I highly encourage you to hit RECRUITS.
I, with the help of a few friends will be running 3 games Friday night and most of Saturday. I'll run the Wild West games, Ken "Lead Addict" Boone will run the post apoc games and Chris "CluckAmok" will be running a French & Indian War game using the Horse & Musket rules.
In prepartion, I'll be making some new terrain clothes. Here's how I do it:
1- Go to your local big box fabric/hobby place and buy a couple of yards of cheap outdoor tablecloth material. It makes no difference what the shiney plastic side has, but make sure it has the cotton backing.
2- Buy a quart of latex paint in whatever color you want for your ground. Interior, exterior makes no difference. Just get flat as opposed to satin or gloss, etc. I took a bottle of favorite ground color I use on my bases to match the color.
3- Roller it on the cotton side. THIS STUFF WILL SOAK UP PAINT LIKE CRAZY. But, it will give you great texture as the cotton gets gooped with paint. For my 4' x 4' square I made for the con, it took the whole quart. You may want buy a whole gallon so you can use it for hills or other terrain to match.


The wrinkles come out when it dries.
4- After it dries, you can dry brush little hints of other color. I'll be adding hints of green to my scrub for the Old West, and rust brown to my gray post apoc. Flat color never "sells" the look.
I've used this technique  on all my tablecover. It's cheap, and because you're painting plastic on plastic, it last a long time. I've use my covers once a week for 20 years and it still holds up. Best part, when it does start to wear, put another coat on!
I'll be making a To the Strongest grid cover the same way (stay tuned).

I'm also working on the custom card designs for Wasteland Warriors. Here's a shot of two of the "Loot" deck. You'll notice a suit in the upper left. This corresponds to a regular card deck. I may remove this. You don't need the custom loot deck, you can use a regular deck and look at a chart, but why wouldn't you buy one?
As usual, Fistful of Lead is always better with a scenario, and most of these will revolve around scavenging for loot besides the main objective. Keeping your gang fed and armed will be essential for a campaign surviving the Wasteland. Or, you can just through down and go.
You might come across this:
The heart shows you how many gang members you can feed between missions. The double ended arrow tells you how much it's worth in trade. In this case, this tasty treat can only feed one gang member, or you could trade it for enough food for ten, or trade it for weapons or tech worth 10.
Not all loot cards are food, tech or weapons. Sometimes it's an event. In this case, the deadly Rad Storm.

More later....

2 comments:

  1. Great idea on the game mats! HAd a quick look back at some of your other posts and they do look effective for something so simple.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Nice design work on the cards, Baron. I second removing the corresponding card suit from the graphic - you don't need it and it could be confusing. I use a similar technique to your mats when making my "roads" and "bare" areas but I find a "sand texture" latex interior paint like the Ralph Lauren brand and add in some paper mache' directly into the paint for added texture. This will make your paint a little lighter in color, so you need to start with a color a shade darker to compensate, and because it is thicker a brush works better than a roller. You can push flocking directly into the "goop," too, if ya want. Looking forward to Recruits!

    ReplyDelete