The Labour Day Massacre

Today was a Deadzone hobby and painting day at Francis' and I took the opportunity to test the assembling of my terrain panels into structures. After I put together a full-sized Deadzone board, four cool dudes (Brett, Francis, Patrick and Shaun) had their miniatures massacre each other upon it. The board consisted of most of the terrain I've painted, which is about 40% of the terrain that I have, so I can only imagine how dense the board will be once all of the terrain is done. Pictures below.

Terrainosaurus!

As part of the second wave shipment, I received an avalanche of terrain with which I intend to make the best Deadzone board ever. I envisage a dense, three-dimensional battlefield, multiple stories high with lofty catwalks soaring over the ground battles. Ideally it would allow crafty models to traverse the full length of the board without ever touching the ground.

To this end I currently have 4 Battlezones worth of terrain, and I have spent the past few weeks painting much of it up. The progress that I have made so far can be seen below.

 Focusing more on efficiency than anything else, I have come up with an assembly line style process for painting up large batches of terrain panels as quickly as possible. This process is:

1. Spray black primer as an undercoat
2. Spray grey primer at a strong angle (from "above" the tiles) to give an easy azimuthal shading effect
3. Drybrush with very light grey to pick out edges/protrusions/features/bolts/etc
4. (Optional) pick out exposed rebar by painting with brown then copper
5. Wash with brown to further shade recesses and give a dirty appearance

The results of this process can be seen below:

This results in a battleground that is still predominantly grey, but it is a grey with a lot of detail, variation and visual depth. You can compare the finished panels to the original bare grey of the unpainted sprue shown below. Additionally, once the panels are all assembled into structures I will add a few detailed touches to liven up the grey and give each structure a bit of coherence.

The "ruined" Battlezone complements the standard Battlezones nicely by providing ruined versions of some of the default panels. The ruined panels shown below show gouged edges and exposed rebar. When used together the amount of ruin might appear like in a piece of 40k terrain. In my case I can spread these panels out amongst the other Battlezones to have interesting areas of damage without appearing to be too much.

Heavy and indiscriminate use of wash creates a large amount of variation over the surface of the panels. This also sometimes results in the panels drying and sticking to the newspaper that they sit on. I have to scrape this newspaper away with a hobby knife, creating localised areas of damage that actually enhance the appearance of the panels.

The effects of the azimuthal shading is subtle but important to establishing depth to the thin plastic panels. This can be seen in the reinforced column pieces shown below, which helpfully double as top-and-bottom connectors for adjacent panels.

These small pieces of damaged walls come in ample supply in the ruined Battlezone. Using these too liberally will allow many models to trivially prevent Clear Shots by hiding a foot behind such a piece, but I have also seen many creative and interesting uses for these pieces on the Mantic website.

Here are the next batch of panels to paint, just after the azimuthal shading stage. The grey primer is not uniform across the panels, creating an additional bit of variation that will add to the visual interest of the terrain. After this batch of 8 walls and another batch I will be moving onto the floor pieces, and then the Great Buildening can begin.

Asterians, Forge Fathers, and digital rules, oh my!

Here are some cool pics from a backers-only post on the Deadzone kickstarter:

Also, some other stuff worth noting:

• Assembly guides for each of the factions are being written up and should be available soon.
• The rulebook, Nexus Psi expansion, Containment Protocols short story compilation, and Incursion supplement are now all available as digital editions (I can grab them for a 20% discount with a kickstarter code).
• For those of you who ordered stuff for the second shipment, our box is in the batch that starts shipping on the 10th - I'll post when I get any kind of shipping notice.
• Digital editions of the Asterian/Forge Father cards should be arriving extremely soon (an update on the 29th July says they're just about ready).

If It Bleeds, We Can Kill It

Over the last weekend I've painted up the mercenary Blaine from the Deadzone Kickstarter set. This is a miniature that all players will be able to use, so if you like his stats then keep him in mind. Aiming to do everything a little different, I've replaced his canon beige-brown look with skin that is dark green.

Mercenaries are models that players can hire on a per-mission basis. They are not formally part of your strike force, and unlike your regular models they will not accrue experience or learn new skills. They are costly but powerful, and can be taken along for individual missions where you need an extra boost of combat ability or expertise. Sometimes the only way to turn a losing streak around is to hire a trenchcoat badass that looks a bit like the Predator. Blaine's stat card is below:

As you can see, Blaine hits like a truck. His shooting is nothing to speak of but in close combat he will have Brawler and 3+ Fight with an AP2 weapon. He's not Fast but Scout will allow him to deploy closer to the enemy. The main reason he will reach the enemy lines reliably is because of his exceptional toughness: Blaine has 4+ Survive with Armour 1 and Really Tough. This makes him just as hard to take down as a Stage 1 Plague (arguable harder due to his smaller size) with the added benefit of not being Slow like the Stage 1 is.

You can rest assured I'll be including this close combat beast with my Marauders the moment I feel my Mawbeasts are not quite slashy enough. With that said, there's no reason you can't hire Blaine for your missions, (or alternatively a proxied not-Blaine if both players want to hire the same mercenary for the same mission).

Awesome Deadzone Terrain Pictures

Including shots of the new Landing Pad and Fortification terrain sets. Click to enlarge images.

Full picture sets available at the following links:
http://gmortschaotica.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/new-deadzone-terrain-pictures.html
http://gmortschaotica.blogspot.com.au/2013/12/awesome-deadzone-table-updated.html

Kickstarter Second Shipment - Important dates

As a backer on kickstarter I've got access to Deadzone earlier than usual - this includes a second shipment of Deadzone stuff scheduled roughly for the middle of the year. If you're interested in getting your hands on a faction starter, some terrain, or anything else, hit me up and I should be able to organise it for you for both earlier and cheaper than getting it retail. However, there are deadlines to Deadzone!

• March 30th - Second shipment orders close - if you don't tell me what you want by this date you will miss the boat and have to wait for retail release
• June 30th - Final day for second shipment payments - if you ordered stuff it has to be paid for by this date
• July-August-ish - You'll get your plastic crack (this is just an estimate, I'll chuck a more definite date here when I know it)
• August-September-ish - Second shipment corrections - Mantic will do another shipment for things that were missed/broken, there will be a deadline on this that I'll update this post with when I know
• After all that - Deadzone will be available for retail.

Later on I'll post a list of what's available through me, along with prices.

Nexus Psi Campaign Book

It's in the Dropbox, check it out! Spot the 40k reference in the enforcer fluff and win a prize (the prize is that it's funny)