Sci-Fi Dungeon Sticks

Welcome back to the blog! 2024 is here and I'm done school, for now at least, leaving me more time to focus on gaming and my online presence! Near the end of 2023 the RPG Alliance held their annual convention, and I ran a couple of games: Vaesen online and Mothership in person. I had a great time running both and got to play some fun games.

Getting the game set-up at the convention.

Running Mothership in person prompted me to dig out my Ultimate Dungeon Terrain (check out how I built it!) and sci-fi scatter terrain so I could set up a few rooms on the fly if the players encountered the creatures lurking in the darkness of the derelict spacecraft. While I love the giant dungeon set-ups (both sci-fi and fantasy) I find them largely impractical, especially when it comes to traveling to and from a convention. Another aspect of many large dungeon set-ups I dislike are full-height walls. I find they make it hard for the players to see their miniatures and in the end, while looking cool, they just get in the way.

The sci-fi UDT with scatter terrain.

Of course, one solution is the 2.5d dungeon tile giving a hint of a wall without actually being a wall. This does not work that well with UDT-type setups. The solution to this is to use modular low or half-height walls, such as "Dungeon Sticks". Given the options I have stated so far it should come as no surprise that this is the method I employ. Digging out sci-fi terrain I haven't used since before the pandemic reminded me of a project I had worked on for an ALIEN game I ran: Sci-Fi dungeon sticks. Looking around I saw a few ideas (Check out this collection on Thingiverse) for this but I didn't love any of them, so I did what any self-respecting terrain-making GM would do, I designed my own solution.

Some new freshly printed scatter terrain for the game.

When I started this project I had a few ideas in mind. I wanted to leverage the 3d printer (Elegoo Mars), I wanted cool walls and I didn't want to print full-length walls to save on resin.

My solution was to print small end pieces that I could slot foam core into. I would then do some simple textures on the foam core and paint them up all the same. This ended up having two main advantages. The first was using less resin, and the second was to allow the walls to come apart for storage and transportation. Since I had the original STLs stored on an old computer I didn't have access to I had to redesign the STL, and at the same time, I created one that would accept straws as wall piping.

One of the 3d models for half-height walls.

I've made the basic stl files I used available on thingiverse if you are interested in trying these yourself.

One of the piping walls in action!

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Tehnolog Miniatures - Are they worth your money?

First things first. I bought these with my own money. I was not asked to provide a review. I get no money from you picking up anything in this post.

Back at the end of October, I decided, "why not?" and I logged into eBay and placed an order for a couple of sets of the Tehnolog miniatures. I thought it would be interesting to see what the turn around time for these figures was, and how they scaled to other figures in my collection.

The first part of my question was pretty easy to answer. My order was confirmed on October 24, 2019, and I received my parcel notification on Dec 3, 2019. So we are looking at just over a month to place an order and have it received from Moscow. It's no Amazon, but realistically it's not that bad either.

First Impression

So what did I order?

• Barbarians set 20 Tehnolog 28mm plastic soldiers Castlecraft 9th Age Warhammer - $8.00 usd.
• Brigands set of 20 Tehnolog 28 mm plastic soldiers Castlecraft 9th Age Warhammer - $8.00 usd.
• Shipping was $12 usd
• Total Bill was $28 usd or about .70 per figure.

My first impression taking the bags out of the box, but before looking at them, was that this plastic sounds like boardgame pieces, that hard plastic clink.

Once opening the Barbarians bag I thought they looked a little on the small side, but overall decent for the price. Then I opened up the Brigands, again the sculpts were generally ok, but size-wise? These guys would make pretty excellent D&D halflings. They come just past half-way on a pre-painted D&D mini.

Going back through the listings for the brigands I will note that there is a picture of them next to some other figures, one of which is a dwarf. It pretty clearly shows the scale.

Likewise the barbarians also include an image to determine the actual scale of the figure.

It is pretty clear to me that the Brigands are not 28mm, at least not 28mm humans. It is also clear to me that if I had been more careful I would have noted that these figures were not an appropriate size and would have ordered something else.

Finally a shot of the two figures, barbarians and bandits, next to a pre-painted D&D mini and a Reaper Bones figure.

Painting

I picked a single barbarian to paint to see how they would take paint. Quick caveat, I am not the world's greatest painter, but I am passable in most lights. The goal here is to prime these, apply a base coat, give those some inks or a wash to get some quick shades and then go back in and drop some highlights on the raised sections.

Priming

After a quick clean with soap and a toothbrush, I set about giving them a brush priming with some Vallejo dark grey. The figure took the paint fine, and in a single coat I had 99% of the green completely covered.

Base Colors

Base colors used.

• Vallejo Model Color: Medium Fleshtone - Flesh.
• Reaper Dark Shadow - Boots, pants & Glove.
• P3 Bootstrap Leather - Belt & sheath.
• Vallejo Model Color: Burnt Umber - Bow.
• Vallejo Model Color: Brass - Belt fittings.
• Vallejo Model Color: Flat Red - Skirt.
• Vallejo Model Color: Sky Grey - Boot Fur.
• P3 Thamar Black - Hair

Shades

Shades used.

• Vallejo Game Ink: Skin Wash - Skin
• Army Painter - Dark Tone - initial wash on lower half of body
• Army Painter - Soft Tone - Final wash on skin

Highlights

Highlights used.

• Vallejo Game Color: Bronze Fleshtone - Flesh.
• Vallejo Model Color: Flat Red - Skirt & mouth
• Vallejo Model Color: Sky Grey - Boot Fur.
• Vallejo Model Color: Brown Sand - Leather and bow highlights
• P3 Thamar Black - Eyes

Final Notes

This figure took paint well and was pretty easy to paint with good, simple detail. I don't know if that will be true for the entire line, but for the price it is worth checking them out. Line painting these would give you a lot of painted humans for use in your games in a short amount of time.

Final Thoughts

There are certainly pros and cons to these figures, but overall they are a pretty good value.

One of the biggest downsides is the narrow range of figures. We do get a fair number of humans that are useful, but because we need to be careful of the scale, some figures that would be useful, are not. However if you need a large number of human barbarians, men at arms, knights, vikings, Russians or maybe even some dwarfs these figures would most likely fit the bill.

Scale wise the ones that work fit in well with many popular lines you may already be using.

The long and short of it? Would I recommend?

Yes. I am going to give these a thumbs up. These figures are a great value, and there is not that much more to say on it, just make sure you pay attention to the images and pic miniatures of an appropriate scale.

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DOTAR SOJAT! John Carter of Mars RPG by Modiphius!

On Thursday my pledge for John Carter of Mars RPG arrived. Pretty exciting! I first wrote about this back in January 2018 when Modiphius announced this would be a thing. Since then those of us who are backers have watched this come together, seeing initial pdfs and pictures of miniatures. For me a good kickstarter maintains excitement for the product even after the kickstarter is complete. Modiphius has done a pretty good job with this with Conan and continues this with John Carter(JCoM), being plugged into the community and sending regular updates.

I did not get an all in pledge, but I did get what I thought was a pretty good approximation of that, DOTAR SOJAT, gave me all the books, miniatures, dice etc. Pretty much everything. Basically I got everything except for the fancy leather bound versions of the book, notebook and the dice bag; nice to haves, but not necessities.

This is the first of two shipments for my pledge. As you can see on the right, the expected delivery was July 2018, and it is now Feb 2019. The pledge fulfillment is late, but it's not several years late, certainly well within my expectations on hitting delivery date targets. The second shipment is supposed to ship late 2019, but mid 2020 would be more likely in my experience. Only time will tell! I also ordered a set of the airship tiles so I could play with miniatures but use less crafted terrain, and well.....Airships....

I am almost sure most of you are here to look at pictures and hear my thoughts on the physical products. To that end I took a lot of pictures and have spent some time with the physical products, although I have not assembled the miniatures.

	The Packaging. We will start with what I see when I open the box. Lots of packaging, not as cool as what I got with Monolith's Claustrophobia, but it appears sufficient to get the product shipped to my door in one piece, after looking through it all, I would say it was successful.
In the Box. After removing the air packs we can see all of the goodies a little more clearly. Well the dice and miniatures anyhow, there is so many of these the books remain unseen, hidden, below the horde of Barsoom!
	Dice. Lots and lots of dice. 15 d20s and 18 combat dice that will assuredly be pressed into service for Conan as well! The dice are clean and easy to read with the combat dice eliminating having numbers on them as well to clarify what is damage and what is not. I approve. D6s are the most common dice out there, we really don't need to press our special dice into service to roll as a d6.
Blister Packs. The resin miniatures are all packed in sealed blister packs. A few are in blister packs that are not sealed, but they were secure for me and had not popped open in transit. Inside the figures are all in small ziploc bags preventing them from moving around freely within the blister.
	Miniatures. Resin figures are a little new to me so I wanted to check them out when I got them. The casts look nice, although there is a little flashing. I think I might actually prefer big obvious flashing like this to a tiny small occasional amount I generally miss till I am painting. The material is grey and has a little flex in it, not something like Bones, but not rigid either. They will look bad ass painted.
White Ape. Another shot of one of the miniatures showing the detail of the figures.
	Notebook. Next up are a few photos from the notebook. It has a great cover, elastic closure and integrated cloth bookmark. It's actually pretty similar in size and function to what I currently use. It does have a few JCoM specific pages though.
Notebook Cont. A shot of the interior of the book showing it's integrated character sheet.
	Notebook Cont. My quick look showed most of the other pages to be blank lined pages with a few grid pages in there as well.
Toolkit A shot of the interior of the book showing it's integrated character sheet.
	Toolkit Cont. The Conan Toolkit was a great resource and I expect nothing less from this, although I've not had time to go over it in detail..
Screen Second half of the toolkit package. I am not a big user of screens, but this one looks like a great selection of reference materials, that I of course didn't take a photo of.
	Slipcase A lovely, robust, slipcase to hold the core book and the campign book with your more conventionally formatted books.
Clipcase cont. The two books inside the slipcase.
	Core Book Quick shot inside the core book. The pages in these books feel thinner and more glossy than what we see in the Conan books. Hopefully that doesn't translate into page tears in the future.
Campaign Book Easily my favorite of the two covers. Love it.
	Campaign Book Interior shot of some of the bad guys. I would have preferred cool art for these, but I don't hate the miniature images either.
Campaign Book Double interior cover map of Barsoom. Pretty cool interior art.
	Ship Tiles I wasn't sure what to expect here. I have heard the Star Trek tiles are scaled a little small, and I didn't get any of the Conan tiles. In the end size and art wise these turned out pretty excellent.
Ship Tile Warpage The only down side is once removed from their shrink wrap they immediately took a slight warp. I live in a dry climate and it's the middle of winter and a cold snap. Slightly dissapointing, but I doubt it will be a long term issue.

Overall it is a cool set of books and accessories from a loved and formative work of Sci-fi. The format isn't even as bad as many people, myself included, feared. As I mentioned above I do have a few concerns, but overall the books and such look excellent and well put together.

It is something I will love having on my shelf and enjoy playing. Who doesn't want to play some good old fashioned sci-fi set on the old ideas of what Mars might have been?

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Friday's Forgotten Fiends: The Essence of Beyond

Welcome back to another installment of Friday's Forgotten Fiends! Custom monsters for your RPG table feature stat blocks for Conan 2d20 and Dungeons and Dragons 5e as well as paper 28mm miniatures and VTT tokens!

The candles flickered in the circle around the old wizard. His blade was raised above him in symbolism of ritual sacrifice. The bronze bowl before him held the still warm heart of some unfortunate soul, either human or a large animal, only he knew. with his circle of power intact, his sacrifice prepared he began the chant in some long forgotten tongue taught to him by his ancient master so many years ago. He had enemies, and he intended to summon a dark thing to do his bidding and have is revenge. He would no longer be the laughing stock in his village. He would show them all the power he possessed! After chanting for what seemed like an eternity he felt the very veil grow thin as the air around him grew cold, and in a final motion his blade struck down into the heart completing the ritual and unleashing the dark forces all around him. He could almost hear the great tear open between our two world, as the gash opened, and he called forth his creature. Within moments a dark smoke like foot stepped through the tear, fel energy swirling and coalescing around it. The last thing he saw was a claw of smoke and a mouth filled with row after row of gleaming white teeth. The chamber was filled with the protests and then screams of the wizard as the dark thing took it's price for his desires. When it had had it's fill of his flesh the thing stood and left the chamber, off to do what it was summoned to do. Behind it the great portal slowly stitched itself back together, and in a moment all that remained was the wizard's body as it was slowly consumed by the remnants of the dark energy that game through with the beast. In moments what can only be described as the Essence of Beyond remained, hungry and angry.

These blobs of malignant energy are the remnants of dark sorcery gone wrong, a merger of the one who summoned forth the magic, and the magic itself. They are a manifestation of the outer dark made physical in our world. Typically found on old places of power such as a ruined temple or ancient sunken city, these things feed on our world, and especially on the life forms in our world. These being simple manifestations of power have coalesced into semi-sentient and hostile creatures. Although having no magic themselves, and being relatively easily vanquished, their very nature can make them difficult to pin down and strike, and in that process many warriors have fallen to these.

Conan 2d20

D&D 5e

VTT Tokens

Paper Minis!

And finally paper minis!

If you liked this article then don't forget to subscribe to get the next exciting installment on pulp rpg gaming both Sci-Fi and Fantasy!

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Till next time, don't forget to Keep it Weird!