Making Contact - A Solo Pulp Alley AAR

A Lost Package - A Solo Pulp Alley AAR

Thought I'd try taking the pictures for this on my phone, reasoning it might be less hassle to do in the midst of a game.

Unfortunately, the daylight in Britain this time of year barely seems to last six hours, so I played by artificial light and I don't think the pictures have come out as well as they could have done.

Warehouse Personnel

Some speedy jobs (as in, they only took days rather than weeks...) to cover some plot points in future Pulp Alley games. The middle gent is a Hasslfree miniature I did a year ago or so when I was putting together a zompocalypse collection, and I felt he was generic enough to transfer across. He just needed a new base.

The chaps flanking him are a mix of Studio Miniatures zombies, Warlord Games survivors and an arm from the Wargames Factory Russian Infantry sprue. The arm in question has had its grenade trimmed down to form a torch-ish shape. Other than green stuffing the arm joints, that was about as much effort as I was willing to commit to this pair. Painting-wise I did no more than a hurried basecoat, wash and highlight with the basecoat colour, with a further highlight on the skin. Certainly not my most creative of miniatures, but hopefully they're vague enough to pass for security guards or police officers (or even just general thugs) according to requirements.

This troublesome witch...

First of the two muggle-dressed witches painted up.

I struggled to enjoy painting this one, and I'm not altogether sure why. It's not the sculpting style, because I've enjoyed painting Offensive Miniatures products before and she's not dissimilar to the male rioters. There were tricky areas to get a brush into - particularly the neck - but I found myself losing momentum before I reached those stages. I liked working on the miniature with green stuff, and she should tick all my 'fun to paint' boxes - not overly detailed, a limited palette of colours, expressive face...

I dunno.

I'm happy with how the hands turned out, anyway - don't think they stand out too much from the rest of her.

I'm struggling with painting her companion too, so it may be a while before I start gaming regularly in Potter Alley!

Aside from them, I'm hurrying through some 'plot points' for the next Pulp Alley game - hopefully I should get another game in before the week is out.

A shifty individual

I've been in a bit of a painting slump of late. I've tried breaking through the block with some sculpting / pushing around of Green Stuff. More on that in the future.

I've got several miniatures lying around with varying numbers of layers of paint, but this is the only one I've managed to work up enough enthusiasm to paint. Relatively straightforward with no nasty hard-to-reach areas which I'm finding with the others. A bit cartoon-y compared to some of the other modern pulp miniatures I've done up over the last few months, but that just made the face more fun to paint. I won't complain at more caricature-lite minis on the market!

I think he's from Black Tree Designs who have a selection of unarmed miniatures, which I'm finding to be a bit of a rarity, or at least not as common as I'd like. I would love to hear folks' recommendations on ranges / companies with modern-ish male and female non(obvious)combatants.

Polo-neck jumpers are surely due their day in the sun again sometime soon, at which point this chap will once again be very sharply dressed. As things and fashions stand, he just looks like he's trying too hard.

Maybe that's what he wants me to think...

A Quick Getaway - A Solo Pulp Alley AAR

The adventure continues as Cedric Wyrtgeorn and his employees seek to escort Dr Elaine Darrow out of Mexico on their hunt for her missing father. I slightly altered the protagonists' profiles, and threw together a League of Legends (four sidekicks) to oppose them, since it got a bit troublesome distinguishing between all the different foot soldiers in the last AAR. It also allowed for trying some of the new Lost World of Lemuria abilities.

I played the game and took the photos before going on holiday - unfortunately the flash stopped working and I didn't have the patience to properly set up each shot, so when I started properly going through the photos on the laptop a lot of them were less focused than I'd like. Alas, holidaying prevented me from reshooting.

Still, it was a fun little gaming session, and I'm enjoying absorbing the Pulp Alley rules.

Putting brick to paper

I've never been particularly good at sticking with a painting project long enough to see it through to anything approaching a completed state, and that inability reaches out to include many other aspects of miniature hobbying.

Terrain especially has suffered from my short attention span - it would feel odd making terrain for a miniature range I hadn't painted, so I just wouldn't make any. Then, once I had painted some models up, I would feel dispirited at the lack of terrain to allow for a game (alas, book-hills and sponge-trees just didn't do it for me).

Having spent most of my hobby career dabbling in fantasy worlds, I had nothing in the way of modern scenery, and after the first, wilderness-based scenario for Pulp Alley's Perilous Island campaign the action moves to more urban settings. 

I felt the similar irritation at my lack of terrain rising, so I've tried to clamp down on my inner snob and look to less aesthetically pleasing but practical (and cheap & easy) techniques for making modern buildings. Given the choice, I'd much rather have beautifully crafted houses, complete with individual brickwork and varnished interior woodwork, but needs must. It would seem I haven't the patience to wait until I've developed the skills needed to construct (miniature) buildings, so to keep the hobby momentum going I've turned to papercraft models to flesh out the tabletop.

 

Germy has a good little collection of shoe box-like units - ideal for a beginner like myself to get an idea on how to go about putting paper buildings together - with the added benefit of having interior decor. I've found scenery to be much more fun in a tabletop game if you can interact with it in some way.

The inner snob emerged briefly to complain about all the white bits still showing, but I've shut him away again - this is about brick bums on seats.

I'm a scavenger by nature (my wife would say hoarder) and over the last year or so I have brought back some surplus flyers from work for a few events, and at last A6 bits of 350gsm card have come in handy! Some of the walls, roofs and floors aren't structurally sound as they could be, being split over two or more bits of card, but they do well enough for now.

I still found these to be a bit of a faff, cutting and measuring card not being my top choice of activity, so I wondered about resizing the box building templates so that for most of the sides I could just stick in an unmodified card.

I started with a couple of Stoelzel walls, doors and windows. I don't have any specialist programmes for this sort of thing (my computer baulks at the idea of anything much more complicated than paint, otherwise I'd be using GIMP), so over a lunch break or two I put together my templates on Powerpoint. Rather than use the A6 flyers, I started small with some defunct business cards (put aside for safe keeping, because you never know when inaccurate contact details might come in handy).

They won't win any design awards, and I think even the British property market would think twice before producing homes to these specifications, but they're a breeze to put together. A business card each for the walls, and one and a third business card each for the roof and floor. Definitely going for impression on these rather than realism!