[Games] Gaslands

[jordangreywolf]

It's rare that I get a call on the landline that's from a legitimate, honest-to-goodness caller (i.e., not a telemarketer, not a robo-caller, not a scammer). If it weren't for business usage, I could say the same for my cell phone, but that's another story. Anyway, Dr_Rhubarb called me up a while back and asked if I'd heard of a game called "Gaslands." As a matter of fact, I had: a few folks on the Reaper forums had posted pictures of their conversions of various Hot Wheels (etc.) toy cars to look like something from the Mad Max / Road Warrior franchise, and mentioned the game.

"Gaslands" is a game with a softcover rule book from Osprey Publishing in the UK. Ostensibly, all you need to play are a few 6-sider dice, a photocopier or printer so you can print the requisite templates, and some Hot-Wheels or equivalent -- and, if you're so inclined, you can paint them up and modify them with little toy bits and such to make them look like post-apocalyptic road-warrior machines. It's a post-apocalyptic setting with the premise being that there's a barbaric motor-sport where teams battle it out before the crowds, with the prize being a ticket to the prosperous colonies on Mars (and away from the wastelands of Earth).

The fluff isn't terribly important, really -- it's really just about various mini-games featuring armed-and-armored cars either racing through checkpoints, competing to mow down zombies, playing "capture-the-flag" while avoiding a giant monster-truck, and so on -- all the while blowing each other to smithereens with rockets, machine guns, grenades, flamethrowers, and so forth. The rules are fairly simplistic, with fairly "fast and brutal" rules for the combat, such that a race is often won by default.

Anyway, Dr_Rhubarb hopes to run a 5-game "campaign" with friends at his house. In the hopes of participating, I've since then been working on converting a few toy cars, as per the team-building rules. In a typical scenario, each team has 50 "points" to spend on vehicles of various types, and potential upgrades. I can't just bolt guns and rockets and rams and such onto a vehicle randomly, and expect it to represent anything that would make sense in the game, so I had to strike a balance between what I actually had to work with, and what might possibly make sense in game terms.



The common vehicles used in the game are cars and trucks of the size you'd come to expect in a Hot Wheels or Matchbox blister pack. Nominally, that would make them 1:64 scale -- at least according to the scale sometimes claimed by some manufacturers (mostly Jada and Maisto) -- and therefore miniatures of somewhere between 25-28mm should in theory work with them ... but in *practice*, that just doesn't look right. I've heard claims that 20mm is the closest approximate scale, but Froggy the Great has posted pictures of his road-war creations with 15mm scale minis, and they looked just fine next to the cars.

Due to the squishy scale of toys, Matchbox/Hot-Wheels MOTORCYCLES are grossly out of scale compared to the cars: I sometimes buy them to use next to my 28-32mm scale minis. That's the problem with making everything -- whether it's a bus or a VW Beetle -- the SAME SIZE. I haven't pinned down a good source of 20mm (or 15mm) motorbikes or buggies, and standard Hot Wheels cars tend to be around $1 each (or less) at Walmart, dollar stores, or even the grocery store, so that's where most of my focus has been.

Oh yeah, and it turns out Home Depot has bins of "special purchase" Hot Wheels blister packs for 69 cents each. Yeah, insofar as miniatures games go, this probably has one of the lowest costs of entry.

Anyway, the photo shows a few assorted cars that I've started disassembling by taking a drill to the underside rivets that hold them together. Older cars were all die-cast with possibly plastic windshields, but newer ones often only use die cast for the main shell, and plastic for everything else (including the undercarriage).



Thanksgiving weekend was busy, rather than a bunch of free time to catch up on the cars, and I've been traveling a lot (and working overtime), so time has been at a premium. Despite going overboard on accumulating cars to convert, once I started reading over the rules and figuring out the actual math of building a team, I decided to just focus on getting too "middleweight" vehicles (two cars/trucks) built up at about 25 points each, to comprise a basic 50-point team. (The sample teams in the book tend toward 4-5 vehicles, but then again, they feature vehicles such as bikes and buggies, which I haven't found an easy supply of in the appropriate scale.)

The golden truck was a '52 Chevy Pickup (Hot Wheels) that I got out of a "mystery bag" at Walmart. The "mystery bag" box was nice enough to show all the vehicle options in the series, and since I deliberately wanted an old pickup, I just picked up all the bags and felt them until I could tell that there was a distinctive hood with pronounced fenders, and then I'd have a pretty good shot at getting the old truck. Sure 'nuff, that's what I got.

Some of the cars I got are awfully pretty, and I was reluctant to mess with the paint jobs aside from applying perhaps a bit of detail and weathering ... but I got the notion that my retro team of cars should look like something that could have come from the Fallout universe ... and "flames" just don't look quite right on anything but a classic hot rod, I think. Dr_Rhubarb had given me a box of "bits" from Warhammer 40K and other sources when he was cleaning out his garage for his house move, so I found the rocket launcher and grate piece from there. The "grinder" unit on the front grill is from a HorrorClix "Carnage Bot" that I got several copies of, on the cheap, a long time ago, and occasionally use for conversions (or for generic retro killer robots as-is).

Meanwhile, the grey car is a Maisto "Leadfoot" car I picked up at the dollar store. I picked up a few copies of a HeroClix mini called "Foolkiller" at CoolStuffInc for 25 cents each, just so I could get a relatively cheap source of "minigun turrets." (I mean, I can still use the figures for something afterward -- I've got a wide range of over-sized Warzone weapons and such that I could swap out, for instance.) For the hood, I used a plastic "grill" from a Warhammer 40K Chaos vehicle kit, and some putty to build up the hood and bumpers.

For the armored windows, etc., I mostly used epoxy putty with some homemade "texture stamps," and a bit of shaving and sculpting. I used some thin cardboard to add front wheel covers for the Leadfoot, and some nylon net from packaging for the side windows of the pickup.

For the "fusion head" on the hood of the pickup (inspired by the look of hoods of pickups in the Fallout setting) I used the top trimmed off of an expended super glue tube cap.

In the background is a "VW Custom Hauler" I got on Black Friday sale at JoAnn Fabric that I might turn into a "war rig."



Here, I've applied some paint, so the vehicles are starting to shape up. I got the idea to make the truck into a "Red Rocket" truck -- with rockets, see? :D




I've added a printed paper "Red Rocket" logo to the doors of the truck, and added some grunge, weathering, scratches, and a bit of detail work on both vehicles. In the background are some Halo Micro Ops "High Ground" terrain pieces. (They're sci-fi, so they're "scale-flexible" -- I think they were intended for 25mm, but they work just as well for 20mm/1:64 scale, and I've used them alongsize 32mm minis as well.) For the ground, I'm using my Secret Weapon Miniatures "Tablescapes" terrain tiles ("Rolling Hills" painted rust brown with ivory dry-brush highlights).




Another view of Leadfoot (with a homemade 1:64 scale sculpted "Nuka-Cola" vending machine in the background). In game terms, this would be a 25-point middleweight vehicle: a Car (12 pts) with turret-mounted HMG (4 pts for the gun, x3 to make it a turret, for 12 pts total), and with the last remaining point going into Grenades for the crew to toss out the windows.

As the game is written, each vehicle gets a certain number of crew, and each turn, a crew member can man one of the vehicle's weapons, if there's something to shoot. Anyone not otherwise manning a weapon is free to fire a handgun -- the weakest weapon -- in any direction from the vehicle. "Grenades" basically just grant the chance to upgrade the "handgun" attack option slightly -- but you only get so many grenades before you run out.

The Car is pretty much the standard vehicle in the game, with 2 crew (so it can only make up to 2 weapon attacks), and middle-of-the-road armor, speed, and maneuverability. The HMG is the middle-tier gun (the lowest being the Machine Gun at 2 points, and the highest being the Mini-Gun at 6 points). Normally, when you have a weapon, you can choose to either have it forward-mounted (so it can only attack in a narrow forward "arc"), rear-mounted (toward the rear, obviously), OR side-mounted (in which case it's assumed you get TWO of the weapon -- one pointing in each side direction). A turret mount lets you measure from any edge of the car in ANY direction.

The irony of the turret mount is that at 3x cost, it's the same cost as if you'd bought a weapon and duplicated it for Forward, Rear, AND Sides. However, when you measure an attack from Front, Rear, or Sides, you have to place the firing/range template PERPENDICULAR to that side of the vehicle: if you want to attack off at a diagonal, a turret is the only way to go.

If I'd put this on a truck (with 3 crew), I could possibly make a good argument for just buying the gun and putting it on each side, as in theory if I had targets in each of 3 directions, I could have each member of the crew fire a different weapon, in a different direction -- whereas with the turret, I may be able to choose any direction I want, but it's just ONE attack.




Front view of "Red Rocket." In game terms, this is a middleweight Truck (15 pts) with forward-facing rocket launcher (6 pts), and a ram (4 pts).

The advantages the Truck has over the Car is that it has a better Hull rating (essentially more "hit points" before it's destroyed), and 3 crew instead of 2 (so it can either have an extra weapon, or that's another potential "handgun" attack each round). The downside is that it has a lower top speed, and lower maneuverability than a car.

Any vehicle can attempt a ram maneuver (most effective when it's the front of your vehicle "T-boning" the side of another), and the Ram simply adds to the damage inflicted by that attack.

The Rocket Launcher is a pricey (6 point) weapon. I could theoretically have put a lighter MG turret on the roof of the truck, or even done that crazy gambit with machine-guns on every side, but I was primarily motivated by the fact that I had a ROCKET LAUNCHER bit in the box, and it might look cool in the truck bed ... so why not use it? Plus, the whole "Red Rocket" idea came to mind. ("Red Rocket" is a brand of service station in the Fallout universe.) It dishes out a lot of damage -- as much as the mini-gun -- but has the advantage that it makes a big explosive template (so it could hit multiple targets), tempered by the downside that it can only be fired three times in a game and then it's out of ammo.

The way the piece is built, the rocket pods are held in place by pressure rather than glue, so I could potentially pop out the pods and reverse them to be REAR-facing. I have no idea if that would serve much purpose, but it would make for one IMPRESSIVE anti-tailgating measure, dontcha think? ;)

...



This is just a page I made showing some of the steps involved, with a few notes on the pictures. Mostly redundant, I guess.

Comments

[tuftears]

Those are amazing! Definitely got that Mad Max/Fallout crossover vibe.