[Fallout/Games] March Miniatures & Elements

[jordangreywolf]

One part of my prep is that I've been trying to organize all the miniatures and terrain so I can FIND it during a session. I've got a couple of modular shelving units that hold a certain size of papercrafting plastic container that seems to have become a quasi-standard at the various craft stores, and I often find such boxes at Goodwill and other thrift stores (sometimes cheaply, sometimes priced more than I could get them NEW at Hobby Lobby or Michael's ... so it's kind of random, but I simply buy it low, and DON'T buy it when it's overpriced ;) ). I'll foam-line the things and try to organize them by some sort of category. This box has my mutant plants in it ... but then I get even MORE mutant plants, more than will fit in it, so I'll add another box or two and one will be ... uh ... Dead Forest, one will be Mutant Jungle Plants, and one will be Glowing Radioactive Plants. Or something like that. One box of "Wastelanders" quickly gets spun off into more boxes with more specific sub-categories. But to make sure I grab the right box, I need a LABEL. Sometimes I just print something off in text, but sometimes I like to put a cute picture on the top.

That's where this came in. I wanted something for my swamp box. I had the idea to do some sort of national park sign. Maybe I could turn this into a billboard design later on? Not that it makes the least bit of sense for there to be a BILLBOARD advertising Everglades National Park. It'll work for labeling my box and later I'll recycle just the "Everglades National Park" sign-within-a-sign for some tabletop terrain (once the PCs actually make it to the Everglades, if that ever happens), and the gator mascot (hand-drawn) I could repurpose so he's gesturing at something else -- like, maybe "HEY KIDS! Steer your parents toward GATORAMA World of GATORS!" Etc.



Brain in a Jar
Reaper Miniatures Bones 77493 "Brain in a Jar" plastic miniature painted up for retro-sci-fi / post-apocalyptic use. The clear cylinder and the main body/base portion that it slots into are made of a more solid plastic than the bendy "Bones" plastic used for the cap and legs, which nicely protects against warping and makes it a lot easier to paint (since I was able to spray-prime the plastic base piece). The three tripod legs are actually part of a single molded piece that fits nicely into a recess on the base of the main body/disc, and the cap has guiding grooves as well, making the whole thing very easy to assemble after I'd painted the "brain" and the cables/tubes connected to it.

Overall, it's a great "pulp-sci-fi" mini, perfect for rocketships-and-rayguns settings such as Slipstream, and I figure I'll get some use out of it for my present campaign as an alternative to the Robobrain or the Think Tank.



Chryslus Station Wagon in the Scrapyard
Modiphius 3D-printed resin model of a Chryslus station wagon from the Fallout games. This was a multi-part piece, with the body in two halves and canopy as a separate piece, and separated tires. While it was fairly easy to assemble, some warping in the prints meant that the surfaces didn't fit flush, so I had to do a lot of sanding/filing and ultimately some epoxy putty gap-filling. Pictured on a Secret Weapon Miniatures "Scrapyard" terrain tile. This wasn't so much something I "needed" for the campaign (I've got plenty of junked retro cars by now) but Goober_Chris printed one off and so I painted it up. He might be able to use it for his own campaign, too, once it gets out of limbo with his regular group.



Mad Jack and Billy-Joe Bob at the Capps Raider Base
"Mad" Jack the wasteland frontiersman and Billy-Joe Bob the local "Florida Man" carefully approach the seemingly unguarded front gate entrance through a scrap barricade surrounding the old Capps Tires service center that had been repurposed as a base for a notorious raider gang (dubbing itself "The Capps").

The miniatures are modified Clix figures -- a Horrorclix hunter on the left, and a HeroClix "thug" on the right -- used to represent two of the protagonists.

This was based off of the IRL community of "Capps" located at the intersection of I-27 and I-17 east of Tallahassee, and as near as I can tell, there's just ONE building to be found there (it's unincorporated), and it's what apparently used to be a general service station/filling station but lost its franchise and is now home to a used tire shop. I happened to have a Plasticville "service station" building that looked an awful lot like the real structure, and some storage containers that made good stand-ins for the actual ones parked nearby IRL. I upped the ante by building "scrap barricades" around the whole thing, imagining it becoming a rural base of operations (far enough out of Tallahassee to escape the bombs) for some survivors, eventually getting taken over by raiders, and then later getting wiped out by the Lamutants as they expanded their reach. The place was largely abandoned when the PCs found it, but they found some feral ghouls inside, and discovered that a colony of giant fire ants (rather literal on the "fire" part) had infested the nearby grounds.


Capps Tire Lobby Floor Tile
Quick gaming floor tile made from mat board, textured wallpaper, and printed elements, to represent the lobby area of a service-station-turned-used-tire-shop-turned-abandoned-raider-base for a post-apocalyptic TTRPG campaign.

I found a roll of a sort of faux tile wallpaper, fairly thick and durable and seemingly water-resistant, at the thrift store ages ago, and kept it around because I had this idea that I could use it for quick 20mm dungeon floor tiles. (This was way back when a more significant part of my fantasy miniature collection would plausibly work with 20mm-square grid gaming tiles.) Here, I just thought it might pass for a plausible floor tile texture, and it had a little bit of thickness. I cut out sections to represent the floor, and left bare (black) mat board for the walls. For a raised countertop, I used some more mat board scraps (though I should have taken the extra step to PAINT the countertop so it would be something other than the same black I used for the walls). In the past, I've printed off a bunch of signs, magazines, posters, Halloween decorations, etc., at a very small scale, filling out sheets of the stuff and then clipping bits and pieces here and there to use as base decor, to glue onto terrain building walls, etc. Here, I used various bits for floor clutter to try to give a shortcut way of conveying that this place was debris-filled and abandoned. I still used some conventional furnishings as I had them, and as the PCs explored the rooms. (They wisely decided NOT to explore the locked bathrooms.)

I used the baseplate from an old Girder and Panel toy construction kit for the adjoining garage, since I had already painted it to pass for grey concrete flooring, and it was about the right size to plausibly represent two car-shop bays at this scale.



Floridaland Parking Lot
Table setup for the start of my "Floridaland" adventure, as part of the larger campaign. Since I didn't have a giant ruined asphalt parking lot board piece (an oversight that I simply MUST correct some day, considering how often post-apocalyptic parking lots filled with potentially explosive nuclear-powered cars figure into my adventure scenarios), I used one of my painting boards. (Since this game and this picture, I've gone back and spackle-painted the whole board so it's more like some "ruined pavement" with a few stained areas here and there.) It's a big plastic yard sign that I salvaged ages ago, using as a surface for spray-painting minis and toys for terrain out in the yard, and then later as a surface for applying washes and so forth, so it has some interesting "distress" on a mostly grey surface that I figured could pass for a debris-and-trash-filled parking lot.

The cars are a mix of 3D-printed models, gutted plastic Pixars Cars Happy Meal toys, junked 1:43 die-cast cars picked up in thrift stores, and a big bus coin-bank/toy (also found at a thrift store). The plants are mostly 3D-printed models from Fantastic Plants and Rocks ( https://www.myminifactory.com/users/Fantastic-Plants-And-Rocks ). The central sign/bus-stop is scratch-built mostly from foam core. The "F L O R I D A L A N D" holo-banners are pieces from a Warsenal "box o' junk" -- translucent acrylic that I added some letterboard letters to, and put on 30mm round-lip bases.

All in all, a lot of fun. This one setup served as a sort of "mini-dungeon" as the PCs went around the parking lot, exploring ruined cars in search of loot, finding the occasional radroach infestation, making a bunch of noise and attracting scavenging feral dogs and hostile stingwings from off stage left, and so forth.



Atomic Land Mascots
Robot mascots roaming the ruins of a theme park, happy to welcome visitors, but their AI has gone a bit off-kilter, and they really REALLY don't want you to ever leave.

Miniatures designed by Jean-Virgile Laprise of M3 Studios, for the Atomic Land Kickstarter ( https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/m3studios/atomic-land/description ). The STLs for these (including the wrecked robot) were included as freebies along with the Kickstarter. A friend of mine got on board with the Kickstarter, but it was actually this little freebie set that proved to be the most compelling for the purposes of my campaign. I used them as additional mascot-robots (or "masbots") for Floridaland, and I plan to reuse them elsewhere during the campaign as well. (I see them as more "general use" than the very Floridaland-specific Masbots.)

Roughly 34mm scale (standing figures are on 1"/25mm diameter resin bases).

Comments

[tuftears]

These are such great miniatures and settings!