Nuclear Renaissance - Drifter and 'Bandicoot' buggy

"Once I was a cop, a road warrior searching for a righteous cause...." 'Mad' Max Rockatansky

The latest character for NR I've completed is the Drifter and his half track buggy 'bandicoot'

Drifter is a mini from em4's future skirmish line 'road hero' a great sculpt packed with character and definitely channeling Mel Gibson in beyond thunderdome. He was a real pleasure to paint, you could almost say he painted himself but that's inspiration for you...

The only change I made to the model was to chop off his right hand, holding a slightly futuristic looking weapon described as an 'autoshotgun' and replace it with a combat knife hand from an old frateris militiaman. 

The chief reason I did this is that in NR firearms are hugely expensive, a shotgun for example costs as much as a naked hero, two goons and a truck for them all to ride in.

As he had a pistol tucked into his belt along with the one in his left hand I elected to lose the shotgun, I guess I just like to try and keep things as WYSIWYG as possible (the holstered and unusable pistols on road judge and rogue cop bother me far too much!!!)

The buggy started out like as a corgi earthmover, cutdown to a bare chassis and engine block, a vw beetle was cut at the firewall and grafted on top as a cabin, and the tracks are from a gorkamorka wartrakk. 

The rest is just an amalgamation of assorted crap, the grille is a fuel tank from a toy motorbike, the supercharger built from Lego, guard dozen blade supports and chocolate coin foil.

The front suspension are cut down toy x-wing fighter laser cannons and the exhaust pipes are the little plastic tubes for the end of paintbrushes.

You can't see it in the photos but underneath I built a propshaft and gearbox/axle just in case anyone turns it over!

I'm not sure whether this character / car pairing will last as not only am I now thinking the Bandicoot needs a more 'nux and slit' style crew, plus I've got the urge to build Drifter either a mean muscle car in the razor cola vein or perhaps a camel wagon-esque truck, sans camels of course!

Thanks for looking, stay tuned for more post apocalyptic 28mm if your eyes can bear my shoddy craftmanship!

Nuclear Renaissance - Growing the Gangcults!

"You can't expect to compete with that! Every day, we get weaker while they get stronger..."

- the captain's girl - 

Some more reinforcements for the gangs.

After more procrastination, deliberation, play testing and tweaking I've (yet again) rewritten all the gang lists in the name of balance, finally settling on a 750pt level for all of the gangs... entailing a few more minis and vehicles as I've generally lowered the amount of skills and upgrades each individual has. 

Our experience has shown its best for each character to have a couple of choice upgrades to reinforce an archetype, rather that the full kitchen sink treatment.

I ordered another batch of minis from em4's great value future skirmish range, sculpted by mark copplestone these are some lovely sculpts even two decades on.

I also bought a couple of bikers, a core aspect of Mad Max that has been sorely missing from our games so far.

Here's a little WIP of one of the vehicles I've been working on, the Bandicoot, an unholy amalgamation of love bug, half track and hot rod.

Interestingly after building this one I was googling for unusual half tracked vehicles and found this...

Not such an original idea after all!

Using scraps of paper with the gang lists scrawled on was proving rather clunky so I've also been working on improving the presentation using a great little app called phonto, which allows you to add text to photographs. 

Starting with a landscape outback scene I added each characters stats to create a game card of sorts.  Plus a summary card for each gang. Here are a couple of examples, plus I'll be putting up each characters card with the minis in following posts.

I intend to take my phone down to the booth at the supermarket and get them printed out as regular 6x4 photos....hopefully they will be legible and thus a quick, easy and (hopefully) elegant solution to biro and a4... I'll show how they turned out either way.

Here are the two warriors that will (for now) finish off the 'sons of simius' marauder gang.

Donk is a musclebound melee bezerker, he will likely ride in the redneck ram truck with Wibber, in a Nux and Slit kind of relationship.

Mama Zet, a hollow eyed gang juve barely out of her teens brings additional firepower in the form of her submachinegun. Although in NR the SMG is a pretty weak ranged weapon it can put out a lot of shots and she has the ducking and diving skills that make her quite hard to hit in return.

She's set up to be a nuisance character, pinning characters with weight of fire by dealing out shock tokens rather than making outright kills. An annoying thorn in the side that's hard to eliminate.

Tactically I think she's best off adding her firepower to krumps shotgun by riding in ziggys truck with him and turning it into a dedicated 'gunboat'.

Next up is a transport and driver for the 'Children of the Apocalypse'

Feral Demagogue, a deranged rabble rouser and fanatical missionary of the cult of Psymon Sez, and 'Bogan' (Australian slang for a thug / lout) a light Tow truck based on a typical Ozzie ute.

Their leader Psymon's steamroller has proved too dammed slow to act as transport for the feral skulltaker and feral headhunter so I've added a cheap fast (ish) three man buggy and a driver who is also a 'bard' to help keep my melee warriors motivated and in the fight once delivered to target.

Feral demagogue is based on an old WHFB flagellant, with a couple of extra bits and bobs to apocalyse him up a tad. I'm not sure the saurus head really works as a crocodile / Komodo skull, but I was all out of skulls, which is slightly ironic considering most of the stuff on my bits box comes from games workshop! One bit I like is the chaos marine backpack vent, meant to represent a dangling speaker to amplify his ranting and raving.

The tow truck started out life as a Disney Pixar cars 'Mater'. Despite the moulded on windshield eyes and goofy grin I was pretty confident with this car as it was designed to look a bit beaten up from the outset, was the right shape (check out the tow trucks at the diner when you are first introduced to goose in Mad Max 1) and already had some great details that made it ripe for the post apocalyptic road wars I had in mind. The missing hood and exposed engine were perfect and the chains / winch at the rear were nicely moulded.

The conversion work was pretty simple, rusty panels added all round, especially over the toothy smile, mesh windscreen to disguise the eyes and a load of scavenged junk in the rear bed, plus the extra seat and a salvaged dashboard strung over the side with rope.

WHFB undead shields were used as armoured hubcaps and the whole lot was painted to make it look as wasteland worn as possible to fit in with the steamroller and 2CV techinical.

Thanks for stopping by!

More road war nonsense soon...