Sunday, November 25, 2012

Hirst Arts Walls


In original Dungeons and Dragons, Dwarves have the ability to note new construction in underground settings.  That OD&D Dwarven ability heavily informs my approach to Hirst Arts dungeon tile construction:  I am building tiles that feature different construction styles, depending on who built the particular dungeon area, and during what epochs they were built.

Hirst Arts provides a plethora of options, including gothic, fieldstone, egyptian, and other themed construction molds.  Even within those broad classifications, there are varied pillars and block sizes and shapes around which different construction styles can be aggregated.


I've been spending much of my limited spare time building wall sections.  I have plenty of floor sections.  The wall sections tend to be more complicated, with more pieces, so it has been a drawn-out process building them, not to mention that the related construction elements are more detailed and less common on the molds than those for floors.


Almost all of the currently buit walls have been built with gothic elements.  Because there are two different sizes of doors, door arches have to come in two different sizes, thus explaining the two photos above.  One doorway is peaked, the other is arched.


All of my floor tiles are built in 3"x 3" sections.  In order to create corner sections, I have sandpapered the edges of the walls where they connect at the corner.  Dental plaster is a pretty hardy material, so this takes some time.  I recommend wearing a filter mask while you are sandpapering, as you generate significant amounts of plaster dust.


There are several different sizes of wall bricks.  The above photo shows a "bricked-up" door arch, representing those door arches that have been bricked-up, to prevent access to the area beyond, or prevent whatever is behind the door from getting out.

Sunday, November 4, 2012

In Which Zombies Eat Our Brains


In celebration of Halloween, we played a couple of games of Zombicide, both last and this weekend.  I purchased Zombicide through one of several Kickstarters I recently participated in.  The rules are very easy to grasp, and Zombicide does a great job of emulating the Zombie-movie genre.  The zombies just keep piling on.


One of early forays into the land of zombies resulted in only one death, as Rob (playing the red figure in the centre of the photo above, and lying on its side in the photo below) "took one for the team" so that the other four survivors could escape with the food we had foraged.


Our most recent game of Zombicide did not end nearly as well: a Total Party Kill.  The picture below shows the last two survivors, Rob and Anita, completely surrounded by zombies, with a street-full of zombies pressing up right behind them.  At this point the survivors were out of molotov cocktails, and the rest of the party had already been eaten.