Traveller Ship Miniatures - Old and New

Here are comparison pics of the older RAFM Scout and Beowulf and the newer Ad Astra ships.  The Ad Astra ships were originally made by MegaMinis, and the pictures are of the ships in their MegaMinis packaging.

The cutting mat grid is in half and full cm.

Big OGRE Miniatures Boards

One of the games I play is Steve Jackson's OGRE. Among my efforts is a large flat map board, two-sided, that I take to conventions and run big multi-player games on.

The board is on five 2'x4' panels of 1/8" MDF that butt together in a specific order. I did not make these maps geomorphic. The first, done around 2007, is a chunk of imaginary territory crossed by large rivers. Intended to simulate the WWII Arnhem Campaign (aka "A Bridge Too Far"), each of the three massive rivers was painted as marshland (to keep GEVs at bay) and only have a single bridge each.  Here is the original mock-up, when the map was only four panels.

After playing on this a time or two, I added the fifth panel:

 A couple years later, inspired by other's talk of real world battlegrounds, I flipped the five boards over, fiddled around a bit with topographic maps, and produced the Delta Board.


This picture shows it in use at KublaCon 2012, but only shows the four eastern boards.

Winter is hard on old RPG Writers

M.A.R. Barker, creator of the extensive "fantasy" world of Tekumel and a truly polyglot linguist, passed away last weekend at the age of 83.

The press release from the Tekumel Foundation is at: http://tekumelfoundation.org/PressRelease-MARBARKER-1929-2012.pdf

In Pursuit of the Wild 15mm toy - Episode Three

I keep hearing the opinion that Combat Wombat 15mm stuff is "small". I suspect this is because we aren't calibrating properly...

I've had the two toys below for a while. The sports car came out of a cheap card of several from BigLots a year ago or so, while the HMMV came out of a little toy diorama set with a plastic tent and a trooper out of scale with everything else.

While just a little small for modern 15mm, the HMMV is close enough for the 15mm WWII Russian Spotter in the picture; HMMVs (or at least the civilian H2 I calibrated myself against a few years ago) are just about 6 feet high. Factor out the base on the miniature and it is pretty close. The car is also just slightly off, but I suspect this is because it is exaggerated in different ways than most miniatures. It is very close, however.

The CW vehicle behind them all here is the 8x8 AGS, a "smallish" vehicle in the line.


While hardly a classic Winnebago, the AGS is not small once put in the right context.

In Pursuit of the wild 15mm toy - Episode Two

Someone was asking about the TRON Legacy toys on TMP. Sadly, the little die-cast ones are all a bit small for 15mm except for the one-man flier, which is too big.

The three-man flier is a nice size, and could be made to work as a crewed fighter with a little effort, mostly in bulking up the cockpit. The toy is not deep enough for any sort of realistic pilot chair. Here it is next to a RAFM 15mm trooper: