Custom Miniatures Progress

Hello,

(We're back to the normal intro)

So as I said in my last post I was making my own 15-20mm miniatures out of clay and paperclip armatures. Well, since I am wargaming in the Second Sino-Japanese War I need two forces. After creating a 20 man platoon supported by pack gun of Chinese infantry I began work on my 20 man Japanese Infantry platoon supported by FT Renault. Here is my progress from today.

Here are 14 posed clay soldiers. Right now they have their arms, legs, and torsos made. What is left to do is the pouches, weapons, and most importantly the head. I began yesterday on these when they only were paper clip armatures so this was a lot of progress.

Here is some terrain I'm building. Made from an egg carton these "pylons" will soon be watch towers. I plan on either painting or somehow showing the various supports and creating a top "hut" for each tower. These will be used to give extended LOS for units and allow you to call mortar support farther. (Since you can use mortars on enemies that atleast 1 unit has vision to)

Made from water bottle caps and clay these bunkers are turning out really well. Though they can only fit 1-2 of my miniatures I think they will be a useful terrain piece for those 2-3 man LMG teams or the 2 man HMG teams.

Here is a view of the "trench" that leads within the bunker. Once the clay is dried you will be able to take the top off in order to put your miniatures inside. I plan to paint these brown and grey with a possible wash.

A nice view of some fish and my misc terrain that I make with my leftover clay after sculpting my main projects. So far I have rocks, rock wall, and a dead guy.

Here are 6 more infantry that need their arms and rest of their bodies sculpted next to the 5cm mortars. As you might guess these 6 miniatures will be the japanese mortar men. I plan to add either backpacks or crates with them to show they are ammo carriers and mortar operators. I think backpacks as that will allow me to use them as other unit types like scouts or veterans.

So that was my progress tonight and that included me going to the gym and shopping today! Sadly, I am out of glue so I will need to buy some tomorrow. Another project I have going on in the background (which I didn't show) are some buildings I am working on. Using more egg carton pieces I'm going to build some traditional Chinese homes that (hopefully) will be modular to allow me to stack them to create multistory buildings.

Rules wise I'm thinking that any window(s) in a building will allow you to shoot out of a 45 degree arc (or 180 to make it simple). The traditional buildings were made of stone while others wood. I'd say the wood buildings would give a +1 Defense rating while the Stone buildings would give a +2 rating. These buildings will also be able to be lifted up and troops put under.

Another project I have on the back burner, or really on the floor as its not started yet, is to create tokens and cards for the FUBAR rule set that I'm modifiying. I need tokens for each action and suppression. On the cards I need to be able to keep track of each soldier, their weapon, name, firepower, experience and rank along with the squad stats of Squad experience, Squad Morale, and Squad Name. Once I get all this made I will post them to this blog so that you may print and make them for your FUBAR games.

For the future rule book I am designing art for that as well. I am no artist, just a creative person, and I have found an art style of drawing soldiers for me that is fun and pleasing to look at but they are cartoonish. No, not cartoonish, they are cartoons. But when this rulebook is made these little guys will be the "mascots" throughout the book. Hopefully I'll be able to get my drawing tablet again so that I can practice drawing on the PC and not just on paper.

Okay, now my ramblings are going towards what exactly is going to be in the rules as FUBAR is a simple 2 page system of rules. How am I going to make it into a fully fledged rulebook? For me that is easy, small additions to the combat to make it more "complex" will be written in but most of the "meat" of the rule book will be in the RPG-lite rules and the campaign rules that the basis of this game will be built on. For me the idea of this game is to have quick and easy combat that then focuses on the two players' struggle against (or maybe with) each other. Seeing experienced squads or maybe even just experienced soldiers live through your campaign earning experience, getting "quirks" and abilities but also being able to live through it all to make it home. Yes it sounds like a lot to keep track of but thats my job is to make it easy on the players to keep track of everything. That's why there will be tokens, squad cards, and a well designed book to support it all. Now will the book be based around the Second Sino-Japanese War? No. That is just what I am using to test the game at the moment as it will hopefully be able to be used in any genre the player desires and with the easy to mod FUBAR ruleset people should be able to do just that.

WOW, that was a long rant. But I hope you enjoyed it as I know I did since I've finally got these ideas put to paper.

Have a nice day,
-"Jonah"