I made my own terrain boards last year for ATZ / The Walking Dead games, then I bought a load of Battle systems terrain.The buildings didn’t fit that well to the sizes of roads and blocks, it worked but it wasn’t great. I splashed out quite a lot of money to invest in Sally 4th’s road system, the size of the road system fits with the Sally 4th photo realistic buildings. I have the intention of making a “Royston Vasey” base for my 7tv Children of the fields games. The sizes of the road pieces should also fit with the TT Combat buildings, Battlesystem and the 4Ground Mall. I’ll post pictures when I have completed more road sections. I have the Sarrissa Bridges to build, will have to work a way to make them work with this road system, may need to talk to Chris at Sally 4th when I work out what I need. Anyway here’s a quick intro and tutorial on prepping these roads.
First step is to spray with a matt black primer.Spray the edges first then paint in the main tile, spread them out to paint the edges then move them close together so you can start to spray before the first tile and stop after the last, you don’t want to start or stop your spray over the piece.This gives a nice texture and a bit of variety to the asphalt. Don’t spray from too close as you will get too much of a build up as you can see on the tiles in this tutorial. Not the end of the world as I will be going back to weather the roads, biggest problem is it obscures the road markings which Chris added (these really help when painting the lines).The pavements come separate and are glued onto the road sections.I used craft paints for the pavements (sidewalks) and the lines. The pavements because I’m going to use a lot of paint and the lines because the rustoleum paint repels some paints. I tried foundry paints to do the lines but it kept beading up, the cheap craft paint worked just fine. I went with an off white colour and it’s worth making sure its not to thick, you don’t want perfect coverage.I tried both the flat foam brush and a wet brushing technique. I found the wet brushing technique best. It’s half way between dry brushing and normal painting. i use the tile to make sure I don’t have too much paint otherwise you will fill in the lines. Best to go with too little paint until you get it right and use a light brushing technique and the paint will stay on the slabs and not fill the crack.Here you can see how the pieces “jigsaw” togetherThe pavement / sidewalk hides the jigsaw,The finished article, the pavements will have more work done on them to get the colour right and then to weather them. You’ll see the bottom right quadrant doesn’t quite line up, I’m guessing it’s an error in the cutting of these pieces but will wait till I have more built and assembled, it may be part of a cunning plan which only comes clear when you have roads coming in from each direction. Easy enough to fix if needed.
Have tried to get to grips with ATZ a few times but this time I’m serious. This will probably be a long or multi part post as I intend to explain things as I work out how to play. Please do comment if I have something wrong.
So the scenario is – The family have been camping, the fan belt on the van broke and they need to find a garage to get a new one. They have heard the news on the radio that there’s some kind of sickness going round and there’s been some violent incidents in the street.
The family are “Shades” or Dad, he’s been trying to be cool and is demanding the family call him shades. He has a shotgun as the family have been hunting. In keeping with the cool nickname business Mum is running under the tag of “Big Bean” she has a couple of BA pistols (she’s also in charge of the show.) Daughter 1 goes by “Madz” and has been hunting with a crossbow and Daughter 2’s tag is “Little Bean”. She has a BA pistol and a teddy bear, she also has one hell of an attitude so watch out for the teddy!
The game starts by the Family moving, they can move normally or take a fast move, 1 set of 2 D6 is thrown and the number of “passing dice” is counted for each character. So a level 3 character would need a 1,2 or 3 to pass and level 5 character would need a 1,2,3,4 or 5 to pass. Each pass allows that character to move half of there normal move extra. I throw 5 and a 6 so no one fast moves this time.
A dice is thrown for each character, I’m taking this as a suburban area as we are just approaching the city. A zombie will be placed as per the score on the dice.
The dice go a bit in our favour this time and we only generate 9 zombies. These are place 12 inches away from the generating character. They are placed in a random direction, I use a games workshop direction dice.
I then threw for who could activate throwing a 3 for the family and a 5 for the Zombies. This means the Family move first as they have a rep greater than 3. The zombies don’t move this time as they have a rep of 3 (4 if they can see someone)
Seeing there are a lot of “people” in the road ahead Shades tells little Bean to go right, she gets within 6 inches of a zombie. As she has not encountered a Zombie yet she take the “Zed or not Zed” test.
She’s a smart girl and realises that something crawling toward her that has been chopped of at the waist is not normal. She pulls out her pistol and shoots it in the head.
She throws 2 dice against her Rep for the Zed or not test scoring 1 success. This means she can fire one shot as the Zombie charges her. She throws a 5 and adds her rep of 3 to give an 8 which is a hit. Normally Zombies can be taken down by scoring equal to or less than the rep of the shooter. As this Zombie is charging she doesn’t get this advantage so needs to score the impact (2) of her weapon or less to take out the Zombie. She throws a 1 which gives an “Obviously Dead” result. The zombie slumps to the ground.
The family all rush over. Big Bean shouting “what do think you’re doing, I told you that is not a toy you can’t just shoot it in a town,” “but Mum, I mean Big Bean”, that thing was moving and it hasn’t got any legs:” Madz is staring at the remains “cool, that’s a zombie.” “nonsense” say Big bean and Shades simultaneously, “you only get zombies in movies “
Turn 2
I throw a 6 for the zombies and a 3 for the family. again the zombies just stand around while the family moves toward the garage.
Little Bean climbs the ladder beside her at the back of the fire hall, Shades moves up to the ladder (it takes a full move to change levels although I may house rule this to no penalty for proper staircases)
So I picked up The police station and extension from Table Top Games from Ebay. I’d never seen any of the stuff from TTCombat first hand but the price was good so I thought I’d give them a try.
Well,very impressed, went together well, very sturdy and excellent value. I need to do a bit of work to stop it looking so clean but thats definately my problem not the building.
The building separates into different floors so it will make it easy to play through the floors.
It was just painted up with craft paints, the wood floors were printed out from images on the net.
The rest of the stuff in the background is Worldworks stuff I made a number of years back.
henryspaintshop 