Skummburg: A Wretched Hive of You Know What

First big installment on Skummburg after Jezebel's Joint...three new buildings plus a windmill, some street lamps and some bits of furniture and fluff...

It was all quite a bit of work but I'm more or less happy with how things are turning out with it  Have some plans for expanding it considerably here in the not too distant future with some more shanties from Miniature Building Authority.

Space Scum salute their new home with some celebratory fire....

My first taste of Warhammer 40k was the big fat Rogue Trader book, so I've always been more of a fan of those earlier, pulpy visions of the 40k universe than of the 'Grim dark' look which came to dominate in subsequent editions.  Skummburg is very much influenced by the illustrations of Logan's World and Helsreach from that tome.  I can really do without the endless acres of Gothic Cathredrals covered with skulls.

K'Lurg Ratcha cruises happily through the streets of his new domain.  Two of his flunkies scout ahead.

Once again I had fun making posters of out little catalogs and advertisements...this fellow seems to appreciate them.

Dead Men Space Marines patrol the streets around the infamous Jezebel's Joint, expecting trouble at any moment.  I've always, always loved that illustration on the right, there.  I liked the idea that Space Marines might often find themselves engaged in mundane policing activities as well as epic last stands against the alien hordes.  Skummburg needs a good bit of policing...

The buildings are a mix of Miniature Building Authority shanties and Armorcast stucco buildings.  Can't get the Armorcast buildings anymore, so the rest of Skummburg is likely to be made up of the shanties which is just fine, I guess.

Interior with furnishings fit for scum.  Or college students...

I wanted a filthy look to the place that would make you feel like you could contract a horrible disease just from walking through the building.  Think I achieved that.

 Interior of the top level of the building pictured above and just below.

 Pieter Porque brandishes his meat axe at someone just for the sake of doing it.  The little shipping containers are Armorcast.  Can't remember when I bought them, they've just been rattling round in boxes for a long time.  They look good painted up. though.

Mad Meg and her crew head over to Jezzie's for a drink...

The street lamps have working LED bulbs in them.  Sweet!  

 Windmill by Daemonscape.  Damn nice model...

 Interior of the second building with more trashy posters and flea-ridden furnishings...

 Scum, indeed...

Skummburg begins!  Hopefully I'll have some more stuff done soon, but this makes a good start...

Jezebel's Joint: A Sleazy Space Dive...

For the last year or so I've been working on building up a pretty sizeable sci-fi/post apocalyptic space port/shanty town/wretched hive of scum and villainy type table but I haven't posted any of the progress until now.  Here's one of the focal points of the set up....

Jezebel's joint!!!

Jezebel's was a bar with a very shady reputation which I discovered when I was going to college in San Francisco way back in the day.  I lived right around the corner from Jezebel's at about the time William Vollman was writing Whores for Gloria, which mostly takes place within a few blocks of the spot.

The neighborhood was a slice of the third world but Jezebel's had a library full of literary classics and military history and I used to go there after class or work and prop up the bar for hours, reading and draining glass after glass of Hefeweizen.  The place is long gone now.  All things considered that might be for the best but I do have some good memories of the place.

I made the sign out of plasticard, dowel and the cover of the last Jezebel's matchbook I had left.  Come to think of it I've had that matchbook for about twenty years now.  Weird.

The interior of my model Jezebel's captures some of the vibe of the real one.  The picture behind the bar is a sticker that came out of a pack of Varga trading cards an old girlfriend gave me um...about twenty years ago!  It's been floating around in boxes for a long time. I couldn't get that terrible crease out of it but I still think it looks good.  The little movie posters came out of a Blue Underground DVD catalog.  Been saving it for years to use for this very purpose.

The structure is made up of two Armorcast buildings glued together to make a bar room up front and a lounge in the back.  View of fatboy from the lounge area.  Armorcast has retired their line of stucco buildings which is a shame.

Plenty of room on the filthy garbage strewn roof top for fightin' and such...

Stairs lead up to the door shown in the photo above...more smut on the wall there.

Long shot of the lounge...

More lounge.  The booths are made by Miniature Building Authority.

 "Sorry about the mess."...Apologies...I don't have my Han Solo and Greedo painted up yet...The little green thing on the table is supposed to be a napkin holder but I didn't think that napkins were really very much in the spirit of Jezebel's so I painted it the front of each green to try and make them look like intercoms or a monitors or something...

 Exterior with local color and a Faster Pussycat! Kill! Kill! poster...

 More exteriors...I have lots more stuff that I haven't posted yet...lots of ramps and platforms, shanties and things of that nature...

 Gotta have big fans in your post apocalyptic buildings.  There's no way around it.  I learned that from the eighties.

Jezebel's is open for business again!

Deep Cut Studio Game Mats (Review)

Never done a product review on the old blog before.  Not really interested in them, but I thought a quick peek at my new Deep Cut Studio mats might be helpful to anyone who happens to be shopping around for game mats.  Mats can be pricey, after all, and that's particularly true if your a North American and you're ordering a mat from Lithuania, which is where Deep Cut happens to be located.  The shipping is murder.  But.  I'm very happy with what I've bought from them so far.  The mats are well worth the money in my opinion.  Here are a few views of mine. I needed an excuse to set up some lights and play around with the camera in the big board's new digs anyway.

 I ordered two mats, the first being the 'Old West' mat. It depicts a desert environment with lots of patches of dry, cracked earth, some drifts of sand and a weary looking shrub here and there.
The artwork is very beautiful and immediately convincing.  Here's a view with some ordinary stones gathered from a creek bed and a lizard hide I got from the terrarium aisle at the pet store.  You can see how well the mat sets off even the simplest terrain.

Three brave adventurers explore the mat.  Deep Cut sells their mats in cloth, pvc and mousepad.  Mousepad is by far the most expensive, of course.  I knew I wanted mousepad from the beginning.  Its lovely, heavy, rugged stuff.  It doesn't fold or crease, doesn't reflect the light, and you can bounce your painstakingly painted miniatures off it all day and their paint won't chip.

Mat detail.  I'm excited abut getting my Egyptians and Hittites onto this.  If I ever finish painting them, that is.

Another view.

And another, this time with minis.

The other mat I purchased was the 'Waterworld' oceanic mat.  I got this one mainly to support the ww2 naval miniatures games I've been getting into lately.  (More on them later.)

View of the artwork.  I had a hard time capturing the color.  Its a somewhat deeper, richer  blue than it appears here.

I'm also looking forward to using this for Rogue Trader adventures and Oldhammer fantasy ship to ship combat.  I've got some resin pirate ships and intend to man them with Dwarf slayers and Skaven weapon teams.  Masts and sails transformed into towering infernos by warp fire throwers.  Think of it!

I was just playing around by this point.  Light still isn't quite right in most of these photos.  Going to have to keep working on that.

Stranded on a tiny desert archipelago after their ship has crashed into the sea, Imperial Prelate Sancho Corleon and his companions wonder what to do next.

 

The Astropath seems to doubt their chances...

Anyway, hope this might be of use to someone.  I've painted a bunch of stuff lately.  More Rogue Trader, Biblicals and some ww2 naval stuff, so there are plenty of posts coming down the pike.  Cheers!