I was hit by a relatively mild Nor’easter yesterday that nevertheless still resulted in being without electricity for almost 9 hours. Since I could not work, I spent the day playing outside with the kids and working on some hobby stuff.

Star Wars Miniatures Battles is on my mind, particularly the scenario I hope to run at Historicon. Last year, I got the notion of running a battle in a cavern system with attached spaceport, with environs rather reminiscent of the dug-out, semi-subterranean architecture of the Lars Homestead (which is actually a real hotel you can stay at in Tunisia!), with doors and vents and pipes built into the carved-out passages. I carved the foam and added the greebles a while ago, but delayed the necessary addition of rock-faces and Sculptamold*¹ until this weekend. It is a messy and somewhat laborious process, especially around the plastic bits, but hopefully it will look good when it’s all painted.

Below is what the rough layout will look like when laid out on the table. The large open space closest to the camera is part of the spaceport landing area:

Most of the time, however, I spent magnetizing these alien plants from the Mantic TerrainCrate Kickstarter:

This is a very nice assortment of PVC modular ‘alien’ plants for you tabletop. Most of them seem rather fungus-y to me, but there’s a very satisfying variety of shapes that is made all the more varied by the pieces being swappable and stackable. The highest I’ve gotten was four pieces, though the balance was pretty precarious. I’m sure you can do better if you glue them and mount them two wider bases.

If you missed the Kickstarter, you can pick them up here.

My wife and I have talked about making a ‘Super Metroid’ style alien terrain board for quite a while now. These, added to sections of the cavern system above, will be my first crack at it. I’ve asked Mrs. DiBaggio to come up with some suitable paint schemes, preferably using our color shifting and glow-in-the-dark craft paints, and I look forward to showing you the finished results.

1. Yes, that’s a link to a 25lb bag. And yes, if you’re doing something on this scale, it’s worth buying. ↩︎