Death’s Head in 28mm scale, yes?

One of the great joys I take from my gaming and modelling hobby is the ability to mash-up all different aspects of my favourite pop culture into something I can play with on the tabletop.  This is one of the reasons I love 7TV so much.  As well as having a decades long obsession with cult TV and movies, I’m also able to use the flexibility of the game to introduce some of my favourite comic book and toy characters from my youth.

Comics crossovers are common now, but when I was eleven this was the most exciting thing EVER!

I was born in the mid-seventies and so most of my childhood was spent growing up in the neon lit, shoulder pad wearing, verging on nuclear apocalypse, 1980s.  Comics were a huge part of my youth, but not perhaps in the way they were for other generations or in other parts of the world.  Superheroes were never really my thing.  In the early eighties the UK was culturally still living in the shadow of the second world war.  The war generation was very much still around and this was reflected in the popular culture of the time.  I had loads of toy soldiers (in the Action Man / Action Force / army men vein), war films were ten a penny on TV and in the cinema and the weekly adventure comics for boys were pretty much all focussed on war!

Some recent eBay purchases through which I have been attempting to relive my youth (and get gaming inspiration of course!)

I existed on a weekly dose of Battle, with the occasional foray into Victor or the self contained Commando books (still going strong today).  Then things started to change, Marvel UK started gobbling up those toy licenses, including the ridiculously popular Transformers.  These were usually full colour comics on proper paper (unlike the war weeklies which were produced on standard newspaper stock).  Unlike their American equivalents, the output from Marvel UK titles like Transformers was weekly.  Most of the content was reprinted from the US titles, but due to the higher frequency of publication soon original UK content was required to fill the gaps.  It was here that some of the best characters and writing in the Transformers title occured.

Anyway this is a hobby blog, so what has all this to do with tabletop gaming?  Well, as I alluded to above, I love taking some of my favourite characters from back in the day and dropping then into a game.

Therefore I present to you Death’s Head, the freelance peacekeeping agent (don’t call him a bounty hunter), who first graced the pages of the Transformers UK comic, before spinning off into other titles (including Doctor Who, Dragon’s Claws and his own eponymous title, before eventually ending up facing off against some of the giants of the Marvel Universe).

A legitimate WTF moment for me in the 80s (before the phrase was invented), was the brutal slaying of my fave Decepticon Shockwave at the hands of Death’s Head.  (Marvel Transformers UK, amazing art by Geoff Senior.)

Originally a Transformers sized mechanoid, he was eventually shrunk down to human size following an encounter with the Time Lord known as the Doctor (yes more crossovers!).  It is the human sized Death’s Head I am working with here.

The Doctor shrunk Death’s Head down to human size using one of the Master’s Tissue Compression Eliminators.

As a Marvel character the easiest way to get hold of a figure was to look at the Heroclix range and success there is one available.  I picked him up off eBay a couple of years ago, but it is only recently I’ve managed to get round to deciding what to do with him.

My starting point – a pre-painted Heroclix model

As a Heroclix figure he came pre-painted.  Often the Heroclix sculpts are great and only let down by a poor paint job.  In this case I was fairly happy with both, but in order to add some more defintion and match up with other tabletop miniatures I may be using alongside him I decided on a ‘splash on’ of Army Painter Dark Tone Quickshade.  I applied this by brush, being careful to soak up any excess before leaving it to dry for a day and then giving it a once over with Testers Dullcote.  I’d already removed the figure from it’s original ‘clix’ base and added to a standard 30mm round base which I then did a basic drybrush and flock job on.

Re-based

Post Quickshade, pre Dullcote

Close up showing the shading effects of the Quickshade Dark Tone dip I painted on.

Finished, matt coated and based, ready for the tabletop.

Now the figure was done it was time to think about the statistics.  I used the excellent online 7TV Casting Agency app to create a profile card.  I based this on the ‘Mean Machine’ profile from the 7TV Apocalypse set (itself a homage to a certain time travelling Austrian cyborg type chap).  Using the rules for customising stars and co-stars from the 7TV Apocalypse Producer’s Guide I switched a few stats and special effects around and have ended up with the following:

For those of you who are interested in the ‘recipe’ for this, here are the steps I took from the base ‘Mean Machine’ profile, following the customisation rules.  Note that the starting point in terms of ratings cost for the base profile was 10:

• Renamed Star Quality from ‘Ill Be Back’ to ‘Freelance Peace Keeping Agent, yes?’ (no ratings cost)
• Removed Military Training special effect (reducing ratings value to 9)
• Decreased Body stat from 5 to 4 (reducing ratings value to 8)
• Increased Mind stat from 2 to 3 (increasing ratings value to 9)
• Added Loner special effect (increasing ratings value to 10)
• Replaced UZI 9mm attack with Grenade, Electrical attack (no ratings cost)
• Renamed ‘Steel Grip’ attack to Hand Power Axe (no ratings cost).  Death’s Head had a nifty range of switchable hand weapons.

I’ll be making the profile downloadable from the 7TV Productions Facebook group shortly.

In the meantime this has got me thinking about how to mix in some bigger ‘mechanoids’ in with the standard 28mm scale 7TV figures I am using.  Cue both Wizkids and their new range of unpainted pre-primed Transformers and my 3D printer…..

Wizkids Transformers miniatures painted up (with 28mm scale figure for comparison)

Is a possible revenge match on the cards?  Shockwave (scaled to the Wizkids Transformers size and so 28mm scale compatible).  Printed on my resin 3D printer.

 

Friendship is Universal – A Visitors Cast for 7TV

At the recent 7TV campaign day I fielded my Visitors cast from V.  You know V, the one about the fascist space lizards who came in peace but really just wanted to eat us (and as many rodents as they could get their hands on).  Oh yeah and I’m not referring to the 21st Century remake (which frighteningly is around ten years old now).

 

 

I’ve had some figures painted up for a while.  Prior to the release of the excellent miniatures early this year by Crooked Dice, I had previously painted up some of the alternatives released a few years back by Nexus Miniatures (now YFT Design Studio) as well as doing some conversions.  In addition I’d also found some excellent close matches in the Inspectors set from Heresy Miniatures.

Nexus Miniatures ‘Uni-tech’ Troopers

More Nexus ‘Visitors’

Heresy Miniatures ‘Inspectors’ – painted as Visitor technicians

I’m a big fan of V and quite rightly the original mini series is held in high regard, as is the slightly more action packed sequel, The Final Battle.  However I personally have a soft spot for the really quite terrible TV series that followed.

Some of the cast of the 1984 TV series

Possibly because this was my first exposure to the series as a teenager when Sky repeated it in the UK in the early nineties.  While (I think) the series starts off well with the whole concept of Los Angeles as an open city after the second alien invasion it quickly goes downhill and degenerates into ‘space Dynasty’ by the end.  For me the ‘jumping the shark’ moment was the exit of (the frankly excellent in anything) Michael Ironside from the main cast; for others I suspect this downward spiral came much earlier.

I’d previously done some conversions using the 7TV Minion miniatures and alien heads

Anyhow, the point of this is that when considering a cast for my alien visitors I have included possibly an unexpected bias to some of those characters from the TV series.

Crooked Dice Alien Invaders

I based these guys using left over bases from the old Sedition Wars game

My approach has been to base these on the base 7TV second edition profiles rather than use the alien cards from the recent Apocalypse edition of the game.  Following the (not too subtle) allegory of the rise of Nazism that the original mini-series followed I felt that using base profiles such as ‘Despotic Dictator’ and the various types of ‘Minion’ was a better fit.

The excellent recent releases from Crooked Dice

Supreme Commander John

Fifth Columnist Martin

Barbara

The one profile that has proven tricky to get right is the iconic Visitor shock trooper.  I based these guys originally on ‘Minions’ but once the advanced alien weaponry was added they felt overpowered for the number of ratings they cost.  In the end I have aligned these more with the X-Commando profile from the Department X programme guide.

Visitor Shock Trooper

These guys proved challenging to build a profile for

I roughly followed the guidelines for modifying profiles which you will find in the Producers Guide of the second edition rules.  In many cases this was just a case of changing the names of existing special abilities to make then fit thematically.  One good example being Diana’s ‘Conversion Process’ which is simply ‘Alien Duplicate’ from the Otherworldy Invader renamed.

Diana

Keep your rodents out of sight

I created all the card layouts using the 7TV Casting Agency online app, and the profiles are stored in various formats in the 7TV Productions Facebook group (where I will place any updates).  However they are also presented in full below.

Feel free to download and utilise in your own Machiavellian plans for world domination and inter-species dining.

Oh and remember, ‘Friendship is Universal’.