144artist Populates the Damocles Sector or Creating a System Agnostic Science Fiction Miniatures Collection

Ever since Necromunda came out, back in the day, I have loved the visual of a cluttered and stacked science fiction battlefield.  It reminds me of Mega-City One of Judge Dredd comics or L.A. in the film Bladerunner.  So when Mantic launched their Kickstart for Deadzone I knew I needed their terrain system to mix in with my ideas. My respectable collection was increased and diversified with their Deadzone 2nd edition campaign which I also backed despite doing little with the pieces from the first one.  I just knew I would use them eventually.  Here are a few of the thoughts I’ve had so far on.

Being a visual person much of my musing manifests in my sketch books. I don’t tend to do detailed drawings so much as shapes and textures. I also play with ideas to connect everything together on the table or think about how I might use some of the more unique or numerous bits and pieces I have in my collection.  In addition to said model parts, electronics bits, junk, and whatever odd shapes that catch my eye I have a couple of boxes of Deadzone terrain as well as a big collection of Makitainers. More on both in future posts.

For more years than I care to admit, I have been collecting bits and bobs that I think would look good glued to futuristic buildings because I dreamed of creating a solid collection of Science Fiction terrain.  I have been playing games so long that while I may never have built a hover tank out of a deodorant container myself, many of my friends did so.  We all made terrain out of whatever came to hand as there was practically no dedicated science fiction terrain on the market in those days.  When the first edition of Necromunda came on the scene it blew our minds with possibilities, the rules even had a section on how to build your own terrain out of whatever you had at hand.  Now there are new ranges and sub-genre’s appearing regularly made out of numerous materials, many pre-painted, some even table ready.  It makes it difficult to decide where to start.  

When developing a large, long term project like this one I will often create an imaginary setting for what I am coming up with.  This helps inspire my visual thinking as well as organize the overall vision, provide a sense of unity, and help decide what I need to build.  This will include drawings, test paints, writings, whatever creative line I’m following will be placed in said setting.  With my Wolsung/Steam Punk collection this was an imaginary riverside neighborhood called Shadows Gate (still working on the docks).  I have come to realize that no one planet was going to be able to contain the variety of what I wanted to build as I see everything from early colonial Habitation Units to the interiors of Hive Cities or exteriors of high tech worlds.  My friends and I play a wide variety of games in general, but specifically we vary in our science fiction miniatures and RPG interests, so I want my collection to be flexible as well as visually unified.

My concept for the buildings is of “Terrain in Continuum” where structures and elements combine to represent various layers of colonization/development.  Where the early colony habitat units become the floors of other structures as the colony becomes a city, even more added becomes a Hive.  Let’s not forget the ruined and apocalyptic pieces when a civilization suffers a collapse that no proper collection should be without and should fit in visually with the rest as it could always be a construction site in a big city.  Yeah, I’ve thought about this for a very long time.

With all this variety in my collection to conceive there would need to be a lot of variety in the worlds and races I populated my imaginary galactic narrative. So the scout ship in my imagination came upon a unique binary star system, filled with the debris of shattered planets and ancient fleets, wide open for exploration, colonization, industrialization, and competition; the Damocles Sector was born.