Dralasite Fill-In Mini?

While cruising through the Reaper Miniatures website (what, you don't do that?) I found this gem:
http://www.reapermini.com/FigureFinder#detail/50129

Except for the height and mouth in the neck... looks like a Dralasite to me. Mark this one ordered as soon as I have some $.

Also posted on http://scattergungamer.blogspot.com/

[The 15mm Frontier] - Bringing Star Frontiers Into 15mm

It is no secret that I absolutely love the old Star Frontiers RPG, but what I have also considered is the possibility of bringing the Frontier into 15mm as a wargaming option. Thisi s tricky, of course, because nobody makes figures for the very distinct races of the SF game. Happily some of these can either be proxied or converted and in one case likely even scratchbuilt. My hope is to be able to explore the various option for bringing Star Frontiers to life in 15mm miniatures over the next few months. Work, time, the move, and other various factors may make this tricky in a practical sense, but at least the theory and brain work can be explored until those obstacles are cleared.

Another big issue for this project has been finding vehicles that look the part too. Star Frontiers had some very distinct ideas about what sorts of vehicles populated their universe. Where Traveller tended to focus a lot on the military hardware, SF was about explorations, discovery, and exploitation and so included a lot of vehicles with minimal or no military hardware. One very outstanding example is the Explorer.

The SF rules describe the Explorer as a huge, RV-like ATV. This vehicle is a self-contained home, lab, and scouting/exploration vehicle that allows a party of adventurers a mobile base of operations and in many cases a safe haven. Such vehicles are hard to find in 15mm as most APC vehicles tend to go along the lines of modern military designs. Some of the early 15mm scifi lines did include vehicles of a similar sort but a recent development from Critical Mass Games really hit the mark.

I borrowed the image of the Dractamaa APC here from Mark's excellent Dropship Horizon blog to show what I mean. Take the heavy combat turrets off of these things and place a lighter armed turret with an observation canaopy on top and these are the spitting image of the Star Frontiers explorer vehicles all the way down to the door between the big wheels. I can even see piles of stowage lashed to those flat spots at the front, accessed by the rooftop hatches.

I'll be posting more thoughts on the 15mm Frontier as they come to me or I find solid miniatures alternatives. Also, I'd like to take a moment to remind folks of my proposal for the 15mm winged simians that I had posted about a while back. They really were the first major step in the whole idea of the 15mm Frontier project.

Take care everyone and stay tuned. Thingsm ay be slow around here, but I'm still kicking.

-Eli

More Star Frontiers Goodness!

Likely the last thing I'll order/buy for gaming until we get settled into the new place, this bunch of Star Frontiers stuff arrived today. It's an Ebay auction I scored for a little over $20 and includes a nearly perfect copy of the Knight Hawks boxed set including the counters as well as the Dramune Run and Mutany in the Elandor Moraes modules.

Though I have most of the PDFs from the remastering project but I am trying to complete a set of the original printed material as I loved this game so much as a kid.

Anyhw, just a quick post!

Take care,

-Eli

A pack rat? Me?

Look what I just dug out of my bookshelf. Yep, that's right... vintage 1982 Star Frontiers. The box is long gone, and the counters too. But I have the maps, the intro adventure, and the original dice, too.

So I have held onto this for 28 years, through college, about a dozen moves, and... I knew right where they were. Compulsive much?

Shower me with envy, mortals! Mua ha ha ha!

Who's Interested in 15mm Winged Humanoids?

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Visit The Frontier

It should be no surprise to you folks that I am a BIG fan of Star Frontiers. It was my first and only mainstream scifi RPG growing up until the release of the West End D6 Star Wars system and though I never played it as much as Star Wars, it has always held a special place among my gaming memories. Sonic weapons, personal defensive screens and an alien fonrtier that wasn't entirely settled were just some of the appeal the game had for me. Also, the rules for robots with their programmed skill sets and games interesting skill system were other pluses. D&D was still king for me at the time, but D&D didn't have skills rules. But a trip through the wayback machine isn't the point of this post. What is the point?

The point is a great revival of Star Frontiers that has been going for several years now and has shown what the love of a good game can do. While Old School RPGs have had a broad-ranging revival of their own, Star Frontiers has had an almost single front revival facilitated by the Star Frontiersman webzine and the digital rematering project that has reformated and consolidated the original SF rules into lovely PDFs. Since 2007 the complete run of the original Star Frontiers rules, modules and supplements has been given the digital treatment.

Star Frontiersman is a collosul effort of love, with fans and the "staff" of the project putting together no less than fourteen issues since 2007 with the first 6 issues being compiled and available for print on Lulu. The material found withing the pages of Star Frontiersman runs the usual range of gamem agazine fair featuring everything from new races, world write-ups, adventures, new equipment and source material. Articles in SF cover various fascets of the setting such as society, law, government, trade, etc as well as conversions for some systems and concepts not originally included in the game but suitable (cybernetics, Aliens, advanced robotic, etc).

Growing from a modest 18 pages in the first issue to a meaty page count of 82 in issue #12, Star Frontiersman has offered so much gaming material that in February they released a 20-page index for issues 1-13. This index gives an issue by issue table of contents and overview of the indivudal issues and then tops it all off by a chunky index by subject.

As mentioned before, content for the Star Frontiersman is mostly fan generated with articles openly solicited on their main site. Several forums and project departments allow people to work together or alone on projects and keep their material stored on the site. Whether it is articles, artwork, source material or adventures, they welcome it all for consideration for inclusion within the pages of the fanzine. Right now they are even having an encountewr design contest with a real prize (a customized hat).

Whether or not you are a fan of Star Frontiers or interested in good scifi gaming material, you should certainly check out the hard work at the Star Frontierman site. All the PDFs are free for download.

Enjoy!

-Eli

Star Frontiers Fleet Battles or Another Chicken Escapes the Coup

Over the last year, I have been returning to the Star Frontiers universe over and over. It has to be one of my favorite settings of all time, and is to me what Traveller is for many other scifi role-players. I missed the Traveller boat. I have often read/seen other retro or nostalgia projects done by other gamers and have a strong desire to do one of these myself. The big problem is that I've never been able to get into any one setting deep enough to do such a project justice.

These projects usually involve either tracking down old miniatures or, in a lot of cases, finding new minis to represent those forces of old. Though the SF ship minis are not off the radar, they are rare and hard to find as the line was never overly huge, popular, or well-supported. I can order a few of the older models and then try to fill the gaps with other figures that sort of fit or I can go with newer models for the whole project and not have to worry so much about it. Does anybody know of any currently produced figs that fit the look of the figs in this post?

I've looked around, but found little. Fleet minis are not my strong spot, so I may have missed some stuff.

Help a brother out?

-Eli